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This is great for competition! Chinese vendors offering a cheaper solution = what economics told me the free market was all about. I also learnt that Anthropic
by gaiagraphia 3mo ago
This is great for competition! Chinese vendors offering a cheaper solution = what economics told me the free market was all about.
I also learnt that Anthropic should get better at what they do if they want to compete. If not, somebody else will win.
Or does this not apply to huge US corporations any more?
- m-ee 3mo agoIt never did. In debt the first 5000 years Geaeber makes the case that pure “free market” trade has never really existed in “the west”. The closest to this ideal that’s ever happened was during the Islamic golden age enabled by religious prescriptions against usury.
- gruez 3mo ago>The closest to this ideal that’s ever happened was during the Islamic golden age enabled by religious prescriptions against usury. How does are bans against consensual financial exchanges close to the "ideal" of the free market? It just sounds like you have an axe to grind about the financial system rather than describing free markets.
- asdf88990 3mo agoUsury and debt based economy creates a dynamic where being competitive in production is secondary to financialistion. In short, instead of market being driven by demand and productivity, it is driven by financier curving out monopolies. Peak Examples are Uber and AirBnB.
- gruez 3mo agoWhat makes this view more correct than say, "economies with marketing creates a dynamic where being competitive in production is secondary to marketing" and concluding that nothings a free market until we ban all advertising? After all, you can make a vaguely plausible argument about how marketing isn't really about the merits of the product, and therefore allowing it is antithetical to the free market or whatever
- asdf88990 3mo agoMarketing isn’t free for starters. Second, marketing can take you only so far compared to the subsidies possible with financialisation. The West is in a state of psychosis with Debt and Monopolies under the illusion of free market. The Chinese markets are more free than West, you can just look at the Auto and AI industry.
- SR2Z 3mo agoI'm flabbergasted that you look at the Chinese property crisis and say "only the West does irresponsible loans." No, 60% of China's economy is state-run companies and the remaining 40% need political officers. China is just as capable of making shortsighted decisions as the US, and they have already made several devastating ones.
- majormajor 3mo ago>I'm flabbergasted that you look at the Chinese property crisis and say "only the West does irresponsible loans." No, 60% of China's economy is state-run companies and the remaining 40% need political officers. China is just as capable of making shortsighted decisions as the US, and they have already made several devastating ones. While these are hardly shy claims, I don't see anything in them to say "only the West does irresponsible loans"? > The West is in a state of psychosis with Debt and Monopolies under the illusion of free market. > The Chinese markets are more free than West, you can just look at the Auto and AI industry. or the prior post >Usury and debt based economy creates a dynamic where being competitive in production is secondary to financialistion. > In short, instead of market being driven by demand and productivity, it is driven by financier curving out monopolies. > Peak Examples are Uber and AirBnB. You can throw a rock these days and find a category where the products coming out of China are miles ahead of those coming out of the rest of the world, from a bunch of companies nobody had heard of a few years earlier. And the list is growing pretty steadily. I would assume plenty of shortsighted decisions are also being made. But I would have a hard time characterizing the state of competition in the west as healthier or more productive when looking at the number of players and the quality of goods being produced in China.
- SR2Z 3mo ago...except Uber STILL faces competition, and I went back to hotels after finding AirBnB too pricy. It is good and proper that people aim to create monopolies, as long as they want to do that in a productive and legal way! Monopolies are inherently dangerous, but the truth is that acquiring and maintaining one is not straightforward unless you can get the government to ban your competitors.
- bigfudge 3mo agoEven if these companies monopoly falters after IPO the disruption and distraction to a focus on producing can be a problem.
- digitaltrees 3mo agoExpand. I am typically against hard money gold bug libertarian arguments but your description seems interesting and I am open to being persuaded.
- wqaatwt 3mo agoNo access to capital can and does constrain supply to a very high degree.
- asdf88990 3mo agoCapital will not be hoarded and stuffed in pillows without Usury. People are happy to take bets for profit and loses, I mean, that is like the entire stock market schtick.
- wqaatwt 3mo agoI don’t exactly see how the modern stock market is superior based on the (moral not economic) criteria being discussed in this thread? It’s even more speculative and detached from productive behaviors.
- m-ee 3mo agoDebt creates debt crises. Throughout history it’s been a major function of any government to resolve these. Notably this function predates any concept of a market in the modern sense. For the most part markets were created by fiat by the government for its own purpose (usually supporting its armies) rather than springing from the ground organically only to later be regulated. I’m not advocating for Islamic finance, it’s just a funny artifact of history that the closest thing to a “free market” unfettered by government interest, did not happen in the “western” world most of its advocates come from.
- UltraSane 3mo agoWithout interest why would anyone loan money? Even the Islamic banking alternatives all just hide the interest charges.
