How OpenAI uses complex and circular deals to fuel its multibillion-dollar rise

These kinds of deals were very much a la mode just prior to the .com crash. Companies would buy advertising, then the websites and ad agencies would buy their services and they'd spend it again on advertising. The end result is immense revenues without profits.

There’s one key difference in my opinion: pre-.com deals were buying revenue with equity and nothing else. It was growth for growth’s sake. All that scale delivered mostly nothing.

OpenAI applies the same strategy, but they’re using their equity to buy compute that is critical to improving their core technology. It’s circular, but more like a flywheel and less like a merry-go-round. I have some faith it could go another way.

> they’re using their equity to buy compute that is critical to improving their core technology

But we know that growth in the models is not exponential, its much closer to logarithmic. So they spend =equity to get >results.

The ad spend was a merry go round, this is a flywheel where the turning grinds its gears until its a smooth burr. The math of the rising stock prices only begins to make sense if there is a possible breakthrough that changes the flywheel into a rocket, but as it stands its running a lemonade stand where you reinvest profits into lemons that give out less juice

There is something about an argument made almost entirely out of metaphors that amuses me to the point of not being able to take it seriously, even if I actually agree with it.