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America is now one big bet on AI

https://www.ft.com/content/6cc87bd9-cb2f-4f82-99c5-c38748986a2e
158•saubeidl•13h ago

Comments

saubeidl•13h ago
https://archive.ph/7nWV1
xiphias2•13h ago
While it's all true, I think it's exciting that there's a country that's not afraid of betting when all the signs point to AI being accerelated.

USA already bet on software when it let China overtake manufacturing.

Now the only worse thing to betting on AI would be slowing it down inside USA.

righthand•13h ago
This is something I don’t get. The general cost of living is sky rocketing, largely due to this push and some of the population thinks there is prosperity for all on the otherside of the meat processing machine we’re pushing everyone toward.

Groceries are going to get more expensive. Every dollar we spend on over building AI infrastructure is a dollar we never get back.

We could use this money for other things such as healthcare and fixing our broken parts of our education system. Instead people are getting ancy to chat with a summarized version of all the garbage on the internet.

ModernMech•12h ago
What's not to get? Groceries, healthcare, and education aren't expensive for them to afford, why would they want to invest their money and time in making those things more affordable for poor people? Better to invest all their resources making a robot slave army. Then it doesn't matter how unaffordable anything is to the poors, they can just die. Win win.
jebarker•12h ago
> The general cost of living is sky rocketing, largely due to this push

How are cost of living increases tied to AI investment?

righthand•12h ago
This is an intentionally disingenuous question right?

Where do you think the tax money being given away to these huge datacenters is going?

What downstream effects does major increase to limited consumer services and goods do across the board?

jebarker•11h ago
No, it was a genuine question. Sorry if I’m asking basic questions, but I actually don’t find your questions as responses help make things any clearer.
Nasrudith•12h ago
There are only two ways it could: either power cost increases which only make up a small portion of cost of living or somehow believing it responsible for inflation. But the latter doesn't make any sense, especially as they believe the money spent to be 'lost'.
righthand•12h ago
How does that not make sense? Inflation is lost money from a consumer viewpoint.
seanmcdirmid•12h ago
Money spent on AI is taking GPUs and software engineers off the market, as well as the energy needed to drive AI data centers. AI doesn’t need food, well, beyond the SWEs, it shouldn’t be inflating food at all. The only thing I could think of is AI investment drawing away agriculture investment or something. Or maybe AI data centers replacing farmland?
gooob•12h ago
the idea is to use AI to build super productive farms and greenhouses, improve the capability to do that in urban areas, automated and super efficient transportation. but it's not just AI doing all that, it's someone who wants to start a business using AI himself to figure out how to best start up a greenhouse in his community and setup the tech infra needed including the API for people to be able to view available produce, estimates on availability, initiate trades, etc. (this greenhouse thing is just one example).

another example could be someone wants to build an ecosystem monitoring station to monitor the nearby ravine (pollution levels with rainfall and other events etc.) and air quality over time. this is just a small datapoint but if people all over the place build their own ecosystem/weather monitoring things using basic electronics ordered from the internet and all plug them in to a standard observability software system then that could provide some pretty awesome outcomes including figuring the best way to clean polluted water (because some of the places will surely have implemented varying methods of sanitizing their own water).

righthand•12h ago
Okay this is even more pie-in-the-sky. You can build productive greenhouses today, we don’t need AI to summarize the internet to figure out how to do it. There are no secrets hidden in the generative token tea-leaves that reveals better greenhouses. Urban farming will never be profitable or sustainable in a dense urban center. It’s been done.

“Standard observability software” whatever that is also does not require AI to build. We need 10GW to calculate rainfall for who? What benefit over how we currently calculate rainfall? This rainfall is hallucinated through summarization?

gooob•10h ago
i can't come up with all the examples. i'm not a farming or ecology expert. so thanks for the information. do some thinking
etblg•11h ago
> the idea is to use AI to build super productive farms and greenhouses

How? What are the mechanisms in which AI will lead to farms and greenhouses being more productive? How will AI improve the existing automation that already exists for the farming sector, and has existed for a hundred years?

gooob•10h ago
fully automated with robots. the AI designs thousands of experiments and deploys them at scale. idk, i'm not an agriculture expert. it was just one example. what other possibilities are there?

electronics recycling, disassembling old computers to get the raw materials into a form that can be used again. we'll need programs to automate the production and testing and analysis of the robots that will recycle the components.

GOD_Over_Djinn•7h ago
> idk, i'm not an agriculture expert.

That much is obvious. The fact that you’re straining so hard to come up with these bongcloud “ideas” should clue you in that maybe this isn’t the revolutionary tech that the suits are selling it as

simianwords•12h ago
> The general cost of living is sky rocketing

there is no evidence of this

anal_reactor•12h ago
The collective west enjoyed a period of prosperity because it had massive technological advantage. The Spanish had guns, native Americans had sticks. The British had steam engines, the Indians had cows. The Americans had computers, the soviets had abascus. Now the Chinese have AI, we have if statements. Losing the AI race is an existential threat to our civilization.
righthand•12h ago
Yet no one can detail how it’s an existential threat. No real usecases for larger society from AI models but we must make everyone’s life worse so we don’t lose the race to nowhere.
SideburnsOfDoom•12h ago
> The collective west enjoyed a period of prosperity because it had massive technological advantage. The Spanish had guns,

as it was said in 1898 by Hilaire Belloc: "Whatever happens, we have got. The Maxim gun, and they have not."

In that case it was the British who had just slaughtered a lot of Matabele in Africa.

> Losing the AI race is an existential threat to our civilization.

Lol. If winning it means a sea of hallucinated "factual" text and deepfake videos, then that death of truth is also a threat. Being rid of that is no threat at all.

glitchc•12h ago
China's also betting on AI. There's massive domestic effort towards model parity and custom ICs.
madamelic•12h ago
Additionally, to my knowledge, China is also doing significantly better on energy production and clean energy at that versus the US.

In the US, we are terrified of nuclear and the administration is trying to make economically worse energy production the norm because they are stuck in the past.

If there is an AI race, I have zero doubt that China WILL win simply because of energy production and the government's willingness to pour money in. It's a foregone conclusion at this point in my opinion because the time to build new energy sources was yesterday. The only way I see China losing is: major debt crisis or getting into a war.

There is no chance, in my opinion, that the US federal government will get off their butts suddenly to fund AI or infrastructure because they are so busy worrying about less than 1% of the population who don't affect them but that they find 'icky'.

Woke isn't destroying the US, it's the people who are busy ' "judging their neighbors' porches" meanwhile the neighborhood is burning down.

dgfitz•12h ago
> If there is an AI race, I have zero doubt that China WILL win.

