Why Sam Altman Won't Be on the Hook for Openai's Spending Spree

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/06/trump-ai-sacks-federal-bailo...

The Optimus narrative is so obviously a fraud. The things can "dance" and play chess, but they cannot operate in dirt, scrub the kitchen, etc. Even if they succeed, BYD will build a $7000 Optimus. Intimidation of crowds and barking orders at humans (for example for the human to clean the kitchen floor) seem the only somewhat realistic goals.

There are also a finite number of opportunities to invest in, so companies that have “buzz” can create a bidding war among potential investors that drives up valuations.

So that’s one possible reason but in the end we can’t know why another investor invests the way they do. We assume that the investor in making a rational decision based on their portfolio. It’s fun to speculate about though, which is why there’s so much press attention.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_pension_scheme...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_wealth_funds...

That is, it doesn't matter so much if OpenAI and individual investors get fleeced, if there's a 20-50% labour cost reduction generally for capitalism as a whole (especially cost reduction in our own tech professions, which have been very well paid for a generation) -- Institutional investors and political actors will benefit regardless, by increasing the productivity or rate of exploitation of intellectual / information workers.

What Would an AI Crash Look Like? - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-10-12/what-h...

Now you have a company where the leader at least notionally doesn't have that kind of a financial stake... and we think that's bad? I disagree with Altman on almost everything, but it feels like grasping at straws.

Also, the LLM space is a red queen environment. Stop investing and you are done.

All that said. IMHO Short to medium term breakthrouhgs will come from hybrid AI systems, the LLM being the universal putty between all users and systems.

Not necessarily. Approaches such as mixture of experts help lower training costs by covering domains with specialized models.

You can see a similar effect in computer chess ELO scores over time, with the odd blip up see https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1iovlb0/oc... (1985 - 2023) and https://wiki.aiimpacts.org/speed_of_ai_transition/range_of_h... (1960 - 2000)

See also - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45857769

I remember the days when Facebook and Google and other familiar giants were painted with the same brush-- all negative speculation as to them being overvalued and on the cliff's edge of doom, because no one could imagine how they'd survive their obscene overvaluations. How and when will they monetize? How will they ever bring in enough revenue to justify the insane capital spending?

1. OpenAI goes public. 2. Pay off the USA's debts with OpenAI stock. 3. Crash the bubble with no survivors. 4. Finally blockchain is useful.

All that the AI Industry is doing is scaling computation/data in the hope that the result may encompass more of "existing real-world data" and thus give the illusion of thinking. You don't know whether the correct answer is due to reasoning or due to parroting of previously seen answer data. I always tell common folks to think of LLMs as very very large dictionaries eg. with the words from a pocket oxford dictionary you can construct only so many sentences whereas from a multi-volume set of large oxford dictionaries you can construct orders of magnitude more sentences and thus the probability of finding your specific answer sentence is much much higher. Now they can understand the scaling issue, realize its limits and why this approach can never lead to AGI.

I agree, its not intelligent. You have to accept that as a fundamental premise and build up from there to figure out where it makes sense to utilise the technology - oh and if you have to refer to the technology and make sure the user knows about it, youve already failed. The user frankly does not care nor do they need to know of its existence.