Previously, I thought investing in AI companies would be a good hedge against AI taking my job, but I hadn't considered the possibility that they fund the build out by issuing shares. Is there no reprieve?
But I'm not sure what people think the stock market is for? It exists primarily so that companies can access capital markets namely by issuing their own shares.
Historically for companies that were growing rapidly or had large capital needs, private markets weren't large enough to handle that. Times have changed, but the whole point of going public is to be able to raise capital by issuing shares.
A long stretch of unemployment can be weathered by selling a bit from strong investments, and a crashing stock-market can be waited-out by staying firmly employed, but both simultaneously is what can force people to "sell low" just to pay regular expenses.
Phrased differently, I don’t see how these companies could grow their equity like Google or Amazon did way back when without having full AGI and changing the entire world. They would need to become worth more than the entire world’s current GDP added up.
There’s a big range on the spectrum where AI does well enough to mess up your life but not well enough to make you even moderately wealthy.
I have no opinion on whether they are.
I think (somewhat arbitrarily), to get to higher valuations, you are going to have to disrupt more than just the software business. Which is what most labs are trying with finance, biology, chemistry, law, etc. That might be enough for a few hundred billion in TAM more.
I think to get to a ~5T+ valuation, then we have to start thinking about AI meaningfully displaces classes of jobs, maybe in the single digit %'s. As in, _global_ SWE headcount starts going down, but revenues for software companies as a whole go up.
I think for ~10T+, you definitely need meaningful job displacement across most white collar sectors.