A race to what? What does the winner get? What does the loser get? What does 'winning' even fucking mean? My statistical next token predictor is better than your statistical next token predictor?

seanmcdirmid•12h ago
Using AI in commercial applications to gain a strategic advantage over your competitors. China will use AI to do things that the USA will shudder at, they already have automated ports that are 10 times more efficient than ours, and we can’t even think about upgrading because our longshoremen unions are too strong.
dgfitz•11h ago
As long as you realize a strong Chinese dollar is the worst thing that could happen to China right now, and as long as we just excuse away the whole “LLMs make more money than they cost” (which they absolutely do not) sure thing.
seanmcdirmid•7h ago
Strong Chinese yuan isn’t that much of a concern, only 15% of the economy is exports.
afavour•12h ago
> all the signs point to AI being accerelated

Feels like a feedback loop. It's exciting that we're all in on AI because we're all in on AI!

kevmo314•12h ago
What is teamwork if not a feedback loop?
somenameforme•11h ago
What signs point to any sort of acceleration besides in spending?

Most major companies have released new versions in the past year, but if people were asked to blindly determine whether they were using the newer or older version, I suspect the results would be close to random. It seems to me that the difference between versions is sharply decreasing in a way that seems to be asymptotic, similar to what happens in literally every other domain with neural networks.

I also think it's clear that the difference between the various choices is also diminishing. Aside from certain manually designed idiosyncrasies (like ChatGPT's obsequiousness), I think people assessing which model they're using would also be mostly random. Somewhat surprisingly, even in the 'LLM arena' [1], where you get to compare output side by side, the difference between models is approaching statistical 0!

[1] - https://huggingface.co/spaces/lmarena-ai/lmarena-leaderboard

twothreeone•11h ago
Mainly growing energy demand of AI deployments leading to capacity increases becoming the bottleneck. The key challenge is going to be scaling up energy production in the US.
rustyconover•13h ago
Just remember TINA - "There Is No Alternative."

But come on, there should be an alternative.

Without diversification, we’re just setting ourselves up for an economic rug pull the moment the AI growth hits the law of large numbers and people realize its not the magic they think it is. Economically? Don’t worry it’ll just be another “oops, your 401k lost a bit, here’s a bailout” moment. AKA, stimulus with sprinkles.

So yeah... keep buying those dips girls and boys.

singleshot_•12h ago
> people realize its not the magic they think it is

2023

tylerchilds•13h ago
My disaster recovery plan is circus.

Call me if you have an act.

Book us if you need to rebuild community.

usrnm•10h ago
You're literally going to compete with the whole United States government, and you call this a recovery plan?
1234letshaveatw•13h ago
Sloppy opinion piece. Stock market increases are bad because it makes rich people happy, but select US sectors are lagging behind Europe which is somehow also bad. Low immigration resulting in a labor force squeeze is bad, but this is offset by reduced demand because of AI, which is, you guessed it, also bad lol
FredPret•13h ago
Bad news sells, especially about leading people/companies/countries.

"${rich_guy} is doomed" will get more clicks than "poor people can now afford 5% more daily protein than last year".

SNosTrAnDbLe•12h ago
Why is this sloppy. The author is not saying that AI is bad but that the current capital being invested in the UD is mostly betting on AI.

If you remove AI then what is left?

re-thc•12h ago
> If you remove AI then what is left?

AI

1234letshaveatw•12h ago
I'll try again- if market increases are bad, why is it bad to lag behind certain sectors in he EU? (sidestepping the inconvenient truth for the author that a majority of Americans are invested in the stock market). If a shrinking labor market is bad, why are AI productivity gains bad?
saubeidl•12h ago
It is bad because the market increases are all in one unproven area and if that doesn't work out, everything will crash.
Moomoomoo309•12h ago
Stock market increases are bad if they are being put to something unprofitable, whuch AI seems to be. Lagging behind Europe is bad because the US loses its competitive advantage, which can become a vicious cycle and kill the sector entirely. Low immigration causing a labor force squeeze is bad because critical industries like farming have crops rot on the field, causing food waste. Reduced demand because of AI is bad because it lowers employment, causing people to become destitute, desperate, and/or dead.

None of this is contradictory.

woeirua•13h ago
We'll know next year if it's not the right move. If we get another wave of incremental upgrades at best then AI will clearly be in a bubble and it's time to look for the exits. If we keep getting major advances then any country _not_ going all in on AI will be left behind.
afavour•12h ago
"Just one more year bro, I promise, this is different, just one more year and it'll change everything bro"
soupfordummies•12h ago
Have we gotten major advancements in the last ~year? Not being facetious, genuinely asking. I don't see it from my end but then again I don't really use much more than ChatGPT a couple times a week.
adcoleman6•12h ago
I think the major advancements are outside the textbox in this last year: video generation, robotic models like Helix, world models, Genie 3.

Even for text, Deepseek R1 was this year, and agentic and coding AI has made progress on length/complexity of tasks. The rise of MoE architecture in the open/local model space has made it possible to run useful models locally on hardware under like $2K, something I didn’t expect for a long time.

senordevnyc•11h ago
In the last ~year, we’ve gotten reasoning models, coding agents, much better multimodal capabilities, usable video models, huge context windows, huge decreases in cost, tons of advances in open source models, and I’m sure a lot more I’m not thinking of. I use AI both to code and to deliver value to my (non-tech) customers, and the last year has been awesome for me.
jcheng•11h ago
The difference in coding ability between then and now is pretty huge. And a year ago o1 hadn’t been introduced yet, whereas now the “reasoning” technique is pretty widespread.

Not sure if you’re counting things built on top of the models but if so, coding agents have also come a long way since a year ago.

Oras•13h ago
> No nation has seen an immigration boom-bust cycle near the scale of the one roiling America. Net immigration nearly quadrupled after 2020 to peak at well over 3mn in 2023, but the backlash led by President Donald Trump sent that figure into freefall. This year only around 400,000 net new arrivals are expected, and that could be the trend in the coming years.

If true, that's <1% of the population?

trod1234•12h ago
There aren't enough jobs because we are stuck in a money-printing loop thanks to the baby boomers. The dynamics and debasement floor prevent new entrants from entering the market while regulation cripples those trying to keep things going. Concentrating and sieving the money-supply into non-productive companies on a moonshot bet to eliminate capital formation and one party that forms the basis for the economic cycle.

Demographics are destiny. Its pretty clear that we'll be taking the accelerated japan route, and the worst of that with japan is the fact that we bailed it out, no ones around to bail us out.

We basically have a generation of children who are now the old, who spurned and wasted the resources given to them in poor stewardship, and who failed to pass them and the advantaged environment on to their children, instead choosing tyrannical to disadvantage their children through control and clutching power to the last of their days and all the destruction that comes thereafter. A fall of empire.

They clutched at the resources so heavily and disadvantaged their own children to the point where significantly less people were in a position to actually be having children themselves, both because of the intolerable and torturous acts which have become so commonplace today but also the resources required to keep the old alive significantly outweighed the resources to foster children. There is an opportunity cost for everything. A Deflationary depopulation is almost inevitable.

thr0w•12h ago
> intolerable and torturous acts which have become so commonplace today

What are you referring to?

trod1234•8h ago
The vast generalized systemic malaise of corruption that afflicts America both in business, and politics.

