Well to be fair Nasa isn't nearly as good as it once was. The quality of engineer during the Apollo era was far better and more like what can be found at Spacex
What is that based on? NASA's recent accomplishments are far beyond anyone. Off the top of my head: The many Mars missions, JWST, Europa Clipper (still in progress), etc. SpaceX hasn't left Earth orbit, afaik.
>Without circular investments and valuations what would Open AI be worth? 100B? 300B? Entirely on revenue alone it seems like 20B. Current valuation appears to be two orders of magnitude off.
They just passed $20B in revenue, you can't really expect a company with this much hype and traction to have a 1x multiple.. that's not to say a 35x multiple makes sense either.
All I see everywhere is "OpenAI generated $13 billion in revenue in 2025" and it just cost them $8 billion. $5B loss in 2025 and projections of losing $14B this year.
I think the comment was a roundabout way of saying this is a clear market failure. There are more societally important things these people could be doing instead of shaving another ms off a transaction or finding minuscule option pricing inefficiencies. That the market is not correctly remunerating those options is the failure.
> For example, the tariff tantrums caused by trump proposing 100%+ china tariffs where he crashed the markets last spring, leading to a moderation in policy.
"Akshually traders are good bcuz they crash the market when the president does insane things" is not the own you think it is.
> this undervalues how financial engineering allows more ideas and companies to be funded
I think the comment is about the marginal utility of additional workers at Jane St over, perhaps, DE Shaw Research. The caliber and education of roughly the same kind of person might be applied to understanding drug mechanisms, or shaving off trading milliseconds.
Is the marginal benefit to the world greater if someone is advancing financial engineering? I don't think it's obvious that our increased complexity is, itself, yielding further increases in 'allowing more ideas and companies to be funded' except in the sense where already-wealthy people gain more discretionary income which they may decide to spend on their pet projects. Futures have existed for much longer than derivative markets; are we helping farmers more when we allow futures to be traded more quickly?
But I disagree that the limit is funding—it's simply a lack of concerted interest. We accept that we should spend tax money on rewarding certain financial activities, and we create a system that disproportionately rewards people who facilitate these activities. But we might restructure things so people are incentivized to do research instead of financial engineering.
I think the fundamental idea is that things of value need to be extracted or manufactured at some point and we're not set up to reward people studying new extractive tools or new manufacturing processes when those people could instead work on finance products.
I think these are totally different things. HFT firms and Hedge Funds are not "allowing more ideas to be funded". Finance in general can indeed be good but I think its much harder to argue for the net benefit of firms like Jane Street or Citadel.
This is just a weird Trump talking point. This situation is unprecedented on many levels. The pentagon already had a signed contract with these stipulations and wanted to unilaterally renegotiate with Anthropic under threat of deeming them a foreign adversary and destroying their business if they didn't accept the DoD demands. It's totally absurd to turn this around on Anthropic and paint them as trying to determine US Military policy.
Incredibly dumb take considering Dario Amodei has been extremely hawkish on China and especially about selling them chips that may allow them to catch up to the US level of capabilities...
Now that they cut them off from distillation attacks I find that dubious. In any case its not relevant to what you said:
>Anthropic cutting off the Pentagon is saying in no uncertain terms that they support allowing the PRC access to frontier military technology but not the US.
So by ignoring your own argument I take it you don't support this easily debunked claim.
You're smoking something funny. They have just shown they are willing to designate a US company as essentially a foreign spy agency because they wanted to try and renegotiate a contract and didn't get what they wanted and that's your reaction?
> I'm glad Anthropic is getting a taste of their own medicine.
I took that to mean that you support the Pentagon's threat which essentially IS to label Anthropic as a national security threat, simply because they wouldn't give the Pentagon the right to use Anthropic's AI to operate weapons or spy on American citizens.
Big fish tries to use their might to kill off small fish .
Anthropic uses big $$ it to become big fish in the AI pond.
Anthropic just found there are bigger fish in their pond.
I'm glad Anthropic have been reminded of this. THat doesn't mean I endorse the US govt using law to make companies a "national security threat" , although its an extremelt easy path from: monopolistic to -> active "national security threat".
Govt can, and in fact, has a mandate to, go after businesses when those businesses threaten a functioning market. Threatening is certainly part of that arsenal.
This is probably true since at least WW2 but isn't the central idea that Professors closest to cutting edge research can do the most interesting teaching?
If you want the best teachers you can always go to Liberal Arts Colleges where this isn't really an issue.
Point blank one of the most nakedly evil things the government has ever tried to do. Apparently Anthropic's sticking points were no using the model for autonomous kill orders and no mass surveillance...
The voters and congress tell the military how to use technology, not Anthropic. Shifting the decision to Anthropic takes away power from the citizenship.
Edit: The point is, go vote if you don't agree with what the administration is doing. Somebody will sell the DoD whatever they want no matter what Anthropic does.
Say I own a spoon company. The government says "hey, I'd like to buy a million spoons from you!" I say "sure, sounds great." We sign a contract stating that I'll give them 1M spoons and they'll send me $1M.
Then the government comes to me and says "hey, actually, turns out we need 500,000 forks and 300,000 knives and only 200,000 spoons."
I say "no, we are a spoon company. Very passionate about spoons. Producing forks and knives would be an entirely different business, and our contract was for spoons."
The military now threatens to destroy my company unless I give them forks and knives instead of spoons.
You say "the voters and congress tell the military how to use utensils, not SpoonCo. Shifting the decision to SpoonCo takes power away from the citizenship."
The military can sign contracts if they wish! They can decline to sign contracts if they wish!
But private citizens can also choose whether to sign or not sign contracts with the military. Threatening to destroy their business if they don't sign contracts the military likes (or to renegotiate existing contracts in the military's favor) is a huge violation.
The poll linked in the article shows even trump voters have <30% approval for the pentagon’s actions here, so if the citizenship tells the military how to do things…
You might want to go look at the laws that were passed in the wake of WWII. The US could trivially nationalize Anthopic if they want to play games with a weapons technology.
This could kill the golden goose. There is a strong argument to be made that Anthropic has a leading model because of the principled people who built it, and I don’t see how they won’t leave, like many did to go to Anthropic from OpenAI and Google.
Forcing those people to make weapons to be used against citizens is nothing like the total war in WW2. Why wouldn’t the pentagon just buy from another LLM supplier?
Bingo, DoD does not want Anthropic to set guardrails on the technology it buys. If they don't want to abide they are free to deny service. We all know how that will turn our for them with the current administration. All while the DoD will just move to another provider that WILL abide. The only power really lies in whatever our elected officials want to do. Take the responsibility seriously.
I'm sorry but the Pentagon already had a contract with Anthropic and is now threatening to use the supply chain risk law to essentially kill their entire company because they wanted to re-write the contract. They could easily just not sign the contract and move to a competitor. Its an incredibly disturbing and chilling move by the Pentagon...
On TAM, corporate retreats and offsites in the US alone represent roughly a 500M+ venue booking market by our estimates, and that is just one slice, not counting flights, activities, or international events.
Since COVID, distributed teams have made in-person gatherings more important, not less. Almost every company does some form of corporate event, whether it is an annual retreat, sales kickoff, leadership offsite, or team meetup.
Almost all US company do corporate event and retreats, every year.
The bigger bet for us is not just that events are a sizable market. It is that this is exactly the kind of messy, coordination-heavy workflow that AI can now handle. Two years ago this would not have worked. With current multi-step reasoning and tool use, it finally does.
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