> Regulation that’s defined entirely in terms of the technology it regulates, as opposed to in terms of the effects it has on society or imposing boundaries and limits on the technology itself, is a core component of the technopolistic political and legislative environment.
Incredible article, a lot to unpack here, but I found this particular offhand tidbit interesting. It does seem like any attempt at tech industry regulation over the past decade or two (that isn't somewhat in the interests of big tech anyway, i.e. age verification and so on) has been either overly vague, or overly specific, leading to easy workarounds.
It seems like a microcosm of a wider trend in regulation; the disconnect between intentions and results. On the rare occasions that consumer-friendly legislation does go through, there is no working mechanism for evaluating its effectiveness and refining the rules as quickly as big corporations can adapt to them. I like how the article frames this, of how the regulations are targeting the wrong thing, how they're defined by the problem rather than the desired end state.
For more thoughts along these lines I'd highly recommend checking out Jennifer Pahlka's blog Eating Policy: https://www.eatingpolicy.com/
It's hard for me to reconcile this piece with my personal experience as someone who works in AI and knows many others that do
The demand for AI is currently overwhelming. As in, can't build data centers and GPUs melting overwhelming, companies growing 3x in a month while already at multi-billion revenues.
The models get better and better, Chinese open source is falling further and further behind American companies. The productivity gains are, at this point, obvious. The best talent works (or wants to work) in America and get compensated obscene amounts, the most capital flows through America, this is still by far the best place to start a technology business in the world
I think American technology was on the decline for the past few years before LLMs, but for the foreseeable future as long as American companies control the talent flywheel I think the new world of tech is going to be much more American than before.
What's often understated is how much of an advantage the US has because it speaks the language of global commerce and technology, which for the entire 20th century and the first quarter of the 21st has been English. That's huge. It means teenagers reading man pages are reading fluently.
At some point, though, the balance could tip. It's impossible to say, and it'd be irresponsible to try to predict it, but there isn't any reason English is natively superior, any more than French was 150 years ago, or Latin 600 years ago. But it's a major advantage the US has that isn't acknowledged often enough.
It's an advantage, but I don't see that changing for a very long time:
1. English became the lingua franca right when the world really became globalized. So everyone from Europe to Asia to Africa has wanted to learn English as a second language for decades. So even if American power went away, I still don't see English falling from its perch. I often say it's really hard for Americans to learn another language because if you go to another country hoping to learn that language, so often you'll find many/most people just want to speak to you in English.
2. The only other power I could see surpassing the US in the mid term is China (and that's in no way guaranteed), but the Chinese language (Mandarin), and especially Chinese writing is inherently more difficult for foreigners to learn. I'd also argue the Chinese writing system is inherently more poorly suited to the digital world.
I think English is definitely a reason that I took for granted. To add to that from my experience:
- The culture is, I think, the root of the flywheel. The entrepreneurship and competitive intensity is unlike anywhere else I've lived (not an American). It's okay to go bankrupt. It's okay to fail multiple times and burn millions in VC money, in fact it's encouraged! Take a break and raise another round and go again, VCs like second time founders. In my home country having one business go under is the worst thing imaginable.
- The capital markets, even YC (one of the lower tier accelerators by now) gives you 500k for 7%, sometimes pre-revenue. That is an absurd proposition elsewhere
- Surrounding yourself with top talent raises the ceiling for what you think is possible and accelerates your career really fast. It's inspiring for me to be around so many smart and successful people.
I’m on a motorhome holiday in Norway right now. The younger people I’ve spoken to, from the Netherlands, through Germany and Denmark and into Norway have as good English as me. As with most American-exceptionalism, you ain’t that special. On previous holidays in France, often held up as “never-willingly-speak-English”, we’ve had similar experiences.
Older people here in Northern Europe often seem to speak English quite well, in France less so.
> but there isn't any reason English is natively superior, any more than French was 150 years ago, or Latin 600 years ago.
Actually, there is. English is relatively unique in its ability to incorporate loan words and features of other languages. This is in part due to its history as a merger of 10k French (thus, Latinate) words into an otherwise Germanic language. But it's also due to the unfortunate history of the British empire, followed by American hegemony, which spread English to many other cultures who freely adapted it.
Whether this is enough to justify a continuing status as "the international language" is obviously debatable. But English is different from almost all other human languages, not because it is better, but because it is just ... more
But this advantage is vanishing. While automated translation is still not good enough for someone fluent in English to tolerate, it's more than good enough already and the progress have been insane over the past few years.
I don't think English speakers are going to have any edge moving forward.
Do not have any empirical evidence, but reality is that China's semiconductor capabilities are not at par with Taiwan yet and the US is able to influence Nvidia's sales to China as well as access to other vendors (TSMC) and technologies, giving the West an unfair advantage.
Just like Chinese EVs and Chinese renewables eventually beat the West, I have no doubt that China can probably eventually pull ahead, but I think it is probably accurate to say that China is currently still behind (how far is hard to say) because they have a slight technology handicap imposed by the US.
The majority of AI revenue is probably VC money sloshing around in a closed system, e.g. a VC funds some AI company and they pay OpenAI/Claude. These startups also pay for other AI startup products and make it mandatory for their employees to use them. I would venture a guess that 50-80% of the AI revenue would dry up if VCs stopped funding AI startups.
I'm working in a large enterprise that is leveraging AI aggressively.
Anecdotally, I'd wager that the modest/incremental but real gains from boring, daily application pale in comparison to the wasted cycles on terrible ideas, disrupted roadmaps due to poor business decision making, and the uncritical injection of insane, LLM generated bullshit into official business documents (fake KPIs for unmeasurable outcomes, references to nonsensical or non-existent process, data-driven decisions backed by hallucinated data. etc.).
I'm deeply skeptical that organizations will see real, lasting gains. I think they'll see some acceleration of copy/paste-adjacent workflows and gains in non-work like generating slide templates, but that's about the limit of it.
As prices rise to meet actual cost, I shudder to think about the idiotic, reactionary ripples it will send through corporate leadership, with everyone scrambling to evade responsibility at the same time and blaming their tech teams for failing to deliver on bullshit/impossible AI initiatives.
