Ad driven internet content is at least 25 years old, so it’s had time to settle into the equilibrium the market will converge to. The current state of things is precisely where the market drove it to, so it seems pretty clear that the “invisible hand” isn’t going to make it better and appears to favor making it worse. This seems like an obvious case where an external force is required to push the market in a direction it doesn’t naturally want to land at.
Beyond the ad driven internet, ad driven content has been at least 150 years old. Ever seen a photo of a pre-WW1 baseball stadium? Or soccer stand? Covered in ads. Old newspapers are awash in ads. Day time TV soap operas are so named because they were sponsored by soap companies.
All a giant waste. Just propaganda blasted at our eyes and ears all day, a drum beat of distraction attacks on our attention. Almost all forms of advertising should be banned or regulated till they are as quiet and unobtrusive as possible.
They aren't even regulating the ads, they're mandating that video platforms show content without monetization.
Live TV had unskippable ads for like the last 80 years, and somehow YouTube is different? Why?
I hate ads, I block ads, and even I think this is stupid. Idk what Vietnam's constitution is like, but I think it's absurd from a free country perspective. If I'm paying to serve you videos, why don't I get to set the terms of that deal? Nobody is forcing you to go to a specific website. If you think they're crap because of all the ads, I likely would agree with you. I think blocking them can't be criminalized, because after all it is your device you're using to remove the ads. But how can you fine or punish a company for not explicitly letting you take the content without complying with their terms?
How, as a user, do I avoid getting ads shoved in front of my eyes on buses? on billboards? on subways? on tv channels? at movies? in my mail? in my email? in my search results? in my map app?
i'm just wondering what you want the "market" to do and how.
Best argument I can think of is the fact that half of ads on American TV have the words "ask your doctor about ___" in them. Drugs ads should be banned.
“You know as well as we do that justice, as the world goes, is only a matter between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” From Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War.
I personally think this quote explains the Trump administration’s worldview far better than anything Trump himself would say.
There is no doubt that OpenAI is taking a lot of risks by betting that AI adoption will translate into revenues in the very short term. And that could really happen imo (with a low probability sure, but worth the risk for VCs? Probably).
It's mathematically impossible what OpenAI is promising. They know it. The goal is to be too big to fail and get bailed out by US taxpayers who have been groomed into viewing AI as a cold war style arms race that America cannot lose.
> The goal is to be too big to fail and get bailed out by US taxpayers
I know this is the latest catastrophizion meme for AI companies, but what is it even supposed to mean? OpenAI failing wouldn’t mean AI disappears and all of their customers go bankrupt, too. It’s not like a bank. If OpenAI became insolvent or declared bankruptcy, their intellectual property wouldn’t disappear or become useless. Someone would purchase it and run it again under a new company. We also have multiple AI companies and switching costs are not that high for customers, although some adjustment is necessary when changing models.
I don’t even know what people think this is supposed to mean. The US government gives them money for something to prevent them from filing for bankruptcy? The analogy to bank bailouts doesn’t hold.
I think what Altman is looking at is becoming so codependent with NVidia and Microsoft that they'll all go down together, meaning the US government would have to deal with the biggest software company and the biggest chip company both imploding together.
If you look at the financial crisis, the US government decided to bail out AIG, after passing on Bear Sterns, because big banks like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley (and even Jack Welch's General Electric) all had huge counterparty risk with AIG.
>I know this is the latest catastrophizion meme for AI companies, but what is it even supposed to mean?
Someone else put it succintly.
"When A million dollar company fails, it's their problem. When a billion dollar company fails, it's our problem"
In essence, there's so much investment in AI that it's a significant part of the US GDP. If AI falters, that is something that the entire stock market will feel, and by effect, all Americans. No matter how detached from tech they are. In other words, the potential for the another great depression.
In that regard, the government wants to avoid that. So they will at least give a small bailout to lessen the crash. But more likely (as seen with the Great Financial Crisis), they will likely supply billions upon billions to prop up companies that by all business logic deserved to fail. Because the alternative would be too politically damaging to tolerate.
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That's the theory. These all aren't certain and there are arguments to suggest that a crash in AI wouldn't be as bad as any of the aforementioned crashes. But that's what people mean by "become too big to fail and get bailed out".
The closest analogy is the dot-com crash and there really wasn't any bailout for that, despite the short term GDP impact. And billion-dollar companies were involved back in the day too, like Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Ebay etc. etc.
If they aren't dumb, why are they investing in MSFT now then if it's a bubble that's doomed to fail? And even in the worst case scenario, a 10-15% decline in the S&P 500 won't trigger the next Great Depression. (Keep in mind that we already had a ~20% drawdown in public equities during the interest rate hikes of 2022/2023 and the economy remained pretty robust throughout.)
