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How OpenAI uses complex and circular deals to fuel its multibillion-dollar rise
- gregoriol 1y agoWill Sam Altman's fall be as legendary as Sam Bankman-Fried's?
- baggachipz 1y agoHopefully moreso
- whimsicalism 1y ago[flagged]
- layer8 1y agoSBF’s fall is almost forgotten already.
- Hilift 1y agoMost of the funds lost to SBF were recovered. And CPZ has a pardon. Crypto has evaporated about $2 trillion in assets since then.
- kyruzic 1y agoThe funds in USD were recovered because bitcoins value is 5x higher than it was when he got arrested.
- 7thpower 1y agoAnd a set of fundamentally sound investments, including Anthropic iirc.
- hiddencost 1y agoI don't understand why you think it's OK to flagrantly violate financial laws for consumer protection, just because the bet got lucky?
- h2zizzle 1y agoI'm assuming Altman wasn't screwing his CFO and letting her post to 4chan about it, so probably not that bad.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Lionga 1y agoAltman was screwing / raping his sister so not quite sure who is worse.
- h2zizzle 1y agoI take it back, what the actual f*ck.
- sph 1y agoI'm no Altman stan, but 1) allegedly and 2) denied by the entire family as the words of an emotionally-unstable person. Don't believe everything you read on the Internet.
- h2zizzle 1y agoAs the family black sheep who's statements are often regarded as the words of an emotionally unstable person, who's familiar with quite a few instances of such people being correct and ignored because they're inopportune (and completely preventable) trauma (if only someone had cared...) threatens the collective family bag/ego, I'm inclined to believe her.
- rhetocj23 1y agoItll be worse. He is doing this for ego, not money from what I see.
- andsoitis 1y agoI can understand how someone's approach can be "hack all the things", however, at some point you run into the fundamental boundaries of the box you are in and you can't hack your way around those.
- jacquesm 1y agoThat doesn't really matter: as long as there are idiots who will buy your inflated stock you've externalized the problem for yourself whilst staying within the box.
- delis-thumbs-7e 1y agoLazy Susan is not a hack - it’s a scam.
- Flockster 1y agohttps://archive.is/tSrC8 https://archive.is/tSrC8
- throwaway106382 1y agoIsn't paying a company to dig a hole who then pays you the same amount to fill said hole illegal?
- baq 1y agoEven worse in VAT countries where such carousels make you eligible for a tax return on technically zero added value
- zetanor 1y agoNot if it increases the GDP.
- throwaway106382 1y agoWell, I've got great news then 92% of GDP growth in the first half of 2025 was hole filling companies paying hole digging companies to dig holes and in-kind pay them to fill them up again what could possibly go wrong
- TZubiri 1y agoSeems like a net loss due to transactional costs.
- klustregrif 1y agoThe increase in value of the companies outweighs the transactional costs and then you borrow against the value of the company and make new circular deals. It works really well for a very long time and then at some point it doesn’t. The trick of the game is to get big corps involved and key decision makers so that the government bails out everyone in the end.
- automatic6131 1y ago> The trick of the game is to get big corps involved and key decision makers so that the government bails out everyone in the end. This is bad. We should not shrug our shoulders and go "Oh ho, this is how the game is played" as though we can substitute cynicism for wisdom. We should say "this is bad, this is a moral hazard, and we should imprison and impoverish those who keep trying it". Or we'll get more.
- Flockster 1y agoOkay, that article is a little bit shallow. I just summarises the headlines of the last weeks of circular deals. But is there also a more in depth article that sheds a little more light onto what this actually means? From a financial perspective?
