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Comment by qeternity | Hacker News Reader

Point to one single transformative invention that was accretive from day one. The ChatGPT moment isn't even two years old. I don't know for certain whether any of these investments are going to work out, but all of the current cash burn is forward looking. It may all come crashing down, but this is not the right analysis.

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This certainly the model that basically all VC funded tech companies use. Though OpenAI is notable, because I don’t think we’ve seen another company burn this much money this fast.

Not a value statement on whether is this is right or wrong.

This predates modern VC by centuries. Early trade routes which connected humanity across continents were highly speculative, requiring huge amounts of capital, and were only profitable years later.

That’s wrong. A single load of pepper was enough to pay for the successful voyage and multiple lost ships.

Yes, that single load took years. It required huge amounts of speculative capital, years of fruitless exploration, and as you say, multiple failed expeditions before it succeeded.

That is my point.

each ship lost was maybe $10-20 million and years exploring were performed by a couple of ships operated by dozens of skilled workers with a very clear path to profitability and timeline (succesful journey to india/americas, and in under 2-3 years).

That's orders of magnitude less than the thousands of employees and billions of dollars being deployed with no clear business model or profitability in sight.

if we adjust for the inflation from sailing age and today ... it actually looks same to me.

all inventions are accretive from day one, in the majority of historical bubbles the speculation was built on top of already profitable technologies but there was always one or two firms that were profitable to begin with. Modern bubbles (AI, Metaverse,Crypto) are speculative from the word go, there isn’t a single company that’s profitable in those verticals.

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