Is this LBO a ridiculous enough of a proposition that you are going to email your senator and or representatives to complain about LBO loopholes in corporate finance law?
Add on the compounding effect that "QA" or "test" in someone's job description was viewed as a synonym for "less-highly compensated" over the past few decades, and you have an entire generation of mid career devs with poorly adapted instincts regarding what is valuable in the process of shipping working product.
Interesting that the algorithmic finance firms are still recruiting. Perhaps they still need a pipeline of rigorous thinkers, or are unwilling to cede significant influence over P+L to llms.
How much drastic would things be if these corporations do open source it? I like to think that markets are fairly efficient so they are fighting tooth and nail for micro-percentage points which granted can be billions but usually what these companies really do is short of fraud at times which can be celebrated by finance (Jane Street frauding Indian investors)
My opinion is that they aren't worried about their competitors so much as the govt.'s patching the loopholes that they do because the only way they are a net sum positive game (in my opinion) is that they make money from the losses of the average person and that too in fraudulent manners at time.
In the future it will be considered one of the most unusual cultural/social decisions ever, that large financial services firms are as they are in the Western world.
I have never seen a group of people so frantically doing nothing of any value.
Definitely the first two, but the latter is not particularly common at most firms. It's hard to put in the type of thought that you need when you're working that much. It's not slinging power points.
It feels like xAI is perpetually playing catch-up.
They haven't quite committed enough to a novel direction relative to anthropic or OAI, what's described in the OP seems symptomatic of a lack of differentiation.
If you spend all your time judging yourself relative to the incumbents, there will be no time left over to innovate.
For a brief moment, they were the top performers in benchmarks with the release of Grok 4.
Then they suddenly fired tons of people. Elon does not understand the market and the competition. You can't run a frontier AI lab like any old VC slop company.
from the tweet above: "Maybe even more importantly: Anthropic wants to control what people do with AI—they block companies they don't like from using their coding product (including us), they want to write the rules themselves for what people can and can't use AI for, and now they also want to tell other companies what their business models can be."
