On Shark Tank if you walk in and say “I have no revenue, no viable business model, and an idea that’s easily copied in a space that’s rapidly marching towards commoditization. I’m asking for $5 billion for 25% of my company.” You’d be laughed off the set.
In the increasingly frothy world of GenAI that’s a Wednesday and you get the cheque.
If it looks like a bubble and smells like a bubble…
The tech is cool, but investors are about to lose their shirts in this space.
If it's actually that easy, why don't you do it?
Are you seriously just leaving $5 billion on the table?
I'll tell you why you won't. Because you wouldn't get it. Because it's not that easy.
Mira Murati is not some rando off the street. Ilya Sutskever is not some rando.
Zuckerberg is not paying Millions to randos of the street to come work for meta.
Nothing gets people to care so much about VC losses as does a 10 figure check!
Seriously, this stuff is great. A lot of people are getting rich, and I'm sure some value will be created out of it. LPs will be the ones holding the bag but thankfully we don't have a tradition of bailing them out like banks, so what do I care? In the meantime I benefit from VC subsidized coding assistants.
Tell me one unique skill, from any of those individuals you quoted, that is worth even 0,01% of $5 billion, for a non existent company with a non existent product.
LOL. So now it's not even their own skill but the "experience of having worked with certain people at well-funded and rapidly growing companies" that would value a nothingburger 12 Billion dollars.
I am sure there must be a better argument that just that. Because I have "worked with certain people at well-funded and rapidly growing companies" a lot and I'm worth nothing whatsoever.
LLMs are a commodity now. It is all about capital. DeepSeek and Grok proved that.
It’s not Klingon cloaking tech.
With minor variations, it is Transformers via autoregressive next-token prediction on text. Self-attention, residuals, layer norm, positional encodings (RoPE/ALiBi), optimized with AdamW or Lion. Training scales with data, model size, and batch size using LR schedules and distributed parallelism (FSDP, ZeRO, TP). For inference KV caching and probabilistic sampling (temperature, top-k/p).
Most differences are in scale, data quality, and marginal architectural tweaks.
Meta had the scale and whiffed so bad the entire Llama team disbanded and Zuck has been recruiting new people with 9 figure offers. Capital is essential but the people deciding when to launch the training run still do matter.
Looking at the team it's clear its a bunch of brilliant but indisciplined cats. They will be difficult to herd but for what the real plan is here, acquisition, it clearly does not matter.
They will do a couple of tools, then another panicked company like Apple, or Facebook or AWS, needing to justify the millions spent on AI and with nothing to show for, will acquire them for billions. When somebody will point out they don't make money or have no product, somebody here will point to the "team" as you just did :-)
But since we are talking about 12 billion, let's play the VC and do the due diligence first on the leader?
Reporting from The Optimist by Keach Hagey and other open sources, plus the famous thread here when Sam Altman got fired from OpenAI, reveals that Mira Murati had a central role in Sam Altman November 2023 firing.
For VCs, this is a masterclass in corporate survival and a massive red flag. Evidence shows Murati was the primary architect of the case against Altman:
- Wrote private memos questioning Altman's leadership
- Initiated board contact through Ilya Sutskever
- Sent "hefty PDF files of evidence" to board members via self-destructing emails
Then ...When employees revolted, fearing lost equity, immediately switched sides, signed the letter demanding Altman's return, then later claimed she "fought the actions aggressively."
She survived by reading the room perfectly:
- Became interim CEO during the crisis
- Positioned herself as essential to Altman's return
- Exited in September 2024 just before the for-profit restructuring
- Immediately raised $2B for her new startup showing it had it planned all along.
Investment Implications:
This reveals someone who will systematically undermine leadership while maintaining plausible deniability, then switch sides when politically convenient. Remember Paul Graham's famous quote about Sam Altman? That he "could be parachuted into an island full of cannibals and come back in 5 years and be king"? Murati might be even more astute.
She went from Intern → Tesla PM → Leap Motion → OpenAI VP → CTO → interim CEO → $2B startup founder, all with zero AI research background.
Her OpenAI trajectory shows world class political instincts. Join during post-Musk power vacuum (2018), build alliances with both sides, orchestrate a coup when convenient, flip sides when it fails, exit perfectly timed before restructuring.
For VCs:
Whether you see this as exceptional political skill or dangerous executive behavior depends on your risk tolerance.
Let's just hope the 10 millions dollars the government of Albania, the poorest nation in Europe, invested on this have been secured with proper share rights. That could make for some awkward reactions back home.
Their head of AI alignment clearly has no idea on how to go on alignment, as you can see here, during this 30 min rambling into nothing, on the subject.
Going just from published research, it seems Lilian Weng focus is LLM agents, safety, and alignment, focusing on how models are used, guided, and evaluated, not how they’re built.
It seems Horace He focuses on deep learning systems and compiler optimization, improving the performance of frameworks like PyTorch.
While both are clearly highly capable, and maybe capable of focusing on other areas, again just from published papers, neither seems to have published work on core LLM architectures or foundational model training, that could help bring about a scientific advance on the performance of current models.
Their contributions seem to be on enhancing usability and efficiency, not the underlying design or scaling of modern LLMs.
If that is the core team, I would be worried if they have the researchers capable of producing a breakthrough worth of the billions committed. But maybe that is why they are still hiring?
You mean, "I have no revenue and no business model but I was the CTO of one of the most important technical companies of this generation, we put out one of the fastest growing SaaS products of all time in a completely new technical category."- not sure how much more signal you would need than that. I don't really get why anyone would be confused about why they are throwing money at her. It's an extremely large amount of money, but it's not as if she has no track record.
It is a bubble, of course, but this person would get $100m round in a non-bubble.
Were so many people saying that when Meg Whitman left eBay? Are people saying that about Mira Murati? -I haven't heard anything to suggest she gets no credit for ChatGPT (the product/technical execution, not the model)
It's true that eBay did well during her tenure. And it's also true that she was a better grownup than the people running it before. But she also said that a monkey could drive the train. Would someone else have done better? Could a monkey have delivered the same results? We'll never know, but the experience at HP doesn't validate her as a business genius.
When proposing a model for evaluating startup investments -- or any decision-making framework -- it’s useful to run a kind of regression test.
Would Shark Tank have funded the most successful startups of the past decade? In many cases, no. They famously passed on companies like Airbnb, Uber, and Dropbox early on (sometimes indirectly via pitch decks or missed introductions), and even directly rejected DoorDash and Cameo, both of which went on to become unicorns. In other cases, they offered terms that, if accepted, would likely have made follow-on funding difficult.
That doesn't mean every GenAI deal today is wise. But pointing to Shark Tank as a benchmark for rational investing is a very selective filter. Historically, it’s missed more home runs than it’s hit.
Business plan, revenue, people: these are all valid signals to form an investment hypothesis. People often outweighs all others wrt early stage companies.
You would have been a fool to invest in apple in the late 90s on any other signal than the return of Steve Jobs. That era created many rich fools.
Will file your comment under: People who forget VCs regularly burn hundreds of millions of other people’s money, chasing hype. Also...90% of startups, and that is what Thinking Machines is, fail.
On the other hand, if for whatever reason some top tier soccer/football/basketball/etc. went to shark tank and said «I want to release my own sportswear brand», they’d probably get their funding. In fact, they’d probably have investors lined up.
Same thing here. Mira is a top tier, high-profile person in the AI space. So investors lined up.
Investors are investing just as much in the person/team as what they are building. What they build will change, but having a good team is all the difference.
Correct, but they're not profitable, rely on quickly depreciating capital assets and loads of tech employees to maintain their services, so it's hard for me to believe that there's a sustainable business here for them.
And like, if anyone's gonna win it should be Google because of their ability to push capital into this for a long time, their world class infrastructure and their cost advantage by having their chips in house. But I have faith in their ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
> The fundraise also saw participation from AI chip giant Nvidia
This is really obvious 'round-tripping' no? Nvidia invests in startups that are going to spend a majority of their funds on GPUs, Nvidia's revenue goes up, Nvidia's stock goes up, Nvidia makes more 'investments' in startups who use that investment to continue the cycle?
No different than investment banks in the US loaning money to ukraine so they can get patriot missiles. This generates two income streams for the US ( interest payments on the debt and money to RTX for the missiles). Trump gets a cut on both of these monies (tax on income).
This is why the Us is pro Israel as well. They are a good customer to the military industrial complex.
Now if we could only get japan, ASEAN, S.Korea into a conflict w China over taiwan we could ramp up this model - but we’ll need to build drone factories to usurp the the cheap turkish, polish, ukrainian, and russian suppliers.
And the additional bonus is that all this has to be transacted in dollars giving our currency preeminence so we can print more of them and not suffer inflation- even tho there are more dollars chasing the same goods- its happening symmetrically around the world because everyone has to use them.
I've been worried about the US abandoning Japan and this radically shifting the power centers in the world. But, the way you describe it sounds like I should not worry. At least, as long as I trust the weapons manufacturers to keep things stable so they can extract their new profit opportunities. I still feel a tinge of worry.
To an extend, sure, but not in the "obvious" way you suggest, because that's very illegal. Any arrangement for Nvidia to obviously and directly fund startups to clearly funnel money back through purchases would quickly attract scrutiny from auditors, regulators, and co-investors.
Sidenote: Nvidia has been caught round-tripping before, way back.
Looking at the valuation I don't get how they would not be round-tripping and otherwise cooking the books a lot right now (not necesarily limited to this case, but more in general).
