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The OnlyFans Economy of American AI
- LurkandComment 3mo agoEvery industry goes through its slop phase. You should see how much of early print was smut or really amaturish. We just like to talk about the Bible and the great art. What we need is a way to filter through it. AI should be decent at this, but for many intentional and unintentional reasons it isn't.
- graemep 3mo agoEarly print was not just smut or amateurish. Some of it was highly harmful misinformation: Malleus Maleficarem is an outstanding example that caused an immense amount of harm.
- swiftcoder 3mo ago> You should see how much of early print was smut Hey, don't malign smut. It's the great technological motivator
- sandworm101 3mo agoIs it just me, but the language gap between me and the AI believers is becoming insumountable. I use AI every day. I have a local server not ten feet from me as i type this, but i struggle to comprehend the gibberish that comes from those only slightly deeper in the rabbit hole than myself. Is this what 24/7 AI thinking does to people? >> I am here to light up the dark path you are unknowingly walking, like lamplighters who used to light street lamps for those brave enough to walk the night alone. >> It all fell apart quickly, turning into smoke and mirrors. You see, I committed the cardinal sin of idolatry. For that, I am an idiot too. With OpenAI, at least I knew the devil Is this a critique of the state of AI or Tolkien fanfic?
- mohamedkoubaa 3mo agoIt is not just you
- swiftcoder 3mo ago> Is this a critique of the state of AI or Tolkien fanfic? Por que no los dos? One of the most storied AI researchers is most known for his Harry Potter fanfic, and we all know how much the techbros love naming things after Tolkien...
- tayo42 3mo agoWho is that?
- swiftcoder 3mo agoYudkowsky
- fragmede 3mo agoEliezer Yudkowskywho wrote Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality http://hpmor.com http://hpmor.com
- rawgabbit 3mo agoThe last notable event in American history when the meaning of words lost any semblance to reality was just before the Civil War. We are living in a post words world where words have no meaning.
- trumpdong 3mo agoWhat happened to words in the American Civil War?
- sandworm101 3mo agoThe intersection of a war, a reliable mail service, and generational literacy promoted by protestant faiths. Every tom dick and harry started writing letters.
- trumpdong 3mo agoAnd then words lost their meanings?
- rawgabbit 3mo agoI was referring to things like this https://dispatch.richmond.edu/1861/4/13/2/31 https://dispatch.richmond.edu/1861/4/13/2/31 https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn84024738/1861-04-13/ed-1/ https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn84024738/1861-04-13/ed-1/
- throwaway041207 3mo agoI don't think the writing style has anything to do with AI, it's just a writer without an editor.
- Bolwin 3mo agoIf this is what we get without editors I want every thing I read to be without editors
- mannanj 3mo agoI actually liked that statement about the sin of idolatry. I resonated and it described something I've been guilty of and learning to break, its embedded deem in the culture. We do idolize and heroize groups and people, think Elon Musk and his cult following in the early days of Tesla. I think it's great to name that even if it's in this crude, sort of offensive way. AI thinking has had this weird effect on me though like you say, where I want to write sentences with more commas in them, and like, try to make 3 points and 3 separate commas in a sentence to condense information better.
- swiftcoder 3mo ago> and will judge, like any sane person, that US frontier models have stopped earning their multiplier I think that this is on the money, although I'd place the bar even lower - DeepSeek v4 Flash is sufficient for basically all day-to-day coding tasks. You might want something beefier for a complicated reverse-engineering project, but it will competently one-shot a decently complicated app or API - and a $10/month OpenCode Go subscription is sufficient to keep you in tokens for such a cost-efficient model... Similarly, my employer hands us all Cursor, I've yet to actually switch it out of "auto" mode, which mostly runs Composer (their in-house finetune of Kimi 2.5).
- xyzal 3mo agoI'll root for DeepSeek v4 Flash as well. It surprised me just how "good enough" it is for most of my needs, and also dirt cheap. Everyone should try it at least once.
- MaKey 3mo ago+1, it's good enough for what I need to do as a DevOps engineer.
