AI versus Marshy 73 - OpenAI is this generation's MySpace

Hey readers,

We’re now two weeks away from ChatGPT being 3 years old.

It’s safe to say awarness is close to “your uncle telling you to buy bitcoin” stage now.

I’ve done my best to cover it.

Partly out of morbid curiosity,

partly out of bemusement, and

partly out of the belief that this technology is (eventually) going to fundamentally change everything.

Yet clashing with that belief is a recurring question:

“Are we fucked?”

Why does it keep popping up?

Well - have you seen the movie The Big Short?

It’s a true story.

Solid cast

And a book was written by Michael Lewis.

A key role in the movie is played by Christian Bale.

Smooth

And the key player in the real life tale is Michael Burry.

He’s famous for predicting the 2008 financial crisis.

He’s now making quite “bearish” bids against Nvidia and Palantir - placing Put options on both of them for over $1B.

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In case you don’t follow economics, investing, or even who these companies are - I got you.

(FWIW I had to bone the f**k up to be able to write some of this).

Nvidia manufactures graphics chips (GPUs) and has benefited from two major groundswells in the last decade - the first was cryptography and blockchain - to employ these technologies you need GPUs.

The second groundswell has (obviously) been generative AI.

This technology also requires GPUs (with exceptions - check out Groq) in order to work and currently demand largely outstrips supply.

This makes (at the time of writing) Nvidia the most valuable company of all-time.

big number goes brr

Palantir is lesser known and more secretive. It sells fraud detection, pattern recognition, and works with governments, police, and security forces around the world.

It’s been going since 2003 and has enjoyed its highest ever valuation in 2025.

brr brr

Palantir is also the name of one of the tools of evil in The Lord of the Rings.

Not satire

It’s founded by Peter Thiel.

He’s kind of Silicon Valley royalty - famous for things like co-founding PayPal, destroying Gawker (also covered in Ryan Holiday’s Conspiracy), co-writing a great read called Zero to One, and more recently - recreationally opining on the advent of The Antichrist.

The reason he gets a mention here (other than that being an impressive collection of facts above) is that he has joined Michael Burry in offloading Nvidia stocks.

see you later

These moves in isolation still don’t mean much - the counterpoints to this are they are just two people who have regularly got things wrong, and the company is worth much more than any withdrawn stock.

On the other hand, one of the people who predicted the 2008 crisis and literally one of the most powerful men in Silicon Valley are backing away…

But I’m not an investor (my beloved Sobah went into liquidation!)

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So let’s look at things through another lens, such as people’s sentiments.

I’m seeing a lot of hate for AI out there.

• Vince Gilligan hates it. “AI is the world’s most expensive and energy intensive plagiarism machine”.
• The Australian government refuses to make adjustments to Copyright law for training. “And this is fundamental to their right as people who are generating works to ensure that they are fairly remunerated for that and that there are fair terms of use.”
• It’s become the topic of worn out comic artists - “Every advert now”

Very appeasing

• My friend Davor calls it a growing dependency.

And I love this take from a teacher named Jeffrey:

Stop making so much sense!

The people are getting frustrated.

I think some of this backlash points to a desire for something more human and connected.

But I also believe that - like a self-absorbed “friend” who behaves anything like one - people will simply stop engaging them and let it drift away.

This will take longer than makes sense - but it will happen.

But what about the gorilla in the room?

OpenAI will go down in history for putting a version of AI on the map that fundamentally changed the direction of technology investment.

But it will also go down.

I loved this line “OpenAI is Speedrunning the 2008 Financial Crisis”.

They lose $3 for every $1 they make.

They’ve done $1.5T worth of deals without legal advice (paywalled).

This snippet is an entertaining summary.

I think this still is mid-Eff-word - sorry Ed

It’s incredibly over-leveraged and will require people paying multiple orders of magnitude more for it than they currently do.

Which is not what people want to do, and harder to justify when there are multiple other companies offering very similar products that are ready to step in (open source models, Google, Groq).

Since starting this newsletter I’ve “got to know” the public face of Sam Altman.

I saw him in Melbourne when he did his tour in June 2023.

I remember being in the room and hearing the words “harness the power of capitalism” and wondering what he meant.

Compare that with a couple of weeks ago…

I don’t like this line of questioning

​Sam doesn’t like the nature of Brad’s question.​

I want to zero in on this bit:

“We do plan for revenue to grow steeply. Revenue is growing steeply.”

Finance isn’t my strong suit - but I have managed sales targets and want to know - how steeply is steeply?

So I ran some envelope math with Perplexity:

​

I interpreted “our revenue is much higher than that” to be no larger than 5X

To grow steeply - the company would need to exceed a triple-triple-double-double (a classic term in SaaS for hockeystick growth).

To do this at the scale they’re at is insane.

“Anyone claiming a plan to T2D2 their way out of a $1T+ debt load, starting from below $100B revenue, is selling a fantasy—there is simply no precedent or plausible financial path.”

There’s more of course.

But I’m kind of surprised/bemused that it’s not as frequently pointed to in the circles I’m in.

This information is hiding in plain sight.

There’s also something to be said for moving later…

The iPod wasn’t the first MP3 player.

Facebook wasn’t the first social media.

And I suspect the winner of this charade won’t be its current leader.

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-Marshy

p.s. I’m thinking about ways I can sustain this wonderful corner of my life while the rest of my life is so busy and am now taking suggestions! 🤣