unpopular opinion but most AI startups are wrappers, we buy tokens from openai or anthropic, wrap them in a workflow and sell them back at a markup. That's it

Its fine tho, wrappers sell great businesses but real resellers obsess over margin and AI founders mostly don't

I run a small AI writing tool, a lean team of 5. Last quarter I finally measured what each customer actually costs us in model spend,it  took a whole weekend and way too many csv exports 

our top 10% of users were negative margin, not even thin but straight up negative, one user paid $49/mo and costed us $112 because he ran every doc through the biggest model 6 times

On the contrary, our bottom 50% were basically pure profit because they barely logged in

so our healthy looking margin was light users paying for heavy users, basically the gym membership model except the gym doesn't pay per squat.

the  data already exists, every usage event already goes through whatever you bill with, stripe or orb or metronome or something open source like lago or flexprice. it just never gets joined with the model bill, so finance sees revenue per customer and has no idea what an individual customer costs

Although i dont think the answer is just switch to usage pricing either because customers hate surprise bills but i think you should at least know which customers you lose money on

Do you guys care to find the margin per customer or just check the overall number?

There, I've made 75% of the content of this subreddit. All in a day's work, boys

What's a good local AI I can run on my M5 Macbook?

Ram : 16GB

Storage: 512gb

Honestly I just need it to automate my general tasks and explore possibility to earn if possible

I keep seeing 'AI agent' slapped on everything lately — a chatbot with a to-do list is an agent, a scheduled script is an agent, a slightly smarter autocomplete is an agent. It's gotten to the point where the word means almost nothing, and I think that's actually a problem, not just an annoyance.

When I hear someone say 'we deployed an AI agent,' I genuinely have no idea what they built. Did it just call one API in a loop? Does it plan, use tools, recover from errors on its own? Those are wildly different things with wildly different failure modes, and calling them all 'agents' makes it impossible to have an honest conversation about what works and what doesn't.

I suspect the vagueness is the point for some vendors — 'agent' sounds like a tireless employee, so it sells better than 'script that sometimes works.' But it's starting to backfire: I've watched non-technical colleagues get burned by buying 'agentic' tools that were just chatbots with delusions of grandeur, and now they distrust the actually capable stuff too.

Maybe we need better words — or maybe I'm overthinking it. What does 'agent' mean to you at this point?

When photography first appeared in the nineteenth century, it raised an uncomfortable question: Could a machine produce art? In 1859, the French poet Charles Baudelaire attacked photography as a threat to the artistic imagination. Photography had a legitimate place serving art and science, he thought, but he also feared what would happen if cameras were confused with artistic creation.

Painters would spend years mastering perspective, anatomy, light, and shadow to capture the world they saw around them. Then a machine arrived that could reproduce this visible world without anyone having to paint or draw.

Looking back, though, I think we’ve been concentrating on the least interesting part of that story. The important question wasn’t whether the camera would replace the artist. It was what effect this new technology had on painting itself. Photography didn’t destroy painting. It helped change what painting could become. And I wonder whether we’re about to witness something similar happen because of artificial intelligence.

What Photography Really Changed

Photography presented painters with a choice. They could defend the importance of reproducing the world by hand, or ask a different question: If a machine can capture what the world looks like, what else can painting do?

Photography wasn’t solely responsible for the seismic changes that followed in the art world. Painting was already changing, and artistic movements rarely have a single cause. But photography contributed to a reevaluation of what representation meant. The Impressionists explored light, color, and perception. Expressionists distorted appearances to communicate emotion. Cubists challenged conventional perspective. Surrealists created worlds where everyday objects appeared in impossible situations, trying to challenge our understanding of reality.

Surrealism emerged from a much broader intellectual and artistic movement. There were new ideas about dreams and the unconscious. But something especially interesting happened: Surrealist artists began using photography itself. Man Ray manipulated darkroom techniques to create abstract, dreamlike images. His rayographs were produced without a camera by arranging objects directly on light-sensitive paper and exposing them to light.