- asdf88990 3mo agoShares and Goodwill. You loan money for good well or share of an enterprise which comes with benefits and risks.
- wahnfrieden 3mo agoUsury is so delicious to many that it’s unfathomable to consider any other incentive comparing to it
- UltraSane 3mo agoWhat is unfathomable is how you have a functioning economy without easy access to loans at reasonable interest rates.
- asdf88990 3mo agoThe same way Stock Market works. Really, Debt benefits a tiny fraction of people involved in the market.
- munksbeer 3mo agoIsn't it just the same thing? You loan the company money and in return they give you a note that says you get a portion of the company and dividends? Different mechanics, but stripping everything away, roughly the same.
- asdf88990 3mo agoNo, because if the company loses money you lose too. With Usury/Debt you pay for lending money and you pay whatever the enterprise makes money or not.
- gaiagraphia 3mo ago>religious prescriptions against usury.
- jujube3 3mo agoGraeber was a confabulator with a very loose grasp of the facts, though.
- vasco 3mo agoYou can read Adam Smith if you're looking for definitions, there's no need to read charlatans.
- m-ee 3mo agoIf I wanted moral philosophy I’d read a better moral philosopher
- MarsIronPI 3mo agoUsury (i.e. taking interest) sounds like free market to me. If you don't like my interest rates, borrow somewhere else.
- skybrian 3mo agoI guess you missed the fraud part.
- gaiagraphia 3mo ago>Fraud According to which lawyer caste? Are American laws absolute truth? If not, who cares?
- CGamesPlay 3mo agoI mean, which lawyer caste do you respect? Is that one is cool with stealing credit cards to buy Claude subscriptions? > 3. At an Italian airport: Constantly stealing bags, opening them to pick out MacBooks and credit cards, a credit card manufacturer-who sells stolen "black" credit card info to transfer stations— is racking his brains to save you money.
- yard2010 3mo agoWhere is this quote from?
- CGamesPlay 3mo agoMidway through https://www.chinatalk.media/p/how-to-buy-cheap-claude-tokens-in https://www.chinatalk.media/p/how-to-buy-cheap-claude-tokens... which was the article from the top-level comment.
- wqaatwt 3mo agoStealing credit cards seems not directed related to using legitimately acquired LLM outputs for whatever legitimate purpose you want to use them.
- techblueberry 3mo agoFraud is just what losers call disruption.
- LtWorf 3mo ago
- gruez 3mo ago>This is great for competition! Chinese vendors offering a cheaper solution = what economics told me the free market was all about. Yeah, like all those Chinese bootleggers selling DVDs for a few dollars rather than $20. Free market! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48664814 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48664814
- gaiagraphia 3mo agoIt's quite curious how multi billion dollar enterprises can't compete with a Chinese bootlegger with a big jacket, tbh. Imagine having such a warchest and being so bad at business, lol.
- 14 3mo agoMy biggest concern with pirating has always been malicious programs. But companies still need to show value in their products or people will pirate. What added value can Anthropic give users not available to pirating users? That is what they should ask themselves.
- kay_o 3mo agoZDR but that is meaningless if the person wants to do nothing more than cheat on homework (or has enough hardware to run a local model)
- tancop 3mo agoany third party provider can offer zdr. if its a reputable company in a place like switzerland or germany i would trust them more than anthropic to hold up that promise.
- dd8601fn 3mo agoBad at business? One of them has to make the thing.
- 3mo ago
- Mistletoe 3mo agoAI was always going to be a race to the bottom and low margins. It’s why I’m extremely bearish on AI as an investment. It’s framed as some high margin business when it’s really going to end up like your toilet paper at Costco. You will use whatever is cheapest and gets the job done.
- 4ffsss 3mo agoCorrect. And the value-add experiences that utilise LLMs require immense imagination et al that folks at Anthropic will not be able to conceive of - given that they have made immense sunk investments in existing assets. This clouds ones thinking immensely. Both OAI and Anthropic have tremendous failure risk and this is of course not reflected in the fake private market valuations. I see a world where lots of stuff is mass produced in china (tokens) but the acutal goods that deliver the experiences are designed, marketed and sold in the west at much higher prices. of course this a nightmare scenario for anthropic et al.
- StopTencent 3mo ago[flagged]
- XenophileJKO 3mo agoI used to think this.. but I think my opinion is changing. The reason is that the leaders likely will be able to accelerate faster. So what you see is the market "stretching".. the bottom getting cheaper and the top end running away and getting more expensive. At some point the top end may be too valuable to even sell access to.
