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[–] 96 points 1 year ago (18 children)

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.

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  • [–] 39 points 1 year ago (9 children)

    It's about 11.5 billion, really.

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  • [–] 43 points 1 year ago (8 children)

    It's exactly 11.4 billion, really.

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  • [–] 18 points 1 year ago (7 children)

    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

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year 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.

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  • [–] -1 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    11.4 bln is 100 mln away from 11.5 bln. I'm not sure "so close" is correct here.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    59 seconds is 1000000000000 pico seconds away from a minute, so I'm not sure you could say 59 seconds is "so close" to a minute.

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  • [–] 14 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 14 points 1 year ago

    According to this article written in July, it's a bit more dire than that if you take a step or two back. Basically, openai and their copycats/derivatives are being held up by investments from Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta, who in turn are being held up by investments from Nvidia. If/when the whole chain collapses it'll be more than 0.5% of earnings that disappear.

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  • [–] [S] 3 points 1 year 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.

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