Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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>Reads first paragraph
>Hmm, this sounds like something that is theoretically infeasible to the point of "spending 30 minutes with some basic physics equations on the whiteboard disproves it"
>"$10 million dollars"
>"People did calculations that in an ideal setup..." oh look there it is, no waaay
Like I'm no physicist, you really don't need much more than vague recollections of high-school physics to be like "huh?" at this...
That was a solid illustration of just how stupid VC culture is. A run into people convinced capitalism is a necessary (and some of them also believe sufficient) element of innovation and technological advancement, like it doesn't regularly flush huge amounts of money down the toilet like this.
When capitalism did contribute to innovation and technological advancement, it was through stuff like Bell Labs, which was funded by a corporation but functioned in practice like its own research institute. I think that the idea of Bell Labs is a little offensive to present day venture capitalists, though. What do you mean, innovation comes from scientists and engineers? We all know that innovation comes from plucky, young, hotshot founders with big ideas who go against conventional wisdom!
AI does add one fun wrinkle that we've talked about before. Unlike consumer tech like uBeam, there are actual customers (note: not user, customer) for these LLM-based services also more interested in keeping on top of the hype than in actual results. If you're an executive at a stagnating tech company what better way to boost your own shareholders' confidence than by giving OpenAI or Anthropic a nice contract to get some relatively vague integration of AI into whatever it is you do. Once you've signed the papers and gotten your name in one of the many breathless press cycles on the subject all the actual questions about how it works and whether it adds any value fall to the wayside. You can watch the little people work that out while you coast a few more years before needing to come up with a new transformative vision of the future of whatever company you've landed at by that point.
Don't forget the implicit (or sometimes even explicit) threat of replacing their workers and how that improves their bargaining position (at least temporarily).