Where the AI market is talking

Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months, up to 10x the lowest ever tracked prices

It's pulling the ladder up behind them. OpenAI bought up more co tracts for wafers than they could even use. But now that means everyone else has to fight over what's left. This makes it too expensive to compete with OpenAI. No upstart can really afford to build infrastructure.

Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months, up to 10x the lowest ever tracked prices

OpenAI (Stargate) kicked off the price increases a year ago by locking up 40% of the global supply of RAM output. https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/openais-star...

Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing

These are services, so "how would <x> do this today?" is irrelevant. The real question is: "What can manipulation of pseudo-random number generation do?" We know that in the cryptographic world, attacking "randomness" is a key offensive capability. It will be here as well -- if Anthropic can watermark text as generated it's LLM, will it be able to watermark outputs as generated by "Spooky23/FooCorp"? Can I pay Anthropic to steer inquiries in a way that benefits my company or governemnt? Pseudo-random to the end user appears random. Most treat it like a random chance. It is not.

Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing

So Anthropic goes on the shit list with Sony Blu-ray and its cinavia watermarking.

Fossil – A Coherent Software Configuration Management System

Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing

> So I agree that the watermarking has a cost. But you can't leave out that it is an attempt to reduce negative externalities of AI. Whether it's a realistic or worthwhile attempt is a whole other debate (and Gruber does a good job of debating just that in the latter part of the essay), but saying that the user's needs are the only thing that should ever be considered is reprehensible. Computers are tools that exist to serve. Creating some bizarro process where we are compromising the technology in service of it's owner to achieve some nebulous goal is gross. Anthropic is crowing about this achievement because they are afraid of the dirt cheap AI models coming out of China and eventually other places impacting their valuation. Full stop. There's some vague notion of preventing harm wit…

Training AI Scientists to Replicate Research

Launch HN: Speko (YC S26) – OpenRouter for Voice AI

Ever since OpenAI launched their improved voice mode, I've been looking for a capable LLM with builtin voice-in and -out. Llama 4 was supposed to be it but turned out to be a dud. I haven't followed the topic closely lately, did I miss anything? Are there capable (!) open weights omni models that allow low latency voice chat? If so, what software do you use them with? Can you use a PWA on your phone? WebRTC? WebTransport?

Incident with Github.com

Yeah let's not forget that in those brief few days when Sam Altman was fired, Satya Nadella swooped in and hired him. Despite the failure of that move, Microsoft has invested $13 billion directly into OpenAI, and has spent $100 billion on the partnership. No sympathy from me watching their software crumble as a result.

The null result in OpenAI's enterprise AI paper

Launch HN: Speko (YC S26) – OpenRouter for Voice AI

Just canceled my WisprFlow subscription a few days ago to switch to a open source, free, local alternative. In my case handy.computer with the Cohere model.

The beautiful mathematics behind OpenAI's sphere packing result

There's a sketch of part of the proof in "the Mellin ansatz." I'd definitely recommend reading the sections before it, though, since they attempt to establish the more foundational connection between sphere packing and harmonic analysis (which is necessary to understand OpenAI's proof).

Universal Health Coverage Could Save $1T and 114k Lives a Year, Yale Study

People talk about policies like they're something like can be picked up off the shelf at supermarket. If you could take the policies and Sweden copy-paste them to the US, then sure, we could save $1T and a hundred thousand lives. This would be a very difficult thing to replicate if you're a country without any existing healthcare system. It is impossible in a country with an extremely mature healthcare system, which accounts for nearly 20% of GDP. No politician is going to want to deal with the fallout of massive layoffs or millions of people having their coverage changed (e.g. no free chiropractor appointments or GLP-1s for weight loss), especially since the Democrats suffered one of the worst Congressional losses in US history the year the ACA was passed. There are ways to make this tra…

On A.I. regulation and messaging

I think this shows how far up his ass his head is. Creating another medical treatment I can't afford doesn't help me. I'd step in the anthropic cancer treatment machine and it would say card declined.

Anthropic's 'watermark' text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing

Anthropic actually tells you the approach they use, and it's not that. From their Claude Text Watermark page[0]: "Claude’s text watermark is a version of the SynthID-Text approach published by Google DeepMind in a Nature paper in 2024." The Nature paper is "Scalable watermarking for identifying large language model outputs"[1]. This method does not separate out tokens into separate classes, but merely uses a seed for the PRNG that selects which among the most likely tokens generated by the LLM will actually be output. This has the advantage that there's no green and red token sets, so no token is systematically favored or disfavored. If a particular token is overwhelmingly predicted to be the most likely candidate, it will almost certainly be selected, so the watermark doesn't affect that…

On A.I. regulation and messaging

You would probably experience a much larger benefit after Anthropic's product gets stolen and released on GitHub for free. This reminds me of the myth of Prometheus. I think most Greek thinkers would agree that Prometheus was the hero, and Hephaestus was a complete jerk, even though one created fire and the other merely stole it. Of course they had to make up a punishment for Prometheus so that he could earn his status the meritocratic way.. Probably much against most people here, I separate the product from the person creating it. As another Anthropic example, there was the math guy at Anthropic who disproved a long running conjecture.. it doesn't look like he's getting Fable and Anthropic the respect he thinks it deserves. The process matters

On A.I. regulation and messaging

There were may companies that announced layoffs and cited ai as one of the factors: Amazon, Oracle, Meta, Microsoft, Block, Salesforce, Cisco, Cloudflare, Atlassian, Coinbase, Snap, GitLab, Monday.com. Both founders of Anthropic and OpenAI have talked about how AI will replace many jobs, and did so with a sense of doom and urgency. And yet...they are (pikachu face) surprised that people do not want data centers (which will increase utility costs for consumers) and graduates boo tech leaders at commencement ceremonies? Tech leaders are clueless.

A third world engineer responds to “RISC-V: They should have known better”

I dont know about the social aspects since I don't live there, but as far as AI goes, it's not just HN. There is no place where you get balanced takes that match the work that we actually do day to day. I suspect part of this is accelerated by the media practices of the hyperscalers like anthropic and openai - they make doomerism super profitable for publishers. One of the most natural emergent counterweights to doomerism is over-skepticism. That is my theory for why it is the way it is. The remaining over-hype is a counterweight to this over-skepticism (I'm not talking about altman hyping his business, I mean the general tech people going around bashing sutton and lecun and mentioning "AGI") Even publications, semianalysis is the only major, decent one in my experience (excluding persona…

Anthropic's 'watermark' text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing

Gruber is a smart, thoughtful man. This is a bizarre take from him. It exhibits an undeveloped understanding of LLMs, and a righteous view that generated prose should assimilate... which should be offensive to organic intelligence. Issues with the proprietary nature of Anthropic's watermarking aside, we will look back on this as a 'thank god' moment in the history of LLMs.

Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?

> Sure, but how is OpenAI, and Claude handling the increased usage? By spending tens of billions in investor cash. It is not clear what a sustainable business model looks like for these companies at the moment. > They are handling it a lot better than Github. Are they? Anthropic has fairly frequent issues. There's high growth and then there's demand increasing 10x in a year. For a mature business like github that's a massive, and I can't think of many big businesses who would be able to scale smoothly to accommodate that kind of demand.