Nilay Patel

Big tech is set to spend almost a trillion dollars in CapEx this year, with nowhere near the revenue levels that would make a return on that anytime soon.

This goes beyond, say, the last explosion of companies going public.

Facebook went public in the early 2010s.

Lots of millionaires were made.

Generationally important companies went public.

But this is like a different level.

It's a different category of numbers even in terms of investment in and expected return out in these IPOs.

What are the timelines for OpenAI and Anthropic to go public?

Because they're raising a lot of money.

They're talking about a lot of money.

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.