Amazon is one of the most famous successes of the era. Bezos quit his job, launched the business out of his garage, with seed money being $10K of his own savings, and was doing $20K/week in sales just 30 days later. And I believe their only VC round before going public was an $8 investment from Kleiner Perkins. But they were a company who proved their viability early on, had a real product with rapid revenue growth before getting any VC $$.
I’d say this SSI round is more similar to Webvan, who went public with a valuation of $4.8 billion, and at that time had done a grand total of $395K in sales, with losses over $50 million.
I’m sure there are good investments out there for AI companies that are doing R&D and advancing the state of the art. However, a $1 billion investment at a $5 billion valuation, for a company with zero product or revenue, just an idea, that’s nuts, and extremely similar to the type of insanity we saw during the dot com bubble. Even more so given that SSI seemingly don’t even want to be a business, they’re saying “we aren’t releasing any sort of product until we develop safe artificial general super-intelligence.” So their plan is to be a total non-business unless they become the first people to hit an incredibly, incredibly difficult milestone.
The dotcom era was full of unprofitable startups pumping up the stock price in all sorts of ways, as they were completely dependent on continues capital flows from investors to stay afloat. Also, a lot of that capital came from retail investors in various forms.
The AI wave that is currently ongoing is for the most part funded by some of the largest and most profitable corporations on the planet.
Companies like Alphabet, Meta, Tesla/X, Amazon and (to a lesser extent) Microsoft still have founders that either control or provide a direction for these companies.
What drives this way is the fact that most of these founders have a strong belief.
We know, for instance, that Larry Page and Elon Musk had a disagreement about the future role of AGI/ASI about 15 years ago, leading to Elon Musk helping to found OpenAI to make sure that Google would not gain a monopoly.
These are strong convictions held by very powerful people that have been held for decades. Short term stock market fluctuations are not going to suddenly collapse this "bubble".
As long as these founders continue to believe that AGI is close, they will continue to push, even if the stock market stops it support to the push.
SSI may fail, of course. But Ilya has a rumor of (from people like Hinton and Elon) as being perhaps the greatest and most capable visionary in the business.
>Agreed, the car bubble is very, very real. Not that the internal combustion carriage is all hype, it's certainly impressive with useful applications, but car manufacturers are getting insane valuations with zero proof they're viable businesses.