ProblemExplorer

Running a company is as complicated as engineering a good solution. Infact, it's the same exact steps, just in different contexts.

The primary difference is that starting a company means talking to people.

So while you can be inside a room, read books and try things out at a computer and become a great engineer, to start a company, you have to go out and talk to people - but the steps are exactly the same. The feedback loop is slower and far more noisy.

Computers don't lie but people do, and that's the essence of business.

> In a model where investors give loans to nascent companies as a mean for those to have needed capital

What would be the collateral a lender(s) would use to loan NVIDIA money in 1993 when it had no assets, nor revenue, nor a proven business plan?

Even if a lender(s) provided a loan without any collateral, what would be the terms of that loan? What would be the amount of loan, who would it be underwritten against, what would be the APR?

I am coming to the conclusion that the number of people on HN who understand actual business is a rounding error. I have made similar comments as yours and I get downvoted so fast that I'm literally blocked from responding not only on the post I got downvoted on but the entire of HN. Saying anything remotely that supports the idea that AI businesses are a massive opportunity is highly unpopular here. Also, HN post throttling algorithms will actively block you from continuing to engage (due to downvoting and other signals the throttling algorithms take into account), so I think that side of the sentiment is massively suppressed on this site increasing the echo chamber.

The overall perception I see most popular on HN of "AI" is that it's a waste of money, natural resources and we should be "doing something else".

I'm old enough where I've personally seen multiple AI winters and also been through major disruptions - the PC era, the consumer internet era, the cloud, social media, gig economy and now "AI".

For every major disruption, the biggest naysayers have been the very groups that got disrupted. They eventually had to either retire or find something else to do.

There's no logical explanation or data you can provide to these naysayers that will change their mind. They have dug their teeth into a narrative disconnected from actual evidence and that's now their identity.

As a result, I have a strong hypothesis that AI will forever redefine what knowledge work - including software - looks like and entails. Credentialism and rentseeking by educational institutions will be a thing of the past. Human experts will be largely employed by frontier and specialized AI agent companies and labs.

I have been extremely lucky to have invested early in Cisco, Google, Amazon, Dell, Uber and NVIDIA - wasn't very sure when I made those investments so much so that I invested only funds I could afford to loose.

I'm now fully leveraging my investments into AI. IF AI goes to h*ll, the consumer, retail, commodities, energy markets are so strongly coupled to it, that I doubt anyone will come out of it for less than a 20% correction, and I will be way past 100 when it does recover, so I have nothing to lose.

> Meta is going to win consumer AI.

I disagree. Google is doing a phenomenal job at capturing use cases at the edge, right where "normie" consumers live. Google's models absolutely suck at coding but if you haven't tried Google Transcribe, you should.

Google has also, far larger distribution and stickiness than Meta.

> but this looks like Meta lawyers trying to shield themselves against partners' suing them

it's less about getting sued and more about not being blocked from being able to scrape.

If your stance is that you're correct with your perspective on loan vs equity, we shouldn't continue to engage but if that's not the case, ask yourself: how would the terms of a loan look like to a young teenager who is just getting into the workforce vs an established professional who has a proven credit history?

> More importantly, how does my vague notion of the ideas are good or bad tie back to my original point that investors willing to loan instead of taking ownership is perhaps more sane?

First, no one is forcing you at gunpoint to respond to me, so feel free to engage and go as deep as you want, as much as you care to, or not at all.

Second, investing, typically in shares of a company, is very different from giving a loan to the same company. Loans are typically based off collaterals, even if it's "unsecured" - it's always secured by something, even if as nebulous as just a credit history or "ability to pay".

No one reasonable in 2026 will argue collaterals with sama or OpenAI today, but I assure you, there was an entire universe of companies that would not give sama a loan in the early 2000s when he struggled to live paycheck to paycheck, or even OpenAI itself (a loan) in 2016 when they were exploring household and gym robots. I'll make the exact same argument for NVIDIA late 2018 to early 2020 post the cryptocurrency demand correction or even before that 2010 to 2015 - go look at the tickers back then.

So again, with the complete power of retrospect:

- Is NVIDIA a company you would loan your own money to?

- Is Dropbox a company you would loan your own money to?

If you get caught up in details like "how long is the term" or "what's the expected ROI of the loan", be generous with those details.

that's not true. Let me repeat the entire claim:

> It’s capital intensive, doesn’t easily scale without linear costs, is basically a commodity, seemingly has negative cashflow forever, and customers aren’t willing to pay what it actually costs. It’s basically the worst tech business model and yet somehow VCs caught a spell and threw every available penny into the fire.

We already agree on the first two. So the following remains:

"commodity, and customers aren’t willing to pay what it actually costs"

To that I say:

- AWS, Uber are all commodity

- Most customers of AWS, Uber aren’t willing to pay what AWS, Uber charges them

Disagreements?

want to take a swing at any one or all three?

