The world is ruled by opportunistic social pack predators.
I mention this because I am seeing a lot of apparently unrelated things that may suggest a pattern leading to — what?
I don’t know.
That said, I can see a picture forming, and it’s not an AI-created picture, even if it’s a painting of the immediate future of Artificial Intelligence.
The first color on the palette is that Anthropic and OpenAI seem to be delaying their IPO, or Initial Public Offering.
The background here is that AI companies burn through cash like runaway trains burning through coal bunkers.
Revenue cannot keep up.
That’s normal for a startup business or industry, but the rate and scale of the AI cash-burn is truly unprecedented, and the price to earnings ratios in these new tech industries often makes no sense.
What seems incontestable is that OpenAI and Anthropic **need** an IPO to raise cash, but only if the IPO valuation is very high.
Will it be?
Who knows, but the SpaceX IPO proved wildly volatile, losing as much as 50 percent of its highest valuation at one point.
SpaceX owns xAI, so to some (muddy) extent, the first AI IPO has already occurred.
But the SpaceX IPO was a muddy thing on several levels.
Anthropic and OpenAI promise a cleaner presentation and valuation, at least in theory.
Anthropic wants to IPO before OpenAI, but they seem to be edging back. Are they confidant of their proposed valuation? If so, why? If not, why not?
OpenAI and Anthropic **need** an IPO to raise cash, but they may also **fear** it as well.
That’s the itch.
How to scratch it?
One way may be to create an alternative reason to **delay** an IPO without triggering a financing panic.
To do that, they need a non-finance reason to SLOW everything down.
Which brings me to the second color on the palette; the current firestorm of Doomsday predictions about AI.
These seem a little too “manufactured all at once” for me.
Could there be another agenda — a look for a reason to slow growth and delay what might be a problematic IPO for either Anthropic or OpenAI?
I don’t know, but it’s not outside the bounds of logic is it?
Pair that with the massive groundswell of local opposition, at a national level, to data centers, and the government’s sudden shut down of two Anthropic modules, and the risk of regulatory capture enters the arena.
It’s a pair of potentially big monsters. Those are the third colors on the palette.
Which brings me to the fourth color on the palette, the nascent suggestion that government may need to be a major owner of AI.
This is a trial balloon being floated from both the right and the left, and by both the technologically illiterate and the very top of the AI pyramids.
One rationale for the government to be a very large stock-owner of AI companies is that putative future “profits” could be used to defray the cost of supporting scores of millions of now unemployed (thanks to AI) workers.
What’s unclear is whether the push here is for benevolent communism (ie the government seizing and nationalizing the means of production in order to fund a social-welfare state) or something else — a massive economic bailout with government buying several hundred billion dollars of AI stock to prevent an AI melt-down.
So those are the fours colors I see on the palette. The CYMK of it all.
But what’s being painted?
I have no idea. I do know, however, that it’s human hands that are painting it.
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