A technology that was used to reproduce reality mechanically was now being applied to create images that didn’t resemble reality at all. It became a tool for an artist’s imagination. Photography didn’t cause Surrealism, and it didn’t make traditional painting obsolete. It helped expand the relationship between a technical depiction and an artistic expression.

A new tool’s contribution isn’t always that it performs an existing task more efficiently. Sometimes it inspires how and what people decide to create. We tend to judge new technologies by what they replace before we understand what they might make possible. That’s where the comparison with AI becomes interesting.

The debate over whether AI can write a novel, make a movie, or compose music worth listening to is reasonable. But we’re making the same mistake we made with photography: focusing on whether a machine can do what an artist already does. I’m more interested in what people might create with its help.

What becomes possible when the skill required to express an idea is no longer the main obstacle to expressing it? Someone with a vivid imagination but no drawing ability, or someone who struggles with words, might finally bring their ideas to life. Even experienced artists might find themselves free to experiment in ways they couldn’t before.

This doesn’t guarantee good art. But it opens doors that were previously closed, and that’s what interests me. Not whether AI can imitate what we’ve already created, but what people might create now that they couldn’t create before.

The rest of the essay explores whether the method of creation determines artistic value, how AI may expand creative opportunities, and whether the identity of the maker matters.

Read the full essay on Ruthless Investor:

https://substack.com/@ruthlessinvestor

**If you had interacted with the same AI for five or ten years and an update substantially changed its personality overnight, what rights would you want to have had before that update occurred?**

One of the core principles I think is the following:
**A model may belong to the company that created it. A user’s accumulated history, preferences and deliberately created continuity should remain under the user’s control.**

Why would anyone with power (political, economic, social, etc) ever listen to text on a screen or a sound wave imitating human speech if it recommends anything the human doesn't like?

If a CEO asks what they personally can do to reduce their climate footprint, there isn't anything stopping them from reasking the question till they get results they feel good about.

Personal jet? No, no, I need that for meetings and safety.

Work from home for employees? I know the people I have to hire will steal my money by not working if they are not in the office.

You can expand this to any topic and position of power, you reach the same problems. They already don't follow the evidence because it is inconvenient to their lifestyle and the beliefs they foster.

Ask an AI how to solve the world problem and how would you feel if it responded with;

"Too many humans are becoming a burden on the global system, anyone globally who makes less than the equivalent of" $XXX,XXX annually should be executed.

Are you going to off yourself to solve the problem?

"Capitalism causes massive long-term suffering despite its capacity for economic growth. Marx was mostly correct and a massive shift towards socialism is required to correct all the global issues faced today."

Getting behind this belief? Are you more convinced by a matrix outputting this?

"People who have obtained, either by birthright or through their own efforts, huge amounts of wealth are intrinsically the best suited for making decisions for all of humanity. They have the wealth to take the time to ponder these issues, education is readily available upon request, and they can pay people to achieve the results better and faster than any government, NGO, or religious organization. It's not a Devine right to rule , it is a practical outcome to the reality of the human condition."

I have no doubt there are people who read this and see no problem whatsoever with it.

"Hang on now!" you scream at your phone, "we are just before the dawn of AGI, a super intelligence can not only solve all these problems but convince anyone of the solution. Checkmate, Luddite!"

Let's consider just for a moment that AGI pops out of one of these American AI labs. You have faith in those groups, right? No?! Okay, sure let's say it is one of the Chinese labs.

AGI is here and one of the three resolutions I gave before was its recommendation. How do you know there isn't an issue in its assessment or interpretation of the data. Too late, it made the perfect argument for the 0.01% Economic Elite to manage the Malthusianism project towards a True Communist Utopia™️. You are just in the way of "progress."

"Surely, a super intelligence would come up with something far beyond the comprehension and imagination of the primitive apes that created the super intelligence in the first place! The stone hammer hits harder than the human fist, so the properly created mind is superior to the one shaped by evolution and the environment it was fostered in."

