Russell Westbrook
As a basketball fan, and more importantly a good-basketball-player fan (but not necessarily an NBA fan, yes there is a huge difference!) I always loved the candor of players in post-game interviews, whether it be outright feuding, calling out the referees (and the token $10,000-50,000 fine), or just genuinely not having a boring media filter (thank you Klay Thompson for this only). The NBA, rightfully, seems to give the most leeway to players out of the 4 major sporting organizations in North America. Some combination of progressive politics by the players (non-zero history of strikes or other useful collective action), a strong players' union, and significant off-court charisma + media presence by players (shoutout Club 520 Podcast), historic terrible owners seems to balance the scales of players against the powers that be (the NBA commissioner as the deputy of the combined team owners).
All this to say, one of my favorite post-game interviews is from Russell Westbrook amid his decade-long beef with Pat Beverley:
Russell Westbrook: “Pat Bev trick y’all, man, like he playing defense. He don’t guard nobody, man. He just running around, doing nothing.” Made sure to note that James Harden scored 47 tonight.
— Tim MacMahon (@BannedMacMahon) November 14, 2019
For context, Westbrook is a former MVP, multi-time All-Star (and All-Star Game MVP), scoring leader, and one of the best dressed in the NBA, whereas Pat Bev is a journeyman hustle-guy, used primarily to throw off the other team's best offensive weapon through debateably dirty defensive tactics.
How this relates to AI
OpenAI, ahead of its forthcoming cash grab by investors and execs... I mean IPO will have to disclose its massive losses over the past two years.
For some background, many founders after taking on huge debts (not like a true financial debt, like a mafia debt) to venture funds when raising capital for their startups, can only succeed and "exit" by going public. This appeases investors because they get their huge loans (ie. Series A) paid back with interest in the form of preferred shares which can be sold on the secondary market (before IPO, usually completely safe from dilution from the earliest rounds of funding, etc). These are immensely profitable if the company has survived from its infancy to something that has become a word-of-mouth company in any industry (which is the only true metrics, not profitability or anything else).
Which gets us back to our NBA beef. Westbrook correctly analyzes the IPO playbook in its entirety. He points out that the fundamentals (profitability, inherent usefulness) are nonexistent (Pat Bev, the primary defender on his opponent James Harden that game let Harden score nearly half of the team's points, which is truly pathetic with an average of 8-9 guys participating on the other team). Similarly OpenAI has lost maybe the most money of any company in any 2 year period of time (likely bled out to AWS, Nvidia or other cloud compute providers).
That is all to say this is just a shell-game swindle. OpenAI is just running around looking busy in an effort to trick y'all.
Know any other professional swindlers, or were a part of an IPO that allowed your founder to ascend to the techno-aristocracy without you? Commiserate here