> The important number is your odds of becoming that default provider in the minds of consumers.
I haven't seen any evidence that any Gen AI provider will be able to build a moat that allows for this.
Some are better than others at certain things over certain time periods, but they are all relatively interchangeable for most practical uses and the small differences are becoming less pronounced, not more.
I use LLMs fairly frequently now and I just bounce around between them to stay within their free tiers. Short of some actual large breakthrough I never need to commit to one, and I can take advantage of their own massive spends and wait it out a couple of years until I'm running a local model self-hosted with a cloudflare tunnel if I need to access it on my phone.
And yes, most people won't do that, but there will be a lot of opportunity for cheap providers to offer that as a service with some data center spend, but nowhere near the massive amounts OpenAI, Google, Meta, et al are burning now.
As a regular user, it becomes increasingly frustrating to have to remind each new chat “I’m working on this problem and here’s the relevant context”.
GenAI providers will solve this, and it will make the UX much, much smoother. Then they will make it very hard to export that memory/context.
If you’re using a free tier I assume you’re not using reasoning models extensively, so you wouldn’t necessarily see how big of a benefit this could be.
They all offer some "memory" cross chat now and they're all more annoying than helpful. Not really compelling. You can pretty easily export your chat if you want.
The money is easy to come by because wealthy investors, while they don't want to pay any more in taxes, are desperate to find possible returns in an economy that sucks outside of ballooning healthcare and the AI bubble... not because they need the money but because NUMBER MUST GO UP.
And more so than even most VC markets, raising for an "AI" company is more about who you know than what results you can show.
If anyone is actually showing significant results, where's the actual output of the AI-driven software boom (beyond just LLMs making coders more efficient by being a better google)? I don't see any real signs of it. All I see is people doing after market modifications on the shovels, I've yet to see any of the end users of these shovels coming down from the hills with sacks of real gold.
Its not a new problem though, and its not just billing. The UI across Gemini just generally sucks (across AI Studio and the chat interfaces) and there's lots of annoying failure cases where Gemini will just timeout and stop working entirely midrequest.
Been like this for quite a while, well before Gemini 3.
So far I continue to put up with it because I find the model to be the best commercial option for my usage, but its amazing how bad modern Google is at just basic web app UX and infrastructure when they were the gold standard for such for like, arguably decades prior.
True pretty much across the board for all generative AI, IMO.
I do understand why people get somewhat enamored with it when they first encounter it because there is a superficial magic to it when you first start using it.
But use it for a while (or view the output of other people's uses) and all the limitations and repetitiveness starts to become pretty obvious, and then after a while that's all you see.
Well written blog post, but its a bit too adjacent to LinkedIn slop-posting in actual message, for me.
I can't help but think the real take away is that you should trust your gut and quit a lot sooner and the poster basically wasted a year being jerked around.
If you are telling your employer you are unhappy for a whole year and they don't fix the conditions leading to your unhappiness, they are telling you they don't value you enough to make those changes (for the sake of simplicity, I'll just assume the employee's specific points of dissatisfaction were reasonable fixes and not ridiculous asks).
You don't owe them a year of soft landing when you quit, in the vast majority of cases they wouldn't have given you anywhere near that if they let you go.
> No States ban complete non-usage of cell phones while driving
And even if they did an increasing number of cars have small-TV-sized "cell phones" built into the dash.
And as a bonus prize, when you crash due to the distraction and the power is gone you get to solve a 3 part puzzle to open any of the doors to get away from the fast moving fire that probably broke out when the battery cells ruptured.
We still have (for now, though even this is under threat) good access to contraception, good sexual education, relatively low child mortality rates, etc here in the US.
Comparing the affordability crisis for the middle class in the US to that of historically poor developing countries as it relates to birth rates is not a very good argument.
It might be somewhat comparable a decade or so from now if we keep letting wealth inequality run away at current rates, but it isn't right now.
This phenomenon has many many causes, and does not represent any statistic on a parents caring for their kids. It is ludicrous you would think so. Please provide at least one study that shows some form of causality.
lots of developing countries have way stronger communities. in these places you can raise your kids in a more "free-range" style and nobody will give you shit about that.
agreed, they collectively care more, would be my view. In many neighborhoods in the US, people only care about themselves, no one else. They don’t even know their neighbors.
> How did people afford existence in 1950 when they made 3x less?
Is this a serious question?
The average price of a home in 1950 was like $7,500 - $10,000.
The average price of a home in 2025 is like $410,000 - $530,000
Of all the (generally) rising numbers that factor into the US economy, wages is one of the major things that has risen the least since the 1950s, and especially so since 1980.
