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Could somebody explain why there is so much negativity towards Thinking Machines in this thread? I realize that they haven't publicly announced a product yet bu
by pdabbadabba 1y ago
Could somebody explain why there is so much negativity towards Thinking Machines in this thread? I realize that they haven't publicly announced a product yet but presumably the VCs have some idea of what Thinking Machines is building, and they have some pretty significant OpenAI talent on board, including Murati herself. Some amount of skepticism is warranted, of course, but a lot of these comments read as closer to hostility.
- bossyTeacher 1y agoBecause it looks like VC are spendings ridicoulous amounts of money for hype while many startups with actual products and a product market fit struggle to attract investors because their product is not related to transformers.
- Roark66 1y agoIt makes perfect sense... Why spend time and money on building a product in hope of attracting VCs that may like it? Instead present your idea in an intentionally vague way that makes everyone's imagination fill in the blanks in the most favorable way.
- riku_iki 1y ago> but presumably the VCs have some idea of what Thinking Machines is building you imply that VCs are rational because bet their own money, which in current complicated world probably is not true. VC funds get money from complicated funnel likely including my/your retirement account and country public debt, VC managers likely receive bonuses for closed deals and not long term gains which may materialize in 10 years. So, investing 2B into non-existing product with unclear market fit/team/tech moat smells very strongly.
- cheema33 1y ago> you imply that VCs are rational because bet their own money, which in current complicated world probably is not true. Correct. Most VCs are using someone else's money. See Softbank. And making extremely poor judgements on how to use that money.
- jordanb 1y agoUnfortunately in many cases those "other people" are, for instance, California's teachers.
- pdabbadabba 1y agoSo your position is that a VC will invest $2B in a startup on vibes alone without having any idea what they're building, because it is not literally their money? That seems like a significantly stronger and less plausible claim than mine, which his merely that a prospective $2B investor has access to more information about the company's plans than we do and that their investment is at least some indication that there is a real product in the pipeline.
- riku_iki 1y ago> that a prospective $2B investor has access to more information about the company's plans than we do and that their investment is at least some indication that there is a real product in the pipeline. there is a funnel of investors: say retirement account holders put money into some retirement fund, fund manager put money into some "innovation fund", "innovation fund" put money in VC fund. All middlemen get % cut, VC likely watch slides about some product roadmap, but they more interested in closing the deal, get % cut and move on.
- pdabbadabba 1y agoAnd if those $2B just go poof because they somehow failed to notice what is apparently so obvious to people on his thread -- that there is no real product -- your position is that the VC does not suffer any significant consequences?
- riku_iki 1y ago> your position is that the VC does not suffer any significant consequences? it is likely they won't suffer any significant consequences
- MaxPock 1y agoNo one needs another mistral
- eddythompson80 1y agohuh, what happened? I haven't been following Mistral but I recall it was everyone's up and coming darling, no?
- esperent 1y agoIt's about to be bought by Apple, so not for long.
- eddythompson80 1y agoI thought that was perplexity.
- littlestymaar 1y agoThere's quite a gap between “Apple considers buying Mistral” and “they are about to be bought by Apple”.
- esperent 1y agoYes, a gap of three to six months, or maybe a bit longer if regulators get involved. Anyway, if Mistral is for sale then if not Apple it'll be another big company.
- littlestymaar 1y agoNo, the gap is right in your second sentence: > if Mistral is for sale At the moment there's no public information about that, it's all about Apple being interested into buying but we don't know if Mistral is interested into selling at all. That's the gap.
- tensor 1y ago
- apwell23 1y ago> Could somebody explain why there is so much negativity towards Thinking Machines > significant OpenAI talent on board, including Murati herself. because ppl on this website don't consider her a 'talent'.
- esperent 1y agoI don't think that's fair. The company was founded around 6 months ago and already has a valuation of 12B even though barely anyone outside of AI has heard of them, and I bet almost nobody even here could name their product. It's not that people think she's untalented, but rather, she'd have to be superhuman to justify that by herself.
- IncreasePosts 1y agoI have a pretty dim view of VCS, or at least a16z, after seeing some of the awful blockchain tech startups they were throwing money at during the last bubble
- Aurornis 1y ago> Could somebody explain why there is so much negativity towards Thinking Machines in this thread? I think it lies at the intersection of a lot of topics where HN comments are hostile: VCs, large fundraising, AI, OpenAI related employees. These are all topics where HN comments are more hostile than pragmatic. Most of the hostility is just a proxy for “VCs bad” banter.
