It's also shockingly twitter-nerd-coded. "The cure for token anxiety", it advertises. To be honest it's hard to see why anyone would buy this product so maybe they decided to take a wild swing with the marketing. The only use is people who really, really, want to run models locally vs getting a much cheaper and higher performance result from a cloud host.
I didn’t check how much this costs, but if you use AI locally a lot, it’s going to be amortised pretty quickly. Burning 100$ a month on tokens has become insanely easy. I remember when it was unimaginable for me…
This won’t be able to run any of the cutting edge models. And the models it can run can be served from cloud providers for very cheap - like <$1 per million tokens for the latest deepseek.
It’d take many years to break even on your $6000 investment, meanwhile better and better models will come out that the DGX can’t run.
You top out at 20 tokens per second on hardware with memory bandwidth this low for any local model actually worth using. Doing the maths, it’s not financially worth it. Only worth it for privacy and control reasons.
I don’t understand your calculation, can you elaborate? At 25USD/Mtk output, assuming your 20tk/s, I generated/saved (minus power costs) ~15k$ in a year.
Granted, it won’t run 24/7, but over a couple of years, this is definitely cheaper.
I think this is a great idea. Wouldn't have guessed this would be possible so I looked into how it'd actually be implemented.
I guess this is done on the device as a VPN via Apple's NetworkExtension config. But instead of a normal VPN where traffic goes through a server, the app just locally applies rules based on the app the packet came from and then routes them normally to their destination.
That is correct! There is no annotation of which apps a packet comes from, so VineWall also runs locally a DNS proxy and uses the domain to infer the app
I think it's probably too soon to say. I certainly still feel that large coding tasks are getting better and better with each model. I'd guess lawyers, doctors, etc feel similarly.
It feels like the only way to push the limits of newer models is with really long context questions that require reasoning. Any short request will naturally just be within the distribution of all the recent models so there isn't a performance difference there.
I think the near future is looking like a bunch of business-critical tasks that scale infinitely with better reasoning, all being done on whatever the most advanced model is at a high cost. Trading stocks, running a business, looking for tax dodges, writing high-performance code. These are all things where there's a tangible return on each jump in reasoning.
We'll have to agree to disagree on that last point. I think that, historically (past ~6 months), "always use the most advanced model" being the norm is really just an artifact of both: The most advanced models oftentimes being the only model that can solve these problems; and: Infinite AI budgets.
I feel like this is one of the most advantaged times in history in terms of regular citizens having access to cutting edge tools.
Looking online it seems like the low end estimate might be $30k a year for such math researchers? And ChatGPT pro or whatever you want will run $100 a month, and should be coverable by grants. I’m quite sure matlab alone cost more in the past
Such suspicious phrasing lol. So you’re saying Paul Graham and his wife Jessica have 800 MILLION dollars worth of OpenAI stock, and that’s not so significant?
Has The Information broken any critical news about OpenAI? I never connected the dots around why I started finding it increasingly in worth paying for over the last year or two, but editorial bias feels correct.
Price targeting can help the poor in some cases and hurt them in others. For essentials where the need to purchase is high and the provider has a semi-monopoly, dynamic pricing leaves everyone worse off. For instance, think of groceries where there is only one store nearby or medicines with only one producer.
On the other hand, for something like a Netflix subscription, price discrimination DOES tend to help the poor users out. Netflix is 10x cheaper in third world countries for the exact same product. If they were forced to charge the same price everywhere, they would just charge everyone the US price and foreign users would be left out.
Per customer pricing will squeeze every customer for every dollar they can possibly afford. The more data they have the more they can calculate the level of desperation for each purchase. If they have your message history and see your mum is dying, they can spike flight tickets for example. And they will know exactly the highest amount you can afford for it.
I would say it would "squeeze" every customer for every dollar they are willing to pay. Perhaps semantics, apologies if so.
I have no problem with this for luxuries like Netflix which have sufficient competition (I am not saying Netflix has sufficient competition - I don't watch much TV, but I assume there is at least some: HBO Max, Disney+, others?)
I think I have a problem with this for literal necessities such as food, water, air.
I believe the solution to these problems is competition. If there is only one grocery store available to me, that store can set prices at whatever they want. If there are 20 stores near me - they are going to have to compete on price. I know plenty of very wealthy people near me who still get many of their groceries from Walmart.
If my mother is dying, but there are literally 1000 safe, fast ways for me to get to her in a hurry, the price is going to be reasonable unless there is some legislation which enforces some minimum (which I am also against).
That does not I mean I in any way support data collection without consent.
I do agree with you that with personal data, and without competition, for-profit companies have a strong incentive to, and will, "squeeze" you for every dollar they can get.
I think some industries, such as energy, are naturally resistant to competition; and while I am generally wary of regulations, those are areas where I think regulation in the public interest makes sense. The question of course becomes which products and services are naturally resistant to competition, and necessary enough that regulation should be required. I don't think entertainment falls in this category. I don't know enough about airline travel to give an informed opinion.
Price discrimination at all is not the same as individualized prices. And really the issue conflates two things: 1, privacy and surveillance pricing; 2, AI profit-maximizing.
Even if Netflix or others do price-discrimination, the AI-pricing issue would still be used to squeeze as much as possible from the poor. It's not like these blood-sucking capitalists who run these massive corporations are into helping the poor.
Yeah I just don't buy that it would somehow help AI companies for everyone to be existentially afraid of their technology. It seems much more reasonable to think that they really believe the things they're saying, than that it's some kind of 4d chess.
Additionally Dario has just been really accurate with his predictions so far. For instance in early 2025 he predicted that nearly 100% of code would be written with AI in 2026.
