I just tried this for fun with Gemini (hardly the best model, but I wasn't about to spend the money having an agentic framework of high-end models go over it ;) ). It advised:

1) Working with the Iranians at the upcoming UN meeting to try to strike a deal where the US stops its blockage of Iranian oil in exchange for Iran allowing free traffic through Hormuz, without nuclear programme preconditions.

2) Adding pressure on Putin to accept the Ukrainian offer of a mutual energy industry targeting ceasefire

3) Focus freed up US naval forces on protecting convoys through the Bab-el-Mandeb

4) Launching an emergency Jones Act waiver

5) Order the EPA Administrator to issue temporary waivers easing seasonal Reid Vapor Pressure (RVP) gasoline restrictions and granting flexibility on Tier 3 sulfur credit banking.

6) Convene the CEOs of the top domestic refiners into a taskforce run by the Department of Energy to coordinate autumn maintenance schedules to avoid multiple regional coker and hydrocracker units taking turnaround downtime simultaneously.

7) Formally announce that the administration will not conduct large-scale, unrefined crude releases from the SPR. Signal to the industry that physical crude in domestic storage is adequate, shifting regulatory focus to downstream bottlenecks.

8) Reprogram allocated DOE infrastructure funds ($1.4 billion) to expedite cavern repairs at Bryan Mound and Bayou Choctaw.

9) Deploy the Northeast Home Heating Oil Reserve (NEHHOR) strictly on an exchange/loan basis (where refiners borrow diesel barrels now and repay them with interest in refined barrels next spring) to protect national balance sheets while easing spot tightness

10) Issue an Executive Order under the Defense Production Act (DPA) to expedite pipeline compressor stations and pipeline permits connecting the Permian Basin to Gulf Coast refining hubs

11) Direct the Surface Transportation Board to prioritize crude and chemical feedstock movements on Class I railroads.

12) Use USDA Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) authorities to establish emergency fuel cost-offset credits for agricultural producers and commercial freight carriers until crack spreads retreat below $30/barrel.

13) Announce this unified security-and-energy plan publicly to provide appropriate signals to the market.

The US economy as a whole would lose more from banning exports than it would gain. If one is concerned about "ordinary people", it makes more sense to continue allowing exports, add a windfall tax on oil companies or add export duties, and then rebate the revenue from that across the US population, than to ban exports.

Had the oil industry not been so naive and spent this whole year betting on TACO and/or Iranian surrender, the US could be making even more money right now on this crisis. New shale production from an existing lease can be added in just 3-6 months, yet shale expansion rates didn't increase over baseline from spring through the summer. Refining capacity is harder to add that quickly, but probably could have been boosted several percent, which would still be a quite meaningful added value. It gets harder to improve capacity now because most types of capacity addition involve downtime and absolutely nobody wants to be shut down now while crack spreads are this high.

I'd love to see the US congress pass a bill renaming Trump ;)

Voting doesn't matter - it never did

Bullshit. By repeating this you're among the worst offenders. You're encouraging other people not to participate in their democracy. You guys have steeped yourselves in propaganda for your entire history and an active corruption and anti-education campaign for at least the last fifty years but you're not that far gone. Yet.

Plus my votes potentially won't count in the next election.

Yeah, voter suppression is bad hey? Stop doing it. Encourage people to think about their vote, cast it, and protect it, because it does matter.

hey will deliberately put their military forces in or near schools and hospitals.

Like these ones? The US department of defence operates more than a hundred schools, many of them on military bases. They pretty much all have hospitals too.

Are you American and eligible to vote? If so, then you are. That's what the very first line of your constitution, "We the people" means. It's a declaration of popular sovereignty, the idea that political power originates with the citizens.

If you voted for the president or representatives who placed Hegseth in power then you're extra responsible. Ditto if you didn't try to recall for those representatives or if you don't vote in the next election for the candidate most likely to ship off anyone involved to be tried for war crimes.

I remember looking it up at the time and I'm pretty sure Google Maps had it listed as an elementary school. It certainly is now:

https://www.google.com/maps/pl...

basic incompetence and a complete disregard for human life.

The first bit of this sentence is absolutely wrong.

I don't know, that sentence seems to describe Hegseth pretty well, along with the people who put him in his current job. Unless you're arguing that his incompetence is more advanced than "basic."

