> Choosing to read selectively isn’t One Weird Trick To Own A Blogger.

I mean it’s pretty obvious that the pro AI as an industry wide replacement people think it is One Weird Trick. I’ve still yet to see any of them articulate how they are going to reach profitability without resorting to the meme of projecting that their baby has doubled size in 6 months so is projected to reach 10.5 trillion pounds by the age of 10.

One of the things that really strikes me is that there are so many people talking about how great the frontier models are but there's nowhere near as many people talking about open weights and local models.

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.

> In what way is SpaceX's volatility an obvious cause?

Let me amend: it's a more-obvious cause given it's pertinent new information in a way Zitron partially leaking financials many institutional investors have already seen is not.

> don't know how to read this and reach any conclusion other than, OpenAI leadership won't accept what financial analysts consider to be a rational valuation of its stock

Neither did SpaceX and, as you say, it's trading above its IPO price and placing tens of billions of dollars of debt.

I think Zitron's analysis was on the balance good, though it didn't say a lot of what folks on here seem to have taken away (e.g., about OpenAI's inference being marginally unprofitable). It seems he's got a bit of a cult of personality around him, which makes me inherently sceptical. But it's a pretty ridiculous reach to claim OpenAI had to delay its IPO because of him versus the much-more visible and talked about thing.

> Ed’s leaks demonstrated that OAI doesn’t make money (even on inference).

They did not.

> 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.