Could somebody explain why there is so much negativity towards Thinking Machines in this thread? I realize that they haven't publicly announced a product yet but presumably the VCs have some idea of what Thinking Machines is building, and they have some pretty significant OpenAI talent on board, including Murati herself. Some amount of skepticism is warranted, of course, but a lot of these comments read as closer to hostility.
True. People here can be like this. I have not forgotten even the greatest juice maker of all times, Juicero was similarly disparaged with all this negativity.
Well a lot of people on this forum are founders or early employees in startups. Every dollar vcs set on fire chasing some obviously stupid idea, waste on crypto memecoins, etc is a dollar that is not helping some legitimate startup get funded.
Yes, but when you put it as "why are you investing in these bad ideas? Invest in mine, it's obviously much better", it sounds a lot more self-interested (and far more likely to be wrong).
It's a bad look on the entire industry. We send billions to serial grifters selling vaporware while the backbone of the internet is basically powered by $5 donations
Often I think if the money could not be used for some better purpose. It is still huge resources wasted. Like digging and filling same trench. Overall it is not efficient use of resources or time to me.
But maybe there is some gain that I can't just imagine...
You can say the same about most science research. In fact, many people do say the same, scrutinizing many different avenues of research as pointless. There are countless examples of "pointless" research ending up being useful.
(Note that it's much more legitimate to scrutinize scientific research, since it's mostly publicly funded, as opposed to VCs investing in startups.)
> Overall it is not efficient use of resources or time to me.
I mean, the tech world has done a lot of good and advanced humanity a lot. More than most industries, IMO. Most of that is by inventing new things. A society could dial down useless spending by dialing down innovation, but it's not clear to me that there's a way to get more innovation with less waste than the current system.
I think many industries are far more of an "inefficient use of resources". I think if the world as a whole would spend 10x more on scientific and technological advancement, at the cost of less e.g. fashion, less investment in entertainment, less investment in (some forms of) finance, etc, the world would be far better off. (I'm not advocating that this should be forced on society, just stating my opinion on what a more optimal way of allocating resources would be.)
These people somehow imagine that they (as taxpayers perhaps) are going to pay the cost one way or another. Not to mention there's a tinge of jealousy over the level of VC money involved - they imagine these people do not "deserve" it.
> Could somebody explain why there is so much negativity towards Thinking Machines in this thread?
I think it lies at the intersection of a lot of topics where HN comments are hostile: VCs, large fundraising, AI, OpenAI related employees. These are all topics where HN comments are more hostile than pragmatic.
Most of the hostility is just a proxy for “VCs bad” banter.
I've lived through 3 and read up on at least 10 more.
Many people know it's a bubble. You see lots of HN comments that it's a bubble. We certainly did in 2007.
In a bubble, the predominant notion is not "I wonder if it's a bubble", but rather "It's a bubble, I hope I can make my money before it pops". A perfect example of this was the Tulip craze in the Netherlands. Nobody actually believed tulip bulbs were worth that much, they just wanted to find a bigger sucker to make a profit, if you read accounts from the time.
This. Ans that's why we even manage to reproduce bubbles in a very simple simulated environnement among finance students who know exactly how overvaluated their assets are (I can't find the paper right now though…)
No, you're predicting that it's a bubble based on past events. It might be likely that it's a bubble. But nobody knows the future, no matter how confident they are.
In the context of economics, bears and bulls are people who have a negative/ positive outlook. Something looking bearish means you have a belief that it will go down. Something looking bullish means I you believe ut will go up.
It's nothing to do with Thinking Machines as a company, it's to do with a VC that's content to bet two billion dollars on a company that has shown absolutely nothing, and the sorry state of affairs that represents.
> It's nothing to do with Thinking Machines as a company, it's to do with a VC that's content to bet two billion dollars on a company that has shown absolutely nothing, and the sorry state of affairs that represents.
Why does it represent a "sorry state of affairs"?
VCs are risking money they manage, it's not like they're putting anyone else at risk. Do we really prefer a world in which we don't take risks to develop new technology?
The VC sector is probably an order of magnitude smaller then, say, fashion. Isn't money better spent taking risks to develop new technologies that have a chance to legitimately change the world for the better?
Note: If you think the technology could be a negative (which, to some extent I do because of the elements of AI safety, that's a separate argument. Not sure that that's what you're referring to though.)
They don't "use" pension funds, pension funds can choose to invest in VCs if they decide to do so. I think most usually invest low single digits of investment in VCs, mostly as diversification.
But I imagine there's immense pressure to do so. Returns are tracked relative to others. All distorted by big jumps in valuations. In the long term, there might be a more prudent/sustainable use of some of that capital but we'll never know, everyone's chasing share price go up, not value added / profit go up.
Yes, it's good to have your finger in the pie. But the stake may be overpriced, given current behaviour.
VCs, who go on and on about capitalism, were whining on Twitter until the Silicon Valley Bank got bailed out. In real capitalism the SVB would have been allowed to fail and the VCs would have taken a hit.
But no risk for them, everyone paid for them to keep their billions.
> VCs are risking money they manage, it's not like they're putting anyone else at risk.
They're putting everyone at risk.
As others in this thread have pointed out what these VCs do is make wildly risky gambles. When it pays off they make billions of dollars in profit and congratulate themselves for their foresight and the power of capitalism. When it doesn't they go cap-in-hand to the federal government, saying that if they're allowed to collapse it'll destabilize the entire economy.
If it were just some rich billionaires who might have to sell their second private jet when this collapses I'd agree with you: who cares what they do with their own money. But what's going to happen is that the taxpayer will end up footing the bill for their reckless behavior, and millions of people will end up worse off for it as governments cut back on welfare, healthcare, and aid programs to balance the books. In a very real sense, people are going to be paying for VC greed with their lives.
> When it pays off they make billions of dollars in profit and congratulate themselves for their foresight and the power of capitalism. When it doesn't they go cap-in-hand to the federal government, saying that if they're allowed to collapse it'll destabilize the entire economy.
But that's not actually true.
The Silicon Valley Bank situation aside - because it was a unique situation, we can open it if you want - when have VCs asked to be bailed out on failed investments? This kind of moral hazard is absolutely a thing in banks and finance in general, but afaik, not in the VC industry.
I have a pretty dim view of VCS, or at least a16z, after seeing some of the awful blockchain tech startups they were throwing money at during the last bubble
This place used to be a place for hackers and founders. Now it is mostly a place for middle aged software engineers who hate someone else to success, change and hope for the future of Linux desktop. Thinking Machines presents both change and success .
I don't think anyone can consider it a success just yet. But someone just injected 2 billion dollars into the enterprise. They are probably given a lot more information than you and I are. Maybe those people are dead wrong and they lose all their money, but maybe not.
With the public information there is neither a point in positivity not negativity. It would be speculation either way. A question that could be worth pondering is what exactly the investors are shown? What would you need to see to put all your money in thinking machines?
The answer was right in Mira's resignation from OpenAI [1]
“I want to create the time and space to do my own exploration.”
To create time and space and even able to explore it is far beyond cutting edge physics of today. If she is able to do it in just few billion dollars it is investment worth making.
Thinking Machines represent the new elite. People with the right pedigree that can raise billions with only an idea. If they fail, they’ll get paid anyway - and they’ll become billionaires.
It is a position that is completely unreachable for 99.9999% of people even in tech.
It is of course easy to write off critics as jealous has-beens and bozos.
My opinion: AI is taking all the money that could be spent on cool advancements that could give the average person hope and putting it towards a pipe dream. Why not be hostile towards the perceived death of an industry you love?
The whole system has gone crazy because of the wealthy having so much that the current game of coming up with stupid stories (AGI, Self Driving Cars, Robots that can do your household chores, Crypto) to convince people that a company can be worth 50-100 times earnings or valueless internet points will go up in price forever! There is no way these companies can possibly meet these expectations but the money sloshing around in the system makes it possible for rich people to keep believing (religiously) as there are no investments actually left for them to earn real money from a population that increasingly has nothing and earns less and less of the pie while valueless investments skyrocket.
> but presumably the VCs have some idea of what Thinking Machines is building
you imply that VCs are rational because bet their own money, which in current complicated world probably is not true. VC funds get money from complicated funnel likely including my/your retirement account and country public debt, VC managers likely receive bonuses for closed deals and not long term gains which may materialize in 10 years. So, investing 2B into non-existing product with unclear market fit/team/tech moat smells very strongly.
So your position is that a VC will invest $2B in a startup on vibes alone without having any idea what they're building, because it is not literally their money? That seems like a significantly stronger and less plausible claim than mine, which his merely that a prospective $2B investor has access to more information about the company's plans than we do and that their investment is at least some indication that there is a real product in the pipeline.
> that a prospective $2B investor has access to more information about the company's plans than we do and that their investment is at least some indication that there is a real product in the pipeline.
there is a funnel of investors: say retirement account holders put money into some retirement fund, fund manager put money into some "innovation fund", "innovation fund" put money in VC fund. All middlemen get % cut, VC likely watch slides about some product roadmap, but they more interested in closing the deal, get % cut and move on.
And if those $2B just go poof because they somehow failed to notice what is apparently so obvious to people on his thread -- that there is no real product -- your position is that the VC does not suffer any significant consequences?
I think most people aren’t aware that as CTO Murati can take a large chunk of the credit for OpenAI’s success. Her skills were mostly in deft technical management, a skill often under appreciated by nerds. Her success here is going to heavily depend on her ability to attract the right talent.