"Meta didn't tell Amazon that Muse would access its store" - and? I didn't tell Amazon I'd be accessing its store either before I started shopping there.

This isn't models going off and browsing Amazon for giggles; they're going there because their user told them to. The user would have otherwise told their web browser to; it just would have taken far more steps.

There's no end to the scale up phase.

So demand is going to keep growing at 10x/year... forever? So Anthropic itself is a paperclip maximizer? That eventually the universe itself will be entirely comprised of Anthropic.

Man... until they harvest my atoms to build their latest zettafab, I want to be invested in THAT!

The same place it's coming from now: subscriptions / API fees. Today, mostly programmers.

then it'd need 80% of those users to be spending $2000 just to break even by 2030

So your model is that their demand suddenly stop growing at 10x per year and switch to ~0x (despite no sign of that), yet they kept building out as if their demand was growing at 10x per year? That's an... unusual hypothesis there.

It's actually the inverse problem. In the past you had few options (if more than one at all!), so comparison is easy. Today you have hundreds or even thousands of options; you're overwhelmed by choice, making selection of the best fit much more work.

If I'm shopping for grow lights (to reuse the last example), first I'm going to want to rule out the wrong form factor, voltage, etc. Then I'll want to rule out anything that's not "approximately" in the right power range. Then I have to dig into what their actual power figures *mean* - is it wall power or it some nominal "LED watts" by some arbitrary metric (some of which metrics are inflated several times over)? Or, it may be fine if they even don't have power listed at all, but if they have light measurements. BUT if they put it in lumens, that's nonsense for plants, one needs photosynthetic flux per day, or at least umol/J and the wall-plug wattage. But it's rare for umol/J to be provided on "non-professional" (read: crazy-expensive) fixtures. Some lights will list photosynthetic flux ratings at different positions under the light, but it would be a headache (and probably give a wrong number) to try to integrate it to the total light output from that. Then you need to get a sense of the efficiency, since most of the cost of running the fixture is actually power. If you have the wall plug power draw AND the daily photosynthetic flux then you can calculate it, but you usually don't have the latter, so you start looking for clues. Lumens *might* give you a hint if you make reasonable adjustments, but it's rough. It's probably a good start to look at what specific LED chips they advertise, if they mention it, as the newer generations are more efficient. If there's heavy sculpting with a lens you can assume it's reducing the flux vs. flat plate/laminated LEDs. Then just looking at the fixture - how well cooled does it appear to be, based on the amount of heat sinks? Better cooled = more efficiency and longer life, but also more weight. UNLESS it's a heat pipe system, which cuts weight down a lot, BUT requires that the panel be in a horizontal orientation. THEN you need to start checking out independent reviews from third party sites...

It takes ages. And I encounter this sort of problem all the time when buying things online. An AI agent that can do all of that fetching and analysis work for me would be such a headache cure.

Let me repeat:

Most of the costs are on scaleup and the infinite race to develop the latest, greatest frontier models.

It's is almost never the case that a company posts a net profit when it's in its growth phase, let alone a virtually-unheard-of 3 1/2 year 10x annualized growth streak. Many can't even manage positive margins. That Anthropic is roughly net-breakeven net income on huge margins, despite growing that quickly and operating in a cutthroat-competitive environment is no small miracle, and essentially guarantees** profitability when said growth streak calms down.

** Under the premise that the market distribution and pricing power between the players remains roughly the same. One always runs the risk that even if investors value the overall market correctly, that each investor assumes that their preferred market player will be dominant in said future (in market share and margins), and thus overvalues them, and the market space gets overinvested in as a whole (the Fallacy of Composition - see for example solar manufacturing 2008-2013, container shipping 2011-2018, China's NEV market 2016-2023, etc). It's quite possible that the frontier labs become less relevant, wherein the better investment buy is in open model servers. But assuming the distribution and pricing power remains the same, any slowdown in expansion goes directly into black on the bottom lines of companies like Anthropic.

Remind me of...

I agree with the GP. You must be looking for much more specific, easy to search and quantify things. I rarely if ever shop there anymore (don't want to support Bezos, and their shipping to Iceland is outrageous (where available at all), even from the European Amazon stores), but like, if I wanted to buy grow lights, I would have to spend hours wading through ads one by one and building up a spreadsheet because you simply can't query on the parameters that matter. And they don't have an AI agent you can outsource the task to.