TL/DR yeah, I'd also like to see some real numbers.
I'll push back against most of the points in your comment.
> The demand for AI is currently overwhelming. As in, can't build data centers and GPUs melting overwhelming, companies growing 3x in a month while already at multi-billion revenues.
This isn't a sign of a successful, sustainable business; it's what a bubble looks like. Between the aggressive marketing (including astroturfing!) that LLM companies are engaged in, the perceived stock market advantage companies can gain by shoving LLMs into their offering, and the missile-gap-style approach that many businesses are taking around this, this centre cannot possibly hold.
> The models get better and better, Chinese open source is falling further and further behind American companies
American companies are, to be fair, flaunting safety and ignoring the wider social impacts of this technology, and both the US federal and state governments seem to be more than willing to go with the flow on that, probably at least partly because of a recognition that the LLM industry is propping up a significant part of the US economy.
> The productivity gains are, at this point, obvious
They are, emphatically, not. For me and my peers (most of us, individual contributors in software -- and emphatically, those of us working at companies who haven't fully leaned into vibe coding), our jobs have become babysitting claude agents and spending most of our time cleaning up its messes and doing code review. Short-term, sure, this might lead to some productivity gains, but long-term, this is going to lead to mass burnout.
> The best talent works (or wants to work) in America and get compensated obscene amounts, the most capital flows through America, this is still by far the best place to start a technology business in the world
Unfortunately, the US is in the midst of cracking down on immigration, and the international perception of the country is increasingly that it is an unsafe one.
> I think American technology was on the decline for the past few years before LLMs, but for the foreseeable future as long as American companies control the talent flywheel I think the new world of tech is going to be much more American than before.
What I see in the US's LLM-backed economy is what I see in many businesses in this same economy, increasingly: the blanket of AI is being used to paper over serious, systemic issues in the organization, but this clearly won't hold. In a world where we have an ounce of responsibility for what we produce, and where customers care about the quality (notably, quality as in correctness) of what's being delivered, this will eventually collapse.
I think it's obvious that demand is overwhelming supply right now. I agree that we don't know how much of the demand is due to perception, perverse incentives, or poor management, and how much of the demand is 'real'. I personally believe that the demand is mostly real and will continue to go up, but I don't have a crystal ball.
I also acknowledge that the productivity gains are highly dependent on your specific company's implementation and the work that you're doing. I think the role of a technical IC (which I am as well) is going to be managing fleets of agents, and many people who aren't suited to that type of work will leave the industry (and many people who are will join).
I generally agree with you on the points about American politics, I don't think the way they are cracking down on immigration is very wise.
As for correctness - it's a nontrivial problem to deploy AI in prod that works and doesn't blow up over millions of runs+. Hence why the initial value has accrued to the intelligence layer (labs) but the bulk of the remaining value will accrue to the applied layer in my opinion.
In the longer term, companies won’t be able to build AI infrastructure fast enough to keep up. The construction capacity isn’t there. The hardware production capacity isn’t there. Raw materials, energy, water—not enough of any of it. The supply chain is a fragile, grotesque joke.
> as long as American companies control the talent flywheel
The companies are eating their seed corn. Senior devs are going to age out and there won’t be enough juniors coming up the ranks to replace them. The oncoming demographic crisis multiplies this problem.
Americans decided to sabotage their own public education system for generations. They were able to bridge the gap with foreign undergrad/grad students for a while but that well has been poisoned, probably for good.
Thank you for sharing the article, it's an interesting perspective and I'm inclined to agree with the point about prior restraint.
I'm sad that America is making it more difficult for foreign talent to come in. But with the flip-flops between D/R in the white house it's really hard to predict what immigration looks like even 5 years from now
He's not denying that there is demand, he just has a different view on what's happening:
When developers say that LLMs make them more productive, you need to keep in mind that this is what they’re automating: dysfunction, tampering as a design strategy, superstition-driven coding, and software whose quality genuinely doesn’t matter, all in an environment where rigour is completely absent.
They are right. LLMs make work that doesn’t matter easier – it’s all monopolies, subscriptions, VCs, and lock-in anyway – in an industry that doesn’t care, where the only thing that’s measured is some bullshit productivity measure that’s completely disconnected from outcomes.
...
One group thinks this will make the world ten times richer. The other thinks it’ll be a catastrophe.
Reasonable conclusion, if you think the entire software industry is rotten then accelerating rot won't do much
I personally disagree with that worldview. (I read the article and the guy's tone is lowkey salty)
The reality is it's insanely hard to convince people (/especially/ consumers. //especially// technical consumers) to pay up to use software. Anyone who has tried to sell software as a startup knows, customers are laser focused on outcomes and value and anything that raises an eyebrow means you're toast
Ofc there are perverse incentives and I think those are bad
Wait until they charge the real pice, if I sold a dollar for 10ct I'd also have a lot of demand.
I'm burning billions of tokens on chatgpt "deepresearch Pro extended" for things I wouldn't even bother googling, the second I have to pay even 2x the price I won't use that anymore
Can't that be countered by the fact that you can pay a reasonable price (something like 20 or 30 bucks) for small businesses independent flat-rate inference subscriptions of models like GLM-5.1? They aren't being subsidized, they just balance normal and power users around their flat rate. Just check something like synthetic.new, Ollama Cloud or OpenCode Go.
The estimates I've seen are that running inference at scale on a Deepseek V3 sized model (so 700B parameters) costs roughly $0.70/mtok or so given current H100 rental costs. Sonnet charges $15/mtok on the API so the delta between the true cost and the API cost is quite large, to the point where even many subscription users are likely profitable.
What are you talking about even. Chinese models are what pretty much every AI company in the US is using now because you can run them on prem and customize them, and because hosted versions cost a fraction of US ones. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9baDOfwUzHQ
And that's in the US, the rest of the world is all using Chinese models as well. Which means these models get far more collaboration from the global research community being developed in the open. They will set the standards in terms of how APIs work. And they will be what everyone uses going forward.
The closed approach simply can't compete with that. The same way Linux destroyed Windows on servers, open AI models will destroy proprietary solutions as well.