I think if you just look at what people like e.g. Sam Altman are doing it's clear that they don't believe everything that they're saying regarding AI safety.
> nearly 100% of code would be written with AI in 2026
I feel like this is kind of a meaningless metric. Or at least, it's very difficult to measure. There's a spectrum of "let AI write the code" from "don't ever even look at the code produced" to "carefully review all the output and have AI iterate on it".
Also, it seems possible as time goes on people will _stop_ using AI to write code as much, or at least shift more to the right side of that spectrum, as we start to discover all kinds of problems caused by AI-authored code with little to no human oversight.
It helps with sales because they position it as “we can give you the power to end the world.” There’s plenty of people who want to wield that sort of power. It doesn’t have to be 4D chess. Maybe they are being genuine. But it is helping sales.
Isn't it more: "We can give you the power to eliminate the people in your organization you dont like" and expands into basically dismantling all government & business for the benefit of the guy with the largest wallet?
It's hard to see as anything but a button anyone with enough money can press and suddenly replace the people that annoy them (first digitally then likely, into flesh).
They're not saying today's AI has that kind of power, and they're not saying future superintelligent AI will give you that power. They're saying it will take all power from you, and possibly end you.
If this is some kind of twisted marketing, it's unprecedented in history. Oil companies don't brag about climate change. Tobacco companies don't talk about giving people cancer. If AI companies wanted to talk about how powerful their AI will be, they could easily brag about ending cancer, curing aging, or solving climate change. They're doing a bit of that, but also warning it might get out of control and kill us all. They're getting legislators riled up about things like limiting data centers.
People saying this aren't just company CEOs. It's researchers who've been studying AI alignment for decades, writing peer reviewed papers and doing experiments. It's people like Geoffrey Hinton, who basically invented deep learning and quit his high-paying job at Google so he could talk freely about how dangerous this is.
This idea that it's a marketing stunt is a giant pile of cope, because people don't want to believe that humanity could possibly be this stupid.
Exxon has never bragged to investors that they'd burn so much oil, civilization would collapse from climate change. They've always talked about how great fossil fuels are for the economy and our living standards. It makes no sense to sell apocalypse to investors either.
There are all sorts of things you could do that might make an AI like you, and none of them have more justification than any other. This is not an argument AI firms are making.
I agree that short-term greed is driving investment, but it would drive just as much investment if AI companies were not warning of apocalypse. Probably it would drive even more, because there'd be less risk of regulatory interference, and more future profit to discount into the present.
So why are they making those warnings? It doesn't benefit them. The simplest explanation is that this stuff actually is dangerous, and people who know that are worried.
> So why are they making those warnings? It doesn't benefit them.
Because "we built a chatbot that can generate technical debt" is not a good proposition for investors. "Invest into our AI before it takes over the world and fires all knowledge workers" is.
> The simplest explanation is that this stuff actually is dangerous, and people who know that are worried.
Does anyone have good estimates of what percent of real production code is currently being written by LLMs? (& presumably this is rather different for your typical SaaS backend vs. frontend vs. device drivers vs. kernel schedulers...)
Really? In my bubble of internet news it seems the sheer number of companies that have formed and shipped LLM code to production has already surpassed existing companies. I've personally shipped dozens of (mediocre) human months or years worth of code to "production", almost certainly more than I've ever done for companies I've worked at (to be fair I've been a lot more on the SRE side for a few years now).
Depends on your reference class. There's a lot of companies and teams where it's literally 100%, and I would be surprised if there were any top company where it's below 75%. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if the industry-wide percentage were a lot lower, although I also have no idea how you'd measure that.
Perhaps it depends on what you mean by "edited by hand"? It's definitely still common for human beings to review generated code and tell Claude "no you need to do it this way". But most developers at Google, Meta, etc. no longer open up an IDE and type in code themselves.
it pushes the idea that these programs are super amazing and powerful to people who are non-technical. It also allows them to control the narrative of how exactly AI is dangerous to society. Rather than worry about the energy consumption of all these new datacenters, they can redirect attention to some far-off concern about SHODAN taking over Citadel Station and turning the inhabitants into cyber-mutants or whatever.
> nearly 100% of code would be written with AI in 2026
HN is the only place I have heard it seriously suggested that anything like this is happening or likely to happen. We certainly get a lot of cheerleading here, my guess is that in the trenches the fraction is way lower.
> Yeah I just don't buy that it would somehow help AI companies for everyone to be existentially afraid of their technology.
It makes more sense if one breaks that "everyone" into subgroups. A good first-pass split would be "investors" versus "everyone else."
From their perspective: Rich Investor Alice rushing over with bags of money because of FOMO >>> Random Person Bob suffers anxiety reading the news.
One can hone it a bit more by thinking about how it helps them gain access to politicians, media that's always willing to spread their quotes, and even just getting CEO Carol's name out there.
I'd argue if they really believed AI was an existential threat, they would shut down research and encourage everyone else to halt R&D. But then again, the Cold War happened, even over the objections of physicists like Einstein & Oppenheimer.
When your statements directly influence millions of dollars in revenue, its always 4D chess. If Sam altman beleives half the stuff he's peddling, I'd be very shocked.
> It seems much more reasonable to think that they really believe the things they're saying
It seems more reasonable to me to think that they know it's bullshit and it's just marketing. Not necessarily marketing to end users as much as investors. It's very hard to take "AGI in 3 years" seriously.
AGI in 3 years is literally not possible as it stands. Our current idea of "AI" as an LLM fundamentally will never be able to reach that goal without some absolutely massive changes
At least Dario Amodei kept the window short. When AGI fails to magically appear in 3 years he will be discredited and we can all agree that he's full of shit and treat everything he says accordingly. This is a huge improvement over the "just 10 years away" prophesying we usually get.
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