zlacker

Your premise that the leaders of every single one of the top 10 biggest and most profitable companies in human history are all preposterously wrong about a new technology in their existing industry is hard to believe.

AI is literally the fastest growing and most widely used/deployed technologies ever.

>>anthon+(OP)
> Your premise that the leaders of every single one of the top 10 biggest and most profitable companies in human history are all preposterously wrong about a new technology in their existing industry is hard to believe.

Their incentives are to juice their stock grants or other economic gains from pushing AI. If people aren't paying for it, it has limited value. In the case of Microsoft Copilot, only ~3% of the M365 user base is willing to pay for it. Whether enough value is derived for users to continue to pay for what they're paying for, and for enterprise valuation expectations to be met (which is mostly driven by exuberance at this point), remains to be seen.

Their goal is not to be right; their goal is to be wealthy. You do not need to be right to be wealthy, only well positioned and on time. Adam Neumann of WeWork is worth ~$2B following the same strategy, for example. Right place, right time, right exposure during that hype cycle.

Only 3.3% of Microsoft 365 users pay for Copilot - >>46871172 - February 2026

This is very much like the dot com bubble for those who were around to experience it.

https://old.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1g78sgf/...

> In the late 90s and early 00s a business could get a lot of investors simply by being “on the internet” as a core business model.

> They weren’t actually good business that made money…..but they were using a new emergent technology

> Eventually it became apparent these business weren’t profitable or “good” and having a .com in your name or online store didn’t mean instant success. And the companies shut down and their stocks tanked

> Hype severely overtook reality; eventually hype died

("Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome" -- Charlie Munger)

>>anthon+(OP)
Your premise that the leaders of every single one of the top 10 biggest and most profitable companies in human history are all preposterously wrong about a new technology in their existing industry is hard to believe.

It's happened before.

Your premise that companies which become financially successful doing one thing are automatically excellent at doing something else is hard to believe.

Moreover, it demonstrates both an inability to dispassionately examine what is happening and a lack of awareness of history.

>>anthon+(OP)
Yup, I've been here before. Back in 1995 we called it "The Internet." :-) Not to be snarky here, as we know the Internet has, in fact, revolutionized a lot of things and generated a lot of wealth. But in 1995, it was "a trillion dollar market" where none of the underlying infrastructure could really take advantage of it. AI is like that today, a pretty amazing technology that at some point will probably revolutionize a lot of things we do, but the hype level is as far over its utility as the Internet hype was in 1995. My advice to anyone going through this for the first time is to diversify now if you can. I didn't in 1995 and that did not work out well for me.

>>anthon+(OP)
The product is the stock price, not Office or Windows. From that perspective they are doing it right.

>>ChuckM+n2
What do you mean exactly by "diversify"? Money/investment-wise?

>>RoddaW+j8
Sell the risky stock that has inflated in value from hype cycle exuberance and re-invest proceeds into lower risk asset classes not driven by said exuberance. "Taking money off the table." An example would be taking ISO or RSU proceeds and reinvesting in VT (Vanguard Total World Stock Index Fund ETF) or other diversified index funds.

Taking money off the table - >>45763769 - October 2025 (108 comments)

(not investing advice)

>>toomuc+t9
What tomuchtodo said. When I left Sun in 1995 I had 8,000 shares, which in 1998 would have paid off my house, and when I sold them when Oracle bought Sun after a reverse 3:1 split, the total would not even buy a new car. Can be a painful lesson, certainly it leaves an impression.

>>anthon+(OP)
Doesn't matter what the leaders think if the users hate it and call it slop

https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/microsoft-satya...

>>anthon+(OP)
I find it very easy to believe. The pressures that select for leadership in corporate America are wholly perpendicular to the skills and intelligence for identifying how to leverage novel and revolutionary technologies into useful products that people will pay for. I present as evidence the graveyard of companies and careers left behind by many of those leaders who failed to innovate despite, in retrospect, what seemed to be blindingly obvious product decisions to make.

>>ChuckM+n2
I started working in 1997. Cisco was one of our big customers so I knew a lot of engineers there. Cisco stock hid $80 in 2000. In 2002 it was at $10.

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/CSCO/

I knew people who purchased their options but didn't sell and based on the AMT (Alternative Minimum Tax) had tax bills of millions of dollars based on the profit IF they sold on the day they purchased it. But then it dropped to $10 and even if they sold everything they couldn't pay the tax bill. They finally changed the law after years but those guys got screwed over.