Like I said, they aren't "that" dumb. They are playing a risky game, but when they see the number go down rapidly they will pull. Which will make the line go down even faster.
>And even in the worst case scenario, a 10-15% decline in the S&P 500 won't trigger the next Great Depression
Only if you believe the 10% decline won't domino and that the S&P500 is secluded from the rest of the global economy. I wish I shared your optimism.
> and the economy remained pretty robust throughout.
Yeah and we voted the person who orchestrated that out. We don't have the money to pump trillions back in a 2nd time in such a short time. Something's gonna give, and soon.
> Only if you believe the 10% decline won't domino and that the S&P500 is secluded from the rest of the global economy. I wish I shared your optimism.
So your hypothesis is that a 10% decline in the S&P 500 will trigger the next Great Depression, i.e. years of negative GDP growth and unemployment? I agree that it could cause a slight economic slowdown, but I don't think AI and tech stocks are a large enough part of the economy to cause a Great Depression-style catastrophe.
The problem is that the non AI economy is already in the toilet. The consumer and commodities markets are all flashing red. Consumer debt is all time high. Inflation is still punishing the bottom end of workers severely and the ACA cuts will cause a lot of financial stress (unless people of course discountinue their plans)
An expected outcome from a AI blowout is the uncertainty and everyone holding onto their assets and credit recalls plus interest rate hikes.
During the great depression it wasn't the stock market collapse that caused it as much as it was the credit crunch that followed. Prior to the blowout people literally bought stocks on credit.
>So your hypothesis is that a 10% decline in the S&P 500 will trigger the next Great Depression, i.e. years of negative GDP growth and unemployment?
Yup. I won't say it's the only factor, nor biggest. But I'm focusing on this topic and not 40+ years of government economic abandonment of the working class. It's the straw that will break the camel's back.
> If OpenAI became insolvent or declared bankruptcy, their intellectual property wouldn’t disappear or become useless
Yes but with all stock growth being in AI companies it would tank the market for one. Secondly, all of those dollars they are using are backed by creditors who would have a default. short of another TARP (likely IMO, the US NEEDS to keep pumping AI to compete with China) .... it could scare investors off too..
Plus with the growth in AI effecting the overall makeup of the stockmarket, something like this hurts every Americans 401k
It is the term "mathematically impossible" that caught my attention. Since it is about the future promise of OpenAI, one could debate the likelihood or "statistically improbable", but "mathematically impossible" implies some calculation, proof and certainty. Hence my curiosity.
I've seen some calculation I think from an HSBC analyst that it would take a monthly subscription of $200/mo. from some large portion of the US population for some insane number of years to break even.
OpenAI’s customer base is global. Using US population as the customer base is deliberately missing the big picture. The world population is more than 20X larger than the US population.
It’s also obvious that they’re selling heavily to businesses, not consumers. It’s not reasonable to expect consumers to drive demand for these services.
I'd be willing to bet that, like many US websites, OpenAI's users are at lest 60% American. Just because there's 20x more people out there doesn't mean they have the same exposure to American products.
For instance, China is an obvious one. So that's 35%+ of the population already mostly out of consideration.
>It’s also obvious that they’re selling heavily to businesses, not consumers.
I don't think a few thousand companies can outspend 200m users paying $200 a month. I won't call it a "mathematical impossibility", but the math also isn't math-ing here.
Even if you grant that OpenAI might be as successful as Apple at international expansion and support, that’s still only a non-US market about double the size of the US market.
Bailing out OAI would be entirely unnecessary (crowded field) and political suicide (how many hundreds of billions that could have gone to health care instead?)
If it happens in the next 3 years, tho, and Altman promises enough pork to the man, it could happen.
>Bailing out OAI would be ... political suicide (how many hundreds of billions that could have gone to health care instead?)
Not that I have an opinion one way or another regarding whether or not they'd be bailed out, but this particular argument doesn't really seem to fit the current political landscape.
on the one hand, i understand you are making a stylized comment, on the other hand, as soon as i started writing something reasonable, i realized this is an "upvote lame catastrophizing takes about" (checking my notes) "some company" thread, which means reasonable stuff will get downvoted... for example, where is there actual scarcity in their product inputs? for example, will they really be paying retail prices to infrastructure providers forever? is that a valid forecast? many reasonable ways to look at this. even if i take your cynical stuff at 100% face value, the thing about bailouts is that they're more complicated than what you are saying, but your instinct is to say they're not complicated, "grooming" this and "cold war" that, because your goal is to concern troll, not advance this site's goal of curiosity...