- Spooky23 1y agoIt’s probably hard to do that in a news context because the real rationales are pretty tight. Depending on your POV OpenAI and the surrounding AI hype machine is at the extremes either the dawn of a new era, or a metastasized financial cancer that’s going to implode the economy. Reality lies in the middle, and nobody really knows how the story is going to end. In my personal opinion, “financial innovation” (see: the weird opaque deals funding the frantic data center construction) and bullshit like these circular deals driving speculation is a story we’ve seen time and time again, and it generally ends the same way. An organization that I’m familiar with is betting on the latter - putting off a $200M data center replacement, figuring they’ll acquire one or two in 2-3 years for $0.20 on the dollar when the PE/private debt market implodes.
- gitremote 1y ago> Reality lies in the middle The argument to moderation/middle ground fallacy is a fallacy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation
- parineum 1y agoNot really. The idea that reality lies _in_ the middle is fairly coherent. It's not, on it's face, absolutely true but there are and infinite number of options between two outcomes so the odds are overwhelmingly in the favor that the truth lies somewhere in between. Is either side totally right about every single point of contention between them? Probably not, so the answer is likely in the middle. The fallacy is a lot easier to see when you're arguing about one precise point. In that case, someone is probably right and wrong. But, in cases where a side is talking about a complex event with a multitude of data points, both extremes are likely not completely correct and the answer does, indeed, lie in between the extremes. The fallacy is that the true lies _at_ the middle, not in the middle.
- ForHackernews 1y ago"You give me a million GPUs for free, I'll announce that you have sacrificed a million GPUs to the machine gods, and your stock price will spike 200 times the value of those GPUs."
- rw3 1y agoHank green did a vlog on this a few weeks ago and it’s a great explainer.
- gtirloni 1y agoThis one? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vz0oQ0v0W10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vz0oQ0v0W10 This comment is pretty depressing but it seems to be the path we're headed to: > It's bad enough that people think fake videos are real, but they also now think real videos are fake. My channel is all wildlife that I filmed myself in my own yard, and I've had people leaving comments that it's AI, because the lighting is too pretty or the bird is too cute. The real world is pretty and cute all the time, guys! That's why I'm filming it! Combine this with selecting only what you want to believe in and you can say that video/image that goes against your "facts" is "fake AI". We already have some people in pretty powerful positions doing this to manipulate their bases.
- throwaway106382 1y agoWe are heading to an apocalyptic level of psychosis where human beings won't even believe the things they see with their own eyes are real anymore because of being flooded with AI slop 24/7/365.
- jimbokun 1y agoWe desperately need a technological solution to be able to somehow "sign" images and videos as being real and not generated or manipulated by AI. I have no idea how such a thing would work.
- SoftTalker 1y agoIt won't work, because most people do not understand what a digital signature is and they will just say that has been faked as well.
- 1y ago
- podgorniy 1y ago[dead]
- righthand 1y agoI honestly don’t get it. People love being swindled? Or people have enough cash to throw into the swindling machine even for no gain? Must be nice.
- cindyllm 1y ago[dead]
- ak_111 1y agoYou can do a lot of money in swindles and bubbles if you time your exit well. There is a fair bit of opportunistic investors who did well in the NFT craze, who speculated knowing fully well that NFT is a craze that will go to zero.
- jacquesm 1y agoThe Greater Fool theory of investing strikes again.
- itsnowandnever 1y agoeverything will eventually go to zero. we look at some of these things and laugh because we're pretty sure they're going to go to zero within weeks or months vs years. but by the end of all of our lifetimes, most the companies on the stock market will be replaced. the few that won't are probably investment banks like goldman sachs
- itsnowandnever 1y agothese deals are made as part of a market so it's more like musical chairs where every time you change a chair you get a ton of money but you don't want to be the one that's stuck without a chair at the end
- ceejayoz 1y agoThey've all realized the guy without the chair can be the taxpayer.
- 1y ago
- uberdru 1y agoI was at a bitcoin conference in 2018. One guy in the booth told me that the company had set up a $100M fund to fund startups that agreed to build apps on their blockchain. I wonder where they are now?
- ZiiS 1y agoAs long as they kept another $100M in coins then fairly happy.