Can this be backed up with any numbers, especially in the US? Every company I've seen using an AI something has obviously been using the API of one of the bigger companies. If this is a valid approach with proof it's basically as good, it would be something I would recommend to my company
Indeed! China is leaning heavily into AI as state policy, as the solution to its looming demographic crisis. Any advantage the US has is going to be brief. It'll be like comparing the high speed trains in China with the high speed trains in California...
"Chinese models are what pretty much every AI company in the US is using now"
- just untrue. you think people inside Cursor use composer for most of their work? haha
the talent at the labs far surpasses the global research community its just not comparable
I'm not saying I prefer it this way, I want open source to do well but it's just not happening at the current pace
It's hard for me to reconcile your post as being authentic. From what I see, current "AI" is simply a geo-political tool, and a tool for governments to maintain power and authority. It is not real AI, since it cannot learn.
Real AI is being suppressed and it seems that it will not be allowed to exist in the mainstream, especially in the US.
But we already know US doesn't, the AI competition is largely Chinese talent vs Chinese talent that the Chinese gov allows to work in west, which they control plurality of global AI talent pipeline, and can cut off at any time, like the reverse has already happened for western semi talent in PRC. Leverage applies to many other sectors.
Simple law of large numbers, i.e. generating comparable STEM than RoW combined = the best talent going forward is some Chinese... with little English fluency. English fluency deprioritized from mandatory a few years ago in PRC, the smartest kids with access to most modern corpus of research in most productive academic system is going to be locked behind mandarin in future.
Western models are not getting better vs massive compute difference predicted during period where compute gap vs PRC is expanding. And better in what which ways? There's entire industrial sectors US models can't get better in va PRC for the simple reasons the industrial chains do not exist in US (or at scale in west as whole). Throwing $$$ at half the problem... is severe misallocation, but the group think in the $$$ group probably feels like everything is peak because muh valuations and fomo investments while digital companies figure out how to integrate AI to write better newsletters, meanwhile some PRC dark factory goes brrrrt. A little hyperbolic, but you get the point.
I think something to be said that PRC can cut off talent pipeline to US AI at anytime, but hasn't... nor losing shit over AGI threat complex. They see absurd amount of $$$ being dumped into western AI and ask themselves, why stop this hyper financialized capital bonfire.
Technology has politics, and it often serves to reproduce terrible modes of operation instead of something that could be described as "good progress" for humanity. The renewable energy landscape is the best example of a space that has had to fight against the old world's financial interests, even in the face of obvious monetary and technological supremacy.
The software world unfortunately has followed adtech + social media companies' operational structures, and we lost decades of "good progress" to attention-funded software.
I have a feeling this is why very few novel companies are springing up from this LLM shift: the relationship of a) lines of code b) solving problems to achieve progress c) getting paid for it has been decoupled for so long, because attention has been the main currency online.
Unsurprisingly, the Chinese technology market leap is fueled by a focus towards the "physical" (raw materials, manufacturing) and it's no surprise that a highly educated population is beating many Western economies in the electronics market (from small gadgets all the way to cars and energy). It's not impossible to try catching up by educating our people to reorient money to industry that brings "good progress", instead of industry that brings virtual money in the form of stocks or tech that mainly serves vices and/or entertainment.
There was someone who said ten or fifteen years ago that these trillion-dollar issues weren't technology companies but technology control companies. It's been in my mind ever since.
I disagree that this is well written. It's a long and meandering where unchallengeable anecdotes build up to sweeping narrative that doesn't add up.
Iran has gone from a peak of power and it's proxies pulled off the biggest attack against Israel in decades. Three years later most of the leadership involved is dead, their power is at a nadir, and Israel has re-established itself as the dominant power.
That Iran isn't totally incapable of fighting back and hasn't capitulated isn't much of a feather in their cap.
Technology wise the West has a string of victories. SpaceX, AI, Waymo, and Apple are leaps and bounds ahead of any Chinese competitors.
Nothing has changed. The US honest to goodness lost a war 50 years ago and continued to dominate. Not to mention Iraq/Afghanistan. Iran being something less than a perfect and clean victory doesn't fundamentally change anything.
What has changed is that the US's failure in Iran has directly impacted many of its former allies all at once, and the current administration clearly shows that it doesn't care about them at all.
This lack of consideration will lead to significantly less favorable trading for all of the businesses you listed, regardless of their current prowess.
> Instead of delivering services and software that unlocks value for their client industries, the software industry has spent the past decade or so trying to control their customers and their client industries.
this is the sad part for me.
I remember when computers did things FOR you.
now you have to do this careful calculus where you balance what you get vs what you give up.
We just finished watching a 90s Dennis Potter TV series, Lipstick on your Collar. Strange and mannered, and about in part the preparation for Suez at the end of empire, by an elderly leadership that hadn't realised that the British empire was already done (and at a time when the young were only interested in America, the new power). More stupidity than malice there. What we're getting today looks like both.
Something i said multiple times on here, with a less refined paraphrasing, and less articulate wording. The perception that the good will have a everlasting run is none-sense and drawn from the foul thought of being invincible. I read a book a wile ago called ( power of agility, agility, ...) and it illustrates the importance of agility. The book depicts the implication of agility and how agility applies to one's self to large enterprises, the thinking behind it is that "Agility" can be applied to a wide range of scenarios. Interesting enough i finished the book at the book store before buying it ( it was like a little over 100 pages), however i still remember what i read from that book and it stuck with me. The part that stuck to me from the book the most is the importance of being prepared to be agile in tough situation. The importance in affirming change in a scenarios that might seem stagnate but hide the true damage or negative impact on self or organization.
ill stop there about the book, but i think you get the point. The book was depicting the realities of both one's own life ups and downs, which includes a side comparison of a organizations reality. In many ways this isn't much different. The enabling aided by the government has increased many sectors of the US to not be agile or just toss the idea out the window " we don't need to be agile we'll just try to takeover this sector in Italy to increase revenue". Becoming comfortable with just creating alternatives to problems is not FIXING the problem that originates.
I like to quip that any sufficiently sized US company eventually becomes a bank, a landlord, a defense contractor or some combination thereof. Another way to put this, in the author's framing, is a tool of empire. We've seen how quickly and easily these large companies have fallen in line with the administration. The era of the tech company as an antiestablishment upstart is long over.
