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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   26640 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026

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The first news articles about possible AI stock crash are out! How much of this is fearmongering and how much good advice, I have no idea:

While the so-called Magnificent Seven – Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Nvidia, Meta, Microsoft, and Tesla – are hugely profitable, many investors worry they are getting in over their heads with a debt-fuelled investment splurge in AI hardware and software that may not deliver tangible returns.

Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft recently committed to spending $660bn (€556bn) on AI this year – up about 60pc from 2025 – in a bid to win the race to AI supremacy.

The Magnificent Seven, which have driven Wall Street and global stock markets for three years, account for about 35pc of the S&P 500, prompting concerns an AI stock correction could lead to contagion across already-jittery markets and trigger economic downturns.

“It is going to burst – market crashes are inevitable – but we just don’t know when,” says Dave Quinn, managing director of Investwise.

In the first week of February, hundreds of billions of dollars were wiped off the value of Big Tech and software-as-a-service stocks, sparked by Anthropic’s release of a tool linked to its Claude chatbot that could automate corporate legal work, along with worries about the AI investment binge.

I suspect a good deal of manipulation -- try to drive down the price to get in lower. We saw similar articles right before Nvidia released its last set of results.

Doesn't mean it's not true, it just means I don't believe these people have any real insight or information.

Hrm. I'm less confused by Google than I am Anthropic.

I read their latest announcement on Friday. They announced another $30 billion in Series G funding, for a total of $67 billion dollars in funding so far, with a post money valuation of $380 billion dollars. They're also claiming a runs on revenue of $14 billion dollars, but I didn't see what time frame they're using to extrapolate. They also don't really say much about costs

Without costs, it's hard to determine if an investment is a smart move, but you can extrapolate a little based on P/S ratio. If I'm doing my math right, for these investments to make sense, Anthropic would have to be a company with at least $75 billion in revenue in like... three years.

I'm not a financial analyst, so I may be missing something. Is this just nuts? It seems like the entire thing is predicated on putting entire industries in the shredder, but those same industries are also the primary consumers of their services.

Addendum: I've done some freelance creative work for private companies in the past, so I've had some mild exposure to private funding. My understanding was that prior to the year of our Lord 2025, if you needed seven funding rounds, the conventional wisdom was that your idea was a loser because a winning idea would have IPOed already.

It's like I'm staring at numbers that simultaneously suggest a software company and a heavy industry at the same damned time, and nobody sees the contradiction.

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