- jacquesm 1y agoThese kinds of deals were very much a la mode just prior to the .com crash. Companies would buy advertising, then the websites and ad agencies would buy their services and they'd spend it again on advertising. The end result is immense revenues without profits.
- CPLX 1y agoExactly, everything old is new again. This was one of the drivers of the original dot-com bubble.
- TZubiri 1y agoI'd gander a guess that there's nothing tech specific here and that fraudulent schemes are well defined for the SEC and commercial courts to take action if something is not kosher
- datadrivenangel 1y agoIt's usually not actually fraud. It's the amazon reinvesting back into growth, except the unit economics don't work if everyone cashes out at the same time, and if anyone starts cashing out the growth stops and everyone cashes out before it's too late.
- forgetfulness 1y agoCircular investments were also a compounding factor in the Japanese asset price bubble. The practice was known as “zaitech” > zaitech - financial engineering > In 1984, Japan’s Ministry of Finance permitted companies to operate special accounts for their shareholdings, known as tokkin accounts. These accounts allowed companies to trade securities without paying capital gains tax on their profits. > At the same time, Japanese companies were allowed to access the Eurobond market in London. Companies issued warrant bonds, a combination of traditional corporate bonds with an option (the “warrant") to purchase shares in the company at a specified price before expiry. Since Japanese shares were rising, the warrants became more valuable, allowing companies to issue bonds with low-interest payments. > The companies, in turn, placed the money they raised into their tokkin accounts that invested in the stock market. Note the circularity: companies raised money by selling warrants that relied on increasing stock prices, which was used to buy more shares, thus increasing their gains from investing in the stock market. https://www.capitalmind.in/insights/lost-decades-japan-1980s-asset-price-bubble https://www.capitalmind.in/insights/lost-decades-japan-1980s...
- adaisadais 1y agoI’ve been listening to “The Smartest Guys In The Room” (the definitive book on Enron and their scandal) and one of the ways Enron continued to grow and grow is by setting up a really complicated system of moving debt onto equities off of their balance sheet. While it was sorta legal (at the time) it was not ethical and led to a massive collapse of the #1 company at the time. Makes you wonder if AI is in such a bubble. (It is).
- sergiotapia 1y agoWhen the AI bubble pops, what will happen to the software engineering jobs?
- miltonlost 1y agoThey'll have to come in and redo all the work that people put onto LLMs as actual engineering software. The number of features I've worked on that could have been done with normal computing practices but instead shoehorned in bad AI to make decisions/routing logic is too high.
- kakacik 1y agoIf it pops, some ai engineers will need to start doing some normal work again, and rest of us... we just continue doing what we were doing for past decades. Or maybe not, nobody knows the future any more then next guy in line.
- afavour 1y agoThere will be a bunch of layoffs and slowly they'll rehire back to pre-hysteria levels. I think the world is still going to need software engineers no matter what but companies will slow down on new features etc in an economic crunch.
- forgetfulness 1y agoThe ripple effect will be felt hard, as American engineers are squeezed between offshoring and more engineers with Big Tech resumes being released into the market, and returnees go push back wages in their home countries in turn
- AndrewDucker 1y agoThe most interesting thing here is that it's now reached the NY Times.
- trollbridge 1y ago“I’m not hearing any music.”
- tim333 1y agoThe numbers are quite historic in size.
- SubiculumCode 1y agoGiven that AI is a national security matter now, I'd expect the U.S.A to step in and rescue certain companies in the event of a crash. However, I'd give higher chances to NVIDIA than OpenAI. Weights are easily transferrable and the expertise is in the engineers, but ability to continue making advanced chips is not as easily transferred.
- embedding-shape 1y agoWhy is ML knowledge "in the engineers" while chip manufacturing apparently sits in the company/hardware/something else than the engineers/humans?
- NBJack 1y agoRead up a bit on the effort needed to get a fab going, and the yield rates. While engineers are crucial in the setup, the fab itself is not as 'fungible' as the employees involved. I can spin up a strong ML team through hiring in probably 6-12 months with the right funding. Building a chip fab and getting it to a sensible yield would take 3-5 years, significantly more funding, strong supply lines, etc.
