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If you're reading this article and wondering "When is this house of cards going to collapse!?", a little advice, gained at a high price to myself: you can waste

If you're reading this article and wondering "When is this house of cards going to collapse!?", a little advice, gained at a high price to myself: you can waste years waiting for it to collapse, 95% of the time, it never will. I never thought Uber or Tesla would survive COVID. I'd have $450K in bitcoin if I held onto the "joke" amount I bought for $200 in 2013. Thing that make me skip this specific narrative: - There's some heavy-handed reaching to get to $400B next 12 months: guesstimate $50B = 1 GW of capacity, then list out 3.3 gigawatts across Broadcom chip purchases, Nvidia, and AMD - OpenAI is far better positioned than any of the obvious failures I foresaw in my 37 years on this rock. It's very, very, hard to fuck up to the point you go out of business. - Ed is repeating narratives instead of facts ("what did they spend that money on!? GPT-5 was a big let down!" -- i.e. he remembers the chatgpt.com router discourse, and missed that it was the first OpenAI release that could get the $30-50/day/engineer in spend we've been sending to Anthropic)

Yizahi 1y ago
Yeah, I've re-evaluated my misconceptions around the same time. As another datapoint - infamous Tether/Bitfinex corporation which was blatantly cheating and insolvent (per normal definition) for years and every time reasonable people were giving them less than a year to bankruptcy and jail. But here were are, Tether is still printing tokens like madman, no one is in jail and every analyst was proven both wrong and right at the same time. Apparently company can be insolvent and cheating and breaking law for a looong time, with zero repercussions. And no one bats an eye. I suspect OpenAI is deeply in red today and any normal small company would went out of business years ago. But they are too big to fail and will continue working this way. They may even transition to being profitable later on, and people will retcon that they always have been so. At this point I just wonder, what would be exact mechanism with which Sam will redirect his negatives to a regular public like us here. Bailouts? Irresponsible government investments? Banks overreaching and them getting bailouts? Something new?...
- refulgentis 1y ago
  Couple points where our principled bear-ishness diverges and I'm bullish: - I think it overstates the case to even get to the $150B #. - $50B/GW sounds very wrong to me. - They don't need anything, 2 of the 3 are GPUs-for-equity, and Broadcom isn't going to insist OpenAI make a $100B 100% full purchase commitment up front, I'd be surprised at $1B. - All I see is undercapacity in the sector after 2-3 years of feverish buildouts, it's hard for me to foresee, in the short term, a place where market signals can't override deals in principle. (random ramble: this reminds me somewhat of when Waymo "committed" to...80K Jaguar & Pacifica purchases? In 2016? I thought that meant they were definitely going to scale in the short term, hell or high water. In retrospect, I bet they're at a 1/4 of the 9 years later, and are yet entirely real.)

Yizahi 1y ago

Yeah, I've re-evaluated my misconceptions around the same time. As another datapoint - infamous Tether/Bitfinex corporation which was blatantly cheating and insolvent (per normal definition) for years and every time reasonable people were giving them less than a year to bankruptcy and jail. But here were are, Tether is still printing tokens like madman, no one is in jail and every analyst was proven both wrong and right at the same time. Apparently company can be insolvent and cheating and breaking law for a looong time, with zero repercussions. And no one bats an eye. I suspect OpenAI is deeply in red today and any normal small company would went out of business years ago. But they are too big to fail and will continue working this way. They may even transition to being profitable later on, and people will retcon that they always have been so. At this point I just wonder, what would be exact mechanism with which Sam will redirect his negatives to a regular public like us here. Bailouts? Irresponsible government investments? Banks overreaching and them getting bailouts? Something new?...

refulgentis 1y ago
Couple points where our principled bear-ishness diverges and I'm bullish: - I think it overstates the case to even get to the $150B #. - $50B/GW sounds very wrong to me. - They don't need anything, 2 of the 3 are GPUs-for-equity, and Broadcom isn't going to insist OpenAI make a $100B 100% full purchase commitment up front, I'd be surprised at $1B. - All I see is undercapacity in the sector after 2-3 years of feverish buildouts, it's hard for me to foresee, in the short term, a place where market signals can't override deals in principle. (random ramble: this reminds me somewhat of when Waymo "committed" to...80K Jaguar & Pacifica purchases? In 2016? I thought that meant they were definitely going to scale in the short term, hell or high water. In retrospect, I bet they're at a 1/4 of the 9 years later, and are yet entirely real.)