this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2025
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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.
It's about 11.5 billion, really.
It's exactly 11.4 billion, really.
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
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.
11.4 bln is 100 mln away from 11.5 bln. I'm not sure "so close" is correct here.
If a man worth 11.5 billion loses 100 million, it affects him less than you or I losing a thousand. In fact it doesn't affect him.
So you're a billionaire and one is not different from the other for you, gotcha.
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.
There are far more seconds in your life than hundreds of millions dollars.
And there are far more dollars in 11 billion than 100 million.
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.
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.
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!
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.
So it ALL depends on the definition of "soon"?
Probably
I was referring to the general concept behind the quote.
I originally want to post the OG (apocryphal?) variant:
But it sounds rather quaint these days.
Partially, if OpenAI lose 11.5 billion, someone get 11.5 billion, the money is used to pay something it did not vanish in a cloud