Yes, absolutely. Even human intelligence stops being useful at a certain point and becomes 'enough, provided the human is motivated and tenacious'. Intention is a better metric, but it's a serious AI weak point if not actively an achilles' heel. 'Warios' come to mind.

Yes, but if you read up two messages in this thread they’re discussing whether AI is power concentrating by default. If you concentrate power through regulation, that’s not “by default”. That’s just corruption in government resulting in a concentration of power.

In terms of API costs they're about right, 10% of weekly usage on a 5x sub is roughly $40 (for Astra). Chinese models cost roughly half as much (and have fewer refusals).

Subs have insane value because large companies cannot use the subscription model. They are loss leaders and are often used for passion projects & startups (where the juicy data is).

Ah and OAI stopped offering the 20x sub as of yesterday.

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TBH it doesn't need to completely solve a problem.

I can use GLM to do in 2 hours what would have previously taken me a week.[1] Switch to Astra or Fable might take that down to 1 hour, maybe.

The difference is not so big when you look at it that way.

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[1] Actually, no, but let's pretend for the sake of argument that SOTA models can 10x - 40x your productivity.

Have you actually used the latest Chinese models? Because, in my experience, they're not just cheaper, they're actually better in many cases. In one recent experiment I did a few days ago on a task that I need in production at scale at my company, Qwen 3.8 and GLM 5.3 Flash were not just cheaper, the results were significantly higher quality than GPT 5.6 Sol.

Even if China doesn't continue to release this stuff for free, I think somebody will. Eventually, maybe Europe or maybe a smaller country that picks up this knowledge will. Or maybe just some random philanthropic billionaire.

Fair. My point is not that all of Marxism is correct (or even most of it) but rather that the specific pattern he and other theorists in that school of thought observed when developing the theory of historical materialism seems to strongly match a lot of what's playing out in AI.

AI, doesn't feel all that different to the mechanical loom that was the impetus behind a lot of Marx's early critiques of industrial technology.

You've got a really cool invention that replaces what was previously a skilled artisan trade. The wealthy then use this invention to excoriate the artisans and render the loom operators as replaceable commodities.

Dario is essentially writing a blog post about why only he (and a few other approved elite companies) should be trusted to own the loom and then make it available for everyone else to labor at. Like the capitalists of Marx's era, he genuinely believes it is better for everyone to have this arrangement and that it is natural people like him should sit as benevolent gods at the top of the pyramid.

It's fascinating to me to see the same underlying mechanisms that gave birth to some of the greatest failed political and social experiments of the 20th century bubbling up again so clearly with AI today.