[skybrian]

If you want to show that that there's a risk of disaster you need to do better than making a silly analogy. Companies will often start expensive projects that fail and then they pick themselves up and move on. Big, profitable companies can afford bigger failures. Google has had a slew of failed projects, and Meta's metaverse stuff tanked, and they're still fine. They can afford to experiment.

So which companies are betting so big that it might actually threaten them? Oracle maybe?

[e3df]

"Google has had a slew of failed projects, and Meta's metaverse stuff tanked, and they're still fine. They can afford to experiment."

Only with the blessing of shareholders. Frankly Google's search box and ad-tech has been carrying all of its failed bets but at some point people will start questioning if Google is returning enough cash given the results of new investments. Google's management does not own the cash - it holds the cash on behalf of the owners.

[skybrian]

Which shareholders do you mean? Mark Zuckerberg holds >50% of voting rights for Facebook. Sergey Brin and Larry Page hold >50% of voting rights for Google. That means management gets to do what it wants, within very broad legal limits.

On the other hand, how the stock does will matter to other employees because they’re shareholders and they have a stake in the outcome.

[outside1234]

Seems clear to me that OpenAI at this point is a Ponzi scheme waiting to collapse. This is why they are trying to IPO and dump their shares on the public market before they go bankrupt.

[skybrian]

Suppose they do somehow collapse. How does that cause wider problems? Their competitors will pick up customers.

[layer8]

If they collapse, then because their value proposition doesn’t add up. It’s unclear why that should be different with their competitors then.

[skybrian]

It looks like nobody is collapsing, but OpenAI might be behind Anthropic now:

https://www.axios.com/2026/03/18/ai-enterprise-revenue-anthr...

https://x.com/albrgr/status/2041288324464451617