On whether the AI boom is a bubble, a host compared it to Uber, whose investor-subsidized rides turned out fine. Isaac, a tech reporter who covered Uber, points to self-driving's endless five-year timelines. He says people simply decided they didn't want the metaverse, so it didn't happen.
…want it to come and are pushing back on that. My point of view is just to like make criticisms that are well-founded and try not to be an equal sort of prognosticator in knowing what the future is going to hold. I just, I don't trust anyone who believes they know the future, if that makes sense.
…But then when they can no longer subsidize it, it's like the whole thing will collapse and like self-driving will never come. And it's like the whole idea doesn't work. And it's like, did it work? Did it work or not work? Like Uber is obviously still around. So to me, it seems like that did work.
Actually, I think self-driving is like a really great example to use because, you know, we were covering it back then and it was always five-year timelines. Everything is going to be autonomous in five years. And this is why we can raise this crazy amount of money. The reason Uber worked is because they basically sold off all of their very expensive development, including self-driving. And Dara came in and became a cost cutter, basically. I think what I would say is like the thing that bothers me about Silicon Valley is that being wrong has no real cost to it. Because if you're wrong, you can just keep kicking the can down the road to the next thing. Let's look at crypto. Let's look. The metaverse is like my favorite example because it was so obviously bullshit in a lot of ways around the thing that I was just talking about of like, get on board because it's inevitable. Like it's not inevitable. People like decided they don't like it. And so it didn't become a thing, you know? But that's why I just like, I think they're very helpful use cases in the lens by using a lens to view like these statements from the people at the top of these companies. The
other tangent I wanted to go on is you guys reported on the Open AI agentic hacking of Hugging Face. And in terms of like trying to stay measured in your reporting, we had a conversation about this yesterday. Like we had a meeting. We didn't cover it. There are many reasons. The primary one is that…
would agree with your audience in that, like, ascribing personhood to these things is dangerous.
Agreed, to be clear.