Not sure you can quantify all work, but to the accounts I read she was constantly guiding, scheduling the teams, resolving conflict, allocating resources. Exactly what a CTO does in a company that size.
Can’t help but feel there’s some sexism attached to the pushback here.
FWIW I would be skeptical of tech bros claiming they sped up 80% response time on microservice handling 5000000000 RPS. But I will be even more skeptical when they say "analyzed and implemented business requirements into maintainable and high performance code".
More generic, grandiose and oft-repeated someone's claims are, more skepticism is warranted.
I don't think that's fair. The company was founded around 6 months ago and already has a valuation of 12B even though barely anyone outside of AI has heard of them, and I bet almost nobody even here could name their product. It's not that people think she's untalented, but rather, she'd have to be superhuman to justify that by herself.
Because connections and social signalling matter more than ideas among the rich of the world. Only some people can get such disproportionate advantages.
Because it looks like VC are spendings ridicoulous amounts of money for hype while many startups with actual products and a product market fit struggle to attract investors because their product is not related to transformers.
It makes perfect sense... Why spend time and money on building a product in hope of attracting VCs that may like it? Instead present your idea in an intentionally vague way that makes everyone's imagination fill in the blanks in the most favorable way.
At the moment there's no public information about that, it's all about Apple being interested into buying but we don't know if Mistral is interested into selling at all. That's the gap.
How do you think VC firms work? There is no "own money". Their entire business is getting rich people, institutional investors, governments, pension funds, endowments etc. to give them money and investing that money in startups, keeping a cut for themselves.
Why do you ask me? One of the top comments assumes that it would be crazy to assume recklessness on the part of a16z. I point out that they are insulated from the consequences on multiple levels.
None? I think almost all VC partners are vested in their funds. They have skin in the game. Yes, they do profit from managing the money of others, but I think it's rare for them not to be putting their own money on the line.
YC is first and foremost a startup accelerator so it makes sense that entrepreneurship would be part of the discussion that people here are interested in.
You are right! Just like how a certain contingent flags posts that discuss any appalling misuse of technology under the pretext that "oh, it's politics, etc.", you should do the same for these scammy news items: flag + hide.
I don't know that it'll work, but it is worth trying.
I think it takes a lot of temerity and hubris to look at a 2B raise and assume it's all hype. A16Z has certainly had some misses, but one assumes there actually is some product they're showing behind closed doors that makes this round much more reasonable than it appears from the outside.
If something makes no sense, seems totally crazy, and is being done by a crowd of extremely smart people, you can only assume one of two things: they are actually crazy and frittering away 2B on hype or, just maybe, there's something we're not aware of. If there are only two camps: optimistic and naive or pessimistic and dismissive, I'll choose naive every day of the week.
Anyways, congrats to Thinking Machines and here's hoping they do have something awesome up their sleeve!
Theranos was worth $9B in 2013 money, and it latet turned out that they had literally nothing but hype. Enron was posting $100B revenue the year before it went bankrupt. Bernie Madoff's fund had huge banks as institutional investors. Magic Leap was valued at $4.6B and had some purportedly amazing demos behind closed doors that anyone who witnessed them thought would revolutionize entertainment.
While these are not necessarily typical cases, they show that it's absolutely possible to have gigantic valuations raised from industry experts with nothing to show for it, if you're good enough at lying.
The weird thing about Theranos is that every single expert who knew about the technical details of blood testing basically called out the BS from the get go.
Blood testing for a single condition can involve blood separation via centrifuges, application of various chemical solutions, a multi-step process using varios test strips (each with different specificities/sensitivities). Not to mention some of the offending markers might be so rare in blood that you'd have to draw multiple vials just to get a statistically significant amount of markers.
Reducing just a single one of these tests to an instant test that works with a drop of blood would be a major breakthrough, subject to various medical awards (and lengthy medical trials).
That makes a lot of sense. VCs only make money when companies go public, so a medical device that requires years of regulatory compliance legwork to even be allowed into a lab or pharmacy is an immediate no-go.
I don't disagree with your broader point, but have spent enough time with enough a16z partners to say they're just people. Not outright stupid, but not extremely smart, either. And their error rate is pretty high.
Which...to some extent is by design. It's part of a VC's job to make bad bets. Sometimes the price of getting into a deal at all is getting in on insane terms, but you still do it because that one investment could return the entire fund. Maybe Thinking Machines is a winner, maybe it's another Clubhouse. We'll see.
I do agree for $2bn, but it’s also well known that US and in particular SV VCs will fund ideas and people, I.e. potential, whereas everywhere else funds results.
It’s that culture that creates some spectacular hits, and a vast number of misses. Not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s a different approach and means that the funding doesn’t necessarily suggest the results one might expect.
> A16Z has certainly had some misses, but one assumes there actually is some product
They don’t need to show a product. It’s been demonstrated that with capital and some skill you can train a foundation model. A16Z has the former. Murati has the latter.
> they are actually crazy and frittering away 2B on hype
This assumes that being careless with billions can only ever be crazy.
If you're already set for life, why not gamble (including at completely irrational levels) for even more insane amounts of money when the whole thing is just a crazy house of mirrors. Yes, there's value at the heart, but there's also crazy amounts of money being funneled in, lots of opportunity for chaos, lots of chances for legal rug pulls. All of it inflated even further by a fervor of carelessness for any kind of consequences - things like the stock market are completely removed from any kind of fundamentals.
In a fun house of mirrors, that 2 billion could be 2 cents, or it could be 2 trillion. Buy the ticket and have fun!
Isn’t this the perspective that leads to all bubbles?
What kind of temerity and hubris would it take to believe that the ratings agencies were colluding with the banks to give AAA to Mortgage Backer Securities?
> one assumes there actually is some product they're showing
Can it simply be that anyone who wants to create new competitive models at this point needs billions for training? This isn't a saas where you can whip up a prototype in a month. Rather than having a product to show, I'd guess it's more about an experienced team and some plausible-sounding research ideas.
Could be, or it could be a simple flawed net present value calculation, similar to Effective Altruism.
SBF said if he had a die and it had a 99% chance of killing everyone and a 1% chance of making the world 1 million times happier he would roll the die. Repeatedly. And Silicon Valley loved him.
I think AI is a similar calculation. Humans are tearing themselves apart and the only thing worth betting on is AI that can improve itself, self replicate and end scarcity. I believe that these VCs believe that AI is the only chance to save humanity.
And if you believe that, the net present value of AGI is basically infinite.
> Humans are tearing themselves apart and the only thing worth betting on is AI that can [...] end scarcity
Scarcity, wow...
- There is no scarcity in the rich world by historical standards.
- There is extreme poverty in large parts of the world, no amount of human intelligence has fixed this and therefore no amount of AI will. It is primarily not a question of intelligence.
- On top of that "ending scarcity" is impossible due to the hedonistic treadmill and the way the human mind works as well as the fact that with or without AI there will still be disease, aging and death.
You can buy six B-2 bombers for that money. And use them against competitor AI startups. You think this sounds stupid? This is where all this AI arms race is going.
This is what I expect. Theyre Not hiring even engineers. By the time they have a strategy, plan, hire, and act on that plan they will be behind the curve, and force to use the $ to acquire someone who did.
> "We're excited that in the next couple months we will be able to share our first product, which will include a significant open source component and be useful for researchers and startups developing custom model," CEO Murati said in a post on the X social media platform.
I guess we know the answer to the second question, in the words of Reggie Watts: "for no apparent reason, other than to create a false sense of importance, of which I couldn't retain on my own."
Remind me, does she have plans to release an actual product? Or is this like Ilya's company where their first and only product will be AGI, if/when that ever happens?
At this point, arms-crossed mugshot of "{ex-Open AI} raises $2B" is a meme. Training one epoch of a model the size of the GPT-4 family is easily an 8 figure job. Considering other ops costs, UI and backend dev, securing Everest sized datasets, demos/talks, wages, bonuses etc, this probably gives them around 100 trial and errors, or in other words "Look at me mum, I won 100 chips for the casino!"
And imagine being the ops guy there, about to run a new training batch, but you specified the wrong input path. Puff, the money is gone. Absolutely wild stuff.
Murati was CTO. Whilst Brockman and Altman may have bypassed or undermined her on some occasions, she can take large credit for OpenAI’s technical success. Brockman can take credit for his extremely hard work, increasing cadence. Altman for incredible fundraising and (often polarising) visionary leadership.
VCs are betting they'll get out with at least some gains before this bubble bursts. They have literally nothing new, not even in theory. They'll build a smaller-but-not-that-small-still-better-than-you-expect model which will be kind of open for others, which means they'll cut some deal and pretend they did something and that they received something in return.
> point is that the pie-in-the-sky promises are insufficiently novel
You have no data to judge novelty on. If you think AI rocket science, they’re flubs. If you don’t, they have a shot. Either way, I can’t see novelty being unsatisfied.
I do hope they have some novel idea up their sleeve. Another firm just executing a similar playbook even if well executed is not going to face headwinds against incumbents
> "We're excited that in the next couple months we will be able to share our first product, which will include a significant open source component and be useful for researchers and startups developing custom model," CEO Murati said in a post, opens new tab on the X social media platform.
This actually sounds like they might be making something that is generally useful to other companies training foundational models. What that is - I have no idea. But they may be onto something here.
Sort of like the old adage about the Goldrush - why pan for gold when you can just sell tons of shovels to all the others rushing to get rich?
Then they should give an answer that isn't filled with the buzzwords currently used to lubricate the money out of some coked-out VC angel investor's accounts.