It is most commonly expressed in process which is designed to isolate, strip of agency, impose cognitive dissonance (through deception and lies), create trauma loops (structured circularly with push-pull dynamics), and utilize sophisticated psychological blindspots that every person has; primarily to induce inconsistent internal states of confusion beneath cognition, which creates psychological stress beyond the point of coping for physiological effect.

Define intolerable and torturous acts rationally by functional element from case studies, you will find the elements in aggregate nearly everywhere you look. That wasn't always the case.

Its under different names, and called different things but the elements are all there. Education, Business, Politics, the sheer number of places is endless. The work of a generation.

For example, Master Data Management is all about creating dossiers of customers for targeting your most profitable customers with extras; while simultaneously reducing finite resources required by basic services that are given to your baseline customer (beyond the point of service failure, just shy of the point of fraud).

Ever wonder about that systemic issue where a ticket you opened, described it properly, and it has a straightforward resolution, but its automatically closed as resolved 20-30 days later with no action taken and no reprimand or escalation path that's effective and it can't be reopened. Or that CSR doom loop where they transfer you so many times taking advantage of the trunk line timeout after a signaling change where the phone disconnects (x minutes after the first signaled transfer), or the lies about higher than normal call volume which aren't actually based on averages and always apply... The loss of some needed benefit because someone decided in error that requirements weren't met for that benefit, depriving you immediately, with no recourse. Like paypall freezing your connected bank account because of a chargeback that was illegitimate on the sellers side.

People blind themselves because this is everywhere, and it shouldn't be, but there is no one capable of stopping it that isn't also more incentivized to continue it for profit.

Who benefits, what recourse, what's required for a rule of law, and what happened in the two decades leading up to 1776 that showed what happens when a rule of law no longer functions.

Coercion is the purposeful application of psychological stress beyond the point of coping to induce outcomes.

While a little funny, if it weren't so close to the truth Agents of Shield got this mostly right except that its everywhere: "Take a deep breath, calm your mind, compliance will be rewarded. Are you willing to comply?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEikUtQKbHk

carefulfungi•12h ago
Trump's stated goal is to deport 4M people (by deporting 3k people per day). They count border crossing apprehensions in this number, so this isn't 4M current residents. The government currently claims [1] 9,740 border crossing "encounters" per month. I'm unsure if it is correct to count these as deportations - but assuming so - then these account for ~480,000 of the 4M target. Leaving ~3.5M current residents to be deported.

Or roughly 1% of the current US population.

https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/southwest-land-border-enc...

maxweylandt•12h ago
I also suspect using 2020 as a baseline will inflate how large the increases appear. Cursory google, but this dataset suggests pretty steady number apart from the covid downturn and now the recent crackdown:

https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/uni...

seanmcdirmid•12h ago
Using 2020 as a comparison basis for anything should be illegal. “Hey look after immigration dropped a lot because all work dried up, immigration increased a lot relative to that!”
bad_haircut72•13h ago
Its not a bubble because the economy isnt actually about trade any more, its about power. The people in power now know that control over technology is the name of the game. It doesnt have to have a return on investment, it has to enable control of public opinion and eventually, robots.
zaik•12h ago
What if the power gained by AI models is less than expected?
__MatrixMan__•12h ago
Then we might have to solve our education problems after all.
kerabatsos•12h ago
Ha! I wouldn’t count on it.
__MatrixMan__•8h ago
Why not?

If you're trying to compete with some country who can do things that you can't and there's nobody to be found who knows how to do the thing, isn't teaching your people the obvious thing to do?

The cost of not doing so will be cumulative, so sooner or later the ROI will be there. It's just a matter of how bad things need to get first. That is, unless there's something else we've got going for us that we can fall back on, but I'm not sure what that thing might be--we've been busy dismantling contenders for the job lately.

re-thc•12h ago
Means not enough GPUs. Keep making them!
koolala•12h ago
What is mightier than the pen? They have guns too.
softwaredoug•12h ago
This would be true if the bubble pops and the gov't spend money propping up OpenAI or something.

But those big companies going out of business won't be how the bubble pops. It'll be the 95% of projects / startups that don't have any ROI.

rhetocj23•12h ago
Assuming chatgpt is an input to those projects - how are those projects going to see ROI given that OAIs focus now is to be profitable through its own ventures?

OAI all over the place and doesnt seem to have a direct thing its focused on executing, which only makes the idea of a bubble more real.

ajross•12h ago
Let's just say this point needs further exposition.

Your argument appears to be that the stock market won't drop because stocks are held by members of the public whose opinions are controlled by technology? Or... that robots are holding the stock?

It doesn't have the rhetorical punch, but my boring traditional economics opinion is that it's probably a bubble because realized profit from these overvalued stocks is too far out in the future to buffer the inevitable liquidity shocks inherent in modern economies. Eventually someone will come up short and have to dump, and we'll get a feedback loop.

But admittedly robots are more fun.

willyxdjazz•12h ago
Hhajja
re-thc•12h ago
> it's probably a bubble because realized profit from these overvalued stocks is too far out in the future to buffer the inevitable liquidity shocks inherent in modern economies

You just need to save the bubble with an even bigger bubble.

rich_sasha•12h ago
Something like 70-80%+ of US stock market ownership is institutional, which ultimately means overwhelmingly pension and insurance funds. I'd imagine much of the rest is individual investors' pension savings.

Bubbles can grow fine so long as no one wants their money back. But eventually they will, and then valuations will be real. When all these boomers draw their savings and buy themselves annuities, what's going to happen?

One pet theory of mine is that the US market goes up so much because of it's population growth. DM in Europe for example don't see this net inflow of people saving for retirement, instead the pressure is rather pensioners pulling money out.

Eventually though even the US stock market will have a reality check, and who knows what happens then.

KoolKat23•12h ago
This is a good point and perhaps is driving the point further. With demographic decline, there's less and less folk able to actually generate value for the pensioners, perhaps it's a sign go all in on AI. If it doesn't work out we were screwed regardless.
flatline•12h ago
The narrative around AI taking all the jobs, causing layoffs, etc. is certainly about power. The stock prices are about sentiment. When that sentiment evaporates because AI cannot in fact replace the workforce, the stock prices will fall, maybe precipitously. Ironically, if AI fulfills its promise, I suspect the same will happen due to a lack of confidence in the consumer economy from mass unemployment.

This bubble will pop either way, but it could continue like this for years.

findthewords•12h ago
In the 1900s we called "control over technology" something else, I believe it was "seizing the means of production".
nonethewiser•7h ago
There is a big difference between nationalizing industry and regulating it.
a_red_horse•12h ago
How can I exit this society? Preferably without a shotgun, but man the way things are looking…
nonethewiser•12h ago
OK Foucault
bgwalter•12h ago
Would have worked in 2022. Now all oligarchs swore loyalty to Trump, the Ellison family is buying CBS and TikTok, LLMs are audited for compliance. Even here Trump criticism is rare now, because everyone feels being watched.

