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On Shark Tank if you walk in and say “I have no revenue, no viable business model, and an idea that’s easily copied in a space that’s rapidly marching towards commoditization. I’m asking for $5 billion for 25% of my company.” You’d be laughed off the set.
In the increasingly frothy world of GenAI that’s a Wednesday and you get the cheque.
If it looks like a bubble and smells like a bubble…
The tech is cool, but investors are about to lose their shirts in this space.
By silveraxe93 2025-07-1612:563 reply If it's actually that easy, why don't you do it? Are you seriously just leaving $5 billion on the table?
I'll tell you why you won't. Because you wouldn't get it. Because it's not that easy.
Mira Murati is not some rando off the street. Ilya Sutskever is not some rando. Zuckerberg is not paying Millions to randos of the street to come work for meta.
By bko 2025-07-1617:28 Nothing gets people to care so much about VC losses as does a 10 figure check!
Seriously, this stuff is great. A lot of people are getting rich, and I'm sure some value will be created out of it. LPs will be the ones holding the bag but thankfully we don't have a tradition of bailing them out like banks, so what do I care? In the meantime I benefit from VC subsidized coding assistants.
Tell me one unique skill, from any of those individuals you quoted, that is worth even 0,01% of $5 billion, for a non existent company with a non existent product.
It's not a particular skill, it's the experience of having worked with certain people at well-funded and rapidly growing companies.
LOL. So now it's not even their own skill but the "experience of having worked with certain people at well-funded and rapidly growing companies" that would value a nothingburger 12 Billion dollars.
I am sure there must be a better argument that just that. Because I have "worked with certain people at well-funded and rapidly growing companies" a lot and I'm worth nothing whatsoever.
By mirekrusin 2025-07-176:48 I can be famous actor, when camera is on and you need to smile you smile, when you need to be sad you make sad face, what’s the big deal, right?
By computerthings 2025-07-1622:58 [dead]
They’ve proven they can launch SOTA models. There are only a handful of people in the world who have that track record.
They know OpenAI’s complete history and roadmap.
They can get a call with any AI researcher on earth.
LLMs are a commodity now. It is all about capital. DeepSeek and Grok proved that.
It’s not Klingon cloaking tech.
With minor variations, it is Transformers via autoregressive next-token prediction on text. Self-attention, residuals, layer norm, positional encodings (RoPE/ALiBi), optimized with AdamW or Lion. Training scales with data, model size, and batch size using LR schedules and distributed parallelism (FSDP, ZeRO, TP). For inference KV caching and probabilistic sampling (temperature, top-k/p).
Most differences are in scale, data quality, and marginal architectural tweaks.
By qgin 2025-07-191:49 Meta had the scale and whiffed so bad the entire Llama team disbanded and Zuck has been recruiting new people with 9 figure offers. Capital is essential but the people deciding when to launch the training run still do matter.
Please investigate the team she has assembled and it will be clear $5B isn't outside the realms of reality.
Looking at the team it's clear its a bunch of brilliant but indisciplined cats. They will be difficult to herd but for what the real plan is here, acquisition, it clearly does not matter.
They will do a couple of tools, then another panicked company like Apple, or Facebook or AWS, needing to justify the millions spent on AI and with nothing to show for, will acquire them for billions. When somebody will point out they don't make money or have no product, somebody here will point to the "team" as you just did :-)
But since we are talking about 12 billion, let's play the VC and do the due diligence first on the leader?
Reporting from The Optimist by Keach Hagey and other open sources, plus the famous thread here when Sam Altman got fired from OpenAI, reveals that Mira Murati had a central role in Sam Altman November 2023 firing.
For VCs, this is a masterclass in corporate survival and a massive red flag. Evidence shows Murati was the primary architect of the case against Altman:
- Collected "screenshots from Murati's Slack channel" documenting alleged toxic behavior
- Wrote private memos questioning Altman's leadership
- Initiated board contact through Ilya Sutskever
- Sent "hefty PDF files of evidence" to board members via self-destructing emails
Then ...When employees revolted, fearing lost equity, immediately switched sides, signed the letter demanding Altman's return, then later claimed she "fought the actions aggressively."
