71–80 of 159 posts
> The A.I. company’s advisers are pushing its chief executive, Sam Altman, to move slowly after SpaceX’s stock has been volatile and as the start-up grapples with financial challenges. SpaceX's stock volatile? It's a shame nobody saw that coming.
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Oh? They’re profitable now? Or anywhere close to it?
No, but the GP wasn't satisfied with that, and had to put in a snide "even on inference" parenthetical. The leaks showed inference having positive margins. The Zitronites will say that the data is fraudulent, and OpenAI must have classified some of their inference as marketing, or R&D, or some other wacky theory of the week. But the actual data does not show that. It is made up. If you want to cherry-pick the worst p…
I think it’s reasonable to draw the conclusion that they are folding inference subsidies (for both paying and non-paying users) under this category. Frankly I think occam’s razor demands it because where else would all that money have gone? Fancy trips for enterprise clients?
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OpenAI did confidentially file their S-1, which costs a ton of money to put together for the bankers and regulators to review. They did test the market and it looks like either the banks or people directly around Altman told him not to move forward. That doesn't mean Zitron was wrong about OpenAI IPOing. They took steps in that direction and then decided not to move forward. That's not his fault. As far as the bubble…
FWIW I think there's a "Y2K never happened" future here, where the bubble never bursts (in the sense of some insane market valuation proving to be lunatic) but everyone does what they can to make sure it doesn't burst on them , and they pull back and the bubble just deflates. Take for example the action on SPACs that made the "SPAC everything" era end.
Maybe my memory of dot-com is fuzzy (likely) and perhaps I didn't see early warning (or even didn't know how to see it). I feel like it all transpired over 3 months. And for those of us in Seattle the "death-knell" was the Nisqually quake that made much of Pioneer Square unsafe to occupy for a while.
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SpaceX demonstrated that the public markets have a limited tolerance for a multi-trillion dollar company that doesn’t make any money. Ed’s leaks demonstrated that OAI doesn’t make money (even on inference). Put these two together and I think the conclusion is pretty obvious.
> SpaceX demonstrated that the public markets have a limited tolerance for a multi-trillion dollar company that doesn’t make any money What? How? SpaceX loses oodles of money. It's trading above its IPO, and just filled an oversubscribed bond deal. > Put these two together and I think the conclusion is pretty obvious Zitron has a faithful following. He isn't a broadly-influential analyst.
What exactly do you think “volatility” means in this context?
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The math doesn’t help Anthropic either but the market views these two companies very differently at the moment. Anthropic is seen as having momentum. Open AI is seen as having likely peaked. That makes a huge difference when pitching an IPO.
ChatGPT is the 5th most visited website in the world and gets a ridiculous amount of user data. They're going to be an advertising powerhouse.
It will draw a non-zero number just curious people who never use ChatGPT.
And bots are exfiltrating model knowledge for the benefit of competition.
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The math doesn’t help Anthropic either but the market views these two companies very differently at the moment. Anthropic is seen as having momentum. Open AI is seen as having likely peaked. That makes a huge difference when pitching an IPO.
Agree but Anthropic momentum is fading too. Open source is starting to slowly become a source of frustration for frontier labs In the discussion around value for money.
I only use free Gemini Pro to plan then scrape the log in Google Drive into local Qwen/Gemma+pi set up
I can plan and architect with Gemini on my phone or wherever and a cron job + custom JSON parser at home updates context in local model setup
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FWIW I think there's a "Y2K never happened" future here, where the bubble never bursts (in the sense of some insane market valuation proving to be lunatic) but everyone does what they can to make sure it doesn't burst on them , and they pull back and the bubble just deflates. Take for example the action on SPACs that made the "SPAC everything" era end.
I'm also feeling like that, not a quick burst like dot-com but a deflating bubble over next 24 months. During which AI costs rise and IPO valuation comes down. Maybe my memory of dot-com is fuzzy (likely) and perhaps I didn't see early warning (or even didn't know how to see it). I feel like it all transpired over 3 months. And for those of us in Seattle the "death-knell" was the Nisqually quake that made much of Pio…
There is this huge knowledge gap here about what the local models could do in terms of consumer queries with a tiny bit of agentic support. If more people could tinker with local models and see what they can do, I think there would be far less belief that only the big two/three hold the keys to the kingdom and far more that the future is a bit more distributed.
On that basis I am always on the lookout for coverage that gets into this — Cal Newport touches on it a bit — because I think it is one of the deflationary factors, as is the quality of open weights models, which in turn is why Anthropic is now getting credulous journalists to write about "distillation attacks".
Re: the dot-com crash, I was in the UK working for an internet startup at the time though I was on a sort of health break/sabbatical at the time of the pets.com crash, so I was reading and researching, and while I do remember the coverage of their valuation being insane, and agreeing with that, I also think it did not have such a long run-up. We did know in 1998 and 1999 that Broadvision's valuation seemed absolutely insane, for example, and that some e-commerce developer and design startups were radically overvalued, but what is so different about this time is how much more broadly things were distributed then. So many players. Even the major duality (which was Microsoft vs ABM — a loose coalition of "Anyone But Microsoft") had many more players.
Whereas now… it feels like a prequel to Rollerball.
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The math doesn’t help Anthropic either but the market views these two companies very differently at the moment. Anthropic is seen as having momentum. Open AI is seen as having likely peaked. That makes a huge difference when pitching an IPO.
ChatGPT is the 5th most visited website in the world and gets a ridiculous amount of user data. They're going to be an advertising powerhouse.
Reddit has been one of the world's top websites for over a decade, yet they are totally irrelevant in terms of ad product market share.
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The math doesn’t help Anthropic either but the market views these two companies very differently at the moment. Anthropic is seen as having momentum. Open AI is seen as having likely peaked. That makes a huge difference when pitching an IPO.
> but the market views these two companies very differently at the moment. Anthropic is seen as having momentum. Open AI is seen as having likely peaked What are you basing this on? Both are currently doing rounds/tenders that are placing without problems. The media treats these two differently, as do financial influencers. But I'd be careful about conflating either of them with the market.