> A huge number of people are convinced that OpenAI and Anthropic are selling inference tokens at a loss despite the fact that there's no evidence this is true
Theres quite a lot of evidence, no proof I'd agree, but then there's no absolute proof I'm aware to the contrary either, so I don't know where you're getting this from.
The two pieces of evidence I'm aware of is that 1) Anthropic doesn't want their subsidised plans being used outside of CC, which would imply that the money their making off it isn't enough, and 2) last time I checked, API spending is capped at $5000 a month
Like I say, neither of these are proof, you can come up with reasonable arguments against them, but once again the same could be said for evidence on the contrary
> which would imply that the money their making off it isn't enough
I don't think this logically follows. An unlimited buffet doesn't let you resell all of the food out the backdoor. At some level of usage any fixed price plan becomes unprofitable.
I agree the 5k cap is interesting as evidence although as you said I suspect there are other reasons for it.
As for evidence against it: The Information reported that OpenAI and Anthropic are 30%+ gross margins for the last few years. Sam Altman and Dario have both claimed inference is profitable in various scattered interviews. Other experts seem to generally agree too. A quick search found a tweet from former PyTorch team member Horace He: https://x.com/typedfemale/status/1961197802169798775 and a response to it in agreement from Anish Tondwalkar former researcher at OpenAI and Google Brain.
Nor Dario's frankly, I was supposed to be out of a job by now according to his predictions over the years. I can totally buy that inference is possible, but not because they said it is
> 1) Anthropic doesn't want their subsidised plans being used outside of CC, which would imply that the money their making off it isn't enough, a
Claude Code use-cases also differ somewhat from general API use, where the former is engineered for high cache utilization. We know from overall API costs (both Anthropic and OpenRouter) that cached inputs cost an order of magnitude less than uncached inputs, but OpenCode/pi/OpenClaw don't necessarily have the same kind of aggressive cache-use optimizations.
Vertically integrated stacks might also be able to have a first layer of globally shared KV cache for the system prompts, if the preamble is not user specific and changes rarely.
> 2) last time I checked, API spending is capped at $5000 a month
Per https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/api/rate-limits, that seems to only be true for general credit-funded accounts. If you contact Anthropic's sales team and set up monthly invoicing, there's evidently no fixed spending limit.
> If you contact Anthropic's sales team and set up monthly invoicing, there's evidently no fixed spending limit.
I don't think thats a smoking gun either, for a start we don't know if the pricing would be the same as you'd get credit-funded, but also a monthly invoicing agreement is closer to their fixed plans (you spend X per month, regardless of usage) than pay-per-use API credits, which may not be profitable.
Not that thats a smoking gun either, I can see it both ways
But a simple assumption that Anthropic runs a normal large MoE LLM (which it almost certainly does) suggests that the actual price of running it (mostly energy) is pretty small.
Absolutely agree, I do use notebooks but like you say I dont think I need to at all, for some reason I just have some natural drive to write things down (plus I like notebooks). But I've often had experiences of reading through old notebooks and finding that the things I care about in there I instantly remembered without having to read the page, and the things I'd forgotten about I didn't care about anymore.
Its the classic interrogation technique; "we're not here to debate whether your guilty or innocent, we have all the evidence we need to prove your guilt, we just want to know why". Not sure if it makes it any different though that the interrogator knows they are lying
I haven't worked at FAANG so maybe I'm out the loop, but flyers on bathroom stalls seems bizarre, like almost less of a corporate action and more of a personal one (like you might get for unionisation), but with all the messaging of corporate, like something you'd see in a company memo.
Like I say, maybe everyone else is accustomed to this idea, but if you have any pictures of them I think a lot of people would be interested in seeing it, unless I'm misunderstand what it is
It started as Testing on the Toilet, which was an effort to get people to actually care about unit-testing their code and software quality and writing maintainable code that doesn't break in 6 months. Later was expanded to Learning on the Loo, general tips and tricks, and then Testing on the Toilet became Tech on the Toilet. It's been going on for a good 20 years now, so that's about 1000 articles (they change them out weekly) and there aren't really 1000 articles you can write about unit testing.
The insight is actually pretty similar to Google's core business model: when you're going to the bathroom, there isn't a whole lot else you're doing, so it's the perfect time to put up a 2-3 minute read to reinforce a message that you want people to hear but might not get attention for otherwise.
I was in a fraternity in college, 20 years ago. We put weekly bathroom notes on the inside of the stall doors. Something interesting, something funny, upcoming news. The elected fraternity secretary was responsible for making those weekly, among many other things.
If they were a day late the amount of pestering they would get until the did that weekly job was hilarious. We all got a kick out of them.
Your toilet time can be yours, just don’t fucking read them lol. Back then razr phones were the hotness, nobody sat on a smartphone and had ads blasted at them while they took a shit.
I guess, if you equate "influence" with "abuse". An awful lot pillars of our society would become abuse then. Ask any parent of a toddler whether their toilet time is actually "theirs".