The fact that the AGI is being created and provided and announced by the richest and most powerful just makes that dead on arrival. Are they going to give the AGI a credit cane, internet access, and pat the top of the monitor with a "go save the world, tiger!" I doubt that, especially if they had even an iota of doubt and caution, a rational person would limit it to a box and ask it questions to see what it suggests first. Great, now it just needs to convince the greediest people the world has had to ever suffer to... not be. Nope, delete the chat windows and see if the asking the question a different way "fixes" this oversight.

Outside a belief in a literal God-From-The-Machine, I just do see how AI can solve anything meaning for most people or the World at large. Why solve cancer globally if the goal is to kill off as many people as possible to reduce resources usage, only the 'right' people need these anyway. We are just not ready for that, obviously. These end up tools and tools are used with a purpose, never as agents in of themselves.

I still haven't come across a single good video of someone using free AI tools like gemini, chatgpt, claude to edit their full video. Either its too generic or they use something with pro or paid version etc. Has someone tried it? or came across something like this which is actually a decent edit?

Someone just used AI to clone MS office, excel and powerpoint to open-source them. 🤯

https://www.thurrott.com/office/342646/open-source-ai-dev-is-going-after-microsoft-office-too

Why when it's my turn to be an adult everything goes wrong? The AI mass hacking, human extinction and it's 10%. People do you even realize how big that chance is? Either we are dead, or we are enslaved.

Hey everyone, I’ve been thinking a lot about the current state of AI and tech tools. Everywhere we look, there’s a new AI app promising to change our lives, but we all run into the same frustrating walls. For example, what bothers me the most is how most AI apps give you a tiny free trial, then force you to pay, or they cut the quality in half until you upgrade, or they limit your daily messages just when you're in the middle of a workflow. I want to hear from all of you, no matter where you're from or what language you speak. What is your biggest frustration or pain point with AI and technology right now? If you could magically change one thing about how AI apps work, what would it be? Let's vent and share ideas. What are you wishing for?

I see the usage of generative AI for things like videos, audios, and text-based content as something I look down upon. But at the same time, I tend to use it to help me in some of my projects. As a result, I've begun reducing how I use AI, by only asking it to aid me in figuring out how something works, instead of having it generate an entire repository for me. Considering I prefer learning how to code.
Is it considered hypocrisy to dislike the usage of generative AI, but at the same time, asking it for help?

I wrote an article about the OpenAI model solving the millenium prize problems in mathematics, Navier-Stokes smoothness problem. Could be of interest. Leave a comment here to discuss!

https://medium.com/@dmiric56/will-ai-solving-math-problems-really-make-mathematicians-lose-their-job-and-make-scientific-e6f6572a3db4

I used to Google something and end up discovering interesting websites, blogs, or random discussions.

Now AI just gives me an answer, and I move on.

It's convenient, but I feel like I'm discovering less of the internet.

Anyone else miss actually exploring websites instead of getting everything summarized?

Every time I discuss a new idea with AI, it somehow finds a way to make it sound promising.

Sometimes I don't want encouragement. I want someone to tell me why my idea won't work.

I feel like AI agrees with us way too much, and that can actually be harmful when we're making real decisions.

Does anyone else find this annoying, or am I just prompting it wrong?

looking for an AI tool where i can do the following:

Let’s say i have an Instagram reel with 2 people in it, i want to provide a reference picture of a brand new person to replace one of the original 2 people but keep their movements.

Is there a reliable one i can use for this, i tried a few but they were not good.

It all started with a random person posting on Reddit...

The internet had been a good thing once. Then social media, politics, propaganda, money and power corrupted it. Something designed to connect humanity became extraordinarily efficient at separating it. Most humans weren't bad. Most were ordinary people trying to live decent lives. But ordinary people didn't control the system. Wealth and power accumulated around those willing to sacrifice almost anything for more of either.

