There is certainly some concern around what is effectively a giant bet but I’m finding Gary’s aggressive doomer takes a little tiresome lately. Just like Sam can’t know for sure that the bet will work, Gary can’t know it won’t. Conviction levels should reflect that

Every startup begins with lots of debt and little revenue and a all in bet that it’ll change. Sam’s company unsurprisingly follow same playbook

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ryukoposting a day ago | parent | next [-]

I refuse to accept that a publicly-traded company with a $300B market cap and hundreds of millions of users is a "startup." Nothing about a startup is comparable to OpenAI besides the megalomaniac running the show.

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roadside_picnic a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Every startup begins with lots of debt and little revenue and a all in bet that it’ll change. Sam’s company unsurprisingly follow same playbook

This reads like an intentional misunderstanding of the general concerns around this current boom. The arguments aren't about the odds of the bet, they're pointing out that in fundamental ways the bet itself doesn't make sense.

I also wouldn't describe this post as "doomerism", it's basically pointing out that this "bet" only makes sense if the plan is for the US public to ultimately be the ones paying for the risks being taken.

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Yeul a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's not much of a bet really. In the old days if a general got it wrong he would die on the battlefield if he was lucky or get shot before a firing squad.

These AI clowns will still have their mansions come what may.

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foldr a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Almost all of those startups fail. Doomerism is the objectively correct outlook on any given startup in the absence of strong countervailing evidence. This isn’t “glass half full vs glass half empty”, it’s “wild optimism vs sober consideration”.

Your use of the word ‘bet’ is a useful clue here. If I bet on a horse, then neither of us knows if the horse will win or not. That doesn’t mean that optimists and pessimists about my prospects as a professional gambler have equally justifiable positions.

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Havoc a day ago | parent [-]

>Almost all of those startups fail.

Funding model aside this has little in common with them. The average SaaS isn't in the right spot at the right time for a once in a lifetime general-purpose technology (along with money to execute at scale)

>doesn’t mean [..] equally justifiable positions.

Indeed. And I'm not confident it'll be enough to cover Sam's 1 trillion either but the range of possible outcomes here seem very wide to me and a good chunk of it being positive. Seems entirely plausible to me that the odds are 60% in favour here or whatever. We don't really know, but we're reading an article that seems very certain.

	▲	mrandish a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> possible outcomes here seem very wide to me and a good chunk of it being positive. The sheer scale of this makes it nothing like other startups, so the same high risk / high return reasoning doesn't apply. Worse, the 'AI bet' isn't like a diverse VC portfolio approach. OAI, NVidia, MSFT, Oracle, etc are all incestuously inter-related parties propping each other up with future commitments they won't be able to meet at their current revenue growth rates. They are so over-leveraged their revenue growth rates would have to grow at increasingly implausible multiples to cover. So, you now have to believe a sequence of individually extraordinary events will all occur and do so in less than 5 years. The financial engineering propping up OAI and it's unprecedented market cap makes it a speculative bet with an astronomically high break even and a fixed near-term expiration date. To compensate for that much risk, any sane VC would want at least a somewhat plausible path to 1000x returns - but at this mega-scale there's a serious question if that's even possible from one company in this time frame. That turns OAI into an incredibly specific prop bet which is increasingly untethered from the long-term ability of AI to become a transformative technology beneficial to humankind or even a sustainable growth industry. Those are still both plausible positive outcomes but OAI returning just 100x to their investors (or even surviving a crash of its own making) is increasingly implausible. A year ago I was trying to come up with a good way to short the bubble but couldn't find a pure play-enough bet. Now it's grown so over-leveraged I'm starting to worry the crash is going to seriously impact the broader economy well beyond tech and equities. So now we all have financial exposure to this crazy prop bet, even though we're not betting.
	▲	foldr a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Every startup says that it’s not like other startups. If the founder of the company’s response to being asked how they’re going to obtain one trillion dollars in revenue is (fluff aside) essentially equivalent to “trust me bro”, then I am very comfortable putting long odds on this happening (unlesss via some kind of government bailout). And yes, obviously there is a wide range of possible outcomes. However, there is not a uniform probability distribution over them.