I call the Hormuz crisis the biggest strategic blunder in US history and it's not even close. It's such a blunder it will probably be written about in history books as the end of the post-1945 era. It's not lost on people that the US would rather let the world burn than split with its attack dog in the region, even slightly. We're also seeing that, as the author notes, a tiny power can strategically defeat a military that over $1 trillion a year is spent on.
The author rightly points out of the lawlessness of everything going on and the destruction of trust in financial markets. All of this is correct. But I don't think the auuthor really identifies the reasons for the push for AI. And that is, labor displacement and wage suppression. Or, to put it another way, further wealth concentration into the hands of the "oligarchs". I guess it's another version of "whatever our oligarchs want to steal this month, they get."
Arms sales where? The non-US arms companies are the biggest winners, namely South Korea and European companies. The US not only threatened its allies, it also pulled ammunition from bases and order pipelines so European nations are picking up even more speed with de-risking from the US arms corporations.
> It’s not because these companies are so fantastic or that their products are so amazing that countries would face local uprisings if they tried to keep them in check
Local uprising seems like a bit of hyperbole (countries have successfully banned Apple, Google, etc.) but Apple (for example) has produced many category-defining products. Google Search and Gmail were also category-defining. NVIDIA developed CUDA and (perhaps more importantly) an entire GPU software ecosystem around it. Etc.
> All that was needed was a tacit understanding that there were rules, that the US set those rules, and that those who followed the rules would benefit from the trade that came with being a part of the global hegemony.
This as been so overwhelmingly obvious in 3rd world countries (viz. India's "non-alignment" foreign policy) but, still, Europe, Canada, Japan and Australia didn't fully get it: the concept of "rules based world order" is just a layer of makeup over "American Imperialism". Americans make rules the same way Tony Soprano made rules: strictly for self-advantage. We should be thankful to Trump to wipe out that makeup, finally.
True, Mark Carney explained that in Davos. But I am not sure Canadians got it.
I think the new world cannot be born is larger than just AI. Even before llms we had a whole generation of people going through CS curriculum who call the Internet "wifi" and don't know what a file is. Even if LLMs disappeared tomorrow my faith that we'll ever have the same curious and brilliant minds in our field as yesteryear is fading. I hope I'm wrong.
That many people don't know what a file is, is most probably down to the very explicit war of one company, namely Apple, on the very concept of a file. And I fully agree that it is a terrible idea that makes people completely forget that what they're handling is actually a computer that could be doing so much more than what Apple allows them to do.
> Sitting in on a talk on autism diagnoses, one of a series of scientific talks, watching an animation they used as a diagnostic aid, hearing everybody around me laugh as if the shapes on the screen made sense, only then truly understanding myself, and feeling more alone than I have ever felt before or since.
Anybody have any idea what diagnostic shapes he's talking about?
The whole Gramsci quote goes further than the part being quoted here: “il vecchio muore e il nuovo non può nascere: in questo interregno si verificano i fenomeni morbosi piú svariati”.
And often he's misquoted with a similar one: "the old world is dying, and the new one is late to come. And in these shadows (chiaroscuri) the monsters are born".
Anyway, it always surprises me how Gramsci seems to be more known and studied abroad than Sardinia and Italy.
I knew the old world was lying to us when I saw what happened to Michael O. Church. Freedom of expression, unless you challenge the people at the top of the ladder. Then they erase and try to murder you.
And now there's evidence that Epstein was behind the prosecution of Swartz. He knew the man was onto something.
The authoritarianism is only more obvious. No one bothers to hide it. The social irresponsibility ramps up and up. Genocide in Burma? The cost of social connection. The cost of freedom.
At some point, it all breaks. No one knows what happens next. Models smooth reality, but reality, at some point, detests smoothness enough to become pointed.
This has to be trolling. You can't claim in one sentence that language is suffering, then in the next claim that only living beings can die or be born. How is abstract concepts suffering fine, but abstract concepts dying isn't?
A contradiction here and there is part of the discource of persuasion, but outrage is a good sign that a bunch who call themselves
engineers are floundering mightly.
The (white?) elephant in the room is very and most defintly bieng anthomophisized like nothing ever before, well not counting our species proclivity to deify almost anyTHING.
One gazillion processing cores, check√
53 contrillian zillawatts power, check√
9 billion consumption units, check√
uptake, marginal~ bills, unpaid^
Things can die and be born. The usage of those terms in relation to non-living entities and absent a description of biological progeny and senescence has been commonplace in English for centuries. For instance, the "birth" of a new era, or the "death" of disco.
You may find it easier to function in modern society without having such a strictly literal view of language. Idioms and metaphors do exist.
> Regulation that’s defined entirely in terms of the technology it regulates, as opposed to in terms of the effects it has on society or imposing boundaries and limits on the technology itself, is a core component of the technopolistic political and legislative environment.
Incredible article, a lot to unpack here, but I found this particular offhand tidbit interesting. It does seem like any attempt at tech industry regulation over the past decade or two (that isn't somewhat in the interests of big tech anyway, i.e. age verification and so on) has been either overly vague, or overly specific, leading to easy workarounds.
It seems like a microcosm of a wider trend in regulation; the disconnect between intentions and results. On the rare occasions that consumer-friendly legislation does go through, there is no working mechanism for evaluating its effectiveness and refining the rules as quickly as big corporations can adapt to them. I like how the article frames this, of how the regulations are targeting the wrong thing, how they're defined by the problem rather than the desired end state.
For more thoughts along these lines I'd highly recommend checking out Jennifer Pahlka's blog Eating Policy: https://www.eatingpolicy.com/
It's hard for me to reconcile this piece with my personal experience as someone who works in AI and knows many others that do
The demand for AI is currently overwhelming. As in, can't build data centers and GPUs melting overwhelming, companies growing 3x in a month while already at multi-billion revenues.
The models get better and better, Chinese open source is falling further and further behind American companies. The productivity gains are, at this point, obvious. The best talent works (or wants to work) in America and get compensated obscene amounts, the most capital flows through America, this is still by far the best place to start a technology business in the world
I think American technology was on the decline for the past few years before LLMs, but for the foreseeable future as long as American companies control the talent flywheel I think the new world of tech is going to be much more American than before.
