Corporate America seems ready to spend real money on AI, at least for now. This money being spent today doesn’t come close to recouping the investment OpenAI et al have made, but the trickle’s begun. The money’s not all imaginary.
OpenAI's bet is that its frontier models will be so far ahead of the current status quo that, if they are the only ones providing those frontier models, they will be able to name their price (to end users and advertisers alike) while increasing their share of spend in the space.
But even today, last-generation and open-source models form a meaningful portion of adopted solutions. Not every application in 2028 will need the AGI-approaching GPT-10 - especially if those applications can leverage a relatively small amount of code, perhaps even written by that GPT-10, that can in turn orchestrate (say) DeepSeek V5 running on compute that can be obtained for pennies on the dollar.
OpenAI could become a victim of its own success, and cause a house of cards to take down the global economy in the process. I personally hope this doesn't happen, but there is real risk here.
There will be the WebVans of the AI boom era, we just don't know their names yet. There also will be Ciscos and Suns that will never reach their high-water mark ever again, or become obsolete in a few years, and sold for less that what people expect.
I really don’t know what a full complement of good tools mean! your team is very large your team is very cheap You spend an awful lot on Ai tooling!
We spend about £50 - £200 a head per month on AI tooling.
Assuming everyone was at the top of of that scale (most aren’t) it’s like ai for 50 employees = cost of 1 employee.
...i just wish the code it generated was decent.
It's still pretty funny money. Companies are buying those subscriptions to show their shareholders how trendy they are, not because they're useful to them. And the subscription price points are widely speculated to not even have positive gross margin, yet alone starting to recoup any investment. It's far from clear that there's any kind of viable business here.
I can’t just copy-paste what comes out. But I have to say I’m able to get substantially more done as it saves me a lot of grunt work. You do have to learn how to use it like any other tool. I have found that it’s helped me sharpen a lot of my own skills in multiple areas and improved my understanding of systems I’m working on. I am able to learn new things much faster because it has a real-time feedback mechanism.
I can’t speak to your direct report but I’d be concerned about falling behind as a leader if you aren’t using it in the course of your regular work.
Like Okay, it sounds like a valid point. The issue is the hand waving and the fact it is not grounded in reality.
It feels like the dotcom bubble was recent to those of us who lived through it, but 25 years is about a generation. But a lot of the people in the markets now (and running companies) were kids back then and thus weren't really aware of what was going on.
If I understand the math correctly. Amd could offer the GPUs at around a 20x discount to OpenAI on a deal worth 10-20 billion and be profitable on both amortized R&D and Cost of Goods sold.
Nah, nothing in the current market is based on fundamentals.
Sure it is. Stock prices are based on supply and demand. Oh, did you mean company fundamentals? Hmm.
BTW that demand is all coming from 401k contributions. The powers that be are terrified of a downturn causing too many job losses tanking the whole thing.
stonks goes up
In theory yes but OpenAI doesn't have a stock and in the word of AntiChrist Peter Thiel : "We only have AI, there is nothing else out there except for AI" so with the belief still strong to carry at least up until GPT 7 OpenAI will find ways to present itself to the world as capable of putting to use the AMD GPUs and AMD will benefit from it.
And honestly the anti Christ is right. Vibe coding is already bigger than self driving cars, the metaverse and all that stuff that emerged during covid
I don't think lending money against stock options would be considered at all safe.
However the deal may work along the lines of:
Investors buy AMD shares, send the price up.
OpenAI uses it's option to buy shares for 1c, sell the to the investors for far more, use the profit to buy AMD GPUs.
So it potentially works very well for OpenAI, ok for AMD and questionably for the investors funding it buy buying AMD shares.
Whether this works out or not no longer depends on the specifics of the deals. This either works big picture or it's all a smoking crater
Not commercially to an extent that supports the massive infra buildout
A couple of neat productivity tricks don’t pay for a 500 billion stargate rollout
This level of denialism if insane.
What exactly do you want?
What level of proof would be enough for you to admit that AI has worked out?
Thanks.
So I continue to sit here laughing. Keep coming back with weak evidence though.
> Can you point me to the effect on earnings of the customers of said AI tools
Just looking at the overview of Levels' ventures listed in the Bio:
http://PhotoAI.com $141K/m
http://InteriorAI.com $29K/m
http://RemoteOK.com $34K/m
http://Nomads.com $14K/m
http://levelsio.com $14K/m
http://pieter.com $6K/m
You can see that his old ventures (which he has built over many many years) are bringing in less money than his new ventures (built over fewer years). How is this not "effect on earnings of the customers of said AI tools"? Levels is a customer of AI tools. His earnings have gone way up as a result of AI tools.
Wonder what they been doing so far, really, as it is only tinygrad that been voraciously pushing for these drivers in recent years, not even AMD themselves. Besides, given ClosedAI's the wonderful record of releasing stuff to the public, even if this happens, may benefit only inside tech, not the general audience.
With AMD's stock jump today it's net worth increased about $35billion, close enough in value to those stocks option they gave away (if it was redeemed instantly).
It's too much of a coincidence so I'm guessing market makers and institutional shareholders priced it in their trading today.
The share options will be worth at least $100bn too, if the conditions are met. But meeting the conditions will require buying huge numbers of GPUs from AMD. GPUs worth $100bn, and somewhere to put them. OpenAI can't afford that - not even close.
So they need to raise financing. On the face of it, the options seem to mean that lending OpenAI the money to buy the GPUs is perfectly safe. You take the stock options as collateral. You lend the money, OpenAI buy the GPUs, the AMD stock goes up, the option conditions are met, and even if OpenAI didn't pay you back the options will let you recover your investment.
However, this loan is far less safe than it first appears. The problem is that although lending the money allows openAI to buy GPUs, this doesn't necessarily cause AMD stock to rise. Infact if OpenAI don't find a profitable use for them then both their stock price, and AMD's will go down. And you'll be left with worthless collateral and a big loan to a company which can't afford to pay it back. So they haven't actually magically created financing at all. They just created the illusion of it. It's very clever. But it's fake. The real announcement will be when or if someone lends OpenAI cash.