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Comment by ActionHank | Hacker News Reader

I’ve discussed with many people at work, all engineers, they’re weirdly oblivious. Most are shocked when I say things like OpenAI and Anthropic are gonna crater.

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There’s a notable difference between saying those companies may crater, and predicting confidently that they will crater. The wording of your comment makes it seem like a foregone conclusion.

for real i hold the opposing view i think openai will be a 5-10T dollar company in the next 5 years, but im speculating just as much as he is.

I still think OpenAI holds on as a Google competitor and Anthropic does fine as a business tool. Do they match their outsized spending with future growth? Well, that I'm not very confident about. A lot of this really comes down to what is the business model of integrating AI with 3rd party systems and I don't see that anyone has truly cracked that yet.

Just a tad bit more ; it like saying either an event will happen or not so probability is 50%.

Your scenario is certainly possible, that doesn’t make both predictions equally (un)likely.

At least you admit you're speculating (we all are). They confidently just say its a foregone conclusion.

If they're actually that confident I hope they short the stock long term with basically all their money.

I also speculate that OpenAI and Anthropic will crater, but I also expect that the market will remain irrational much longer then anyone shorting it today will remain solvent.

So yes, I believe it's going to leave a smoking hole in the ground, but I won't be betting money on it.

If you run a traditional short (borrow and sell the shares), you need to be right on the direction and the timing to make any money. One random surge in the price can kill your short even if said surge is short-lived.

I'm also speculating that they'll kindly donate at least 1 T of that to me out of the kindness of their heart.

Because it is, there isn’t enough money to be made to cover their valuation and their competition are essentially free by comparison.

I can’t imagine being so overleveraged that I run into economic thermodynamics. It’s like interstellar travel: there’s not enough energy available to do it quickly and at scale and efficiently. There’s not enough monetary potential energy to satisfy the buildout.

We've been hearing this since DeepSeek was released in Jan 2025, and in that time, Anthropic's revenue has grown 100x. And they're still growing like crazy.

So...why hasn't that "essentially free" competition taken them down yet?

Mostly politics combined with nobody actually knowing how to utilize AI yet. We’re just now finding a singular use-case for AI, which is coding. Every other use-case has been a complete dead end. Cool gimmicks for demos, but nothing anyone uses on any regular basis, and definitely not value creating.

Everything is very unstable right now. This is still a very new tool and we’re very much experimenting on a product level.

Tell that to the mathematicians, translators, paralegals, financial analysts, customer support reps, etc, etc.

The customer support reps find the AI assistance hamfisted and laughable. AI call transcriptions get big and small details wrong, often leaving out critical details in favor of generic and high level "customer and agent discussed an ongoing issue with their home appliance." AI "let me direct your call" bots are constantly sending people to essentially random departments. AI bots trying to directly be the customer service serve only to piss people off before they get to a human, and I've run into a few businesses that are only staffed by bots.

Virtually all of those have no use for AI.

And, when they do, it’s because AI can write code. Take for example financial analysis. AI sucks ass at that, but it’s good at writing code. You’re using it to write code to do the analysis.

When you ask AI a math question, it’s not answering the question. It’s writing a program to answer the question. Because AI is basically only useful for writing code.

lol, this couldn’t be more false and reductive.

I guess the mathematicians are all freaking out over nothing, since AI can’t do math. Weird how it’s been solving these problems that have stumped humans for decades or more…just coincidence I guess.

I’m also quite sure that when AI is doing someone’s job by writing code to do it, they’ll be comforted that it’s not really doing it, it’s just creating and using tools from scratch to do it.

The desperate grasping for any kind of position to hang onto that AI isn’t already more capable than most experts in many fields is…sad to watch.

I never said AI isn’t capable or more capable than experts, just that it’s only good at writing code. It’s really, really good at coding.

The complete opposite is the generally held perspective among engineers where I work. It’s the management that think they’re not going to crater.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

-Upton Sinclair

It's ironic that this describes both the engineers and the management, depending on where you stand.

> when I say things like OpenAI and Anthropic are gonna crater

But how do you know that? (And no I'm not shocked by this statement, it's just odd to say it with conviction.)

Two companies valued at 3 trillion dollars who sell a product anyone can make that falls in cost by 50% every single quarter.

I don't understand how anyone could argue that doesn't crater with any conviction.

Not sure about Anthropic, unless they continue to fall over themselves in ego. They have strong GTM in my take.

Google is a bit oblivious (though is probably the smarter money based on diversification alone IMHO). OpenAI has folks wondering just how publicly Mr. Altman can blunder his wording before he gets ousted (today was along the lines of "you will own nothing" with his take that personal RAM ownership being an affront to efficiency).

All three are trying to convince enterprise buyers that central tokenmaxxing is the best thing since sliced bread; many of the circles I run in occasionally have huge (emphasis: huge in the 2010s ZIRP sense) buyers that are begging for more edge AI.

I talk to our risk lead and he was also weirdly oblivious as well. The whole company is dependent on them not going down the shitter. Surely that's a tangible risk?

I'm indifferent either way myself. It's just shocking the amount of ignorance.

It's the cryptobro craze but for AI. It's tiresome, I don't have AI fatigue, I love using Claude, I have aibro fatigue. I'll lump in the people all in on AI, and that includes anyone who hates it vehemently because they just have to sour conversations.

Yeah. AIbros and AI companies are SHOCKED that AI and datacenters are unpopular.

But guys, if your companies weren't run by psycopaths and weren't promoted by assholes who appear to be the exact same guys behind the NFT craze, (this is the future of creative expression! Don't like it? Your a luddite. Cope.) and weren't predicting horrible nightmare scenarios based on their tech maaaaaaybe people would like AI and be more interested in using it?

I personally see that generative AI is a very powerful and useful technology but I hate everyone involved in it and do not want to see them succeed because they're icky people.

Its like if the nazis had discovered how to harness atomic energy before anyone else. Fuck that.

I've talked to someone who has worked at those companies, and they drink the koolaid that people like Sam Altman shove down your throat, even when its blatantly bullshit.

Note that both Sam Altman and Dario have conveniently watered down AGI, and moved away from "trying to achieve AGI" essentially.

1929 all over again.

Robber Barrons are back !

Question is: Who is gonna be the Carnegie that builds libraries vs the assholes who just hoarded

The model employee must live (or pretend to) inside the company's information bubble.

Words are cheap. Put your money and short Anthropic (when it IPOs) if you are convinced it will crater.

Are you one of those people who lost half their money to spacex? You sound like you are.

I agree with this sentiment entirely. Too much cheap talk. If you want to talk then you should be taking a position.

There is no position to take. The market will remain irrational longer than I remain solvent. But I'm not sure how long that will be

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