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Mira Murati’s AI startup Thinking Machines valued at $12B in early-stage funding

reuters.com

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Re: Mira Murati’s AI startup Thinking Machines valued at $12B in early-stage funding

#101

Post by tsimionescu »

erulabs wrote: post #53

I think it takes a lot of temerity and hubris to look at a 2B raise and assume it's all hype. A16Z has certainly had some misses, but one assumes there actually is some product they're showing behind closed doors that makes this round much more reasonable than it appears from the outside. If something makes no sense, seems totally crazy, and is being done by a crowd of extremely smart people, you can only assume one…

Theranos was worth $9B in 2013 money, and it latet turned out that they had literally nothing but hype. Enron was posting $100B revenue the year before it went bankrupt. Bernie Madoff's fund had huge banks as institutional investors. Magic Leap was valued at $4.6B and had some purportedly amazing demos behind closed doors that anyone who witnessed them thought would revolutionize entertainment.

While these are not necessarily typical cases, they show that it's absolutely possible to have gigantic valuations raised from industry experts with nothing to show for it, if you're good enough at lying.

Re: Mira Murati’s AI startup Thinking Machines valued at $12B in early-stage funding

#103

Post by rhubarbtree »

ks2048 wrote: post #26
beauzero wrote: post #8

Does anybody know what they are building yet?

"it wants to build artificial intelligence systems that are safer, more reliable and aimed at a broader number of applications than rivals". If only I had had that idea, maybe I could have raised $2B.

And the credentials of running if you also had the credentials of being a very successful CTO at OpenAI, you might have.

Re: Mira Murati’s AI startup Thinking Machines valued at $12B in early-stage funding

#104

Post by eddythompson80 »

esperent wrote: post #76
eddythompson80 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

huh, what happened? I haven't been following Mistral but I recall it was everyone's up and coming darling, no?

It's about to be bought by Apple, so not for long.

I thought that was perplexity.

Re: Mira Murati’s AI startup Thinking Machines valued at $12B in early-stage funding

#106

Post by rhubarbtree »

moezd wrote: post #79

At this point, arms-crossed mugshot of "{ex-Open AI} raises $2B" is a meme. Training one epoch of a model the size of the GPT-4 family is easily an 8 figure job. Considering other ops costs, UI and backend dev, securing Everest sized datasets, demos/talks, wages, bonuses etc, this probably gives them around 100 trial and errors, or in other words "Look at me mum, I won 100 chips for the casino!" And imagine being the…

Murati was CTO. Whilst Brockman and Altman may have bypassed or undermined her on some occasions, she can take large credit for OpenAI’s technical success. Brockman can take credit for his extremely hard work, increasing cadence. Altman for incredible fundraising and (often polarising) visionary leadership.

From what I’ve read, Murati was an excellent CTO.

Re: Mira Murati’s AI startup Thinking Machines valued at $12B in early-stage funding

#107

Post by rhubarbtree »

pdabbadabba wrote: post #32

Could somebody explain why there is so much negativity towards Thinking Machines in this thread? I realize that they haven't publicly announced a product yet but presumably the VCs have some idea of what Thinking Machines is building, and they have some pretty significant OpenAI talent on board, including Murati herself. Some amount of skepticism is warranted, of course, but a lot of these comments read as closer to…

I think most people aren’t aware that as CTO Murati can take a large chunk of the credit for OpenAI’s success. Her skills were mostly in deft technical management, a skill often under appreciated by nerds. Her success here is going to heavily depend on her ability to attract the right talent.

Re: Mira Murati’s AI startup Thinking Machines valued at $12B in early-stage funding

#109

Post by kipe »

techpineapple wrote: post #85
erulabs wrote: post #53

I think it takes a lot of temerity and hubris to look at a 2B raise and assume it's all hype. A16Z has certainly had some misses, but one assumes there actually is some product they're showing behind closed doors that makes this round much more reasonable than it appears from the outside. If something makes no sense, seems totally crazy, and is being done by a crowd of extremely smart people, you can only assume one…

Could be, or it could be a simple flawed net present value calculation, similar to Effective Altruism. SBF said if he had a die and it had a 99% chance of killing everyone and a 1% chance of making the world 1 million times happier he would roll the die. Repeatedly. And Silicon Valley loved him. I think AI is a similar calculation. Humans are tearing themselves apart and the only thing worth betting on is AI that can…

I think they act as if making these bets is the only way to save themselves. None of them care about humanity obviously.

Re: Mira Murati’s AI startup Thinking Machines valued at $12B in early-stage funding

#110

Post by jaggederest »

esperent wrote: post #74
Aurornis wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Could somebody explain why there is so much negativity towards Thinking Machines in this thread? I think it lies at the intersection of a lot of topics where HN comments are hostile: VCs, large fundraising, AI, OpenAI related employees. These are all topics where HN comments are more hostile than pragmatic. Most of the hostility is just a proxy for “VCs bad” banter.

> HN comments are more hostile than pragmatic In the case of a bubble, hostility is pragmatism. Of course, nobody knows that it's a bubble, but nobody knows it's not a bubble either.

I've lived through 3 and read up on at least 10 more.

Many people know it's a bubble. You see lots of HN comments that it's a bubble. We certainly did in 2007.

In a bubble, the predominant notion is not "I wonder if it's a bubble", but rather "It's a bubble, I hope I can make my money before it pops". A perfect example of this was the Tulip craze in the Netherlands. Nobody actually believed tulip bulbs were worth that much, they just wanted to find a bigger sucker to make a profit, if you read accounts from the time.

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