Comment by netcan
7 hours ago
So yes, but that doesn't negate the circular investment aspect, for most intents and purposes.
The risk is from this structure is mostly to do with how this affects market cap. Companies using the value of their shares to fund demand for their services.
That's a risk.
I feel like the whole market at this point is just AI since big tech other than Apple are all massively invested into that. Everyone owns either the S&P or the total world ETF which are both heavily skewed towards big tech and this trade - so literally everybody is in it. It might go well for a few more quarters/years but once something breaks or gets exponentially cheaper this will take down the whole market with it.
It's just hard to tell the difference between "real" demand and "circular." That's the concern.
PG had an essay about this during the dotcom, when he worked at yahoo. Iirc...Yahoo's share price and other big successes in the space attracted investment into startups. Startups used that money to advertise on yahoo. Yahoo bought some of these the startups.
So... a lot of the revenue used to analyze companies for investment was actually a 2nd order side effect of these investments.
Here the risk is that we have Ai investments servicing Ai investments for other Ai investments.
Google buys Nvidia chips to sell anthropic compute. Anthropic sells coding assist to Ai companies (including Google and Nvidia). They buy anthropic services with investor money that is flowing because of all this hype.
Imo the general risk factor is trying to get ahead of actual worldly use.
The Ai optimists have a sense that Ai produces things that are valuable (like software) at massive scale...that is output.
But... even if true, it will take a lot of time, and lot of software for the Econony to discover this, go through the path dependencies and actually produce value.
The most valuable, known software has already afy been written. The stuff that you could do, but haven't yet is stuff that hasn't made the cut. Value isn't linear.
I'm starting to transition how we build software at our company due to the power of AI. No more: five code monkey contractors under a lead. Two top-notch devs are all that is needed now, unrestrained by sprints and mindless ceremonies. There is going to be a giant sucking sound in India.
I can't continue the current model. The dev that gets AI is done in five hours, the ones that don't are thrashing for the next two weeks. I have to unleash the good AI dev. I have the Product team handing us markdown files now with an overview of the project and all the details and stories built into them. I'm literally transforming how a billion dollar company works right now because of this. I have Codex, Claude and GitHub Copilot enterprise accounts on top of Office 365. Everyone is being trained right now as most devs are behind, even.
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> literally everybody
I personally make sure I really diversify, so that when I buy funds, I buy those with stocks of EU companies which pay dividends. AFAICT there are 0 European AI companies that pay dividends.
There are zero US pure-play AI companies which pay dividends, right?
You have to go pretty far down the list of holdings (under "Holding details") to find any big bets on AI:
https://www.vanguardinvestor.co.uk/investments/vanguard-ftse...
>Companies using the value of their shares to fund demand for their services.
That's not what's happening here though. Google isn't using the value of its shares to fund demand. Google is using its own cash flow to fund this demand from Anthropic.
The question is whether Anthropic has demand from end users for the capacity they are buying from Google (that's a yes I guess) and whether that demand is profitable for Anthropic (that's a question mark).
True.
Regardless, (a) it's ability/desire to make such investments is still driven by stock-driven optimism and (b) these transactions' "signal" can have a similar, warping effect.
In this case the transaction creates demand for Google's services and also funds anthropic's growth... which represents demands for google's services.
"Loop" is an approximation of an analogy. The risk is that enough of such transactions create a dynamic that distorts feedbacks.
>(a) it's ability/desire to make such investments is still driven by stock-driven optimism
I don't think it has much to do with the stock price at all. Current platform oligopolists fear the rise of new platforms. They want a foot in the door for strategic reasons.
What could happen is that frontier labs like Anthropic and OpenAI never become platforms and turn out to be providers of a largely commoditised, low margin service.
In that event, current valuations are too high. But Anthropic's valuation doesn't seem extreme to me. Their $30bn annual run rate is valued at $380bn.
Given this price and Anthropic's strategic value, Google's investment seems reasonable.
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The tech industry goes through investment phases to produce oligopolies it turns around and enshittifies, parasitizing income off what it has built. Venture capital, acquisitions, acquihires, circular investments - It’s been incestuous for years. The question is whether competition from China’s sophisticated tech sector, which already surpasses the US in many areas, will put a pin in these plans this time round.
I don't agree with the "full cynicism" POV, but I do agree that TechnoChina's existence is a potential paradigm shifter.
But generally speaking, AI is currently pretty competitive and robust. Straightforward business model where users pay money and select the best deal are central. Market power is relatively dispersed.
So... Idk. Nvidia doesn't have competition. But Intel didn't have much competition either, and they drive the Moore's law bus for a long time.
Hardware has been less prone to enshitification. Maybe it's because the demand curve for compute doesn't have natural limits. Drive down price, and demand grows by enough that the total market grows.
There is a giant capital outlay required to produce a competitive model. Joe Schmo can’t jump into this market. Best he could do would be to ingratiate himself to an existing funding cartel. The moat surrounding a handful of market participants is billions of dollars wide.
There’s competition now among the American companies (who have a head start in this space) as always happens as the professional oligopolists try to manufacture their footholds in the new market.
Nor is it cynical to objectively appraise the interests and economics at play. People aren’t playing circular financing games out of the goodness of their hearts.
Nvidia clearly has competition, that's what this deal with Google is about (TPUs).