Comment by vanuatu
3 days ago
valuations and funding look at *growth*, not money out and money in
ai has produced some of the fastest growing companies of All Time and plotting the trend leads to very profitable businesses in the future (which is the whole point of investing)
i think it would be a more nuanced and interesting conversation to talk about 1) how growth will change and 2) how the rapidly falling cost of intelligence will affect the different players in the ecosystem
(not a bullpost for the labs, i think their situation is precarious)
I am coming to the conclusion that the number of people on HN who understand actual business is a rounding error. I have made similar comments as yours and I get downvoted so fast that I'm literally blocked from responding not only on the post I got downvoted on but the entire of HN. Saying anything remotely that supports the idea that AI businesses are a massive opportunity is highly unpopular here. Also, HN post throttling algorithms will actively block you from continuing to engage (due to downvoting and other signals the throttling algorithms take into account), so I think that side of the sentiment is massively suppressed on this site increasing the echo chamber.
The overall perception I see most popular on HN of "AI" is that it's a waste of money, natural resources and we should be "doing something else".
I'm old enough where I've personally seen multiple AI winters and also been through major disruptions - the PC era, the consumer internet era, the cloud, social media, gig economy and now "AI".
For every major disruption, the biggest naysayers have been the very groups that got disrupted. They eventually had to either retire or find something else to do.
There's no logical explanation or data you can provide to these naysayers that will change their mind. They have dug their teeth into a narrative disconnected from actual evidence and that's now their identity.
As a result, I have a strong hypothesis that AI will forever redefine what knowledge work - including software - looks like and entails. Credentialism and rentseeking by educational institutions will be a thing of the past. Human experts will be largely employed by frontier and specialized AI agent companies and labs.
I have been extremely lucky to have invested early in Cisco, Google, Amazon, Dell, Uber and NVIDIA - wasn't very sure when I made those investments so much so that I invested only funds I could afford to loose.
I'm now fully leveraging my investments into AI. IF AI goes to h*ll, the consumer, retail, commodities, energy markets are so strongly coupled to it, that I doubt anyone will come out of it for less than a 20% correction, and I will be way past 100 when it does recover, so I have nothing to lose.
They look at growth discounted against interest rates. Both seem to be moving unfavorably.