Patrick Boyle

overcome for so long yeah but you know there's the funny thing as last time we spoke we spoke about the nasdaq inclusion so 15 days after the ipo passive investors whether they like it or not will become shareholders right and that is an incentive even to get in at the ipo because you know 15 days later there's sort of some new bag holders to take it off your hands um

In the long run, like any company, the value of any company is the cash flows, like you're buying cash flows, you're buying the profits of a company.

You know, is there a version of the world where it could become profitable?

Yeah, but it doesn't.

doesn't look like an amazing business at the moment.

Like, it's a wonderful, it's a cool science experiment, but that doesn't mean that, you know, it's not obvious how you convert all of this stuff into dollars and cents.

Yeah, I mean, you know, once again, all of this AI stuff, it's really early in this business and it's really hard to know who the winners and losers will be, you know?

So the question with OpenAI, with Anthropic, with any of these is sort of, are they the sort of Google of,

search you know or are you investing in the yahoo or the aol or whatever you know because yeah being first doesn't necessarily make you the big winner um you know it's uh it's not something that i'm excited about just because it's kind of a roll of the dice and a hope and pray kind of thing um you know also it's not obvious even if ai is a huge productivity booster

It's reasonable to think it could boost the productivity of all the people using it, but that doesn't mean they get to charge that because there's sort of 10 models out there.

They're all reasonably equivalent to each other.

And so the question is, will AI be a winner-take-all model?

Right.

like the way internet search was, or will we have kind of 10, you know, it's a bit like Uber, you know, where there's sort of, you know, in every part of the world, there's Uber, and then there's a few other ones.

And the problem with, if there's always a few other ones, you never really get to crank up your prices.

And so people benefit from the affordable taxi rides, which is great, but the companies themselves never get that profitable.

So with these huge valuations,

The assumption is that one of these things is going to win the whole market and is going to be able to charge an awful lot of money for their services in the future.

It is.

For years, people have been saying, you know, there's no companies going public.