If the Tesla Optimus will actually work (big if), you will be able to send that to beat down protests in Portland instead of the National Guard.

simianwords•12h ago
this is not a convincing argument. anything that is useful also grants you power. AI is useful primarily (which is why investments are poured into it) and then it grants power thereby.

it is just simpler to claim that AI is useful hence the investment instead of a roundabout explanation with power.

tigerBL00D•12h ago
It's still a bubble if it happens that investors' expectations are unreasonably inflated. Most expect return on their invested capital.
tomrod•12h ago
Then it isn't the economy, since the economy is how people allocate scarce resources -- that is and always will be normalizable by the time a person has in a day. Abstract AI utilization of data centers don't impact my garden directly, so at least in partial equilibria I can ignore what David Brin in Existence calls the Message Flood, or otherwise known as the Fermi-Paradox Arms Race.

In Existence, Brin explores a speculative solution to the Fermi Paradox — the question of why we see no signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. The novel suggests that advanced civilizations create memetic or AI-based “message entities” — self-replicating digital ambassadors designed to spread across the galaxy to preserve their creators’ legacy or recruit new species.

This notion applies to other activities -- but basically, when a society puts all its resources to something other than its preservation then it expires in short order.

lumost•12h ago
At the time of Adam Smith’s wealth of nations, there was a schism between eastern and Western Europe on the role of politics in the economy. Eastern Europe was influenced by much stronger aristocracies that exercised stronger control of the populace and thus lacked the small business competition that inspired smith.

While many “small” businesses offering similar products compete on a marketplace subject to the law of supply and demand, large centralized monopolies compete for money producing “slots” often allocated through a political process. The political figures in control of these systems are often free from material needs and thus less motivated by profit.

At the extreme of political economy, money ceases to matter in the internal sense. A state can simply order workers to work without pay or be punished, burn debt that they don’t want to pay, or lock traders into a room with orders to buy. There is still an economy, but it becomes one of political favor which is earned through multiple mechanisms.

tomrod•12h ago
> A state can simply order workers to work without pay or be punished, burn debt that they don’t want to pay, or lock traders into a room with orders to buy. There is still an economy, but it becomes one of political favor which is earned through multiple mechanisms.

Without irony, this is my observation for how corporations work internally. The currency between teams is backscratching.

The USSR was a big corporation with a license of coercive force.

lumost•11h ago
Exactly right! A corporations internal governance has only a loose correspondence to a market economy. It's quite common for individuals to be promoted who have actually been counter-productive to the stated market goals of the organization.
KoolKat23•12h ago
Someone has to pay interest on that debt still however.
softwaredoug•13h ago
There is other emerging tech we could be investing in that other economies are doubling-down on. But the Administration has made green energy harder for American companies. And a lot of health tech too is tougher under the current administration. Tarrifs, affordability, etc also hit hard on small businesses, making growth there tough.
bgwalter•12h ago
That is the tragic part. This administration ran on a platform of bringing back the real economy and manufacturing. Now they fuel the Bitcoin and "AI" bubbles, which are nonessential and non-tangibles.

The GDP increases are fake. Mining Bitcoin produces nothing, in fact the money supply should not be increased to match the fake GDP increase. The same is true for "AI".

wing-_-nuts•12h ago
>Now they fuel the Bitcoin and "AI" bubbles, which are nonessential and non-tangibles.

The current boom has basically had nothing to do with any government efforts. It is booming in spite of the current administration. This is all private industry.

bgwalter•12h ago
The administration tried to sneak in a ban on "AI" regulation into the "Big Beautiful Bill", but fortunately failed last minute.

The administration facilitates "AI" exports:

https://www.iaps.ai/research/promoting-the-stack-trumps-ai-e...

It removes environmental regulations:

https://apnews.com/article/national-environmental-policy-act...

For the Nvidia bubble, it has recently lifted export regulations to China.

It facilitates meetings of "Open" "AI" with world leaders and almost certainly exerts pressure with tariffs etc. behind the scenes to force these deals.

It keeps talking up "AI", which helps the bubble.

GOD_Over_Djinn•8h ago
> The current boom has basically had nothing to do with any government efforts.

You must have missed the federal governments 500B “stargate” project

wing-_-nuts•5h ago
Give me a source that show's taxpayer funds are being used for that, cause all I see is private investment and vague promises of 'future partnership'
tim333•11h ago
Bit unfair to "AI". It does produce some stuff.
eproxus•11h ago
You’re absolutely correct!
mdhb•10h ago
A hell of a lot of absolute slop as well… it’s really not at all obvious that it’s a net win in any way at this stage.

Actual real life case studies that people can point to where they deployed it and it all went great are actually very hard to come by. It was only the other week that there was that study that said the number was as low as I think they said like 5% or something.

No shortage of excitement though, but a lot of things seem to be riding on some big breakthroughs coming down the pipeline that may never arrive.

missedthecue•9h ago
I feel like I am living in another reality when I hear about all these "studies" confirming LLMs have no value and how no one uses them. I am using LLMs all day. I have more ideas about how to use them than I have time to build out.
GOD_Over_Djinn•8h ago
> I have more ideas about how to use them than I have time to build out.

Can’t you just use your AI-supercharged productivity to build them? What’s the bottleneck here?

missedthecue•7h ago
My day job and then family life consumes a lot of my time, but in 2025 so far I have shipped 8 personal tools and side-projects from zero, which is a record for me.(not to mention a lot of smaller stuff like custom browser extensions). That probably would have been 1 maybe 2 in a world without AI.
nonethewiser•7h ago
Couldn't they be useful but not necessarily so powerful that he could do that?
rchaud•8h ago
The Bitcoin and AI people grease the palms of the super PACs while the manufacturing and real economy people provide the votes. Win-win.
stronglikedan•9h ago
> Tarrifs, affordability, etc also hit hard on small businesses, making growth there tough.

It'll take a while to fix what the last admin broke and correct course, but Rome wasn't built in a day. Imagine what we could have accomplished with 8 uninterrupted years, but that's water under the bridge. American's learned their lesson from that debacle, and here we are. We'll get there, and it will be a much better place for everyone of any class, not just the "elites" that try to divide the lower classes.

NHQ•12h ago
A.I. is a clever way to export electricity.
add-sub-mul-div•12h ago
It's one big bet from the top 0.1% on displacing a vast amount of labor. They don't care what the vehicle is, it just happens to be AI.
shubhamjain•12h ago
> Foreigners poured a record $290bn into US stocks in the second quarter and now own about 30 per cent of the market — the highest share in post-second world war history. Europeans and Canadians have been boycotting American goods but continue buying US stocks in bulk — especially the tech giants.