Apparently we all have enough money to put it into OpenAI.
Some players have to play, like google, some players want to play like USA vs. China.
Besides that, chatting with an LLM is very very convincing. Normal non technical people can see what 'this thing' can already do and as long as the progress is continuing as fast as it currently is, its still a very easy to sell future.
I don't think you have the faintest clue of what you're talking about right now. Google authored the transformer architecture, the basis of every GPT model OpenAI has shipped. They aren't obligated to play any more than OpenAI is, they do it because they get results. The same cannot be said of OpenAI.
Correction: OpenAI investors do take that risk. Some of the investors (e.g. Microsoft, Nvidia) dampen that risk by making such investment conditioned on boosting the investor's own revenue, a stock buyback of sorts.
I'm based in the US and I tried twice to create an account for Hetzner (a personal account as well as a company / startup account). They rejected all my attempts. I don't quite understand their business model :)
My understanding of YC is that they place more emphasis on the founders than the initial idea, and teams often pivot.
That being said, I think there is an opportunity for them to discover and serve an important enterprise use case as AI in enterprise hits exponential growth.
I was staying in a apartment in London a long time ago and a Sunday(!) bailiffs came and kicked everyone in the building out in 3 hours. The reason was that the rent hadn't been paid to the building owner by the management company. Most people just left and lost the rent they had paid. These things happen and there are no protection for tenants unfortunately.
That's for long term rentals, and what gp describes was already illegal action against against a normal long term tenant . In the UK a tenancy is a property right not just a contract -it's a right to a specific property, not just a contract with a person. So if the tenancy was executed with the consent of the owner, they can't just kick out the tenants even if the management company didn't pay them . That's because the tenants right to the property isn't just via the chain of contracts between them and the owner. For a hotel room or Airbnb, or a lodger, very different rules apply
This is unreasonable. In any just society, the bailiffs would be slapping cuffs on the owners of the management company, while the tenants would get notice.
You can't throw someone out of their home without notice because you have a business dispute with some third party.
> ...for leasing to a hotel chain that later went bankrupt?
No, the story in the great-grandparent's post is not about a hotel, it's about a residential lease where:
1. They were paying rent to a property management company who managed a building's apartments.
2. The property management company stopped paying rent to the building owner.
3. The building owner had the police throw out every person living in those apartments with 0 day notice.
The person at fault is #2 - the property management company. That is who the building owner's dispute is with. It is criminal that the people who were thrown out onto the street with zero notice were the tenants who have up to this point upheld their end of the agreement.
The bar for getting thrown out of your home should be far higher than the bar for getting thrown out of your hotel room.
Still a weird story. Leases are contracts and they survive pretty much anything including the sale of the property to another owner. As long as the rent is being paid I don’t see how eviction would be justified.
The fact is that, for a long time, British kings considered themselves kings of France as well - and even believed that France was the senior kingdom. The language they spoke reflected that attitude.
That said, as a Frenchman who has to speak English every day, I can assure you that English has long since become its own thing!
They spoke French because they were Normans and married mostly with the continental aristocracy.
Their claim to the French throne was based on the rules of succession and an argument over them (arising from those intertwinned lineages).
An interesting fact is that King Richard I (Sean Connery in Robin Hood with Kevin Costner)'s mother was from South West France and he grew up there, and so he spoke French and Occitan but not really English.
Henry IV was the first English king to speak english natively since before the conquest. Mel Gibson's Braveheart is particularly ridiculous because everyone would have been speaking various amounts of Norman French to each other in reality. Wallace, the Bruce, Edward I and II, the various other nobles.
Totally. Mini apps and mini-app stores are already developing in crypto (Farcaster, World,..) and the approach may well become the primary way to deploy advanced and secure apps going forward.
What about DEI makes it an “ideological” movement as opposed to other movements who are presumably not ideological?
And I’m not sure what “most people”, is supposed to mean; you do realize you’re talking about 49% – that is, under half, so definitively not “most” – of the US of A’s population?[0]
Maybe the demonizing everybody who does not agree with it or the agenda driven financial investment by mega corporations with ESG scores invented by the WEF folks
Most Americans are growing skeptical of DEI as an ideological framework and that helped Trump.
This suggests two possible paths forward: either we move beyond the theoretical underpinnings and focus on practical inclusion — supporting people from diverse backgrounds through approaches with broad consensus.
Or DEI becomes increasingly marginalized, championed primarily by masked activists who struggle to maintain relevance.
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