She survived by reading the room perfectly:
- Became interim CEO during the crisis
- Positioned herself as essential to Altman's return
- Exited in September 2024 just before the for-profit restructuring
- Immediately raised $2B for her new startup showing it had it planned all along.
Investment Implications:
This reveals someone who will systematically undermine leadership while maintaining plausible deniability, then switch sides when politically convenient. Remember Paul Graham's famous quote about Sam Altman? That he "could be parachuted into an island full of cannibals and come back in 5 years and be king"? Murati might be even more astute.
She went from Intern → Tesla PM → Leap Motion → OpenAI VP → CTO → interim CEO → $2B startup founder, all with zero AI research background.
Her OpenAI trajectory shows world class political instincts. Join during post-Musk power vacuum (2018), build alliances with both sides, orchestrate a coup when convenient, flip sides when it fails, exit perfectly timed before restructuring.
For VCs:
Whether you see this as exceptional political skill or dangerous executive behavior depends on your risk tolerance.
Let's just hope the 10 millions dollars the government of Albania, the poorest nation in Europe, invested on this have been secured with proper share rights. That could make for some awkward reactions back home.
Their head of AI alignment clearly has no idea on how to go on alignment, as you can see here, during this 30 min rambling into nothing, on the subject.
At correct time stamp: https://youtu.be/Wo95ob_s_NI?t=1040
What is in contrast to the published vision of Thinking Machines Lab.
By mv4 2025-07-1615:42 Exactly, it's not what, it's who.
You mean, "I have no revenue and no business model but I was the CTO of one of the most important technical companies of this generation, we put out one of the fastest growing SaaS products of all time in a completely new technical category."- not sure how much more signal you would need than that. I don't really get why anyone would be confused about why they are throwing money at her. It's an extremely large amount of money, but it's not as if she has no track record.
It is a bubble, of course, but this person would get $100m round in a non-bubble.
By BobbyTables2 2025-07-1613:081 reply By that logic it almost sounds as if Meg Whitman was highly qualified to run HP…
She was qualified.
Are you saying that her previous experience shouldn't have counted as a positive attribute for being hired?
By BobbyTables2 2025-07-170:041 reply The Sun rose consistently during her tenure at eBay but we certainly don’t give credit for that.
eBay would have succeeded even if a Labrador retriever was CEO - due to everyone else’s efforts.
By awongh 2025-07-170:27 Were so many people saying that when Meg Whitman left eBay? Are people saying that about Mira Murati? -I haven't heard anything to suggest she gets no credit for ChatGPT (the product/technical execution, not the model)
By xhkkffbf 2025-07-1615:08 It's true that eBay did well during her tenure. And it's also true that she was a better grownup than the people running it before. But she also said that a monkey could drive the train. Would someone else have done better? Could a monkey have delivered the same results? We'll never know, but the experience at HP doesn't validate her as a business genius.
By arthurcolle 2025-07-1614:00 It's a false signal
By belter 2025-07-1614:49 Analysis like this, was what took Yahoo to hire Marissa Mayer :-))
By zanellato19 2025-07-2113:47 We have a saying in Brazil that goes "The best thing in the world is QI."
QI meaning Quem Indica, meaning the best thing in the world is not technical skill, but who you know. This is what stuff like this looks like to me.
By kirubakaran 2025-07-1616:31 (Setting the current example aside...)
When proposing a model for evaluating startup investments -- or any decision-making framework -- it’s useful to run a kind of regression test.
Would Shark Tank have funded the most successful startups of the past decade? In many cases, no. They famously passed on companies like Airbnb, Uber, and Dropbox early on (sometimes indirectly via pitch decks or missed introductions), and even directly rejected DoorDash and Cameo, both of which went on to become unicorns. In other cases, they offered terms that, if accepted, would likely have made follow-on funding difficult.
That doesn't mean every GenAI deal today is wise. But pointing to Shark Tank as a benchmark for rational investing is a very selective filter. Historically, it’s missed more home runs than it’s hit.
By Erem 2025-07-1615:18 Business plan, revenue, people: these are all valid signals to form an investment hypothesis. People often outweighs all others wrt early stage companies.
