[a_humean]

Openai isn't even close to too big to fail. Bank of America fails the entire banking system collapses and the entire real economy grinds to a halt. If GM fails hundreds of thousands lose their jobs and entire supply chains collapse. If power utilities fail then people start actually dying within hours or days.

If OpenAI fails nothing actually important happens.

[ungreased0675]

When their product is embedded at the OS level in every Windows 11 computer, would that be too big to fail?

[clbrmbr]

Yet. But we are getting close to an event horizon, once enough orgs become dependent of their models.

Open source models are actually potentially worse. Even if OAI is not TBTF because of the competition, we have a scenario where AGI sector as a whole becomes TBTF and too big to halt.

[yunwal]

I mean, there's about a hundred thousand startups built on top of their API. I'm sure most could switch to another model if they really needed, but if copyright is an issue, I'm not sure that would help.

[Andrex]

If you've plugged your whole business into OAI's snake oil, you're an early adopter of technology and you'll likely be able to update the codebase appropriately.

The sooner SCOTUS rules that training on copyrighted material is infringement, the better.

[whimsicalism]

you cannot erase that much value and say "nothing important happens", market cap is largely a rough proxy for the amount of disruption if something went under

[Thrymr]

I do not think the situation is remotely comparable to the possibility of the banking system collapsing. Banks and other financial institutions exert leverage far beyond their market caps.

[dralley]

"whose" money matters here. It's VC money, mostly. Well-capitalized sophisticated investors, not voters and pension funds.

If Microsoft loses 30 billion dollars, it ain't great, but they have more than that sitting in the bank. If Sequoia or Ycombinator goes bankrupt, it's not great for lots of startups, but they can probably find other investors if they have a worthwhile business. If Elon loses a billion dollars, nobody cares.