Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

Tim Bray linked to this so I guess it's an OK link for a Bloomberg post even though it's in newsletterhunt. Matt Levine here writes, "I feel like a lot of stories in financial markets these days are about essentially this tension, 'everyone must prepare for apocalypse by owning AI stocks' vs. 'you are trying to trick us into owning AI stocks.'" And yet, the Standard and Poor (S&P) 500 index won't include SpaceX (which - just to be clear - is essentially an AI stock that also loses money launching space ships). Levine concludes, "It could be years before the big AI companies are profitable enough to get into the S&P. And then a few years after that, maybe they'll take over the world. In a sense, S&P is betting they won't." I don't really care one way or another which way the stocks go. But I do agree that betting on any of these companies at this point is a long shot, mostly because AI is math, and you can't own math.

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: Jun 09, 2026 09:42 a.m.

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