Nilay Patel

But at some point, they're going to have to go public and return all that money, right?

Is that push for commercialization to make money and be an actual business instead of a research lab, is that what's pushing people to quit?

You've got to work for a bunch of meta executives who work at OpenAI now to push ads on people?

You know, when companies go public, they have to start delivering quarterly earnings.

Their CEOs have to do investor calls.

Things get very regular and standardized and quite honestly, much more boring.

That is not a great environment to suddenly start writing huge checks to random researchers because you want to lure them from Meta to make AGI.

Do you think the process of going public or becoming more responsible companies or even just having to make money will bring some of the froth in this market down?

But going public could make these companies themselves worth close to a trillion dollars each, even as investors pour more money back into them on the back of AI hype.

One question looming over all of this is where the tech talent pipeline goes.

And what happens when you start automating the very junior programmers, and beyond that, junior roles of all kinds in white collar work?

If you don't have any junior people, where are you gonna get the mid-career people?

And if you don't have any mid-career people, where are you gonna get the senior folks?

We're already seeing layoffs across the board at tech companies.

They're all trying to do more with less and then saying the cuts are because of AI or that they're all just trying to be leaner and more cost conscious after the explosion of spending that we saw in the pandemic.

It occurs to me that

If these companies develop AGI, or even if they continue down the road they're on, which is very capable models that can basically automate software development, they will automate away a bunch of the jobs these engineers are doing that are getting paid all this money for.

Does this market realize that?

Is it contended with the idea that paying billions of dollars for a software engineer to develop the product that will automate the software engineer away is kind of a doom loop?

Or is that just not on anyone's radar?