You would have been a fool to invest in apple in the late 90s on any other signal than the return of Steve Jobs. That era created many rich fools.
Whenever I hear someone say this I file them under 'techie with no business sense or appreciation of user value'
By belter 2025-07-1615:13 Will file your comment under: People who forget VCs regularly burn hundreds of millions of other people’s money, chasing hype. Also...90% of startups, and that is what Thinking Machines is, fail.
By TrackerFF 2025-07-1613:44 On the other hand, if for whatever reason some top tier soccer/football/basketball/etc. went to shark tank and said «I want to release my own sportswear brand», they’d probably get their funding. In fact, they’d probably have investors lined up.
Same thing here. Mira is a top tier, high-profile person in the AI space. So investors lined up.
By nradov 2025-07-1613:02 Shark Tank is semi-scripted entertainment. It's not representative of how venture capital works in the real world.
> If it looks like a bubble and smells like a bubble…
People have been saying this for the better part of 10 years
By rchaud 2025-07-1614:42 Zero interest rate policy (2008-2022) probably had a hand in that.
By rockwotj 2025-07-1613:57 Investors are investing just as much in the person/team as what they are building. What they build will change, but having a good team is all the difference.
chatgpt and claude are two of the fastest revenue growing products of all time
By disgruntledphd2 2025-07-1711:25 Correct, but they're not profitable, rely on quickly depreciating capital assets and loads of tech employees to maintain their services, so it's hard for me to believe that there's a sustainable business here for them.
And like, if anyone's gonna win it should be Google because of their ability to push capital into this for a long time, their world class infrastructure and their cost advantage by having their chips in house. But I have faith in their ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
By pdabbadabba 2025-07-1519:2820 reply Could somebody explain why there is so much negativity towards Thinking Machines in this thread? I realize that they haven't publicly announced a product yet but presumably the VCs have some idea of what Thinking Machines is building, and they have some pretty significant OpenAI talent on board, including Murati herself. Some amount of skepticism is warranted, of course, but a lot of these comments read as closer to hostility.
True. People here can be like this. I have not forgotten even the greatest juice maker of all times, Juicero was similarly disparaged with all this negativity.
By soared 2025-07-171:24 The greatest juice maker was in fact magic leap
By yread 2025-07-1617:41 Or Color
By yunwal 2025-07-1614:48 So was Dropbox famously
By emsign 2025-07-164:59 Ah yes, they were simply ahead of their time.
Yes. VCs invested money. It ended up a flop. And this hurts us... how exactly? Other than some VCs losing their money on a bad bet, who cares?
By seanhunter 2025-07-169:381 reply Well a lot of people on this forum are founders or early employees in startups. Every dollar vcs set on fire chasing some obviously stupid idea, waste on crypto memecoins, etc is a dollar that is not helping some legitimate startup get funded.
Yes, but when you put it as "why are you investing in these bad ideas? Invest in mine, it's obviously much better", it sounds a lot more self-interested (and far more likely to be wrong).
By seanhunter 2025-07-1615:02 You asked how it hurts people. That is how it hurts people.
By lm28469 2025-07-169:46 It's a bad look on the entire industry. We send billions to serial grifters selling vaporware while the backbone of the internet is basically powered by $5 donations
By chii 2025-07-169:39 These people somehow imagine that they (as taxpayers perhaps) are going to pay the cost one way or another. Not to mention there's a tinge of jealousy over the level of VC money involved - they imagine these people do not "deserve" it.
Often I think if the money could not be used for some better purpose. It is still huge resources wasted. Like digging and filling same trench. Overall it is not efficient use of resources or time to me.
But maybe there is some gain that I can't just imagine...
By edanm 2025-07-1612:31 You can say the same about most science research. In fact, many people do say the same, scrutinizing many different avenues of research as pointless. There are countless examples of "pointless" research ending up being useful.
(Note that it's much more legitimate to scrutinize scientific research, since it's mostly publicly funded, as opposed to VCs investing in startups.)
> Overall it is not efficient use of resources or time to me.
