Companies IPO much later now because the laws changed. They used to be forced to IPO much earlier because employees shareholders pushed them over the threshold for # or private shareholders.
So you're absolutely correct about the comparison.
That said, I bet whatever happens over the next 20 years goes beyond what any of us can imagine. I wouldn't be surprised if the winners of this paradigm are worth hundreds of trillions. Sounds ridiculous until you look backwards and valuation a and consider this is an exponential curve and time is compressing.
Well sure..., but what might be less obvious is that a can of beans, a tank of gas, a wig and a chair can all inflate at 2% a year while stocks and land inflate much faster.
The way we measure inflation is focused on consumption goods that everyone depends on. It doesn't take into account the stock market.
In other words we could stay around 3% in measured inflation but see ~30% annual equity inflation...
So my point is that the most valuable companies in 20 years could be worth hundreds of trillions while the cost of a can of beans is like $5, not $200.
Zimbabwe type inflation happens when the economy doesn't get more efficient at producing stuff as fast as the government prints money. If the economy increases efficiency very quickly and the government prints money to peg at 2% inflation, the products we consume only increase a little bit while scarce assets increase a lot.
This is why in the time I took a can of beans to increase in price 3x a house increased 20x.
As a power user of Google search for decades, I find myself using it less and less (maybe now 5% of my historical peak usage). There are several reasons, but the main one is because they have gradually traded search quality for ad revenue with the direct consequence being wasting my time.
If I type in the name of a company so that I can navigate to their website, and I have to scroll past my whole viewport of other companies bidding to be placed above where I'm trying to go, I learn it's faster for me to just type the website address into the bar instead of going via Google.
They designed a UX that made my life easier and caused me to form a habit, and then broke that UX for money causing me to form a new habit.
It's just one example of dozens, but the consequence is that I see 95% fewer Google ads than I used to. My guess I am on the leading edge (along with many others on this forum) of a wave of change of user behavior that spells pessimism for Google search revenue.
It is unfortunate and only sometimes sustainable to alienate a third of your user base to extract 2x as much money from the rest for a net 30% increase in short term revenue. It’s not repeatable usually.
I'd assume Google leadership weren't unintelligent, looked at the trends, and decided maximizing search revenue per user was more advantageous than search quality.
E.g. how Amazon knows they have a problem with counterfeits and low-quality copies that damages their brand, but chose volume over quality
Neither company will ever explicitly put it in those terms, but it seems obvious Google isn't looking at search as a growth engine anymore.
It’s not a judgement of intellect but of character. Those people were forced out of Google when the advertising/boiler room mentality took over.
Amazon kind of does say it but they were clever about it. They don’t let rhetoric win only raw numbers. That means they will always shill or scam for profit. Has been that way for decades but only now are people paying attention.
> I learn it's faster for me to just type the website address into the bar instead of going via Google.
It pretty much always was, assuming you type reasonably well anyway. Especially once browsers just started guessing at what you want by automatically adding "https://" and ".com" to whatever you type into an address bar and trying that before redirecting you to a search engine.
What terrifies me is the thought that knowing the answer everyone sees is wrong and everyone being incapable of thinking critically about it. Maybe this is a timeless problem, but I fear it getting worse.
Or it's controlled by Dr. Evil tho the initial phase of it that's completely and 100% correct so we get sucked in and then Dr. Evil in five or ten years starts manipulating humanity. Sounds not good ... to the point of even evil ;-)
> Maybe this is a timeless problem, but I fear it getting worse.
It's both, I think. It seems to me that it happens during periods of fast technological advancement. We just happen to be living through a sustained period of that.
The historical precedent is that it slows down again after people get a chance to take in the new reality. I am not sure how comforting that is.
Say what everyone who has an iphone or android phone is also wearing Meta Smart Display glasses? Those are only generation one smart display glasses, they have a lot of improving to do.
Disrupt trust and you disrupt the nash equilibrium.
I remember that morning when almost every channel was replaying it. I remember watching live when the second plane hit.
I didn't understand the long term implications then, but I remember hearing things other people said who clearly did understand. It wasn't about the towers or the death, it was about the attack on trust and the long term impact that would have on individual people's choices that made up the broader culture.
Like a stick in the spokes of a continent sized bike that takes decades to flip over.
Values drive behavior. Who owns / runs futurism and what are their values?
Journalism / media as activity needs to be sustainable and unfortunately in our current world it's seems very difficult to sustainably remain high integrity. Sometimes it may be greed, but most of the time I think it's survival.
In this case AI is part of what is threatening journalist survivability, so it kind of makes sense.
Lots of people really want to convince the public there is a bubble.
Hmmm...
My advice: if you actually want to know the truth of what is going on, get a general understanding of finance and read the actual financial statements/filings and their disclaimers. It's very easy to write articles like this that cherry pick certain numbers out of context to support a specific narrative. Reuters is in the process of liquidating their reputation in the same way that forbes and business insider and many others publications have.
