Too big to fail? Where have I heard that before... Ah rightt it was the Lehman Brothers, back in 2007

"Too big to fail? Where have I heard that before... Ah rightt it was the Lehman Brothers, back in 2007"

1987, 2007, 2027 ?

This time too big to rescue ?

I'm thinking there's soon going to be some shareholders somewhere who are going to raise a stink when they're presented with yet another bag of billions thrown to something that has no ROI.

This is one case where I will accept that the selfish cunts put a stop to the project.

Perhaps more accurately "the technology really has become too big for failure to be recognised or admitted."

But fail it will. It's now approaching a scale where its disturbance of finance and economics globally could undermine it's raison d'être and a great deal more.

Top-tier Banks are "too big to fail" due to their systemic interconnections and a government could step in to guarantee debts to prevent a catastrophic meltdown of the monetary system as happened with Lloyds in the UK.

These AI ventures are generally invested in by direct private capital, investment banks, and pension funds - all of which are perfectly capable of failing, and some of which could potentially be propped up if their investment decisions proved to be poor, but AI companies themselves are not "to big to fail" - the market correction is coming, and these tech firms will take a hammering - many will say about time, as to be honest despite their insane valuations, technology companies globally are currently providing very little that is genuinely "new" - the valuations are created by clever marketing, not underlying value.

The investors will get their fingers burned, many will cry foul, as with HP Autonomy & Theranos in the past. Some might be propped up/bailed out depending on who they are, some will learn their lessons (for a while at least), and some will go under - thus has it ever been.

The Metaverse, Blockchain, NFTs.

Don't these idiots get it yet? You invest at the start and pull out when all the articles start mentioning the bubble bursting.

Are we now "valuing" companies by how much money they've had thrown at them?

If so, that would seem like a pretty poor yardstick of measure.

You could give me 13 Billion and I could spend it all, in due course, but it doesn't make me worth 13 Billion does it?

Its investor valuation. I give you 10 guilders for 25% of your company, which means I think your company is worth 40.

Note, too, that these investors aren't collectively crazy. Theyre just gambling on that one of these shops may be the next Google and that is pretty much their job. Place a lot of bets and if only one pays off, you can show your backers a positive return on investment. Also, the FOMO is real. A VC fund won't often be asked why they did invest in something - that's their job - but eyebrows will be raised if an opportunity walked by, they said no, and then that opportunity exits at an eyewatering amount of money.

In other words, things are mostly working as intended.

> Note, too, that these investors aren't collectively crazy.

There's also the fact that it's possible to know something is a bubble and make money off of it anyway--if your timing is right and you get out before the burst. Of course, this is easier said than done, but also of course, most professional moneyfondlers have an unjustifiably high opinion of their own intelligence.

Sure - that's exactly the value - anything in the world is worth EXACTLY what people are currently willing to pay for it - be it food on a supermarket shelf or a 60+ year old Ferrari 250 GTO. Shares in AI companies are worth ridiculous amounts simply because of FOMO (which even itself isn't a new invention - we used to call it "Hype"...)

After a few months with Claude Pro, I’ve decided to cancel and just stick with ChatGPT Plus. No need to pay for both, and I don’t see a strong differentiator.

Out of curiosity, did you compare both regarding integration with other software via MCP?

e-Tulips bobbing along in the South Sea blissfully hallucinating

This proves yet again that companies and investors will gladly pour billions of dollars into magic GenAI beans that promise to grow into endlessly churning money printers "any day now", all without a pesky employee workforce crying about labor rights or governments imposing regulations on how reckless you can be with it.

We just need all the electricity you can generate, a few hundred more data centers and endless pallets of purpose-built hardware you can *totally* use for other, more productive things once this collective cash-greed hallucination falls apart.

Yeah, they should probably adapt this [1]metaphoric artwork into some "Venus of the dollar bills" -- to acutely ray-trace the current DC insanity image and aesthetically render its collective reflection conveyed through the shiny world of finance (or suchlikes) ... ;)

[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2024/03/06/style/venus-of-the-rags-replaced-intl-scli

Seen this?

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/humans-hired-to-fix-ai-slop-rcna225969

In the old days, if a company lost a billion dollars, is was finished. Done and closed.

Now? Billions are thrown at failed companies. Yet somehow us peons can't have raises or even jobs.

I'm sure there's no correlation, right? Right?

Eat the rich,

I seem to remember the common wisdom was, by the time your company got to a Series C or D, it was time to shit or get off the pot.

The IT world has worked to repair its reputation after the Y2K bug did not result in the catastrophic consequences forecast. Techies would argue that the billions spent dealing with the bug were why nothing bad happened. To the general public, though, the panic was unjustified, and the tech sector was subsequently regarded with suspicion for several years.

This always bothers me. The media hyped the bug, then when we successfully dealt with it the papers weren't lauding us as heroes, but questioning whether it was just a scam all along.

In AI land, we're in the hype stage.