> Just because you can cook with a hammer doesn't make it its purpose.
If you survey all the people who own a hammer and ask what they use it for, cooking is not going to make the list of top 10 activities.
If you look around at what LLMs are being used for, the largest spaces where they have been successfully deployed are astroturfing, scamming, and helping people break from reality by sycophantically echoing their users and encouraging psychosis.
Email, by number of emails attempted to send is owned by spammers 10 to 100 fold over legitimate emails. You typically don't see this because of a massive effort by any number of companies to ensure that spam dies before it shows up in your mailbox.
To go back one step farther porn was one of the first successful businesses on the internet, that is more than enough motivation for our more conservative congress members to ban the internet in the first place.
Is it possible that these are in the top 10, but not the top 5? I'm pretty sure programming, email/meeting summaries, cheating on homework, random QA, and maybe roleplay/chat are the most popular uses.
The number of programmers in the world is vastly outnumbered by the people that do not program. Email / meeting summaries: maybe. Cheating on homework: maybe not your best example.
This is another example of why its frustrating still.
"Yes I'm happy I'm not dying" ignores that "go to the hospital [and waste a day, maybe some financial cost]" because a machine was wrong. This is still pretty inconvenient because a machine wasn't accurate/calibrated/engineered weak. Not dying is good, but the emotions and fear for a period of time is still bad.
I 100% understand those frustrations. That the "detectors" should've been more accurate, or the fears, battery of tests, and costs associated of time and money. But, if you have the means to find out something that could have been extremely concerning is actually "nothing wrong" - isn't that worth it?
My friend is 45, had bloody stool -> colonoscopy -> polyps removed -> benign. Isn't that way better than colon cancer?
There's a lot of speculation about how different rounds will get paid out.
Unless someone has insider information and is willing to post, we have absolutely no idea who was made whole, who lost and/or who gained.
At the size of Brex, anything is possible and it depends on how much leverage they had at each priced round. Guaranteed payout, equal, founders multiplier, lead multipier. All possible.
Additionally, what people don't realize is the headline number can get severely inflated IF debt is included in the purchase price. If say their book was 4.3B in debt then the equity part is ~800m and all of a sudden everyone's underwater.
An opaque method of ensuring investors get a huge payout at the expense of employees with ISOs that convert to common stock. Many startups refuse to share this multiplier with candidates, and will instead insist their equity grant is "competitive with the market" and "very generous."
I wouldn't be surprised if, despite the large-sounding acquisition sum of ~5b, many employees are getting their equity zero'd out and replaced with a back-loaded 4 year grant, with vesting starting today and no credit for time already worked.
It's a different form of guaranteed payout where their value is a multiple on the next round or buyout event.
Both guaranteed payout and multiplier are forms lowering your specific allocation of the evaluation so you get a larger payout vs the rest of that group or future groups.
In terms of quality they are there, now it's expansion. I, for one, am quite excited for all this competition. I don't care who makes my level 4/5 self driver, I just want it now.
If you think that just because VSCode is free there's no money on the line, you're not thinking about things the way others do. As I said, reputation alone definitely has a cost and Microsoft has partnerships where VSCode is strategic. They probably just made a calculation that there's not enough users and/or the users using that private API were strategically misaligned with their direction.
This is the knife-food vs knife-stab vs gun argument. Just because you can cook with a hammer doesn't make it its purpose.
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