I've seen plenty of evidence and I could take a bunch of time to dig it up and present it to you... Or you could just take note to think critically about the content whenever someone else is paying for you to read an article instead of you paying for it yourself. (Even if it's for a source which historically had a good reputation)
Maybe I'm being chastised and down voted by real people who take offense to encouraging study and critical thinking about information that impacts financial decisions on a website with community guidelines that encourages intellectual curiosity, or maybe I'm being attacked by LLM bots in a time when it's never been cheaper or easier to do so.
Youre riding a fine line between being curious and sealioning. If you're actually curious, try asking another way.
No, that's not all I need to know. I need to know much much more than that, because my needs follow from my wants and I want to understand the full truth.
I can think for myself, and I don't need you, or Reuters, to think for me, thank you.
I mean the oligarchy and corruption has gotten out of hand, we the people deserve our voices to be heard, instead of the people with the most money and power deciding everything.
Ai is different because it wields our languages, often more effectively than we do, this is the real danger of Ai
In terms of proposals, Michael Sandel and Daron Acemoglu have some ideas that are worthy of wider discussion.
I'm working on an essay, here is my current reference section
Human level embodiment took 10,000x longer to evolve than human level abstract and symbolic information processing, and is also probably 10,000x harder to replicate in an alternative form.
I'm not responsible for deciding whether companies IPO. I'm also not fully apprised of Anthropic's current financials. I have done research deep dives into private and public companies for investment reasons.
All that said, my instinct is that the unprecedented context of Anthropic's IPO is not enough of a reason to prevent it from doing said IPO. If anthropic has insufficient capital and is operating at a significant loss, with no way to model a transition to profitability, or is over-valued, those are reasons I can understand.
My issue with the existential risk reason, is that there is also a risk that anthropic disrupts and deflates multiple industries while capturing that value for itself. If the public are blocked from participating in it's success, that is also a risk to the public. To people who are skeptical about AI and assume this is all a big scam I'm sure what I'm saying sounds delusional or like ajoke... But what I struggle with is how the logic can run one way but not the other.
Given the unprecedented potential impact at stake, the risks, the potential rewards, and the risks of not participating in the potential rewards, all seem similarly unprecedented.
Is this just a case of someone assuming the risks far outweigh the rewards? Is it that simple?
> Today, at least at the undergrad level, universities function as a job screen for people who can dedicate themselves to an academic program and complete it
I predict that this is not going to last much longer itf institutions continue to avoid holding students accountable for egregious acts of academic misconduct.
Every time they choose student tuition over maintaining the integrity of the credentials the value of the credentials as a screen drops a little bit. At some point it will fall below a threshold, and then at some point afterwards the rest of society will realize it.
The credential itself is usually irrelevant, most jobs that require a degree will accept any degree. In those cases it's being used as a class filter more than an indication of merit or training.
Is this still true? My understanding was that that was a thing in the 1990s and into early 2000s but not really any more.
Obviously some degrees still matter, if you're doing real engineering or practicing medicine or practicing law or other STEM things you need the proper education to do so.
But I think for a lot of the jobs that wanted "any degree" to like, be a sales rep or work at a rental car place or whatever entry-level office job, that the college degree requirement has gone away.
This comment has me confused. The first sentence reinforces my point, the second one contradicts it (and isn't true in my experience, many companies want a degree, any degree). Say more?
I guess I don't understand what you're trying to say, especially after your reply.
Here's what I am saying: most top companies require degrees but will only take a degree from a select list of colleges, while government jobs that require degrees will accept a degree from any college.
Protip: university was always mostly a class filter - sure it had other functions too but access required years without substantial earnings, prior education, money, and cultural familiarity with academic institutions, so basically only rich people could go to university
The tipping point will be when an AI/LLM is as good as a human with a bachelor's degree. At that point, it won't matter how legitimate the credentials are, because the jobs just won't be there for people anymore.
For software at least, that point was probably reached like 10 months ago, and has definitely been blown past by now. It's not like humans with a fresh degree and no experience have much business/product sense, which is the only place where the AI might still be lacking. From what I can see, usually "senior" (so generally several years experience) means "can be asked to do a vague thing and they'll actually get it done independently."
For a lot of office jobs, in terms of what people do on computers, this is already the case. However, I don't think a lot of these jobs are going away just yet.
It's really the same enshittification trajectory everywhere: Once it's been turned into a commercial product, the optimization of rent seeking gradually displaces all other purposes.
So you're absolutely correct about the comparison.
That said, I bet whatever happens over the next 20 years goes beyond what any of us can imagine. I wouldn't be surprised if the winners of this paradigm are worth hundreds of trillions. Sounds ridiculous until you look backwards and valuation a and consider this is an exponential curve and time is compressing.
reply