Ian Welsh – Page 10 – The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Regular readers will know that for a couple years I’ve been saying that Chinese open source AI would win the AI “war” because it’s cheaper and non proprietary (prices can’t just be raised suddenly, or capacities taken away.)

Over the last few months there’s been a lot of screams coming from regular AI users. OpenAI and Anthropic moved to token based billing, which is to say “you pay based on how much you use.” They still weren’t charging full rate, but they were charging a LOT more and users were not happy. One company spent 500 million by mistake: they forgot to put limits on how much their employees could spend.

Oops.

Nor are ordinary users exempt:

I Went From $3,000/Month on Claude to $5/Week on DeepSeek

And honestly? 80% of my work is identical.

For the past two months, I was burning $3-5K monthly on Claude Code. Every idea from design to development to testing – full end-to-end automation, even simulating users to test my products and provide feedback. Extremely token-intensive.

But Claude’s caching sucked, making it insanely expensive. Then I discovered DeepSeek V4.

The numbers: • Claude: $5 input, $25 output per million tokens •

DeepSeek: $0.28 input, <$1 output (with their current discount) • DeepSeek cached: $0.0002 – literally less than a penny The caching optimization is game-changing.

Once DeepSeek has seen content, it basically stops charging tokens. My result: $5/week vs $1,000/week for the same workload.

So now Microsoft has created their own minor Deepseek fork, and will run it on their servers to power Copilot. You can still use a version run by US labs, but if you can’t afford, or justify that, you can use the Deepseek version.

Driving the news: Microsoft says companies using Copilot Cowork will pay based on how much compute they use.

The company tells Axios it is exploring a fine-tuned version of DeepSeek V4, or another open-source model, as a lower-cost alternative to the Anthropic and OpenAI models now powering Copilot Cowork.

Microsoft says it expects to make a lower-cost model available in the coming weeks and will confirm its choice then.

Worse than this, there’s beginning to be serious pushback on whether AI is all that useful. Uber’s COO opened the door back in March:

In perhaps the most high-profile example of this growing concern yet, Uber COO Andrew Macdonald acknowledged during a recent podcast appearance that gains in productivity simply weren’t being reflected in the oodles of cash the company has been shelling out on AI.

“That link is not there yet, right?” he told Rapid Response host Bob Safian. “I think maybe implicitly there is more that is getting shipped, but it’s very hard to draw a line between one of those stats and, ‘Okay, now we’re actually producing 25 percent more useful consumer features.'”

“If you’re not actually able to draw a direct line to how much useful features and functionality you’re shipping to your users that trade becomes harder to justify because it’s not free,” he complained. “AI is not free.”

As far as I can tell there’s little evidence that US priced AI is more cost-effective than the employees who were laid off because it was so great. I rather suspect that in most cases, it’s less cost-effective.

But more importantly we have the “it’s better to be wrong with the crowd” effect moving against AI. In almost all positions, including executive ones, if you’re wrong in the same way that everyone else is wrong, it’s no big deal. If you’re wrong against the crowd (say not getting into AI when the rest of your industry is) and it turns out that AI is the next big thing, well, you’re fired.

So much of the AI mania was driven by this and a relentless hype cycle. Now that important people are beginning to push back on it, it’s no longer required to be all-in on AI. And that’s bad for Anthropic and Claude.

AI is not the next coming. It is not going to make it to general AI (not this generation of large language models anyway) and while it does have some utility the US frontier models cost far more to operate than any conceivable return most of their customers will receive. It isn’t the “get rid of three-quarters of your employees” super app corporate leaders were promised.

And to the extent it is useful, well Chinese open source models are more cost effective. As good? Generally no. But they keep catching up, and paying 70 to 97% less makes up for being somewhat behind.

So to the extent that AI is a real industry, odds are high China’s going to win the race. Since the models that will win will be built off open source models that’s not a crisis for anyone, it’s a good thing, far better than a proprietary future.

BUT it does mean that US AI expenditures are probably going to turn out to be the biggest misallocation of resources in centuries: bigger than the housing bubble and bigger than the dot-com bubble (which at least did have a world changing technology behind it.) Not quite the Dutch tulip bubble, but at least the Dutch got lots of pretty flowers of that, instead of massive ugly data centers.

