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Comment by rhrtah | Hacker News Reader

Goldman Sachs recently stoked fear about software stocks due to claimed AI competition.

What if their strategy is this: slowly drive down software stocks, keep talking about AI, buy the downward market. Then cash in on the IPOs of OpenAI and Anthropic.

Then let OpenAI and Anthropic implode. Goldman Sachs had no problems underwriting webvan at the end of 1999, which then imploded in 2000.

Anyway, I just valued my dog at $1 billion post-money. You can buy it at pets.com.

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Matt Levine has put this forward in his newsletter - if you're moderately influential you can go on TV and tell people that "X industry will be dead in 10 years" because of AI and then profit from the inevitable stock dip.

Because we live in the worst possible timeline the end result for AI companies does seem to be "too big to fail", where these massive investments will get foisted on working class people via a bailout or an IPO and index inclusion.

His newsletter (and podcast) are fantastic.

I doubt talking heads on the TV can move markets.

I don't see why any AI company would ever be "too big to fail". I can't see why any government would be motivated to take the political hit of bailing them out.

What if the president of the nation happens to hold stock in these companies?

Once the bureaucracy is automated, there will be no "reasonable" choice.

What if the head of that government was a lame duck president, and those AI companies personally funded his next yacht.

You're attributing way too much intent to what is the viewpoint of some random analyst at Goldman Sachs (who doesn't even control any purse strings). A year ago there was another big hullabaloo when a GS team wrote a long post about how AI companies would never make enough revenue.

what goes up, must come down

spinning wheel, round and round

https://youtu.be/zhnEjxsjjuA

Claude Code is trivially an attempt to hobble the rest of the software business: the PID controller, the control vectors, the ever change loss surface, the bash and JSON jank at the foundations, the no one is this stupid context management, the some-data-critical-to proceed | tail -n 5, the sed editing, the speculative execution of partial frames.

OpenRouter and Opencode show you how behind it is, that bootstraps you off of them. They have issues too and Zen is starting to feel icky, but they let you speed run to the next thing.

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