Cargo Culture
We recorded 23 claims from this post. 7 were checked against evidence. 16 can’t be checked. 18 more are held. Read the post at its source.
Claims from this post (23)
In the order they appear in the post. Each quotation is the speaker’s words in this post. A label such as “Supported” or “Can’t be checked” is the claim’s current assessment; its page has the evidence and the reasons.
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Rhetoric
“It’s simple: the tech industry has completely run out of ideas, and all that’s left is a cargo cult that hasn’t had a human experience since 2015.”
Our reading: The tech industry has completely run out of ideas and is now a cargo cult.
No horizon
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Rhetoric
“Put another way, the tech industry has become the largest cargo cult of all time.”
Our reading: The tech industry has become the largest cargo cult of all time.
No horizon
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Causal claim
“Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta sunk what will soon be over a trillion dollars into AI data centers because they don’t have any other ideas, and because the only thing that the MBA’d elites running the tech industry can do is hire people, fire people and spend money.”
Our reading: Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta have sunk what will soon be over a trillion dollars into AI data centers because they have no other ideas and because the MBA'd elites running the tech industry can only hire people, fire people and spend money.
No horizon
Scope: Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta
Assessment: SupportedSaid
Observation
“Everything is about creating the signs that your company is part of the big thing that will supposedly lift every Silicon Valley valuation — after all, 61% of venture capital funding went to AI in 2025 — to the point that it isn’t really clear what anything means or what anybody is doing.”
Our reading: 61% of venture capital funding went to AI in 2025.
No horizon Evidence as of
Limitation: The finding is specific to OECD/Preqin coverage and its classification of AI firms.
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Observation
“I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest none of these guys actually contributed very much in their most-recent tenures, and that their hiring and positions were further cargo cult moves.”
Our reading: Shazeer, Karpathy, and Zoph probably contributed little in their most recent tenures at AI labs, and their hiring was cargo cult behavior.
No horizon
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Observation
“That’s right, a mid-tier AI model and an AI app that nobody uses!”
Our reading: Meta's expensive AI researcher hiring produced only a mid-tier AI model and an AI app that nobody uses.
No horizon Evidence as of
Limitation: The packet lacks a May 2026 comparative benchmark and an absolute May standalone-app active-user count.
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Causal claim
“Why does anybody think LLMs are going to change anything? Because everybody vaguely came to the consensus that ChatGPT was trending in the direction that something would change.”
Our reading: People think LLMs are going to change things because everybody vaguely came to the consensus that ChatGPT was trending in the direction that something would change.
No horizon
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Causal claim
“Amazon, Google, and Meta had to buy all those GPUs because Microsoft bought a lot of GPUs.”
Our reading: Amazon, Google, and Meta had to buy all those GPUs because Microsoft bought a lot of GPUs.
No horizon Evidence as of
Limitation: Executive explanations can omit competitive motives.
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Forecast
“Buying GPUs and building data centers sort of feels like Amazon Web Services, even though the $765 billion that big tech will spend in 2026 will be more than ten times Amazon’s combined capex during the period where AWS was being built.”
Our reading: Big tech will spend $765 billion in 2026, more than ten times Amazon's combined capex during the AWS build-out.
Not yet due Evidence as of
Limitation: The cited model has broader infrastructure coverage than an ordinary company-capex sum may have.
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Observation
“They have raised — assuming their most-recent rounds fully close — close to $300 billion in the space of two years, and are on course to burn tens of billions of dollars each in 2026.”
Our reading: Assuming their latest rounds fully close, OpenAI and Anthropic have raised close to $300 billion in two years.
No horizon Evidence as of
Limitation: The evidence packet contains financing components rather than a verified aggregate.
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Observation
“Neither Anthropic nor OpenAI are actually startups.”
Our reading: OpenAI and Anthropic are not actually startups.