- canadiantim 3mo agoGlm 5.2 very much argues against that. Opus 4.8 level quality for cheap. That’s sufficient for most tasks, so if/when you do need SOTA models you can spend more for specific tasks but otherwise rely on the cheap but still plenty good models for everything else
- naturalmovement 3mo agoDo you also think Chinese selling counterfeit US postage stamps on eBay for 50% retail price (which is a major problem CBP and USPIS are fighting presently) is the free market at work? This post is so delusional and dripping with condescension I've read it three times and I still can't figure out if you're trolling or not.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- bandrami 3mo agoPostage stamps have specific legal protection from duplication. The output of an LLM is not itself eligible for any legal IP protection.
- naturalmovement 3mo agoSo it's a proxy. Do you think you can re-stream cable TV or Netflix to your own paying customers at a cheaper price?
- bandrami 3mo agoIf it's streaming an uncopyrightable product, absolutely. This isn't even a gray area. I'm curious why you think you cannot re-stream a public domain stream.
- naturalmovement 3mo agoYou're playing word games to justify something which is clearly ethically wrong. You can't re-stream free over-the-air network TV. That one company with the datacenter full of TV tuners tried and was sued out of existence.
- bandrami 3mo agoFree over-the-air network TV is (generally) copyrighted. The output of LLMs cannot be copyrighted. This isn't a semantic game; it's literally the case that Anthropic cannot seek relief for people duplicating the output of an LLM.
- thesmtsolver2 3mo ago> what economics told me the free market was all about. Don't complain when US starts to play by the same rules China has been using for decades.
- solid_fuel 3mo agoWhat is the implication here? Are you warning that US corporations might start doing something shady, like scraping the internet at large scale for training data? Or mass-dowloading pirated copies of books, completely ignoring copyright? I find it hard to imagine a future where US corporations have degraded to such a point.
- chaostheory 3mo agoNo, he means that the US will close most of its domestic market to competition just like China has for decades, and the US may start subsidizing and dumping its goods everywhere
- echelon 3mo ago> the US may start subsidizing and dumping its goods everywhere The US is a net importer, not exporter. It needs to absorb trade at a deficit to encourage the use of the US dollar as the reserve currency. We import goods, we settle in surplus dollars. The world runs on those dollars. If the US starts dumping on various industries (how is it even primed to do this?), then the world reserve currency status comes into question.
- DiogenesKynikos 3mo agoMost of the Chinese domestic market is open to foreign competition. The areas that are closed off are those that are politically sensitive: publishing (including social media) and banking. As for dumping, Chinese goods generally sell at a markup abroad, which is the opposite of dumping. Chinese tokens cost more abroad. Chinese cars cost several times more in Western markets than in China.
- 3mo ago
- roenxi 3mo agoI get the vague impression that this was written in a sarcastic way, but it has a straightforwardly true literal read because yes, this is what the free market is about and Anthropic will have to compete with the Chinese if they want a big share of the market. Chinese models are cheap and good; even without reselling Anthropic's services they're competitive. Which reading did you intend? And, gotta say, the idea that the Chinese are better at selling US models than the Americans is hilarious. There might be an economic study here somewhere about just how anti-consumer and anti-progress their IP laws turned out to be. We've got an entire postindustrial revolution centred around who can ignore the most stupid laws.
- andsoitis 3mo ago> the idea that the Chinese are better at selling US models than the Americans is hilarious This is not the right deduction. China blocks foreign AI from operating there.
- LtWorf 3mo agoI think you will find that it's the USA government imposing such restrictions.
- andsoitis 3mo agoThat is ALSO happening, but that's beside the point. Chinese AI apps like DeepSeek are freely available for ordinary Americans to download and use. There's no federal law banning private citizens from using them. So to claim that Chinese companies are better at selling American companies' work than the American companies can do themselves when they are prohibited from operating in that market, is the wrong deduction to make.
- 8note 3mo agothere will be soon enough. TikTok is the example for the US clamping down on companies that dont toe the regime line on israel
- neya 3mo ago> Or does this not apply to huge US corporations any more? When it comes to favorite companies of the tech communities, it's almost always "Rules for thee, but not for me" The standard stance is "they can do no wrong and they are absolutely perfect". I mean, look at any thread with anything about Apple in it.
- kburman 3mo ago[flagged]
- toss1 3mo agoExternally subsidized predatory pricing is the opposite of a free market.
- amanaplanacanal 3mo agoSo all those companies selling at a loss to gain market share aren't part of the free market? Like openai, anthropic, and SpaceX?
- toss1 3mo agoExternally subsidized predatory pricing is the opposite of a free market — precisely because it sells things at below market rates. Free markets are where players compete on quality, efficiency, and supply. Prices are a result of cost and supply and provide real information on these factors. Competition for customers selects the most effective and efficient producer. Sustained efforts of selling at a loss to gain market share is the exact opposite. The entire purpose is to corrupt the free market by sending false price signals which SUPPRESS free market competition and push market share to whoever can burn the most capital (whilst providing an actual service/product), not whoever is most efficient or highest quality or lowest actual price provider. Uber and AirBnB are better examples of your "selling at a loss to gain market share", where they burned capital to undercut prices for close to a decade on falsely low pricing to destroy incumbents. Spending on R&D while developing expensive technology is different and arguably very much a part of a free market, and is not what I was talking about. Spending capital to steal your competitors' technology, and then spending more of it to make it available at below-market rates, is absolutely not a free-market activity. Just because it is not stopped by someone enforcing a free market, does not make it a free market.
