The reason it is so noteworthy is because these companies are based upon valuations which assume mostly debt free companies with giant free cash flows. If Google starts to look like Ford a lot of the assumptions around why it’s worth so much money go out the window. Of course we’re not there but this is a change in direction which is new and noteworthy.
I think it's true across most of society today. There's value in removing friction up to a point but we're finding that by treating everything as an end to optimize results in loss of meaning. Most of life is lived in the in between moments and by fully removing them we lose something important.
Interestingly I haven’t had such a challenge in the past but regularly am accused of being AI. In my case I think it’s because I have experience writing philosophy papers which trend towards a more stilted tone. For this response I’m also probably exaggerating it a tad.
A lot of it is that good argumentative/persuasive writing follows the structures that AI writing follow. Groups of three, not only x but y, etc. It’s all stuff that’s considered a best practice. It used to be comments structured like that meant you were writing overly formally now it’s so common people see it as LLM output.
Oh as for how I feel about this… couldn’t care less if people think I’m AI or not. Im not in it for the karma, I don’t care if people think I use AI even as someone who’s anti AI.
Just because something is doesn’t mean it ought to be. We’ve settled on this system because it seems to be generally the most effective way of valuing things. In times of extreme changes in valuation it comes off as more egregious than normal.
>Their expertise will be used to improve Grok Build coding agent.
Is Grok not a toxic enough brand (by association with Musk) that people who would use Cursor wouldn't avoid Grok?
Like, the assumption seems to be that all the goodwill that Cursor users have towards Cursor will now apply automatically to Grok, which seems like a pretty significant leap.
I've been teaching myself physics lately and have found Grok to be one of the best both at coming to a correct answer and helping me to understand how to get it myself. It also seems a lot better than other models at saying "I don't know" or pointing out when my question doesn't make sense.
I'm just trying to get it to help me learn physics. If my topic of interest shifts to mid-20th century European history I'll keep what you said in mind.
If you're going to use the model to learn history you're going to learn the version of history that the model teaches you. A little bit of digging around grokpedia should give you some idea of what that model thinks
I'm a heavy Cursor user, I spend hundreds of dollars per month in overages above my $200 subscription, and I'll be switching away. I have zero interest in Musk's AI.
The CEOs ideology matters due to the fact it impacts the product design. The reason people don't want to use Grok is because it's bad, and it's bad because the team behind grok have to spend cycles crowbarring in far right white genocide conspiracy theories so that it doesn't embarrass their boss on twitter. One of the things we learned with Anthropic is that you have a lot more success being focused on the core product - coding agent, than trying to do that and chase internet chatbot users.
As someone that trains LLMs, even if grok does have a "avoid ""woke""" fine-tuning, adding that needs a few thousand examples SFT and a system prompt. It costs nothing extra to do it to coding agents and is not the reason why grok sucks at coding. It's just not in the same league in general - it's 0.5T parameters only and not trained specifically for coding at all.
Even if the way they are doing it did damage coding performance, it is a simple matter of serving another model without that fine tuning in the enterprise API preferably only to the grok coding harness (or cursor, now). Coding performance for subscription plans don't move the needle in terms of revenue anyways and quality there doesn't matter as much.
Achieving the improvements from K2.5 -> composer 2.5 with just post-training is actually more impressive. Though I believe their next model is trained from scratch.
> So SpaceX is buying 15 years of future cashflows, assuming no change in revenue. Which is bad assumption given past growth was gigantic.
I'd argue it's a bad assumption in the opposite direction. There's no moat. People can and will switch tooling and Cursor could easily be left with a steep decline in users.
But revenue is not really the informative quantity. If you sell gold you will have a huge revenue, but very little profit. I can be a trillion dollar company too if we exchange dollar bills for face value.
"training good coding models" many would say that is a highly debatable statement, and some would say that is just flat out not true. Cursor has not trained a frontier model from scratch, what they did was take an already made (non-frontier) model and further trained it on their user data about coding outcomes from its coding agent. So, a form of distillation and RL.
Sure - why use cash when you can use bits of paper instead?
I'd expect more of the same to come - good way to lock in some of this crazy SpaceX valuation by converting it into something with a bit more inherent worth.
Cursor is massively overvalued. But so is SpaceX so it all evens out in the end.
> each share of Cursor’s common stock and each share of Cursor’s preferred stock outstanding immediately prior to the Effective Time of the Merger will be automatically converted into the right to receive shares of the Company’s Class A common stock based on an implied equity value of Cursor of $60.0 billion and the price of the Company’s Class A common stock equal to the volume-weighted average closing price thereof over the seven consecutive trading days
Current market cap is 2.66T which is pretty bonkers. Thats about intel, amd, and micron put together.