Business is driven by stupid people engaged in group think, especially in the West, far more than most people will admit. Everything Silicon Valley does these days is someone trying to create a monopoly or oligopoly so they can be insanely profitable, while China actually competes on price, and that’s why China keeps eating the West’s lunch.

I’d cry, except that an open source AI world is a far better one than a proprietary one, and every tear some Silicon Valley tech bro cries over a lost opportunity to make a monopolistic buck an angel gets their wings.

What I write here is for the benefit of everyone, but alas, I live in capitalism and I, and the site, take money to keep running. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.

The Cruelty Is the Point: American Execution Edition

By Ian Welsh

On June 16, 2026

9 Comments

I recently stumbled across a story about the Supreme Court (not exactly bleeding heart liberals) refusing to let Alabama use nitrogen suffocation:

An Alabama man facing the death penalty by nitrogen gas was spared Thursday as the U.S. Supreme Court refused to set aside a lower-court ruling that found the method is unconstitutionally cruel, issuing a brief order that came well after the hour originally planned to initiate Jeffery Lee’s execution…

…During the previous Alabama nitrogen executions, the inmates shook, pulled at the restraints and exhibited labored breathing. During the state’s last execution by nitrogen gas, 30 minutes elapsed between Anthony Boyd exhibiting signs of being impacted by the gas and state officials closing the curtain to the viewing room to signal the execution was complete.

The idea is that you breathe, but the gas you’re breathing is nitrogen, so eventually you die.

Of course this is going to suck, anyone who’s ever suffocated or had serious breathing issues knows that one of the worst feelings in the world is not being able to breathe.

There’s been a lot of this sort of thing going on: the company that used to sell drugs for execution stopped doing so, and various US states have been looking for alternatives. The prisoner in this case wants a firing squad, figuring it’s quicker and less painful.

Meanwhile up here in Canada we have legal assisted suicide. It’s a controversial program, because it seems like the government or various relatives are a little too eager about it. (After all, dead people don’t take up hospital beds and dead relatives don’t cause problems.) I think assisted suicide is often a good thing, but easily abused, however we’ll leave a moral deep dive for another article.

The thing is there’s never any criticism that it is a painful death. I looked into it. They give the patient:

An anxiolytic and sedative drug: Midazoloam.
They give them a drug to put them into a coma-like state with a rapid acting drug: Profofol. Then,
They give them a drug which causes paralysis, including of the lungs. Rocuronium. The patient dies of suffocation, same as with helium (or Hemlock, which Socrates was executed with.)

But the patient doesn’t suffer, because they’re deeply unconscious.

This protocol works, it’s well known, so why not use it?

Because Alabama and other US states want the prisoner to suffer. Moaning about expense is ridiculous, however expensive it is it’s cheaper than keeping a prisoner on death row, same as it’s cheaper than keeping a patient in hospital.

Executing prisoners without causing undue suffering is a solved problem. Alabama and other states like it just want the prisoner to suffer, so they keep searching for a method that will be painful and courts will allow.

Nothing Is Wrong With Transhumanism In Theory

By Ian Welsh

On June 15, 2026

24 Comments

Only in practice.

Transhumanism is one of those topics where I feel like Marx declaring “I am not a Marxist.”

Do I think transhumanism is basically a good idea?

Absofuckinglutely.

Do I like most of the people who call themselves transhumanists?

Fuck no.

I don’t like being human. I’ve spent days on end screaming in agony. I’ve lain in a mixture of my own puke and shit for hours, in so much pain I couldn’t move. I’ve thrown up more than many bulemics.

Then there’s aging.

Then there’s other people (see Israel, dog rape, genocide, etc, etc..)

Now don’t get me wrong: humans can be great. Someone did eventually come to my hospital room (an orderly, they do the real work) and clean off all the vomit and shit and a nurse did once save my life (I wasn’t entirely thrilled at the time, but she gave a damn.)

But the fact is that human life is often ass, aging sucks, illness sucks, being weak and powerless and pushed around by your own government or someone else’s government sucks, and so on. We’re stuck in bodies we didn’t choose, which often spend lots of time hurting us grievously and making us sick.

So if we could extend lifespans a lot while ALSO reducing the effect of aging, I’d be all for it. (We’ve done a bit of this already.) If we can reduce pain and suffering and disease and so on, I’m all for it.

If we can increase abundance and have a society where people don’t have to work but still have more than enough, that’s great!

