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Mira Murati’s AI startup Thinking Machines valued at $12B in early-stage funding
131–140 of 260 posts
Re: Mira Murati’s AI startup Thinking Machines valued at $12B in early-stage funding
#132It's kinda sad that this is frontpage news, because there is nothing related to technology in the title, nothing intellectually interesting.
Re: Mira Murati’s AI startup Thinking Machines valued at $12B in early-stage funding
#133I 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 ne…
The weird thing about Theranos is that every single expert who knew about the technical details of blood testing basically called out the BS from the get go.
Blood testing for a single condition can involve blood separation via centrifuges, application of various chemical solutions, a multi-step process using varios test strips (each with different specificities/sensitivities). Not to mention some of the offending markers might be so rare in blood that you'd have to draw multiple vials just to get a statistically significant amount of markers.
Reducing just a single one of these tests to an instant test that works with a drop of blood would be a major breakthrough, subject to various medical awards (and lengthy medical trials).
Re: Mira Murati’s AI startup Thinking Machines valued at $12B in early-stage funding
#134Could 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…
It's nothing to do with Thinking Machines as a company, it's to do with a VC that's content to bet two billion dollars on a company that has shown absolutely nothing, and the sorry state of affairs that represents.
> It's nothing to do with Thinking Machines as a company, it's to do with a VC that's content to bet two billion dollars on a company that has shown absolutely nothing, and the sorry state of affairs that represents.
Why does it represent a "sorry state of affairs"?
VCs are risking money they manage, it's not like they're putting anyone else at risk. Do we really prefer a world in which we don't take risks to develop new technology?
The VC sector is probably an order of magnitude smaller then, say, fashion. Isn't money better spent taking risks to develop new technologies that have a chance to legitimately change the world for the better?
Note: If you think the technology could be a negative (which, to some extent I do because of the elements of AI safety, that's a separate argument. Not sure that that's what you're referring to though.)
Re: Mira Murati’s AI startup Thinking Machines valued at $12B in early-stage funding
#135Could 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…
True. People here can be like this. I have not forgotten even the greatest juice maker of all times, Juicero was similarly disparaged with all this negativity.
Yes. VCs invested money. It ended up a flop. And this hurts us... how exactly? Other than some VCs losing their money on a bad bet, who cares?
Re: Mira Murati’s AI startup Thinking Machines valued at $12B in early-stage funding
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's nothing to do with Thinking Machines as a company, it's to do with a VC that's content to bet two billion dollars on a company that has shown absolutely nothing, and the sorry state of affairs that represents.
> It's nothing to do with Thinking Machines as a company, it's to do with a VC that's content to bet two billion dollars on a company that has shown absolutely nothing, and the sorry state of affairs that represents. Why does it represent a "sorry state of affairs"? VCs are risking money they manage, it's not like they're putting anyone else at risk. Do we really prefer a world in which we don't take risks to develop…
VCs, who go on and on about capitalism, were whining on Twitter until the Silicon Valley Bank got bailed out. In real capitalism the SVB would have been allowed to fail and the VCs would have taken a hit.
But no risk for them, everyone paid for them to keep their billions.
Re: Mira Murati’s AI startup Thinking Machines valued at $12B in early-stage funding
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 tha…
What is the false positive rate? Broken clock...
Bears predicted 11 of the last 3 recessions or something.
Re: Mira Murati’s AI startup Thinking Machines valued at $12B in early-stage funding
#138It's kinda sad that this is frontpage news, because there is nothing related to technology in the title, nothing intellectually interesting.
You are right! Just like how a certain contingent flags posts that discuss any appalling misuse of technology under the pretext that "oh, it's politics, etc.", you should do the same for these scammy news items: flag + hide.
I don't know that it'll work, but it is worth trying.
Re: Mira Murati’s AI startup Thinking Machines valued at $12B in early-stage funding
#139I 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…
> Humans are tearing themselves apart and the only thing worth betting on is AI that can [...] end scarcity
Scarcity, wow...
- There is no scarcity in the rich world by historical standards.
- There is extreme poverty in large parts of the world, no amount of human intelligence has fixed this and therefore no amount of AI will. It is primarily not a question of intelligence.
- On top of that "ending scarcity" is impossible due to the hedonistic treadmill and the way the human mind works as well as the fact that with or without AI there will still be disease, aging and death.
Re: Mira Murati’s AI startup Thinking Machines valued at $12B in early-stage funding
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
True. People here can be like this. I have not forgotten even the greatest juice maker of all times, Juicero was similarly disparaged with all this negativity.
Yes. VCs invested money. It ended up a flop. And this hurts us... how exactly? Other than some VCs losing their money on a bad bet, who cares?
Well a lot of people on this forum are founders or early employees in startups. Every dollar vcs set on fire chasing some obviously stupid idea, waste on crypto memecoins, etc is a dollar that is not helping some legitimate startup get funded.