On the one hand, that isn't necessarily a problem. It can be just a useful algorithm for tool calling or whatever.

On the other hand, if you're telling your investors that AGI is about two years away, then you can only do that for a few years. Rumor has it that such claims were made? Hopefully no big investors actually believed that.

The real question to be asking is, based on current applications of LLMs, can one pay for the hardware to sustain it? The comparison to smartphones is apt; by the time we got to the "Samsung Galaxy" phase, where only incremental improvements were coming, the industry was making a profit on each phone sold. Are any of the big LLMs actually profitable yet? And if they are, do they have any way to keep the DeepSeeks of the world from taking it away?

What happens if you built your business on a service that turns out to be hugely expensive to run and not profitable?

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Salgat 7 days ago | parent | next [-]

>On the other hand, if you're telling your investors that AGI is about two years away, then you can only do that for a few years.

Musk has been doing this with autonomous driving since 2015. Machine learning has enough hype surrounding it that you have to embellish to keep up with every other company's ridiculous claims.

	▲	ivan_gammel 7 days ago \| parent [-]
		I doubt this was the main driver for the investors. People were buying Tesla even without it. Whether there is hype or not, the laws of money remain the same. If you invest and don’t get expected returns, you will be eventually concerned and will do something about it.

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coolThingsFirst 7 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Why are companies allowed to lie? I really can’t understand. If a person lies they lose credibility but it doesn’t apply to the rich and powerful.

	▲	bloppe 7 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Lying to investors is illegal, and investors have incentive and means to sue if they think they were defrauded. The problem is proving it. I'm sure a lot of founders genuinely believe AGI is about to appear out of thin air, so they're technically not lying. Even the cynical ones who say whatever they think investors want to hear are hard to catch in a lie. It's not really about being rich and powerful. That's just the unfortunate reality of rhetoric.
	▲	rossdavidh 6 days ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		In addition to the other comments/answers to this, I would like to add that if you lie to your investors (in public), and they suspect you're lying but also think it will allow you to cash out before the lie becomes apparent, they may not care, especially if the lie is difficult to distinguish from pathological levels of optimism.
	▲	orionsbelt 7 days ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Predictions about the future and puffery are not illegal. Lying about facts are. Nobody knows how far away AGI is, everyone just has their own predictions.
	▲	xenotux 7 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It's not a crime to be wrong; it's only a crime to deliberately lie. And unless there's an email saying "haha we're lying to our investors", it's just not easy to prove.