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 ;)

Not sure why this was modded flamebait. I don't see anything grossly inaccurate and any editorializing isn't exactly couched in fantasy.

"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.

Coding, primarily. That's the majority of the text-generation token burn, and strong majority of paying users. Free users asking questions about their daily lives make up a lot of people but only quite small amounts of tokens per user per day, and generally on tiny models. Some users like mathematicians may burn through a lot of tokens on their work, but there's just not enough of them to matter in the overall picture.

Margins at Anthropic and OpenAI are an impressive 40% (and also sustainable at the open model providers), so this isn't just going away. Most of the costs are on scaleup and the infinite race to develop the latest, greatest frontier models.

Browsing sites like Amazon and Ebay is a chore anyway when you're looking for something specific or have a complex weighing of parameters. An AI agent for narrowing down product listings would be a big deal. But these sites neither make their own *nor*, apparently, let you use external ones.

I mean, it's possible...

In that Paramount Skydance is a heavily leveraged company whose debt rating is in junk territory, with a debt-to-EBITDA ratio of 4-5x, and we're entering a period of monetary tightening, while it has been loading itself up with "traditional media" forms in a time of shifting viewership trends. Aka, if Paramount Skydance ends up going bankrupt and its assets get sold off...

Then, and only then, might it lead to better outcomes for the consumer. Barring that? No.

That largely depends on what the contract actually says, and how the data is 'federated' within Flock's own systems.

It sounds like Flock's business model was to build the massive data-collection system, but since that's expensive, it used contracts with government entities to pay for the build-out. The contracts with each of the entities might well be for the services delivered to them, but since many municipalities have separate contracts for how real estate (and installing something on a light pole counts) then Flock might be maintaining their own contracts separately for the physical placement of their cameras.

So Flock gets agencies/government to pay for the services of license plate data collection with one contract then uses another contract for Flock to pay for the rental for pole space. If the contract to provide data to the polity lapses or is terminated, that doesn't necessarily mean that Flock's permits to maintain equipment on poles is also terminated as they're separate contracts. Granted, operating the cameras is on Flock's dime now, but if they continue to harvest data then they might find takers for that data even if not the original municipality or other agency who paid for the cameras.

The thing that our current interpretation of the Constitution lacks is where the dividing line between one's self and a third-party sits when it comes to the sanctity of one's person, papers, and effects. At the time that the Constitution was written there was no photography, let alone videography, mass-processing of records automatically, etc. Someone had to physically observe someone in public in order to know what they did, and could only repeat with their words what they saw rather than demonstrating it. We don't have good law for 3rd party collection of volumes of data about people and the ability of said 3rd party to provide that data to the government. A ruling, law, or amendment that puts protections on requesting information and establishes some kind of checks and balances system that applies to the government in all its forms is needed. I don't know what the threshold should be either, but clearly right now when we have stories where the justification for a search is, "ASDFG" then something needs to change.