I mean, the tech world has done a lot of good and advanced humanity a lot. More than most industries, IMO. Most of that is by inventing new things. A society could dial down useless spending by dialing down innovation, but it's not clear to me that there's a way to get more innovation with less waste than the current system.
I think many industries are far more of an "inefficient use of resources". I think if the world as a whole would spend 10x more on scientific and technological advancement, at the cost of less e.g. fashion, less investment in entertainment, less investment in (some forms of) finance, etc, the world would be far better off. (I'm not advocating that this should be forced on society, just stating my opinion on what a more optimal way of allocating resources would be.)
> Could somebody explain why there is so much negativity towards Thinking Machines in this thread?
I think it lies at the intersection of a lot of topics where HN comments are hostile: VCs, large fundraising, AI, OpenAI related employees. These are all topics where HN comments are more hostile than pragmatic.
Most of the hostility is just a proxy for “VCs bad” banter.
> HN comments are more hostile than pragmatic
In the case of a bubble, hostility is pragmatism.
Of course, nobody knows that it's a bubble, but nobody knows it's not a bubble either.
By jaggederest 2025-07-166:123 reply I've lived through 3 and read up on at least 10 more.
Many people know it's a bubble. You see lots of HN comments that it's a bubble. We certainly did in 2007.
In a bubble, the predominant notion is not "I wonder if it's a bubble", but rather "It's a bubble, I hope I can make my money before it pops". A perfect example of this was the Tulip craze in the Netherlands. Nobody actually believed tulip bulbs were worth that much, they just wanted to find a bigger sucker to make a profit, if you read accounts from the time.
By littlestymaar 2025-07-166:46 This. Ans that's why we even manage to reproduce bubbles in a very simple simulated environnement among finance students who know exactly how overvaluated their assets are (I can't find the paper right now though…)
By esperent 2025-07-173:02 No, you're predicting that it's a bubble based on past events. It might be likely that it's a bubble. But nobody knows the future, no matter how confident they are.
By PartiallyTyped 2025-07-168:581 reply Bears predicted 11 of the last 3 recessions or something.
It's nothing to do with Thinking Machines as a company, it's to do with a VC that's content to bet two billion dollars on a company that has shown absolutely nothing, and the sorry state of affairs that represents.
> It's nothing to do with Thinking Machines as a company, it's to do with a VC that's content to bet two billion dollars on a company that has shown absolutely nothing, and the sorry state of affairs that represents.
Why does it represent a "sorry state of affairs"?
VCs are risking money they manage, it's not like they're putting anyone else at risk. Do we really prefer a world in which we don't take risks to develop new technology?
The VC sector is probably an order of magnitude smaller then, say, fashion. Isn't money better spent taking risks to develop new technologies that have a chance to legitimately change the world for the better?
Note: If you think the technology could be a negative (which, to some extent I do because of the elements of AI safety, that's a separate argument. Not sure that that's what you're referring to though.)
They use our pension funds for this. They also distort the market.
I do see some value in it, we need to take risks with our capital and on a long term horizon it's fine.
But there has to be some rationale behind it at least, some evidence based approach.
They don't "use" pension funds, pension funds can choose to invest in VCs if they decide to do so. I think most usually invest low single digits of investment in VCs, mostly as diversification.
By KoolKat23 2025-07-1612:47 Absolutely.
But I imagine there's immense pressure to do so. Returns are tracked relative to others. All distorted by big jumps in valuations. In the long term, there might be a more prudent/sustainable use of some of that capital but we'll never know, everyone's chasing share price go up, not value added / profit go up.
Yes, it's good to have your finger in the pie. But the stake may be overpriced, given current behaviour.
By bgwalter 2025-07-168:38 VCs, who go on and on about capitalism, were whining on Twitter until the Silicon Valley Bank got bailed out. In real capitalism the SVB would have been allowed to fail and the VCs would have taken a hit.
But no risk for them, everyone paid for them to keep their billions.
> VCs are risking money they manage, it's not like they're putting anyone else at risk.
They're putting everyone at risk.
