I remember the late 90s where people were worried about corporations getting their hands on the internet and the general warning was "they'll turn it into a mall with a few anchor stores and no choices"
I think that's a great way to explain it. And it's also something we do very differently in Europe, where any investment has to be justified by more traditional factors, which a tech startup obviously can't offer in its nascent and growing phase.
You would think this would be more widely understood but whenever I point out that it works like this and that e.g. in the dotcom bubble they sometimes literally hired people off the street to fill seats just to look like they had something I get down voted on reddit/hacker news
It's incredible how longstanding this hype mechanism is as a mode of valuation in tech. The dot com boom going back twenty years was itself a hype bubble that didn't actually require companies like Pets .com to be profitable -- just to have a kind of sleek, glossy, future-forward veneer
Add to that example (e.g., dot com bubble) led by company’s like Enron, the real estate bubble created by “banks too large to fail” in the mid- to late oughts.
I feel a lot of the hype centered valuations could be, and should be, eliminated, if the SEC and CBOE held those responsible, accountable.
silicon valley (the tv show) had some problematic people on the show, but this was one thing i think they did really well, starting with the first ep of the first season. they showed how much of it is just a marketing ploy/sham, and you basically just fake it until you (maybe) make it.
Expensive for a minute, until everyone needs their inventory to move at the same time. Then producers get the short end of the stick again; when exporters finally have liquidity to purchase, prices will have tanked already. Vicious cycle.
(Little story: I gave this interview on the walk between the metro and Fondation Louis Vuitton on my way to see the Rothko retrospective last year, which I also stand by.)
Reminds me about a discussion I had about Rothko painting at the National Gallery of Canada with an artistic companion and their incredulous response to my reductionist assessment of the work as a creative analog to dimensional reduction 🙃
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All they had to do to make their original valuations was eliminate all public transit, half of all personal vehicles and monopolize the existing taxi infrastructure.
First people should stop believing in fake notions. AI as most define it never existed and probably never will in our living existence. Period. Dr. Luc Julia exposes many facts in his book L'intelligence Artificielle n'existe pas! Following video resumes most of the content. https://youtu.be/6prCHASkavM?si=hl8duShhXEmw7ZpP
I mean this just describes good ol' American salesmanship. Talk people into taking something they might not want by making it sound as big and amazing as possible - which usually involves lying!
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AI is over hyped. I’m a retired software engineer and I developed AI applications 30 years ago for data analytics. These companies figured out how to monetize it. Yes a slightly different AI but ours did statistical analysis too.
Yes, although there were VCs (from 1940s) & IPOs well before Netscape (1995) & the Web. e.g the PC hype cycle started in the 1970s & Apple went public in 1980.
They were at the time. Tech was dominated by big corps, IBM, Honeywell etc., & defence based semiconductor industry.The PC revolution was created by garage based small teams of hippies, ex students, people from outside the corporate world, by the 90s the mainframe was dying & the world had changed.
Yes, intel was famously non-corporate, as was IBM, Xerox and the guys from Compaq. Even the 1/3 of Apple was an ex intel/Fairchild guy. software side was usually wildly profitable by the time VCs came in
Experienced this. Worked for a startup (maybe two, or three) and we produced... Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Oh, we were busy all day, working, but in the end we did not have a product or service we were selling. Zero revenue. We were estimated at 1.5 million. Boss was scamming investors.
I’ve seen many examples of this as well. A gander at many penny stocks, but concentrated more so within the Pink Sheet market, shows investor scams are plentiful.
Again though, the reasons why this is permitted to occur, is because Big Money OWNS the agencies that are supposed to protect investors.
I have seen so many tech bro hype cycles for disability tech thst never seemed to manifest meaningfully in daily disabled life, from videogame style prosthesis to wheelchairs that climb stairs to inferior automated versions of the Be My Eyes app. The hype cycle is so obvious in the disability world.
I think a lot about the internet in the early 00s just after the bubble burst, a brief hiatus in the VC hype cycle, and it just makes me madder at egg16egg for despoiling it.
🎯 - very prescient take
“What we need to fear most is not what AI will do to us on its own, but how people in power will use AI to control and manipulate us”
I was an engineer and key player in several startups which I think were largely beneficial to society - e.g. on-line billing. I have always been mindful of a phrase I heard early in my career.
Just cause you can build it, doesn't mean you should
Don't know that I can necessarily articulate this properly but seems a lot like the same thing has been happening in politics too: hype built up around candidates as a way to leverage support and growth of political mechanisms, completely divorced from the effectiveness or value of those politicians
I believe there are a number reasons “techno hype” plays an over-weighted role w/in the markets today.
