If i order fast food im not hiring the worker because i pay them.
Hiring means one thing, investing means something else.
Any company that props up their AI bet is the most valuable to them now, even if it provides no real value for users...
Funding people means having a lot of trust in them. What's unsaid is if the investor believes coloring outside of the lines to make everyone more money is a breach of that trust, or just the normal cost/risk of business.
Also in this AI era I've learned something else: it isn't intelligence that builds institutions. It's philosophy, and it's faith. The AI industry is full of smart people, but If you lack a set of beliefs you won't know why you're working or what you're working towards or how to put one foot in front of the other day after day to make steady progress towards helping people over the longest time scales.
In the AI era our industry has found itself with one of the more bizarre problems I could imagine: in accepting that it builds products for AIs and not for humans, it has become philosophically bankrupt
https://www.pcgamer.com/dreamworld-infinite-world-mmo-kickst...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27319457
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26898266
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/dreamworld
To be sure, there's nothing wrong with the idea that modern computers and distributed computing techniques can handle streaming updates for a significantly higher scale of concurrent same-world users than prior-generation MMOs. But clearly something unexpected happened here, and while I completely understand the lack of a public post-mortem, I hope that YC has examined why its mentorship model and community were unable to set up this team for, if not success, at least having greater integrity in its relations with its userbase.
If I tried to enter the mindset of a VC, I could potentially see that as a "Is this person at the 'edge of progress' currently" flag, although I wouldn't trust it more than a "Is this person chasing hype" warning personally. Maybe it's a good way of getting some specific type of person to apply, in some other way?