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Comment by slg | Hacker News Reader

Which somewhat undermines all the doomsday scenarios that people have been talking about. Going back to 23andMe going bankrupt in the first place, this data is clearly not worth nearly as much as it would be if any potential buyers thought there was an actual legal path to abusing this data in the way many are predicting. That doesn't mean that won't change in the future and part of the problem here is that there is no putting the toothpaste back in the tube, but buyers don't think this will change anytime soon, which should be an indication that it probably won't.

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DeCODE, which was a very fancy Icelandic company roughly in the same niche as 23andme (founded in the 1990s!), also got bought by a pharma. Amgen in their case. For more background, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeCODE_genetics.

Genetic information is valuable for finding drug targets, but it's generally a poor predictor of disease, except in case of rare monogenic disorders. With the advent of large population studies such as UK Biobank, which include lots of epigenetic information as well, I am not sure if one can get much extra value from 23andme's dataset in a pharmaceutical context.

> Which somewhat undermines all the doomsday scenarios that people have been talking about.

Does it though? This is just a temporary stop gap, the data will continue to move and be exchanged, and this company will eventually collapse or be bought out as well.

In a world in which people are willing to wildly speculate on stuff like NFTs and crypto, no one was willing to speculate on purchasing this data. That doesn't mean this data will never have value (which I stipulated in my original comment), but it is a clear indication that no one with the money to afford this data genuinely thinks it is worth the billions it would be if some of the fearmongers' claims were perceived as likely outcomes.

It may also be possible that the data's value is not realizable today, but can be in the future (in a way that does not benefit the people from which this data was derived).

This has played out in real time since the advent of stable diffusion and LLM ai - the data available on the internet was originally thought to be unmonetizable. Most people putting that data online simply thinks nothing of it, and let it be freely viewed.

Now, all of a sudden, these same people start complaining that their data are being used to train an ai (from which they obviously claim they want a piece of the profit off).

I expect genetics data to follow the same trajectory (and we just dont have any use for said data right now).

Yes, that is why I used the word "speculate". If there is a 10% chance this data explodes in value by 100x, then we could have expected that someone would have paid close to 10x the cost (minus the NPV of that money). The fact that no one did indicates a widespread belief that the odds of this hypothetical change happening are perceived to be low or that the value wouldn't actually increase that much after the change.

Your logic seems to be based on a belief in a perfectly rational and near-omniscient market. Given how much money is lost in various investments, how many companies fail, etc... I'm not sure such confidence is warranted, or safe.

Dismissing valid concerns about such data being sold and traded around as "fearmongering" also seems unfair. Given the

Idk.

Everybody made fun of Elon buying twitter but the spin-off from it (X.ai) was valued enough to buy the original company.

We'll need to wait a bunch of more years to see if the 23andme concerns were unfounded.

Those are all paper transactions with made up numbers. You need outside money coming in from sane investors for the numbers to mean things.

Fidelity isn't a sane investor?

Crucial X.ai bought out X with a minority of stock. X.ai as in the thing spun out from X to do ai using X's data. Fidelity seems to value X.ai enough to be happy to have gotten more shares of it using the X shares.

I swear if OpenAI happened like 1 year prior to the twitter sale then everybody would have a different opinion about 44 Billion being the correct price for twitter.

Existing investors can be onboard with the possibility of an exit even if it's less than their investment. From Fidelity's perspective they have a pile of money burned in a fire. Turning the ashes of that pile into what might be a swing for the fences or any type of exit at all is attractive. Also, sometimes good money follows bad to hedge against taking a larger loss on paper and in this case buying favor might get them access to another deal like SpaceX. None of it feels above board, an efficient market in action, or sane from most perspectives.

Huh? Both the acquisition of Twitter and the ongoing capitalization of X.ai involved real outside money from external investors.

The sale of X to X.ai at the end of march was not an arms length transaction.

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