I have a couple of projects that need raw access to an appropriate AI model and OpenRouter can get that for you. And they do make it very convenient. You put some cash in your account with them and use their API to get access to whichever model you happen to choose at the time. It shows the prices clearly, so you can experiment to find one that works well for your purposes and is as inexpensive as possible. I didn't bother to write the code that interfaces with OpenRouter of course, I used AI for that.

I am frankly amazed at the $billions that were spent to buy this thing. It's really just a router for AI prompts and a convenient way to pay for the service, and they take a little cream off the top like a credit card agency. But I guess this is what attracted Stripe, which acts as a payment intermediary for all kinds of things. Stripe probably had very little expertise in the AI arena and this was an easy though expensive way in to the modern paradigm of paying for AI as a commodity.

"Is that a good thing?"

It sure is a good thing to me. I've owned some Chromebooks and they were way less capable than a Mac laptop. Or a Windows laptop for that matter.

I checked out the specs for the Neo and it looks a lot better than your average student Chromebook. The screen is 500 nits of brightness, 16 hour battery, an aluminum enclosure. Plus it can run apps that aren't resident in the browser, a much more flexible machine.

Sorry but to me it seems pretty ridiculous to claim that wars and expensive healthcare are subsidies.

Meanwhile China "spends far more on supporting its industries than any other economy".

"subsidies like wars and policies such as keeping healthcare expensive"

The report does constrain it's definition of subsidies, unlike yourself.

"The methodology in this study excludes unquantifiable instruments of industrial policy and may underestimate measures where data are unavailable or incomplete. Therefore, total industrial policy spending in China may be significantly higher."

"Have you see the subsidies we give out?"

I don't approve of most of the subsidies, but they are far less than what China spends.

"Even with such a low-end estimate, China is an outlier; it spends far more on supporting its industries than any other economy in this study. As a share of GDP, China spends over twice as much as South Korea, which is the second-largest relative spender in the sample. In dollar terms, China spends more than twice as much as the United States."
https://www.aeaweb.org/forum/2...

China provides massive state subsidies to specific industries and dumps surplus products onto global markets at artificially low prices. Is that capitalism?

https://www.newsweek.com/us-wa...
Last fall, the European Union announced it was launching an anti-subsidy investigation into surging European imports of Chinese EVs. EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said the prices of these vehicles are "kept artificially low" by China's "huge state subsidies."

"just copying, catching up, old technology", in this case that's an accurate description, right?

Meanwhile the "China Begins Mass Production of Homegrown DUV Chip Tools" headline which turns out to be "about five units expected this year" is obviously an overstatement.

The USA is in the grip of a bizarre international crime syndicate at present but that may not always be the case. Meanwhile China is clearly trying to eat your lunch now and will definitely be doing it in the future.

"move toward cooperation", China is relentlessly predatory and routinely attempts to globally dominate multiple industries. I don't think the rest of us need to cooperate with that.

"momentum they have should have everyone in the West shit their pants", let's see some cites. They are far, far behind.

China is learning that there's a long road ahead just to replicate the equipment that's been available for a decade. Obviously they need to get started on it, especially since there's "a bill now moving through Congress would cut off from ASML sales and servicing by statute", but they won't reach the state of the art for many years even if they steal it as usual.

That guy is a doom monger who makes his living bashing AI and I don't believe a word he says.

We're still in early days with these LLM's and AI in general. There's huge potential and very large demand for it, that's the reason for the infrastructure boom. The companies that could benefit the most from AI haven't had time to properly integrate it, so naturally there are growing pains. Anthropic and OpenAI are themselves just fledgling companies trying to grapple with success.

Meanwhile, token prices have fallen dramatically.

"According to Ramp’s enterprise spending data, the average cost per million tokens across major providers fell from roughly $10 to $2.50 in a single year. Epoch AI’s research suggests that inference costs are dropping at rates approaching 200x per year when accounting for both pricing and efficiency improvements."

"The pattern here echoes the early days of cloud computing, when providers offered aggressively low pricing to capture market share, then gradually introduced reserved instances, tiered pricing, and consumption-based billing as usage matured. The AI pricing cycle appears to be compressing that same evolution into a much shorter timeframe."

https://www.artefact.com/blog/...

But alongside that people are now deploying agentic AI that burns through tokens far more rapidly. Companies have even been incentivizing employees to burn tokens. This is all going to even out in the coming years.

It won't be possible to stop this for long. Cameras are tiny and already you could just have one clipped to your collar. After a while it won't require big chunky glasses to mount one, it will just be ordinary eyewear.