The “Markets” overall devolved into nothing more than high-stakes Casinos, controlled by the House (Big Money) w/ little, to no, oversight from the agencies obligated by law to do so.
A company’s Share Price (SP) today, depends heavily on the prevailing attitude of Large Hedge Funds and Banks.
Between Algo Trading & Shorting, both of which yield SP manipulation, Company CEO’s and Industry Leaders see “Hype” as the only answer, b/c the SEC and CBOE are willfully blind.
It's not just IT, either. Venture capital can create that kind of incentive in other industries. I've seen it in nuclear, which is why I'm cautious about people who over-promise on new nuclear technologies.
The main thing that I think is unfair is not crediting our system of risk capital with any real social returns. I also wonder what the alternative is... I suppose you could design an risk taking machine that didn't expose much to the public (Google x?), but that also has its downsides.
I'm saying that the hype narrative exists irrespective of social returns, making claims that are rarely if ever measured against the actuality of the outcomes.
This is not the same thing as saying there are no returns.
My experience with Venture Capital is that it's transactional. VCs invest in a company because there is a large transaction on the horizon. So, yah, of course they only care about short term gain and hype is their greatest asset.
Hype as valuation started 2 years before the 1995 Netscape IPO. In 1993 former Silicon Valley Banker Anthony Perkins founded Red Herring magazine. Its title not only reflected the nickname bankers had for IPOs but explicitly recognized the hype. We can ignore Marc Andreessen.
There's been a ton of coverage of quantum computing lately, all with the assumption that this marvelous future is only years away. The fact is there is no guarantee quantum computing will ever work, as there are fundamental problems that may never be overcome. But the noise serves to drive investors
I did my physics degree literature review on quantum computing over 20 years ago, and the media landscape around it then was that it was just around the corner.
There is a guarantee that "quantum computing will ever work" though, as it works now. Just not at any useful scale.
Where narrative usually = lie or infused with half truths let's say. Having worked in Silicon Valley for decades, that IS how they work. Even worse? Often journalists "can't" write the whole truth ¬hing but the truth bec they're taught to balance their writing to ensure advertisers don't leave.
Comments
This was commonly shared:
https://worldofends.com/
I feel a lot of the hype centered valuations could be, and should be, eliminated, if the SEC and CBOE held those responsible, accountable.
I think of the random manipulation of the California utilities market by douchebag traders
Spot on accurate.
I’ve worked places that championed themselves as innovative market disrupters upending the entire (insert word) industry.
In reality it’s just like a web app barely working
Meanwhile, Silicon Valley elites seek profitable investments rent-seeking in DC
https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/8/24065999/uber-earnings-profitable-year-net-income
How could that have possibly not worked?
Yes Google Facebook Amazon etc were successful, but unless you’ve got money to waste (and some of them have) you’re probably not going to find it
But AI retouching? Has saved decades of my life in the last two years! ❤️📷❤️❤️
Again though, the reasons why this is permitted to occur, is because Big Money OWNS the agencies that are supposed to protect investors.
“What we need to fear most is not what AI will do to us on its own, but how people in power will use AI to control and manipulate us”
Just cause you can build it, doesn't mean you should
https://Go.workersfiremusk.com
Not a coincidental.
The “Markets” overall devolved into nothing more than high-stakes Casinos, controlled by the House (Big Money) w/ little, to no, oversight from the agencies obligated by law to do so.
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A company’s Share Price (SP) today, depends heavily on the prevailing attitude of Large Hedge Funds and Banks.
Between Algo Trading & Shorting, both of which yield SP manipulation, Company CEO’s and Industry Leaders see “Hype” as the only answer, b/c the SEC and CBOE are willfully blind.
https://vcinfodocs.com
Trump is VC’s (and Putin’s and white Christian nationalists’) useful idiot. Everything is happening all at once right now.
'little cribs and acessories',..
...for Pet Rocks...
"hype it right",..and many will always come and beg you to take their money.
Yet, COBOL is still used in US Government systems. Bet there are also systems with assembler and Fortran.
I'm saying that the hype narrative exists irrespective of social returns, making claims that are rarely if ever measured against the actuality of the outcomes.
This is not the same thing as saying there are no returns.
There is a guarantee that "quantum computing will ever work" though, as it works now. Just not at any useful scale.
This is very on point. How the hell have we got here?