Investors thought someone renting office space was going to revolutionize the world and valued their company 50B.

I don't think it's automatically a bad idea. Offices require a lot of support, networking, security, maintenance, certifications etc. There are efficiency gains in scaling. In addition, Wework is useful for companies which hire employees in different cities.

Lots of things are good ideas but investing is about price vs value. Good ideas can be overpriced as easily as bad ideas.

Funnily enough a lot of the open source world has landed on an API that is basically a copy of OpenAI. So if you develop against OpenAI it’s almost a slot in solution to switch to an open source solution.

and on top of that you have solutions like openrouter.ai where you can route inference easily with a combobox

Well, now their job is to keep up the illusion until they have cashed out or offloaded the investment to somebody else.

This reminds me of a comedy sketch where a guy is interviewing for a job at a startup, finally gets to the last round and meets the founder, and he tells him the whole thing is an illusion for investors

the bet is if they can produce ai that can replace a level of generic office worker. a bot that you can add to slack and give tasks to do.