I fail to find any plausible explanation for this other than the fact that yes, it is a bubble. Tesla, a car company facing declining sales, an executive exodus, and a CEO who’s more of a liability, is almost a $1.5T company now. An absurd P/E of 259. Sure, P/E isn't the most realiable metric. But, for a company with declining sales, and onslaught from Chinese competitors, a P/E of anything above 50 is absolutely ludicrous. Do people actually buy into the absurdity of humanoid robots and robotaxis?

"Be fearful when everyone is greedy." I’ve cashed out of U.S. stocks, and I think it's wise thing to do when craze is at its peak.

reustle•12h ago
> Do people actually buy into the absurdity of humanoid robots and robotaxis?

Have you ever taken a Waymo? You see them on every street in SF now.

dghlsakjg•12h ago
I've never even seen a Waymo and I haven't left North America for half a decade. Popular in SF does not mean inevitable everyhwere.

It remains to be seen whether robotaxis can 1. scale outside of certain cities 2. make a profit given the apparent teams of actual human remote drivers that robotaxi companies employ to get their robots out of trouble. I would love to see it, but the lack of speed and momentum points to it having some serious growing pains.

seanmcdirmid•12h ago
I rode a few in SF and can’t wait for them to come to Seattle. They don’t use actual human remote drivers, and the support person I spoke to when I had an issue had a Filipino accent, so I’m not sure they were even in the usa (although that totally could have been California also). I don’t think they wound need that many people anyways to do live support. Waymo is definitely being cautious, but the cities they move into seem to all be success stories.
dghlsakjg•11h ago
They say they don't have drivers, but they do admit to having actual people that solve live issues that the car cannot understand, which seems like a semantic difference to me. If its one support person per 1k cars, its probably a non issue, if its one per 5 cars then its a totally different problem.

In any case, the "can it make money" question is still unanswered (at least according to Waymo as of March). https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/20/waymo-ceo-tekedra-mawakana-1...

seanmcdirmid•7h ago
If those faults are limited to 1 5 minute session every 20 or so rides, then it isn’t a big deal to cover them.
lm28469•12h ago
> Have you ever taken a Waymo? You see them on every street in SF now

Man I can tell you 99.9999% of people in real life outside of silicon valley tech hubs do not give a single shit about these things. City dwellers are already so disconnected from reality, but silicon valley takes it to a whole other level.

Only terminally online tech solutionists get a hard on for these things

tim333•11h ago
I live a long way from silicon valley and think robotaxis are kind of interesting.
baal80spam•12h ago
Why don't you short everything, if you are so sure the bubble is about to burst?
piva00•12h ago
Because of another adage: "markets can stay irrational for longer than you can remain solvent".
andxor•12h ago
Bears always sound smarter, but making money in the markets is a whole different game.
rhetocj23•12h ago
Im a bear of LLMs, doesnt mean I havent made money off it.

I have. Intrinsic valuation and pricing are not the same thing.

findthewords•12h ago
Musk's greatest achievements are in the field of financial engineering. I wish he could write a book about it, because it's the only part about his life that's remained invisible.
dghlsakjg•12h ago
> "Be fearful when everyone is greedy." I’ve cashed out of U.S. stocks, and I think it's wise thing to do when craze is at its peak.

The man who said the thing you are quoting also repeatedly advised never to bet against America, and to never try to time the market...

tim333•11h ago
Although Buffett's company is currently holding about $348bn in cash and equivalents. He also has ~$300bn in stocks so a little over 50% cashed out.

I think he'd say he's more into pricing things than timing - he probably thinks the market is expensive.

lifestyleguru•12h ago
I'm afraid the only potential brain in vicinity of your computer is yours. I'm also salty I didn't buy nvidia.
cs702•12h ago
Key quote:

> The hundreds of billions of dollars companies are investing in AI now account for an astonishing 40 per cent share of US GDP growth this year.

In other words, investment in AI is a massive private-sector stimulus program, powering economic growth.

Questions for which no one knows the answer include:

* Will these AI investments earn a positive rate of return in the aggregate?

* Without these investments on AI and their second-order economic effects, would the US economy be growing?

* Are the higher-order effects of AI investments temporary, or can they become self-sustaining (for example, via creation of new jobs and industries)?

rtkwe•12h ago
> Without these investments on AI and their second-order economic effects, would the US economy be growing?

It's only 40% of the growth so.. yes.

trenchpilgrim•12h ago
That 40% is only the investment in companies making AI products. It does not include "second order" effects.
cs702•12h ago
Not necessarily. It depends on the second-order economic effects of these investments in AI.

For example, companies that build new giant data centers for AI pay salaries to thousands of temporary construction workers who then spend some of it on retail goods and services. That additional spending by the workers is a second-order effect, and it shows up on GDP growth. There are higher-order effects too, but they are more diffuse.

rtkwe•12h ago
Given how much of the investment goes into the stuff inside of the data center and then the power to run it both of which don't really go out to the US economy so much as the builders' wages I feel pretty safe in saying it's not the remaining 60% of GDP growth.
cs702•11h ago
The incremental revenues to software and hardware vendors and energy providers is also used to hire new people, build new infrastructure (manufacturing plants, energy production systems, etc.), with second-order economic effects too. There are higher-order effects too, also more diffuse.
rtkwe•11h ago
Again I'm not denying second order effects exist. Just saying it's not 150% of the direct effects.
cs702•9h ago
Ah, got it. I'd say it's possible but no one knows for sure. There's too much related spending that's hard to measure, including, for example, organizations spending to try out newfangled AI services. I don't think that kind of spending is counted in the investment figure, because it's not capex.
overfeed•11h ago
You're right, but I find your take too clinical and ignoring the human factors, such as overall market confidence.

Another way to look at this is asking if AI investments get wiped out, would they take down GDP growth with them? I think there would be a pull back across the board. I will speculate that without AI investment juicing growth, we would have seen broad investment pullbacks in the 2nd quarter, and a shrinking GDP.

orwin•12h ago
I wouldn't be so sure, especially since we know a lot of it is actually vendor financing/circular financing (Nvidia give money to OpenAI who buy dedicated datacenter from oracle who buy GPUs from Nvidia), so a part of the growth might have to be counted twice, or more.
rtkwe•12h ago
Wouldn't that just mean it's less of the actual GDP growth? Either way if it's only 40% of the calculated figure double counted or not I have a hard time seeing how the secondary effects would account for the remaining 60% too, which would be 150% of the original first order effects.
overfeed•11h ago
Market confidence in growth is a second-order effect. Non-AI investments would decrease markedly if growth is stalling.
goalieca•12h ago
The 40% investment could presumably go into jobs and infrastructure that might be more durable.
wing-_-nuts•12h ago
That 40% investment used to be sitting in giant cash slushfunds on company balance sheets. This isn't government investment. It would have never been spent on 'infrastructure'.