I was young and thought the dot com boom would go on forever. It didn't. The AI bubble will burst too but whether it is 2026, 27, 28, who knows. Bubble doesn't mean useless, just that the investors will finally start demanding a profit and return on their investment. At that point the bubble will pop and lots of companies will go fail or lose a lot of money. Then it will take a couple of years to sort out and companies have to start showing a profit.

>>rightb+Z2
And this is the broken mindset tanking multiple large companies' products and services (Google, Apple, MS, etc). Focus on the stock. The product and our users are an afterthought.

Someone linked to a good essay on how success plus Tim Cook's focus on the stock has caused the rot that's consuming Apple's software[0]. I thought it was well reasoned and it resonated with me, though I don't believe any of the ideas were new to me. Well written, so still worth it.

0. The Fallen Apple - https://mattgemmell.scot/the-fallen-apple/

>>anthon+(OP)
Were you around in 2008?

>>ChuckM+rc
Heh, I was at Netscape when the Sun-Netscape Alliance was created. Tip of the hat to a fellow gray beard. ;)

>>rightb+Z2
The investor being the customer rather than actual paying customers was something I noticed occurring in the late 90s in the startup and tech world. Between that shift in focus and the influx of naive money the Dot Bomb was inevitable.

Sadly the fallout from the Dotcom era wasn't a rejection of the asinine Business 2.0 mindset but instead an infection that spread across the entirety of finance.

>>anthon+(OP)
every time these companies make a mistake and waste billions of dollars it is well-publicized. so there is plenty of data that they are frequently and preposterously wrong.

>>anthon+(OP)
The mistake is simple. It is like the difference between giving you many tools to use vs making you the tool.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRq_SAuQDec

>>ChuckM+n2
I have zero doubt that AI will eventually make many people lots of money. Just about every company on earth is collecting TBs of data on everyone and they know they're sure they can use that information against us somehow, but they can't possibly read and search through it all on their own.

I have quite a few doubts that it'll be a net positive for society though. The internet (for all of its flaws) is still a good thing generally for the public. Users didn't have to be convinced of that, they just needed to be shown what was possible. Nobody had to shove internet access into everything against customer's wishes. "AI" on the other hand isn't something most users want. Users are constantly complaining about it being pushed on them and it's already forced MS to scale back the AI in windows 11.

>>rightb+Z2
In particular it's the short term stock price. They'll happily grift their way to overinflated stock prices today even though at some point their incestuous money shuffle game will end and the stocks will crash and a bunch of people who aren't insider trading are going to be left with massive losses.

>>6510+9v
I get the feeling that a lot of people using AI, feeding it their private data, and trusting what it tells them are certainly being tools.

>>ChuckM+n2
The comparison to the dotcom bubble isn't without merit. As a technology in terms of its applications though I think the best one to compare the LLM with is the mouse. It was absolutely a revolution in terms of how we interact with computers. You could do many tasks much faster with a GUI. Nearly all software was redesigned around it. The story around a "conversational interface" enabled by an LLM is similar. You can literally see the agent go off and run 10 grep commands or whatever in seconds, that you would have had to look up.

The mouse didn't become some huge profit center and the economy didn't realign around mouse manufacturers. People sure made a lot of money off it indirectly though. The profits accrued from sales of software that supported it well and delivered productivity improvements. Some of the companies who wrote that software also manufactured mice, some didn't.

I think it'll be the same now. It's far from clear that developing and hosting LLMs will be a great business. They'll transform computing anyway. The actual profits will accrue to whoever delivers software which integrates them in a way that delivers more productivity. On some level I feel like it's already happening, Gemini's well integrated into Google Drive, changes how I use it, and saves me time. ChatGPT is just a thing off on the side that I chat randomly with about my hangover. Github Copilot claims it's going to deliver productivity and sometimes kinda does but man it often sucks. Easy to infer from this info who my money will end up going to in the long run.

On diversification, I think anyone who's not a professional investor should steer away from picking individual stocks and already be diversified... I wouldn't advise anyone to get out of the market or to try and time the market. But a correction will come eventually and being invested in very broad index funds smooths out these bumps. To those of us who invest in the whole market, it's notable that a few big AI/tech companies have become a far larger share of the indices than they used to be, and a fairly sure bet that one day, they won't be anymore.

>>autoex+uw
Stock price increases that don't lead to higher dividends eventually are indistinguishable from Ponzi schemes after the fact.