You can't claim that the tech industry isn't innovating. You can say that innovation effort has shifted away from many things that still need it. The issue I have is that the companies and products are so large and complex that they are extremely difficult to compete with.

I'm in agreement with the general point but was big tech well liked in the early 2020s?

Facebook scandals had exploded already, Google had already long abandoned "don't be evil", nobody ever liked Microsoft, and I think sentiment towards Apple is somewhat unchanged.

This feeling made me leave the tech industry.

It felt like I was helping the bad guys, and my conscience couldn't deal with that.

Considering the search engine company is selling a very popular self driving taxi service, they seem to be quite credible and innovative.

>But AI is absolutely loathed by the public.

by the public populating the echo chambers on reddit and bluesky, perhaps.

9.5 out of 10 normies use it daily now and have no negative opinions about it. the wholesome folx use it too, despite their incessant kvetching.

People began disliking big tech well before this latest bout of AI.

In 2014 I moved from London to SF to start a big tech job. In my first day there I accidentally wondered into a massive rally, I asked one of the participants what it was about and they said they were protesting all these foreign tech workers coming to SF. It felt a bit weird to end up in the middle of an ‘anti-me’ rally - especially one so passionate and energetic. A few protesters pressed me on where I was from and what I do, I lied and told them I was an investment banker. They told me that they suppose that was ok. I specifically told them that because not long ago it was finance being the target of protests and I curious to see if they had somehow moved on - if this was a principled stance or if it was being astroturfed.

These protests ended up getting pretty violent, people were throwing rocks through bus windows, throwing up on cars.

People are being led around by the nose. Cui bono? 2000 years and most people still can't manage to ask that question reflexively. AI hate is a parochial narrative being pushed by people who stand to lose influence. Examined objectively, there are reasons to be cautious when adopting AI tools but a knee-jerk rejection of everything AI is a purely irrational response that has been drilled into people through repetition, conformity and media influence.

Tech companies were never the "good guys" any more than they are the "bad guys" now. Those are just colored filters thrown in front of the lime light to shift your perception. As soon as tech or AI works to their benefit then suddenly they'll be the good guys again and no one will care they were the bad guys before. People just go where the algo leads them, believe what their influencers believe, think what their peers think.

People should really look at cash flow statements instead of just earnings. Anthropic published one and their cash flow was positive for the first half of this year.

That doesn't mean all the circular financing won't be a problem, but people keep drawing the wrong conclusions from the negative earnings, which are relevant to investors but not so much to the viability of the business.

Didnt it start with Korean stocks first? It feels like a wave, it hits there first then the US tech stocks. Korea index has stabilized for a few days now, but hasn't recovered what it lost.

The filing showed that it was profitable. The biggest expenses were because the stock valuation of Anthropic went really high.

I asked this to ChatGPT “if anthropics valuation didn’t rise and stayed at 200B what would their profit be on q2”

The answer is around 1B of profit.

in many ways, its the very thing that makes us people