To be fair the other Thinking Machines has been defunct over 30 years.
That said, what was left of the old one was bought by Sun, which is now owned by Oracle.
I wonder if they still own rights to the name? Not the wisest move to name your new company after something owned by the most famously litigious tech corporation.
Thinking Machines was chosen over the Cray because they had more visual appeal. Sheryl Handler the CEO had (has) a real flair for and it showed; they were neat looking machines
The Cray machines looked more like an airport seating area. Or with later models, obstacles in a laser tag arena. While the Thinking Machines with the moving LEDs looked alive, almost like it was designed to be a character in a movie, which they became.
Fascinating question! I can't find any mention of this seemingly obvious issue.
Here's[1][2] their trademark application from February, which is still "NOT ASSIGNED". Technically it's for their logotype but I imagine it's all the same issue, considering that they include "Computer hardware" in the description of their company (which is exactly what the old one did). This site ominously says that the only action since the filing date was on June 5th, titled "LETTER OF PROTEST EVIDENCE FORWARDED" -- perhaps that's Oracle?
I think this[4] is the trademark for the original's ("Thinking Machines Corporation") trademark logotype, first used in 1987 and defunct ("cancelled"?) by 1999. Another site[5] lists three other "Dead/Cancelled" trademarks owned by the original, and two more recent attempts by randos in 2006 and 2010 that were both shot down.
Technically they're "Thinking Machine Lab Inc."[3], but they're basically always referred to without the "Lab", even to the point of using thinkingmachines.ai as their domain (which, hilariously, doesn't use their trademarked logotype). Another goofy tidbit is that they also filed a trademark for a serif logotype of the words "BEEP BOOP"[6] -- maybe that's their fallback name!
Would be fascinated to hear from anyone familiar with US trademark law on what might be going on, and how we might see what the "LETTER OF PROTEST" is! My layperson understanding would definitely tell me that Oracle would maintain the trademarks, but perhaps they were forced to let them lapse due to lack of use?
I've been slowly building (y'know how it is...) a (one-man...) company filed as "Doering Thinking Machines, LLC" for a few years (named after an old family business, "Doering Machines"), so I'm quite interested to see how this shakes out!
[2] For the love of god, please HN gods, just make these comments markdown. IDK what battle you're fighting but it's a baffling one. The lack of blockquotes is painful, but the lack of inline links is downright diabolical! You have three people now, you can afford the effort ;)
I really hope these seemingly experienced entrepreneurs got the trademark sorted out and locked down before adopting it. Otherwise it may be an expensive lesson.
IANAL but I do know trademarking a logotype is a kind of 'trade dress' that's not the same trademarking the words of the name (even if those words appear\ in the logotype).
This company calls for a Butlerian Jihad. I mean, in all seriousness: calling themselves like the original evil in Dune with at least a likelihood that a evil general intelligence is showing up soon is very disturbing.
On Shark Tank if you walk in and say “I have no revenue, no viable business model, and an idea that’s easily copied in a space that’s rapidly marching towards commoditization. I’m asking for $5 billion for 25% of my company.” You’d be laughed off the set.
In the increasingly frothy world of GenAI that’s a Wednesday and you get the cheque.
If it looks like a bubble and smells like a bubble…
The tech is cool, but investors are about to lose their shirts in this space.
If it's actually that easy, why don't you do it? Are you seriously just leaving $5 billion on the table?
I'll tell you why you won't. Because you wouldn't get it. Because it's not that easy.
Mira Murati is not some rando off the street. Ilya Sutskever is not some rando. Zuckerberg is not paying Millions to randos of the street to come work for meta.
Nothing gets people to care so much about VC losses as does a 10 figure check!
Seriously, this stuff is great. A lot of people are getting rich, and I'm sure some value will be created out of it. LPs will be the ones holding the bag but thankfully we don't have a tradition of bailing them out like banks, so what do I care? In the meantime I benefit from VC subsidized coding assistants.
Tell me one unique skill, from any of those individuals you quoted, that is worth even 0,01% of $5 billion, for a non existent company with a non existent product.
It's not a particular skill, it's the experience of having worked with certain people at well-funded and rapidly growing companies.
LOL. So now it's not even their own skill but the "experience of having worked with certain people at well-funded and rapidly growing companies" that would value a nothingburger 12 Billion dollars.
I am sure there must be a better argument that just that. Because I have "worked with certain people at well-funded and rapidly growing companies" a lot and I'm worth nothing whatsoever.
I can be famous actor, when camera is on and you need to smile you smile, when you need to be sad you make sad face, what’s the big deal, right?
[dead]
They’ve proven they can launch SOTA models. There are only a handful of people in the world who have that track record.
They know OpenAI’s complete history and roadmap.
They can get a call with any AI researcher on earth.
LLMs are a commodity now. It is all about capital. DeepSeek and Grok proved that.
It’s not Klingon cloaking tech.
With minor variations, it is Transformers via autoregressive next-token prediction on text. Self-attention, residuals, layer norm, positional encodings (RoPE/ALiBi), optimized with AdamW or Lion. Training scales with data, model size, and batch size using LR schedules and distributed parallelism (FSDP, ZeRO, TP). For inference KV caching and probabilistic sampling (temperature, top-k/p).
Most differences are in scale, data quality, and marginal architectural tweaks.
Meta had the scale and whiffed so bad the entire Llama team disbanded and Zuck has been recruiting new people with 9 figure offers. Capital is essential but the people deciding when to launch the training run still do matter.
Please investigate the team she has assembled and it will be clear $5B isn't outside the realms of reality.
Looking at the team it's clear its a bunch of brilliant but indisciplined cats. They will be difficult to herd but for what the real plan is here, acquisition, it clearly does not matter.
They will do a couple of tools, then another panicked company like Apple, or Facebook or AWS, needing to justify the millions spent on AI and with nothing to show for, will acquire them for billions. When somebody will point out they don't make money or have no product, somebody here will point to the "team" as you just did :-)
But since we are talking about 12 billion, let's play the VC and do the due diligence first on the leader?
Reporting from The Optimist by Keach Hagey and other open sources, plus the famous thread here when Sam Altman got fired from OpenAI, reveals that Mira Murati had a central role in Sam Altman November 2023 firing.
For VCs, this is a masterclass in corporate survival and a massive red flag. Evidence shows Murati was the primary architect of the case against Altman:
- Collected "screenshots from Murati's Slack channel" documenting alleged toxic behavior
- Wrote private memos questioning Altman's leadership
- Initiated board contact through Ilya Sutskever
- Sent "hefty PDF files of evidence" to board members via self-destructing emails
Then ...When employees revolted, fearing lost equity, immediately switched sides, signed the letter demanding Altman's return, then later claimed she "fought the actions aggressively."
She survived by reading the room perfectly:
- Became interim CEO during the crisis
- Positioned herself as essential to Altman's return
- Exited in September 2024 just before the for-profit restructuring
- Immediately raised $2B for her new startup showing it had it planned all along.
Investment Implications:
This reveals someone who will systematically undermine leadership while maintaining plausible deniability, then switch sides when politically convenient. Remember Paul Graham's famous quote about Sam Altman? That he "could be parachuted into an island full of cannibals and come back in 5 years and be king"? Murati might be even more astute.
She went from Intern → Tesla PM → Leap Motion → OpenAI VP → CTO → interim CEO → $2B startup founder, all with zero AI research background.
Her OpenAI trajectory shows world class political instincts. Join during post-Musk power vacuum (2018), build alliances with both sides, orchestrate a coup when convenient, flip sides when it fails, exit perfectly timed before restructuring.
For VCs:
Whether you see this as exceptional political skill or dangerous executive behavior depends on your risk tolerance.
Let's just hope the 10 millions dollars the government of Albania, the poorest nation in Europe, invested on this have been secured with proper share rights. That could make for some awkward reactions back home.
I wasn't referring to Murati (although she seems capable).
Their head of AI alignment clearly has no idea on how to go on alignment, as you can see here, during this 30 min rambling into nothing, on the subject.
At correct time stamp: https://youtu.be/Wo95ob_s_NI?t=1040
What is in contrast to the published vision of Thinking Machines Lab.
John is not exactly used to interviews.
I was more concretely referring to the level of talent in the engineering team, for example Lilian Weng and Horace He.
Horace can probably produce $50M of revenue personally per year.
Going just from published research, it seems Lilian Weng focus is LLM agents, safety, and alignment, focusing on how models are used, guided, and evaluated, not how they’re built.
It seems Horace He focuses on deep learning systems and compiler optimization, improving the performance of frameworks like PyTorch.
While both are clearly highly capable, and maybe capable of focusing on other areas, again just from published papers, neither seems to have published work on core LLM architectures or foundational model training, that could help bring about a scientific advance on the performance of current models.
Their contributions seem to be on enhancing usability and efficiency, not the underlying design or scaling of modern LLMs.
If that is the core team, I would be worried if they have the researchers capable of producing a breakthrough worth of the billions committed. But maybe that is why they are still hiring?
Exactly, it's not what, it's who.
You mean, "I have no revenue and no business model but I was the CTO of one of the most important technical companies of this generation, we put out one of the fastest growing SaaS products of all time in a completely new technical category."- not sure how much more signal you would need than that. I don't really get why anyone would be confused about why they are throwing money at her. It's an extremely large amount of money, but it's not as if she has no track record.
It is a bubble, of course, but this person would get $100m round in a non-bubble.
We have a saying in Brazil that goes "The best thing in the world is QI."