As others in this thread have pointed out what these VCs do is make wildly risky gambles. When it pays off they make billions of dollars in profit and congratulate themselves for their foresight and the power of capitalism. When it doesn't they go cap-in-hand to the federal government, saying that if they're allowed to collapse it'll destabilize the entire economy.
If it were just some rich billionaires who might have to sell their second private jet when this collapses I'd agree with you: who cares what they do with their own money. But what's going to happen is that the taxpayer will end up footing the bill for their reckless behavior, and millions of people will end up worse off for it as governments cut back on welfare, healthcare, and aid programs to balance the books. In a very real sense, people are going to be paying for VC greed with their lives.
By edanm 2025-07-1712:17 > When it pays off they make billions of dollars in profit and congratulate themselves for their foresight and the power of capitalism. When it doesn't they go cap-in-hand to the federal government, saying that if they're allowed to collapse it'll destabilize the entire economy.
But that's not actually true.
The Silicon Valley Bank situation aside - because it was a unique situation, we can open it if you want - when have VCs asked to be bailed out on failed investments? This kind of moral hazard is absolutely a thing in banks and finance in general, but afaik, not in the VC industry.
By IncreasePosts 2025-07-160:56 I have a pretty dim view of VCS, or at least a16z, after seeing some of the awful blockchain tech startups they were throwing money at during the last bubble
By bix6 2025-07-163:11 The math to justify that investment is crazy.
This place used to be a place for hackers and founders. Now it is mostly a place for middle aged software engineers who hate someone else to success, change and hope for the future of Linux desktop. Thinking Machines presents both change and success .
By Rebuff5007 2025-07-167:421 reply My negativity for Thinking Machines is precisely because others (such as yourself) already consider it a success.
I don't think anyone can consider it a success just yet. But someone just injected 2 billion dollars into the enterprise. They are probably given a lot more information than you and I are. Maybe those people are dead wrong and they lose all their money, but maybe not.
With the public information there is neither a point in positivity not negativity. It would be speculation either way. A question that could be worth pondering is what exactly the investors are shown? What would you need to see to put all your money in thinking machines?
By geodel 2025-07-1620:16 The answer was right in Mira's resignation from OpenAI [1]
“I want to create the time and space to do my own exploration.”
To create time and space and even able to explore it is far beyond cutting edge physics of today. If she is able to do it in just few billion dollars it is investment worth making.
1. https://www.wired.com/story/mira-murati-thinking-machines-la...
By strken 2025-07-1614:28 From 2007: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
By TrackerFF 2025-07-169:43 Thinking Machines represent the new elite. People with the right pedigree that can raise billions with only an idea. If they fail, they’ll get paid anyway - and they’ll become billionaires.
It is a position that is completely unreachable for 99.9999% of people even in tech.
It is of course easy to write off critics as jealous has-beens and bozos.
By techpineapple 2025-07-164:052 reply My opinion: AI is taking all the money that could be spent on cool advancements that could give the average person hope and putting it towards a pipe dream. Why not be hostile towards the perceived death of an industry you love?
By andy_ppp 2025-07-1610:00 The whole system has gone crazy because of the wealthy having so much that the current game of coming up with stupid stories (AGI, Self Driving Cars, Robots that can do your household chores, Crypto) to convince people that a company can be worth 50-100 times earnings or valueless internet points will go up in price forever! There is no way these companies can possibly meet these expectations but the money sloshing around in the system makes it possible for rich people to keep believing (religiously) as there are no investments actually left for them to earn real money from a population that increasingly has nothing and earns less and less of the pie while valueless investments skyrocket.
By motoxpro 2025-07-167:10 I'd much rather this than the 2010s of Uber for X or the 10,000th SaaS productivity app.
> but presumably the VCs have some idea of what Thinking Machines is building
you imply that VCs are rational because bet their own money, which in current complicated world probably is not true. VC funds get money from complicated funnel likely including my/your retirement account and country public debt, VC managers likely receive bonuses for closed deals and not long term gains which may materialize in 10 years. So, investing 2B into non-existing product with unclear market fit/team/tech moat smells very strongly.
> you imply that VCs are rational because bet their own money, which in current complicated world probably is not true.
Correct. Most VCs are using someone else's money. See Softbank. And making extremely poor judgements on how to use that money.