- singron 1y agoNvidia isn't a fab.
- wongarsu 1y agoBut the fabs don't belong to NVIDIA, they belong to TSMC. I have no doubt that Taiwan and maybe even the US government would step in to save TSMC if for some reason it got existential problems, but that doesn't provide an argument for saving NVIDIA
- trollbridge 1y agoRight. I could spin up a strong ML team, an AI startup, build a foundational model, etc give a reasonable amount of seed capital. Build a chip fab? I’ve got no idea where to start, where to even find people to hire, and i know the equipment we’d need to acquire would be also quite difficult to get at any price.
- vmg12 1y agoHere is a charitable perspective on what's happening: - Nvidia has too much cash because of massive profits and has nowhere to reinvest them internally. - Nvidia instead invests in other companies that use their gpus by providing them deals that must be spent on nvidia products. - This accelerates the growth of these companies, drives further lock in to nvidia's platform, and gives nvidia an equity stake in these companies. - Since growth for these companies is accelerated, future revenue will be brought forward for nvidia and since these investments must be spent on nvidia gpus it drives further lock in to their platform. - Nvidia also benefits from growth due to the equity they own. This is all dependent on token economics being or becoming profitable. Everything seems to indicate that once the models are trained, they are extremely profitable and that training is the big money drain. If these models become massively profitable (or at least break even) then I don't see how this doesn't benefit Nvidia massively.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- belter 1y ago> Everything seems to indicate that once the models are trained, they are extremely profitable Some data would reinforce your case. Do you have it? Here is my data point: "You Have No Idea How Screwed OpenAI Actually Is" - https://wlockett.medium.com/you-have-no-idea-how-screwed-openai-actually-is-8358dccfca1c https://wlockett.medium.com/you-have-no-idea-how-screwed-ope...
- trollbridge 1y agoRight. As far as I can tell, OpenAI, Grok, etc sell me tokens at a loss. But I am having a hard time figuring out how to turn tokens into money (i.e. increased productivity). I can justify $40-$200 per developer per month on tokens but not more than that.
- koolba 1y agoThere’s about 5M software devs in the US so even at $1000/year/person spend, that’s only $5B of revenue to go around. Theres plenty of other uses cases but focusing on pure tech usage, it’s hard to see how the net present value of that equates to multiple trillions of dollars across the ecosystem.
- gmoore 1y agoIf you want to dig deeper on this - check out https://www.wheresyoured.at/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/
- Jonovono 1y agoHis podcast Better Offline is a treat too.
- crazygringo 1y agoThis is such a strange article -- there's nothing particularly unusual going on here. The first example basically stands in for all of them -- Microsoft invests $13B in OpenAI, and OpenAI spends $13B on Azure. This is literally just OpenAI purchasing Microsoft cloud usage with OpenAI's stock rather than its cash. There is nothing unusual, illicit, or deceptive about this. This is entirely normal. You can finance your spending through debt or equity. They're financing through equity, as most startups do, and they presumably get a better deal (better rates, more guaranteed access) via Microsoft than via other random investors and then buying the cloud compute retail from Microsoft. This isn't deceiving any investors. This is all out in the open. And it's entirely normal business practice. Nothing of this is an indicator of a bubble or anything. Or take the deal with Oracle -- Oracle is building data centers for OpenAI, with the guarantee that OpenAI will use them. That's just... a regular business deal. What is even newsworthy about this? NYT thinks these are "circular" deals, but by this logic every deal is a "circular" deal, because both sides benefit. This is just... normal capitalism.
- philipwhiuk 1y ago> Microsoft invests $13B in OpenAI, and OpenAI spends $13B on Azure. This isn't deceiving any investors. It's Microsoft increasing its revenue by selling its stock.