QI meaning Quem Indica, meaning the best thing in the world is not technical skill, but who you know. This is what stuff like this looks like to me.
By that logic it almost sounds as if Meg Whitman was highly qualified to run HP…
She was qualified.
Are you saying that her previous experience shouldn't have counted as a positive attribute for being hired?
The Sun rose consistently during her tenure at eBay but we certainly don’t give credit for that.
eBay would have succeeded even if a Labrador retriever was CEO - due to everyone else’s efforts.
Were so many people saying that when Meg Whitman left eBay? Are people saying that about Mira Murati? -I haven't heard anything to suggest she gets no credit for ChatGPT (the product/technical execution, not the model)
It's true that eBay did well during her tenure. And it's also true that she was a better grownup than the people running it before. But she also said that a monkey could drive the train. Would someone else have done better? Could a monkey have delivered the same results? We'll never know, but the experience at HP doesn't validate her as a business genius.
It's a false signal
Analysis like this, was what took Yahoo to hire Marissa Mayer :-))
(Setting the current example aside...)
When proposing a model for evaluating startup investments -- or any decision-making framework -- it’s useful to run a kind of regression test.
Would Shark Tank have funded the most successful startups of the past decade? In many cases, no. They famously passed on companies like Airbnb, Uber, and Dropbox early on (sometimes indirectly via pitch decks or missed introductions), and even directly rejected DoorDash and Cameo, both of which went on to become unicorns. In other cases, they offered terms that, if accepted, would likely have made follow-on funding difficult.
That doesn't mean every GenAI deal today is wise. But pointing to Shark Tank as a benchmark for rational investing is a very selective filter. Historically, it’s missed more home runs than it’s hit.
Business plan, revenue, people: these are all valid signals to form an investment hypothesis. People often outweighs all others wrt early stage companies.
You would have been a fool to invest in apple in the late 90s on any other signal than the return of Steve Jobs. That era created many rich fools.
Whenever I hear someone say this I file them under 'techie with no business sense or appreciation of user value'
Will file your comment under: People who forget VCs regularly burn hundreds of millions of other people’s money, chasing hype. Also...90% of startups, and that is what Thinking Machines is, fail.
On the other hand, if for whatever reason some top tier soccer/football/basketball/etc. went to shark tank and said «I want to release my own sportswear brand», they’d probably get their funding. In fact, they’d probably have investors lined up.
Same thing here. Mira is a top tier, high-profile person in the AI space. So investors lined up.
Shark Tank is semi-scripted entertainment. It's not representative of how venture capital works in the real world.
> If it looks like a bubble and smells like a bubble…
People have been saying this for the better part of 10 years
Zero interest rate policy (2008-2022) probably had a hand in that.
Investors are investing just as much in the person/team as what they are building. What they build will change, but having a good team is all the difference.
chatgpt and claude are two of the fastest revenue growing products of all time
Correct, but they're not profitable, rely on quickly depreciating capital assets and loads of tech employees to maintain their services, so it's hard for me to believe that there's a sustainable business here for them.
And like, if anyone's gonna win it should be Google because of their ability to push capital into this for a long time, their world class infrastructure and their cost advantage by having their chips in house. But I have faith in their ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
> The fundraise also saw participation from AI chip giant Nvidia
This is really obvious 'round-tripping' no? Nvidia invests in startups that are going to spend a majority of their funds on GPUs, Nvidia's revenue goes up, Nvidia's stock goes up, Nvidia makes more 'investments' in startups who use that investment to continue the cycle?
No different than investment banks in the US loaning money to ukraine so they can get patriot missiles. This generates two income streams for the US ( interest payments on the debt and money to RTX for the missiles). Trump gets a cut on both of these monies (tax on income).
This is why the Us is pro Israel as well. They are a good customer to the military industrial complex.
Now if we could only get japan, ASEAN, S.Korea into a conflict w China over taiwan we could ramp up this model - but we’ll need to build drone factories to usurp the the cheap turkish, polish, ukrainian, and russian suppliers.
And the additional bonus is that all this has to be transacted in dollars giving our currency preeminence so we can print more of them and not suffer inflation- even tho there are more dollars chasing the same goods- its happening symmetrically around the world because everyone has to use them.
I've been worried about the US abandoning Japan and this radically shifting the power centers in the world. But, the way you describe it sounds like I should not worry. At least, as long as I trust the weapons manufacturers to keep things stable so they can extract their new profit opportunities. I still feel a tinge of worry.
Yes, though realistically they’d be buying the GPUs regardless of who the investors and this sort of vertical integration isn’t directly illegal
Yes, except they are monopolist, right? It's basically not optional choice.
Technically dominating a market by virtue of best product (or only available) is legal too.
If you can achieve that without anti competitive behaviour then being a monopolist is fine. Legally anyway
Whether this circular thing counts as such behaviour - don’t know but doubt it
To an extend, sure, but not in the "obvious" way you suggest, because that's very illegal. Any arrangement for Nvidia to obviously and directly fund startups to clearly funnel money back through purchases would quickly attract scrutiny from auditors, regulators, and co-investors.
Sidenote: Nvidia has been caught round-tripping before, way back.
Looking at the valuation I don't get how they would not be round-tripping and otherwise cooking the books a lot right now (not necesarily limited to this case, but more in general).
Very strong Y2K bubble vibes.
The magnitudes make it s.t. it doesn't really matter, I think.
Could somebody explain why there is so much negativity towards Thinking Machines in this thread? I realize that they haven't publicly announced a product yet but presumably the VCs have some idea of what Thinking Machines is building, and they have some pretty significant OpenAI talent on board, including Murati herself. Some amount of skepticism is warranted, of course, but a lot of these comments read as closer to hostility.
True. People here can be like this. I have not forgotten even the greatest juice maker of all times, Juicero was similarly disparaged with all this negativity.
The greatest juice maker was in fact magic leap
Or Color
So was Dropbox famously
Ah yes, they were simply ahead of their time.
Yes. VCs invested money. It ended up a flop. And this hurts us... how exactly? Other than some VCs losing their money on a bad bet, who cares?
Well a lot of people on this forum are founders or early employees in startups. Every dollar vcs set on fire chasing some obviously stupid idea, waste on crypto memecoins, etc is a dollar that is not helping some legitimate startup get funded.
Yes, but when you put it as "why are you investing in these bad ideas? Invest in mine, it's obviously much better", it sounds a lot more self-interested (and far more likely to be wrong).
You asked how it hurts people. That is how it hurts people.
It's a bad look on the entire industry. We send billions to serial grifters selling vaporware while the backbone of the internet is basically powered by $5 donations
Often I think if the money could not be used for some better purpose. It is still huge resources wasted. Like digging and filling same trench. Overall it is not efficient use of resources or time to me.
But maybe there is some gain that I can't just imagine...
You can say the same about most science research. In fact, many people do say the same, scrutinizing many different avenues of research as pointless. There are countless examples of "pointless" research ending up being useful.
(Note that it's much more legitimate to scrutinize scientific research, since it's mostly publicly funded, as opposed to VCs investing in startups.)
> Overall it is not efficient use of resources or time to me.
I mean, the tech world has done a lot of good and advanced humanity a lot. More than most industries, IMO. Most of that is by inventing new things. A society could dial down useless spending by dialing down innovation, but it's not clear to me that there's a way to get more innovation with less waste than the current system.
I think many industries are far more of an "inefficient use of resources". I think if the world as a whole would spend 10x more on scientific and technological advancement, at the cost of less e.g. fashion, less investment in entertainment, less investment in (some forms of) finance, etc, the world would be far better off. (I'm not advocating that this should be forced on society, just stating my opinion on what a more optimal way of allocating resources would be.)
These people somehow imagine that they (as taxpayers perhaps) are going to pay the cost one way or another. Not to mention there's a tinge of jealousy over the level of VC money involved - they imagine these people do not "deserve" it.
> Could somebody explain why there is so much negativity towards Thinking Machines in this thread?
I think it lies at the intersection of a lot of topics where HN comments are hostile: VCs, large fundraising, AI, OpenAI related employees. These are all topics where HN comments are more hostile than pragmatic.
Most of the hostility is just a proxy for “VCs bad” banter.
> HN comments are more hostile than pragmatic
In the case of a bubble, hostility is pragmatism.
Of course, nobody knows that it's a bubble, but nobody knows it's not a bubble either.
I've lived through 3 and read up on at least 10 more.
Many people know it's a bubble. You see lots of HN comments that it's a bubble. We certainly did in 2007.
In a bubble, the predominant notion is not "I wonder if it's a bubble", but rather "It's a bubble, I hope I can make my money before it pops". A perfect example of this was the Tulip craze in the Netherlands. Nobody actually believed tulip bulbs were worth that much, they just wanted to find a bigger sucker to make a profit, if you read accounts from the time.
This. Ans that's why we even manage to reproduce bubbles in a very simple simulated environnement among finance students who know exactly how overvaluated their assets are (I can't find the paper right now though…)
No, you're predicting that it's a bubble based on past events. It might be likely that it's a bubble. But nobody knows the future, no matter how confident they are.
What is the false positive rate? Broken clock...
Bears predicted 11 of the last 3 recessions or something.
Bears as in... bears, the animal?
In the context of economics, bears and bulls are people who have a negative/ positive outlook. Something looking bearish means you have a belief that it will go down. Something looking bullish means I you believe ut will go up.
It's nothing to do with Thinking Machines as a company, it's to do with a VC that's content to bet two billion dollars on a company that has shown absolutely nothing, and the sorry state of affairs that represents.
