I feel like people speculating on the unsustainability of their losses probably
value what they know more than what they don't know.
In this case however, what you don't know is more relevant than what you do know.
Despite the author's knowledge of publicly available information, I believe there is more the author is not aware of that might sway their arguments. Most firms keep a lot of things under wraps. Sure they are making lots of noise - everyone does.
The numbers don't add up and there are typical signs of the Magnificent 7 engaging in behavior to hide financials/ economics from their official balance sheets and investors.
PE & M7s are teaming up creating SPACS which then build and operate data centers.
By wonders of regulation and financial alchemy, that debt/ expenditure doesn't need to be reported as infra invest in their books then.
It's like the subprime mortgage mix all over again just this time it's about selling lofty future promises to enterprises who're gonna be left holding the bag on outdated chips or compute capacity without a path to ROI.
And there are multiple financial industry analysts besides Ed Zitron who raise the same topics.
Enterprises are always selling lofty future promises.
And your subprime mortgage reference - suggesting they are manipulating information to inflate the value of the firm - doesn't cleanly apply here. For once, here is a company that seems to have faithfully represented their obscene losses and here we are already comparing them to the likes of enron. Enron never reported financial data that can be categorized as losses.
I see lots of people speculating about these losses and I really wish someone investing in openai could come out and say something vague about why they are investing.
Once again, I need not tell you, the information available to the general public is not the same as that which is available to anyone that has invested a significant amount into openai.
So once again, reign in your tendencies to draw conclusion from the obscene losses they have reported - especially since I'm positive you do not have the right context to be able to properly evaluate whether these losses make sense or not.
Well, in the one thing you are right is that obviously with the one private enterprise that is OpenAI, information is not public.
But so while you sure want to sound authoritative you are just as much speculating as I am.
And to re-iterate, professional financial industry analysts from major banks, PE funds, career investors, as well as now Jeff Bezos, as Sam Altman before, are all speaking of a bubble and raising warnings.
Furthermore, there is public information out there of publicly traded companies which engage with OpenAI. And there is a clear trend observable that they're seeking alternative means of financing compared to public markets to fund these endeavors, effectively obfuscating their spend.
Pair that with studies from MIT, IBM, McKinsey and so forth that there is hardly any ROI in enterprise AI projects, failure rates are above 90%.
You're welcome to draw your own conclusions from this, but I'd rather suggest you not lecture others about how they interpret publicly available data while you build your entire argument on "nobody (including me) knows anything".
In this case however, what you don't know is more relevant than what you do know. Despite the author's knowledge of publicly available information, I believe there is more the author is not aware of that might sway their arguments. Most firms keep a lot of things under wraps. Sure they are making lots of noise - everyone does.