Okay fuck all this, fuck OpenAI, fuck Effective Altruism, fuck this entire line of thinking. Ockham's razor on all this shit is THERE'S NOTHING THERE.

You know Uber's business model? Undercut taxis by breaking the law. Eventually the law caught up. Price difference between Uber and a taxi is now nominal; taxis are cheaper half the time. Uber? Their profits come from bringing you take-out.

You know WeWork's business model? Lose money on subleases but make it up on volume. Softbank was all in, though, 'cuz "vision." So Wall Street hallucinated a $47b valuation and got all upset when it turns out losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year is bad for profit. Now they're bankrupt.

You know Theranos' business model? Con investors into giving them money while they struggled to violate the fundamental laws of fluid mechanics in pursuit of epidemiology. Theranos is a special case in that they fucked up cancer tests and shit like that but ultimately? They lied about impossible shit and eventually the public caught them out.

You know Enron's business model? Lie about how much money you have so you can borrow money so you can bet money so you can lose more money. Enron is a special case because they caused rolling blackouts across California to the point where eventually even the left bank grifters looked into it but ultimately? They lied about impossible shit and eventually the public caught them out.

You know FTX's business model? Lie about how much money you have so you can borrow money so you can bet money so you can lose more money. FTX is a special case because fuckin' Seqoiah et. al. gave a frizzy-haired autist and his friends multiple billions of dollars based on their utter obtuseness about the one thing they should fucking understand (money) but ultimately? They lied about impossible shit and eventually the public caught them out (fucking Coindesk? Fuck off with that shit).

You know what drives me batshit? Everyone wringing their hands about how Sam Altman has Skynet on a leash and if we don't give him exactly what he wants we're all gonna be Borg'd into grey goo or some shit. Meanwhile, Skynet?

We've got a friend involved in an Amazon-affiliated startup. She confides to my wife yesterday "I'm afraid that if I tell them that no one will ever sign up for their services they'll just pivot into something even stupider." I said "make sure she waits until she's grifted as much money as she can possibly get; that's what everyone else is doing."

Microsoft has comped $13b worth of cloud time to OpenAI. That doesn't mean Microsoft has invested $13b in OpenAI. This is Hollywood accounting; when you pay yourself from someone else's cut you never seek a bargain. Friend of mine wrote the movie Deja Vu. It made $180m in the box office. He never saw a dime beyond the advance because according to Disney, they spent $780m promoting it. This is like how a Skinny Puppy album can cost $11m to produce: You bring the band members to your house, let them use your studio, encourage them to hang out, and bill them $100k a day against their future profits to ensure you never have to pay them.

Everyone is talking about how OpenAI has somehow scuttled an $86b valuation when what they've done is jeopardize the idea that someone is going to give them a billion dollars for 1.1% of one of their many, convoluted, funds-incinerating subcompanies. Meanwhile Microsoft has pulled some kind of coup by hiring the CEO even though Bill Gates himself says GPT5 is a nothingburger.

You know how this all makes sense?

1) GPT is a dead fucking end

2) Sam Altman wants to spend a billion dollars on it anyway

3) The board can't kill one of their white calves

That left three OpenAI employees on the board: Altman, Brockman, and Sutskever. And it left three independent directors: Toner, Quora co-founder Adam D’Angelo, and entrepreneur Tasha McCauley. Toner and McCauley have worked in the effective altruism movement, which seeks to maximize the leverage on philanthropic dollars to do the most good possible.

4) the monkeys throw shit at each other

hey, how much money have "effective altruists" actually given to anything? I mean, it's full of tithing billionaires and shit, right? But they've squirrelled away half a billion across fifteen years, putting them nowhere near anything effective. "For all humanity" is TESCREAL bullshit code meaning "for absolutely no one living or breathing." It's all a LARP. It's sociopathic twitchfucks doing their selfish best to screw over us NPCs so they can pretend their building a bug-out bunker for the betterment of all mankind.

what if I told you... it was all a grift

But to most people, it will never matter how much OpenAI was worth. What matters is what it built, and how it deployed it. What jobs it destroyed, and what jobs it created.

What has it built? What has it deployed? What jobs has it destroyed? What jobs has it created? There's this fundamental assumption at all this that Skynet is just around the corner but what we get, time and time again, is a hallucinating chatbot that can't even play Not Hotdog.

This whole Sam Altman conundrum is solved in one if you assume nobody wants to be the first person to give the game away.

That's all it is.

And every. single. company. listed. above. went through the same cycle.