> A lot of the "common wisdom" was that subscriptions were heavily subsidized, but in actuality they're just not quite as outrageously profitable.

Both can be true! Assume that it costs you $10 to support inference of 1MM tokens, and you sell that for $100. So you have a 90% profit margin.

Now you also have flat rate subscriptions for $200/month, where you sell upto 100MM tokens. That costs you $1000, but you're selling it as a loss leader because that drives up demand, bottom up - for your product, which is good for long-term profitability specially when your investors are not yet sensitive to you burning cash.

I have multiple $500/mo OAI subs. Still cheaper than buying my own hardware for equivalent performance.

> Make a compute intensive process a necessity (that's where AI comes in) and buy 100% of all compute capacity, eventually buying up all the fabs and locking everyone out of acceptable general purpose computing, forced to move everything to the cloud

This is overly dramatic and pointing that out is necessary because this could cause someone else, even if not you, tremendous anxiety and pessimism about the future: None of which is good for your health.

First of all, no one's been forcing anyone to use AI or "move everything to the cloud". AI is tremendous leverage. It's exactly as useful as a jet or FSD is for commuting. It expedites significantly intelligence-related tasks. No one is forcing anyone to use AI. However, just like a person who owns a jet gets to a place faster than a person without, or a FSD allows you to get work done instead of staring at other cars, a person using AI will get their tasks done quicker than a person without. But that doesn't force a necessity.

Moving "everything" to the cloud is also not going to be financially smart. Companies like Apple, Google, Cloudflare, etc are aggressively moving compute to the edge, locally on device. This increases your own chances of running services locally on device because the device manufacturers will build their hardware to match the demand.

Second, compute capacity has always been elastic. Supply constraints have forever been an issue and that's how markets work. Supply gets constrained, suppliers react to demand, market reaches equilibrium.

In 1996, I had a real tough time getting a T1 line to my office. By 1998, it was no longer an issue. By 2000 there was more fiber than we knew what to do with.

I had a real tough time hiring good, quality engineers 2020 through 2024. That was a constraint in the supply. The market reacted and now there are a lot more good, quality engineers.

Yes, there's a severe constraint now but the market is going to respond and we will have a very different situation in 2030.

Capitalism works. It's not always roses though and not everyone benefits all the time.

> If an idea is good, is it not saner to get a loan instead of dilluting ownership?

Is the idea of a company or companies that R&D and sell GPUs good?

Is the idea of Dropbox good?

Is the idea of diffusion LLMs good?

The title is clickbait. This is important to point out because this, at the minimum, it severely degrades public's perception of how smart, intelligent, qualified the individuals at CYBERCOM are.

I am unaware of who Klippenstein is and whether he's left or right leaning. This article via HN is my first exposure to him, but without any context at all, just by reading the article, I can figure out he's very left leaning.

Why does that matter?

It matters because journalism in 2026 has turned from reporting facts into appealing to a certain spectrum of an audience. It's no longer about providing facts of the matter but about leading an audience to a conclusion that they already had in their minds and re-enforcing it. This is the same echo chamber loop journalists accuse social media of but they are guilty of the very same.

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First, Klippenstein (seems to) imply that it was the Trump administration that began claims of Russian intelligence interference.

Not so. In October 7, 2016 - the Obama administration, via both Department of Homeland Security and Office of the Director of National Intelligence, publicly attributed compromises of political organizations’ emails to the Russian government, connecting the subsequent disclosures to Russian-directed efforts. This was a government intelligence attribution and not merely a statement from the Democratic Party or Clinton campaign

Next, Klippenstein (seems to) imply that CYBERCOM is running the show here. That's not how INT works - CYBERCOM complements, and doesn't replaces FBI/DHS, while CIA is itself foreign focused. CYBERCOM’s role also includes disrupting foreign cyber operations, not just merely investigating them.

Now a very noble interpretation of Klippenstein is he's describing a bipartisan willingness to restrict speech in the name of election security - that his central objection is to the government’s intervention in political expression, not exclusively to which party controls it.

This is a fair argument but if there's foreign intelligence interference, that brainwashes the American public, making them draw conclusions that are factually invalid, whose responsibility is to atleast point that out?

The DoW has, at its disposal, incredibly advanced intelligence dissemination tools (as a requirement for INT operations) that are a great fit for this usecase. Should not the American public, who pay for all of it, not make use of it?

> I'm not sure what happened in recent years, but they definitely switched their strategy to maximize data collection and make sure privacy-savy users are pressured via technical solutions to reveal their identities.

Every scammer, fraudster, scammer-in-training, fraudster-in-training, uses a Google account.

The first company federal investigators often go for data is often Google because that's the start of their lead into their investigation. Google needs to provide answers, sometimes by regulation in countries.