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The Doom Justifies the Valuation

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141–150 of 161 posts

Re: The Doom Justifies the Valuation

#142
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You cold also drive valuations like Musk does. Hype up the *positives*. Even here on HN, Tesla fans try to justify the market cap by pointing at Optimus, even though nobody can buy it and there's already competition for it which you can buy.

The positives aren’t there though, beyond what people are already using it for (pair programming aid, fancy auto complete, refactoring tool). Hence the article’s thesis: the doom justifies the valuation.

Lack of physical reality doesn't stop Musk from hyping in an endless loop. Or hyperlooping, if you will.

SpaceX announced a private flight around the moon in 2017 to launch in 2018, but instead in February 2018 SpaceX cancelled the certification of vehicle it was supposed to use and said they were switching to BFR. In September 2018, that became dearMoon and was due to fly there in 2023. Starship did actually launch in 2023, but exploded twice, and dearMoon was cancelled by the customer in 2024. Starship still isn't getting its test orbits circularised, because SpaceX doesn't trust the engines will relight correctly. What's in the IPO docs, to justify the price? Space based data centres that only make any sense (and even then barely) with cheap rockets that don't work right yet.

Can say the same for self-driving, or Optimus, or TBC, or Neuralink, or Cybertruck, or X, or Grok (where the closest he gets to "doom" these days seems to be how he considers "woke" a dirty word). And in the past even how many cars Tesla expected to sell vs. what they actually sold, which is a demonstration of how shifting goalposts, and not just missing them, still fails to undermine hype.

It's all "jam tomorrow" with him, even though when tomorrow comes there's still no jam; and yet, how many trillion in market cap?

Re: The Doom Justifies the Valuation

#143
post #62
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

*why would they warn if it they didn’t believe it. 2 words: regulatory capture. Ban Chinese models because they’re “bad”. (can’t have head to head competition). Bad open weight model (can’t let people escape the subscription model).

People have been warning about the dangers of advanced AI since long before open weight competition was a consideration.

yes, and all their abstract, philosophical thought is now being used to justify high valuations by these companies. if what they are making is the new nuclear bomb, well then they must be very valuable indeed.

Re: The Doom Justifies the Valuation

#144
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Looking at the ongoing Mythos export control issue, it's obviously not good for profits We must live in different planets. The whole episode about Mythos has been the absolute best free PR move ever designed. At this point everyone in tech assumes Anthropic and Mythos are the absolute best models. All of this got achieved without spending a single $$ in advertisement. This model is also probably really dangerous,…

> The whole episode about Mythos has been the absolute best free PR move ever designed. Great PR. For a product nobody can pay for. And a high chance that when anyone can, the market shrinks from "worldwide internet users" to "the USA only". And it's known to be a highly dynamic market: based on the historical average, it only takes 11 weeks to be completely trounced by someone else's model, so if you're out of the m…

>For a product nobody can pay for

I remember then Thefacebook.com was only available at certain universities and everyone felt slight envy that they weren't included. Didn't work out too bad for them.

Re: The Doom Justifies the Valuation

#145
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember a meme that spread to that effect, but it was similarly divorced from reality. Hundreds of banks failed during the financial crisis, including multiple which were very large. There were a few cases like Wachovia, where an unhealthy bank was required to sell itself in order to avoid a technical failure that would have impacted over 10 million Americans' access to their money. But this was still unpleasant f…

I remember large banks that caused the failure to be bailed out. And talk of trickle down economics, except that average joe was not bailed outed, but punished. I remember robo signing of home foreclosures with no checks and people loosing houses despite paying debts.

> I remember large banks that caused the failure to be bailed out. And talk of trickle down economics, except that average joe was not bailed outed, but punished.

Another thing that is commonly remembered but did not really happen as described. If you had to identify any particular bank as having caused the crisis, it would have to be Lehman Brothers, which was not bailed out. But really, it was a systemic crisis to which TARP was deployed as a systemic solution. Much of the "bailout" talk is based on memories of AIG, which is not a bank and behaved far more irresponsibly than any bank did; they seem not to have bothered hedging their exposure to widespread mortgage defaults at all.

> I remember robo signing of home foreclosures with no checks and people loosing houses despite paying debts.

This did happen, yes, and that was bad.

Re: The Doom Justifies the Valuation

#146
post #18

I have never understood this line of thinking. Why would a company warn that their technology is dangerous if it wasn't? Looking at the ongoing Mythos export control issue, it's obviously not good for profits. If you assume AGI is possible, you must agree that it would be at the very least profoundly destabilizing. The companies are built around this assumption.

the headline literally explains that it is to maximize hypothetical valuation

Re: The Doom Justifies the Valuation

#147

I was hoping for more analysis here :\ like from a technical standpoint, why is the doom and gloom incorrect? I've heard some really interesting arguments for that, and non of them are here.

I think the counter arguments to doom are more social and economic. If we make AI smarter than ourselves it's likely people will still have jobs/income and a higher standard of living in the same way that in invention of the tractor didn't lead to millions of unemployed potato diggers and a potato tycoon with a million tons of spare potatoes.

Re: The Doom Justifies the Valuation

#148

Yea, the "doom trolling" seems to be starting to reach its limit. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/17/opinion/ai-dangerous-open...

Can you share a non-paywalled version? Wayback machine doesn't seem to have this.

https://archive.ph/UTcTa

Re: The Doom Justifies the Valuation

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you share a non-paywalled version? Wayback machine doesn't seem to have this.

https://archive.ph/UTcTa

The argument in the article seems dumb. Basically if companies believe AI is risky then morally they have to stop developing it. Which would be kind of stupid - if Anthropic etc. don't do it the Chinese or some other bunch will and likely less responsibly.

Re: The Doom Justifies the Valuation

#150
>It’s all just nonsensical hype, ... It’s a questionable promise of future technology.

I don't see why pondering the future and planning for eventualities is bad. Better to ignore it and have no plans?

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