Cargo Culture
We recorded 16 claims from this post. 16 can’t be checked. 7 more are held. Read the post at its source.
Claims from this post (16)
In the order they appear in the post. Each quotation is the speaker’s words in this post. A label such as “Supported” or “Can’t be checked” is the claim’s current assessment; its page has the evidence and the reasons.
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Rhetoric
“It’s simple: the tech industry has completely run out of ideas, and all that’s left is a cargo cult that hasn’t had a human experience since 2015.”
Our reading: The tech industry has completely run out of ideas and is now a cargo cult.
No horizon
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Rhetoric
“Put another way, the tech industry has become the largest cargo cult of all time.”
Our reading: The tech industry has become the largest cargo cult of all time.
No horizon
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Causal claim
“Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta sunk what will soon be over a trillion dollars into AI data centers because they don’t have any other ideas, and because the only thing that the MBA’d elites running the tech industry can do is hire people, fire people and spend money.”
Our reading: Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta have sunk what will soon be over a trillion dollars into AI data centers because they have no other ideas and because the MBA'd elites running the tech industry can only hire people, fire people and spend money.
No horizon
Scope: Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Observation
“I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest none of these guys actually contributed very much in their most-recent tenures, and that their hiring and positions were further cargo cult moves.”
Our reading: Shazeer, Karpathy, and Zoph probably contributed little in their most recent tenures at AI labs, and their hiring was cargo cult behavior.
No horizon
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Causal claim
“Why does anybody think LLMs are going to change anything? Because everybody vaguely came to the consensus that ChatGPT was trending in the direction that something would change.”
Our reading: People think LLMs are going to change things because everybody vaguely came to the consensus that ChatGPT was trending in the direction that something would change.
No horizon
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Observation
“Neither Anthropic nor OpenAI are actually startups.”
Our reading: OpenAI and Anthropic are not actually startups.
No horizon
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Conditional forecast
“OpenAI, Anthropic and every AI startup could disappear tomorrow and the world’s financial systems would continue unabated, other than the brutal hit to the stock market and screeching of venture capitalists.”
Our reading: If OpenAI, Anthropic and every AI startup disappeared tomorrow, the world's financial systems would continue unabated, apart from a brutal hit to the stock market and the screeching of venture capitalists.
No horizon
Only if: if OpenAI, Anthropic and every AI startup disappeared tomorrow
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Observation
“Perhaps they’re lucky enough to have businesses that effectively run themselves, or monopolies that can survive having 98% of their free cash flow spent on AI data centers that only lose money, or are smart enough to stay out of the way of the people who actually do work.”
Our reading: Perhaps some company leaders run monopolies that can survive spending 98% of their free cash flow on AI data centers, which he says only lose money.
No horizon
Qualifier: perhaps (one of several alternatives offered)
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Causal claim
“The use of annualized revenues (the single-most easily manipulated metric in Valley history) as a means of promoting growth only exists as a means of spreading the symbology of hypergrowth, all while deliberately obfuscating the actual financial health of the company”
Our reading: In the AI bubble, annualized revenue is used only to spread the symbolism of hypergrowth while deliberately obscuring companies' actual financial health by extrapolating an annual figure from a single monthly or weekly snapshot, which is especially egregious because it includes non-recurring charges like spending via Anthropic's API.
No horizon
Scope: the economics of the AI bubble
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Rhetoric
“AI is the natural endpoint of the Valley’s cargo culture — money-hungry models that can vaguely resemble something that might grow into the future, with opportunities to deploy capital that resemble previous infrastructure movements, all with convenient ways to explain away dissent that mostly boil down to “bad thing happen before but then good thing happen after.””
Our reading: AI is the natural endpoint of Silicon Valley's cargo culture.
No horizon
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Recommendation or value judgment
“AI boosters are no longer allowed to speak in the future-tense, nor are they allowed to justify AI’s losses based on previous eras.”
Our reading: AI boosters should not justify AI with future-tense promises or by comparing its losses to previous eras.
No horizon
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Recommendation or value judgment
“I challenge everybody reading this to start living in the present, and to stop taking excuses for the mediocrity of AI.”
Our reading: People should stop accepting excuses for AI's mediocrity and judge it on the present.
No horizon
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Rhetoric
“If you’re an AI booster yourself, know that the AI companies treat you with complete contempt.”
Our reading: AI companies treat AI boosters with complete contempt.
No horizon
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Observation
“Unless OpenAI is one of the single largest accounts in digital advertising, I think it’s far more likely that there are actual costs being hidden.”
Our reading: Unless OpenAI is among the largest digital advertisers, it is far more likely that real costs are hidden in its sales and marketing line.
No horizon
Qualifier: unless OpenAI is one of the largest digital advertising accounts
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Rhetoric
“It can’t magic up $2 trillion in revenue by 2030 for an industry that basically doesn’t exist without OpenAI or Anthropic.”
Our reading: Faith alone cannot produce $2 trillion in AI revenue by 2030 for an industry that basically does not exist without OpenAI or Anthropic.
No horizon
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Recommendation or value judgment
“And however you feel about AI, you should demand better proof of its inevitability than a bunch of mythology, hype, and cargo cult bullshit.”
Our reading: People should demand better proof of AI's inevitability than mythology and hype.
No horizon
Held from this post (7)
These records did not pass every check, so nothing about them is published. Held is not a finding.
- The two reviews reached different assessments. Our reading, not assessed: OpenClaw is a product that 99% of people have never heard of except those immersed in Silicon Valley cultism, which is why Microsoft, NVIDIA, Meta and Amazon all built OpenClaw products and OpenAI hired its founder.
- The two reviews reached different assessments. Our reading, not assessed: The investments in OpenAI and Anthropic, at least by Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, were a successful attempt to build their largest individual customers and a new revenue stream, made under what he imagines was the mistaken belief that those customers would eventually become independent enough to pay them without continually raising venture capital.
- The two reviews read the claim differently
- The two reviews reached different assessments. Our reading, not assessed: OpenAI and Anthropic threw as much money as they could at pre-training because a paper had suggested doing so would bring infinite gains rather than diminishing returns, and when Anthropic built Claude Code by adding scripts on top of an LLM, OpenAI immediately copied it to make Codex.
- The two reviews reached different assessments. Our reading, not assessed: Amazon Web Services may have lost money, but it lost significantly less than OpenAI or Anthropic and was significantly more useful than anything the AI industry has ever produced.
- The two reviews reached different assessments. Our reading, not assessed: Every AI lab and startup started with subsidized subscriptions, assuming that at some point somebody else would solve the problem of costs or that they would make it up in volume, because that is what worked before.
- The two reviews reached different assessments. Our reading, not assessed: Baseten does not own its infrastructure and rents from hyperscalers, so its $1.5 billion raise goes directly to Google, Amazon and Microsoft, much like the money raised by OpenAI and Anthropic, which in turn gets spent buying more NVIDIA GPUs.