This is important. Even more important, however, is the reality that @sama and @DarioAmodei as well as the other leaders @OpenAI and @AnthropicAI , as brilliant as they are in building AI technology, and as much as they do have a platform owing to the success of their businesses, they have no demonstrable experience / skill in knowing how their products will actually affect economies or there participants. They don't have halos, and we all should be indifferent to their prognostications on topics outside of their expertise. It's no more complicated that that, or it shouldnt be.
While I’m no fan of socialism or arbitrary confiscations of wealth, I can see why Bernie Sanders’ proposal (for the government to take a 50% stake in AI companies) resonates, including with many on the right.
The CEOs of the leading AI labs have told us repeatedly that they will cause massive job loss. This is not a story that I believe, nor does the data bear it out, but this is what they have told us. Similarly, they have hyped the risks of AI without putting an equal or greater emphasis on the benefits or readily available mitigations.
Conservatives have another fear. The employees of the leading labs claim to be philanthropic, but what we’ve seen is massive enrichment of NGOs advancing an agenda at odds with traditional values, fueling a revolution against our cities and communities. Soros-maxxing is not charity in our book.
Anthropic and OpenAI have established themselves as Public Benefit Corporations. What could be more in the public benefit than using half the wealth generated by these companies (which trained for free on the collective knowledge of humanity) to pay down the national debt? There is no ideological bias in that philanthropy.
Dario and Sam have begun to walk back their claims of massive job loss, but the damage to public trust is done, and now the chickens are coming home to roost. I could almost support the Sanders proposal as a stupidity tax.
There’s just one problem. Nationalization of AI will accelerate the corporate-government fusion we’re already sliding toward. Conservatives rightly fear a Central Bank Digital Currency. They ought to be even more concerned about Central Government AI — a system with even more totalistic power over information, decision-making, and human behavior.
We saw how social media was weaponized to censor conservatives (including President Trump) in the last Democrat administration. The definition of “trust & safety” expanded to mean protecting the public from supposed psychological harms, micro-aggressions, and disinformation (you know, like hearing conservative ideas or true facts about Covid).
That “safety” agenda as applied to AI will be vastly more powerful and Orwellian. AI won’t just moderate posts; it will curate reality — with the ability to rewrite history, enforce ideological conformity, influence policy at scale, mass surveil Americans, and condition the benefits of the many systems it controls on approved behavior.
America won’t win the AI race if we beat China but end up with a CCP-style social credit system in the U.S. — and that is the danger as the government becomes more deeply involved in AI development and assumes direct ownership and control.
Conservatives are right to fear where this is all headed but ought to think more carefully about how regulations they are flirting with now (that are widely celebrated among those with a long history of lust for Big Government) will be used against them the next time a Democrat administration is in power.
Most using these tools everyday to build themselves understand this. It's not the jobs that will be disrupted so much as the businesses. The jobs will just migrate to the disrupting companies.
Dynamic model routing is a super important part of the equation - the vast majority of use cases do not only not require a frontier model, but frontier models are actually materially less effective for most of them.
And don't forget about the other two critical variables also.
Dynamic model routing is a super important part of the equation - the vast majority of use cases do not only not require a frontier model, but frontier models are actually materially less effective for most of them.
And don't forget about the other two critical variables also.
This is an important thread on this topic, and another reason why @xai is so useful. While there is important nuance to be properly understood, @michaeljburry analysis is too superficial (setting aside his obvious attempt to hand wave complexity) and is not at all a clinical evaluation of these transactions.
