Could somebody explain why there is so much negativity towards Thinking Machines in this thread? I realize that they haven't publicly announced a product yet but presumably the VCs have some idea of what Thinking Machines is building, and they have some pretty significant OpenAI talent on board, including Murati herself. Some amount of skepticism is warranted, of course, but a lot of these comments read as closer to hostility.
Where is all the hate for SSI?
True. People here can be like this. I have not forgotten even the greatest juice maker of all times, Juicero was similarly disparaged with all this negativity.
Ah yes, they were simply ahead of their time.
Yes. VCs invested money. It ended up a flop. And this hurts us... how exactly? Other than some VCs losing their money on a bad bet, who cares?
Often I think if the money could not be used for some better purpose. It is still huge resources wasted. Like digging and filling same trench. Overall it is not efficient use of resources or time to me.
But maybe there is some gain that I can't just imagine...
You can say the same about most science research. In fact, many people do say the same, scrutinizing many different avenues of research as pointless. There are countless examples of "pointless" research ending up being useful.
(Note that it's much more legitimate to scrutinize scientific research, since it's mostly publicly funded, as opposed to VCs investing in startups.)
> Overall it is not efficient use of resources or time to me.
I mean, the tech world has done a lot of good and advanced humanity a lot. More than most industries, IMO. Most of that is by inventing new things. A society could dial down useless spending by dialing down innovation, but it's not clear to me that there's a way to get more innovation with less waste than the current system.
I think many industries are far more of an "inefficient use of resources". I think if the world as a whole would spend 10x more on scientific and technological advancement, at the cost of less e.g. fashion, less investment in entertainment, less investment in (some forms of) finance, etc, the world would be far better off. (I'm not advocating that this should be forced on society, just stating my opinion on what a more optimal way of allocating resources would be.)
Well a lot of people on this forum are founders or early employees in startups. Every dollar vcs set on fire chasing some obviously stupid idea, waste on crypto memecoins, etc is a dollar that is not helping some legitimate startup get funded.
Yes, but when you put it as "why are you investing in these bad ideas? Invest in mine, it's obviously much better", it sounds a lot more self-interested (and far more likely to be wrong).
These people somehow imagine that they (as taxpayers perhaps) are going to pay the cost one way or another. Not to mention there's a tinge of jealousy over the level of VC money involved - they imagine these people do not "deserve" it.
It's a bad look on the entire industry. We send billions to serial grifters selling vaporware while the backbone of the internet is basically powered by $5 donations
It's nothing to do with Thinking Machines as a company, it's to do with a VC that's content to bet two billion dollars on a company that has shown absolutely nothing, and the sorry state of affairs that represents.
> It's nothing to do with Thinking Machines as a company, it's to do with a VC that's content to bet two billion dollars on a company that has shown absolutely nothing, and the sorry state of affairs that represents.
Why does it represent a "sorry state of affairs"?
VCs are risking money they manage, it's not like they're putting anyone else at risk. Do we really prefer a world in which we don't take risks to develop new technology?
The VC sector is probably an order of magnitude smaller then, say, fashion. Isn't money better spent taking risks to develop new technologies that have a chance to legitimately change the world for the better?
Note: If you think the technology could be a negative (which, to some extent I do because of the elements of AI safety, that's a separate argument. Not sure that that's what you're referring to though.)
They use our pension funds for this. They also distort the market.
I do see some value in it, we need to take risks with our capital and on a long term horizon it's fine.
But there has to be some rationale behind it at least, some evidence based approach.
They don't "use" pension funds, pension funds can choose to invest in VCs if they decide to do so. I think most usually invest low single digits of investment in VCs, mostly as diversification.
VCs, who go on and on about capitalism, were whining on Twitter until the Silicon Valley Bank got bailed out. In real capitalism the SVB would have been allowed to fail and the VCs would have taken a hit.
But no risk for them, everyone paid for them to keep their billions.
> Could somebody explain why there is so much negativity towards Thinking Machines in this thread?
I think it lies at the intersection of a lot of topics where HN comments are hostile: VCs, large fundraising, AI, OpenAI related employees. These are all topics where HN comments are more hostile than pragmatic.
Most of the hostility is just a proxy for “VCs bad” banter.
> HN comments are more hostile than pragmatic
In the case of a bubble, hostility is pragmatism.
Of course, nobody knows that it's a bubble, but nobody knows it's not a bubble either.
I've lived through 3 and read up on at least 10 more.
Many people know it's a bubble. You see lots of HN comments that it's a bubble. We certainly did in 2007.
In a bubble, the predominant notion is not "I wonder if it's a bubble", but rather "It's a bubble, I hope I can make my money before it pops". A perfect example of this was the Tulip craze in the Netherlands. Nobody actually believed tulip bulbs were worth that much, they just wanted to find a bigger sucker to make a profit, if you read accounts from the time.
What is the false positive rate? Broken clock...