This is what always confuses me about the “keep up or get left behind” crowd. Either these tools are gods in boxes and we’re all going to be replaced or they are actually something that you can gain expertise around. If you can gain expertise around them then sure there’s value in keeping up. But those shouting we’ve all gotta keep up are mostly the same claiming they are building god boxes. It genuinely has to be one or the other. Something isn’t a god box if you have to learn how to best use it.
Seems like there is skill in knowing what to ask the genie for, no matter how powerful the genie is? How is that not going to be an issue?
That said, there are things people had to worry about last year with weaker models that aren't really a problem anymore, so some of the knowledge you get by "keeping up" becomes obsolete and could be skipped by waiting.
Context: I vibe code most of my production code, but I come from a long FED career so I'm vibe-coding small things, constantly tweaking, refining prompts, picking work to do that fits with the existing work, etc. So I'm either "doing it wrong" or "being careful". Anyway, that's the perspective I have ATM...
So, it seems to me that there's quite a lot of skill to using these "god boxes": which models, connecting to your systems, hosting the code, running the model, running the code, not breaking your production pipelines, having a production pipeline in the first place.
Sure, the god boxes help with a lot of that. But they don't help setting up the accounts, connecting your code hosting to your production servers. You can't currently just give random people in your org access to an LLM account and have them safely make production changes w/out some engineering knowledge and oversight. In NGOs, especially the small ones, they already outsource all that to 3rd parties so they don't have to worry about it. But with "just the right amount" of in-house knowledge, gear, config (maybe one office computer hooked up with Claude, or a small GHCP account, with GH + hosting configured), it's possible that anyone in the company might be able to add to the company's suite of useful small tools, or add features.
(I also think there's more to "hey claude, make feature X" than we're capturing here, but as I said at the top, I might be doing it wrong.)
> This is what always confuses me about the “keep up or get left behind” crowd. ... But those shouting we’ve all gotta keep up are mostly the same claiming they are building god boxes. It genuinely has to be one or the other. Something isn’t a god box if you have to learn how to best use it.
I think the answer is the shouters are just telling people what they want to hear (a.k.a. lying), in the service of selling more. To the capitalists, they sell "god boxes" with the promise of one day being able to lay of most if not all those pesky, annoying workers. To the workers, they sell "something that you can gain expertise around" to defuse the intense opposition a job-destroying "got box" would create.
It’s so wild to me to make a multiyear purchasing decision based upon recent events. My next car will be an EV not suggesting it’s a bad decision however I’m still blown away by statistics like this.
> It’s so wild to me to make a multiyear purchasing decision based upon recent events.
Recent events? Russia going rogue and the US going haywire both happened a decade ago at least. Those are two major suppliers of fossil fuel for Europe.
The current trend was bound to happen, it only required time for the industry to pivot.
We're commenting on the fact that demand has surged in the last few months. Russian and American behavior from a decade ago didn't (directly) cause that.
There was definitely a build up. Trump was held back from being Trump in the first term. Even with that, there was no recourse for any of the actions that he took. There were also the court decisions that happened in between terms. So this term, he naturally feels no need to hold back. It is unlikely this Trump term would happen had his first not happened.
The thing is a lot of people might be right at the tipping point of buying an EV and then some news like this comes out and it pushes them over the line.
I feel EVs at this moment are right at the level of “I’m gonna buy a new car, but maybe I’ll wait for the one after before I jump into an EV”. Better batteries (solid state), better charging speeds and more fast charger availability seem to have a large group of people waiting.
It’s not a bad idea. I bought in 2022 and the range of newer EVs is already a lot more than mine. But I really enjoy my car and don’t have much pressure to take so many roadtrips.
What I can’t see doing is buying a new ICE now. If you just want something to hold you over a few years, buy used or lease.
That makes no sense to me. I've had an EV for five years and right now the infrastructure is fantastic in comparison. There are chargers everywhere, they're fast enough, and the prices are reasonable. The batteries are also quite large. I see absolutely no reason to buy an IC car any more. Many people have solar panels installed, making the commute practically free.
I think at the upper range, and for Teslas, this is true. But for the rest, not quite yet.
Suppose you buy an entry-level Renault 5, the WLTP range is 310km. In mild conditions you typically get 85-90% of that, enough for the majority of people. But in winter you get 65% of that, so 195km, on a new battery. And after 5 years that may be 165km in winter, and that's just not great. With home-charging that still is enough for most requirements, but you are more restricted for longer trips and have to charge diligently.
I live in an apartment so I wouldn't be home-charging daily, there'd be plenty of times I'd want to park my car at the first available spot in my area at 55% charge and use it the next day, which is even more restrictive.
For the entry-level Tesla the WLTP range is 530km or 70% more. There the problem is much less. And for home-chargers, it's also a no-brainer usually, especially with home solar. But for an apartment-dweller who just needs an entry-level car, it's still a toss-up between a new EV like a renault 5 for 30k, or just a Toyota Corolla Hybrid that gets great mileage, low maintenance and can be had new for 30k or a few years old for 20k.
