Could somebody explain why there is so much negativity towards Thinking Machines in this thread? I realize that they haven't publicly announced a product yet but presumably the VCs have some idea of what Thinking Machines is building, and they have some pretty significant OpenAI talent on board, including Murati herself. Some amount of skepticism is warranted, of course, but a lot of these comments read as closer to hostility.
True. People here can be like this. I have not forgotten even the greatest juice maker of all times, Juicero was similarly disparaged with all this negativity.
Well a lot of people on this forum are founders or early employees in startups. Every dollar vcs set on fire chasing some obviously stupid idea, waste on crypto memecoins, etc is a dollar that is not helping some legitimate startup get funded.
Yes, but when you put it as "why are you investing in these bad ideas? Invest in mine, it's obviously much better", it sounds a lot more self-interested (and far more likely to be wrong).
It's a bad look on the entire industry. We send billions to serial grifters selling vaporware while the backbone of the internet is basically powered by $5 donations
These people somehow imagine that they (as taxpayers perhaps) are going to pay the cost one way or another. Not to mention there's a tinge of jealousy over the level of VC money involved - they imagine these people do not "deserve" it.
Often I think if the money could not be used for some better purpose. It is still huge resources wasted. Like digging and filling same trench. Overall it is not efficient use of resources or time to me.
But maybe there is some gain that I can't just imagine...
You can say the same about most science research. In fact, many people do say the same, scrutinizing many different avenues of research as pointless. There are countless examples of "pointless" research ending up being useful.
(Note that it's much more legitimate to scrutinize scientific research, since it's mostly publicly funded, as opposed to VCs investing in startups.)
> Overall it is not efficient use of resources or time to me.
I mean, the tech world has done a lot of good and advanced humanity a lot. More than most industries, IMO. Most of that is by inventing new things. A society could dial down useless spending by dialing down innovation, but it's not clear to me that there's a way to get more innovation with less waste than the current system.
I think many industries are far more of an "inefficient use of resources". I think if the world as a whole would spend 10x more on scientific and technological advancement, at the cost of less e.g. fashion, less investment in entertainment, less investment in (some forms of) finance, etc, the world would be far better off. (I'm not advocating that this should be forced on society, just stating my opinion on what a more optimal way of allocating resources would be.)
> Could somebody explain why there is so much negativity towards Thinking Machines in this thread?
I think it lies at the intersection of a lot of topics where HN comments are hostile: VCs, large fundraising, AI, OpenAI related employees. These are all topics where HN comments are more hostile than pragmatic.
Most of the hostility is just a proxy for “VCs bad” banter.
I've lived through 3 and read up on at least 10 more.
Many people know it's a bubble. You see lots of HN comments that it's a bubble. We certainly did in 2007.
In a bubble, the predominant notion is not "I wonder if it's a bubble", but rather "It's a bubble, I hope I can make my money before it pops". A perfect example of this was the Tulip craze in the Netherlands. Nobody actually believed tulip bulbs were worth that much, they just wanted to find a bigger sucker to make a profit, if you read accounts from the time.
This. Ans that's why we even manage to reproduce bubbles in a very simple simulated environnement among finance students who know exactly how overvaluated their assets are (I can't find the paper right now though…)
No, you're predicting that it's a bubble based on past events. It might be likely that it's a bubble. But nobody knows the future, no matter how confident they are.
In the context of economics, bears and bulls are people who have a negative/ positive outlook. Something looking bearish means you have a belief that it will go down. Something looking bullish means I you believe ut will go up.
It's nothing to do with Thinking Machines as a company, it's to do with a VC that's content to bet two billion dollars on a company that has shown absolutely nothing, and the sorry state of affairs that represents.
> It's nothing to do with Thinking Machines as a company, it's to do with a VC that's content to bet two billion dollars on a company that has shown absolutely nothing, and the sorry state of affairs that represents.
Why does it represent a "sorry state of affairs"?
VCs are risking money they manage, it's not like they're putting anyone else at risk. Do we really prefer a world in which we don't take risks to develop new technology?
The VC sector is probably an order of magnitude smaller then, say, fashion. Isn't money better spent taking risks to develop new technologies that have a chance to legitimately change the world for the better?
Note: If you think the technology could be a negative (which, to some extent I do because of the elements of AI safety, that's a separate argument. Not sure that that's what you're referring to though.)
They don't "use" pension funds, pension funds can choose to invest in VCs if they decide to do so. I think most usually invest low single digits of investment in VCs, mostly as diversification.
But I imagine there's immense pressure to do so. Returns are tracked relative to others. All distorted by big jumps in valuations. In the long term, there might be a more prudent/sustainable use of some of that capital but we'll never know, everyone's chasing share price go up, not value added / profit go up.
Yes, it's good to have your finger in the pie. But the stake may be overpriced, given current behaviour.
VCs, who go on and on about capitalism, were whining on Twitter until the Silicon Valley Bank got bailed out. In real capitalism the SVB would have been allowed to fail and the VCs would have taken a hit.
But no risk for them, everyone paid for them to keep their billions.
> VCs are risking money they manage, it's not like they're putting anyone else at risk.
They're putting everyone at risk.
As others in this thread have pointed out what these VCs do is make wildly risky gambles. When it pays off they make billions of dollars in profit and congratulate themselves for their foresight and the power of capitalism. When it doesn't they go cap-in-hand to the federal government, saying that if they're allowed to collapse it'll destabilize the entire economy.