No horizon
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Observation
“Both companies have had everything paid for them either by hyperscalers or venture capitalists, and are fundamentally incapable of operating without infinite resources, and the best that anybody has to defend their endless billions of burn is to refer to the 184-year-old railway bubble or the Dot Com Bubble, using them as symbolic proof that everybody can lose a lot of money, and that somehow results in something good, I guess?”
Our reading: OpenAI and Anthropic have had everything paid for them by hyperscalers or venture capitalists and are fundamentally incapable of operating without infinite resources.
No horizon Evidence as of
Limitation: The plain reading preserves a checkable financing-dependence claim, but the absolute wording goes substantially beyond it.
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Conditional forecast
“OpenAI, Anthropic and every AI startup could disappear tomorrow and the world’s financial systems would continue unabated, other than the brutal hit to the stock market and screeching of venture capitalists.”
Our reading: If OpenAI, Anthropic and every AI startup disappeared tomorrow, the world's financial systems would continue unabated, apart from a brutal hit to the stock market and the screeching of venture capitalists.
No horizon
Only if: if OpenAI, Anthropic and every AI startup disappeared tomorrow
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Observation
“Perhaps they’re lucky enough to have businesses that effectively run themselves, or monopolies that can survive having 98% of their free cash flow spent on AI data centers that only lose money, or are smart enough to stay out of the way of the people who actually do work.”
Our reading: Perhaps some company leaders run monopolies that can survive spending 98% of their free cash flow on AI data centers, which he says only lose money.
No horizon
Qualifier: perhaps (one of several alternatives offered)
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Causal claim
“The use of annualized revenues (the single-most easily manipulated metric in Valley history) as a means of promoting growth only exists as a means of spreading the symbology of hypergrowth, all while deliberately obfuscating the actual financial health of the company”
Our reading: In the AI bubble, annualized revenue is used only to spread the symbolism of hypergrowth while deliberately obscuring companies' actual financial health by extrapolating an annual figure from a single monthly or weekly snapshot, which is especially egregious because it includes non-recurring charges like spending via Anthropic's API.
No horizon
Scope: the economics of the AI bubble
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Rhetoric
“AI is the natural endpoint of the Valley’s cargo culture — money-hungry models that can vaguely resemble something that might grow into the future, with opportunities to deploy capital that resemble previous infrastructure movements, all with convenient ways to explain away dissent that mostly boil down to “bad thing happen before but then good thing happen after.””
Our reading: AI is the natural endpoint of Silicon Valley's cargo culture.
No horizon
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Recommendation or value judgment
“AI boosters are no longer allowed to speak in the future-tense, nor are they allowed to justify AI’s losses based on previous eras.”
Our reading: AI boosters should not justify AI with future-tense promises or by comparing its losses to previous eras.
No horizon
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Recommendation or value judgment
“I challenge everybody reading this to start living in the present, and to stop taking excuses for the mediocrity of AI.”
Our reading: People should stop accepting excuses for AI's mediocrity and judge it on the present.
No horizon
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Rhetoric
“If you’re an AI booster yourself, know that the AI companies treat you with complete contempt.”
Our reading: AI companies treat AI boosters with complete contempt.
No horizon
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Observation
“Some have been mighty confident about inference being profitable (due to a $7.5 billion cost of revenue on $13.07 billion in revenue), but overlooked my reporting from last year verified by the Financial Times showed OpenAI spent $8.67 billion on inference in the first nine months of 2025.”
Our reading: OpenAI spent $8.67 billion on inference in the first nine months of 2025, undermining claims that its inference is profitable.
No horizon Evidence as of
Limitation: Inaccessible reporting is an evidence gap, not evidence that the claim is false.
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Observation
“Unless OpenAI is one of the single largest accounts in digital advertising, I think it’s far more likely that there are actual costs being hidden.”
Our reading: Unless OpenAI is among the largest digital advertisers, it is far more likely that real costs are hidden in its sales and marketing line.