What's often understated is how much of an advantage the US has because it speaks the language of global commerce and technology, which for the entire 20th century and the first quarter of the 21st has been English. That's huge. It means teenagers reading man pages are reading fluently.
At some point, though, the balance could tip. It's impossible to say, and it'd be irresponsible to try to predict it, but there isn't any reason English is natively superior, any more than French was 150 years ago, or Latin 600 years ago. But it's a major advantage the US has that isn't acknowledged often enough.
It's an advantage, but I don't see that changing for a very long time:
1. English became the lingua franca right when the world really became globalized. So everyone from Europe to Asia to Africa has wanted to learn English as a second language for decades. So even if American power went away, I still don't see English falling from its perch. I often say it's really hard for Americans to learn another language because if you go to another country hoping to learn that language, so often you'll find many/most people just want to speak to you in English.
2. The only other power I could see surpassing the US in the mid term is China (and that's in no way guaranteed), but the Chinese language (Mandarin), and especially Chinese writing is inherently more difficult for foreigners to learn. I'd also argue the Chinese writing system is inherently more poorly suited to the digital world.
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I think English is definitely a reason that I took for granted. To add to that from my experience:
- The culture is, I think, the root of the flywheel. The entrepreneurship and competitive intensity is unlike anywhere else I've lived (not an American). It's okay to go bankrupt. It's okay to fail multiple times and burn millions in VC money, in fact it's encouraged! Take a break and raise another round and go again, VCs like second time founders. In my home country having one business go under is the worst thing imaginable.
- The capital markets, even YC (one of the lower tier accelerators by now) gives you 500k for 7%, sometimes pre-revenue. That is an absurd proposition elsewhere
- Surrounding yourself with top talent raises the ceiling for what you think is possible and accelerates your career really fast. It's inspiring for me to be around so many smart and successful people.
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I’m on a motorhome holiday in Norway right now. The younger people I’ve spoken to, from the Netherlands, through Germany and Denmark and into Norway have as good English as me. As with most American-exceptionalism, you ain’t that special. On previous holidays in France, often held up as “never-willingly-speak-English”, we’ve had similar experiences.
Older people here in Northern Europe often seem to speak English quite well, in France less so.
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The language of global commerce and technology has not and has never been English
It is money.
Specifically, right now, petro-dollars. For a while before that, it was pounds
The writer is asking how much longer that will continue to be true that it is petro-dollars.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_currency
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> but there isn't any reason English is natively superior, any more than French was 150 years ago, or Latin 600 years ago.
Actually, there is. English is relatively unique in its ability to incorporate loan words and features of other languages. This is in part due to its history as a merger of 10k French (thus, Latinate) words into an otherwise Germanic language. But it's also due to the unfortunate history of the British empire, followed by American hegemony, which spread English to many other cultures who freely adapted it.
Whether this is enough to justify a continuing status as "the international language" is obviously debatable. But English is different from almost all other human languages, not because it is better, but because it is just ... more
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This.
But this advantage is vanishing. While automated translation is still not good enough for someone fluent in English to tolerate, it's more than good enough already and the progress have been insane over the past few years.
I don't think English speakers are going to have any edge moving forward.
There are no switching costs for users to move to a new model.
> Chinese open source is falling further and further behind American companies
This is simply not true?
Do not have any empirical evidence, but reality is that China's semiconductor capabilities are not at par with Taiwan yet and the US is able to influence Nvidia's sales to China as well as access to other vendors (TSMC) and technologies, giving the West an unfair advantage.
Just like Chinese EVs and Chinese renewables eventually beat the West, I have no doubt that China can probably eventually pull ahead, but I think it is probably accurate to say that China is currently still behind (how far is hard to say) because they have a slight technology handicap imposed by the US.
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This is absolutely false as a recent study from Stanford clearly states https://hai.stanford.edu/news/inside-the-ai-index-12-takeawa...
> There are no switching costs for users to move to a new model.
This depends on how many proprietary APIs are in the way of the model itself.
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> This is simply not true?
Yes, this is purely delusional.
The majority of AI revenue is probably VC money sloshing around in a closed system, e.g. a VC funds some AI company and they pay OpenAI/Claude. These startups also pay for other AI startup products and make it mandatory for their employees to use them. I would venture a guess that 50-80% of the AI revenue would dry up if VCs stopped funding AI startups.
The gains are so obvious that nobody can cite a source proving them
I'm working in a large enterprise that is leveraging AI aggressively.
Anecdotally, I'd wager that the modest/incremental but real gains from boring, daily application pale in comparison to the wasted cycles on terrible ideas, disrupted roadmaps due to poor business decision making, and the uncritical injection of insane, LLM generated bullshit into official business documents (fake KPIs for unmeasurable outcomes, references to nonsensical or non-existent process, data-driven decisions backed by hallucinated data. etc.).
I'm deeply skeptical that organizations will see real, lasting gains. I think they'll see some acceleration of copy/paste-adjacent workflows and gains in non-work like generating slide templates, but that's about the limit of it.
As prices rise to meet actual cost, I shudder to think about the idiotic, reactionary ripples it will send through corporate leadership, with everyone scrambling to evade responsibility at the same time and blaming their tech teams for failing to deliver on bullshit/impossible AI initiatives.
TL/DR yeah, I'd also like to see some real numbers.
source: revenue, people opening their wallets
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I'll push back against most of the points in your comment.
This isn't a sign of a successful, sustainable business; it's what a bubble looks like. Between the aggressive marketing (including astroturfing!) that LLM companies are engaged in, the perceived stock market advantage companies can gain by shoving LLMs into their offering, and the missile-gap-style approach that many businesses are taking around this, this centre cannot possibly hold.
American companies are, to be fair, flaunting safety and ignoring the wider social impacts of this technology, and both the US federal and state governments seem to be more than willing to go with the flow on that, probably at least partly because of a recognition that the LLM industry is propping up a significant part of the US economy.
