Theoretically speaking, payment could take the form of data as part of an enterprise agreement on rates charged. Notably, the OpenAI API privacy policy specifically states...
> We may also aggregate or de-identify Personal Data so that it no longer identifies you and use this information for the purposes described above, such as to analyze the way our Services are being used, to improve and add features to them, and to conduct research. We will maintain and use de-identified information in de-identified form and not attempt to reidentify the information, unless required by law.
The fact that Mixpanel has this data in non-de-identified form is suspect to me. Granted, my entire comment was clearly tongue-in-cheek. Although I think it's possible that OpenAI is selling this data to get a discount on Mixpanel usage, in reality I understand that the more likely explanation is that whoever was responsible for managing this data is completely and totally incompetent.
"The fact that Mixpanel has this data in non-de-identified form is suspect to me."
The way mixpanel works is that they tag users with a device ID, then once they become a customer, you back port your own customer ID to mix panel and they switch the device ID to your internal customer record so that you can see what your signed up users are doing, where they signed up from and generally track the user journey.
They aren't specifically going after you... they just try to create a unique hash from everything they can and by doing weird things to your system you are making a truly unique hash easier
5 9's is like 7 minutes a year. They are breaking SLAs and impacting services people depend on
Tbh though this is sort of all the other companies fault, "everyone" uses aws and cf and so others follow. now not only are all your chicks in one basket, so is everyone elses. When the basket inevitably falls into a lake....
Providers need to be more aware of their global impact in outages, and customers need to be more diverse in their spread.
These kinds of outages continue to happen and continue to impact 50+% of the internet, yes, they know they have that power, but they dont treat changes as such, so no, they arent aware. Awareness would imply more care in operations like code changes and deployments.
Outages happen, code changes occur; but you can do a lot to prevent these things on a large scale, and they simply dont.
Where is the A/B deployment, preventing a full outage? What about internally, where was the validation before the change, was the testing run against a prodlike environment or something that once resembled prod but hasnt forever?
They could absolutely mitigate impacting the entire global infra in multiple ways, and havent, despite their many outages.
They are aware. They don't want to pay the cost benefit tradeoff. Education won't help - this is a very heavily argued tradeoff in every large software company.
I do think this is tenable as long as these services are reliable. Even though there have been some outages I would argue that they’re incredibly reliable at this point. If though this ever changes the costs to move to a competitor won’t be as simple as pushing a repository elsewhere, especially for AWS. I think that’s where some of the potential danger lies.
> and judging by the HN post age, we're now past minute 60 of this incident.
Huh? It's been back up during most of this time. It was up and then briefly went back down again but it's been up for a while now. Total downtime was closer to 30 minutes
There is pretty concrete published data that shows trends in less hiring for roles that are easily replaced by AI such as content writers and front-end developers
Personally I let go a developer I was using because I only had them around for front end work and now I'm much more productive just doing that with Claude Code directly
So the returns for the average business are largely due to less employee and contractors spending
> There is pretty concrete published data that shows trends in less hiring
Is there any concrete evidence that lower hiring is due to AI, and not due to some other factor - such as a stalling economy? I suspect AI growth is the only thing currently staving off a full-blown recession.
Have you given thought to the fact that there is an overlap between "jobs easily replaced by AI" and "jobs that are easy to consolidate into existing roles", or even "non-essential jobs"?
> jobs that are easy to consolidate into existing roles
I think you are on to something here. AI is what gives people the ability to consolidate many roles into one.
Like in my example, when I fired my front-end developer, I now can easily do that task.
Or, a marketing generalist can now create blog posts using ChatGPT instead of needing to also have a content writer
To your point about "non-essential": "Front-end development" is not necessarily something I would consider non-essential, but maybe "front-end developer" is now. Something to think about
If you're vibe coding a front end, you're going to run into issues with technical debt eventually, so that's a very short sighted way to handle things.
Or if you do have the technical skill for front-end work, you could have done it without the AI.
I do doubt this, however, because AI assisted programming does not increase productivity for skilled workers as much according to studies.
I've been programming for well over a decade, but as a founder I wear many different hats so I had a front end developer to help take some of the load off.
But AI coding got to the point where, for me personally, it took less of my own time and effort to work directly with the AI (Claude Code) to do the front-end tasks required compared to working with the developer, reviewing their code, etc.
I'm not "vibe coding" or adding technical debt.
> you could have done it without the AI.
Technically anyone could do anything, but there are finite things in this world like the number of hours in a day lol
> according to studies.
Great, I don't care about the "studies". I'm talking about how things work for me personally in the real world and giving a concrete example of how AI spend has replaced an employee but you are welcome to ignore that
Also, it should be noted that in studies, the conclusions are typically based on an average or median, so some people will see a benefit, and some people won't... and that will be based on a number of factors
There is money going in, but not as much as what these valuations and investments imply. The numbers are inflated and that's common knowledge by this point.
And yet it's one of the fastest growing products of all time and is currently the state of the art for AI coding assistants. Yeah it's not perfect but nothing is
I give the model a lot of credit for being very good at a fairly narrow slice of work (basic vibe coding/office stuff) that also happens to be extremely common. I'm harder on Claude Code because of its success and the fact that the company that makes it is worth so much.
They brought up some performance related edge case that I've never even run into even with extremely heavy usage including building my own agent that wraps around CC and runs several sessions in parallel... So yeah I failed to see the relevance
You do realize that you pay for Mixpanel right?
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