alt Hacker NewsHere's an analogy (as far as I understand the situation...)
Let's say I own a lemonade stand. I sell you a 20% stake.
My stand loses $10. When I report my financial results, I report losing $10. Then I report that your share of those losses is $2, and my share is $8. This creates transparency.
So OpenAI really did lose $8.8B or whatever, but some of those losses are 'attributed' to other shareholders/owners of their subsidiaries, because they have a complicated corporate structure. So they report both numbers - the total loss, and then the part they 'own'.
So when Ed says "It’s unclear what this means", he's either terribly uninformed or intentionally misleading his readers into thinking something fishy is going on when it isn't.
Either way, it's bad journalism - if you don't know what it means, shouldn't you try to find out or ask an expert or something and then inform your readers? (And the thing is, it would easy enough to dunk on them for losing $8 billion, without adding these weird insinuations!)
OK got it. I guess this is a good call out or whatever then from you all, but, I gotta say, the point can't help but feel a little incommensurate to the $8.8 billion elephant in the room.. Like even in the original article, this is like a passing point to the overall thing, right?
Like its you want to both say that you agree with the overall point here, but also can't trust that very same conclusion because one part in the article reveals an obvious ignorance. Except no one has been able to actually state the exact ignorance here other than the suggestion that Microsoft is in fact the one losing $3 billion dollars, which doesn't really feel very far from Zitron's original implication anyway given all the stuff he writes!