The problem is that people can take loans without financial liability (not how home purchases work) and drive profitable businesses (which are good for the economy) into the ground (bad for the economy and society).
No one is worried about the bank making the loan in this situation. They are concerned that PE is buying up large parts of the economy using debt they aren't responsible for, which makes them irresponsible owners because they do not face consequences when the moves fail
> which makes them irresponsible owners because they do not face consequences when the moves fail
Again, isn't that entirely the bank's problem? They're responsible for the debt if the company can't pay it, right? I agree on the surface this seems like a bad deal for the bank, but what makes you think you know better than the bank so much so that they shouldn't even be allowed to take that risk?
The difference is that when you buy a home the debt is in your name and you are required to pay it off. In a leveraged buy out wouldn't be to person taking out the loan, the debt is owned by the target of the purchase. If it were like a home loan and this deal goes south GameStop would go bankrupt and have to sell it's own assets to cover the losses. But in reality the debt from the deal would be owned by Ebay and if GameStop can't pay the loan back it'd force Ebay into bankruptcy and sell Ebay's assets. It's essentially a riskless move by GameStop and PE in general. Heads GameStop wins tails Ebay loses
It is a thorny question. The best way I can square the difference is that generally buying a house with debt is on the debtor and the house itself is collateral. The debtor can't pay back the loan the house is taken by the bank to be sold. Where as a PE leveraged by out the debtor is the target company. A company is different than real estate in that they are a legal entity that is now responsible to pay back a loan equal to their own value. The collateral is the business, but the business is now illiquid and has to sell of real assets and go bankrupt.
For example, Joanne's Fabrics was a profitable business with a fair amount of real estate. After PE bought them and was saddled with unreasonable debt they were in the red and had to sell all their stores. This removed useful and profitable business from the economy and sold off the assets in a fire sale. Where as me losing a house just means a bank now owns it and someone else can buy it. But if someone were to buy Joanne's they'd have to pay off the debt Joanne's owed for being bought and run into the ground
There is a long practice of having cosigners on home loans. This feels basically like that.
Which, granted, if you don't like the idea of establishing a company to take on loan responsibilities, I am not trying to offer a defense of that. Was a legit question of how you would structure it so that this is illegal, but home/auto loans are not.
A cosigner is different than what's happening in leveraged buy outs. A Cosigner is financially responsible if the debtor cannot pay back their portion of the loan. In a Leveraged buyout the purchaser does not take on financial liability for the debt, that is all placed on the company being purchased. This means that if the purchaser isn't even the cosigner in this scenario; the company being purchased is the sole entity responsible for repayment. So if GameStop goes through with this, but Ebay can't repay the debt than Ebay would suffer graver consequences than GameStop
But the biggest reason the purchaser does not have to cosign that loan is because in an LBO the purchaser is also essentially the mortgage bank for that loan. Should that be allowed?
Fair, but the nefarious scenarios people are talking about should at least be a major reputational hit for the people that did the fund raising. We are literally describing a ton of value getting destroyed. Someone is taking that hit.
The sentiment is not that this man shouldn't be prosecuted it is that the blatant double standard and growing endemic societal cancer that is corruption is being allowed to blossom while leaders target scape goats for the same behavior. What this administration is trying to signal with going after this guy is that the problem is not with them, it's someone else, that they're on the up and up. It is why scapegoating is an effective tactic
it's a blatant double standard if you have evidence of people "doing it and getting away with it", but you don't, you just suspect it. and it's scapegoating if blame is centered on a person or group to explain away the totality of a widespread (or made up) problem, and that is also not happening here, instead "a person did something" and got arrested.
I don’t understand the point of denying reality when it unfolds in front of you. Plenty of evidence for these things. Denial of obvious truth is an American epidemic and cultural export
The point is that none of the congressional cases would end in a conviction. So unless you want to suspend rule of law theres not really much we can do without some hard evidence.
They want it, sure. Customers want everything if it's free, but this is about what they value with their money. In this thought experiment, you're Anthropic, not the customer. You're making a choice that's best for Anthropic. Will Anthropic lose customers because the latency is higher? No way. Customers want low cost and lots of usage more than they want low latency. In a cutthroat race to the bottom, there's no room to "give away" massively expensive freebies like a data center near every population center when the customer doesn't value those extras with actual money. It's the same reason we all tolerate the relatively slow batched token generation rate--the batching dramatically lowers the cost, and we need low cost inference more than we want fast generation. If the cost goes up we'll actually leave, for real.
After the initial announcement of "fast mode" in Claude Code, did you ever hear about anyone using it for real? I didn't. Vanishingly few people are willing to pay extra for faster inference.
Remember that the time-to-first-token is dominated by the time to process the prompt. It's orders of magnitude more latency than the network route is adding. An extra 200 milliseconds of network delay on a 5-10 second time-to-first-token is not even noticeable; it's within the normal TTFT jitter. It would be foolish to spend billions of dollars to drop data centers around the world to reduce the 200 milliseconds when it's not going to reduce the 5-10 seconds. Skip the exotic locales and put your data centers in Cheap Power Tax Haven County, USA. Perhaps run the numbers and see if Free Cooling City, Sweden is cheaper.
They’re unwilling to pay for fast mode because of the current step function price increase once you hit your quota. It’s a psychological effect. Because most shops I know in the US currently paying $125/mo per seat for Claude would happily - HAPPILY - pay 2x, and begrudgingly pay 10x that amount for the same service. If fast mode was priced 25% or 50% more they’d happily pay for that too. But it’s just not priced that way currently with weird growth subsidization & psychology.
The only AI use case that cares about latency is interactive voice agents, where you ideally want <200ms response time, and 100ms of network latency kills that. For coding and batch job agents anything under 1s isn't going to matter to the user.
tbh, that's a good point about the voice agents that I hadn't considered. I guess there are some latency-sensitive inference workloads. Thanks for pointing that out.
A customer service chatbot can require more than one LLM call per response to the point that latency anywhere in the system starts to show up as a degraded end-user experience.
Easy solution - use hyperscalers with super expensive API charge only when latency really matters. Otherwise build your own DC. Easy to expect customers don't care latency that much over money.
Black macbooks are anodized aluminum which are thin coatings that would be removed when filing. It might look cool but it’d be the silvery color of raw aluminum
This looks really interesting. I'm curious to learn more about security around this project. There's a small section, but I wonder if there's more to be aware of like prompt injection
I'm happy you brought this up. I've been thinking about this and working on a plan to make it as solid as possible. For now, the best way would be to run each agent in a docker container (there is an example Dockerfile in the repo) so any destructive actions will be contained to the container.
However, this does not help if a person gives access to something like Google Calendar and a prompt tells the LLM to be destructive against that account.
You can make it free but still require a person to travel to the county seat or some other distant location to get the ID. That requirement disproportionately hinders minority and poor voters. It’s also easy to “forget” their registrations.
Yeah I remember the discourse around that acquisition as being a really smart play to shore up the new frontier in social media as Facebook grew stale and uncool.
Tons of critical comments on HN at the time, for one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3817840. And most of the positive ones viewed it as a defensive measure rather than another Google + YouTube story.
I strongly disagree. I think he might be a joke as an individual, and I hate a lot about his impact on the world, but as a business leader, he's probably at the top 1% of all CEOs, which isn't saying that much, but it's very much not a joke if your metric is shareholder value.
I mean I also think this move doesn’t make sense, but I always find these type of comments interesting. Do people think they could do better in Mark’s shoes?
