My favorite conspiracy theory is that these projects/blog posts are secretly backed by big-AI tech companies, to offset their staggering losses by convincing executives to shovel pools of money into AI tools.
My favorite conspiracy theory is that these projects/blog posts are secretly backed by big-AI tech companies, to offset their staggering losses by convincing executives to shovel pools of money into AI tools.
For some reason people forgot that marketing isn’t just ads on the TV. Anthropic and OpenAI have multi billion dollar marketing budgets and are going to have an IPO this year, it’s not a mystery.
They have to be. And the others writing this stuff likely do not deal with real systems with thousands of customers, a team who needs to get paid, and a reputation to uphold. Fatal errors that cause permanent damage to a business are unacceptable.
Designing reliable, stable, and correct systems is already a high level task. When you actually need to write the code for it, it's not a lot and you should write it with precision. When creating novel or differently complex systems, you should (or need to) be doing it yourself anyway.
Is it really a secret, when Anthropic posted a project of building a C compiler totally from scratch for $20k equivalent token spend, as an official article on their own blog? $20k is quite insane for such a self-contained project, if that's genuinely the amount that these tools require that's literally the best possible argument for running something open and leveraging competitive 3rd party inference.
An article over, these claims are exaggerated - they have dumped the tinycc compiler, not written one from scratch.
tinycc wasn't written in Rust.
Like this?
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/06/google-microsoft-pay-creator...
Provided the sponsored content is labelled "sponsored content" this is above board.
If it's not labelled it's in violation of FTC regulations, for both the companies and the individuals.
[ That said... I'm surprised at this example on LinkedIn that was linked to by the Washington Post - https://www.linkedin.com/posts/meganlieu_claudepartner-activ... - the only hint it's sponsored content is the #ClaudePartner hashtag at the end, is that enough? Oh wait! There's text under the profile that says "Brand partnership" which I missed, I guess that's the LinkedIn standard for this? Feels a bit weak to me! https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/a1627083 ]
There's about a hundred new posts on reddit every day that im sure are also paid for from this same pile of cash.
It feels like it really started in earnest around october.
I'm also convinced that any post in an AI thread that ends with "What a time to be alive!" is a bot. Seriously, look in any thread and you'll see it.
Slop influencers like Peter Steinberger get paid to promote AI vibe coding startups and the agentic token burning hype. Ironically they're so deep into the impulsivity of it all that they can't even hide it. The latest frontier models all continue to suffer from hallucinations and slop at scale.
https://github.com/steipete/steipete.me/commit/725a3cb372bc2...Secretly? Most blog posts praising coding agents put something like 'I use $200 Claude subscription' in bold in 2nd-3rd paragraph.
I don't think that's really a conspiracy theory lol. As long as you're playing Money Chicken, why not toss some at some influencers to keep driving up the FOMO?