Sam Altman has been playing 6-D chess this entire time, and we thought he was just a fraudster.
This has seriously crossed my mind as well. Like we've reached an endgame here where big tech has now found a way to literally burn off trillions of dollars into waste heat.
This is called “begging the question”. I need some evidence that Ellison is not an undead.
the "AI" is just an attempt to pump the stock price
OpenAI though can't survive as there's no business at all to fall back on
ChatGPT has brand recognition and adoption, but not the best product anymore.
Companies with worse products win all the time based on brand and adoption. So it isn't clear to me at all that Google can win.
Also Google doesn't have great business reputation for sticking to their APIs, so they need to be lot better than open model always, which it is now but my guess would be it wouldn't be for long.
For me personally this is a major feature.
If you consider those angles you'll see that Google does not want AI chat to replace Google search any time soon. Google is being dragged into this kicking and screaming. They are damned if they do, and damned if they don't.
Companies don't ever "have" things, they are themselves things that people have. There isn't a fundamental difference between taking a loan smaller than their total capitalization or spend some money they have liquid at the bank. It's both taking money from the shareholders and spending on something.
That said, yes that investment is stupid and deserves quotes around the word. But making risky investments when the company is operating in the red isn't stupid at all... it's just that this one isn't risky, it's certainly bad.
Why not continue for the next 5 ? Maybe they will find customers on Mars.
This while situation is very strange - there are some big companies pouring tens of billions into it (Alphabet, Meta) - since they don't have anything better to do with the money printers they have, but there are several others whose valuations are based on completely unrealistic projections where their expected revenues in 5-10 years represent 99% of their current 'value'.
esafak•1h ago