In May, at the peak of tokenmaxxing, people were talking about OpenAI IPO’ing at a trillion dollars, Anthropic at two trillion dollars. Maybe that will still happen, but it probably shouldn’t.

Tokenmaxxing died, Chinese open-weight models forced price wars, OpenAI just revised it revenue forecast down $20 billion and the so-called “rogue AI” (really just bad software) fiasco hadn’t yet made the news. With the errant, and possibly criminal, nature of poorly controlled agents now front and center, potential liability is clearly becoming a major new issue. LLM’s might well someday be renamed Large Liability Modules.

A significant new copyright decision by a U.S. appeals court also just undermined the generative AI companies:

Against all of this, it’s harder and harder to fathom how the companies could really merit the enormous valuations they are seeking. This is perhaps part of why OpenAI has pushed back their OpenAI until 2027. (Anthropic is supposedly going to IPO next month, but notably still has not publicly released its S-1.)

Two things I read this morning, jet lagged in New Dehli, seem even more ominous.

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