Unfortunately, I refuse to buy a Tesla due to Musk's politics.
Mate, I too live in an apartment and have had Zoe 41kWh (Type2-only) for several years. I've been through all that, including several 900+km trips. It's not as bad as it sounds. I'll reiterate - with CCS you don't really worry about charging. Those 310km is enough for over 80% of anyone's trips. The guy who bought 9yr-old Zoe drove away 278km with 28km left when he got home. Recently I've got a Cupra Born with 77kWh and couldn't care less about the charging infrastructure anymore. It's just a regular car at this point. Charging on the street is even more practical than driving to the nearest petrol station.
There's some people that say having no airconditioning, no dishwasher, no elevator, no computer, no smartphone isn't as bad as it sounds.
And they're completely right, for them. And completely wrong, for others.
I'll never claim that it's not enough for you. And I agree also that 80% of anyone's trips can be done on just about any EV, even an old Zoe. The statistics are very clear on that, 80% of trips are short.
But you won't sell to the majority with that limitation. Just like 80% of the time my house has just 2 people in it (me and my gf), but if there was a local law that on homes in my street I could not have more than 2 people in the house (like visiting friends and family), I wouldn't have bought it. Because I don't buy it for '80% of the time', I buy it for 100% of the time.
The same goes for cars. People buy 5 seater cars even though the average car has 1.5 persons in it, for this very reason. Only 1% to 2% of cars have 2 seats, even though this is more than necessary for the average occupation in a car.
Renault seems to have made a sensibly priced range with some classic styles too. Familiar cars but with EV, rather than early adopter cars like the Nissan Leaf or weird tech bro cars.
It moves up people's purchasing plans. If you were expecting to replace your vehicle in the next two years because of performance degradation, and now your fuel costs are substantially higher, then a purchase today might make more sense than your original plan.
Of even if people are just considering and EV as compared to an ICE car they may think "you know what, who knows when fuel prices will come down? maybe I just switch now!"
"make a multiyear purchasing decision based upon recent events" You have this all backwards. The fact is that for many decades petroleum is an unreliable energy source due to geopolitical factors, but people have been pretending that was not the case. What has happened in the last two months is people have finally realized the long-term truth.
Yeah buying an EV instead of a gas car is a hedge that doesn't cost much. There is an asymmetry in the upside and downside risk. The downside risk is all on gas with no upside. No downside for the EV.
EVs have been better for ~90% of the driving most people do for a decade, but a lot of people held back because they fixated on things like epic road trips or needing to haul many sheets of plywood.
What a price shock does is force people to acknowledge how much money they’ve been spending on edge-cases, making many of them reconsider how much it’s really worth to, for example, go on an all-day drive without every stopping for more than a few minutes or whether the SUV/pickup truck aesthetic is worth paying 50% more every day.
It's more like the recent events trigger people's awareness and learning about multi-year trends that are happening regardless of recent events.
EVs are a good deal in much of the world. They're more quiet, lower maintenance costs, lower fuel costs, therefore lower cost of ownership and operation. And they have less volatile costs as electricity prices swing less than gas prices.
Long-term trends show electricity and gas prices decouple.
It's just that every time gas prices spike, people look into solutions and find out these truths.
Climate change has been in the zeitgeist for decades now. Pretty sure many people are cognizant of this and want to move away from fossil fuels. This is just a boost to do so.
Interesting point, I wonder why governments haven't planted the idea in buyers that ICE cars will be getting more expensive to own (e.g. through taxes) in the coming 5-10 years. Then the thought of buying an ICE car now will also be less attractive because people know they won't be worth much in the 2nd hand market in 5-10 years.
But I suppose I see the answer, it's because of the car manufacturers employing many EU voters (in particular in Germany which is the 400kg gorilla in the EU), no government wants to piss off their voters.
It's not as direct as a future tax, but ICE cars have been gradually made less useful in many EU countries including Germany and France. You can't drive one into the centre of Paris, and older ICE cars are banned from the centre of larger German cities.
Even people who never go to these cities know it reduces the second hand value.
Oil usage being subject to supply shocks is nothing new, it’s completely inevitable. Moving to renewables is an obvious upgrade, this recent crisis is just bringing that into the light for folk.
I think the comments that the tech industry was always a bit terrifying and this piece can both be accurate. It is the case that the public perception has changed significantly due to lighting trust on fire and that the trust might not have been that deserved in the first place.
The asset liquidation analogy is perfect. For about the past ten year, I think the Cambridge Analytica hearings are a good turning point, tech has realized that their warm and fuzzy persona is no longer valuable cultivating and so there’s been a very rapid burn down of that persona into the hyper capitalist power hungry one we have today. It has always been the case that money and power were motivating factors but until that was laid fully bare there was value in pretending like it wasn’t the only factor.
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