In 2025, venture capital can't pretend everything is fine any more

VC, ZIRP, and macro backdrop

• Some argue the real problem isn’t just ZIRP but pervasive financialization: capital out-earning labor and “paper wealth” beating tangible value creation, echoing Piketty-style concerns.
• Others dispute the article’s claim that ZIRP “caused” inflation, pointing instead to COVID disruptions, energy shocks, demographics (shrinking labor force, early retirements), and global inflation patterns.
• There’s pushback on “ignoring politics”: fiscal choices, stimulus, and weak antitrust/enforcement are seen as inseparable from the current mess.

Google, monopolies, and real wealth

• One thread debates whether Google’s huge revenue growth is real innovation or mostly ad-budget reallocation aided by monopoly power.
• Critics say search quality degradation, spam, and ad-chasing represent a social loss not captured in GDP.
• Others argue Google improved advertising measurability, lowered costs for some advertisers, enabled online commerce, and built widely used products and Android, though much of its revenue is still simple ad capture.
• Strong disagreement over antitrust: some see it as arbitrary punishment for “winning,” others as essential to avoid ecosystem strangulation and resource misallocation.

AI progress, usefulness, and hype

• Split views on whether frontier LLMs since GPT‑3 are “the same toy” or substantially better: some see only marginal gains, others report large practical improvements (coding, math, multimodal, STT/TTS, vision).
• Vision, transcription, and accessibility use cases (e.g., AI “eyes” via smart glasses) are cited as genuinely life-changing, even if niche.
• Hallucinations and unreliability remain central complaints, with anecdotes of fabricated academic citations and unsafe use for structured data.
• Several commenters say hype (“superintelligence soon”) is harmful: LLMs are powerful tools but not obviously on an exponential, internet‑like trajectory.

OpenAI’s economics and moat

• Debate over whether OpenAI is a speculative AGI bet or already a solid consumer business that will “drown in money” once ads are turned on.
• Skeptics question unit economics, lack of a strong moat (many competitors, open models), and whether chatbot ads can ever rival search ad economics.
• Others stress there is already significant real spend on tokens and AI subscriptions; utility may be uneven but not zero.

State of VC and alternative models

• The article’s “VC is moribund except AI, and AI except OpenAI” framing is challenged by people claiming active dealflow, especially in narrow AI-powered SaaS niches (e.g., industry-specific appointment automation).
• Pitchbook/NVCA data is cited to argue venture activity is high again, albeit heavily skewed to AI and “AI-adjacent” branding. Many founders feel forced to bolt “AI” onto otherwise mundane products just to raise.
• Some see a quiet shift toward bootstrapped “micro‑SaaS” and creator-led businesses (audience-first, low capital, many subscriptions) that don’t need VC and may erode the traditional “swing for the fences” fund model.
• VCs’ incentives via management fees (especially mega-funds) are noted as cushioning poor performance, though smaller funds and individual partners still live or die by exits.

Business, power, and inequality

• A philosophical subthread compares large firms to “little dictatorships”: hierarchical, surveillant, anti-union, and structurally driven to evade regulation and taxes.
• Others call this overbroad but acknowledge incentives push firms toward monopolization and political capture.
• Several comments argue recent tech waves (platforms, surveillance ads, now AI) have mostly deepened inequality and exploitation rather than broadly improving living standards.