If it’s from the government, yes, there’s nobody but taxpayers paying it - either by the Treasury, borrowing with interest or money printing that devalues everyone’s money.

Money comes from somewhere and the government is in effect a financial proxy for the public. He’s offering us our own money.

Claude. You can download these files from the manufacturer’s website.

If it’s on the publicly available internet, they probably did, without permission.

Local AI offers privacy, independence, and no monthly tollbooth.

Sam Altman, reading your comment, hissing in agony three times like someone poured holy water on him…

It can’t come soon enough. See this Reuters story about China’s bubble popping:

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-ai-bubble-has-already-burst-2026-10-26/

The longer we wait, the more catastrophic and destabilizing the pop will be.

That said, despite Google’s massive stock drop, I don’t think we’re there yet in the US. Google never expected the AI Overview to be a money maker. They just needed it to answer users’ questions more readily than a trip to ChatGPT or Claude. And they probably count that as a success. To Google, they are more than willing to cannibalize their own ad revenue if it means having the largest seat at the trough for AI later, because they think it will be a single funnel to capture all revenue for practically every industry.

So AI has become an almost mythical final form of capitalistic value capture. It’s like a poker game and every tech giant just continues to raise the bet because even if they’re bluffing, they think whoever holds out longest wins all the money. They’re still in that mindset. But in fact, AI is more like a poker game where to play, you incinerate your bet in a burning dumpster in the middle. That’s the thing that, once they realize it, will cause the bubble to pop.

Not there yet, unfortunately.

Yup, totally. AI outputs also killed my confidence using hyphens mid-sentence (but I still do it because it’s just how I think). But thanks, I’ll actually make a note to stop using that AI-hijacked phrasing…

Some choice quotes:

“The CEO is in full AI psychosis and has been for a while now,” one of the sources told 404 Media.

I think it’s important to use the term “AI psychosis” until it becomes mainstream. There’s power in simplifying, in two words, the mental illness that has spread to nearly every major-company CEO and C-suite MBA hump. And until it becomes a meme, until they know the general public sees them and knows they are blindly confident in something they don’t understand, that we know they are conning themselves and us, they won’t spare a moment of introspection to reconsider.

“Perception is more important than truth, the truth doesn’t matter if you don’t win on perception.”

Let’s unpack this. The programmers are concerned about Proton’s push for security, and they push back on objectively unmaintainable AI code - to say nothing of Yen’s bullying to push to live before it’s even tested - and this is Yen’s response. In essence: Security does not matter more than the perception of speed.

This is demonstrably idiotic, because security issues are the “truth” being undermined here, and when someone hacks or compromises key parts of your service, that will be far more damaging some CEO-naval-gazing version of “look how fast we are.”

In all, the many quotes from engineers really do the job convincing that this guy is not just a bad CEO, but a bad person. I’m sure to Board members or billionaires, this type of psychopathy and lack of empathy looks like a feature and not a bug. This probably won’t change that, but every moment spent holding up a mirror helps.

treating him like a public utility with a podcast

Elon Musk has a podcast? What does this mean?

It’s really interesting thinking about what changed in tech and why all the leaders are like this. It used to be people developing and fitting technology to goals - mapping the world, enabling democratic power or niche hobby relationships - and that generally ended up being exciting and helpful.

But at some point tech became captured by a few specific ideas and technology - SaaS, AI, data mining - and every CEO now tries to fit the goals to the technology. It no longer matters to these people what the benefit to the user is, they just work backwards from what the technology can do and rationalize whatever it is as the goal.

Considering how tech CEOs are acting, with their bunkers, bodyguards, remote islands and rockets, I’m not sure they planned to come back after leaving with all our money.