On the upside, even if AI is a bubble and implodes spectacularly we're going to have metric tons of compute available for climate models, drug discovery and anything else that requires a super computer to model.

diffeomorphism•11h ago
Will we? The hardware you want for AI and the hardware you want for super computing seem to have different priorities, e.g. concerning floating point precision.
wing-_-nuts•5h ago
compute is compute, yes. Maybe some older models might have to be rewritten to take advantage of a gpu farm's parallel processing capabilities, but humanity will ultimately benefit if the current AI boom fizzles
Spivak•12h ago
I think you would find a large political block that would be more than supportive of economic stimulus taking the form of a public jobs and training program to improve infrastructure, landscaping, and other public works.

I personally would implement it as a "civilian military" to make it a cool high-status line of work that people might choose for a few years out of civic duty. Uniforms, ranks, bases, parades, you get your food/housing provided, you get 'deployed' on projects. Get your college paid for if you stay on long enough.

thmsths•12h ago
And there is a precedent for that the Civilian Service Corp, which was created as part of the new deal. If you go to a national/state park there is a good chance they built some of that infrastructure.
stocksinsmocks•7h ago
LLMs are infrastructure.
throwaway290•12h ago
is this real? by first look USA only spent like 4% of GDP on space stuff at the peak of space race. 40% is insane.
hvb2•12h ago
40% of growth, not 40% total
cloverich•12h ago
I think its 40% of growth, not gdp?
throwaway290•12h ago
Whoops, my bad.
runamok•11h ago
40% of *growth*, not 40% of total GDP.
kibwen•12h ago
"The Depression was preceded by a period of industrial growth and social development known as the "Roaring Twenties". Much of the profit generated by the boom was invested in speculation, such as on the stock market, contributing to growing wealth inequality. Banks were subject to minimal regulation, resulting in loose lending and widespread debt. By 1929, declining spending had led to reductions in manufacturing output and rising unemployment. Share values continued to rise until the October 1929 crash, after which the slide continued until July 1932, accompanied by a loss of confidence in the financial system. By 1933, the U.S. unemployment rate had risen to 25%, about one-third of farmers had lost their land, and 9,000 of its 25,000 banks had gone out of business. President Herbert Hoover was unwilling to intervene heavily in the economy, and in 1930 he signed the Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act, which worsened the Depression. In the 1932 presidential election, Hoover was defeated by Franklin D. Roosevelt, who from 1933 pursued a set of expansive New Deal programs in order to provide relief and create jobs. In Germany, which depended heavily on U.S. loans, the crisis caused unemployment to rise to nearly 30% and fueled political extremism, paving the way for Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party to rise to power in 1933. Between 1929 and 1932, worldwide gross domestic product (GDP) fell by an estimated 15%; in the U.S., the Depression resulted in a 30% contraction in GDP."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression

noosphr•12h ago
I read these articles about how much of a suckers bet AI is and start feeling existential dread about the coming market crash.

Then I remember I just did a weeks worth of work in a few hours and feel a lot better about my prospects at least.

AI won't replace people, but it will make people who know how to use it vastly more efficient. In the same way that a tractor made a farmer more efficient.

lm28469•12h ago
The fact that LLMs are somewhat useful isn't really the subject here. The problem is that to be worth what they're evaluated at they'd need to be thousands of times more useful than they are. They can be useful, and extremely overvaluated at the same time, which still ends up in a crash. All the actors are bleeding money right now, would you spend $500 a month on an llm ? $1000 ? how many people would ?

You also don't account for the infinite flow of slop being generated 100x faster than any productive work: "Deloitte to pay money back to Albanese government after using AI in $440,000 report", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45500485

How much money, resource and time is spent on generating/hosting/discussing/cleaning up this slop ? How much of social distrust is created by LLM generated sociopolitcal discussions online ? &c.

ses1984•12h ago
Did you pay for that AI to work for you? How much would you be willing to pay for it?

Tractors undoubtedly increase farmer efficiency, the evidence is clear to see, even when accounting for all costs necessary to design and produce tractors. There’s even room for farmers and tractor manufacturers to generate economic profit.

That remains to be seen of AI.

tombert•12h ago
Sample size of one, but I pay $20 a month for ChatGPT and I feel I get much more than that of value from it.

I would honestly probably be willing to pay $75-100 for ChatGPT if it came down to it. I feel it makes some tedious jobs a lot less horrible and in turn pays for itself.

a_red_horse•12h ago
> Tractors undoubtedly increase farmer efficiency, the evidence is clear to see, even when accounting for all costs necessary to design and produce tractors. There’s even room for farmers and tractor manufacturers to generate economic profit.

Aren’t small independent farms struggling because of debt loads are really small returns?

Is this what AI will do as well? Enable large players consolidate while anything bigger than hobby work becomes very difficult and expensive for individuals.

tombert•12h ago
I am still a bit so-so on stuff like Codex and Cursor, but ChatGPT has undeniably helped me get more work done, if for no other reason than unblocking me with stuff.

I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s relevant. Most of my adult life has followed a pattern: I work on a personal project until I get blocked on some bullshit detail (e.g. some arcane Linux server error), get annoyed because I am not making money and the project is no longer fun, and give up on the project about halfway through.

Being able to paste server logs and weird error messages and having ChatGPT generate recovery scripts has been extremely valuable to me. I am not even sure it’s necessarily reducing my workload, but it has absolutely allowed me to focus much more interesting and fun parts, and I finish a much larger percentage of my projects.

I am probably not learning as much as I would if I had powered through the issue, but I am definitely learning more than if I had abandoned it.

fnordpiglet•12h ago
I agree until the end - won’t replace people - it will replace people. There are tons of people who a) can’t or won’t learn how to maximize their value with the fools, b) some jobs will outright be automated and they’re jobs that require little executive intelligence and judgement. Not everyone is smart - the median IQ is 100. I expect a hollowing out of non manual labor work under 115 IQ. Further, world models and robotics will start hollowing all but the most poorly paid manual labor or the highest skill, which most people are incapable of. There will be a large hollowing out of labor across the low end.

The fact we haven’t fully automated everything in ~3 years seems to be the proof this isn’t really happening. It takes at least a decade to iron out how a new technology fits into things how to exploit it efficiently, and this specific technology requires a lot of subtle research and building tooling and infrastructural code, processes, and techniques we’ve never built before. It also has a large physical infrastructure requirement.

However for those manual tasks above (effectively any sort of coding, classification, labeling, task oriented data work) my experience is LLMs have much higher precision and recall at any scale of work without labor issues around hiring and ramp up/idle time, let alone cost. I’m not saying this is good - but it is absolutely true and in my last two jobs we’ve eliminated massive numbers of roles for people and we are just beginning in the cycle and not very mature. By the end I expect as many as 20k+ reduced, maybe much much more, from my current company in these sorts of roles.