> It's nothing to do with Thinking Machines as a company, it's to do with a VC that's content to bet two billion dollars on a company that has shown absolutely nothing, and the sorry state of affairs that represents.
Why does it represent a "sorry state of affairs"?
VCs are risking money they manage, it's not like they're putting anyone else at risk. Do we really prefer a world in which we don't take risks to develop new technology?
The VC sector is probably an order of magnitude smaller then, say, fashion. Isn't money better spent taking risks to develop new technologies that have a chance to legitimately change the world for the better?
Note: If you think the technology could be a negative (which, to some extent I do because of the elements of AI safety, that's a separate argument. Not sure that that's what you're referring to though.)
They use our pension funds for this. They also distort the market.
I do see some value in it, we need to take risks with our capital and on a long term horizon it's fine.
But there has to be some rationale behind it at least, some evidence based approach.
They don't "use" pension funds, pension funds can choose to invest in VCs if they decide to do so. I think most usually invest low single digits of investment in VCs, mostly as diversification.
Absolutely.
But I imagine there's immense pressure to do so. Returns are tracked relative to others. All distorted by big jumps in valuations. In the long term, there might be a more prudent/sustainable use of some of that capital but we'll never know, everyone's chasing share price go up, not value added / profit go up.
Yes, it's good to have your finger in the pie. But the stake may be overpriced, given current behaviour.
VCs, who go on and on about capitalism, were whining on Twitter until the Silicon Valley Bank got bailed out. In real capitalism the SVB would have been allowed to fail and the VCs would have taken a hit.
But no risk for them, everyone paid for them to keep their billions.
> VCs are risking money they manage, it's not like they're putting anyone else at risk.
They're putting everyone at risk.
As others in this thread have pointed out what these VCs do is make wildly risky gambles. When it pays off they make billions of dollars in profit and congratulate themselves for their foresight and the power of capitalism. When it doesn't they go cap-in-hand to the federal government, saying that if they're allowed to collapse it'll destabilize the entire economy.
If it were just some rich billionaires who might have to sell their second private jet when this collapses I'd agree with you: who cares what they do with their own money. But what's going to happen is that the taxpayer will end up footing the bill for their reckless behavior, and millions of people will end up worse off for it as governments cut back on welfare, healthcare, and aid programs to balance the books. In a very real sense, people are going to be paying for VC greed with their lives.
> When it pays off they make billions of dollars in profit and congratulate themselves for their foresight and the power of capitalism. When it doesn't they go cap-in-hand to the federal government, saying that if they're allowed to collapse it'll destabilize the entire economy.
But that's not actually true.
The Silicon Valley Bank situation aside - because it was a unique situation, we can open it if you want - when have VCs asked to be bailed out on failed investments? This kind of moral hazard is absolutely a thing in banks and finance in general, but afaik, not in the VC industry.
I have a pretty dim view of VCS, or at least a16z, after seeing some of the awful blockchain tech startups they were throwing money at during the last bubble
The math to justify that investment is crazy.
This place used to be a place for hackers and founders. Now it is mostly a place for middle aged software engineers who hate someone else to success, change and hope for the future of Linux desktop. Thinking Machines presents both change and success .
My negativity for Thinking Machines is precisely because others (such as yourself) already consider it a success.
I don't think anyone can consider it a success just yet. But someone just injected 2 billion dollars into the enterprise. They are probably given a lot more information than you and I are. Maybe those people are dead wrong and they lose all their money, but maybe not.
With the public information there is neither a point in positivity not negativity. It would be speculation either way. A question that could be worth pondering is what exactly the investors are shown? What would you need to see to put all your money in thinking machines?
The answer was right in Mira's resignation from OpenAI [1]
“I want to create the time and space to do my own exploration.”
To create time and space and even able to explore it is far beyond cutting edge physics of today. If she is able to do it in just few billion dollars it is investment worth making.
1. https://www.wired.com/story/mira-murati-thinking-machines-la...
From 2007: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
Thinking Machines represent the new elite. People with the right pedigree that can raise billions with only an idea. If they fail, they’ll get paid anyway - and they’ll become billionaires.
It is a position that is completely unreachable for 99.9999% of people even in tech.
It is of course easy to write off critics as jealous has-beens and bozos.
My opinion: AI is taking all the money that could be spent on cool advancements that could give the average person hope and putting it towards a pipe dream. Why not be hostile towards the perceived death of an industry you love?
The whole system has gone crazy because of the wealthy having so much that the current game of coming up with stupid stories (AGI, Self Driving Cars, Robots that can do your household chores, Crypto) to convince people that a company can be worth 50-100 times earnings or valueless internet points will go up in price forever! There is no way these companies can possibly meet these expectations but the money sloshing around in the system makes it possible for rich people to keep believing (religiously) as there are no investments actually left for them to earn real money from a population that increasingly has nothing and earns less and less of the pie while valueless investments skyrocket.
I'd much rather this than the 2010s of Uber for X or the 10,000th SaaS productivity app.
> but presumably the VCs have some idea of what Thinking Machines is building
you imply that VCs are rational because bet their own money, which in current complicated world probably is not true. VC funds get money from complicated funnel likely including my/your retirement account and country public debt, VC managers likely receive bonuses for closed deals and not long term gains which may materialize in 10 years. So, investing 2B into non-existing product with unclear market fit/team/tech moat smells very strongly.
> you imply that VCs are rational because bet their own money, which in current complicated world probably is not true.
Correct. Most VCs are using someone else's money. See Softbank. And making extremely poor judgements on how to use that money.
Unfortunately in many cases those "other people" are, for instance, California's teachers.
So your position is that a VC will invest $2B in a startup on vibes alone without having any idea what they're building, because it is not literally their money? That seems like a significantly stronger and less plausible claim than mine, which his merely that a prospective $2B investor has access to more information about the company's plans than we do and that their investment is at least some indication that there is a real product in the pipeline.
> that a prospective $2B investor has access to more information about the company's plans than we do and that their investment is at least some indication that there is a real product in the pipeline.
there is a funnel of investors: say retirement account holders put money into some retirement fund, fund manager put money into some "innovation fund", "innovation fund" put money in VC fund. All middlemen get % cut, VC likely watch slides about some product roadmap, but they more interested in closing the deal, get % cut and move on.
And if those $2B just go poof because they somehow failed to notice what is apparently so obvious to people on his thread -- that there is no real product -- your position is that the VC does not suffer any significant consequences?
> your position is that the VC does not suffer any significant consequences?
it is likely they won't suffer any significant consequences
People with no product, no specific insight, and no published plan raising $$ trillions, due to elite background.
(Sure -- that background is somewhat self earned.)
They were founded 6 months ago, have no product, yet are purported to be worth $12B? I mean ... Come on.
Mistral having a $113M seed round from a slide deck
Murati: “hold my beer”.
I don't know much about them, but how they decided to call themselves strikes me as ... unwise: https://bookanalysis.com/dune/thinking-machines/
(They could have just as well picked Skynet.)
Pretty sure it's a reference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_Machines_Corporation, the famous supercomputer company from the 80s-90s where Richard Feynman briefly worked.
I think most people aren’t aware that as CTO Murati can take a large chunk of the credit for OpenAI’s success. Her skills were mostly in deft technical management, a skill often under appreciated by nerds. Her success here is going to heavily depend on her ability to attract the right talent.
Please quantity those contributions in "technical management". Otherwise it sounds like a boilerplate excuse non technical people will use.
Not sure you can quantify all work, but to the accounts I read she was constantly guiding, scheduling the teams, resolving conflict, allocating resources. Exactly what a CTO does in a company that size.
Can’t help but feel there’s some sexism attached to the pushback here.
And what a conflict resolver she was. It even elevated her to the level of CEO.
https://makeagif.com/gif/im-actually-not-sure-about-that-mir...
FWIW I would be skeptical of tech bros claiming they sped up 80% response time on microservice handling 5000000000 RPS. But I will be even more skeptical when they say "analyzed and implemented business requirements into maintainable and high performance code".
More generic, grandiose and oft-repeated someone's claims are, more skepticism is warranted.
> Could somebody explain why there is so much negativity towards Thinking Machines
> significant OpenAI talent on board, including Murati herself.
because ppl on this website don't consider her a 'talent'.
I don't think that's fair. The company was founded around 6 months ago and already has a valuation of 12B even though barely anyone outside of AI has heard of them, and I bet almost nobody even here could name their product. It's not that people think she's untalented, but rather, she'd have to be superhuman to justify that by herself.
Because connections and social signalling matter more than ideas among the rich of the world. Only some people can get such disproportionate advantages.
Oh that’s because the good people of HN have decreed a butlerian jihad
Because it looks like VC are spendings ridicoulous amounts of money for hype while many startups with actual products and a product market fit struggle to attract investors because their product is not related to transformers.
It makes perfect sense... Why spend time and money on building a product in hope of attracting VCs that may like it? Instead present your idea in an intentionally vague way that makes everyone's imagination fill in the blanks in the most favorable way.
Where is all the hate for SSI?
Probably because people view this grifting as something negative.
> they haven't publicly announced a product yet but presumably the VCs have some idea of what Thinking Machines is building
"Presumably" they have "some" idea. Oh really? Are you "sure" about that? Is that a $12B type confidence?
Well, I'm fairly confident they at least have the concept of an idea.
No one needs another mistral
huh, what happened? I haven't been following Mistral but I recall it was everyone's up and coming darling, no?
It's about to be bought by Apple, so not for long.