I worked as a Big 4 auditor for a decade, here’s my take on the Burry “Fugazi” thread
The transaction is real and the figures check out. Apollo led a $3.5bn capital solution for Valor Compute Infrastructure to fund a $5.4bn purchase of GB200 GPUs leased to xAI on a triple-net structure. Nvidia went in as an anchor LP. All publicly disclosed
But the accounting isn’t prima facie erroneous, and the thread oversells two things
On Nvidia’s revenue. Selling to an SPV is fine. The question under ASC 606 (US revenue standard) is whether control actually transferred. If VCI bears the risks and rewards, Nvidia books the sale legitimately
The REAL issue is the $1.9bn Nvidia ploughs back into VCI as an LP. That’s the round-trip. Net, Nvidia took in roughly $3.5bn of outside cash but booked $5.4bn of revenue
If part of your “sale” is funded by capital you re-injected, that portion isn’t a sale. The honest treatment is either net the $1.9bn off the transaction price, or run a “variable interest entity” (VIE) analysis and consolidate VCI. Recognising gross revenue on round-tripped capital is the potential weak apot
On “legally invisible.” This is rhetoric. The chips sit on VCI’s balance sheet, xAI carries an ROU asset and lease liability under ASC 842 (US leasing accounting standard). Nothing vanishes. It’s held by an entity nobody consolidates, and whether that non-consolidation is correct is the VIE question above
On Level 3 (fair value measurement tier). “No outside party can verify what they’re worth” is wrong. Level 3 means no observable inputs for that specific asset, NOT unverifiable
We typically ALWAYS brought in valuation specialists particularly for high risk material txs, you use observable comps and secondary GPU prices as model inputs, and auditors treat it as a critical audit matter. It gets more scrutiny, not less
The legitimate concern is smaller than this post lets on. Level 3 marks are management estimates exposed to optimistic bias, 34.7% concentration is high for retail annuity backing, and that sits on top of 16.6x leverage and a Bermuda captive outside US statutory oversight. Stack GPU residual-value risk on a multi-year lease and that’s the main concern
Burry’s substance is defensible. The “retirees unknowingly carry invisible risk” packaging is sensationalised. Policyholders hold fixed contractual claims, their exposure is to Athene’s solvency, not directly to GPU residuals
TLDR: auditors need to test whether the sale is overstated by the $1.9bn round-trip, and apply extra scrutiny to the unobservable Level 3 inputs
I’d hate to be the Audit partner signing these transactions off particularly given the public interest and frequency of similar transactions
Arthur Anderson Déjà vu?
On the substance, the @AnthropicAI situation reminds of a summer associate colleague who was getting his MBA at Stanford. When I asked him how he liked it, he said "The good news is that everyone there has a halo [the sign of intellectual brilliance, including well beyond their area of expertise]. The bad news is that 95% of them either gave it themselves, or got from a peer [from inside the same echo chamber]."
@DarioAmodei is obviously brilliant in his domain, but he doesn't have a halo, no one does, and it's on us if we care about what he says outside of it.
If they were true economist, in the scientific sense of the title, they would follow the data. If they were to do this, they would see that variants of Austrian, Chicago and to a lesser extent neo classical theories provide a profoundedly more substantial explanation of the wealth and general population benefits, than Marx and Kaynes et al. Totally bizzard this isn't reflected proportionately in western academia.
And not only for their performance, which is incredibly strong, but also for vanishingly low inference costs, which is only electricity when run locally. Very underestimated!
@GrahamHall@am_rueben is an elite talent that could become generational if he masters his low post scoring effectiveness. Another year with @GatorsMBK will help most.
I think it would be helpful if @FactoryAI spelled out more clearly that there are no charges for either inference or compute, and therefore no tokens charges, for the bring own device plan when using an open weights model. Assuming this is how it works.
As someone with several mac minis, mac studios, having a persistent agent across my devices has been a pain.
I literally resorted to just never letting my laptop sleep, which would get crazy hot in my bag.
Cloud agents with cloud computers are clearly a better solution.
The time is fast approaching where it will no longer be necessary (even if there was time, which there isn't) to review every line of code. Similar to how we already don't review the assembly details from our compilers.
This 30-minute speech by the Head of Anthropic "Coding Agents" researcher will teach you more about vibe coding than 100 paid courses.
Bookmark it & give it 30 minutes today. This video will change the way you use AI forever,