My point is the opposite actually: if you are the parent of a toddler, you'll know that your toilet time is not actually yours, because your toddler will try every effort to get your attention and influence you, up to and including crawling into your lap while you are doing your business; tantrumming on the bathroom floor; tantrumming outside the bathroom door; cutting up the mail you really need to file; spilling food all over the floor; unlatching childproofing; moving furniture; and enlisting their siblings.
It's not really a FAANG thing. I bet you've seen the memes about X days without a serious accident, or without stopping the production line. It's the equivalent in a restroom or a urinal: A place you can make sure people see key information. You can find this in many industrial sites. A call center might have reminders of core principles for how to close calls quickly, or when to escalate. A lab might have safety tips. A restaurant will remind you of hand washing. An industrial site of some important safety tip or two.
While I've not seen this in every single place I've worked, it's very common.
I can say at Google we usually just had engineering tip posters in the washrooms they were usually very insightful and just written by other engineers at the company.
Stuff like how to reduce nesting logic, how to restructure APIs for better testing, etc.
People usually like them. I can't say I've seen what the parent post described so I imagine it's "the other" FAANG mentioned here.
You're right that it was just other employees who decided what to print there. But I don't think that absolves the company (Facebook) really... Everything a company does is just things that its people do! Nothing about the flyer was outside the parameters of the job of its maker. Their job was to make the company money by helping advertisers maximize ad revenue, and that's exactly what they were doing.
Facebook had a serious internal propaganda arm when I was there. Couldn't manage to get floor length stall walls in most of the bathrooms, but every stall had a weekly newsletter about whatever product stuff.
Every high traffic flat space on the wall would be covered with a poster, most of them with designs lifted from US WWII propaganda, many hard to tell if satire or not. I was surprised there was never one about carpooling with der füher.
On the face of it, this or at least acting as a code reviewer from an experienced point of view seems like the solution, the problem is that we all naturally get lazy and complacent. I actually think AI was at its best for coding a year or so ago, when it could kind of do part of the work but theres no way you could ever ship it. Code that works today but breaks in 6 months is far more insidious.
I get its necessary for investment, but I'd be a lot happier with these tools if we didn't keep making these wild claims, because I'm certainly not seeing 10x the output. When I ask for examples, 90% its claude code (not a beacon of good software anyway but if nearly everyone is pointing to one example it tells you thats the best you can probably expect) and 10% weekend projects, which are cool, but not 10x cool. Opus 4.5 was released in Dec 2025, by this point people should be churning out year long projects in a month, and I certainly haven't seen that.
I've used them a few times, and they're pretty cool. If it was just sold as that (again, couldn't be, see: trillion dollar investments) I wouldn't have nearly as much of a leg to stand on
Any semi-capable coder could build a Reddit clone by themselves in a week since forever. It's a glorified CRUD app.
The barrier to creating a full blown Reddit the huge scaling, not the functionality. But with AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and backends like S3, CF etc, this hasn't been a barrier since a decade or more, either.
What I could do in a week is maybe set up an open source clone of reddit (that was written by many people for many months) and customize it a little bit.
And I have a pretty decent career behind me as a aoftware developer and my peers percieved me as kinda good.
Even capable coders can’t create a Reddit clone in a week. Because it’s not just a glorified CRUD app. And I encourage you to think a bit harder before arguing like that.
Yes you can create a CRUD app in some kind of framework and style it like Reddit. But that’s like putting lines on your lawn and calling it a clone of the Bernabeu.
But even if you were right, the real barrier to building a Reddit clone is getting traction. Even if you went viral and did everything right, you’d still have to wait years before you have the brand recognition and SEO rankings they enjoy.
In what way (that's not related to the difficulty of scaling it, which I already addressed separately)?
The point of my comment was:
"Somebody with AI cloning Reddit in a week is not as special as you make it to be, all things considering. A Reddit clone is not that difficult, it's basically a CRUD app. The difficult part of replicating it, or at least all the basics of it, is its scaling - and even that wouldn't be as difficult for a dev in 2026, the era of widespread elastic cloud backends".
The Bernabeu analogy handwavingly assumes that Reddit is more challenging than a homegrown clone, but doesn't address in what way Reddit differs from a CRUD app, and how my comment doesn't hold.
And even if it did, it would be moot regarding the main point I make, unless the recent AI-clone also handles those differentiating non-CRUD elements and thus also differs from a CRUD app.
>But even if you were right, the real barrier to building a Reddit clone is getting traction.
True, but not relevant to my point, which is about the difficulty of cloning Reddit coding-wise, not business wise, and whether it's or isn't any great feat for someone using AI to do it.
Calling Reddit a CRUD app isn’t wrong, it’s just vacuous.
It strips away every part that actually makes Reddit hard.
What happens when you sign up?
A CRUD app shows a form and inserts a row.
Reddit runs bot detection, rate limits, fingerprinting, shadow restrictions, and abuse heuristics you don’t even see, and you don’t know which ones, because that knowledge is their moat.
What happens when you upvote or downvote?
CRUD says “increment a counter.”
