Michael B

Sam Altman: “It’s always about compute.” He’s describing the Co-Design Thesis in real time. Next-gen models demand massive coherent clusters not just more GPUs, but unified fabrics connecting them at scale. The data center IS the computer. Most investors aren’t ready. 🚀

⚡️Hollywood is over as a real mass-employment machine. The brand survives. The city survives. The celebrities survive. The money at the very top survives. The actual industrial ecosystem that let thousands of ordinary ambitious people build durable lives underneath the dream is being butchered. That is the signal. Los Angeles spent decades pretending glamour and production were the same thing. They are not. Glamour is cheap. A functioning labor market is expensive. When the economics broke, the system chose to preserve the image and sacrifice the workers. That is what always happens. The red carpet stays. The middle dies. The old machine worked because it controlled distribution, attention, and cash flow. Cable money was huge. Theatrical mattered. Studio power meant something. A bloated human hierarchy could still be fed. Then streaming blew the doors open, burned capital, failed to replace the old margins, and handed power to finance. After that, every extra layer of labor started looking like a liability. The knife came out. Now the whole place is being stripped down to franchise management, IP extraction, event content, and prestige theater. Fewer bets. Fewer jobs. Fewer ladders. Fewer careers. Fewer ways in. Fewer ways up. The machine still wants the aura of culture. It no longer wants to pay for the human density that produced it. People keep waiting for a rebound in production. Production is not the point anymore. The point is capital efficiency. The point is squeezing known brands, offloading cost, and preserving the illusion that the old kingdom still rules while the actual factory is being disassembled behind the facade. Los Angeles also lost the right to assume the work had to stay there. Once margins tightened, every spreadsheet started asking the obvious question. Why pay LA costs if the content can be shot elsewhere, cut elsewhere, written elsewhere, managed remotely, subsidized elsewhere, or generated from a smaller labor base entirely? The city still has symbolic gravity. Symbolic gravity does not stop payroll collapse. And the next hit is obvious. AI does not need to “replace Hollywood” in one dramatic move. The damage comes from attrition. Fewer writers hired. Fewer assistants. Fewer editors. Fewer concept artists. Fewer junior staff. Fewer development people. Fewer support layers. Fewer chances for anyone without leverage to enter the system and survive long enough to become valuable. The machine is closing the reproductive pathway of the industry. That is the real death. An industry can keep producing famous things while ceasing to be a place where large numbers of people can build a future. That is where Hollywood is now. A prestige shell. A showroom. A graveyard of middle-tier careers lit by the afterglow of its own mythology. The blunt version is simple. Hollywood is not collapsing as an image. Hollywood is collapsing as a life path.