- Multiplayer 3mo agofired it up via the $5 opencode go subscription and am stoked. This is an amazing amount of capability for pennies on the dollar. I'm using it alongside my codex and claude max subs. Just fantastic for coding that claude is architecting.
- ignoramous 3mo ago> This is an amazing amount of capability for pennies on the dollar. True. I doubt how long OpenCode can subsidize $10/mo Go plan for. Its weekly and monthly limits already seem restrictive for some of the most capable models like Qwen 3.7 Max and GLM 5.1. That said, if the tasks are do-able by DeepSeek v4 Pro, Mimo 2.5 Pro, and Qwen 3.7 Plus, then it indeed is a super nice deal. I haven't too many complains other than the fact that these models sometimes require more/detailed instructions than Claude Sonnet / GPT 5.x did.
- obsidianbases1 3mo agoI really enjoyed this critical take on the current landscape. It's a breathe of fresh air from the seemingly neverending stream of sycophants
- woadwarrior01 3mo agoThe sycophants are plied with insider / early access, with the tacit threat that such access would be revoked if they're critical of the provider.
- tcp_handshaker 3mo ago[flagged]
- tcp_handshaker 3mo agoThey are in the phase I need a government bailout like the banks after their crazy financial adventures of the 2000 to 2008. At which point the corruption is so big, that an Empire crumbles under its own stench? "Trump to meet AI leaders to discuss US investment in their companies" - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c98r8r7dz5no https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c98r8r7dz5no "Trump Officials Held Millions of Dollars of SpaceX Ahead of IPO" - https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/trump-officials-held-millions-dollars-114500115.html https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/trump-offi...
- Waterluvian 3mo agoThe retirement investor bailout strategy seems to have recently failed with the index fund rejection of SpaceX but therefore Anthropic and OpenAI. They’ll have to keep looking for ways to make others deal with the consequences of their actions.
- tcp_handshaker 3mo agoOnly for the S&P not the NASDAQ, but the Capex they need until 2030 is well over 2 to 3 trillion, so now they plan to use US Treasury Bonds as their exit liquidity. "Your 401K Is Their Exit Strategy" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48433705 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48433705
- Levitz 3mo ago[flagged]
- tcp_handshaker 3mo agoExcept you provided no argument. Explain why the AI gang, like a rich kid who run a high debt at the Casino, during their drunken weekend in Vegas...is frenetically calling on daddy US to bail them out: "US officials eye government stakes in AI companies" - https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/us-officials-eye-government-stakes-ai-companies-notus-reports-2026-06-05/ https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/us-officials-eye... "Trump to meet AI leaders to discuss US investment in their companies" - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c98r8r7dz5no https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c98r8r7dz5no They are facing a Capex of 2 to 3 trillion until 2030, and have now realized they are out of money.
- zkmon 3mo agoMost 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.
- xnx 3mo agoIs "taboo" the right word? "taboo" = "banned on grounds of morality or taste". Not sending data to known IP thieves, state actors, and competitors in China (or Russia or Israel) seems very rational.
- tcp_handshaker 3mo ago>> Not sending data to known IP thieves, state actors, and competitors in China (or Russia or Israel) seems very rational. As opposed to sending data to known IP thieves, state actors, and competitors in the USA ? Which one is the most irrational?
- Levitz 3mo agoYou can legally act against one, not against the other. Not exactly a hard question.
- tcp_handshaker 3mo agoLooking 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-held-millions-of-dollars-of-spacex-ahead-of-ipo https://news.bloomberglaw.com/texas-brief/trump-officials-he...
- sandworm101 3mo ago
- hparadiz 3mo agoThere's a lot of assumptions in here and reductivism of the paid plans to just the models. If that's your idea of how you want to use the API sure that's a reasonable mental financial model but if you want automatic integration with third party systems the cost of the "premium" models is not that high relative what was being paid for SAS apps before and during.