By jordanb 2025-07-1612:05 Unfortunately in many cases those "other people" are, for instance, California's teachers.
By pdabbadabba 2025-07-1614:561 reply So your position is that a VC will invest $2B in a startup on vibes alone without having any idea what they're building, because it is not literally their money? That seems like a significantly stronger and less plausible claim than mine, which his merely that a prospective $2B investor has access to more information about the company's plans than we do and that their investment is at least some indication that there is a real product in the pipeline.
> that a prospective $2B investor has access to more information about the company's plans than we do and that their investment is at least some indication that there is a real product in the pipeline.
there is a funnel of investors: say retirement account holders put money into some retirement fund, fund manager put money into some "innovation fund", "innovation fund" put money in VC fund. All middlemen get % cut, VC likely watch slides about some product roadmap, but they more interested in closing the deal, get % cut and move on.
By pdabbadabba 2025-07-183:091 reply And if those $2B just go poof because they somehow failed to notice what is apparently so obvious to people on his thread -- that there is no real product -- your position is that the VC does not suffer any significant consequences?
By riku_iki 2025-07-183:12 > your position is that the VC does not suffer any significant consequences?
it is likely they won't suffer any significant consequences
By bluelightning2k 2025-07-1610:29 People with no product, no specific insight, and no published plan raising $$ trillions, due to elite background.
(Sure -- that background is somewhat self earned.)
By seattle_spring 2025-07-162:441 reply They were founded 6 months ago, have no product, yet are purported to be worth $12B? I mean ... Come on.
By littlestymaar 2025-07-166:49 Mistral having a $113M seed round from a slide deck
Murati: “hold my beer”.
By dr_kiszonka 2025-07-165:082 reply I don't know much about them, but how they decided to call themselves strikes me as ... unwise: https://bookanalysis.com/dune/thinking-machines/
(They could have just as well picked Skynet.)
By reasonableklout 2025-07-165:13 Pretty sure it's a reference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_Machines_Corporation, the famous supercomputer company from the 80s-90s where Richard Feynman briefly worked.
By rhubarbtree 2025-07-166:021 reply I think most people aren’t aware that as CTO Murati can take a large chunk of the credit for OpenAI’s success. Her skills were mostly in deft technical management, a skill often under appreciated by nerds. Her success here is going to heavily depend on her ability to attract the right talent.
By never_inline 2025-07-1617:041 reply Please quantity those contributions in "technical management". Otherwise it sounds like a boilerplate excuse non technical people will use.
By rhubarbtree 2025-07-176:012 reply Not sure you can quantify all work, but to the accounts I read she was constantly guiding, scheduling the teams, resolving conflict, allocating resources. Exactly what a CTO does in a company that size.
Can’t help but feel there’s some sexism attached to the pushback here.
And what a conflict resolver she was. It even elevated her to the level of CEO.
https://makeagif.com/gif/im-actually-not-sure-about-that-mir...
By rhubarbtree 2025-07-2317:04 This is a good example of the kind of response I wouldn’t expect if she were male.
By never_inline 2025-07-1714:38 FWIW I would be skeptical of tech bros claiming they sped up 80% response time on microservice handling 5000000000 RPS. But I will be even more skeptical when they say "analyzed and implemented business requirements into maintainable and high performance code".
More generic, grandiose and oft-repeated someone's claims are, more skepticism is warranted.
> Could somebody explain why there is so much negativity towards Thinking Machines
> significant OpenAI talent on board, including Murati herself.
because ppl on this website don't consider her a 'talent'.
By esperent 2025-07-163:25 I don't think that's fair. The company was founded around 6 months ago and already has a valuation of 12B even though barely anyone outside of AI has heard of them, and I bet almost nobody even here could name their product. It's not that people think she's untalented, but rather, she'd have to be superhuman to justify that by herself.
By never_inline 2025-07-1617:02 Because connections and social signalling matter more than ideas among the rich of the world. Only some people can get such disproportionate advantages.
