Marcus

Marcus

@mkmeier.bsky.social

Nerd, Software Dev, Cosmere Arcanist, Nihilist, Atheist

20 followers26 following50 posts

When I wrote this, my main thesis was companies can't charge enough to make money serving these models. The margins have improved, but I don't think they've broken even yet. Hard to get those numbers until we get public financials from OpenAI or Anthropic. Still waiting for the fall.

Marcus@mkmeier.bsky.social

I just want to write this prediction down to see if it comes true. I suspect OpenAI and Anthropic will end up the Netscapes of this wave. First-movers with early success, that ultimately fail to be replaced by a new wave on stronger foundations.

If there was money to be made, I don't think the hyperscalers would need debt to fuel the build out. Just use the profits. The fact that NVidia has to use financial engineering (their recent $500B financing arrangement) seems like an admission that the companies their funding can't just make money.

Writing software and maintaining software are two very different things. It's a credit to @edzitron.com's research that he picks up on this so clearly as a non-engineer. Also a great example of how coding is only a small part of software engineering.

Ed Zitron@edzitron.com

Wrote the intro for this week's Premium but wanted to share in advance, because people need to start being realistic about what Claude Code/Codex can actually do, and how they are not replacing All Software Companies in a few prompts (and no, they will not get there either).

There are tasks that AI can do, but there is still value in doing it yourself. I'm worried that chasing speed as the primary reason for leaning on AI misses the point. Planning and design should take time, and there's benefit in doing it yourself.

For example: Last week someone showed of that they made an architecture diagram in 10 minutes. However doing it yourself means every piece is put there deliberately, and you've considered all pieces carefully. Even if you review the output, how many details do you gloss over if it's just AI output?

Doing the diagram yourself also means it's a more reliable input for later agentic work actually implementing that diagram. Speed to output isn't the only relevant metric.

Could developers make this mistake? Sure Have developers made this mistake? Many times However in production systems there are deterministic tools specifically setup to prevent this. Also if a human accidentally destroys an environment a new one is deployed in minutes, maybe an hour. Not 13 hours.

Ed Zitron@edzitron.com

Lmfao. Amazon saying this was “human error not AI error.” These perverts don’t respect humanity

These are also the kind of details of love to hear more about. Do analysts or other journalists actually check into this stuff??

Ed Zitron@edzitron.com

Also uhh isn’t this like half of NVIDIA’s cash on hand? If investors had a single brain cell they’d see this as a huge red flag and a significantly worse deal. Before NVIDIA had to spend $100bn to get OpenAI to build 10GW of data centers (so $300bn of GPUs). Now it’s $30bn for stock! Boring

"up to" does a lot of heavy lifting. Many people seem to forget $0.00 is included in "up to." If a deal doesn't have a minimum commitment, it doesn't matter.

Ed Zitron@edzitron.com

there's the magic words - "up to"

So AI demand is insatiable. We have to build everything NOW because there's so much demand. All this capex is needed to meet monstrous demand. .... but we promise to help you if you can't find customers. wtf... what am I missing?

Ed Zitron@edzitron.com

we're doing vendor financing, quite frankly, we're doing some of the greatest vendor financing we've ever seen, the chips are so good that AMD is having to loan them to the customer and also pay to rent them back, it's simply tremendous - can you believe it? www.theinformation.com/articles/amd...

I guess one could argue that they have to issue the guarantee as a formality, but really don't expect to need it. Meeting bank expectations does sometimes require you to make redundant promises. But if the demand was so self-evident, this really just seems unnecessary.

Marcus reposted

"The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little." —FDR, 1937

Marcus reposted

AI is a bubble, but too many people confuse a bad investment strategy with the tech itself. AI will not go away after the bubble bursts any more than websites went away after the dot-com crash. The tech is too useful (though not the panacea the hype mongers would have us believe). 1/3

Marcus reposted

@garymarcus.bsky.social: LLMs still hallucinate and continue to make boneheaded errors, and this Caltech / Stanford paper is yet another suggesting that this is inherent. Even LLMs marketed as offering "reasoning" systems have major problems with reasoning. garymarcus.substack.com/p/breaking-l...

garymarcus.substack.comBREAKING: LLM “reasoning” continues to be deeply flawedA new review underscores the breadth of the problem, and shows that close to a trillion dollars hasn’t changed that

Marcus reposted

Hehe, quoting @garymarcus.bsky.social "if you care about the security of your device or the privacy of your data, don’t use OpenClaw. Period." (Bonus : if your friend has OpenClaw installed, don’t use their machine. A. Don’t catch a CTD — chatbot transmitted disease)

Marcus reposted

Replying to @edzitron.com

You know what also happens if Oracle can’t spend this much on capex every quarter? NVIDIA stops selling as many GPUs, by which I mean Oracle stops ordering billions of servers through Hon Hai/Foxconn, Quanta, Wistron and Wiwynn, AKA the Taiwanese server manufacturers that really buy the chips.

Marcus reposted

There's a ton of stuff in here that Ed put the stats in better than I could, so if you got the time it's well worth the read. But this line killed me! "Every part of the AI bubble — this fucking charade — is unprofitable, save for NVIDIA and the construction firms erecting future laser tag arenas"

Ed Zitron@edzitron.com

My final newsletter of 2025: We're in The Enshittifinancial Crisis, the fourth stage of enshittification, where companies turn on their shareholders. Unprofitable, unsustainable AI threatens future of venture capital, private equity and the markets themselves. www.wheresyoured.at/the-enshitti...

Marcus reposted

Anybody remember AI a month ago? • Everybody in the Bay Area seemed to think that AGI was imminent • Expectations for GPT-5 were through the roof • Zuckerberg was spending bajillions of dollars on Alexandr Wang, staff and GPUs, and seemed to have a coherent plan

I just want to write this prediction down to see if it comes true. I suspect OpenAI and Anthropic will end up the Netscapes of this wave. First-movers with early success, that ultimately fail to be replaced by a new wave on stronger foundations.

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I don't think the way we're using AI right now is sustainable, and once the dust settles we'll be using more bespoke, self-hosted, and custom tuned AI models rather than these large centralized models.

I think training data is going to get harder and more expensive to come by for future generations to. Given how expensive these frontier models are on free training data, I suspect these "do everything" models will be simplified and optimized to more targeted use-cases.

I just want to write this prediction down to see if it comes true. I suspect OpenAI and Anthropic will end up the Netscapes of this wave. First-movers with early success, that ultimately fail to be replaced by a new wave on stronger foundations.

I haven't followed AI closely for some time. Deep dived this last week due to some stuff at work. I can see some helpful use cases, but the vast majority of what I'm seeing is Hype. I'm looking forward to the bubble bursting so we can work with it rationally.

Marcus reposted

America cannot long remain free, nor first among nations, if it becomes the kind of place where universities are dismantled because they don't align politically with the current head of the government.

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