And if someone wants to change their body so they like it more, I’m all for that. Good for them!

The problem with transhumanism is transhumanists counting virtual people who don’t exist and pretending their making decisions which will make trillions of people in an imaginary future better off while hurting people living today.

Silicon Valley morons who think they’re brilliant because they’re rich and who don’t get that improvements that don’t wind up helping the majority, but are gated behind massive fees are good for them, and no one else are the flag-bearers of modern transhumanism. It’s more likely the way we’re going that transhumanist technologies, as they are developed, will give us an elite that is smarter, healthier, fitter and lives longer while the masses live shit lives, suffer and die in droves.

It’s the problem with doing anything thru non-competitive markets. You want palliatives, not cures. You want a cure for cancer that costs 50K a pop, not to sell it just above unit costs so everyone can be cancer free.

If your first priority is being rich, and your second priority is helping people, your second priority doesn’t functionally exist.

Transhumanism is a great idea. I think human bodies basically suck. I think better bodies that hurt a lot less, age less and so and are modifiable so we can make our own choices rather than accept the result of evolution and the genetic lottery of who our parents are is a good idea. And while we’ve got a pretty good Pope right now, Christians can stick “suffering is good” where the sun don’t shine. They can have it, leave me out.

But too many modern transhumanists are obsessed with theoretical people who don’t exist yet and with getting rich, and not making sure everyone benefits.

If they can’t be trusted to even spread the wealth, how can they be trusted to share permanent genetic and technological advantages they could wealth gate to create a genetic (cybernetic?) aristocracy which is actually superior?

Transhumanism: great idea, despite what the trads say (If God made us so we suffer this much, that isn’t a good thing, it’s proof God is a piece of garbage.)

Modern transhumanists: mostly just people who want to be superior and gate it behind toll booths that make them wealthy and leave most people without the benefits.

(Aside: I’m putting off writing about the new Iran deal till we see the actual text of the agreement. Too many people saying too many different things. It sure does look like a US loss, but if so it’s a good thing even from a nativist perspective for the US to admit it rather than dragging out a situation which hurts them more than Iran.)

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 14, 2026

By Tony Wikrent

On June 14, 2026

32 Comments

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 14, 2026

by Tony Wikrent

War

‘Sounds a Lot Like a Nuclear Threat’: Trump Floats ‘Ultimate Alternative’ If Iran Talks Collapse

Jake Johnson, June 13, 2026 [CommonDreams]

President Donald Trump claimed Saturday that the US and Iran are on track to sign a diplomatic agreement this weekend, but added that “we have the ultimate alternative” if the process doesn’t “work out.”

“The ‘ultimate alternative’ sounds a lot like a nuclear threat,” Sina Toossi, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, wrote in response to the president’s Truth Social post. “Not the first time Trump has hinted at it.”

Trump not violating any laws

‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’ Trump Stuns By Saying ‘I Don’t Know’ When Asked Directly NBC’s Kristen Welker ‘Don’t You Need to Uphold the Constitution?’ Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025

Inside the White House Freakout Over the Epstein File

Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, June 10, 2026 [New York Times]

On July 17, 2025, at around 6 o’clock in the evening, President Trump’s top officials filed into the White House Situation Room — the secure bunker where classified and high-stakes national security matters are discussed and decided. This was where President Barack Obama, along with Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the president’s national security team, watched the raid that ended with the death of Osama bin Laden in 2011.

Now, however, Trump’s most senior advisers had gathered — without him — to figure out how to gain some measure of control over a very different kind of crisis threatening to engulf the presidency: the Epstein files….

The Orbit is Fracturing

Mike Brock, Jun 10, 2026 [Notes from the Circus]

Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan have a book coming out. The book is called Time Change, and Simon & Schuster has put substantial weight behind it, and the New York Times Magazine has run the set-piece excerpt this morning. The piece is framed, with the careful gentleness of the trade, as an inside look at the White House freakout over the Epstein files. The frame is not what the piece is.

What the piece is is a scene. The scene is the John F. Kennedy Conference Room inside the White House Situation Room complex, on the evening of July 17, 2025, at approximately six in the evening. The Vice President of the United States is in the chair. Around the table are the Chief of Staff, the Counsel, the Press Secretary, the Deputy Chief of Staff for Communications, the Communications Director, the Deputy Attorney General, a personal attorney to the President, another personal attorney to the President, and the Deputy Chief of Staff for Legislative, Political, and Public Affairs. On speakerphone — on speakerphone, the detail to which I will return — are the Attorney General of the United States and the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The President is not in the room. The President is not in the building.