There's quite a gap between “Apple considers buying Mistral” and “they are about to be bought by Apple”.
Yes, a gap of three to six months, or maybe a bit longer if regulators get involved.
Anyway, if Mistral is for sale then if not Apple it'll be another big company.
No, the gap is right in your second sentence:
> if Mistral is for sale
At the moment there's no public information about that, it's all about Apple being interested into buying but we don't know if Mistral is interested into selling at all. That's the gap.
I thought that was perplexity.
I'll take another ten Mistrals thank you.
Andreessen Horowitz is not gambling with their own money:
https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/andreessen-horowitz...
Moreover, if some banks will fail in the aftermath, they'll be bailed out at the expense of you know whom.
How do you think VC firms work? There is no "own money". Their entire business is getting rich people, institutional investors, governments, pension funds, endowments etc. to give them money and investing that money in startups, keeping a cut for themselves.
Why do you ask me? One of the top comments assumes that it would be crazy to assume recklessness on the part of a16z. I point out that they are insulated from the consequences on multiple levels.
None? I think almost all VC partners are vested in their funds. They have skin in the game. Yes, they do profit from managing the money of others, but I think it's rare for them not to be putting their own money on the line.
Exactly the point they are making?
Gives a whole new meaning to the "2 on 12 seed round" !
It's kinda sad that this is frontpage news, because there is nothing related to technology in the title, nothing intellectually interesting.
YC is first and foremost a startup accelerator so it makes sense that entrepreneurship would be part of the discussion that people here are interested in.
You are right! Just like how a certain contingent flags posts that discuss any appalling misuse of technology under the pretext that "oh, it's politics, etc.", you should do the same for these scammy news items: flag + hide.
I don't know that it'll work, but it is worth trying.
This is so weird to me.
Yes, she was there at OpenAI and by all accounts a super respected non researcher.
Clearly she's incredible, her reputation proceeds her etc. but is operational strength (being a good exec) really what gets to AGI?
Feels almost like cargo-culting.
I suppose one should expect ‘time to agi’ to be a function of:
1. Researchers
2. Productivity-enhancing things in the org (either technical stuff like frameworks/optimisations or nebulous social things like better collaboration)
3. Amount of available compute.
4. Luck
And then the past experience with openAI should help a lot with doing a good job of #1 and #2 even if it is just being a competent executive.
Surely availability of data is here as well?
IIRC, she was the driving force behind ChatGPT - the product, that is. Arguably the most successful AI/LLM product.
Maybe the product she’s pitched has massive commercial potential.
What does one do to be considered as "driving force" et al?
The ability to attract good researchers is probably more important than being one your self.
> Feels almost like cargo-culting.
Why almost?
Sorry: precedes
I think it takes a lot of temerity and hubris to look at a 2B raise and assume it's all hype. A16Z has certainly had some misses, but one assumes there actually is some product they're showing behind closed doors that makes this round much more reasonable than it appears from the outside.
If something makes no sense, seems totally crazy, and is being done by a crowd of extremely smart people, you can only assume one of two things: they are actually crazy and frittering away 2B on hype or, just maybe, there's something we're not aware of. If there are only two camps: optimistic and naive or pessimistic and dismissive, I'll choose naive every day of the week.
Anyways, congrats to Thinking Machines and here's hoping they do have something awesome up their sleeve!
Theranos was worth $9B in 2013 money, and it latet turned out that they had literally nothing but hype. Enron was posting $100B revenue the year before it went bankrupt. Bernie Madoff's fund had huge banks as institutional investors. Magic Leap was valued at $4.6B and had some purportedly amazing demos behind closed doors that anyone who witnessed them thought would revolutionize entertainment.
While these are not necessarily typical cases, they show that it's absolutely possible to have gigantic valuations raised from industry experts with nothing to show for it, if you're good enough at lying.
The weird thing about Theranos is that every single expert who knew about the technical details of blood testing basically called out the BS from the get go.
Blood testing for a single condition can involve blood separation via centrifuges, application of various chemical solutions, a multi-step process using varios test strips (each with different specificities/sensitivities). Not to mention some of the offending markers might be so rare in blood that you'd have to draw multiple vials just to get a statistically significant amount of markers.
Reducing just a single one of these tests to an instant test that works with a drop of blood would be a major breakthrough, subject to various medical awards (and lengthy medical trials).
Well, in this case, no one knows the technical details.
Theranos famously didn't manage to raise VC money, the funding all came from people like Rupert Murdoch and the Walton family.
That makes a lot of sense. VCs only make money when companies go public, so a medical device that requires years of regulatory compliance legwork to even be allowed into a lab or pharmacy is an immediate no-go.
> a crowd of extremely smart people
I don't disagree with your broader point, but have spent enough time with enough a16z partners to say they're just people. Not outright stupid, but not extremely smart, either. And their error rate is pretty high.
Which...to some extent is by design. It's part of a VC's job to make bad bets. Sometimes the price of getting into a deal at all is getting in on insane terms, but you still do it because that one investment could return the entire fund. Maybe Thinking Machines is a winner, maybe it's another Clubhouse. We'll see.
I do agree for $2bn, but it’s also well known that US and in particular SV VCs will fund ideas and people, I.e. potential, whereas everywhere else funds results.
It’s that culture that creates some spectacular hits, and a vast number of misses. Not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s a different approach and means that the funding doesn’t necessarily suggest the results one might expect.
> A16Z has certainly had some misses, but one assumes there actually is some product
They don’t need to show a product. It’s been demonstrated that with capital and some skill you can train a foundation model. A16Z has the former. Murati has the latter.
> they are actually crazy and frittering away 2B on hype
This assumes that being careless with billions can only ever be crazy.
If you're already set for life, why not gamble (including at completely irrational levels) for even more insane amounts of money when the whole thing is just a crazy house of mirrors. Yes, there's value at the heart, but there's also crazy amounts of money being funneled in, lots of opportunity for chaos, lots of chances for legal rug pulls. All of it inflated even further by a fervor of carelessness for any kind of consequences - things like the stock market are completely removed from any kind of fundamentals.
In a fun house of mirrors, that 2 billion could be 2 cents, or it could be 2 trillion. Buy the ticket and have fun!
Isn’t this the perspective that leads to all bubbles?
What kind of temerity and hubris would it take to believe that the ratings agencies were colluding with the banks to give AAA to Mortgage Backer Securities?
> one assumes there actually is some product they're showing
Can it simply be that anyone who wants to create new competitive models at this point needs billions for training? This isn't a saas where you can whip up a prototype in a month. Rather than having a product to show, I'd guess it's more about an experienced team and some plausible-sounding research ideas.
Could be, or it could be a simple flawed net present value calculation, similar to Effective Altruism.
SBF said if he had a die and it had a 99% chance of killing everyone and a 1% chance of making the world 1 million times happier he would roll the die. Repeatedly. And Silicon Valley loved him.
I think AI is a similar calculation. Humans are tearing themselves apart and the only thing worth betting on is AI that can improve itself, self replicate and end scarcity. I believe that these VCs believe that AI is the only chance to save humanity.
And if you believe that, the net present value of AGI is basically infinite.
> Humans are tearing themselves apart and the only thing worth betting on is AI that can [...] end scarcity
Scarcity, wow...
- There is no scarcity in the rich world by historical standards.
- There is extreme poverty in large parts of the world, no amount of human intelligence has fixed this and therefore no amount of AI will. It is primarily not a question of intelligence.
- On top of that "ending scarcity" is impossible due to the hedonistic treadmill and the way the human mind works as well as the fact that with or without AI there will still be disease, aging and death.
Well in that end game of a post scarcity is there a need for humans?
If you were in the top 1% and you don’t need labor anymore because it can be automated.
Even in post scarcity some people will want as much as possible for themselves, if history is any baseline.
I think they act as if making these bets is the only way to save themselves. None of them care about humanity obviously.
I think they care about the nebulous concept “humanity” as represented by themselves “the light of consciousness”. Humans? Not so much.
Oh it’s going to get exciting indeed!
> A16Z has certainly had some misses,..
Yeah, similar to Trump administration may have had some misses but extremely smart people are doing great things.
Well, if you have to pay $200 million to a top AI engineer, $2B is a very short runway for a startup.
Wouldn't overlook this company, they manage to bring over a good deal of top talent from OpenAI including John Schulman
I guess investors are hoping for another Anthropic, or resurrection of Richard Feynman to help with development.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_Machines_Corporation for the reference
Danny Hillis deserves a mention
Absolutely, moreso than Feynman in this context. But, Danny Hills doesn't make a good sound bite.
You can buy six B-2 bombers for that money. And use them against competitor AI startups. You think this sounds stupid? This is where all this AI arms race is going.
Now that I would invest in.
That's what a B2B business is?
I am willing to sell my killthe.ai domain for the highest bider :D
How many nukes? Will carpeting Silicon Valley unlock the value?
Does anybody know what they are building yet?
"it wants to build artificial intelligence systems that are safer, more reliable and aimed at a broader number of applications than rivals".
If only I had had that idea, maybe I could have raised $2B.
They need to build a Terminator T-800 as the ultimate AI safety and a Time Machine.
And the credentials of running if you also had the credentials of being a very successful CTO at OpenAI, you might have.
I am working on a pitch deck for a startup that is going to build language models that aren't just safe and reliable but they are actually CONSCIOUS.
consciousmachines.ai
Such an obvious next step. Conscious, ethical, inclusive machines.
"I have an idea for a startup. it's like AI but BETTER. Wouldn't you like better AI? Money please!"
