He could have lost the key and doesn't want to be a target or ridiculed. Happened to a lot of people.

1. We pay for saas, so we don't have to manage it. If you vibe-code or use these AI things, then you are managing it yourself.

2. Most Saas is like $20-$100/month/person for most Saas. For a software engineer, that maybe <1h of pay.

3. Most Saas require some sort of human in the loop to check for quality (at least sampling). No users would want to do that.

Number 2 is the biggest reason. It's $20 a month.... I'm not gonna replace that with anything.

Writing this message already costs more than $20 of my time.

I predict that the market will get bigger because people are more prone to automate the long-tail/last-mile stuff since they are able to

> 2. Most Saas is like $20-$100/month/person for most Saas. For a software engineer, that maybe <1h of pay.

    |Segment                   |Median Enterprise Price                   |
    |--------------------------|------------------------------------------|
    |Mid-market                |~$175/user/month                          |
    |Enterprise (<100 seats)   |~$470/seat/month implied (~$47K ACV)      |
    |Enterprise (100-500 seats)|~$312–$1,560/seat/month range (~$156K ACV)|

So for a lot of companies, it's worth using AI to create a replacement.

I'll add the nuance that those might be big companies with slack capacity, or at least firms that already are at a point in their effort/performance curve where marginal effort injections in their core business are not worthy enough (a point that, without being big companies, would be actually weird). Even with AI and as processes become more efficient effort is at premium, and depending on your firm situation an man-hour used in your business might be a better use of effort and time that using it on non-core services.

I can see that, assuming models don't make some giant leap forward.

The main reason is that he gets all the downsides without the upsides. I know $5B is a lot but, for a 700B company, it isn't. If OpenAI was a regular for-profit, he would have been worth >$100B already.

This is probably one of the significant factors why other co-founders left too. It's just a lot of headaches with relatively low reward.

It's not like he had anything to do with the technical achievements, except convincing the engineers that they were doing something valuable, but the cat is out of the bag on that.

All the downsides without much upside...

Sergey Brin is trying to change that lately, but Altman still has a sizable head start.

I can see an argument when it comes to cashing out, but I’m not clear how that should work without creating really weird incentives. Some sort of special tax?

Well yeah. After some amount, you get 100% taxes. So that instead of having billionaires who compete against each other on how rich they are or on the first one to go contaminate the surface of Mars or simply on power, maybe we would end up with people trying to compete on something actually constructive :-). Who knows, maybe even philanthropy!

I'm not against higher taxation of the wealthy. I think inequality is a serious problem. The issue is what the wealth of these people isn't a big pile of cash they are wallowing in, it's ownership of the companies they build and operate. Is that what we want to take away? How, and what would we do with it?

I think it makes more sense to tax it as that power is converted into cash. I'm not clear how a wealth tax should work.

Yeah, that makes sense to me. And those are all good questions of course :-).

> So, who owns and runs the companies?

I guess ownership stays the same, we just need to prevent the companies from growing too big. Because the bigger they are, the more powerful their leaders get, for once (aside from all the problems coming from monopolies). But by taxing them, we prevent the people owning those companies from owning 15 yachts and going to space for breakfast :D.

> How do new companies get formed?

I don't know if that's what you mean, but I often hear "if you prevent those visionaries from becoming crazy rich, nobody will build anything, ever". And I disagree. A ton of people like to build stuff knowing they won't get rich. Usually those people have better incentives (it's hard to have a worse incentive than "becoming rich and powerful", right?).

Some people say "we need to pay so much for this CEO, because otherwise he will go somewhere else and we won't have a competent CEO". I think this is completely flawed. You will always find someone competent to be the CEO of a company with a reasonable salary. Maybe that person will not work 23h a day, maybe they won't harass their workers, sure. But will it be worse in the end? The current situation is that such tech companies are "part of the problem, not of the solution" (the problem being, currently, that we are failing to just survive on Earth).

I want skilled institutional investors who have a track records of making smart bets. I don't want a random person who happened to get lucky in business dictating investment policy for substantial parts of the economy. I want accountability for abuses and mismanagement.

I know China gets a bad rep, but their bird cage market economy seems a lot more stable and predictable than this wild west pyramid scheme stuff we do in the US. Maybe there are advantages for some people in our model, but I really dislike the part where we consistently reward amoral grifters.

100%. First, a company should not be that big. The whole point of antitrust was to avoid that. The US failed at that, for different reasons, and now end up with huge tech monopolies. And it's difficult to go back because they are so big now.

BTW I would recommend Cory Doctorow's book about those tech monopolies: "Enshittification: why everything suddenly got worse and what to do about it". He explains extremely well the antitrust policies and the problems that arise when you let your companies get too big. It's full of actual examples of tech we all know. He even has an audiobook, narrated by himself!

My point is that it all only benefits a few people. Those people used to call themselves "kings", appointed by god. Now they are tech oligarchs. If the people realised that it was bad to have kings, eventually maybe they will realise that it is bad to have oligarchs?

But right now people make it a hobby, and that thing can run on a laptop.

This is just so wild.

This is a classic question to every paid software. The answer is it depends.

https://x.com/chrisbrunet/status/2037376353461567734

Apparently, no citizen wants to do this job? Why do we allow things like this?

So maybe the actual question is what kind of a Stanford undergraduate would choose a university IT position in ~2021 instead of aiming for more lucrative tech roles. Perhaps the kind that wants to maximize their chances of getting H-1B.

Stanford wouldn't blatantly violate laws like this.

Blatant violation would be if they do it on many cases and large scale.

There are 2 further points:

1. I'd say the ideal setting is for both parents to work and hire a sitter even though it might financially net the same (or affordably negative) as having one stay-at-home parent. Because a human needs community and diverse things to do, not just one thing over and over everyday for years. Both of the parents will be much happier.

2. When people say taking care of baby/toddler is difficult, it's almost always about not eating well and/or not sleep well. Eating would take an hour of spoon-feeding because the kid wouldn't eat by themselves. Kids wouldn't be able to sleep by themselves. You must focus on solving these 2 areas first. Once they are solved, it gets a lot easier to take care of a baby/toddler.

> some job to push papers/keyboard keys around for 8+ hours.

There are tons of socializing during the work time. Nobody sits and types for 8 hours a day without moving.

i can't speak for my wife's experience directly, but while she complained about other issues, lack of sleep was never her problem.

and the idea that work gives you more community than staying at home is nonsense. we always had family and friends around, and taking the babies to events or visit others is also a non issue.

about swapping places, i did. when our first was 1 year old, my wife started to work. i was always working from home, and i loved the idea if taking care of the kids at home, it's been something i wanted to do all my life, except when it actually happened i was lost. i didn't know what to do with the kids and things only got better for me when i started working part-time and we hired a maid. but this was my problem, it wasn't at all my wife's problem while she was at home. also, as the kids got older, things got easier, and i'd happily repeat the experience now that i am better prepared for it.

practically speaking the most annoying part of my wife working for both of us was breastmilk pumping. the benefits of going to work are not worth that hassle.

I misused the word a bit.

I meant the kid had a hard time falling asleep. They would get cranky. They would take >30 minutes to fall asleep. They would get up and walk around wanting to play but they would be cranky because they were sleepy. Co-sleeping or not is independent of this.

unless the child doesn't like to be held then i believe co-sleeping does help here.

cuddling together, maybe reading a story provides an alternative to directly sleeping or playing, allowing the child to settle down until it falls asleep...

from my observation, a child not wanting to go to sleep is coming from the child needing to sleep alone.

We like to hate Elon, but damn this is impressive.

Even China cannot catch up, and they can direct their resources and people to do anything.