this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2023
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This whole thing is basically a nonstory when you realize how much money is in tech. Meta changed their name and sank billions on an idea that everyone thought was stupid from the beginning, and they're still fine.
Putting a billion into the flavor-of-the-month that has like 10% chance to be the next big thing is a no-brainer when you're printing multiple billions in profit doing nothing, and have a lot more cash on hand.
The real story, is how wealth inequality and monopolies have essentially allowed the rich to waste tons of money chasing more wealth while having almost no incentive to provide value to society. Who gives a fuck about hallucination and prompt injection? It's all trivial details that VCs are giving away billions to eventually solve.
This parallels the height of GM, when they put money in everything from satellites to ATMs. Sure, at the time there was plenty of money to dump on such ventures. But eventually, those bad bets caught up to them. It seemed like a "no big deal" when a hugely profitable company wasted billions of dollars on bad investments. But each one of those bad investments represented a lost opportunity for a good investment. Eventually, the cash cow at GM ended, and the company is left with nothing but huge debts and worthless investments. Any tech company that is just buying the equivalence of lottery tickets is probably destined for failure too, no matter how profitable it is right now.