The Vice President says, this is a significant issue. He is described by people who were present as visibly anxious. He is, according to the reporting, advocating internally for the full release of all Epstein-related files held by the Justice Department, and for a congressional inquiry. The Chief of Staff has told colleagues, in some venue or other that Haberman and Swan have access to, that the Vice President has shown tendencies toward conspiracy theories. Another senior official has told the reporters that the Vice President has been aggressively pursuing the Epstein issue since the memo’s release.

That is the scene. That is what we are looking at.

I have written, in these pages, that the man at the center of this administration is evil, and that the orbit around him has chosen, every day, to be where it is. I asked, in that piece, why anybody around him is tolerating the insanity. I am writing this piece because today’s excerpt is the beginning of an answer, and the answer is not what some readers wanted to hear. The answer is that some of them are, in fact, no longer tolerating it. They are positioning. They are leaking. They are sitting for interviews. They are, in private rooms, telling Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan things that they know will appear in books published by Simon & Schuster and excerpted in the New York Times Magazine. They are, in other words, beginning the work of constructing the record by which they will, later, explain what they were doing in the room….

Donald Trump is Evil

Mike Brock, June 08, 2026 [Notes from the Circus]

… Why is anybody around him tolerating this insanity?

The question is not rhetorical. I want it asked out loud, by name, in the rooms where it matters, by the people who go home at night and tell themselves they are the adults in the room. I want it asked of the Cabinet members who have signed on to be the cabinet of a man whose pathology is not a secret and has never been a secret. I want it asked of the aides who walk down the hallway with their phones in their hands and pretend they did not hear what they just heard. I want it asked of the Senate Republicans who have voted, vote after vote, to let this man put his name and his face and his will on the institutions of the United States. I want it asked of the donors who have written the checks. I want it asked of the lawyers who have drafted the briefs. I want it asked of the press secretaries who have stood at the podium and said the words they were told to say. I want it asked of every single one of them, and I want them to have to answer it, and I want the answer to be on the record.

There is no good answer. There is only the answer of careerism, and the answer of cowardice, and the answer of the ambient corruption of being in the orbit of a man whose pathology you have to pretend not to see. The aides who tell their friends he is not really like that. The Cabinet members who tell themselves they are the bulwark. The Senate Republicans who tell themselves they are the moderating influence. The donors who tell themselves they are funding tax policy. The legal team that tells itself it is doing the work of the law. Each of these is a lie….

Trump asking (anti)Republicans in Congress to void first-term impeachments

Joyce Vance, June 12, 2026 [Civil Discourse]

…there’s a 1984, “Let’s rewrite history” moment tonight. The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump has a new gambit to rewrite history. He is “pushing lawmakers to pass a resolution aimed at voiding his first-term impeachments.”….

‘Abolish ICE,’ Summer Lee Says After Haitian Immigrant Daphy Michel’s Death Ruled a Homicide

Jessica Corbett, June 12, 2026 [CommonDreams]

The U.S. Took Over Venezuela’s Oil Industry. Where Has All the Money Gone?

[Council on Foreign Relations, via Letters from an American, June 11, 2026, Heather Cox Richardson]

… Based on tanker-tracking data from Bloomberg and reports on discounts applied to Venezuelan crude, the estimated value of U.S.-controlled oil exports has increased from $600 million in January (about 380,000 barrels per day) to about $3.7 billion in April alone (about 1.1 million barrels per day). The largest recipients of Venezuelan oil since January 3 have been the United States (43 percent), India (26 percent), and Spain (8 percent).

The Trump administration has shared some details with Congress. Secretary of State Marco Rubio testified in January that $300 million had flowed through a “short-term” account in Qatar and been disbursed to Venezuela, while another $200 million was “still sitting” in the account. He indicated the administration would conduct a retroactive audit on the funds that moved through the Qatar account. The following month, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said during a press interview that the full $500 million had been transferred to Venezuela and that the administration would use U.S. Treasury accounts going forward.

But the administration has yet to provide a public accounting of the Qatar account, including how the funds were spent or what safeguards were in place to prevent corruption and money laundering….

