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by glenngillen 37 days ago
Zitron’s narrative around AI revenues is that somehow the people Anthropic/OpenAI etc are pitching to, people who meet the sophisticated or wholesale investor tests (i.e., the only people actually able to trade on this information) do not know what ARR means, how it’s different from revenue, and are unable to read financial statements for themselves. And that he is seemingly the only one with insight, with the partial bits of information he has access to, that can tell them the truth of the situation.

I used to love his stuff. Until he just wouldn’t stop beating this drum so breathlessly. Now I wonder how much I’d suffered Gell-Man amnesia with the other content of his I’d previously enjoyed.

3 comments

> somehow the people Anthropic/OpenAI etc are pitching to, people who meet the sophisticated or wholesale investor tests (i.e., the only people actually able to trade on this information) do not know what ARR means

This is… not unrealistic. Plenty of such investors have fallen for clear scams.

To be honest I'm pretty sure he is right about "AI players are basically throwing out numbers because the real one are not so shiny (yet?)".

What I'm not really fan about is the communication style and the "trust me bro" approach, which is pretty annoying ... but I guess it's because it's easier to make the view counter go up.

I mean, yes, "sophisticated" people, including institutional investors, do fall for scams. See SBF, Theranos. These scams are often most effective when there's mania and FOMO about a technology that everyone seems to be saying is amazing and will make them rich, in spite of the current evidence, which sounds a lot like AI.