> the AOL buyout of Time Warner

To be clear, there is a world of difference between IPOs and LBOs. In the risk they create. And in the risk they signal.

It is still "in distribution", that is why when its "distributed" properly, it will surely add much, much more value to the economy.

But it is a generational opportunity - we can remove a lot of barriers that come with knowledge, lack of it, access to it and more. Someone can easily get pretty on point medical advice without access to doctors. Get specific engineering advice without engaging with those engineers. We can apply common sense or specific knowledge on scale - in a world where about 50% of people have IQ under 100 and access to knowledge is gated behind lines and payments, this has a huge chance ot improve their lives.

And there is the whole shadow inference economy - just for example, a few corporations I have worked with in insurance and telecommunications have been slowly introducing it inside their workflows and their data tooling, being able to clean data, tag it, analyse it in a way that before would probably cost them billons in human costs.

One of them has a database going back to the 80's, with data being formatted and reformatted in all shapes and sizes, coming back all the way from paper records for some of their oldest clients. Cleaning this up was unimaginable before as a "something we can do in a day" project, but was more of a "possible with insane costs". This lead to all further activity being shaped by decisions someone made 40+ years ago, details being lost, data being thrown away or saved in random notes.

And there's millions of companies like that all around the world, which can now do "impossible" and become much more efficient and productive for a much cheaper price and in way less time than ever.

Sorry, my bad, might be 97 running on windows 98 - but yes, this is a giant corporation serving hundreds of corporate customers and a few hundred thousand private ones, using nearly 30 years old software because the management does not see reasons to upgrade and spend the extra cost associated with it. New machines and Windows XP are only used by upper management.

Worst part?

Their whole software stack is running on some version of Visual Basic, written by a dude that did not trust "others code" so he wrote everything from scratch, and retired about 5 years ago.

Nobody knows how any of it works, or has any clue. The company will continue to run it and pay him for consultations as long as he is able to do it.

Not OP but, anyway, AI output should be treated like any other source material.

I study from reputable sources every day and never cease to be amazed by how many errors or misconceptions they have. Peer-reviewed articles, books from renowned scholars, news from major publications… regardless of the source, false information and contradictions accumulate. I’d wager that AI, besides helping me uncover these issues in the literature, has had a lower error rate than most of the materials that I read on a daily basis.

> what is driving this is the need for insiders, employees, early investors to be able to sell their stock at scale before the music stops

How would you differentiate insiders needing to sell versus insiders needing to dump before a crash?

I remember when Uber and Airbnb and WeWork went public in quick succession. There were similar claims. WeWork never made it public. And Uber and Airbnb's IPO investors made of fantastically.