Money Stuff: Palantir Delivers the Tendies

Summary

Summarized wtih ChatGPT

One theme of this column is that public companies should do stupid stuff to make their stocks go up. Not exclusively!

Highlights from Article

I think a lot about how OpenAI, when it raises money from investors, tells them that “It would be wise to view any investment in OpenAI Global, LLC in the spirit of a donation, with the understanding that it may be difficult to know what role money will play in a post-AGI world.” OpenAI, these days, has real and growing revenue (from selling subscriptions to its consumer chatbot, etc.), much bigger expenses (from spending tons of money training models), and an enormous market valuation driven by the assumption that eventually that will flip. But OpenAI doesn’t encourage that assumption, at least, not officially. OpenAI’s marketing is like “sure eventually our expenses might come down, but if all goes well our revenue won’t go up in ways that you can understand; instead we will transcend money.” It’s honestly a great pitch, I love it.

I think a lot about how OpenAI, when it raises money from investors, tells them that “It would be wise to view any investment in OpenAI Global, LLC in the spirit of a donation, with the understanding that it may be difficult to know what role money will play in a post-AGI world.” OpenAI, these days, has real and growing revenue (from selling subscriptions to its consumer chatbot, etc.), much bigger expenses (from spending tons of money training models), and an enormous market valuation driven by the assumption that eventually that will flip. But OpenAI doesn’t encourage that assumption, at least, not officially. OpenAI’s marketing is like “sure eventually our expenses might come down, but if all goes well our revenue won’t go up in ways that you can understand; instead we will transcend money.” It’s honestly a great pitch, I love it.

But for the AI buildout the pitch is pretty much “we need several trillion dollars to build stuff that nobody can entirely conceive of right now, and we don’t really have an economic model of how it will make money, but it is so cool that the money will probably take care of itself, unless we transcend money, which would be cool too.”

Even Wall Street skeptics on AI’s ultimate money-making potential, such as Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s head of equity research Jim Covello, have said it’s worth staying invested in those who provide the plumbing.

• Pickaxes, not gold

All material owns to the authors, of course. If I’m highlighting or writing notes on this, I mostly likely recommend reading the original article, of course.

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