I heard they are building a What the hell were you thinking machine.
A a supercomputer with 65536 processors and a 16 dimensional hypercube interconnect, in a black monolithic enclosure with red blinkenlights.
Yeah, but no Richard Feynman this time around. And I was just wearing this shirt today! https://www.tamikothiel.com/cm/cm-tshirt.html
Gavin Belson Signature Edition Box 1
why are you giving away the joke
More of the same it seems. How can you deliver a product within 2 months of there is anything novel.
> How can you deliver a product within 2 months of there is anything novel
Uh, run the training script with your thoughtful modifications? They’re not welding together an LLM.
hype
This is what I expect. Theyre Not hiring even engineers. By the time they have a strategy, plan, hire, and act on that plan they will be behind the curve, and force to use the $ to acquire someone who did.
Well this is blatantly false, she linked the career page and I know of people that received offers recently.
They have very strong talent from Meta's FAIR/Pytorch teams as well as a lot of strong people from OAI.
This is wrong. they have strong engineering and a product coming this year
While you are seeing in to the future, can you tell me the Powerball numbers?
the product is announced and their hires are public
foundational models
[flagged]
It is literally in the article:
> "We're excited that in the next couple months we will be able to share our first product, which will include a significant open source component and be useful for researchers and startups developing custom model," CEO Murati said in a post on the X social media platform.
Is there a word (like aphorism or metaphor) for someone trying to prove a point and doing the opposite? There just has to be.
"You've just proved my point" is enough.
What are they building?
they have concepts of a product
A big, beautiful... thing.
Who is this person and why is she attempting to skinwalk the name of a really cool computer company (creators of the Connection Machine)?
I hope Sheryl and Danny are getting compensated somehow...
Ex-CTO of OpenAI
I guess we know the answer to the second question, in the words of Reggie Watts: "for no apparent reason, other than to create a false sense of importance, of which I couldn't retain on my own."
Remind me, does she have plans to release an actual product? Or is this like Ilya's company where their first and only product will be AGI, if/when that ever happens?
At this point, arms-crossed mugshot of "{ex-Open AI} raises $2B" is a meme. Training one epoch of a model the size of the GPT-4 family is easily an 8 figure job. Considering other ops costs, UI and backend dev, securing Everest sized datasets, demos/talks, wages, bonuses etc, this probably gives them around 100 trial and errors, or in other words "Look at me mum, I won 100 chips for the casino!"
And imagine being the ops guy there, about to run a new training batch, but you specified the wrong input path. Puff, the money is gone. Absolutely wild stuff.
Murati was CTO. Whilst Brockman and Altman may have bypassed or undermined her on some occasions, she can take large credit for OpenAI’s technical success. Brockman can take credit for his extremely hard work, increasing cadence. Altman for incredible fundraising and (often polarising) visionary leadership.
From what I’ve read, Murati was an excellent CTO.
Ridiculous bubble. Valued for what exactly?
What are they going to spend those $2B on?
Buying Windsurf, presumably.
SUCH a good comment - made me laugh
Signing bonuses for 10 engineers.
How about defense systems?
Maybe they can make a T-800 to ensure when AI/skynet goes rogue humanity has a chance.
It’s the ultimate AI safety.
“I’ll be back”
VCs are betting they'll get out with at least some gains before this bubble bursts. They have literally nothing new, not even in theory. They'll build a smaller-but-not-that-small-still-better-than-you-expect model which will be kind of open for others, which means they'll cut some deal and pretend they did something and that they received something in return.
> They have literally nothing new, not even in theory
They haven’t built anything yet. It’s a bit premature to call out the non-existing product as insufficiently novel.
>It’s a bit premature to call out the non-existing product as insufficiently novel.
I think the point is that the pie-in-the-sky promises are insufficiently novel.
> point is that the pie-in-the-sky promises are insufficiently novel
You have no data to judge novelty on. If you think AI rocket science, they’re flubs. If you don’t, they have a shot. Either way, I can’t see novelty being unsatisfied.
Some of the best OpenAI people work at TM. Wish them all the best.
a16z is the new softbank when it comes to signaling short or run
Sheesh. 12B. Here I am working my ass off for $25M.
Looks like a bubble, pops like a bubble.
After what we have seen in terms of talent acquisition this seems like a no-brainer really.
I do hope they have some novel idea up their sleeve. Another firm just executing a similar playbook even if well executed is not going to face headwinds against incumbents
I need to get around to betting against this on prediction markets soon.
> "We're excited that in the next couple months we will be able to share our first product, which will include a significant open source component and be useful for researchers and startups developing custom model," CEO Murati said in a post, opens new tab on the X social media platform.
We need to jack up interest rates again.
This actually sounds like they might be making something that is generally useful to other companies training foundational models. What that is - I have no idea. But they may be onto something here.
Sort of like the old adage about the Goldrush - why pan for gold when you can just sell tons of shovels to all the others rushing to get rich?
Then they should give an answer that isn't filled with the buzzwords currently used to lubricate the money out of some coked-out VC angel investor's accounts.
hahaha
So novel, they couldn't even come up with an original name.
To be fair the other Thinking Machines has been defunct over 30 years.
That said, what was left of the old one was bought by Sun, which is now owned by Oracle.
I wonder if they still own rights to the name? Not the wisest move to name your new company after something owned by the most famously litigious tech corporation.
Yet the Jurassic Park franchise is just as strong as ever.
Thinking Machines CM-5 in Jurassic Park (1993):
https://www.starringthecomputer.com/appearance.html?f=11&c=1...
Jurassic World Rebirth passes $500 M in revenue:
https://www.koimoi.com/box-office/jurassic-world-rebirth-wor...
Fun fact, in the novel the computers were Cray X-MPs (sadly Cray is now semi-defunct, since they were bought and merged into HPE) [1].
[1] https://cray-history.net/2023/08/20/cray-systems-in-popular-...
Thinking Machines was chosen over the Cray because they had more visual appeal. Sheryl Handler the CEO had (has) a real flair for and it showed; they were neat looking machines
The Cray machines looked more like an airport seating area. Or with later models, obstacles in a laser tag arena. While the Thinking Machines with the moving LEDs looked alive, almost like it was designed to be a character in a movie, which they became.
Maybe the new company should consider something like this for the next investor show and tell
https://rodyne.com/?p=1674
what? Cray machines were pretty rad looking in their own way.
They were, but they didn't blink.
One would imagine they already thought of that. There are at least two people at a16z old enough to know about the original TM.
Fascinating question! I can't find any mention of this seemingly obvious issue.
Here's[1][2] their trademark application from February, which is still "NOT ASSIGNED". Technically it's for their logotype but I imagine it's all the same issue, considering that they include "Computer hardware" in the description of their company (which is exactly what the old one did). This site ominously says that the only action since the filing date was on June 5th, titled "LETTER OF PROTEST EVIDENCE FORWARDED" -- perhaps that's Oracle?
I think this[4] is the trademark for the original's ("Thinking Machines Corporation") trademark logotype, first used in 1987 and defunct ("cancelled"?) by 1999. Another site[5] lists three other "Dead/Cancelled" trademarks owned by the original, and two more recent attempts by randos in 2006 and 2010 that were both shot down.
Technically they're "Thinking Machine Lab Inc."[3], but they're basically always referred to without the "Lab", even to the point of using thinkingmachines.ai as their domain (which, hilariously, doesn't use their trademarked logotype). Another goofy tidbit is that they also filed a trademark for a serif logotype of the words "BEEP BOOP"[6] -- maybe that's their fallback name!
Would be fascinated to hear from anyone familiar with US trademark law on what might be going on, and how we might see what the "LETTER OF PROTEST" is! My layperson understanding would definitely tell me that Oracle would maintain the trademarks, but perhaps they were forced to let them lapse due to lack of use?
I've been slowly building (y'know how it is...) a (one-man...) company filed as "Doering Thinking Machines, LLC" for a few years (named after an old family business, "Doering Machines"), so I'm quite interested to see how this shakes out!
[1] https://furm.com/trademarks/thinking-machines-99054776
[2] For the love of god, please HN gods, just make these comments markdown. IDK what battle you're fighting but it's a baffling one. The lack of blockquotes is painful, but the lack of inline links is downright diabolical! You have three people now, you can afford the effort ;)
[3] https://trademarks.justia.com/741/37/thinking-machines-74137...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_Machines_Lab
[5] https://uspto.report/TM/99051772
[6] https://trademarks.justia.com/990/71/beep-99071391.html
I really hope these seemingly experienced entrepreneurs got the trademark sorted out and locked down before adopting it. Otherwise it may be an expensive lesson.
IANAL but I do know trademarking a logotype is a kind of 'trade dress' that's not the same trademarking the words of the name (even if those words appear\ in the logotype).
[dead]
I guess "random and pleasing" is appropriate for both CM-5s and LLMs.
Maybe it's a throwback fashion statement.
Bet they've never heard of it
[flagged]
You manage to turn any topic, any conversation into your pet issue, don't you.
When billions of dollars are being wasted on hype tech while people are homeless, starving, being murdered in Gaza etc, yes! I do!
Do you really think you’re increasing sympathy for your cause with this tripe? You may actually be more effective if you troll for the other side.
You must be fun at parties.
2bn from 16az, post-artificial paradigm auto-correct. this is a market exodus for parting the red sea.
This company calls for a Butlerian Jihad. I mean, in all seriousness: calling themselves like the original evil in Dune with at least a likelihood that a evil general intelligence is showing up soon is very disturbing.