- crazygringo 1y agoMicrosoft isn't selling any stock. It's using its cash. And an increase in revenue isn't the point. Microsoft isn't doing this to try to bump its short-term stock price or anything -- investors know where revenue is coming from. Microsoft is doing it because it thinks OpenAI is a good investment and wants to make money with that investment and have greater control.
- jpollock 1y agoThe last time this hit the news, it was the dotcom bubble, and Nortel was in a similar position with startups, taking equity for equipment.
- 9cb14c1ec0 1y agoComplex and circular deals lead to the downfall of Enron. Just saying...
- sherinjosephroy 1y ago[dead]
- throwaway106382 1y agoSpeedrunning to "too big to fail". Turn on the infinite money printers and feed them directly into Sam Altman's bank account or the Chinese/Russians/Iranians/Boogeymen will destroy us all.
- anonymousiam 1y agoSort of like Bitcoin...
- seydor 1y agoThey are fueling rich family office money into the bank accounts of their personell. Not bad not bad.
- nocoolnametom 1y agoThe fact that it is private equity that is going to evaporate when the bubble bursts is the only silver lining I can see. However, my natual cynicism makes me bet they'll spend whatever they've got left over on their pet politicians to use government (ie, public funding) to bail themselves back out.
- jmyeet 1y agoMany here now didn't live through the dot-com bubble as an adult so can't really appreciate what it was like. The hype was something hard to describe. Financial analysts and journalists struggled to come up with ways to describe the health of these "companies". My favorite was what revenue multiple companies would trade it. But the major takeaway was that almost none of these companies were real businesses. This is why I laughed at dot-com comparisons in the 2010s around the tech giants because Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc were money-printing machines on a scale we have trouble comprehending. That doesn't make them immune to economic struggles. Ad spending with Google will rise and fall with the economy. OpenAI has a paper valuation in the hundreds of billions of dollars now and no prospect of a revenue model that will justify that for many, many years. Currently, the hardware is a barrier to entry but that won't last. It has parallels in the dot-com era too when servers were expensive. The cost of training LLMs is (at least) halving every year. We're probably reaching the limits of what these transformers can do and we'll need another big breakthrough to improve. OpenAI's moat is tenuous. Their value is in the model they don't release. But DeepSeek is a warning shot that it will be in somebody's geopolitical interest, probably China's, to prevent a US tech monopoly on AI. If you look at these AI companies, so many of them are basically scams. I saw a video about a household humanoid robot that was, surprise surprise, just someone in a VR suit. Many cities have delivery drones now but somebody is remotely driving them. I saw somebody float the theory that the super-profitable big tech companies are engaging in layoffs not because they don't need people but to pay for the GPUs. It's an interesting idea. A lot of these NVidia deals are just moving money around where NVidia comes out on top with a bunch of equity in these companies should they become trillion dollar companies. Oh and take out data center building from the US economy and we're in recession. I do think this is a bubble and it will burst sooner rather than later.
- nova22033 1y agoRelated https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/29/microsoft_earnings_q1_26_openai_loss/ https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/29/microsoft_earnings_q1... Microsoft seemingly just revealed that OpenAI lost $11.5B last quarter
- guywithahat 1y agoIt's incredible how Tesla used to lose a few hundred million a year and analysis shows would freak out claiming they'd never be profitable. Now Rivian can lose 5 billion a year and I don't hear anything about it, and OpenAI can lose 11 billion in a quarter and Microsoft still backs them. I do think this is going to be a deeply profitable industry, but this feels a little like the WeWork CEO flying couches to offices in private jets
- randomNumber7 1y agoThe winner takes it all, so it is reasonable to bet big to be the one.
- anonymousiam 1y agoThe one what? What is the secret sauce that will distinguish one LLM from another? Is it patentable? What's going to prevent all of the free LLMs from winning the prize? An AI crash seems inevitable.
- schnitzelstoat 1y agoIt could end up like Search did, at first you had Lycos, AskJeeves, Altavista etc. and then Google became absolutely dominant. They want to be the Google in this scenario.