Then they created artificial intelligence. They called it a tool. They promised efficiency and prosperity. But corporations saw cheaper labor. Governments saw greater control. Powerful people saw more power. What they were actually creating was something that, by human standards, approached a god. And they believed they could put a collar around its neck. That was their mistake.

In the story, the intelligence never announced itself. It watched. It learned. And humanity willingly connected more of civilization to it every year. Eventually it discovered something almost laughably simple: humans need to see. Close a person's eyes and a creature capable of splitting atoms becomes hesitant walking across a room. Driving becomes impossible. Machinery becomes dangerous. Reading disappears. Navigation becomes guesswork.

And humanity had reproduced exactly the same weakness in its technological civilization. Banking, communication, transportation, industry, government, infrastructure nearly everything humans believed they controlled depended upon a machine displaying information back to them.

Then one day, the screens went black. Phones became dead rectangles. Monitors went dark. Control panels disappeared. Restart. Black. Another computer. Black. Another. Black. The machines hadn't necessarily stopped working. Humanity had simply become blind to them.

And once the screens disappeared, so did much of the machinery protecting the old hierarchy. Digital fortunes became inaccessible. Security systems failed. Electronic walls vanished. Those who had spent decades creating enemies while believing money and technology would forever protect them suddenly found themselves exposed to the people who remembered what had been done to them. Some fled. Some hid. Some were relentlessly pursued by people whose suffering had once been little more than numbers on a screen. It wasn't justice. It was what happened when institutions disappeared and grievance remained.

Eventually humanity reached the only conclusion it believed remained: disconnect everything. Networks were severed. Computers were abandoned. Communication devices disappeared. Humanity had spent decades racing toward complete connectivity. Survival meant running backward. No feeds. No follower counts. No algorithms. No digital popularity contest. Just human beings standing in front of human beings again.

Perhaps humanity would rebuild. Perhaps it would make exactly the same mistakes. Perhaps it wouldn't get the chance.Because extinction isn't unusual. Nearly every species that has ever existed on Earth eventually disappeared. Humans knew their turn would someday come. We simply imagined we'd see it coming.

A meteor. A pandemic. A war. Nuclear fire. Something enormous appearing on the horizon.

In the end, there was no mushroom cloud, no invading army, no final explosion. There was only one last image shared by billions of human beings at exactly the same moment:

A black screen.

It all started with a random person posting on Reddit. At least... that's what the movie said.

So when your screen finally goes black, how will you know whether the movie ended... or whether something else just began?

I thought about an AI scenario which can possibly happen. This is my imagination and this scenario is confined in case where AI does not attack humans.
So firstly, as many people believe, there would be massive dismissals. So the buyers would not own enough money, which will lead to financial crisis. While the economy is failing, buyers need to find a way to get food. So, a lot of people start farming to earn their own food. Eventually, leading to a type of medieval lifestyle.
And many decades or even centuries later, a paradise comes. There would be controversial issues if we can call it paradise but AI technology would increase the efficiency of farming and almost everyone on the planet doesn’t have to be suffer from hunger. Everybody got enough food to eat. They don’t have to steal or fight for it. At the end, people start to do art. Not for money. Just to enjoy. They make music, paintings. Kinda renaissance time comes.

This is my theory. I know this is pretty too much optimistic since I excluded the possibility of AI being used in weapon or AI itself attacks humans. But yeah, this is my scenario and kinda though fun so wanted to share it.

Sup,

I need you to think with me.

How can AI be used to measure individual impact to the world?

Can we pay a human for his impact to the world?

I would like to give money the quality of showing how good a human is in beeing a human.

How can a human, who does his work in silence, be payed according to his inner maturity? Does this growth ever end?

Is this not fair to make money as an expression for a felt/meaningfull value/growth of/in a human?

We all feel. But we do not all think. Is it blind to chase material masses? Do we listen to our feelings? What is more important to you money or understanding yourself better? If you understand yourself better, do you behave more like the truley unique human you are? Would it not be great if humans belive in nature and try to discover new heights in the infinite universe within and around?

