Or for short, The Aristocrats

Yeah, but they never really systematically subsidised fares as such, except for some one-off bonuses to attract divers and stuff like that, in the sense that they didn’t systematically pay drivers more than people were paying per ride. They subsidised it in the sense that the cut they took didn’t cover their development costs, servers, marketing, etc. But those costs don’t increase linearly per customer and they also plateau as the software stack matures, so there’s a path to just raising prices and getting to profit, and each additional customer brought them closer to profit even while the subsidies existed.

OpenAI and Anthropic are paying something like 10x the amount for inference as they get from subscriptions, let alone free usage and training costs. So each new customer is taking them further from being profitable. And if they jacked up the prices 10x, so that the basic subscriptions were a few hundred and the pro ones a few thousand a month, they would still be in the position that Uber was when they were doing the subsidies for their infrastructure. I think it’s fairly obvious that they wouldn’t be acquiring customers very quickly at those prices.

That’s got nothing to do with how expensive it is to serve models to customers which is what was being discussed.

The cost of inference has passed the cost of training quite a while ago and it’s by far the majority of expenses

I think they mean the company since they’re the most famous example of subsidising the product to gain market share and their name is invoked all the time in discussions of AI economics

We are still in the Uber-subsidized part of the relationship.

It’s not comparable, the costs for Uber are fixed development costs which decrease per customer with more customers. AI is strictly more expensive the more users there are since the cost is per use. The financial outlook for the industry is very bad, it will probably never be profitable except maybe in some extremely niche situations.

While there’s some truth to this, the perspective is all wrong. It’s pointless to hand wring about Russia when the reason they can do this successfully is that you can just buy elections in Western countries, and it’s convenient to distract from our home grown corporate/fascist movements. Sure Russia tries to support them because they are bad for Europe, but they can only do that because we allow such things in the first place. They would still exist without Russia. Maybe they would grow a little more slowly, but that’s it. Our unwillingness to confront the evils in our own society is the problem.

you don’t understand, Hamas was hiding in those cemeteries, do you want to support terrorism or what

No doubt, but murdering and forcing people out of their homes isn’t an appropriate way to deal with being persecuted. A religious document about some people millennia ago doesn’t actually give you any entitlement to someone else’s land. And from the very beginning, Zionism’s goal was to exclude Arabs from the region, based on plain racist hatred. Just because they were victims of antisemitism in Europe does not mean they couldn’t continue to perpetrate their own evils, and it’s notable that the antisemite leaders of the time wholeheartedly supported the Zionist project, as do by and large their descendants in the fascist movements of today - because it gets the Jews out of Europe and kills Muslims, they think of it as two birds with one stone. The only long term solution anywhere is for everyone to have equal rights, and it is wrong for Europe and now the US to export their apartheid elsewhere.

Animals sure, European settlers? No, that’s historical fact.

hope they remember that their government fully supports this war

Just once I want someone to run on eradicatimg all religion and banning it’s practice.

Several socialist/communist countries have had some form of this as policy.

I do understand that, but that’s just life. If countries don’t take a long term view and build up their own capacity, but instead just buy the cheapest stuff right now, that won’t be ideal for them. But the solution isn’t to try to dictate other countries’ domestic economic policy, that can’t possibly work. Even if China changes its policy on this matter those countries would still have to spend the exact same amount of money to build their own manufacturing base. Tariff imports a little bit if you have to, but most importantly put that money into actually building domestic capacity for the most important things. This is just the USA trying to put off doing that because the neoliberals are addicted to sucking everyone else dry through finance capitalism and manufacturing isn’t as profitable as tech-IP rent seeking.

the auto industry relies on Chinese imports for much of its materials, without extra investment only applying tariffs will hurt it too

I think they will also have to subsidise or otherwise incentivise manufacturing in their own countries to develop it but like I said their labour costs are lower than in China so they have some competitive advantage there already. I agree it’s bad that the capacity is not more distributed but I don’t believe that China’s internal subsidies will prevent any country from doing this, only post industrial countries which already have the money to buy large amounts of Chinese exports.

I replied with several specific arguments elsewhere in this thread, including a further on this comment chain.

Why would the goal be for “everyone to have a trade surplus”? More like, everyone retains manufacturing capability for at least the most critical things, and speculation which is not even grounded in at least some kind of industrial base is somewhat disincentivised.

Not directly, it’s just a prod to think about the subject a bit more. The IMF wouldn’t push for this if it was of benefit to anyone but the USA and maybe Europe.

The real answer is that, if by “historically oppressed” they mean “poor”, labour costs and purchasing power there are both lower and so it will be within their means to subsidise the manufacturing that they themselves are able to consume, probably even at a lower price than China. If they’re historically oppressed but actually have money now then obviously they can just use that.

Labour costs in China are not that low these days, that’s kind of the point of the subsidies. It’s also much more competitive to subsidise domestic production than to tariff imports. Without that, it just means that Americans pay more for the Chinese goods they’re going to buy anyway because they don’t have a domestic alternative. If the revenue from tariffs in America were actually used to improve manufacturing capacity it wouldn’t be such a problem.

Yeah, the IMF, defender of historically oppressed countries. Lmao.