zlacker

>>modele+(OP)
I do wonder if OpenAI is built on a house of cards. They aren’t a nonprofit, aren’t open, and stole a huge quantity of copyrighted material to get started.

But, by moving fast and scaling quickly, are they at the Too Big to Fail stage already? The attempted board coup makes me think so.

>>ungrea+mr
Openai isn't even close to too big to fail. Bank of America fails the entire banking system collapses and the entire real economy grinds to a halt. If GM fails hundreds of thousands lose their jobs and entire supply chains collapse. If power utilities fail then people start actually dying within hours or days.

If OpenAI fails nothing actually important happens.

>>a_hume+9T
you cannot erase that much value and say "nothing important happens", market cap is largely a rough proxy for the amount of disruption if something went under

>>whimsi+YV
"whose" money matters here. It's VC money, mostly. Well-capitalized sophisticated investors, not voters and pension funds.

If Microsoft loses 30 billion dollars, it ain't great, but they have more than that sitting in the bank. If Sequoia or Ycombinator goes bankrupt, it's not great for lots of startups, but they can probably find other investors if they have a worthwhile business. If Elon loses a billion dollars, nobody cares.

>>dralle+lY
It is VC money pricing in the value of this enterprise to the rest of society.

More over, if capital markets suddenly become ways to just lose tons of money, that hurts capital investment everywhere, which hurts people everywhere.

People like to imagine the economy as super siloed and not interconnected but that is wrong, especially when it comes to capital markets.

>>whimsi+XY
In the case of OpenAI it's potential value that investors are assessing, not value. If they folded today, society would not care.

And as for the whole idea of "company value equals value to society", I see monopolies and rent seeking as heavy qualifiers on that front.