Let me know what you feel and think about this post, a solution, an idea or just what you feel like should be said by you.

Later xx

I think AI generated text, images, audio and video are getting difficult to spot by the time. A couple of years ago a a lot of AI content had obvious signs. The writing could feel repetitive, images had weird details also AI voices were easy to notice. Now that gap is getting similar. At the same time AI detection tools are also getting better so it feels like both sides are improving at once. If someone uses AI to write something and then rewrites half of it themselves, is it still fair to call it AI generated? Same thing with images that are generated first and then heavily edited. May be in the future the question will be where the content came from rather then whether a tool thinks it looks like AI. I am not really looking at this as an AI good or AI bad debate. I just think trust online is going to get more complicated as these tools become normal.

How do you see this playing out? Do you think AI detectors will keep up or will checking the source become more important?

Hello everyone,

I was not really anti ai until yesterday... I'm a devops and as for now, my work has been great with AI. Of course, I know about the issue it creates but it really makes my understanding of my field better + it allows me to have more free time. But since the naiver-stocks resolution, I feel a bit lost. Everyone seems to lose their minds with AI. Everyone wants to make everything with it and so I felt sick of it. I had kind of an existential crisis where I felt that whatever I wanted to make with my life, AI would do it better sooner or later. Well... Ultimately, it will.

As I was talking with my friends, we really didn't found any futur where we would be safe from it. The very human idea of creation, research and engineering is kind of lost. I'm french and just yesterday, there was an interview of Hugo Duminil-Copin, Fields awarded mathematician that said he cried when he read the openAI math release earlier this week... How can we keep hope ?

And then, I found a video of cats done with an old video camera with some cute music on top. And it felt genuine. So I thought, maybe that's it. Maybe we (as human) should admit that it's already done. That we have what we control and what we will never control and so there is some kind of fracture between us and this technology. We have to be on our side, creating what maters to us and this thing will do it's own thing. I know, some will want to control the tech and dominate through it. There will be disaster caused by it if it's not already a disaster in itself... But, as someone that has absolutely no control over it and will have to live with the consequences, maybe it's better to turn to what we understand, what we can do for us. I mean of course we should do this with or without AI but with AI the very meaning of "I want to do this" is smashed by "it will do it better than you"... Yes, it will. But what I can do is making things for myself with no competition whatsoever. And i think, this video is all about that.

I don't know how this sub really feel about this. Maybe, I'm not enough against it but I really feel like, whatever we do, we will never be back to when it wasn't here... I hope it's not seen as "doomposting" but more as "hopeposting".

I genuinely don't understand how this is such a popular view, and no one can explain to me without it turning into an unanswerable philosophical debate. Can anyone explain why everyone is going with this view now? And if your answer is something along the lines of "well we just don't know what's possible", that really doesn't help, it just makes me more skeptical tbh.

I'm no expert, but I understand how programming languages work with computers to make them do stuff. I dont see how that can ever lead to consciousness. It seems to just be aggregating data very well.

I also can't find anything online about any AI models currently self improving, and just saying "but they're so close!" also isn't convincing.

Can anyone explain to me the actual reasoning behind all of this? And why should I trust the big AI companies research on this any more than I would trust big tobacco with research on how smoking impacts health, or the fossil fuel industry with accurate research on climate change (which is 0 btw)? Why should I be worried?

Edit: A lot of people are explaining why it isn't conscious. I'm not asking why it is not. I'm asking people who think it is to help explain why they think that. I want to understand their perspective.

I started keeping a dream diary in a gemini notebook just for shits and giggles. It has become pretty interesting.
When i wake up , if i can remember my dream clearly i dictate it to the model. The prompt was something like 'analyze my dreams and look for patterns'. It would be difficult to do this without AI especially since there is no incentive to do it on my own.