No horizon
Qualifier: unless OpenAI is one of the largest digital advertising accounts
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Rhetoric
“It can’t magic up $2 trillion in revenue by 2030 for an industry that basically doesn’t exist without OpenAI or Anthropic.”
Our reading: Faith alone cannot produce $2 trillion in AI revenue by 2030 for an industry that basically does not exist without OpenAI or Anthropic.
No horizon
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Recommendation or value judgment
“And however you feel about AI, you should demand better proof of its inevitability than a bunch of mythology, hype, and cargo cult bullshit.”
Our reading: People should demand better proof of AI's inevitability than mythology and hype.
No horizon
Held from this post (18)
These records did not pass every check, so nothing about them is published. Held is not a finding.
- The two reviews reached different assessments. Our reading, not assessed: OpenClaw is a product that 99% of people have never heard of except those immersed in Silicon Valley cultism, which is why Microsoft, NVIDIA, Meta and Amazon all built OpenClaw products and OpenAI hired its founder.
- The record does not meet the current rules. Our reading, not assessed: Microsoft hired DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman for over a billion dollars with little to show for it other than mid-tier LLMs, a universally-loathed chatbot, massive capex, and AI revenues too small to break out in Microsoft's earnings.
- The two reviews reached different assessments. Our reading, not assessed: OpenAI sells LLM access at a massive loss, does not own its infrastructure, and has no path to profitability other than spending others' money.
- The two reviews reached different assessments. Our reading, not assessed: The investments in OpenAI and Anthropic, at least by Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, were a successful attempt to build their largest individual customers and a new revenue stream, made under what he imagines was the mistaken belief that those customers would eventually become independent enough to pay them without continually raising venture capital.
- The record does not meet the current rules. Our reading, not assessed: OpenAI and Anthropic are each on course to burn tens of billions of dollars in 2026.
- The criteria are ambiguous. Our reading, not assessed: OpenAI and Anthropic have enough money and clout to hire just about anybody, can deploy billions in stock for acquisitions, have their infrastructure fully paid for by other companies, and, because that infrastructure cost so much, effectively nobody else can train models or serve inference at their scale, making them the functional equivalent of a hyperscaler.
- The criteria are ambiguous. Our reading, not assessed: Anthropic allows Claude Code chief Boris Cherny to burn upwards of $130,000 a month in tokens.
- The two reviews read the claim differently
- The two reviews reached different assessments. Our reading, not assessed: OpenAI and Anthropic threw as much money as they could at pre-training because a paper had suggested doing so would bring infinite gains rather than diminishing returns, and when Anthropic built Claude Code by adding scripts on top of an LLM, OpenAI immediately copied it to make Codex.
- The criteria are ambiguous. Our reading, not assessed: Nobody is actually building their own SAP, Salesforce, or Office 365, but because the idea sounds directionally correct and affirms the bias toward AI growth, it took hold, which meant some stocks went up and some went down.
- The two reviews reached different assessments. Our reading, not assessed: Amazon Web Services may have lost money, but it lost significantly less than OpenAI or Anthropic and was significantly more useful than anything the AI industry has ever produced.
- The two reviews read the claim differently
- The two reviews reached different assessments. Our reading, not assessed: Every AI lab and startup started with subsidized subscriptions, assuming that at some point somebody else would solve the problem of costs or that they would make it up in volume, because that is what worked before.
- The two reviews read the claim differently
- The criteria are ambiguous. Our reading, not assessed: It is very clear that OpenAI moved numbers around to make things look better than they are, and he believes its inference costs are being booked under sales and marketing.
- The two reviews read the claim differently
- The two reviews reached different assessments. Our reading, not assessed: Baseten does not own its infrastructure and rents from hyperscalers, so its $1.5 billion raise goes directly to Google, Amazon and Microsoft, much like the money raised by OpenAI and Anthropic, which in turn gets spent buying more NVIDIA GPUs.
- The two reviews read the claim differently