> They don't need to "hedge their bets" it's already a humongous win.
replyThat's a flawed argument. Why wouldn't you want to hedge a risky bet, and one that's even quite highly correlated to Microsoft's own industry sector?
do we know whether Microsoft could have been selling secondary shares as part of various funding rounds?
replymy impression is that many of these "investments" are structured IOUs for circular deals based on compute resources in exchange for LLM usage
About the same as they wasted on Nokia.
replyI think people are looking for excuses to declare OpenAI and Anthropic teetering on the brink of failure when the actual reality is… they are wildly successful by absolutely any measure. This deal is proof. If Microsoft didn’t believe in OpenAI they wouldn’t have restructured it this way. They’d have tightened their reins and brought in “adult supervision”
reply> I think people are looking for excuses to declare OpenAI and Anthropic teetering on the brink of failure when the actual reality is… they are wildly successful by absolutely any measure.
replyMaybe that will be true someday. But, right now, they are burning billions of dollars every quarter. Their expenses far far outweigh their income and they are nowhere near profitability.
silly valley stopped letting the subtraction of two numbers dictate their reality since the start-up era. while the money and vcs stopped trying to finding the next uber and went all in on llms, they didn't get wiser in how they gauge if something is worth investing in
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