Financial Times reported that Anthropic is telling investors “gross margins are above 80% before revenue it shares with distribution partners and before the cost of training models.”
This is like saying, “I got $500 at the casino, but don’t ask me how much I spent on the slot machines”. All the AI corpos are in the same boat, so this “fear of danger” is likely a smokescreen for, “we’re hemorrhaging cash”.
The better part of a decade, all the resources in the world, and you expect me to be impressed with something that can’t perfectly do an entry level programming project? With that kind of resource usage, I expect a moon landing at the very least.
There is no use case for chat boxes. Uber was losing money, but it was driving people to places. Amazon was losing money, but it was delivering books to people. Chat boxes don’t do shit.
Uber would have failed if their cars just drove in circles. Amazon would have failed if they didn’t deliver anything. There is no real use case for this tech, just like with scam coins or monkey pictures, this is tech searching for a problem to solve.
The most foundational aspect of business is that you gotta do something to get money. What exactly have these chat boxes produced? Shitty porn and incorrect advice. If that’s the best they’ve got after consuming the entirety of human knowledge and guzzling an ocean of freshwater, this shit ain’t going nowhere.
These folks don’t actually wanna leave. Peter Thiel will blow a lot of smoke about how he’s totally gonna leave California because of Communisim or whatever, but there’s a couple things to keep in mind.
The billionaires are spending mad money to fight this tax. This is not the action of someone who plans to leave the state.
The infrastructure that makes the billionaires rich cannot be moved from California easily. A person is easy to move, a warehouse less so. Those assets can be taxed, even if the owner leaves the state.
Fuck these guys. Billionaires do not contribute to the economy; they suck out the wealth and hoard it. Even in the worst case scenario of rich folks leaving the state with their ill gotten gains, the state wasn’t gonna get that money anyways The worst case scenario for California of the mythical “Wealth Flight” is a bunch of parasites moving elsewhere.
These parasites have had it too good for too long. A measly little one time tax is a step in the right direction that I hope opens the door to more aggressive taxation on these dregs of society.