If it were just some rich billionaires who might have to sell their second private jet when this collapses I'd agree with you: who cares what they do with their own money. But what's going to happen is that the taxpayer will end up footing the bill for their reckless behavior, and millions of people will end up worse off for it as governments cut back on welfare, healthcare, and aid programs to balance the books. In a very real sense, people are going to be paying for VC greed with their lives.
> When it pays off they make billions of dollars in profit and congratulate themselves for their foresight and the power of capitalism. When it doesn't they go cap-in-hand to the federal government, saying that if they're allowed to collapse it'll destabilize the entire economy.
But that's not actually true.
The Silicon Valley Bank situation aside - because it was a unique situation, we can open it if you want - when have VCs asked to be bailed out on failed investments? This kind of moral hazard is absolutely a thing in banks and finance in general, but afaik, not in the VC industry.
I have a pretty dim view of VCS, or at least a16z, after seeing some of the awful blockchain tech startups they were throwing money at during the last bubble
This place used to be a place for hackers and founders. Now it is mostly a place for middle aged software engineers who hate someone else to success, change and hope for the future of Linux desktop. Thinking Machines presents both change and success .
I don't think anyone can consider it a success just yet. But someone just injected 2 billion dollars into the enterprise. They are probably given a lot more information than you and I are. Maybe those people are dead wrong and they lose all their money, but maybe not.
With the public information there is neither a point in positivity not negativity. It would be speculation either way. A question that could be worth pondering is what exactly the investors are shown? What would you need to see to put all your money in thinking machines?
The answer was right in Mira's resignation from OpenAI [1]
“I want to create the time and space to do my own exploration.”
To create time and space and even able to explore it is far beyond cutting edge physics of today. If she is able to do it in just few billion dollars it is investment worth making.
Thinking Machines represent the new elite. People with the right pedigree that can raise billions with only an idea. If they fail, they’ll get paid anyway - and they’ll become billionaires.
It is a position that is completely unreachable for 99.9999% of people even in tech.
It is of course easy to write off critics as jealous has-beens and bozos.
My opinion: AI is taking all the money that could be spent on cool advancements that could give the average person hope and putting it towards a pipe dream. Why not be hostile towards the perceived death of an industry you love?
The whole system has gone crazy because of the wealthy having so much that the current game of coming up with stupid stories (AGI, Self Driving Cars, Robots that can do your household chores, Crypto) to convince people that a company can be worth 50-100 times earnings or valueless internet points will go up in price forever! There is no way these companies can possibly meet these expectations but the money sloshing around in the system makes it possible for rich people to keep believing (religiously) as there are no investments actually left for them to earn real money from a population that increasingly has nothing and earns less and less of the pie while valueless investments skyrocket.
> but presumably the VCs have some idea of what Thinking Machines is building
you imply that VCs are rational because bet their own money, which in current complicated world probably is not true. VC funds get money from complicated funnel likely including my/your retirement account and country public debt, VC managers likely receive bonuses for closed deals and not long term gains which may materialize in 10 years. So, investing 2B into non-existing product with unclear market fit/team/tech moat smells very strongly.
So your position is that a VC will invest $2B in a startup on vibes alone without having any idea what they're building, because it is not literally their money? That seems like a significantly stronger and less plausible claim than mine, which his merely that a prospective $2B investor has access to more information about the company's plans than we do and that their investment is at least some indication that there is a real product in the pipeline.
> that a prospective $2B investor has access to more information about the company's plans than we do and that their investment is at least some indication that there is a real product in the pipeline.
there is a funnel of investors: say retirement account holders put money into some retirement fund, fund manager put money into some "innovation fund", "innovation fund" put money in VC fund. All middlemen get % cut, VC likely watch slides about some product roadmap, but they more interested in closing the deal, get % cut and move on.
And if those $2B just go poof because they somehow failed to notice what is apparently so obvious to people on his thread -- that there is no real product -- your position is that the VC does not suffer any significant consequences?
I think most people aren’t aware that as CTO Murati can take a large chunk of the credit for OpenAI’s success. Her skills were mostly in deft technical management, a skill often under appreciated by nerds. Her success here is going to heavily depend on her ability to attract the right talent.
Not sure you can quantify all work, but to the accounts I read she was constantly guiding, scheduling the teams, resolving conflict, allocating resources. Exactly what a CTO does in a company that size.
Can’t help but feel there’s some sexism attached to the pushback here.
FWIW I would be skeptical of tech bros claiming they sped up 80% response time on microservice handling 5000000000 RPS. But I will be even more skeptical when they say "analyzed and implemented business requirements into maintainable and high performance code".
More generic, grandiose and oft-repeated someone's claims are, more skepticism is warranted.
I don't think that's fair. The company was founded around 6 months ago and already has a valuation of 12B even though barely anyone outside of AI has heard of them, and I bet almost nobody even here could name their product. It's not that people think she's untalented, but rather, she'd have to be superhuman to justify that by herself.
Because connections and social signalling matter more than ideas among the rich of the world. Only some people can get such disproportionate advantages.
Because it looks like VC are spendings ridicoulous amounts of money for hype while many startups with actual products and a product market fit struggle to attract investors because their product is not related to transformers.
It makes perfect sense... Why spend time and money on building a product in hope of attracting VCs that may like it? Instead present your idea in an intentionally vague way that makes everyone's imagination fill in the blanks in the most favorable way.
At the moment there's no public information about that, it's all about Apple being interested into buying but we don't know if Mistral is interested into selling at all. That's the gap.
