[serviceberry]

Venture capital bets on returns. It's not about some objective and eternal value. A successful investment is just something that another person will buy from you for more.

So yep, a lot of time, they bet on trends. Cryptocurrencies, NFTs, several waves of AI. The question is just the acquisition or IPO price.

I don't doubt that some VCs genuinely bought into the AGI argument, but let's be frank, it wasn't hard to make that leap in 2023. It was (and is) some mind-blowing, magical tech, seemingly capable of far more than common sense would dictate. When intuition fails, we revert to beliefs, and the AGI church was handing out brochures...

[ncallaway]

> it wasn't hard to make that leap in 2023

It...does seem hard to make that leap to me. I mean, again, to a casual and uncritical outside observer who is just listening to and (in my mind naively) trusting someone like Sam Altman, then it's easy, sure.

But I think for those thinking critically about it... it was just as unjustified a leap in 2023 as it is today. I guess maybe you're right, and I'm just really overestimating the number of people that were thinking critically vs uncritically about it.

[namaria]

They also learned a long time ago to not evaluate the underlying product. Some products that were passed on by big players went on to become huge. So they learned to evaluate the founders. They go by social proof and that's how they were conned into the massive bets done on LLMs.