They tended to be solo productions, or sponsored by aristocratic patrons. Anyone suggesting that we could create movies, TV, music, or games on the scale we do today, without copyright, does not seem worth taking seriously.
The Claude Code client source was never their moat. There are plenty of other companies with equivalent tools (gemini cli, cursor cli, augment, codex, etc.) The models that it talks to are far more important.
Not to say you're wrong about commoditization. I don't think these companies will be able to raise their prices and keep them there to make enough money to keep building models like they've been doing.
I disagree, Claude harness is the majority of its added value imho. I still use old Claude models over free models for the chain of thought and execution capacity, when free models have largely reached Sonnet 4.5 level and even surpassed it.
The problem is the amount of data with that cutoff is really minuscule to produce anything powerful. You might be able to generate a lot of 1700s sounding data, you’d have to be careful not to introduce newer concepts or ways of thinking in that synthetic data though. A lot of modern texts talk about rates of change and the like in ways that are probably influenced by preexisting knowledge of calculus.
Without passing opinion on GP's point, I think that just proves it's hard to establish a data set that doesn't bias toward the result you're hoping to find.
There are licensing laws already protecting the lawyers whose names appear on motions and briefs, but not much protection for the junior lawyers who will be impacted most. Big law, like the fancy consultancies, was historically built like a pyramid, with an army of 1st-3rd year associates doing due diligence and document reviews. The bottom was cut out of that in the 2000s by offshoring and automation. AI is contributing to another wave, but not dropping off a cliff.
No, not quite. It really comes down to opex vs capex and the depreciation schedule for your investment.
Software development is typically categorized as capex, on a 3-5 year depreciation schedule. You assume the software you write today will be generating value for you that long.
If a big, expensive model training project only gives you value for a year or less, that is not like most companies.
No, the IRS made that change a while back as part of the TCJA but that’s been reverted in the OBBBA. If you build something and never touch it, sure that should probably be capex you have to depreciate. But if you’re investing continuously in it over time, I don’t see how it’s anything other than opex - there’s nothing being depreciated because you’re constantly improving it. Automobile manufacturers don’t have to count their labor force as capex. Indeed I can’t think of any other industry where labor is capex.
But believing that the financials of a project are governed solely by how IRS rules force you to account for headcount is kind of silly.
> If a big, expensive model training project only gives you value for a year or less, that is not like most companies.
The model itself that gets built? Sure (although clearly the timelines are getting longer). However the important bit here is the research that got done along the way and the infrastructure built to make that model building process cheaper, better etc. all of that stuff sticks around but because it’s hard to appreciate externally you discount it to 0 when it’s literally what they actually spent the money on.
But none of that even matters. Google had 270B in opex and their capex has grown from 50B in 2024 to 90B in 2025 and is projected to grow to ~175B for 2026. But even if you discount the “AI” treadmill, you’re still looking at many tens of billions in capex that if they stopped they’d die.
You're saying no one capitalizes software development costs anymore? The rest of the internet disagrees strongly. The finance team at my employer would disagree strongly. Accountants talk to dev teams all the time about how many hours went into new development vs maintenance. It's not just a temporary IRS rule. It's GAAP.
It's the same in other industries. In your example, if labor went into building a whole new assembly line that pays itself off over several years, capex. If it just goes into building products to sell, opex.
Software that is sold as a service and requires ongoing maintenance like running in the cloud (and people to keep it running in the cloud) is opex not capex. Google Search is most definitely opex.
There was some accounting changes passed during the Biden administration’s funding bill that made it capex for a few years. It’s been rolled back in the Trump administration’s bill and I suspect no one will ever let it happen again.
Macs are very popular in schools today for teachers and staff. Switching to Macbook Neos for students would actually simplify their support burden. I'm not sure they'd be cost justified though.
Still if you're the lawyer on the side of the lawsuit claiming that the code is copyrightable, you really don't want that copilot attribution in the commit message muddying the waters.
you actually do, as counter-intuitive as that seems. co-authored implies (and gives you room to argue) that you were involved in the process. hiding the fact that you did if proven otherwise (not that hard to prove in many cases if it comes to that) won’t be looking good. at my work, we are mandated to include AI attribution and I would say every well-run company should have same mandate
AI nutters always use this argument that bots are merely doing what people are doing: "a person learning from 100 books is just the same as an LLM learning from 100 million books".
If you own an apple tree, and (as is common in some countries) a child leans over your fence to grab an apple, you don't lose sleepless nights over it. But if a corporation comes over and leans over with its 10 meter long robotic arm and takes all your apples then it's a disaster.
Scale matters. People don't care for small "losses" because we want other people to prosper. But AI steals from everyone and brings prosperity only to Amodei and Altman.
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