you could do the same, get together with a group of other people and invest in something using your disposable software eng income (maybe you already are). or you could just complain when someone else takes the risk and reaps the rewards because you apparently have no concept of things like jealousy, envy, or basic economics lol.

When you have too many empty suits at the top making all the decisions, then you get into a situation of the blind leading the blind. It is shocking that it can happen at such a scale.

It's frustrating for intelligent, motivated founders who do the hard work to watch vaporware competitors getting billion dollar valuations and taking all the market share right in front of them.

Too many investors don't have a clue about what real innovation/value looks like because they've never actually seen it - Most of them probably got into their position through a combination of hard hustling and luck instead of through hard work and critical thinking.

Unfortunately, hustling doesn't advance science or human knowledge.

I'm well aware and I agree. Systematically, this fundamentally means that no human being should extend any trust to any corporation in this economic environment, that no corporation can be trusted to build anything remotely resembling infrastructure (including any tool anyone will depend on for a period of time longer than one fiscal quarter). That no corporation can be trusted to keep any promise to anyone who is not a top-level investor

You are telling me, and I agree, that these large firms are dangerous animals that I can't reason with, that could decide to maul me at any time, and that my best bet is to limit my exposure to them as much as I can manage, moreso the larger they are. This means that it is in the interest of everyone who isn't themselves an oligarch to use every meager lever of power available to them to try to change this situation, up to and including killing these things when possible, because it is deeply difficult to avoid being under the power of these behemoths, and they do not and will never have your best interests in mind in any respect someone doesn't force them to

That's the logical conclusion of this thing people keep telling me is obvious as though that also means it's inevitable. But for some reason a lot of people who wanted to tell me how this all works seem either surprised or sometimes even hostile when I start talking about stuff like that

That said, the part they should "know better" about is that this use case makes no sense whatsoever for the technology as it actually works. I'd be really surprised if this kind of thing even positively impacted their stock valuation because it reeks of a flailing and incompetent vision for how to apply the technology. The most charitable I can be for a thing like this is to say "well they got caught up in the stupid hype and are just trying to throw an LLM into anything they can", which works for a lot of companies but not for one that's spent over a decade building world-class expertise and could be argued to have actually invented the specific underlying technology powering this hype wave. I get that the underlying motivation for any decision made by a company is that they think they will profit from it. This is tautological. I am saying that even from that perspective, this is conspicuously stupid in a way that only seems like it can inspire investor confidence if investors continue to buy hype that seems decreasingly tethered to reality

When I read this, my first thought was this company almost certainly won't succeed, but it's great that there is private investment going into developing the technology. What a way better thing to explore than some "me-too" SaaS CRM thing or wherever the usual VC money flows.

Or that they will incorrectly discount things that you say in the future. But then that's one of the reasons that lying is so often a bad strategy in the first place.

This seems like a good thing for a business to do, although perhaps they should figure out better ways to do this so they don't anger all their consumers

TL;DR - Armchair experts on either side of the argument make poor investors.

The lack of barriers to creating, marketing, and hype-selling a new project inherently makes 99% of the projects in this space "vaporware". The terms "grift, rugpull, scam" etc. are appropriate.

Unsophisticated retail "investors" (and hell, even sophisticated speculators just subscribing to 'greater fool' investing - e.g., most VCs) are focused heavily on the upside in these types of projects, because the measure of success is "money made". There are people who respond to this by writing off the space entirely - "It's a ponzi scheme", "scam city", "tulips", etc. All fun memes to tout the "I told you so narrative"

My personal belief is that there is the potential for "ethical alpha" (subjective, perhaps - primarily meant to differentiate from 'get out before it implodes' alpha) to be had by investing long-term in the remaining projects with the combination of development attention, enterprise buy-in, and scaling capabilities that could deliver meaningful value to end-users. I'm not going to get into a debate over which projects meet these criteria, whether they exist, or any other debate which likely will revolve endlessly with no resolution.

I acknowledge there are risks associated with the broader technology being adopted in a meaningful sense, but subscribe to a perspective that there is yet-unrealized value in its application.