DebtDeflation•12h ago
We're in this weird situation where:

1) the average American is heavily dependent on equities in their 401k for retirement,

2) so the stock market has to go up,

3) but the stock market is already at record valuations and it's difficult to see how forecasted growth levels justify the current valuation let alone an increased valuation,

4) without revenue growth, the only way for companies to sustain EPS growth is massive reduction in costs,

5) labor is the primary cost for most companies,

6) in come the AI folks telling CEOs that "AI can replace most of their workforce",

7) and so as the article states, everyone goes all in and "America is one big bet on AI"

That leaves us with only 2 possibilities - AI either replaces a significant part of the workforce or it does not. If it does not, the bubble bursts and the economy crashes. If it does, the economy still crashes because consumer spending is 70% of GDP and if the majority of the population becomes unemployed then spending collapses.

I don't think people have realized the latter (or at least they're deliberately choosing to ignore it). That said, I believe the former is more likely (AI not replacing the majority of the workforce in the near future). Either way, buckle up.

realusername•12h ago
I have the exact same opinion. And I should add that all these companies "firing people to replace them by AI" are in reality just firing people because the economy isn't great, of course that sounds way worse for investors if they told the truth.
danans•11h ago
> firing people to replace them by AI" are in reality just firing people because the economy isn't great

More concretely, they can use this situation to squeeze more productivity out of those who remain employed. With the consumer tapped out of discretionary time, attention and spending power, the remaining way to grow profits is to lower overhead.

sdenton4•12h ago
Option 3, nothing changes: people (and institutions) still have income they need to put /somewhere/, and continue putting it in 401ks and index funds because that's the system. Stonks continue to go up, completely unmoored from any behavior in the actual world.
surgical_fire•12h ago
"I know the game is rigged, but it's the only game in town"
DebtDeflation•11h ago
That sounds a lot like the "everyone has to live somewhere and historically house prices never decrease" argument circa 2006-2007.

Equities are not the only asset class in existence and in any market people can sell just as easily as they can buy.

Not to mention, in addition to the GFC, it took the stock market until 1954 to recover the 1929 highs and in Japan it took until 2024 to recover from the 1989 crash, so there are clear examples where the stock market doesn't always go up for very long periods of time.

pas•11h ago
... and let me recommend this blog post about how the housing bubble was exaggerated, and it the bubble is real, the money manifesting as demand for housing is really there (of course coming from the economic growth and brutal amounts of wealth transfer from will-be-owners to was-owners)

https://www.fullstackeconomics.com/p/the-2000s-housing-bubbl...

housing related supply-side problems are simply very hard to address whereas everybody and their dog is pumping money into the market (cheap loans to help families, singles, poor people, cheap loans to developers, and anyone who wants, because it's low risk anyway, and companies are doing CoL adjustments, and then there are spillover effects from big metro areas, and foreign investors ...)

and US population was growing, and construction starts were and are still low (historically but compared to the "pent up" demand)

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST

of course the problem is that simply pouring money into housing without transportation infrastructure just leads to even more problems, so it's really a problems bubble! (always has been.)

zzzeek•12h ago
> That leaves us with only 2 possibilities - AI either replaces a significant part of the workforce or it does not. If it does not, the bubble bursts and the economy crashes. If it does, the economy still crashes because consumer spending is 70% of GDP and if the majority of the population becomes unemployed

close, but you see, part of the plan is also that immigration is basically shut off. so the majority of the population laid off from their office jobs will have plenty of work to do in the fields and food processing plants if they want to eat.

peteyPete•10h ago
Couldn't agree more. I've been voicing this for the past decade. Its crazy how the system is setup for eventual failure. Its a race to the top, or bottom, depending on who's looking, but for most, the bottom. Companies have to either consolidate by buying all their competitors, and customers, or find a way to deliver the same goods/services for less. Its always less. At some point, not everything can be made with love and good intentions... You can't cut all corners without destroying the integrity of the original product. You can't outsource all the manufacturing without affecting job markets. Manufacturing is already mostly outsourced, now they're going to outsource a lot of the cognitive labor to AI. The never ending chase for consistent quarterly growth numbers has really messed us up and they're not really planning for whats to come. Not that they could plan for AI progressing as quick as it is and replacing jobs as quick as they are, but they're not ready.

We're already seeing governments shaming and gaslighting their citizens as they try to find ways to pay for programs to support as many as possible, saying they don't want to work anymore, they're lazy and have to be given everything, pre-chewed.... When you make it nearly impossible for humans to find worth and purpose by exchanging labor for pay, you devalue any contributions they could have and are racing to a future where most of what humans have to give, outside of original creative thought, and art, which AI can do too so it depend on others willing to find value in it, then you're not left with a whole lot. Most of the population aren't self starting entrepreneurs with an infinite drive for wealth and who want to sacrifice everything for a job. Many just seek stability and want to find something they can be at least ok at and can repeat and provide for themselves and their family. By making jobs that much harder to get, you're adding barriers for most to find work. Many countries have been spoiled by stability for so long, their populations don't view survival as a "fight", maybe a struggle, but not a fight for life. Soon it'll be a fight, if not all out war, and almost no one will be ready for that. IF the economy and government (under whatever system and name you want to call it) was setup to provide for all, knowing all the wealth was centralized and they had a mandate to redistribute resources so all could be comfortable, it would be a different story, and even then, but its not the case. A time is coming soon where companies will start losing customers because customer's spending power will disappear. Companies will have optimized themselves out of a path for future growth by destroying their customer base.

Younger generations are already looking at a future vastly different from the one we saw or thought we'd see. Most things older generations took for granted are literally out of reach. Some older people literally expect younger people to just toughen up and just work hard and make it happen, since they did. Easy to say when their education cost them a couple summers worth of income + maybe a side job. The next generation paid their student loans over years, then decades, some pretty much for life. Now its not just education, owning a home is now out of reach of a lot of people. So now if you have the guts to take on an education, you're dealing with potentially decades of student loans, average homes in the US have gone from around $140,000 to $500,000 over the past 20 years, while incomes adjusted for inflation has grown roughly 12.7% between 2003 and 2023, or roughly 0.6% a year. Add on to that the extra cost of other new necessities the picture is looking very different. Life is more and more equating to financial slavery. Used to be any job enabled you to provide necessities for a family, now unless you live in the middle of nowhere, its harder and harder to even get started. AI is already causing cuts to entry level lobs, thinning out the pipeline for future senior employees..

Its going to be fun they said... Its going to be glorious they said...

One thing for sure, its the people who will pay the price during the adjustment period.

McAlpine5892•10h ago
> 1) the average American is heavily dependent on equities in their 401k for retirement,

> 2) so the stock market has to go up

This is why I've come to despise 401k's replacing old-school pensions. Yes, pensions had their problems but with 401k's workers must fleece themselves to have any sort of retirement opportunity.

Want a shot at retirement? Now we all have to run ourselves into the ground to make number go up. It's insane.

camel_Snake•8h ago
Where do you think pensions were storing the money?

These are two sides of the same coin.

tombert•12h ago
It is a little frustrating how we as a society have just decided that corporations don’t need to make money, and indeed can just ponzi their way indefinitely as long as they use some vague “tech” branding.

