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But we don’t know that.

One product worked and made money.

The other is (effectively) being dumped on the market by VCs in hopes of being a valuable unicorn.

It may never turn a profit.

My argument is that that VC bet on something that may not work out may have destroyed lots of real jobs. It wasn’t harmless, even if you ignore all the other externalities about resource usage.



It doesn't matter if some company turns a profit. AI is out of the box. I can run llama at home on a 3070 and it does a pretty serviceable job. It's not going to go away and it's not going to get any worse. Whether or not X company survives isn't relevant. There are plenty of auto companies that didn't survive idk 1910 but cars didn't go away. Tech doesn't go away if it's clearly useful.


It matters.

It’s not OK in my mind for VC to just stand-up companies that destroy parts of the economy and then go out of business because it turns out they were never profitable in the first place.

It would be insane for that to be considered good economic policy.


> It’s not OK in my mind for VC to just stand-up companies that destroy parts of the economy and then go out of business because it turns out they were never profitable in the first place.

Is this a real thing that happens? Can you name some historical examples? What is stopping from destroyed businesses from being rebuilt pretty quickly? Uber subsidized taxi rides for millions of people for years, but if Uber went out of business, legacy taxis would come right back. And even if they didn't for X amount of time, X would have to be > the amount of subsidy that was received in the meantime. And if the legacy business was so vulnerable that people were willing to try and replace it with some big matrixes, the replacement company might still escape the local maximum that the previous company was trapped in.


The VCs are irrelevant. The concept of an engine is separate from Ford, Chevy, Tesla, etc, and the other companies that sell variations of it.

Edit: Also, the VCs that are just GPT wrappers deserve to die. The only people it hurts are the investors with more money than sense.


How are the VCs irrelevant?

It’s their massive money injections that allows these distortions to happen.

If people had been having to pay for the resources ChatGPT (etc) uses to use it then they wouldn’t have had the deleterious effects they have.

One definition of dumping: “Selling goods at less than their normal price, especially in the export market as a means of securing a monopoly.”

Isn’t that exactly what’s going on? Grow too big to fail fast so you’re the winner and people have to use you?




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