- 38484858 3mo ago[flagged]
- blfr 3mo agoI don't get the point. That Anthropic or OpenAI have more expensive products than Alibaba? So does Apple, AWS/GCP, and pretty much any other large western company vs its Chinese counterparts.
- jayd16 3mo agoIt's a ludicrous amount of words to say "I use the cheap models and that makes me very smart."
- rdiddly 3mo agoI honestly could not follow any discernible point or thrust to this incoherent, disorganized, self-indulgent piece-of-shit post. He didn't even successfully establish or explain the titular Onlyfans analogy. I know more about his fucking taste for sci fi than I do about the ostensible subject matter. I know more about his physical composition (answer: he is made of metal. He was forged in the fires of science. O glorious creation, emerging complete and perfect from the furnace!) than I do about the subject matter.
- jayd16 3mo agoThey argue it's Onlyfans-like because users will "simp" for the big players. That is to say there is a level of fandom that accompanies the transaction?
- twolf910616 3mo agoHow many words did I read in this article before I realized it wasn't written by AI? 10? 20? A paragraph or two? It's quite strange that it's very easy to detect AI in writing.
- jampekka 3mo ago> It's quite strange that it's very easy to detect AI in writing. Or you detect only the easy to detect AI writing?
- sometimelurker 3mo agoI really freaked out once I stopped seeing AI gen videos on those scrollyapps, that fear is what got me off them. (the videos got so good I couldn't tell if they were real or not)
- ramon156 3mo agoSomething something entropy If I ask three models to write an intro to the cold war, they'll all try to pick words that sound like they should be related-ish. I'm not saying that's how they work at all, but the output is indistinguishable from just grabbing some words in the wikipedia page. Humans make mistakes. They'll use words they recently learned. They'll use words that sound good. Entropy still applies, but these outliers are what keeps us from a synthetic piece of writing
- IsTom 3mo agoEspecially with how they pick (one of) the most likely word as the next one. And the most likely word is exactly the one with least entropy, the least surprising one and giving the least amount of information you can.
- boelboel 3mo ago"I am also an engineer, which means I have a healthy respect for the practical. All this made me a fine skeptic ..." is what did it for me.
- 3mo ago
- fancyfredbot 3mo agoThe article is right that open models already compete well with the frontier labs, and that the main thing holding big corps back from switching is fear of China. I can't see OpenAI or Anthropic undermining their business by releasing top tier open models, but surely Nvidia will do it eventually.
- notyourwork 3mo agoNvidia has to balance relations with their biggest customers. So that’s a careful decision to be made by them.
- KellyCriterion 3mo agoQuestion that I do not understand: How should a local-run Chinese Model "phone home" if someone runs it locally on the hardware? I think Im missing some understanding here?
- rjsw 3mo agoI think the fear is that it might insert some "phone home" routine into the source code that it generates.
- Jtarii 3mo agoHas anyone demonstrated that this type of attack is even possible? Also the moment anyone detects this attack it will nuke deepseek/other chinese AI labs reputation completely, it is the most high risk low reward attack ever.
- fragmede 3mo agoYes. https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.05566 https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.05566 In that paper, if it LLM was told it was 2023, then the code it generated was fine. If the prompt included the fact that it was 2024, then it intentionally wrote exploitable code.
- monsieurbanana 3mo agoI don't think they do at the moment, but they could be trained subtly add backdoors to code or make "phone home" api calls during dev time, triggering on certain conditions ("is user employee of xyz")
- adampunk 3mo ago>I am here to light up the dark path you are unknowingly walking, like lamplighters who used to light street lamps for those brave enough to walk the night alone. What the light reveals has a name: Qwen 3.7 Max. I sure am glad we left idolatry behind.
