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- Hacker News
- i think financially, frontier labs are going to crash. this is purely from a financial standpoint. the question is when, this article posits 2027/28. i need to better verify the claim. (its easy to be right, its hard to time being right.)
however, when frontier labs become financially insolvent (and they will eventually, the question is when) i think smaller local models will end up taking over. and i think there is a bet to be placed on smaller models here. the demand for ai isnt going away. peoples workflows would be crushed without it. the question actually becomes, who either purchases frontier labs, or what cheaper alternative replaces frontier labs?
- I always imagined they're doing that psychological experiment where they randomly give a rat food when they press a button. They get way more addicted than when it's a consistent amount. They can't get away with the optics of facebook-level gamification but this is some sort of loop hole.by qoez
- Became obvious it was AI authored as I read, classic AI overstatement of parallels, lots of jargony words, its not X it is Y.by yoggies_bro
- This feels like Claude thought to me—assertions and comparisons that look impressive on the surface, but kind of make me scratch my head the more I think about them.
I think what made me throw in the towel was “Figure 2 — Two Instruments, One Shape” [0]. That chart comparing when contracts reset. Weirdly consistent norms! [looks at the sourcing] Oh… it’s… not from data at all… it’s just notional…
Is there anything here other than “the people financing the factory are betting that it’ll be able to sell what it makes once it’s built”?
I mean… isn’t “an instrument that splits time in two” kind of… what capital financing is? And this risk is what earns investors their interest, and the rest of the financial system involves different ways for people to calibrate their bets on the risk materializing?
Including derivative instruments that allow investors to smear out the point-in-time “cliffs” this writer is concerned about? If you think the revenue is never going to come, you can bet on that now. Or go into the distressed datacenter acquisition business to prepare! Conversely if Payment Day comes and you think they just need a couple more months, you can adjust the loan or make them a new loan to cover those first few months’ payments, etc., right? Since both parties stand to lose if it blows up completely, unless it’d be worth more to sell to somebody else?
These are also not individual homeowners’ “investments.” The risk is coordinated, and it’s big, but we know that already, right? Yes we know the revenue, yes it’s different from the costs of paying down their capital investments, yes both are reported on the financial disclosures.
How is the claim here any stronger than “all this depends on them actually being able to sell this crap once they get it built”?
[0] https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!-2DS!,f_auto,q_auto:...
by alwa - wow excellent piece. Gary Marcus had a long post about this article on his substack.
scary stuff
"And look at what this implies about OpenAI’s valuation as it moves toward an IPO:
OpenAI’s equity - valued north of $850 billion - is functionally the junior tranche of a capital structure whose senior claims, the take-or-pay compute obligations, exceed any revenue path management itself has articulated.
On those numbers, the equity is effectively underwater, and the market has not priced it that way because it still treats those obligations as service agreements rather than what they are economically: debt.
Even if OpenAI can meet those obligations, OpenAI’s unaudited financial statements - as of March 31, 2026 - disclose $665 billion in non-cancellable compute commitments (management’s more recent plan runs to $750 billion). These commitments are take-or-pay in structure - which, as established above, is debt.
Carry the net present value of those obligations as senior debt - roughly $450–500 billion, the same methodology rating agencies have used for decades to capitalize take-or-pay contracts as debt - and a company the market prices as debt-free carries a senior claim worth more than half its entire equity value."
and the 2008 analog
"Millions of subprime borrowers were, at that moment, paying the low introductory rate on a two-year adjustable rate mortgage - the 2/28 ARM. A low fixed-rate for two years, then the rate reset to a payment 30% to 50% higher. During those first two years the loan performed beautifully: the borrower paid, the servicer collected, and the bond paid its coupon. Nothing looked wrong because the whole complex - housing, mortgages, securitization - was sitting inside the teaser period.
The AI boom has rebuilt this exact structure, and the market is once again underwriting the teaser.
It has a reset wall of its own - a schedule of dated, contractual, non-negotiable payment shocks - hiding inside the trillions of dollars of compute contracts signed by OpenAI and other frontier labs since 2024."
by jumanji493 - Interesting piece, I just wish the author had presented the data and their thesis instead of making Claude vomit out 20 pages of trash around it.
- I get the structural comparison they are trying to make.
But mortgages are not a frontier AI lab.
They try to draw a comparison to the valuation of the real estate and the valuation of the hyper scalers in the markets.
I would argue that the demand and valuation of a house is less elastic than AI. While a house’s value may continue to appreciate in the market there is an upper bound for the price of a house set by people’s income. We don’t know yet what the value of AI is. The underlying product, the model keeps improving and therefore increases its value. A house is still fundamentally a house a year later and doesn’t intrinsically appreciate in value.
From gpt-3 to gpt-5.5 there’s been a massive change in the underlying value of the product and company in a way that simply doesn’t happen with a house. That’s where the analogy breaks down.
by awongh - > Every ARM reset was known, dated, and contractually inevitable from the moment of origination. Aggregate those reset schedules and you get the most damning exhibit of the era: the reset wall.
One of my distinct memories from this era is watching CNBC where a guest said exactly the same thing.
As the interview went on, he became more animated and used stronger language to the point of:
"You don't get it, THEY ARE GOING TO BE PICKING PEOPLE OFF THE FLOOR when these ARM rates reset"
I would guess this was right about 2006 which lines up with the article.
by alexpotato