By slj 2025-07-170:27 Oh that’s because the good people of HN have decreed a butlerian jihad
By bossyTeacher 2025-07-1519:371 reply Because it looks like VC are spendings ridicoulous amounts of money for hype while many startups with actual products and a product market fit struggle to attract investors because their product is not related to transformers.
By Roark66 2025-07-169:38 It makes perfect sense... Why spend time and money on building a product in hope of attracting VCs that may like it? Instead present your idea in an intentionally vague way that makes everyone's imagination fill in the blanks in the most favorable way.
By awongh 2025-07-1612:35 Where is all the hate for SSI?
By az226 2025-07-207:35 Probably because people view this grifting as something negative.
> they haven't publicly announced a product yet but presumably the VCs have some idea of what Thinking Machines is building
"Presumably" they have "some" idea. Oh really? Are you "sure" about that? Is that a $12B type confidence?
By baobabKoodaa 2025-07-167:55 Well, I'm fairly confident they at least have the concept of an idea.
By eddythompson80 2025-07-162:021 reply huh, what happened? I haven't been following Mistral but I recall it was everyone's up and coming darling, no?
By littlestymaar 2025-07-166:511 reply There's quite a gap between “Apple considers buying Mistral” and “they are about to be bought by Apple”.
Yes, a gap of three to six months, or maybe a bit longer if regulators get involved.
Anyway, if Mistral is for sale then if not Apple it'll be another big company.
By littlestymaar 2025-07-178:26 No, the gap is right in your second sentence:
> if Mistral is for sale
At the moment there's no public information about that, it's all about Apple being interested into buying but we don't know if Mistral is interested into selling at all. That's the gap.
By eddythompson80 2025-07-165:55 I thought that was perplexity.
By tensor 2025-07-162:10 I'll take another ten Mistrals thank you.
> The fundraise also saw participation from AI chip giant Nvidia
This is really obvious 'round-tripping' no? Nvidia invests in startups that are going to spend a majority of their funds on GPUs, Nvidia's revenue goes up, Nvidia's stock goes up, Nvidia makes more 'investments' in startups who use that investment to continue the cycle?
No different than investment banks in the US loaning money to ukraine so they can get patriot missiles. This generates two income streams for the US ( interest payments on the debt and money to RTX for the missiles). Trump gets a cut on both of these monies (tax on income).
This is why the Us is pro Israel as well. They are a good customer to the military industrial complex.
Now if we could only get japan, ASEAN, S.Korea into a conflict w China over taiwan we could ramp up this model - but we’ll need to build drone factories to usurp the the cheap turkish, polish, ukrainian, and russian suppliers.
And the additional bonus is that all this has to be transacted in dollars giving our currency preeminence so we can print more of them and not suffer inflation- even tho there are more dollars chasing the same goods- its happening symmetrically around the world because everyone has to use them.
By xrd 2025-07-1612:55 I've been worried about the US abandoning Japan and this radically shifting the power centers in the world. But, the way you describe it sounds like I should not worry. At least, as long as I trust the weapons manufacturers to keep things stable so they can extract their new profit opportunities. I still feel a tinge of worry.
Yes, though realistically they’d be buying the GPUs regardless of who the investors and this sort of vertical integration isn’t directly illegal
Yes, except they are monopolist, right? It's basically not optional choice.
By Havoc 2025-07-1614:29 Technically dominating a market by virtue of best product (or only available) is legal too.
If you can achieve that without anti competitive behaviour then being a monopolist is fine. Legally anyway
Whether this circular thing counts as such behaviour - don’t know but doubt it
By jstummbillig 2025-07-1611:15 To an extend, sure, but not in the "obvious" way you suggest, because that's very illegal. Any arrangement for Nvidia to obviously and directly fund startups to clearly funnel money back through purchases would quickly attract scrutiny from auditors, regulators, and co-investors.
By bboygravity 2025-07-1611:55 Sidenote: Nvidia has been caught round-tripping before, way back.
Looking at the valuation I don't get how they would not be round-tripping and otherwise cooking the books a lot right now (not necesarily limited to this case, but more in general).
Very strong Y2K bubble vibes.
By daveed 2025-07-1612:15 The magnitudes make it s.t. it doesn't really matter, I think.