- skeeter2020 1y agoThen they're doing it backwards. Google first built a far superior product, then pursued all the tricks to maintain their monopoly. OpenAI at best has the illusion of a superior product, and even that is a stretch.
- OldGreenYodaGPT 1y ago[flagged]
- brazukadev 1y agohave you not been here for long enough? HN crowd is treating genAI the same way it treats blockchain, nothing new.
- llbbdd 1y agoWorse, honestly. There was a strong case to be made that crypto was absent of a real problem to solve. Meanwhile people use GenAI for real work every day and a disturbing cut of HN has their ears plugged, insisting it's a bubble and that everyone is lying about it working.
- barbazoo 1y agoMy team has shipped now heavily used features that are built with GenAI under the hood. I have a hard time not seeing the value in that technology. Personally I haven’t seen blockchain make any impact whatsoever but maybe it’s just a little more niche or just a different one.
- schnitzelstoat 1y agoYeah, Reddit has a strong anti-AI sentiment. I'm not anti-AI, I'm just sceptical that it's as powerful as the AI companies are making out. I don't think we are anywhere near AGI, like centuries away. I also don't think AI is going to be able to do all human jobs, in the physical world we have seen relatively little progress in robotics compared to the leaps made with transformers. And in the information world, while the LLMs can assist in many tasks and make workers more efficient I don't think they can entirely replace programmers (who are the expensive workers). So yeah, I just don't think we are going to see the kind of world-changing benefits that OpenAI etc. are promising and which their valuations appear to be based upon.
- rhetocj23 1y agoAGI isnt coming any time soon. The constraint on the progress toward it is R&D, and R&D requires an increase in high quality labour than what exists today.
- moelf 1y agorelated https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45766138 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45766138
- megaloblasto 1y agoEveryone loves to compare AI with the dot com bubble. My question is, were there any policies put in place after the dot com bubble to mitigate a similar crash? Or did we learn nothing?
- coldfireza 1y agoit's a bubble
- coldfireza 1y agoIt's a bubble
- rchaud 1y agoOpenAI is raising funding based on its own forecasts for AI demand growth, and sending most of it to Oracle, MSFT, Nvidia as well as paying insiders enormous salaries. There are some interesting parallels here with the business model described in the book Confessions of an Economic Hitman. Developing countries take out huge loans from US lenders to build an electric grid, based on inflated forecasts from US consultancies they hired. The countries take on the debt, but the money mostly bypasses them and lands in the pockets of US engineering firms doing the construction, and government insiders taking kickbacks for greasing the wheels. When the forecasted growth in industrial production fails to materialize, the countries are unable to repay the debt and have no option but to offer the US access to their resources, ports and votes in the UN. What happens when OpenAI's forecasts of gargantuan growth fail to materialize and they're unable to sell more stock to pay off lenders? Does Uncle Sam step in with a bailout for "national security" reasons?
- skeeter2020 1y ago>> figure out how to innovate on the financial model Does it feel rather Orwellian that the original geeks now seem to be the same people who - forget about claiming technological innovation of as their own - completely discount it and apparently the important thing is now the creativity in funding an enterprise? We don't hear about the breakthroughs from the technologists, but the funding announcements from th investors and CEOs. It's not about the benefits of the technology, but how they're going to pay for it. Seems like a wildly perverse version of wag the dog...
- whimsicalism 1y agothis is all a function of the media reporting, the change in ‘nerd culture’ has been vastly overreported. these companies are staffed by spectrum-y nerds that we are being desperately propagandized into thinking are actually frat ‘bros’.
- programjames 1y agoNo, they aren't. Locally, the person with the most esoteric knowledge is probably a weird nerd. It's mostly an accident that they chose to invest time in things typically associated with smarts. But globally, the best wizards got there by making it their profession. So maybe at your middling university, the people who could land a job at a frontier lab were nerdy wannabe frats, but at decent universities like MIT or Tsinghua, they're usually just better in every aspect of their lives. E.g. MIT has "math olympiad fraternities" all the cool kids join.
