istewart
The 0.000001% chance that this thing morphs into the new global reserve currency is enough for a proper rationalist to keep it trundling along, don’t you think?
Also don’t underestimate the value of having someplace to park useful cronies you don’t currently have any other job for
Aww, how nice, Sam got his hair done professionally. And they gave him the Nimoy cut!
Point well made. Engineers, however quantitative they may be, are not often finance people. If the true believers were left in charge, they’d probably bankrupt promises much more rapidly, and auger the whole enterprise into the ground that much quicker. I can’t see that Altman is actually that great a finance guy either, at least in stewardship of other people’s money, but he has cultivated the ability to manipulate cash out of people and institutions during this grift-dominant era of Silicon Valley.
I feel like before Redbox went under, it was also a dumping ground for this sort of thing. For instance, that mid-budget Western “Rust” where Alec Baldwin killed the camerawoman on set felt like it was destined for this sort of distribution strategy. Who’s clamoring to go out to the theater to see a Western with Alec Baldwin these days? But it might stand out among all the other slop when you’re looking to turn your brain off on a Saturday night.
See also the rise of the “geezer-teasers,” where a random 80s/90s action star signs up to appear in the first and last 10 minutes of a generic action movie filmed someplace inexpensive, most likely eastern Europe or southeast Asia. There were a lot of those. Perhaps my favorite, that I still want to watch someday, was Danny Trejo and Danny Glover in “Bad-Ass 2: Bad-Asses.”
Yeah, this is the “emperor has no clothes” reality that I keep bringing up with my friends who are still invested in the bubble (emotionally if not financially). The genAI/LLM tech stack defies the entire decades-long cost curve and investment thesis for computer technology. Up through the smartphone era, you bought in because you could get more utility for lower cost. What’s being pushed now is higher-cost for dubious utility gains; it’s just that some vendors are eating losses to hide the costs. (And of course the externalities get swept under the rug.)