They are, emphatically, not. For me and my peers (most of us, individual contributors in software -- and emphatically, those of us working at companies who haven't fully leaned into vibe coding), our jobs have become babysitting claude agents and spending most of our time cleaning up its messes and doing code review. Short-term, sure, this might lead to some productivity gains, but long-term, this is going to lead to mass burnout.
Unfortunately, the US is in the midst of cracking down on immigration, and the international perception of the country is increasingly that it is an unsafe one.
What I see in the US's LLM-backed economy is what I see in many businesses in this same economy, increasingly: the blanket of AI is being used to paper over serious, systemic issues in the organization, but this clearly won't hold. In a world where we have an ounce of responsibility for what we produce, and where customers care about the quality (notably, quality as in correctness) of what's being delivered, this will eventually collapse.
Thank you for your perspective!
I think it's obvious that demand is overwhelming supply right now. I agree that we don't know how much of the demand is due to perception, perverse incentives, or poor management, and how much of the demand is 'real'. I personally believe that the demand is mostly real and will continue to go up, but I don't have a crystal ball.
I also acknowledge that the productivity gains are highly dependent on your specific company's implementation and the work that you're doing. I think the role of a technical IC (which I am as well) is going to be managing fleets of agents, and many people who aren't suited to that type of work will leave the industry (and many people who are will join).
I generally agree with you on the points about American politics, I don't think the way they are cracking down on immigration is very wise.
As for correctness - it's a nontrivial problem to deploy AI in prod that works and doesn't blow up over millions of runs+. Hence why the initial value has accrued to the intelligence layer (labs) but the bulk of the remaining value will accrue to the applied layer in my opinion.
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> The models get better and better, Chinese open source is falling further and further behind American companies.
Prior restraint is going to put a damper on American state of the art for the foreseeable future.
https://thezvi.substack.com/p/the-ai-ad-hoc-prior-restraint-...
In the longer term, companies won’t be able to build AI infrastructure fast enough to keep up. The construction capacity isn’t there. The hardware production capacity isn’t there. Raw materials, energy, water—not enough of any of it. The supply chain is a fragile, grotesque joke.
> as long as American companies control the talent flywheel
The companies are eating their seed corn. Senior devs are going to age out and there won’t be enough juniors coming up the ranks to replace them. The oncoming demographic crisis multiplies this problem.
Americans decided to sabotage their own public education system for generations. They were able to bridge the gap with foreign undergrad/grad students for a while but that well has been poisoned, probably for good.
Thank you for sharing the article, it's an interesting perspective and I'm inclined to agree with the point about prior restraint.
I'm sad that America is making it more difficult for foreign talent to come in. But with the flip-flops between D/R in the white house it's really hard to predict what immigration looks like even 5 years from now
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He's not denying that there is demand, he just has a different view on what's happening:
When developers say that LLMs make them more productive, you need to keep in mind that this is what they’re automating: dysfunction, tampering as a design strategy, superstition-driven coding, and software whose quality genuinely doesn’t matter, all in an environment where rigour is completely absent.
They are right. LLMs make work that doesn’t matter easier – it’s all monopolies, subscriptions, VCs, and lock-in anyway – in an industry that doesn’t care, where the only thing that’s measured is some bullshit productivity measure that’s completely disconnected from outcomes.
...
One group thinks this will make the world ten times richer. The other thinks it’ll be a catastrophe.
(from an earlier post, https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2026/the-two-worlds-of-progr...)
Reasonable conclusion, if you think the entire software industry is rotten then accelerating rot won't do much
I personally disagree with that worldview. (I read the article and the guy's tone is lowkey salty)
The reality is it's insanely hard to convince people (/especially/ consumers. //especially// technical consumers) to pay up to use software. Anyone who has tried to sell software as a startup knows, customers are laser focused on outcomes and value and anything that raises an eyebrow means you're toast
Ofc there are perverse incentives and I think those are bad
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> The demand for AI is currently overwhelming [...] companies growing 3x in a month while
"Yes, but have you considered number go up?"
> The demand for AI is currently overwhelming.
Wait until they charge the real pice, if I sold a dollar for 10ct I'd also have a lot of demand.
I'm burning billions of tokens on chatgpt "deepresearch Pro extended" for things I wouldn't even bother googling, the second I have to pay even 2x the price I won't use that anymore
Can't that be countered by the fact that you can pay a reasonable price (something like 20 or 30 bucks) for small businesses independent flat-rate inference subscriptions of models like GLM-5.1? They aren't being subsidized, they just balance normal and power users around their flat rate. Just check something like synthetic.new, Ollama Cloud or OpenCode Go.
The estimates I've seen are that running inference at scale on a Deepseek V3 sized model (so 700B parameters) costs roughly $0.70/mtok or so given current H100 rental costs. Sonnet charges $15/mtok on the API so the delta between the true cost and the API cost is quite large, to the point where even many subscription users are likely profitable.
I hear this analogy (selling a dollar for 10ct) but it's unclear to me how we can cleanly map intelligence to cents.
If the LLM was GPT-1, most people wouldn't even use it for free. So clearly there's another axis here?
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What are you talking about even. Chinese models are what pretty much every AI company in the US is using now because you can run them on prem and customize them, and because hosted versions cost a fraction of US ones. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9baDOfwUzHQ
And that's in the US, the rest of the world is all using Chinese models as well. Which means these models get far more collaboration from the global research community being developed in the open. They will set the standards in terms of how APIs work. And they will be what everyone uses going forward.
The closed approach simply can't compete with that. The same way Linux destroyed Windows on servers, open AI models will destroy proprietary solutions as well.
Can this be backed up with any numbers, especially in the US? Every company I've seen using an AI something has obviously been using the API of one of the bigger companies. If this is a valid approach with proof it's basically as good, it would be something I would recommend to my company
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Indeed! China is leaning heavily into AI as state policy, as the solution to its looming demographic crisis. Any advantage the US has is going to be brief. It'll be like comparing the high speed trains in China with the high speed trains in California...
ai generated video script
"Chinese models are what pretty much every AI company in the US is using now" - just untrue. you think people inside Cursor use composer for most of their work? haha
the talent at the labs far surpasses the global research community its just not comparable
I'm not saying I prefer it this way, I want open source to do well but it's just not happening at the current pace
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>companies growing 3x
which companies are growing, the ones mining for gold or the ones selling the shovels?