Read More

Open Thread

By Ian Welsh

On June 13, 2026

27 Comments

Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

Possible New Iran Deal?

By Ian Welsh

On June 12, 2026

17 Comments

One reason I try not to post too much about Iran, other than blockade consequences, is that the level of bullshit flying around is so high, and it’s so hard to predict Trump. (He’s declared there was a deal over twenty times.)

However, this seems worth noting: Trump reposting Iran’s foreign minister:

Whether this will lead anywhere? Damned if I know. If I had to guess Trump’s threats to take Karch Island led to the military explaining to him that taking an island that is under artillery, missile and drone superiority by Iran, in a waterway which is mined, with the Iranians still having subs and plenty of speedboats left is a suicide mission.

But that’s just a guess, and probably wrong, since it assumes rationality.

I stumbled upon this graphic, it’s not quite right (the guy on the other side of Khameini is also alive) but it gives a sense of the scale of the leadership turnover in Iran:

Fundamentally the entire senior leadership of Iran was wiped out. The irony is that they were much less hawkish and far less willing to use force than the current bunch. Westerners (Israelis included) just cannot get thru their heads that assassination doesn’t work against functional organizations and societies. The leaders are simply replaced, often with more effective people.

Anyway, I hope there’s a deal that opens the Strait because I don’t want my food prices to double.

We’ll see.

(We’ll return to the “Freedom” series soon, probably with a discussion of Violence and Freedom.)

What I write here is for the benefit of everyone, but alas, I live in capitalism and I, and the site, take money to keep running. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.

No Eyesight, No Blogging

By Sean Paul Kelley

On June 11, 2026

10 Comments

~by Sean Paul Kelley

My Dr. gave me the wrong blood presure meds. One type blocks a hormone, another type halts it creation. I need the meds that block the hormone, not halt it. Without it my eyes turn into a mess. It is a very rare side-effect.

I woke up Saturday morning and could not focus my eyes on a damn thing—I could not count my fingers, had I not known they were there, of course.

It was quite worrying. So, I called Docs message service. She called back with instructions: stop taking the meds. Come see me Monday. Had to ~~weight~~ wait a minute for an opthmalology appt. which was early today. Great news: all will be back to normal in a few more days.

And my blood pressure is fine.

Can I just add how unsettling it is when the world is one giant blur of color? Not being able to focus sucks.

And the Iran War is back ON!

By Ian Welsh

On June 10, 2026

19 Comments

Well, the “ceasefire” sucked while it lasted, but the war will suck more. Multiple US attacks on Iran, and Iranian retaliation against US bases. America hit water supply in some minor Iranian cities as well. We’ll see if it’s a brief spam or a full on resumption of war.

I suppose this was inevitable. Trump isn’t feeling enough pain, because Americans aren’t transmitting it to him yet. There’s been a lot of work on keeping gas prices low, at the cost of actual shortages starting in about a month to two months, and Trump won’t sign any deal Iran will accept, nor will he reign in Israel in Lebanon, which Iran apparently does actually see as a bottom line demand.

This is you going to hurt most of readers if it continues. A LOT. The Iranians have stated they’ll hit oil harder this time, and the world is already on the brink. The economic tsunamin coming will be unlike anything seen since the oil shocks, without the ability to simply “pay up” since the actual infrastructure will take years to rebuild.

This is shit-crazy. Absolute disconnect between elite interests (where they just raise prices) and the interests of 90% of the world’s population. We are talking famines in many countries, people going hungry even in the first world, lots of basic goods in short supply (for example most pills use hydrocrarbons and then there are plastic shortages, chip shortages, etc, etc…)

The bottom line remains that the US can’t actually beat Iran, since it can’t take out their missiles. So this is just a question of who can take the pain longer and whose military supplies will last longer, and my money is still that the US and Israel run out of interceptors before Iran runs out of missiles.

We’ll see if Iran stops playing around. I’d personally send some ranging missiles near the Israeli desalination plants, then suggest that as an indication of good faith half the Iranian money seized by the US be sent within 48 hours. If not, take out a plant. Ask again, this time 55%.

Iran needs to indicate that it can actually destroy Israel (which it can) and that it’s willing to do so because it seems like Israel is making all the actual decisions.

We’ll see how this plays out. Meanwhile, if you can, stock up on basic staples. You’ll be grateful you did.