Andrew E. Freedman is a senior editor at Tom's Hardware focusing on laptops, desktops and gaming. He also keeps up with the latest news. A lover of all things gaming and tech, his previous work has shown up in Tom's Guide, Laptop Mag, Kotaku, PCMag and Complex, among others. Follow him on Threads @FreedmanAE and BlueSky @andrewfreedman.net . You can send him tips on Signal: andrewfreedman.01 ","collapsible":{"enabled":true,"maxHeight":250,"readMoreText":"Read more","readLessText":"Read less"}}), "https://slice.vanilla.futurecdn.net/13-4-24/js/authorBio.js"); } else { console.error('%c FTE ','background: #9306F9; color: #ffffff','no lazy slice hydration function available'); } Andrew E. Freedman Social Links Navigation Senior Editor Andrew E. Freedman is a senior editor at Tom's Hardware focusing on laptops, desktops and gaming. He also keeps up with the latest news. A lover of all things gaming and tech, his previous work has shown up in Tom's Guide, Laptop Mag, Kotaku, PCMag and Complex, among others. Follow him on Threads @FreedmanAE and BlueSky @andrewfreedman.net . You can send him tips on Signal: andrewfreedman.01
Notton I'd be cautious… If I had no other choice between Anthropic, OpenAI and xAI, I'd take Anthropic. I fully expect a rug-pull from OpenAI, and xAI to happen at some point. Not that I fully trust Anthropic either. They don't order from Oracle with the money they got from Nvidia, but they're still part of the monetary pledge loop. Reply
timsSOFTWARE The AI companies are risky bets – just like the web companies in 2000. If you had known Amazon was going to become the juggernaut that it did, then even if you held through the crash that reduced their stock price by 97%, you would have done very well in the end. But I don't think anyone – probably not even Jeff Bezos himself – would have been able to tell you in 2000 that they were going to become the #1 overall seller of everything, and that most of their profit would come from selling cloud computing services – a sector that didn't really exist yet. And so similarly here, LLMs are probably not the end of the line/most advanced final form of AI. Maybe what's next will come from one of these AI firms that are big today – or maybe it won't. Reply
JamesJones44 timsSOFTWARE said: The AI companies are risky bets – just like the web companies in 2000 It's honestly worse than it was in 2000 by a lot. Back then you didn't have private equity running companies valuations up 1000s of percentage points before they even came to market. It was at least a semi level playing field for public buyers back then. Now, most of the money from an investment point of view has been made. Public buyers are being left with the table scraps. Whether any of the AI names can turn a meaningful profit is irrelevant for private equity investors that have run the valuation up as they will or have already cashed out by IPO day. Reply
alan.campbell99 Dario is just as likely to rug pull as any of these other grifters. I don't trust any of them and see no reason to. https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/01/05/claude-devs-complain-about-surprise-usage-limits/ Reply
bill001g JamesJones44 said: It's honestly worse than it was in 2000 by a lot. Back then you didn't have private equity running companies valuations up 1000s of percentage points before they even came to market. It was at least a semi level playing field for public buyers back then. Now, most of the money from an investment point of view has been made. Public buyers are being left with the table scraps. Whether any of the AI names can turn a meaningful profit is irrelevant for private equity investors that have run the valuation up as they will or have already cashed out by IPO day. They will still get massive number of people lining up to buy. Look at game stop. Game stop was laughing all the way to the bank as they issued new shares. The only reason they still exist is they put all the money in bitcoin rather than spend it on the actual business of brick and mortar stores. At least this time you don't have thousands of idiots with free stimulus money from the government they can't wait to gamble. It seems to be a large number of people love to find new ways to gamble online. Risky stock is just one when you can bet if the USA bombs Iran on a certain day it is even more absurd. Reply
Mindstab Thrull Is Anthropic the company I'm thinking of? I don't think it is but… There's one now-popular AI company I've heard of that got a bunch of money from others and only seems to be surviving because more are putting more money into it. Kind of like the Star Citizen of AI companies. Reply
Key considerations
- Investor positioning can change fast
- Volatility remains possible near catalysts
- Macro rates and liquidity can dominate flows
Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/anthropic-files-to-go-public-claude-maker-races-openai-and-spacex-to-ipo#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com/subscription
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Informational only. No financial advice. Do your own research.