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points by atleastoptimal 3 days ago | 0 comments
The guy from SemiAnalysis said this too. If he buys Anthropic now at $2T and they go to zero, he's fucked, but if they go to $20T, we're all fucked.
[–] jmuguy 3 days ago
They're not really a "good investment" unless they are literally worth more than combined GDP of the entire planet, multiple times over. I don't think I'm buying shares of Weyland-Yutani here, but they sure are acting like it.
[–] spwa4 3 days ago
Why wouldn't the same apply to Spacex? That one sold and is holding it's IPO price.
[–] rootusrootus 3 days ago
The market is unhinged. TSLA also continues to maintain an absurd valuation, and my bet is the same dynamic explains SPCX.
[–] methodical 3 days ago
While this is true, something to keep in mind is that the liquidity of the market is finite. The market may be able to hold SPCX up currently but adding an additional $100b (and much more as the lockup periods end) plus whatever OpenAI ends up offering might be too much for a lot of these pensions and the other buyers of these shares can manage. They will naturally get included in the indices as they become able to but the question is whether or not all 6 trillion of collective market cap they're attempting to offload will be able to be held up with time. My working theory is that they're aware of this fact to and it's been part of the reason they've been rushing to the door with these IPOs and non-standard lockup periods.
[–] 59percentmore 3 days ago
TSLA is the beneficiary of a slow-walked short squeeze. If measures hadn't been taken, it would have have turned into a black hole for the markets. TSLA was not owned by large institutional holders, and was actually bet against by them, the opposite of SPCX. SPCX is currently liquidity for X investors and it will collapse when they have exited.

People need to go to jail this time.

[–] pc86 3 days ago
What crime has been committed?
[–] 59percentmore 3 days ago
That's the wrong question. The right question is, "What crimes can be construed to have been committed, in order to put enough people in jail for long enough sentences such that the chain of malicious and destructive financial misconduct which lead to the crisis can be severed?".

We put Capone away on tax evasion. Get creative.

[–] janderson215 3 days ago
Maybe I’m the only person who thinks this, but I think your line of thinking is very dangerous and way more dangerous than ANT or SPCX.
[–] pc86 3 days ago
Capone actually did evade taxes, though. Nobody "construed [it] to have been committed." It was a real crime.

If you think something is bad for society but it's not legal, you make it illegal. You don't make up false crimes and arrest people for those. That's what tyrants and sociopaths do. It's disgusting.

[–] Master_Odin 3 days ago
It's down 8% over past 6 months while the S&P500 is up 7%. It's definitely so far been not a great investment, unless you managed to get in and out during that brief huge upswing
[–] internetter 3 days ago
It stands to reason Anthropic will also have a huge upswing. I may eat my words.
[–] runarberg 3 days ago
There are people playing that same game on the other end, and they have the tools to exploit market swings which you may not have. Those are the people who will benefit from the potential huge upswing, and that money came from somewhere, most likely from your investment.

Playing the stock market is a loosing game. It is gambling where all the rules and all the odds are stacked in favor of a handful of people who gamble for a living. (it is also systemic exploitation of the working classes; so if you are into worker solidarity [you should] you should not partake in said exploitation).

[–] dbmnt 3 days ago
It is not, played over time, a losing game. Just look at the lifetime graph of any major index.

If you just buy and hold, and don't panic sell during a recession, you'll win.

Will other more sophisticated players make money exploiting short-term swings? Sure. Will other players beat your returns? Also yes.

But that money isn't coming out of your pocket, so why does it matter? You're still beating leaving your money in a savings account, where inflation is outpacing interest.

[–] internetter 3 days ago
> Playing the stock market is a loosing game. It is gambling where all the rules and all the odds are stacked in favor of a handful of people who gamble for a living

Indeed. And yet opting out is an even bigger loss.

[–] rjbwork 3 days ago
Which I did. Most obvious opportunity for a trailing stop order of my entire time trading, lol.
[–] zeeveener 3 days ago
If I understand correctly, the argument isn't that it can't _hold_ it's price, but that it's not worth investing in if the goal is _meaningful gains_.
[–] baobabKoodaa 2 days ago
The point is that IPO price is more speculative than the price established by the public market once the stock is freely tradable. When a stock holds its price post IPO, that indicates the IPO was priced more or less correctly (absent any other information).
[–] karmakurtisaani 3 days ago
Only a small fraction of SpaceX stock is available on the market.
[–] nrmitchi 3 days ago
Fwiw I agree that SpaceX is generally completely detached from reality and I am as-close-as-I-can-be to sure that Elon is doing some heavy manipulation behind the scenes, but this has changed recently as lockups expired. IIRC the current float is ~30%, compared to it's initial IPO when it was comically low at ~4-5%.

