SoftBank scrambling to come up with $22.5B in OpenAI funding before New Year Japanese tech investment giant SoftBank needs to secure $22.5 billion before the end of the year to make good on its commitments to AI partner OpenAI. According to Reuters, there are several levers SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son could pull in order to put the funding package together, including calling on untapped margin loans …
.... by stealing content from human creators. And they whine that they should be allowed to do so, because otherwise their business would not be viable. Tough luck, I'd say, if you cannot make money in legal ways, perhaps you should find another line of business and what you are doing is, essentially, organised crime.
OpenAI isn't remotely close to profitable and even its overpromising CEO says it will be 2030 before it finally turns its first profitable quarter.
They are only able to continue at the pace they are because of massive cash injections from people suckers like SoftBank's CEO to keep feeding the beast, each time at ever larger valuations.
Not only that, they have the gall to buy up 40% of the world's DRAM silicon wafers just to sit on it with the intention to stifle competition, nevermind that they are also screwing over anyone else who currently needs anything that uses DRAM.
Screw OpenAI, I wish they'd crash and burn.
It's only a matter if time before the music stops in this grand financial game of musical-chars. The sad part, and the risk, is the fallout from being the one left standing may take national and global economies down with them. Somebody is going to be left holding the bag, and it's a rather large and smelly bag.
I don’t really know how corporates operate financially at this scale, but on the face of it, $22.5 billion dollars seemed like betting the business. Then I check the market cap for SoftBank and it’s $25 trillion?
Only the USA has a bigger GDP than that (and I know it’s a completely different thing, but anyway)
Staggering.
Where do these dumb ideas that companies that prepay for capacity like Apple for N2 and OpenAI for DRAM are doing it to "stifle competition". You prepay for capacity because you actually NEED it. It doesn't remotely make financial sense to buy up capacity that you have no intent of using.
What do you think, that OpenAI is taking those wafers and feeding them to the shredder to screw Google and the other AI companies?
It's brave to assume that AGI will be solved by the time the billions of dollars of hardware investments are ready. I would instead bet on AGI being solved after that hardware is obsolete. Then what? Old supercomputers aren't worth much because their operating costs are too high.
Was about to say the same thing.
They've sold their stake in the highest valued and probably most profitable company around, at the time when it is coining profit. In order to dump money into something that will crash and burn in the next few years.
I can't wait to read all about the greatest con in history in a few years time. And the number of rich folks like the head of softbank, who come out saying stupid things like "We never saw the crash coming. We all believed AI would make us rich. We never could have seen it was all one big scam..."
Those who aren't tech-literate will all think we have gone off the rails as we wander the wastelands laughing at what's gone down, chuckling that 'the richest men in the world, the ones who imagined they were the smartest in business' couldn't see it coming.
We can give a little wave, a double thumbs-ups, and enjoy a joint nod and a wink, like bus and taxi drivers do when they encounter a fellow traveller
It's going to be fucking great. Well, at least we'll die laughing.
He has to progressively sell or mortgage all the stuff that makes decent money so he can toss endless sacks of cash into the AI money pit.
Future MBA students will be writing about the redistribution of wealth that is taking place here, and the methods that have been devised to do it, for years to come.
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