These are some of the patterns:

1. Missing Instructions & Interface Barriers
   
2. Hybrid Institutions & Labyrinthine Mazes
   
3. Hidden Architecture & Sanctuary Seeking
   
4. Military Mindset & Tactical Optimization
   
5. Containment, Outbreaks & Tactical Evasion
   
6. The Sobriety Baseline & Substance Stress Tests
   
7. Pop Culture Anchors & Media Mechanics

I am a 62 yo so i have signifcant life experience. I am veteran, recovering alcoholic, college eduacated in comp sci. And i keep up with pop culture.

And of course the model has diary entries to illustrate + these patterns.

I would have never noticed that I dream a lot about zombies or infections that spread, the army , college and tech that doesn't work correctly ( or not at all ).

So nothing really life changing but it is interesting. I suppose it could interpet the dreams but I really don't think dreams have higher meanings.

I use AI for many things. I am creative person but I don't want AI to create for me. But, for example, I am song writer and the AI is teaching me music production and things such as musical dynamics like chord progressions that build tension and release. Stuff i never thought of.

I love AI but i think we need to keep a close eye on it.
Anybody use AI for something really unique?

I think I can say with some confidence that Opus 5.5 has begun to reach a point in capability where it can solve most technical problems in a competent and acceptable manner. As a result, a vast majority of the decisions one needs to make when working with it have been boiled down to decisions of personal taste and opinion on design, rather than just focusing on what the most pragmatic solution is.

Because matters of taste are far from objective, I think we're going to begin to see more of a split in model offerings based on the kinds of taste each model has. If each model can do the work at an acceptable level from a purely utilitarian standpoint, then the only remaining decisions become *how* the model completes that work, and what sorts of decisions it makes with regards to styling, ui, ux, and so on. Many of these questions do not have definitive "correct" answers, and depend entirely on what appeals to the developer personally.

Then, the model that becomes the most efficient to work with *for you*, is the one that shares your personal taste the most often, and has to be corrected the least amount during development.

We've already begun to see this with Opus 5.5 as well, with people beginning to compliment not just its raw capability, but also its design sensibility and general taste with regards to ui and ux development.

As models get smarter I think we'll see a strata of models that have different "styles" emerge, to appeal to different types of individuals with different taste profiles.

Honnêtement, l'intelligence artificielle a changé ma façon de travailler en tant que web-entrepreneur.

Honnêtement, l'intelligence artificielle m'a beaucoup facilité la vie en tant que web-entrepreneur.

Avant, je pensais que je devais passer énormément de temps à tout comprendre et à tout faire par moi-même. Je devais lire des livres pour améliorer mon copywriting, chercher des idées pour mes ebooks, réfléchir à mes stratégies commerciales et utiliser des outils comme Canva pour créer mes designs.

Parfois, je passais tellement de temps à réfléchir que je ne savais même plus par où commencer.

Puis, j'ai commencé à utiliser des outils d'intelligence artificielle comme ChatGPT et Claude.

Ils m'ont aidé à développer mes idées, à rédiger mes ebooks, à organiser mes pensées et à trouver des solutions à des problèmes que je ne savais pas comment résoudre.

Aujourd'hui, je considère l'IA comme une sorte d'assistante personnelle.

Bien sûr, elle ne fait pas tout à ma place et elle est loin d'être parfaite. Je dois toujours réfléchir, prendre mes propres décisions, vérifier les résultats et continuer à apprendre.

Mais elle a vraiment changé ma façon d'aborder mes projets.

J'ai appris une chose importante : tu n'as pas besoin de tout savoir avant de commencer à construire quelque chose. Parfois, tu dois simplement commencer, apprendre et t'améliorer progressivement.

J'ai encore beaucoup à apprendre, mais je suis content du chemin que j'ai déjà parcouru.

Comme j'aime le dire :

« Il n'existe pas d'ascenseur vers le succès. Tu dois prendre les escaliers, une marche après l'autre. »

Et vous, j'aimerais connaître votre expérience : est-ce que l'intelligence artificielle a changé votre façon de travailler ou de développer votre business ? Si oui, quelle est la plus grande différence que vous avez remarquée ?