• Kirp123@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    The difference between 100 million and 11.5 billion is about 11 billion. If you own a bank 11 billion that’s not only that bank’s problem, it’s the economy’s problem.

        • boonhet@sopuli.xyz
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          2 days ago

          Well, if you want to get exact, sure. But if we’re talking about half units, like 11 and a half billion, then 11.4 is so close to 11.5 there’s no difference and calling it just about 11 sorta implies that it’s a more significant difference IMO

          • MattBlackAlien@lemmy.world
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            2 days ago

            You need to be as precise as your resolution, otherwise the precision is meaningless. I guess you could argue that your resolution is units of half-billion (since some things are measured like that), but the initial value of 0.1B, and your use of 0.5 rather than ‘half’ suggests a resolution of 0.1B.

            This is different to the aphorism ‘The difference between a million and a billion is about a billion’, both because of the difference in scale, and the quoted resolution.

    • sus@programming.dev
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      2 days ago

      So I wondered a bit how much it actually affects the economy.

      “S&P 500” companies’ market cap is about 57 trillion dollars with a P/E ratio of about 30. So openai by itself is dragging down the total s&p 500 earnings by only about 0.5%. The bigger problem is that there are multiple companies like openAI, and a large chunk of the entire economy’s valuation is tied to the promise that all the AI companies will somehow become profitable sometime soon.

      • jballs@sh.itjust.works
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        2 days ago

        When you put it that way, I’m actually kind of mad. Most of my retirement is in index funds, so essentially OpenAI just pissed away half a percent of my life savings in the last quarter!

      • Kirp123@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        If OpenAI goes down then it will start a domino effect as people lose confidence in AI and AI companies. That’s how the bubble pops.

    • Alphane Moon@lemmy.worldOP
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      2 days ago

      I was referring to the general concept behind the quote.

      I originally want to post the OG (apocryphal?) variant:

      Owe Your Banker £1,000 and You Are at His Mercy; Owe Him £1 Million and the Position Is Reversed

      But it sounds rather quaint these days.