lenerdenator
So I get why they don't care.
I don't have the math behind that number, but it sounds somewhat in-line with what we know the market to be. You have a few companies seeking trillion+-dollar valuations at IPO, and the spends from established players make that number sound plausible.
Given that the infra costs are going to remain stubbornly high for the coming 3-5 year period you specified, I don't know that even $200 billion is really that much in the grand scheme of things. If things keep going at more-or-less the same pace they have been with advances, and SV pulls their heads out of their asses about getting data centers built out, maybe.
[0] https://fortune.com/2026/10/10/big-tech-bill-miller-wellsky-...
Seriously though, it'd be nice if we started using a more shared and less vendor-specific jargon to refer to what these latest features are. We're getting into JVM vs. .NET Execution Engine distinctions and they just muddy the water on what goes on in the market.
If we did anthropomorphize people like him, he'd be in a lot more trouble than he is. Instead we legally and socially treat him like a lawnmower.
IPOs aren't the magical moment that they were in decades past. You get to answer to a bunch of retirement fund managers and "the market", meaning less-savvy retail investors. You have to open up your books.
It seems like Anthropic, OpenAI, etc. are doing an IPO because they are literally out of other options. Older IPOs like Facebook felt different, like the hard part had been done, and they just had to scale. There's a difference in selling something because you want to, versus selling something because you have to. Facebook was just relying on the idea that they were a platform that more people would inevitably sign up for. For the most part, they did. It seemed obvious. They likely could have continued on by simply operating privately, but the IPO gave them capital to dominate the market.
Anthropic and other hyperscalers cannot continue on privately. They're facing a systemic shortage of capital to achieve their goals. They need the infrastructure, and there's not enough capacity to make enough for all of these companies to survive.
The places where American society needs costs cut or needs an increase in labor - healthcare immediately comes to mind - are places where you'd be asking Anthropic (or any other AI player) to take on massive amounts of liability.
If you screw up someone's drawing, you regenerate the drawing and charge the hack/fraud for the privilege. If you screw up a blood bank order, you pay the survivors a few million dollars. Since you've created a system that can scale blood bank order up-screwing, you'll be doing that a lot. There's not profit in paying out medical torts.
Given that SV-based companies work to dismiss liability even more than most American companies do (which is saying a lot), I don't see that working well for them.
Yes, they're getting their bonus. No, we can't hire and onboard more people to deal with the insane demands being made as a result. Why do you ask?
I know it seems innocent enough at first, setting up a system just the way you want it and learning a lot of Linux's userland internals while doing so, but before you know it you're installing esoteric window managers to get your theme just right and hunting for the perfect picture of an anime waifu to be your wallpaper, all while telling others that you "use Arch, btw". Always sad to see someone fall into that sort of life.
One thing that I really hope we see out of the LLM revolution: a return to native applications. You could argue that Electron cross-platform apps made sense when you had to pay a team to maintain two or three (at least) native clients; you can't make that argument anymore when the marginal cost of a line of code is $0.00.
Given the numbers I see here [0], I wouldn't count on the lawsuits to cause a meaningful change in the Jack Welch tactics being used.
Most lawsuits are either dismissed or settled out-of-court.
[0] https://securities.stanford.edu/research-reports/1996-2019/C...
EDIT:
I'll also add, the average shareholder doesn't know that they do, in fact, hold shares. If you asked someone with a 401(k) or Roth IRA which equities their investments are held in, they're going to say "Uhhh... Ameriprise?" or something about the company that manages the portfolio, not the actual contents of the portfolio itself. We've abstracted the living hell out of equities ownership.
If it makes the major shareholders money, then in our system, it is, by default, not a failure mode, but a feature.
The C-suite has a contract that guarantees them generational wealth under most circumstances. They're incentivized by stock options granted to them by the board, which is elected by shareholders. Most shareholders in major companies are institutional investors who are paid to do nothing but make sure that a company going out-of-business is a non-issue (if not even a boon) for their returns. It makes no real difference to the institutional investor if Reddit goes down in price; the people who were gaining in their holdings from Reddit are diversified. The people actively drawing off of their holdings are doing so from asset classes less volatile than equities.
In other words, there's no incentive to keep companies running as a going concern.
Charlie Munger once said, "Show me the incentives, and I'll show you the outcomes." There are very, very, very few actual incentives to operate a real infosec effort at most companies. Think about it: how many companies have you heard of going out-of-business because of breaches? If you're like most Americans, you've probably received at least one letter from some company you did business with telling you that their systems were compromised and your data may or may not have been stolen as a result. They'll usually close out the letter with an offer of free credit monitoring for some finite length of time. Since that's useless and a lawsuit is a pain in the ass with no guarantee of benefit, the vast majority of people simply sigh and toss the letter in the trash.
There's no real way to pin identity theft or other consequences on a given data breach, so it's hard to make any sort of claim that way.
At the end of the day, the company has saved money by not instituting best InfoSec practices and red-teaming their software on a routine basis. There are no civil or criminal penalties for them not doing so.
So they don't.
I suspect some of these sentiments are real, but also suspect there's a not-insignificant amount of astroturfing going on.
It is not a profitable quarter.
The regulations, liability, and stringency of procedure in pharmaceuticals and healthcare in general simply won't gel with the SV mindset of "move fast and break things"/"forgiveness is easier to get than permission". A University of Missouri pathologist working with Jon Carreyrou put a SV biotech darling in literal prison despite a huge valuation. That sort of accountability is the exact thing founders seek to avoid, not court.
Makes sense.
That being said, water isn't like electricity, land, or a given year's tax revenues. It exists in a cycle and can be reused. It can be piped in from a potable water source, and you could probably develop a cooling loop that would return it back to the civic supply in potable form.
Other than somebody not wanting to because "b-b-b-b-but what about the shareholders!?", why not build that loop, put its components into mass production, and let economies of scale start cutting the cost while having less impact upon local water districts?