30% is much higher than 4-5%, but it's still much lower than most public companies (~80%)

[–] devmor 3 days ago
Buying a stock that holds its price is equivalent to putting your money in a savings account with no interest.
[–] PacificSpecific 3 days ago
I presume you mean a stock that holds its price with no dividend?
[–] andriy_koval 3 days ago
stock will likely hold inflation adjusted price unlike saving account.

Given gov currently spends 1T annually on servicing debt, I expect US is forced to print money and increase inflation for a long time.

[–] nrmitchi 3 days ago
As others said, the market is generally unhinged currently, with enough extremely wealthy people needing somewhere to put money that doesn't really matter to them, and I suspect some level of "investing in SpaceX public stock" is done to appease/appeal-to Elon.
[–] BLKNSLVR 3 days ago
The fact its price is only holding, as opposed to having maintained its initial growth, is an indicator (for me anyway) that the bubble is pretty close to its maximum size, and it could only take very few more breaths, cough Anthropic and OpenAI cough, to reach critical mass (mixing my metaphors).

But, as they say, bears sound smart, bulls make money.

[–] grey-area 3 days ago
That means public investors have made 0%
[–] yreg 3 days ago
Holding price is not enough.
[–] smath 3 days ago
If they grow to 20T then buying the index will also be a good investment but with a good risk hedge.
[–] columk 3 days ago
Isn't it likely that inference providers like Anthropic continue to capture more and more of the share of labor as revenue? Everything up makes sense for a year or two as we automate more and more labor, but at some point unemployment will drag the whole market down. It's difficult to see it working out any other way, unless we come up with something like a token tax.
[–] bjt 3 days ago
> Isn't it likely that inference providers like Anthropic continue to capture more and more of the share of labor as revenue?

Not if open weight models turn inference into a commodity that's sold at cost.

[–] j45 3 days ago
They will capture share of labour as the labour works today.

There will be, as is always the case, some amount of new labour skills that emerge and I can't say for sure what percentage or amount that might be.

Looking at tech work being increasingly well the last 20-30y, we can imagine new ways of working might be pretty valued.

[–] GeorgeWBasic 3 days ago
It always has been the case that some new labor skills emerge, but that only has to be wrong once. And given that how it's always worked is that the new skills used brainpower to make centaurs of people, to use Cory Doctorow's term, that might not happen this time.
[–] j45 2 days ago
That's a fair way to think about it.

Most technologies seemed doom and gloom, and also have absorbed existing jobs for new ones, and current LLMs as AI is a bigger sponge than usual.

[–] teaearlgraycold 3 days ago
> if they go to $20T, we're all fucked

Maybe I’m naive but I expect any kind of “we’re just taking over the world now” event with any AI company will be met with enough resistance from 99.99999% of the world’s population that they’ll have to make it a sweet deal for us if they want to survive.

[–] IsTom 3 days ago
Not if they start making killbots.
[–] BLKNSLVR 3 days ago
Our killbot manufacturing process needs 50% of the oxygen in the earth's atmosphere. Thankfully, unlike GPUs and RAM, which we needed to purchase from their manufacturers, we can extract oxygen out of the air at outrageous volumes and minimal cost. This effort has already begun, therefore by the time you read this, you are unlikely to have the ability to disagree, much less protest. And if you do somehow manage to protest, say hi to one of our many killbots, who are likely to also be in attendance, en masse.
[–] LPisGood 3 days ago
Actually we can do classical theory of strategic interaction here. There will be a range of acceptable negotiated settlements to both parties since both parties have some estimate E of the expected balance of power resulting after a war. If A is the amount of surplus value Anthropic expects to lose in a war and H is expected amount of value humanity expects to lose in a war, the the range [max(E - H, E - A), min (E + H, E + A)] gives a whole continuum of mutually acceptable settlements.

Now there will be bargaining friction given that any power sharing agreement with Anthropic will likely increase their future capacity and thus the future expected balance of power, but maybe AI has a long enough utility horizon that we should all expect to be dead by the time it realizes the long-term expectation advantage

[–] jgalt212 3 days ago
They already exist and Ukraine is still stuck in an untenable position because they gave up their nukes.
[–] warkdarrior 3 days ago
Maybe Anthropic should invest in nukes, to avoid Ukraine's fate.
[–] jumboshrimp 3 days ago
In an era where AI crawls the Internet all day, I've come to regard humor like this as distasteful.
[–] warkdarrior 3 days ago
I am not going to censor myself because at some future time, in some datacenter, an AI is going to misinterpret my comment.
[–] vlyan 3 days ago
that's very virtuous of you. I'm not sure your mild contempt will make much of a difference if/when a profoundly retarded human gives GPT-69 access to "LAUNCH NUKES LOL" button.
[–] andriy_koval 3 days ago
US has millions of FSD controlled cars on the road already..
[–] overfeed 3 days ago
> resistance from 99.99999% of the world’s population that they’ll have to make it a sweet deal for us if they want to survive.

