[bcrl]

What precisely is the moat surrounding AI that SpaceX is using to justify this kind of spending spree? I don't how SpaceX and other AI companies will be able to keep the weights of their AI models private in the face of interest by virtually everyone in the world. It would be absolutely trivial for a nation state to walk into a data center using a state issued security certificate to seize a few of the physical servers running the cloud services of OpenAI / Grok / Claude. Copying the weights is trivial. Infiltrating a company with spies as new hire coders to gain access to source code is also trivial.

This is really starting to feel like the pets.com era again.

[yifanl]

Because there's nowhere else for the money to go, the money must go to AI.

There are no growth opportunities in any other industry (except healthcare due to disastrous demographics), where else are people going to invest?

[jackyinger]

This is an insane take. Of course there are other areas that are growing or could grow if there was investment.

The problem is an absolute lack of vision on the part of those holding the capital.

Meeting the challenges of climate change could hold huge opportunities. Look at China’s massive expansion in renewables, look at the expansion of renewables in the US despite political headwinds.

Have some imagination, break out of your echo chamber. AI ain’t the only game to be played.

[mekdoonggi]

It's not lack of vision. It's that capital demands gambling. Everyone knows you could plough money into big projects in the US and double your money reliably. But the powers that be do not want that. They want to gamble, and try to become trillionaire #2.

[jackyinger]

To be clear I don’t see gambling to increase one’s wealth as a vision. That’s playing a game.

Vision is seeing a change that could be made. “I could be richer” is about as banal as a vision could get.

[marcosdumay]

It's not insane. The GP is correctly describing a bubble economy.

The money chasing investments is orders of magnitude larger than the money people have on their pockets to spend. As a consequence, the only profitable thing to do is sell capital goods to make business and there is no profit on selling actually useful things.

China is in a different reality in large part because of their capital barriers that stop money from flowing in. Countries with bad reputation are also less affected.

What the GP gets wrong is that none of this makes AI a good business. Instead, it makes Nvidia a good business, but that's not news.

[suncemoje]

Looking at venture funding, it's definitely true. That doesn't mean other problems don't exist or aren't worth solving. But the concentration of (competing) capital and talent is insane.

[marcosdumay]

The lack of places for investment money to go does not make the business profitable.

[bilbo0s]

Not to be a jerk or anything, but that only matters for the guys and gals left holding the bag.

I don't think that will be Musk. He'll probably pull out significant resource from all this financial engineering relatively quickly. Probably via more financial engineering.

[dtagames]

Cursor is a harness that can be used with all kinds of models. It's a much better harness than anyone else's and takes the company out of just playing the model game.

[suncemoje]

Exactly this. I think valuations and the AI market could get stirred up if:

- We get an open source Opus 4.8 equivalent and pair it with an open source coding agent

- Running this OS stack becomes cheaper than what frontier model providers charge (see OS model prices on OpenRouter vs. frontier lab prices)

- This happens across verticals (i.e. not just software)

The first “DeepSeek moment” didn’t do much damage back in the days, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a similar moment becomes a lasting, effective, cheaper alternative.

[Slartie]

OpenCode exists, it is your "open source coding agent" that is practically on par with Claude Code and Copilot in terms of being able to do the 80% of things that most people actually use.

DeepSeek v4 Flash/Pro also exist, they are open weight and on par with Sonnet, just a bit below Opus. Again: practically useful and sufficient for 80% of things most people actually do. And most of the remaining 20% are benchmarks designed to push the limits, not productive work.

Using these already is way cheaper than your typical Claude API prices. What's still missing is a) mindshare - everyone still thinks "claude = coding" and everyone thinks he/she really needs the very best models because he/she is doing such incredibly complex stuff - and b) someone pushing such a stack as a convenient solution for corporations to easily dump their token money into, complete with user management, enrollment, monitoring, all that enterprisey stuff you need if you want to sell to, well, enterprise customers.

[suncemoje]

Need to give that a try then. What's your experience so far? Also in terms of cost/benefit?

My current hypothesis is that the $150 Claude Max subscription - of which I barely hit the limits anyways, even though I used it non-stop at work - still is very cost effective.

If the price of Claude Max increased significantly (say 2-3x), and my business would balk at paying the subscription, then I'd look for an alternative.

[AtlasBarfed]

They are a distant third at best, at least in trading companies. If you look at Chinese and other likely national actors, they are probably further down.

The thing with dotComs is that they didn't have THIS level of unsustainable financing burn, and a tangible issue of token processing cost that has no magic wand coming with the current practical limits of Moore's law.

[ahartmetz]

> I don't how SpaceX and other AI companies will be able to keep the weights of their AI models private

That is an interesting point. If there are higher concerns, copyright law is easily ignored, and only one person needs to get access to the data once.

[klooney]

SpaceX is good at building data centers in tough regulatory environments, in a way that other players have been unable to match