There are gambles like "I want to heavily invest in this technology" and there are gambles like "I want to commit fraud to bail out my other company". The thing people are criticising isn't the gamble, and it's disingenuous to present that as the main issue.
I think the biggest problem here is that we have too much media coverage and scrutiny on stuff like this today. 24x7 financial news, 24x7 tech news, and 24x7 financial/tech news!
Here's the deal - these are HUGE bets, with a HUGE risk of failure, and a HUGE reward. As a society we should be focusing on the willingness to take these bets, and allowing them to fail without pointing an laughing like a bunch of school kids at a science fair.
Scientific history is full of failure, and examples of failure leading to discovery and advancement. Let's embrace it and repeat after me - "Failure is Always an Option".
If you know exactly what your machine is going to do, you are responsible for what your machine does. This is why you can have web services.
If you don't know exactly what your machine is going to do, you are unleashing a dangerous machine on an unwitting population of human beings, and that's reckless.
This probably is relevant to the financial sector. Engaging in a digital arms race, and then claiming the machine is responsible for your lost retirement money.
We are so enthralled with technology that we're willing to spend large parts of our lives engaging with it. That's like a teenager loving their bo, damn the consequences.
Now we've come to trust large amounts of other people's money to a digital contest.
Betting large amounts of money on a contest is just that: a bet.
Maybe we should stop and think about whether betting retirement money in a global AI contest is a good idea.
Sure, you can make the argument that gambling is legal in many jurisdictions, but even then you have to remember that the house always wins.
I'm unclear on what you're asking me to opine on, but if you're looking for me to state my stance, as differentiated from the two aforementioned parties, here it is.
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.
This assumes a very high level of naivety by the people funding the company, who at least theoretically, should be, or have access to, technical experts that can study the technology for themselves.
We're not talking about people raising money from the general public or using heavy-handed sales tactics. We're talking about billionaires funding this thing - I'm not going to cry if they lose money on a bad investment (unless there is outright fraud involved).
Suggest you lay off the personal attacks and review the site's Guidelines [1]. I'd already passed over and chosen to ignore your opening attack in your first comment but you've ramped it up with this reply.
Finally, maybe rather than just saying that 'all sorts of entities are investing in this hoopla', try to make an actual case yourself as to what the value case in this technology is. We should try to think for ourselves here, not just follow the (investing) herd.
This is exactly why there are so many skeptics. Too many people trying to sell it as a "get rich quick" investment without downsides while there are so few concrete use-cases so far.
Most of the comments seem to be basically medieval anti-progress views. It's really sad, and seems to be becoming even more of a norm across the technologies (e.g. AI also)
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.
The majority of the people putting the stock value down have no clue how bad this is: they are just making a bet (and many of them will make a lot of money even if this turns out to be an elaborate hoax). Sure a lot of people disagree, but if you read all the threads here you can quickly get a sense that among people who have a clue what this means on a technical level (those who real hacker news) don't agree how bad it is.
Slides talk about S&P IT but no one is concerned with IT public market valuations (at least relative to the rest of the public market). The concern is with private tech market.
Slides talk a lot about how the amount of funding is justifiable but the question is whether the valuations are. Lower amounts of funding do suggest there is less at risk, however.
How do you reconcile slide 37, which suggests that fund raising is as difficult as ever, with the widely held view that money is flowing freely today.
Even if one takes an amoral view of it, there is a risk that the people you were investing in will now waste time investigating a non-existent technology.
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.
I dont understand why business leaders cannot see this for what it is and take back some control. Investors need to start asking more probing questions about how organizations develop and deploy applications. Perhaps if the money becomes contingent, people will start to give a shit about the engineering quality.
At no point should "fun" be a line item when determining what technology to select in a high stake environment.
We are in finance and we picked the most boring technologies we could find. Most of our stuff doesn't even talk to the network stack. I can't imagine running our transactions, with their piping hot PII, through the labyrinthine monstrosity that is modern "best practices".
Seems that we are more likely to throw down a $100 at a betting table, and gambling to winning it all , than on developers pioneering the next useful technology. Just noticing for myself how high the stakes really are. ;-D
Sure, the tech is not perfect. But it will get better over time, not worse.
Soon there may be a "good version" of it that replaces a big chunk of anything financial and financializes another chunk of everything else.
Or maybe not.
I understand assigning a low probability to that event, but the upside is so big that it's still a bit weird to be just a hater and not make a lottery-ticket-sized investment.
Or I guess the chance of being able to tell randos on the internet "I told you so and they never fooled me!" in a few years if it fails must be a similar-sized reward in utility.
It's sort of like a lottery ticket, but people are buying the stock in the hopes of awesome new technology, rather than merely hoping to get rich. As long as you buy only what you can afford to lose, it's probably worth it for some of us.
There aren't a whole lot of companies willing to even try really ambitious projects like they do.
IMO it seems weird to be interested in a technology which enables digital scarcity and therefore value, but not be interested in the value created by a practical implementation of the technology.
It's a strange enough position to me that it makes me question whether people who say this actually understand the technology.
Plus, who cares about other peoples' "greed"? There's lots of greed in traditional finance but that doesn't stop most of us from investing in stocks and that kind of thing. If I think GOOG is a sane, rational long-term investment while others are going bonkers over it, I don't see why that would change my mind.
No, most people would like to be richer for less effort and therefore will invest early in a technology and expose themselves to larger upsides were it to take of, and repeat marketing material without incurring responsibility if it's false. I will not hold you responsible for what you just said, for instance, because I assume you're just someone who read the official communication of the company you're invested in, even if it's objectively false to say that people are expected to understand ambiguity in a way closer to the spirit rather than in a way closer to the letter.
Making marketing material truer will lower the amount of people trapped into the vicious cycle of repeating false claims for the sake of propping up a risky investment, and is good for everyone involved long term.
But short-term, making outrageously optimistic statements will create a large amount of proponents which is what probably financed this report in the first place.
The difficulty is in ramping up truth without destroying too much the franchisees who are the ones who put up the actual money but valued their investment in light of a false/exaggerated statement.
Government tech investment delivered the Internet, the single largest advancement to humanity, even bigger than the moon landing.
It's also like he doesn't know what investments are: a gamble that you think the proposed company/solution/whatever is going to succeed, and that the few successes will be far more valuable than what was spent on all the investments, successes and failures combined.
This is like if I wrote an unhinged rant about how Y Combinator wastes money and is stupid because most of the picks have turned out to be shit choices, and ignoring the fact that the few that survived, found their market fit, and succeed were highly profitable and helped fund future rounds to continue the process.
comments like this really make me smh. what's wrong with some lucky people getting rich off of this? you do realize they financed that research for the past 20 years, and if it's actually an investment group instead of a few passionate individuals I can guarantee you they also financed a shitload of other endeavours that went nowhere and ate the losses, lol.
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.
That’s exactly what I am saying. It’s not a technical problem, it’s an incentive problem and the entire industry has no incentive to adopt a the technical solution these people are parroting to investors.
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