Bears predicted 11 of the last 3 recessions or something.
This. Ans that's why we even manage to reproduce bubbles in a very simple simulated environnement among finance students who know exactly how overvaluated their assets are (I can't find the paper right now though…)
The math to justify that investment is crazy.
This place used to be a place for hackers and founders. Now it is mostly a place for middle aged software engineers who hate someone else to success, change and hope for the future of Linux desktop. Thinking Machines presents both change and success .
My negativity for Thinking Machines is precisely because others (such as yourself) already consider it a success.
I don't think anyone can consider it a success just yet. But someone just injected 2 billion dollars into the enterprise. They are probably given a lot more information than you and I are. Maybe those people are dead wrong and they lose all their money, but maybe not.
With the public information there is neither a point in positivity not negativity. It would be speculation either way. A question that could be worth pondering is what exactly the investors are shown? What would you need to see to put all your money in thinking machines?
Thinking Machines represent the new elite. People with the right pedigree that can raise billions with only an idea. If they fail, they’ll get paid anyway - and they’ll become billionaires.
It is a position that is completely unreachable for 99.9999% of people even in tech.
It is of course easy to write off critics as jealous has-beens and bozos.
People with no product, no specific insight, and no published plan raising $$ trillions, due to elite background.
(Sure -- that background is somewhat self earned.)
I think most people aren’t aware that as CTO Murati can take a large chunk of the credit for OpenAI’s success. Her skills were mostly in deft technical management, a skill often under appreciated by nerds. Her success here is going to heavily depend on her ability to attract the right talent.
I don't know much about them, but how they decided to call themselves strikes me as ... unwise: https://bookanalysis.com/dune/thinking-machines/
(They could have just as well picked Skynet.)
Pretty sure it's a reference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_Machines_Corporation, the famous supercomputer company from the 80s-90s where Richard Feynman briefly worked.
I have a pretty dim view of VCS, or at least a16z, after seeing some of the awful blockchain tech startups they were throwing money at during the last bubble
My opinion: AI is taking all the money that could be spent on cool advancements that could give the average person hope and putting it towards a pipe dream. Why not be hostile towards the perceived death of an industry you love?
The whole system has gone crazy because of the wealthy having so much that the current game of coming up with stupid stories (AGI, Self Driving Cars, Robots that can do your household chores, Crypto) to convince people that a company can be worth 50-100 times earnings or valueless internet points will go up in price forever! There is no way these companies can possibly meet these expectations but the money sloshing around in the system makes it possible for rich people to keep believing (religiously) as there are no investments actually left for them to earn real money from a population that increasingly has nothing and earns less and less of the pie while valueless investments skyrocket.
I'd much rather this than the 2010s of Uber for X or the 10,000th SaaS productivity app.
Because it looks like VC are spendings ridicoulous amounts of money for hype while many startups with actual products and a product market fit struggle to attract investors because their product is not related to transformers.
It makes perfect sense... Why spend time and money on building a product in hope of attracting VCs that may like it? Instead present your idea in an intentionally vague way that makes everyone's imagination fill in the blanks in the most favorable way.
They were founded 6 months ago, have no product, yet are purported to be worth $12B? I mean ... Come on.
Mistral having a $113M seed round from a slide deck
Murati: “hold my beer”.
> but presumably the VCs have some idea of what Thinking Machines is building
you imply that VCs are rational because bet their own money, which in current complicated world probably is not true. VC funds get money from complicated funnel likely including my/your retirement account and country public debt, VC managers likely receive bonuses for closed deals and not long term gains which may materialize in 10 years. So, investing 2B into non-existing product with unclear market fit/team/tech moat smells very strongly.
> you imply that VCs are rational because bet their own money, which in current complicated world probably is not true.
Correct. Most VCs are using someone else's money. See Softbank. And making extremely poor judgements on how to use that money.
Unfortunately in many cases those "other people" are, for instance, California's teachers.
> they haven't publicly announced a product yet but presumably the VCs have some idea of what Thinking Machines is building
"Presumably" they have "some" idea. Oh really? Are you "sure" about that? Is that a $12B type confidence?
Well, I'm fairly confident they at least have the concept of an idea.
> Could somebody explain why there is so much negativity towards Thinking Machines
> significant OpenAI talent on board, including Murati herself.
because ppl on this website don't consider her a 'talent'.
I don't think that's fair. The company was founded around 6 months ago and already has a valuation of 12B even though barely anyone outside of AI has heard of them, and I bet almost nobody even here could name their product. It's not that people think she's untalented, but rather, she'd have to be superhuman to justify that by herself.
No one needs another mistral
huh, what happened? I haven't been following Mistral but I recall it was everyone's up and coming darling, no?
It's about to be bought by Apple, so not for long.
I thought that was perplexity.
There's quite a gap between “Apple considers buying Mistral” and “they are about to be bought by Apple”.
I'll take another ten Mistrals thank you.