>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.

> 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.

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.