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The OnlyFans Economy of American AI

leoveanu.com

211–220 of 221 posts

Re: The OnlyFans Economy of American AI

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I missing out? I feel like I can definitely tell the difference in quality between Claude Opus and other smaller models. The smaller models are much more likely to make mistakes or to get stuck on random stuff Maybe I just haven't been trying the right models?

It's not just you. I tried an Opencode Go subscription, and experimented with most of their models (GLM, Kimi, Qwen, Deepseek), and none of them got anywhere close to Opus - the difference in quality was very noticeable, especially with Deepseek V4 Pro and Flash. The only caveats: I didn't play around with Qwen 3.7 Max very much, and of course these models are far cheaper than Opus. But any suggestion that Deepseek a…

> But any suggestion that Deepseek approaches Opus in terms of quality/intelligence immediately makes me suspect propaganda - it's that noticeable of a difference.

The argument was never that DeepSeek is on a level with Opus - the argument is that DeepSeek is good enough for the majority of day-to-day engineering tasks (where Opus is decidedly overkill).

Re: The OnlyFans Economy of American AI

#212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just you. I tried an Opencode Go subscription, and experimented with most of their models (GLM, Kimi, Qwen, Deepseek), and none of them got anywhere close to Opus - the difference in quality was very noticeable, especially with Deepseek V4 Pro and Flash. The only caveats: I didn't play around with Qwen 3.7 Max very much, and of course these models are far cheaper than Opus. But any suggestion that Deepseek a…

> But any suggestion that Deepseek approaches Opus in terms of quality/intelligence immediately makes me suspect propaganda - it's that noticeable of a difference. The argument was never that DeepSeek is on a level with Opus - the argument is that DeepSeek is good enough for the majority of day-to-day engineering tasks (where Opus is decidedly overkill).

Absolutely. The cost comparison is roughly between DeepSeek and Haiku (assuming a reputable Western provider, not DeepSeek's own API) whereas the average capabilities sit comfortably above Sonnet.

Re: The OnlyFans Economy of American AI

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the odds of that are low. It's not like decision maker(s) are watching social media and going with the vibes, but it's almost certain that there's a rich conversation going on behind the scenes in opaque channels, especially with regards to the AI-only companies. And those conversations are likely what drove their decision.

> It's not like decision maker(s) are watching social media and going with the vibes, What do you mean? They are all on twitter! It’s the most engaging activity for billionaires

Lol, fair point! But I'd argue two things. The first is that few to none of them are changing their opinions due to the proles. The second is that public vs private opinions often differ, sometimes extremely, especially with influential people. For an example there I think it's fairly certain that some chunk of the people pushing AI believe it's a bubble, and are motivated solely by trying to squeeze the boom window for all they can personally extract. And so their public positions on things, and their private ones may different radically - especially in domains where they stand to win/lose as a result of those issues.

Re: The OnlyFans Economy of American AI

#214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of the Chinese models are open weights, so if you are concerned about them "phoning home", then anyone can just self-host and run them themself, or use via a US provider such as OpenRouter.

There's a higher-order concern here that I'm paranoid enough to voice: that if used as a coding agent, an AI model affiliated with a country's government might try to make my software susceptible to attacks by that government's intelligence forces. And note that I'm not singling out China here.

If you're that paranoid, then you shouldn't be using any online services at all, and should not have an internet connection to your PC. Never use a compiler that you have not bootstrapped yourself without the use of any other compiler binary.

Even with these precautions you may still be hacked by state-level actors using a whole variety of sophisticated attack vectors. There may be Stuxnet-like software hidden on your hard drive where you cannot see it. If you do not have a TEMPEST hardened compute environment then anything you type on your keyboard or display on your screen may be getting stolen.

That said, it would be a fantastic achievement if someone could create a coding model that managed to hide a backdoor in the code it was generating. although surely simpler to hack you in 100 other ways.

Re: The OnlyFans Economy of American AI

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the Honolulu Star-Observer (a corporation, or “artificial person”) only has those rights & privileges that it has been granted by the State of Hawaii? This is going to end up being a nice little windfall for the attorneys and otherwise just clog the Federal court system.