It's hard for me to reconcile your post as being authentic. From what I see, current "AI" is simply a geo-political tool, and a tool for governments to maintain power and authority. It is not real AI, since it cannot learn.
Real AI is being suppressed and it seems that it will not be allowed to exist in the mainstream, especially in the US.
This is the ultimate "no true Scotsman" post.
>American companies control the talent flywheel
But we already know US doesn't, the AI competition is largely Chinese talent vs Chinese talent that the Chinese gov allows to work in west, which they control plurality of global AI talent pipeline, and can cut off at any time, like the reverse has already happened for western semi talent in PRC. Leverage applies to many other sectors.
Simple law of large numbers, i.e. generating comparable STEM than RoW combined = the best talent going forward is some Chinese... with little English fluency. English fluency deprioritized from mandatory a few years ago in PRC, the smartest kids with access to most modern corpus of research in most productive academic system is going to be locked behind mandarin in future.
Western models are not getting better vs massive compute difference predicted during period where compute gap vs PRC is expanding. And better in what which ways? There's entire industrial sectors US models can't get better in va PRC for the simple reasons the industrial chains do not exist in US (or at scale in west as whole). Throwing $$$ at half the problem... is severe misallocation, but the group think in the $$$ group probably feels like everything is peak because muh valuations and fomo investments while digital companies figure out how to integrate AI to write better newsletters, meanwhile some PRC dark factory goes brrrrt. A little hyperbolic, but you get the point.
I think something to be said that PRC can cut off talent pipeline to US AI at anytime, but hasn't... nor losing shit over AGI threat complex. They see absurd amount of $$$ being dumped into western AI and ask themselves, why stop this hyper financialized capital bonfire.
Nice read!
Technology has politics, and it often serves to reproduce terrible modes of operation instead of something that could be described as "good progress" for humanity. The renewable energy landscape is the best example of a space that has had to fight against the old world's financial interests, even in the face of obvious monetary and technological supremacy.
The software world unfortunately has followed adtech + social media companies' operational structures, and we lost decades of "good progress" to attention-funded software.
I have a feeling this is why very few novel companies are springing up from this LLM shift: the relationship of a) lines of code b) solving problems to achieve progress c) getting paid for it has been decoupled for so long, because attention has been the main currency online.
Unsurprisingly, the Chinese technology market leap is fueled by a focus towards the "physical" (raw materials, manufacturing) and it's no surprise that a highly educated population is beating many Western economies in the electronics market (from small gadgets all the way to cars and energy). It's not impossible to try catching up by educating our people to reorient money to industry that brings "good progress", instead of industry that brings virtual money in the form of stocks or tech that mainly serves vices and/or entertainment.
I haven’t seen something on HN so well written and insightful in many, many years. Everyone here should read this.
There was someone who said ten or fifteen years ago that these trillion-dollar issues weren't technology companies but technology control companies. It's been in my mind ever since.
LOL! (And I haven't written that in a very long time...)
The article is delusional. In particular, these claims:
- The Iran war is over.
- Iran has "won" the war.
- The US has lost influence with Asian allies.
- The petrodollar is over.
- The US economy is weaker due to billionaires and the stock market.
It's especially laughable given the recent diplomacy with China.
I also predict a secular government is running Iran before the fall...
I disagree that this is well written. It's a long and meandering where unchallengeable anecdotes build up to sweeping narrative that doesn't add up.
Iran has gone from a peak of power and it's proxies pulled off the biggest attack against Israel in decades. Three years later most of the leadership involved is dead, their power is at a nadir, and Israel has re-established itself as the dominant power.
That Iran isn't totally incapable of fighting back and hasn't capitulated isn't much of a feather in their cap.
Technology wise the West has a string of victories. SpaceX, AI, Waymo, and Apple are leaps and bounds ahead of any Chinese competitors.
Nothing has changed. The US honest to goodness lost a war 50 years ago and continued to dominate. Not to mention Iraq/Afghanistan. Iran being something less than a perfect and clean victory doesn't fundamentally change anything.
What has changed is that the US's failure in Iran has directly impacted many of its former allies all at once, and the current administration clearly shows that it doesn't care about them at all.
This lack of consideration will lead to significantly less favorable trading for all of the businesses you listed, regardless of their current prowess.
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> Instead of delivering services and software that unlocks value for their client industries, the software industry has spent the past decade or so trying to control their customers and their client industries.
this is the sad part for me.
I remember when computers did things FOR you.
now you have to do this careful calculus where you balance what you get vs what you give up.
I remember being so confused in 2015, watching us go from on-prem to cloud. Truly, the shackles of AWS set us free.
Worth reading, well written.
We just finished watching a 90s Dennis Potter TV series, Lipstick on your Collar. Strange and mannered, and about in part the preparation for Suez at the end of empire, by an elderly leadership that hadn't realised that the British empire was already done (and at a time when the young were only interested in America, the new power). More stupidity than malice there. What we're getting today looks like both.
Something i said multiple times on here, with a less refined paraphrasing, and less articulate wording. The perception that the good will have a everlasting run is none-sense and drawn from the foul thought of being invincible. I read a book a wile ago called ( power of agility, agility, ...) and it illustrates the importance of agility. The book depicts the implication of agility and how agility applies to one's self to large enterprises, the thinking behind it is that "Agility" can be applied to a wide range of scenarios. Interesting enough i finished the book at the book store before buying it ( it was like a little over 100 pages), however i still remember what i read from that book and it stuck with me. The part that stuck to me from the book the most is the importance of being prepared to be agile in tough situation. The importance in affirming change in a scenarios that might seem stagnate but hide the true damage or negative impact on self or organization.
ill stop there about the book, but i think you get the point. The book was depicting the realities of both one's own life ups and downs, which includes a side comparison of a organizations reality. In many ways this isn't much different. The enabling aided by the government has increased many sectors of the US to not be agile or just toss the idea out the window " we don't need to be agile we'll just try to takeover this sector in Italy to increase revenue". Becoming comfortable with just creating alternatives to problems is not FIXING the problem that originates.