It's a biological and societal reality. While we may end up solving the immediate demographic crisis through technology (e.g. Optimus for the elderly), the future of humanity depends on raising children. Not taxing the rich, personal convenience, or trivializing my stated position as one that is "easy" to have.
Of all the public online communities, you'd think HN would be capable of calling it the way it is. But I'm afraid it's been overrun by brainwashed ideologues as I've seen many times the truth being downvoted into oblivion during my short time here. Maybe we should do an experiment and make an account that only posts Paul Graham's positions and see how often it gets downvoted. I suspect the culture has shifted quite a lot since HN's founding and a decent chunk on the margin no longer cares about what's true over what's acceptable.
As they say... (often misattributed to John Steinbeck, but at best its really a rough paraphrase of something he wrote) "Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."
The truly wealthy have long convinced the average "middle class" American that they exist in roughly the same social class (even though this has always been an insane lie) but this illusion is quickly falling away due to current economic circumstances causing untenable concentration of wealth.
Ultimately its the absolute naked greed of the truly wealthy that is causing this realignment (that is likely to end badly for them as well) to happen. They are so dead set against making even the smallest move toward fair taxation that they are creating a situation in which the shrinking middle class have no choice but to see that they are quickly becoming an endangered species whose relative fortunes are moving rapidly down rather than slowly up.
> And lots of his dumb comments were from like 2 years ago, not 12 - he was not "young" when he said them.
If you're talking about the "globalize the intifada" comment, he actually never even said that, but a whole lot of people (you among them, it seems like?) have been brainwashed into thinking he did through political maneuvering.
The root of that whole drummed up controversy was him refusing to blanket condemn the phrase when media people (never attributing it as something he himself had said) kept asking him to.
And he was always very clear what his reasons for that were, which were extremely reasonable to anyone who isn't a kneejerk ultra zionist.
It's so depressing that the entire Mamdani debate has become mired in Israeli politics. You can completely ignore that issue, and still have plenty of questionable stuff to talk about. He has repeatedly talked about defunding the police. Literally, not figuratively, and not that long ago [1a-c].
He said he wanted to close down Rikers Island, right in the middle of the debates [2]. He said that prisons are unnecessary [3]. He said he wants to empty jails [4-6]. His comments on crime and policing, in general, are quite extreme. I could set literally every other topic to the side, and this would be a voting issue for me.
These are his words. I'm not taking them out of context or reinterpreting them. About the only response to this stuff a reasonable person can muster is "he doesn't believe that now". Yeah, OK. I guess we'll find out...
[1] does not mean no more police. The NYPD has $11 billion in funding and has offices all over the world for some reason when they should really just be city-sized for NY. They are overfunded, and he believes they should not be.
[2-6] indicate that our current prison system is punitive and does nothing in the way of rehabilitation or reform. No, he will not close every prison. Yes, in an ideal world we would not need hundreds of prisons full to the brim because we would actually rehabilitate and release people. This is hardly a fringe opinion and it is in fact a very common criticism of our prison system. Interpreting these statements as "he is just going to stop prisons and let all the violent criminals out in one go!!!" with no further though IS reinterpreting his words uncharitably because obviously that would be stupid.
Re [1], he explicitly says the opposite in the posts I linked to. You're just ignoring what he literally says and writes, and substituting your own feelings on the matter.
Regarding prisons, again, he is explicitly talking about closing down prisons. He has moderated his rhetoric more recently on this issue, but no, your interpretation of the subject is not what he's saying here, and it clearly isn't what he means, even today.
He has a long history on these topics. I'm not misinterpreting his comments.
He does not literally say the opposite. Either way, you'll see what I mean when none of this goes the way you think that it will. He's in office now anyways.
He literally says the opposite. It's why I quoted what I did. Very first link:
> We don't need an investigation to know that the NYPD is racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety.
> What we need is to #DefundTheNYPD.
> But your deal with @NYCMayor uses budget tricks to keep as many cops as possible on the beat.
> NO to fake cuts - defund the police.
The only way you can say this doesn't mean "defund the police" is by re-defining his words using Orwellian double-speak ("he doesn't really mean defund"), and then, when you get to the last line, ignore the part where he explicitly tells you not to do that. No fake cuts! Defund!
> About the only response to this stuff a reasonable person can muster is "he doesn't believe that now"
He clearly still believes in police reform. In some places that includes reducing police budgets in favor of more effective public safety programs. That's what "defund the police" means. Not "abolish", reduce funding. In NYC he's running on maintaining police funding at current levels and adding additional nonviolent peacekeeping capacity. He may personally believe that ultimately funding can be redirected further, but that's not what he's running on.