- gmd63 3mo agoIf you can use mountainous capital to sell at a loss in order to distort the market, yes, that's not a "Free Market", as in, the vaguely understood competitive marketplace armchair economists idealize. True freedom in the market means the freedom to capitulate your wealth to snake oil salesman and schemers who operate on generational timeframes until economic power consolidates and renders your society into de-facto tyranny. Before any sort of regulations existed, we were all trading shiny rocks with ultimate freedom, and that somehow has produced a bunch of economic situations in the modern day that a ton of people don't like. What's more interesting to me is freedom from the need to have investigative journalists doing deep dives into potentially fraudulent, thieving, or scheming companies behind every purchase, and to know that what I'm granting market success to is exactly what my money or time is going towards - I'm not buying something at a loss that funds some other deliberately obfuscated project that's made opaque from my perspective of the market transaction. The proverbial "market wisdom" doesn't emerge out of markets with extreme information asymmetry.
- janalsncm 3mo agoIf you continue studying econ you will learn about the various failure modes of free markets including the free rider problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-rider_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-rider_problem
- achierius 3mo agoIf you keep studying econ you will learn that these failures are actually the norm, and thus why the only "capitalist" states to really succeed have been the ones where the state was strong enough to reign in the market. Of course, such a state of affairs is temporary at best -- since the alternative is so lucrative!
- abc42 3mo agoFree markets work when paired with property laws that can be enforced if broken. If China could offer a cheaper solution in that framework, it would be as you say.
- petterroea 3mo agoChina aren't offering a cheaper solution. They are subsidizing an existing one (which is already subsidized) in order to gain foothold. The difference is that in the US subsidies come from VC, while OP implies subsidies come from the AI labs that buy the training data (which may as well also be VC backed, so just one extra hop). This isn't "the market working as intended", this is an exhaustion fight to the bottom where the one with most money gets to stay in the market. As with most venture capital startups. I believe this VC tactic is a well documented "cheat code" to bypass market forces and build a monopoly. I find it hard to compare that with a free market. However, I don't really mind China "stealing" from Anthropic. For us consumers we are getting the cake and eating it too. I.e we are getting rapid improvement to the tune of over a hundred billion dollars in funding, yet the market remains big enough that there's a chance of it not ending up as a monopoly in 20 years. And venture capital are footing the bill. A part of their investment is practically being redirected to fund Chinese AI development. It lets us live out our lives as happy CAC farmers[1]. So I would argue its not as much of a "cheaper solution" as it is intentionally and maliciously abusing another company's product to extract more value than the billing plans intend (given an average user), and further subsidizing the product by selling this data to competitors. But I don't necessarily think its a bad thing for us end-users. Nor for the market. But it is bad for Anthropic and its investors. [1]: https://phrack.org/issues/71/17 https://phrack.org/issues/71/17
- gmerc 3mo agoAll I can say is lol. DeepSeek showing 3 order of magnitude efficiency gains over the performative capital furnace that was training and inference absolutely moved the bar here.
- overfeed 3mo ago> China aren't offering a cheaper solution. They are subsidizing an existing one Chinese labs are also pursuing legit frontier-advancing R&D into efficiency and publishing papers in the open, a culture that's in retreat at top American AI labs
- petterroea 3mo ago
- AlexCoventry 3mo agoThe "free market" gave the PRC its current strategic lock on rare-earth minerals. There's definitely no such thing as a free market in a Maoist dictatorship. I personally think the "free market" concept is an unachievable ideal and thought-terminating cliche, but "free market in a Maoist dictatorship" is for sure a contradiction in terms.
- Levitz 3mo ago>This is great for competition! Chinese vendors offering a cheaper solution = what economics told me the free market was all about. Ah yes, systematic fraud and protectionist practices, free market through and through.
- TZubiri 3mo agoNuance please. They are: 1- breaking terms of conditions of the service 2- getting banned and creating thousands of accounts to break the conditions of the service at scale 3- using VPNs and proxies (possibly residential) to mask their network origin and identity 4- Using potentially fake names to sign up 5- Using different credit cards? Fraud on so many levels, a lot of the infrastructure and modus operandi is what cybercriminals use, these are attackers man, whether you like the victim or not, and whether you think it's poetic or not, I recommend compartimentalizing and just trying to gauge whether an act is wrong or not in itself.