This would of course negatively impact eBay because it would now be saddled with immense debt. To pay this debt, there would be mass layoffs leading to a decline in customer service, quality and innovation.

Deals like this benefit nobody but shareholders (in the short term) and lenders. The workers at the companies get laid off, consumers get worse products, and the odds of bankruptcy spike. Leveraged buyouts seem like a net negative to society.

I think this comes from Anthropic recently implementing auto routing of model effort. You can manually set effort with /effort in CC.

It does seem like this new routing is worse for the consumer in terms of code quality and token usage somehow.

This was my suspicion. They had a bad training run that was really good at a few things.

Doesn't seem to match the buzz internally at Anthropic about it?

Design aside, the quality is undeniable, the price is reasonable and the M chips have been in their own league of efficiency. (Tho the new Intel and Qualcomm chips look to be catching up)

Is being a serious competitor to OpenAI a good business proposition? OpenAI burns through insane amounts of cash and it seems pretty likely that it will ultimately just be replaced by cheaper Chinese models/inference.

The real product is the agent harnesses, which to be fair can be trained specifically to work with an in-house harness, but not sure it's necessary to own the models, especially if Chinese companies are licensing theirs for fine-tuning like we see with Cursor.

Google is a good example of this, they aren't at the very top, but they're very competitive, and they can afford it, and it may one day pay for itself. Eventually it will be just good enough that in theory you don't need to keep chasing the #1 spot if it just works. I think that's something we all forget too easily.

Hosting videos is really expensive. AI video generation inference is really expensive. I'd love to see how much money this experiment cost.

So much that they walked away from a billion dollar deal with Disney by dropping Sora.

It's not clear to me what that billion dollar meant.

To me it seems it was "Disney gets shares and we get to use their characters in Sora".

Even if Sora breaks even, why would you gift Disney stock? It's not like they actual gave 1B to openai.

I don't think anyone outside of Disney/ClosedAI knows what deal was actually made. Maybe they just shut down public use of Sora but Disney will still be able to use it internally? Maybe they never even signed anything, as is too often the case with AI deals, especially big ones, how we read about signed/inked deals but then it turns out it was all just words spoken. Maybe they took the cash, then shut Sora down to save money? Could be any number of things that happened which we might never know.

Hosting videos is not that expensive, compared to generation and inference costs. It's not cheap but it's not that horrible

I assume the logic is that you can now sell the TV for less than competitors, which would surely bring customers. Seems pretty straightforward and inline with how the whole TV broadcast industry has subsidized content with ads for decades.

Not just TV's. Xiaomi subsidizes it's mobile phones by having ads in it's file manager and other default basic apps. Just as an example.

Can you share a link to your agent class or another one you think is good?

Kneecapping the country's best AI lab seems like a bad way to win at the cyber.

It's going to get increasingly difficult to sell software when there is no moat to replication. We're quickly reaching the point where you can just tell an agent "learn what this software does and then code it".