- esperent 1y ago> HN comments are more hostile than pragmatic In the case of a bubble, hostility is pragmatism. Of course, nobody knows that it's a bubble, but nobody knows it's not a bubble either.
- jaggederest 1y agoI've lived through 3 and read up on at least 10 more. Many people know it's a bubble. You see lots of HN comments that it's a bubble. We certainly did in 2007. In a bubble, the predominant notion is not "I wonder if it's a bubble", but rather "It's a bubble, I hope I can make my money before it pops". A perfect example of this was the Tulip craze in the Netherlands. Nobody actually believed tulip bulbs were worth that much, they just wanted to find a bigger sucker to make a profit, if you read accounts from the time.
- littlestymaar 1y agoThis. Ans that's why we even manage to reproduce bubbles in a very simple simulated environnement among finance students who know exactly how overvaluated their assets are (I can't find the paper right now though…)
- blackoil 1y agoWhat is the false positive rate? Broken clock...
- PartiallyTyped 1y agoBears predicted 11 of the last 3 recessions or something.
- seattle_spring 1y agoThey were founded 6 months ago, have no product, yet are purported to be worth $12B? I mean ... Come on.
- littlestymaar 1y agoMistral having a $113M seed round from a slide deck Murati: “hold my beer”.
- bix6 1y agoThe math to justify that investment is crazy.
- geodel 1y agoTrue. People here can be like this. I have not forgotten even the greatest juice maker of all times, Juicero was similarly disparaged with all this negativity.
- emsign 1y agoAh yes, they were simply ahead of their time.
- edanm 1y agoYes. VCs invested money. It ended up a flop. And this hurts us... how exactly? Other than some VCs losing their money on a bad bet, who cares?
- seanhunter 1y agoWell a lot of people on this forum are founders or early employees in startups. Every dollar vcs set on fire chasing some obviously stupid idea, waste on crypto memecoins, etc is a dollar that is not helping some legitimate startup get funded.
- edanm 1y agoYes, but when you put it as "why are you investing in these bad ideas? Invest in mine, it's obviously much better", it sounds a lot more self-interested (and far more likely to be wrong).
- seanhunter 1y agoYou asked how it hurts people. That is how it hurts people.
- chii 1y agoThese people somehow imagine that they (as taxpayers perhaps) are going to pay the cost one way or another. Not to mention there's a tinge of jealousy over the level of VC money involved - they imagine these people do not "deserve" it.
- techpineapple 1y agoMy opinion: AI is taking all the money that could be spent on cool advancements that could give the average person hope and putting it towards a pipe dream. Why not be hostile towards the perceived death of an industry you love?
- motoxpro 1y agoI'd much rather this than the 2010s of Uber for X or the 10,000th SaaS productivity app.
- andy_ppp 1y agoThe whole system has gone crazy because of the wealthy having so much that the current game of coming up with stupid stories (AGI, Self Driving Cars, Robots that can do your household chores, Crypto) to convince people that a company can be worth 50-100 times earnings or valueless internet points will go up in price forever! There is no way these companies can possibly meet these expectations but the money sloshing around in the system makes it possible for rich people to keep believing (religiously) as there are no investments actually left for them to earn real money from a population that increasingly has nothing and earns less and less of the pie while valueless investments skyrocket.
- emsign 1y ago> they haven't publicly announced a product yet but presumably the VCs have some idea of what Thinking Machines is building "Presumably" they have "some" idea. Oh really? Are you "sure" about that? Is that a $12B type confidence?
- baobabKoodaa 1y agoWell, I'm fairly confident they at least have the concept of an idea.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- dr_kiszonka 1y agoI don't know much about them, but how they decided to call themselves strikes me as ... unwise: https://bookanalysis.com/dune/thinking-machines/ https://bookanalysis.com/dune/thinking-machines/ (They could have just as well picked Skynet.)
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- reasonableklout 1y agoPretty sure it's a reference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_Machines_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_Machines_Corporation, the famous supercomputer company from the 80s-90s where Richard Feynman briefly worked.
- rhubarbtree 1y agoI think most people aren’t aware that as CTO Murati can take a large chunk of the credit for OpenAI’s success. Her skills were mostly in deft technical management, a skill often under appreciated by nerds. Her success here is going to heavily depend on her ability to attract the right talent.
- _yy01 1y agoPlease quantity those contributions in "technical management". Otherwise it sounds like a boilerplate excuse non technical people will use.