I like to quip that any sufficiently sized US company eventually becomes a bank, a landlord, a defense contractor or some combination thereof. Another way to put this, in the author's framing, is a tool of empire. We've seen how quickly and easily these large companies have fallen in line with the administration. The era of the tech company as an antiestablishment upstart is long over.
I call the Hormuz crisis the biggest strategic blunder in US history and it's not even close. It's such a blunder it will probably be written about in history books as the end of the post-1945 era. It's not lost on people that the US would rather let the world burn than split with its attack dog in the region, even slightly. We're also seeing that, as the author notes, a tiny power can strategically defeat a military that over $1 trillion a year is spent on.
The author rightly points out of the lawlessness of everything going on and the destruction of trust in financial markets. All of this is correct. But I don't think the auuthor really identifies the reasons for the push for AI. And that is, labor displacement and wage suppression. Or, to put it another way, further wealth concentration into the hands of the "oligarchs". I guess it's another version of "whatever our oligarchs want to steal this month, they get."
> I call the Hormuz crisis the biggest strategic blunder in US history and it's not even close.
This crisis created billions of arms sales which is a success for some, especially as it made the other scandal go away.
Arms sales where? The non-US arms companies are the biggest winners, namely South Korea and European companies. The US not only threatened its allies, it also pulled ammunition from bases and order pipelines so European nations are picking up even more speed with de-risking from the US arms corporations.
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> It’s not because these companies are so fantastic or that their products are so amazing that countries would face local uprisings if they tried to keep them in check
Local uprising seems like a bit of hyperbole (countries have successfully banned Apple, Google, etc.) but Apple (for example) has produced many category-defining products. Google Search and Gmail were also category-defining. NVIDIA developed CUDA and (perhaps more importantly) an entire GPU software ecosystem around it. Etc.
> All that was needed was a tacit understanding that there were rules, that the US set those rules, and that those who followed the rules would benefit from the trade that came with being a part of the global hegemony.
This as been so overwhelmingly obvious in 3rd world countries (viz. India's "non-alignment" foreign policy) but, still, Europe, Canada, Japan and Australia didn't fully get it: the concept of "rules based world order" is just a layer of makeup over "American Imperialism". Americans make rules the same way Tony Soprano made rules: strictly for self-advantage. We should be thankful to Trump to wipe out that makeup, finally.
True, Mark Carney explained that in Davos. But I am not sure Canadians got it.
I think the new world cannot be born is larger than just AI. Even before llms we had a whole generation of people going through CS curriculum who call the Internet "wifi" and don't know what a file is. Even if LLMs disappeared tomorrow my faith that we'll ever have the same curious and brilliant minds in our field as yesteryear is fading. I hope I'm wrong.
Hey, welcome on my favorite soapbox!
That many people don't know what a file is, is most probably down to the very explicit war of one company, namely Apple, on the very concept of a file. And I fully agree that it is a terrible idea that makes people completely forget that what they're handling is actually a computer that could be doing so much more than what Apple allows them to do.
Microsoft has done their part too. Try using a modern Office 365 program and see how many clicks it takes to get to an actual file browser.
> Sitting in on a talk on autism diagnoses, one of a series of scientific talks, watching an animation they used as a diagnostic aid, hearing everybody around me laugh as if the shapes on the screen made sense, only then truly understanding myself, and feeling more alone than I have ever felt before or since.
Anybody have any idea what diagnostic shapes he's talking about?
Social Shapes Test https://www.cmu.edu/corecompetencies/collaboration/resources...
Web version here, if you want to see what it's like https://psytests.org/arc/ssten.html
I have never seen these before. Very interesting!
The whole Gramsci quote goes further than the part being quoted here: “il vecchio muore e il nuovo non può nascere: in questo interregno si verificano i fenomeni morbosi piú svariati”.
And often he's misquoted with a similar one: "the old world is dying, and the new one is late to come. And in these shadows (chiaroscuri) the monsters are born". Anyway, it always surprises me how Gramsci seems to be more known and studied abroad than Sardinia and Italy.
thank you
I knew the old world was lying to us when I saw what happened to Michael O. Church. Freedom of expression, unless you challenge the people at the top of the ladder. Then they erase and try to murder you.
And now there's evidence that Epstein was behind the prosecution of Swartz. He knew the man was onto something.
The authoritarianism is only more obvious. No one bothers to hide it. The social irresponsibility ramps up and up. Genocide in Burma? The cost of social connection. The cost of freedom.
At some point, it all breaks. No one knows what happens next. Models smooth reality, but reality, at some point, detests smoothness enough to become pointed.
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A reminder that this author also believes Typescript to be a capitalist conspiracy from Microsoft.
Can you source this? I couldn't find anything from the author like this.
Might be a very very uncharitable reference to this, for example: https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2021/the-oss-bubble-and-the-...
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ah, an actual, not a base insult, but a pure ad hominem in its natural state!
The lack of proper integer types might as well be a conspiracy.
Reminder that the article was good and there is a lot of truth in it.
Also, never trust Microsoft.
the only thing suffering here, is language. things, no matter how vigorously anthomorphisized, can niether die, or be born.
This has to be trolling. You can't claim in one sentence that language is suffering, then in the next claim that only living beings can die or be born. How is abstract concepts suffering fine, but abstract concepts dying isn't?
A contradiction here and there is part of the discource of persuasion, but outrage is a good sign that a bunch who call themselves engineers are floundering mightly. The (white?) elephant in the room is very and most defintly bieng anthomophisized like nothing ever before, well not counting our species proclivity to deify almost anyTHING. One gazillion processing cores, check√ 53 contrillian zillawatts power, check√ 9 billion consumption units, check√ uptake, marginal~ bills, unpaid^
Things can die and be born. The usage of those terms in relation to non-living entities and absent a description of biological progeny and senescence has been commonplace in English for centuries. For instance, the "birth" of a new era, or the "death" of disco.
You may find it easier to function in modern society without having such a strictly literal view of language. Idioms and metaphors do exist.
Capital letters are apparently suffering a little.
I really wonder how much time and effort people think they are saving by avoiding the Shift key.
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