Comment by techtuate
10 hours ago
I was wrong - not investing in FB and Amazon many years ago - thought those businesses will shrivel and die. I believe OpenAI is a bit of a coin flip as the AI space evolves. In fact I feel all AI will be marginal return generators at best. There are a lot of incumbents and a lot more coming as barriers to entry get increasingly lower. Unless a company can build a near monopoly it'll be hard to justify a 100X revenue valuation despite heavy losses. I feel it's safer to take a punt on alternate compute companies (Musk leads but others exist) than take a bet on one of many AI companies to build a monopoly.
If you were going to invest in any AI company literally the only one I would trust to still exist in 10 years would be Google
Exactly. I remember the beginnings of ChatGPT, OpenAI looked like the future and Google had Bard, which was not very good. It looked like Google was soon to become irrelevant. Fast forward to today and they have a lot of great products in this space powered by their own custom AI chips.
Yep. Two simple boring bets on AI: NVIDIA and Google.
You are probably too late for both. But if you buy the AGI line, then yeah, those are the ones to go to.
I still think NVIDIA is a bad bet--where is their moat in the long term? Doesn't the sort of work NVIDIA engineers do look vulnerable to AI-assisted automation? NVIDIA engineers code against a well-defined test suite/specification, right?
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Im more into buying Shovels. NVIDIA is arguably one of them, and I already have some.
But I recently added POET, CBRS and similar. I think whatever happens, "shovel sellers" will be the main winners in this bubble.
They will exist, but at what valuation? Can NVIDIA really continue to raise?
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Prices for both companies are already very forward looking, and assume best case scenario of insane growth for at least a decade while assuming no risk or competition.
But tech is also one of the fields that is more prone to disruption.
Nvidia is consistently one product away from it's competitors to eat highly into their margins.
Google may have a stronger moat. No company in Italy I'm aware of is using anything but copilot or Gemini/notebooklm (talking legal, insurance, etc, not tech) because they are natural extension to the cloud and Microsoft 365 existing plans.
Recency bias seem to push investors to ignore those risks and plenty reason like you: they use recent hindsight to project future growth.
I think that NVIDIA is quite risky. I still don't understand what is their moat. There is nothing in their hardware to make them irreplaceable.
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I have a suspicion that when China will roll out their NVIDIA capable chips - and that is a question of when, not if - NVIDIA stock will plummet as it is heavily overvalued atm.
Never thought about Amazon, but I did completely expect Facebook to tank. Apparently I underestimated their level of deviousness and willingness to manipulate people.
I don't even think I want to take a guess on OpenAI. I just don't think they can deliver a good product that aligns with my own moral compass, while trying to generate profit for shareholders.
For the first year or more after IPO Facebook's stock was completely flat. I bought around the IPO and it went down significantly and only recovered after a couple years. I stupidly sold at that point once I'd had about a 10 or 15% gain.
Everyone forgets that Amazon, Google, eBay had tens of competitors at the time. We only remember the winners.
All that is a side show. What would you have done with the cash if you were right? Thats always the real story.
My Aunt runs an accounting firm and is constantly moaning about the number of people who have over accumulated cash from IPOs and have no clue what to do with it all.
I would retire.
If you have two million euros lying around, that would be life-changing money for me. I'd put everything into VWCE and then live off interest. I think I'd spend a year in Japan just to see what it's like, then travel around a few other countries, and finally settle somewhere back in Europe - buy a small house in the middle of nowhere, renovate it, and then smoke weed and play video games until the end of my days.
Don't you think sitting alone at home smoking weed and playing games might get a little bit lonely? Humans need human contact. Might as well pick up a night shift at the convenience store so you can talk to people.
At which point the plan becomes something you can put into action tomorrow, if you wanted. It's like the parable of the Mexican fisherman: https://www.thekinnardhomestead.com/the-parable-of-the-mexic...
Stoner WoW addicts working dead-end jobs live better than kings did in previous centuries, and we're too status-obsessed to notice this.
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> and then smoke weed and play video games until the end of my days.
This might be less fun than you imagine.
> I'd spend a year in Japan just to see what it's like
There's laws and shit about that. You can't just immigrate to a country illegally.
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That's such a cynical take. If everyone does what you're describing, we will never make progress as a society.
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We love in a kind of bizarro world where the “capitalists” have printed so much money that they’re wildly inefficient in allocation of resources, as evident by all the excess cash sloshing around; while the “communists” of China and to some degree Russia and the BRICS in general are widely efficient in allocation of resources, as evident by the creativity and innovation and advancements they’ve made in very short order.
That’s at least my generalized perspective.
Russia has allocated a significant proportion of its resources to exterminating its own children.
China has done well, but the rest of the BRICS categorization makes no sense to me. India (and also Pakistan) are behind China on renewables but are having a huge surge right now.
Well, China's efficiency seems to come mostly from the government enforcing competition between companies by several mechanisms, and creating some "free entrepreneurship" areas where they allow people to start companies with almost no strings attached.
And I don't see what you are seeing on the rest of BRICS.
I can't see much creativity and innovation in Russia. They sell oil and natural resources & use the money (whatever is not stolen by oligarchs) to fund an unnecessary war which they are losing.
If anything, Russia is a prime example of inefficient allocation of resources.
Including Russia and BRICS doesn’t support your thesis. Nothing efficient about their resource allocation
(And China is a state capitalist economy)
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IMO they cannot let OpenAI fail.
It's not only an AI company, it's the symbol of AI hype. This AI hype is significant part of the US economy, and the AI infrastructure spending basically half of its growth.
("it's not this it's that", I swear it's human generated slop)
The bubble either pops or it gets bigger. We've survived worse, better it pops now.
Anthropic actually turned an operating profit recently due to huge revenue growth.
Do you have a source for that claim?
Hmm, it looks like if their revenue doubles to ~$10B and their expenses don't, they stand to gain a very sweet ~$500M.
https://www.reuters.com/business/anthropic-nears-first-quart...
That being said, it does look like it's being partially subsidized by Elon burning lots of money. We'll see if he can keep it up or if it will be left behind as hardware evolves.
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WCGW… Companies with $500B+ valuation don’t bancrupt…
Enron entered the chat.
If Enron were running today, they’d put Don Jr on the board, have the US Attorney reassigned to Guam, and sell them Venezuela for a dollar.