"the day the law goes into effect, it strips each Hawaii entity of the powers it held the day before. The new law asserts that “[t]he creation and continued existence of a corporation is not a right but a conditional grant of legal status by the State and remains subject to complete withdrawal at any time. All powers previously granted to corporations under the laws of this State are revoked in their entirety."(TFA)…

Yeah, that’s clearly unconstitutional. The government can’t grant or withhold rights and privileges to, say, a newspaper publishing corporation, based on whether the newspaper content is what the government wants it to be.

Re: The OnlyFans Economy of American AI

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are actually referring to open weight models, not open source. Gpt-OSS is an example of an open weight model. It’s highly capable in agentic settings, people use it for coding all the time. My greater point remains. Models like the qwen variants, minimax, k2.5, glm models are available by American providers like AWS at a much cheaper price than api offerings from the big three LLM providers. Your point about Chin…

Not a great example: Qwen 9b is a tiny model that outputs barely coherent text in a casual chat, nowhere near comparable to Haiku. But the broader point stands.

I am not sure if you are testing qwen 3.5 9b. I would also verify that you are running it correctly. Qwen 3.5 9b is actually a very capable coding model that can do agentic coding albeit it’s obviously not as good as opus.

You can look up the benchmarks on that model as well. Your experience does not align with mine.

Re: The OnlyFans Economy of American AI

#217
post #9

Most American companies (regulated ones, definitely) can't dare to touch any Chinese models, though they knew that it makes perfect economic sense. Until the taboo prevails, the cartel get's their flood of profit. That's a cartel protected by regulations.

Even with open weights, there's a legit reason to be careful when making stuff for defense.

Let's say I am making sensor software, and I say, huh, let's bring in a tiny little vision model for my EO sensor - then it can identify "boat shapes" even if it doesn't have a database of all boats. Pretty neat, right? Well, the point could be made, that the weights might be hiding behavior that will make my vision model . . not see specific boats very well.

"Landing craft? I see no landing craft."

Some decent testing would expose this in a couple shakes, but, well, now you know how much software testing happens in Defense, especially in the unmanned world. Not a whole bunch.

Re: The OnlyFans Economy of American AI

#218
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking forward to the outcome of those legal processes againt the CEOs, that sit behind Trump at the inauguration. After they stole all the knowledge in the world to train their models. And the current administration is drunk on SpaceX pre IPO shares...how did they get them? "Trump Officials Held Millions of Dollars of SpaceX Ahead of IPO" - https://news.bloomberglaw.com/texas-brief/trump-officials-he...

I meant to look for an example of Musk losing a lawsuit and I accidentally came upon another two. Here and elsewhere you are just running propaganda, knowingly or not.

Musk and companies have so far over 950 lawsuits and legal processes for criminal or unethical activity (yes I researched this). Even his data centers and gas turbine deployments are illegal!

Lost one lawsuit against the same AI mafia, and if you look at the legal details reason was for filling the claim too late.

He publicly called a hero a Pedophile, and got away with it...in court.

Now...who do you work for?

[1] - "EPA rules that xAI’s natural gas generators were illegally used" - https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/16/epa-rules-that-xais-natura...

Re: The OnlyFans Economy of American AI

#220
post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"People shouldn't need to use AI unless they're overworked, Google is good enough." But why should I work harder than necessary to do the same job? Why wouldn't I want to use the best tools available?

You're likely not doing the "same job". If you really want to take that stance, you can take it so easy that you're unemployed and your employer can vibecode their business into the ground. The best tool available is your own mind. You should at least understand what you're being held accountable for. We already went through all this shit the previous decade with copypasta and the decade before that with WYSIWYG and…

I'm not taking that stance. It's possible to have a moderate position between "Don't use AI" and "let AI do everything." I am doing the same job, more or less, just a little faster/more efficiently.

Have you heard of comparative advantage? Even if the US is better than Nowhereville at making literally everything, it still makes sense for Nowhereville to make whatever it can make with the lowest opportunity cost.

I'm smarter than AI in my area of expertise, or in any area I have time to learn thoroughly. But I can't learn everything. AI is a better generalist than I am.

Or maybe you're right. Technology never improves productivity. We ought to go back to assembly language written on clay tablets, everything's been downhill since then.

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