Oracle is the one to look out for if/when the bubble bursts. Most of the big tech will be fine, albeit hurting for a while. For Oracle, this might be existential.
But there would be other consequences too, just consider the philanthropic organizations that Larry Ellison supports! Like the Ellison Medical Foundation, a non profit whose sole purpose is to keep Larry Ellison alive as long as possible!
Larry Ellison owns 40% of Oracle ($625B market cap) as of today. So even if Oracle tanks and becomes a $60B company (10% of what is worth today), Larry will still be a billionaire worth $25B. He will keep his private islands and yachts.
Please stop. This kind of rage-posting is not what HN is for. It's fine to think whatever you want about Mr Ellison or any other tech luminaries, and criticize them for whatever you like. But commenting in this style does nothing to harm Ellison, whilst making HN a dismal place for your fellow community members who do actually read what you post.
Maybe the entire purpose of OpenAI was to suck all the inflation the US government created on the last decade and burn it out in a huge bonfire at the end of its life.
Sam Altman has been playing 6-D chess this entire time, and we thought he was just a fraudster.
In a universe where all AI investment goes to zero, wouldn’t you have the opposite effect? You can torch wealth but not the money supply, which ultimately _increases_ inflation, not decreases it.
There is only a short term inflation decrease while we produce what people mistakingly think is wealth. That can evaporate, but the money supply won’t.
It's confusing, but bankruptcy destroys mainly money, and only has second order effects on wealth.
What makes it hard to understand is that the Oracle going bankrupt on their debit because OpenAI took all their money is what would destroy the money. AFAIK, OpenAI itself doesn't have a lot of debit to burn. It would burn money that is currently on the hands of Oracle's creditors.
And bankruptcy is a bit of an extreme example, but just people thinking Oracle is less credit-worthy would destroy some money already. Repeat that for every company that invested in OpenAI.
>Maybe the entire purpose of OpenAI was to suck all the inflation the US government created on the last decade and burn it out in a huge bonfire at the end of its life.
This has seriously crossed my mind as well. Like we've reached an endgame here where big tech has now found a way to literally burn off trillions of dollars into waste heat.
Don't they still sell a database product? As long as they don't do the Venture Capital thing and sell off the most promising business units there should still be something for the company to do after the AI bubble implodes. Certainly there will be a lot of layoffs, and maybe even a chapter 13, but I don't think they'll stop existing.
