[edot]

You can tell these guys know nothing about LLMs or how they’re provided. I love how they show OpenRouter’s graph of token usage as if it speaks for usage across the board. DeepSeek looks like the king because people who use Anthropic and OpenAI use them on either a direct basis or AWS Bedrock …

And the bar chart for token costs, really? As if that’s information? Their sources are the API docs ffs. If they had at least modeled something to estimate token costs that would be interesting, but showing the public prices and calling it research is dumb.

[toomuchtodo]

Apollo Group has $1T assets under management, I believe them over most folks on HN. Their argument that the Mag 7 is burning up all of their free cash flow is factually accurate, as the returns are not materializing for the investments being made (ie underperformance).

[davidpapermill]

The Mag 7 spending around $700B on capex this year, expected around a trillion next year.

That's more than their combined FCF, and they're borrowing to bridge the gap.

[Danox]

One is not spending anything out of the ordinary up until this point in comparison to their competition. But the Apple Silicon design group might start spending some money on something practical, something that might begin the typical Apple long-range process of replacing two or three existing companies within their current supply chain, but that’s nothing new over the last 25 years.

[toomuchtodo]

It is a bit unfair to lump Apple in with everyone else in the Mag7, as their strategy is arguably reasonable and prudent for the current position of the hype circle. Apple Silicon was a spectacular decision and investment. Everyone else has lost their damn mind.

[roboror]

If we're doing money=smart, the mag 7 control almost $4T in assets and cash, so wouldn't you trust them even more?

[toomuchtodo]

Not based on the evidence of how they allocate capital. Meta wasted $80B on the Metaverse, for example. Apollo allocates capital as their day job. Mag7 allocates by vibes.

https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/mark-z...

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/19/technology/mark-zuckerber... | https://archive.today/iEGAj

[triceratops]

> Apollo allocates capital as their day job. Mag7 allocates by vibes

Lol what in the world? Is running a trillion dollar corporation anything other than allocating capital?

You can argue that Meta made a poor capital allocation decision with VR and perhaps continues to do so with AI.

[toomuchtodo]

I have an opinion based on the data, yours may differ. Favorite this thread for when the music stops. It has before (1999-2000, 2007-2008), it will again.

[triceratops]

I'm objecting to your categorization of the job of running one of the Mag7s as something other than "capital allocation". The CEO of Meta or Amazon or any of these other companies allocates capital all day long. They do it differently than an asset manager like Apollo for sure, and sometimes make worse decisions. But it's in the same category.

[re-thc]

> Apollo Group has $1T assets under management, I believe them over most folks on HN

If only that's a measure of if they know how to time the stock market. The real measure is how much they earn not if their sales or marketing department manages to get more customers.

[petesergeant]

> Apollo Group has $1T assets under management, I believe them over most folks on HN

Ah, the old _argumentum ad giletum Patagoniae_

[serf]

in pecunia veritas , an old HN favorite.

[staticman2]

Vanguard has 12T under management so you believe any PDF they put out 12 times more?

[toomuchtodo]

Vanguard holds and manages index funds and are, broadly speaking, not active managers. Apollo is a sophisticated, active capital market participant|manager.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Global_Management

[jknoepfler]

I mean, I'd assume this deck was trying to sell something. But the relevant comparison is to stonk-bros on HN LARPing as hedge fund managers, not Vanguard.

Which, to be fair, Vanguard has earned a good deal of trust from me on the passive investment side of the equation, although I don't think it's meaningful to make it linearly proportional to the total size of their managed assets? I'm not even sure how I'd operationalize that in reality.

Having actual skin in the game on getting an answer right is generally a sign of credibility, though.

That said, without context I'm not really drawing any conclusions from this.

[pj_mukh]

"I love how they show OpenRouter’s graph of token usage as if it speaks for usage across the board."

I'm not sure what was said during what looks like a deck of a presentation? I'm hoping it wasn't this, because that's an obvious misfire.

[CamperBob2]

I love how they show OpenRouter’s graph of token usage as if it speaks for usage across the board.

Based on the light-gray shade on your comment, I'm guessing most HN'ers don't understand how questionable that particular graph makes the rest of the presentation look.

It's like publishing a physics textbook and including an appendix on astrology.