- rhubarbtree 1y agoNot sure you can quantify all work, but to the accounts I read she was constantly guiding, scheduling the teams, resolving conflict, allocating resources. Exactly what a CTO does in a company that size. Can’t help but feel there’s some sexism attached to the pushback here.
- ml-anon 1y agoAnd what a conflict resolver she was. It even elevated her to the level of CEO. https://makeagif.com/gif/im-actually-not-sure-about-that-mira-murati-uff8Jt https://makeagif.com/gif/im-actually-not-sure-about-that-mir...
- rhubarbtree 1y agoThis is a good example of the kind of response I wouldn’t expect if she were male.
- _yy01 1y agoFWIW I would be skeptical of tech bros claiming they sped up 80% response time on microservice handling 5000000000 RPS. But I will be even more skeptical when they say "analyzed and implemented business requirements into maintainable and high performance code". More generic, grandiose and oft-repeated someone's claims are, more skepticism is warranted.
- miohtama 1y agoThis place used to be a place for hackers and founders. Now it is mostly a place for middle aged software engineers who hate someone else to success, change and hope for the future of Linux desktop. Thinking Machines presents both change and success .
- Rebuff5007 1y agoMy negativity for Thinking Machines is precisely because others (such as yourself) already consider it a success.
- muskmusk 1y agoI don't think anyone can consider it a success just yet. But someone just injected 2 billion dollars into the enterprise. They are probably given a lot more information than you and I are. Maybe those people are dead wrong and they lose all their money, but maybe not. With the public information there is neither a point in positivity not negativity. It would be speculation either way. A question that could be worth pondering is what exactly the investors are shown? What would you need to see to put all your money in thinking machines?
- geodel 1y agoThe answer was right in Mira's resignation from OpenAI [1] “I want to create the time and space to do my own exploration.” To create time and space and even able to explore it is far beyond cutting edge physics of today. If she is able to do it in just few billion dollars it is investment worth making. 1. https://www.wired.com/story/mira-murati-thinking-machines-lab/ https://www.wired.com/story/mira-murati-thinking-machines-la...
- TrackerFF 1y agoThinking Machines represent the new elite. People with the right pedigree that can raise billions with only an idea. If they fail, they’ll get paid anyway - and they’ll become billionaires. It is a position that is completely unreachable for 99.9999% of people even in tech. It is of course easy to write off critics as jealous has-beens and bozos.
- lowsong 1y agoIt's nothing to do with Thinking Machines as a company, it's to do with a VC that's content to bet two billion dollars on a company that has shown absolutely nothing, and the sorry state of affairs that represents.
- edanm 1y ago> It's nothing to do with Thinking Machines as a company, it's to do with a VC that's content to bet two billion dollars on a company that has shown absolutely nothing, and the sorry state of affairs that represents. Why does it represent a "sorry state of affairs"? VCs are risking money they manage, it's not like they're putting anyone else at risk. Do we really prefer a world in which we don't take risks to develop new technology? The VC sector is probably an order of magnitude smaller then, say, fashion. Isn't money better spent taking risks to develop new technologies that have a chance to legitimately change the world for the better? Note: If you think the technology could be a negative (which, to some extent I do because of the elements of AI safety, that's a separate argument. Not sure that that's what you're referring to though.)
- bgwalter 1y agoVCs, who go on and on about capitalism, were whining on Twitter until the Silicon Valley Bank got bailed out. In real capitalism the SVB would have been allowed to fail and the VCs would have taken a hit. But no risk for them, everyone paid for them to keep their billions.
- KoolKat23 1y agoThey use our pension funds for this. They also distort the market. I do see some value in it, we need to take risks with our capital and on a long term horizon it's fine. But there has to be some rationale behind it at least, some evidence based approach.
- edanm 1y agoThey don't "use" pension funds, pension funds can choose to invest in VCs if they decide to do so. I think most usually invest low single digits of investment in VCs, mostly as diversification.
- bluelightning2k 1y agoPeople with no product, no specific insight, and no published plan raising $$ trillions, due to elite background. (Sure -- that background is somewhat self earned.)
- awongh 1y agoWhere is all the hate for SSI?
- _yy01 1y agoBecause connections and social signalling matter more than ideas among the rich of the world. Only some people can get such disproportionate advantages.
- slj 1y agoOh that’s because the good people of HN have decreed a butlerian jihad
- az226 1y agoProbably because people view this grifting as something negative.