- jmyeet 3mo agoThis is kind of a winding, long-winded way of saying that AI models are going to be commoditized, mostlikely by the Chinese. This has been my position ever since DeepSeek came out. It is a national security interest for China for an American company not to "own" AI. And they will release models to make that not happen. We aren't yet at the point where running local models can compete with DC type infrastructure but it's not that far away either. 12B models are easy to run on consumer hardware. 31B models aren't that hard either but the tokens/sec are a bit slow. Where will we be in 3 years? 5? I think we'll be running 100B+ models on <$5000 PCs. And at that point is there a law of diminishing returns with even bigger models? We will see. The issue is that several companies, most notably OpenAI, are predicated on: 1. There will be an AI moat; and 2. That company will "win" or "own" AI. That's the basis of the OpenAI valuation. If that doesn't happen, it's going to be ahuge problem to recover sufficient revenue to recoup the investment. And I don't think it will happen. In 3-5 years the NVidia hardware you buy will be several times cheaper and faster than what we have now. That will massively depreciate existing investments because it will ultimately come down to performance-per-Watt but if a theoretical G100 can do 3-4x of the inference of an H100 for the same power, the older hardware just won't be able to compete.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- tcp_handshaker 3mo ago>> In 3-5 years the NVidia hardware you buy will be several times cheaper and faster than what we have now. That will massively depreciate existing investments because it will ultimately come down to performance-per-Watt but if a theoretical G100 can do 3-4x of the inference of an H100 for the same power, the older hardware just won't be able to compete. And this is the core of why this will all end in tears. You have race conditions and thread inversion issues, between four threads in the virtual cpu of this bubble. And you are going to experience some nasty deadlocks. T1 is -> Depreciation and amortization T2 is -> NVDA, AMD and others booking revenues at the time they do T3 is -> Constraint theory at it applies to time until physical deployment and data centers energy constraints T4 is -> US Treasury bonds rates and cost of credit
- bix6 3mo agoIs there any truth to the Chinese models having built in f’ery? Like phoning home or inserting backdoors. Or is that just everyone blanketing “China bad”? Also what local models are people running and actually finding useful?
- witx 3mo agoIf you think american models aren't phoning home and don't have backdoor capabillities, you're naive. With all the sloppers not looking at the code this is bliss for that sort of things
- codemog 3mo agoWe’ve detected zero cases of any Chinese models doing this. I’m quite tired of the American propaganda. If only Americans understood China really does not care about them outside of wanting to sell them things. They’re too busy building high speed rails, modern cities, and providing healthcare to their citizens. I am ashamed to be an American these days.
- witx 3mo agoYes yes my code also doesnt have any bugs because all my tests are passing. I'm a cynic, if history has taught me anything is that none of these countries are to be trusted with tools like these.
- JumpCrisscross 3mo ago> tired of the American propaganda Not propaganda. Projected cynicism.
- bee_rider 3mo agoThe models themselves should not be able to phone home, right? They are just piles of weights that generate text (and associated metadata), they don’t have any ability to run code. They could be trained to generate code that would phone home. But these are just tools, anybody doing the right thing and checking and understanding every line of code that they use an LLM to generate has nothing to worry about.
- sivakon 3mo agoWhat is this $100 plan the author was talking about?
- sandcat_ 3mo agohttps://www.qwencloud.com/pricing/token-plan https://www.qwencloud.com/pricing/token-plan I think
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- ericyd 3mo agoOne of the least satisfying posts I've read on here in a while
- anotherevan 3mo agoI think comparing American AI to OnlyFans is in extremely poor taste. If I were OnlyFans I would sue. /s
- sleight42 3mo agoLost me at "simps" and "cucks". Ad hominem? Don't care. I have standards.
- palmotea 3mo ago> Anyway, that guy said something along the lines of “we should be patient with these companies and give them room to fail.” I like to call this the OnlyFans economy. Nobody is simping for a cartel. The simps thrive in the parasocial economy, shoulder in shoulder with the cucks paying $500 million invoices. I haven't totally processed this, but it seems like there's a useful connection here. There are all kinds of workers who bizarrely take on the perspectives of the billionaire class, even when it actively harms their interests. Some of it is ignorance and simply getting duped by propaganda, but now I wonder if there may be a para-social component as well, like those guys pathetically wasting money on OnlyFans: "if I carry a torch for the billionaires schemes, then I can feel I'm like them and part of their group."
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]