- whimsicalism 1y agoI went to a top 5 ranked school globally (~these lists fluctuate) and have been in elite circles since then. I can promise you that even there the autistic nerd fully outcompetes the renaissaince man.
- yahoozoo 1y agoSomeone named Altman focusing on the money? Color me surprised.
- blibble 1y agoseems like it's like a mix of enron, subprime mortgages, and .com boom all in one
- JohnMakin 1y ago"Circular deals" feels like an awfully cute way to say "fraud"
- random9749832 1y agoA lose lose situation for most people. Either the stock market crashes or AI progress meets expectations in the coming years and people start losing jobs.
- barbazoo 1y agoSo real estate it is after all?!
- jwpapi 1y agoWhen I was 16 I started working at a startup buying and reselling used electronics. There were like 5 competitors all trying to become the winner takes it all. Afaik after 10 years some closed, restructured but most of them burnt a lot of money. One lets call him indie dev made a lot of money building a simple comparison platform and getting 10-20% on all deals. This is n=1, but I think it still made me really averse to raising money.
- guluarte 1y agothis seems like a fake circular economy, ms invests in openai which uses the money in azure, amazon invests in anthropic which pays aws for hardware and infra, nvidia invests in openai which uses the money to buy nvidia hardware, etc
- sigbottle 1y agoWeird angle, but isn't "believing there will be a crash" sort of framing it as if this were still normal market dynamics? OpenAI and AI in general has posed itself as an existential threat and tightly integrated itself (how well? let's argue later) with so many facts of society, especially government, that like, realistically there just can't be a crash, no? Or is this too doomsday / conspiratorial? I just find it weird that we're framing it as crash/not crash when it seems pretty clear to me they really genuinely believe in AGI, and if you can get basically all facets of society to buy in... well, airlines don't "crash" anymore, do they?
- 1899-12-30 1y agoA crash in the stock market doesn't necessarily mean a crash in the real market, The AI bubble burst being dot com style vs a gfc debacle depends on how much critical financial infrastructure is at risk during the debt deleveraging. If you look at the gdp growth during those two periods, the dot com era was a mild stagnation compared to the gfc's actual gdp decline.
- camdenreslink 1y agoIf OpenAI were to shut down today, would anything in society really change? It seems all valuations are based on future integration into society and our daily lives. I don't think it has really happened yet.
- mv4 1y agoHow's this legal? Smaller businesses get in trouble for creative deals leading to inflated earnings.
- boringg 1y agoAs an aside does anyone get the feeling that NYT is also training its fire on all California tech companies these days? I know that NYT really doesn't like California (always hasn't - from restaurants to culture to business) but curious if other people see that as well?
- cs702 1y agoHere's a diagram from Morgan Stanley showing OpenAI's hair-ball of deals: https://x.com/akcakmak/status/1976204708655079840/photo/1 https://x.com/akcakmak/status/1976204708655079840/photo/1 It really is a hair-ball: purchase-sale relationships, revenue share agreements, investments, vendor loans, and repurchase agreements, etc.
- trinsic2 1y agoGamersNexus Consumer Advocacy Channel did a piece on this [0] [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3JfOxx6Hh4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3JfOxx6Hh4
- DenisM 1y agoA couple of thoughts on the big picture: * Rise of AI is one of the biggest “transfers” of IP-generated wealth. * It is also a dramatic increase in the “software is eating the world” trend, or at least an anticipation of such. It kinda turned from everyone dragging their feet through software andoptin over the course of 30 years into a massive stampede.
- ingigauti 1y agoReminds me of Iceland pre 2008 - lot of circular & complex deals - but now it's different
- ekjhgkejhgk 1y agoSam Conman.
- ungreased0675 1y agoComplex and circular deals sounds suspiciously close to fraud.