That was a solid illustration of just how stupid VC culture is. A run into people convinced capitalism is a necessary (and some of them also believe sufficient) element of innovation and technological advancement, like it doesn’t regularly flush huge amounts of money down the toilet like this.

AI does add one fun wrinkle that we’ve talked about before. Unlike consumer tech like uBeam, there are actual customers (note: not user, customer) for these LLM-based services also more interested in keeping on top of the hype than in actual results. If you’re an executive at a stagnating tech company what better way to boost your own shareholders’ confidence than by giving OpenAI or Anthropic a nice contract to get some relatively vague integration of AI into whatever it is you do. Once you’ve signed the papers and gotten your name in one of the many breathless press cycles on the subject all the actual questions about how it works and whether it adds any value fall to the wayside. You can watch the little people work that out while you coast a few more years before needing to come up with a new transformative vision of the future of whatever company you’ve landed at by that point.