Criminal justice is majorly fucked in the US broadly. We incarcerate non-dangerous people with minor offenses way too long, and we let dangerous repeat offenders walk free. The answer isn't so simple as "lock more people up" or "let everyone go", we're in a trickier bind than a straightforward over incarceration or over lenient set of policies. Mamdani talks a lot about reducing penalties for minor nonviolent offenders, and for increasing rehabilitative capacity, but he does retreat to rehabilitation too readily (from a rhetorical efficacy perspective) when questioned about how to handle repeat offenders.
I don't think he's actually changed his values at all, he's just polished his phrasing and set more achievable near-term goals.
Yeah, I understand that's what people are saying to rationalize it. And like I said: we'll find out! But see my reply to the sibling comment, where I link directly to his words:
He's well-documented, saying many times, in many different variations, in many different places, that he wants to eliminate prisons, "dismantle" the police, and so on. One or two comments you might be able to brush aside, but this is a consistent pattern.
That's what people are saying when they say defund. Reduce funding for. Consistently this is what anyone who says defund the police has always meant. You gotta take off the tin foil hat, my guy.
"We'll find out" haha, you think he's going to shut down the nypd? They have an operating budget of what, $6 billion dollars annually?
He's not going to shut them down, you can't just stop a $6b organization. You can, however, defund it. Maybe they could do just fine with $5 billion. If the city has an extra billion to spend on building housing or improving transit or providing health care or services to the homeless... a billion dollars a year buys a lot of things.
These kinds of folk will panic over "defund the police" as if it's shutting down an entire office. Meanwhile this administration proceeds to effectively shut down the DoED in all but name and we get a shrug back.
It becomes very hard to assume good faith in such situations.
He literally, repeatedly said “defund and dismantle”. He’s not trying to be subtle. I’m not taking anything out of context. It’s obvious that he didn’t mean “reduce funding”, and while that may be what you think is reasonable, it’s not what he meant when he said it. I’ve given you the receipts.
You have to be trying really hard to interpret that in the way you’re trying to do it, “my guy.” I’m just reading his words and taking him seriously.
Oh, the answer really is “let everyone go,” and then “get rid of all billionaires, cap wealth at $100,000,000 and tax the rest at 99%, and make sure every single person has a high-quality, safe place to live, good food, medical care, and friends.
Less, much less, but not zero. You'll always have the odd person who ends up a problem even under optimal circumstances. The range of trait expression in humans is very broad, and there are a lot of humans. You can't run away from that, but you can be compassionate about it. Insisting that your socialist utopia will simply render all humans happy and harmless, and as such there will be no need for forceful law enforcement is obviously wrong and harmful to your movement.
Yes. He did. Because the law[0] (the passage of which he was not involved) says Riker's Island needs to be closed by 2027 -- something Eric "how much will you pay to play?" Adams slow-walked on purpose.
The rest of your diatribe is a bunch of bullshit that doesn't pass the sniff test.
> "I think that frankly, I mean, what purpose do they serve, right?” Mamdani said when asked by a co-host of “The Far Left Show” in August 2020 if prisons were obsolete.
> “I think we have to ask ourselves that … I think a lot of people who defend the carceral state, that defend the idea of it and the way it makes them feel, they’re not defending the reality of it and the practices that are part and parcel of it,” he continued.
> “Because if you actually break it down … how many people come out the prison system better than they went into the prison system?”
From the New York Post so presumably this is the worst they could find on the topic.
>About the only response to this stuff a reasonable person can muster is "he doesn't believe that now".
My response is "looks good to me. Accepted". if police aren't protecting the people they shouldn't be funded by taxpayers. All for police reform.
And yes, if we aren't jailing everyone for being homeless or smoking weed, we'd need less prisons. If prisons were about reform, we'd nedd less prisons. These all make sense.
But I guess if detractors just want to take soundbites, remove all subtlety, and blast it out to twitter's 280 character limit, then their plan worked. It's just a same these same people would try to downplay 90% of the stuff Trump said in 2024 that he is doing in 2025 to the letter.
I haven't seen any evidence that any Gen AI provider will be able to build a moat that allows for this.
Some are better than others at certain things over certain time periods, but they are all relatively interchangeable for most practical uses and the small differences are becoming less pronounced, not more.
I use LLMs fairly frequently now and I just bounce around between them to stay within their free tiers. Short of some actual large breakthrough I never need to commit to one, and I can take advantage of their own massive spends and wait it out a couple of years until I'm running a local model self-hosted with a cloudflare tunnel if I need to access it on my phone.
And yes, most people won't do that, but there will be a lot of opportunity for cheap providers to offer that as a service with some data center spend, but nowhere near the massive amounts OpenAI, Google, Meta, et al are burning now.