Reddit says “run a ranking algorithm refined over years, with vote fuzzing, decay, abuse detection, and intentional lies in the UI.” As the number you see is not the number stored.
What happens when you add a comment?
CRUD says “insert record.”
Reddit applies subreddit-specific rules, spam filters, block lists, automod logic, visibility rules, notifications, and delayed or conditional propagation.
What happens when you post a URL?
CRUD stores a string.
Reddit fingerprints it, deduplicates it, fetches metadata, detects spam domains, applies subreddit constraints, and feeds it into ranking and moderation systems.
Yes, anyone can scaffold a CRUD app and style it like Reddit.
But calling that a clone is like putting white lines on your lawn and calling it the Bernabeu.
You haven’t cloned the system, only its silhouette.
> Reddit runs bot detection, rate limits, fingerprinting, shadow restrictions, and abuse heuristics you don’t even see, and you don’t know which ones, because that knowledge is their moat.
> Reddit says “run a ranking algorithm refined over years, with vote fuzzing, decay, abuse detection, and intentional lies in the UI.” As the number you see is not the number stored.
> etc...
The question is; is moltbook doing this? That was the original point, it took a week to build a basic reddit clone, as you call it the silhouette, with AI, that should surely be the point of comparison to what a human could do in that time
I mean as has already been pointed out the fact that its a clone is a big reason why, but then I also think I could probably churn out a simple clone of reddit in less than a week. We've been through this before with twitter, the value isnt the tech (which is relatively straightforward), its the userbase. Of course Reddit has some more advanced features which would be more difficult, but I think the public db probably tells you that wasn't much of a concern to Moltbook either, so yeh, I reckon I could do that.
Double your estimate and switch the unit or time to next larger one. That's how programmers time estimate tend to be. So two months and I'm right there with you.
> Good time to be in business if you can see through the bs and understand how these systems actually function
You missed out the most crucial and least likely requirement (assuming you're not self employed); management also need to be able to see through the bs.
"The muse visits during the act of creation, not before. Start alone."
That has actually been a major problem for me in the past where my core idea is too simple, and I don't give "the muse" enough time to visit because it doesn't take me long enough to build it. Anytime I have given the muse time to visit, they always have.
> No more AI thought pieces until you tell us what you build!
Absolutely agree with this, the ratio of talk to output is insane, especially when the talk is all about how much better output is. So far the only example I've seen is Claude Code which is mired in its own technical problems and is literally built by an AI company.
> Write your own code without assistance on whatever interval makes sense to you, otherwise you'll atrophy those muscles
This is the one thing that concerns me, for the same reason as "AI writes the code, humans review it" does. The fact of the matter is, most people will get lazy and complacent pretty quickly, and the depth of which they review the code/ the frequency they "go it alone" will get less and less until eventually it just stops happening. We all (most of us anyway) do it, its just part of being human, for the same reason that thousands of people start going to the gym in January and stop by March.
Arguably, AI coding was at its best when it was pretty bad, because you HAD to review it frequently and there were immediate incentives to just take the keyboard and do it yourself sometimes. Now, we still have some serious faults, they're just not as immediate, which will lead to complacency for a lot of people.
Maybe one day AI will be able to reliably write the 100% of the code without review. The worry is that we stop paying attention first, which all in all looks quite likely
> Absolutely agree with this, the ratio of talk to output is insane, especially when the talk is all about how much better output is.
Those of us building are having so much fun we aren't slowing down to write think pieces.
I don't mean this flippantly. I'm a blogger. I love writing! But since a brief post on December 22 I haven't blogged because I have been too busy implementing incredible amounts of software with AI.
Between Christmas and New Year's Day I was on vacation, so I had plenty of time. Since then, it's only been nights & weekends (and some early mornings and lunch breaks).
RatatuiRuby is pretty new still: its beta launch was Jan 20. Octobox's TUI is built on it [0], and Sidekiq is using it to build theirs [1].
I believe they'll be maintainable long-term, as they've got extensive tests and documentation, and I built a theory of the program [2] on the Ruby side of it as I reviewed and guided the agent's work.
I am getting feedback from users, the largest of which drove the creation of (and iteration upon) Rooibos. As a rendering library, RatatuiRuby doesn't do much to guide the design or architecture of an application. Rooibos is an MVU/TEA framework [3] to do exactly that.
Tokra is basically a tech demo at this stage, [4] so (hopefully) no users yet.
Lights out manufacturing is always the boogieman that's being built or coming tomorrow. Never seems to happen though. The Wikipedia article for it only cites two such factories, and at least one of them requires humans still and isn't fully lights out.
Theres quite a lot of evidence, no proof I'd agree, but then there's no absolute proof I'm aware to the contrary either, so I don't know where you're getting this from.
The two pieces of evidence I'm aware of is that 1) Anthropic doesn't want their subsidised plans being used outside of CC, which would imply that the money their making off it isn't enough, and 2) last time I checked, API spending is capped at $5000 a month
Like I say, neither of these are proof, you can come up with reasonable arguments against them, but once again the same could be said for evidence on the contrary
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