The "dark-enlightenment" billionaires have been planning for a "collapse" for years, and their plans involve bunkers, acquiring citizenship in remote places, pervasive surveillance and armed dogbots/drones, the last 2 powered by AI, naturally.

[–] strangattractor 3 days ago
I love the bunker building. Where is Dario's bunker?

Altman already has a couple I think.

Thiel has gone to Argentina but has a backup in New Zealand (w/ Citizenship).

Zuckerberg just bought an Irish castle (a Medieval bunker of sorts) but probably has others.

Musk probably has plans for a Moon bunker complete with Pleasure-Dome. Investor funded of course. Not sure how cosmic rays affect sperm however.

Brin couild opt for Blimps - imagine floating above the reeks and the wrecks like a Meth from Altered Carbon.

Bezos - does he have a bunker?

[–] phainopepla2 3 days ago
Zuckerberg's Hawaiian demesne has a fully underground bunker complete with medical clinic. I know several people who worked on it (and disregarded their NDAs entirely, impossible to prevent people in Hawaii from talking story)
[–] dofm 3 days ago
> Altman already has a couple I think.

If they aren't patrolled by giant, iris-scanning eyeballs he's missed out on a vertical.

[–] strangattractor 2 days ago
Ultimately it shows how invested these guys are in the rest of us. It's like society gave them the ability to accumulate all this wealth - then they turn and and give society the finger when things look bad.
[–] vouwfietsman 3 days ago
Sadly true, even to the point of paying for not only the pilot to fly their helicopter to the island in the inevitable collapse, but also the pilot's family. Not as a token of generosity of course, no, because otherwise the pilot wouldn't fly them.
[–] rootusrootus 3 days ago
And then they need to staff that island with all the accoutrements they are accustomed to from modern society. And defend it with a navy. And presumably pay for all of this with their billions of ... what, exactly?
[–] vouwfietsman 3 days ago
Haha, indeed all of the preparations are surprisingly short-sighted. Nevertheless it shows the thought process behind many of the so-called 'leaders'.
[–] gspr 3 days ago
Whenever I feel gloomy about the future, I try to think how hilariously dumb the bunker building morons are. Then I feel better.
[–] andriy_koval 3 days ago
why they are dumb in your opinion?
[–] BLKNSLVR 3 days ago
Being one of the last humans on earth is highly likely to result in being one of the last humans to commit suicide.
[–] andriy_koval 3 days ago
I think humans will survive.
[–] BLKNSLVR 3 days ago
I fundamentally agree, but not if the only ones alive are techbros in bunkers, which was my point.
[–] gspr 3 days ago
Because if they're needed, they're not sustainable. And if they're not needed, they're a complete waste.

Maybe these sociopaths should try to save the world rather than making fantasy hedges against its collapse (while actively making things worse).

[–] andriy_koval 3 days ago
> Because if they're needed, they're not sustainable

You can pack enough to survive for decades in that bunker, and then see how world will look like. If you are superrich, it is dumb to not take this chance.

> Maybe these sociopaths should try to save the world rather than making fantasy hedges against its collapse (while actively making things worse).

Its very loaded topic. There are other competing sociopaths, and also 8B of population who don't care about saving world much. But both goals(bunker and saving the world) could be tried simultaniously.

[–] overfeed 3 days ago
> You can pack enough to survive for decades in that bunker, and then see how world will look like.

These billionaire nerds got lucky, but now think themselves as natural-born leaders — as evidenced by their wealth, but they wouldn't survive the post apocalypse.

If society collapses, and you were an elite ex-special forces armed detail on a billionaire's security team, would you continue to accept their now-worthless dollars, or would you or just take a fully-stocked bunker for you and yours?

Remember there are effectively no cops or courts in this world that would stand in the way of the (former) billionaires from being demoted to farm-hand by those with the guns.

[–] gspr 3 days ago
> You can pack enough to survive for decades in that bunker,

Emphasis being survive. Maybe. These morons seem to think this will be a continuation of their current lives. That somehow people will continue to serve them if society has collapsed. They're delusional.

> There are other competing sociopaths, and also 8B of population who don't care about saving world much.

Oh please! The billionaires think that they're so special, they owe their fortune to their inherent genius. But when it comes to helping the world it's apparently "but but the other 8B aren't doing it, I'm just a regular guy who can't accomplish anything!"

Losers.

[–] dachris 3 days ago
Good point - in a way, if we get AGI, investors have financed the way to their potential undoing.

The term singularity is worn out, but the physics parallel is quite apt - a point where the known gears of economics stop working, and it's unknowable what's there until you get there.

[–] jonny_eh 3 days ago
What if, here me out, you got to share in the profits of the companies you buy shares in? Let's call those payments "dividends". Theb it doesn't matter how much shares go up in value.
[–] jorblumesea 3 days ago
the technology isn't the company yeah? maybe AI will take over the world but it's unlikely to be a single firm