I think this “rapid growth at all costs” is going to bite us, and I think it is possible that it’s going to bite us even more than the .Com bubble or the 2008 crash.

I really hope I am wrong, but I don’t see we can expect companies to keep growing if we don’t require them to be profitable.

lm28469•12h ago
> It is a little frustrating how we as a society have just decided that corporations don’t need to make money

Making money was already a problem, what we should strive for is creating value. You can make big bucks selling cigarettes, leaded gas or PFAS riddled products... the money is made but you're still a net negative for society

rkomorn•12h ago
It's too bad we also can't really agree on what value is.

A decade or two ago, I'd have told you the companies that are building new technologies (smartphones, streaming services, etc) were creating value.

I don't think that at all anymore, even retroactively.

logicchains•12h ago
>It's too bad we also can't really agree on what value is.

This is fortunately a problem that economics has already solved: value is what people are willing to pay for. Any other definition involves imposing someone's own subjective judgement on what's valuable.

rkomorn•12h ago
I think that totally discards the comment I was responding to.

Needless to say, I don't agree with your definition or your idea that it's solved.

cloverich•11h ago
It partially addresses it, specifically addresses one part but not the other.

"Value" to the individual is subjective, and defined by the price people are willing and able to pay. Its "solved" in the sense that modern economics universally accepts it.

The harder part are the second order effects / negative externalities (e.g. cancer from cigarettes). But it’s a constant balancing act between over- and under-regulation. On a more general level this was represented all the way back in Adam Smith's work. i.e. I don't think it unfair to say value and regulation is a conceptually solved problem, irrespective of the constant attempts to undermine it.

rkomorn•11h ago
Personally, I don't really see the point of coming into a thread while completely disregarding the context.

The OP I was replying to brings the notion that money and value aren't the same thing. If someone disagrees with that premise, then maybe they should reply to OP.

lm28469•12h ago
Maybe, maybe not, it mostly wasn't a problem for the first 300 000 years of modern human history, now it's our main issue... I think it's worth questioning your "objective" definition
oceanplexian•11h ago
> A decade or two ago, I'd have told you the companies that are building new technologies (smartphones, streaming services, etc) were creating value.

I feel like I’m getting old saying this, but no, I was there and the entire tech community went hard against smartphones, claiming they would never be better than a Pocket PC or a Palm Pilot and were simply another marketing ploy by Apple.

They claimed that they were inferior to purpose built MP3 players, no one would ever pay hundreds of dollars for a phone, real software developers didn’t write apps, wireless data would never scale, etc. As far as I know all those comments are still preserved for posterity in places like Slashdot.

rkomorn•11h ago
Yeah, I... don't think we're on the same page at all. Not only is "smartphones" just an example of things I no longer see as "creating value", but the value vs MP3 players and other devices at the time is also not what I'm talking about.

Whatever axe you have to grind against the smartphone naysayers of the time... I have no horse in that race.

tombert•12h ago
I don’t disagree with anything you said but it’s kind of a whataboutism.

Cigarettes and leaded gas are bad and a net negative on the world, but they aren’t Ponzi schemes in the same way that so many tech companies are.

rhetocj23•11h ago
Yes. Revenue is a proxy for value created in the economy. Profit is a proxy for value created for the owners (equity shareholders).

Thats it.

KoolKat23•11h ago
Profit at the purest level is a reflection of value created.

Yes there's a whole bunch of financial engeering to create "losses" for tax reasons etc. but ultimately value added is profit.

tombert•11h ago
I don’t think it’s all artificial. I think a lot of startups operate at huge losses of VC money because they have an interesting enough idea and they hope to find a way of making profits eventually, and they never do.

I think this can be said about nearly every Blockchain startup, for example.

simonsarris•12h ago
If we build out a bunch of data center infrastructure or (better yet) energy/power plant related infrastructure, and AI doesn't pan out, is it really so bad?

I think its a bit like trains in the 1800s. Plenty of overspending, plenty of speculation that went bust, but in a lot of ways the country was better for all the madness.

maxglute•10h ago
Borderline all or nothing bet. The distribution of AI capex investment and burnt/stranded assets is not like past bubbles.

Railroad boom. Most of spending moving heart to build out rail network that increase CONUS rail by +400%. US freight backbone. 50+ year infra. Upgrade signal etc and improve network capacity.

Dotcom Boom. Most of spending in moving earth to build out ~150m of fiber. Agnostic pipes for backbone of internet. Also 50+ year infra. Upgrade switches at nodes to increase network capacity.

AI boom. Most of investment going into chips with <5 year deprecation cycle. Datacenters <10 years, heavily specialized for AI use, i.e. power/cooling makes it inefficient/not economic for general compute.

Looking like ~20% goes to eletricfication capex (if it gets built at all). That's the stranded asset i.e. consolation prize, ~10% (generous) increase in US electrification, which isn't nothing, but also not substantial.

Also consider Tulip mania. Tulips die in a few weeks. All value gone.

TLDR potentially bulk of AI investment is closer to tulips in terms of deprecated / stranded assets past medium term i.e. <10 years, than rail or fiber.

ffsm8•9h ago
The most insidious thing about this bet isn't that it fails...

It's that it could succeed.

Loosing the bet will only mean lots of ultra rich people have wasted tons of money - winning it means the average person, wherever they're American, Chinese, Russian or European (or wherever else you wanna list) will be fucked... And the ultra rich will be the only beneficiaries.

But nothing makes me think AGI is achievable through LLMs alone, so I guess I don't mind that bet too much. It's just a question of time when it fails - and the failure will likely not be completely catastrophic, as there is actual value in LLMs, albeit much less then the market is valuing it.

Jackson__•9h ago
A big bet, with none of the mandatory electricity infrastructure figured out. Maybe better to call it a pipedream.

Building a Fiber Optic ISP in My Homelab [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKBoO0eRAJY
1•nodesocket•2m ago•0 comments

Securities Fraud Investigation into Palantir Technologies Inc. (PLTR) Announced

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/investing/markets/stocks/PLTR/pressreleases/35293964/securities-f...
2•mgh2•10m ago•0 comments

Publishing an E-Zine on the Net (1995)

http://web.textfiles.com/ezines/publish.txt
1•kmstout•12m ago•0 comments

JPMorgan's Dimon Says AI Cost Savings Now Matching Money Spent

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-07/jpmorgan-s-dimon-says-ai-cost-savings-now-matc...
1•theonionspeaks•14m ago•0 comments

We didn't rewrite our feed handler in Rust

https://databento.com/blog/why-we-didnt-rewrite-our-feed-handler-in-rust
1•deepriverfish•15m ago•0 comments

LOPSA board votes to unanimously dissolve

https://www.lopsa.org/blog/13550085
1•ecliptik•26m ago•1 comments

Quiet, but Discoverable

https://jch.github.io/posts/2025-10-07-notifications-quiet-default.html
1•jollyjerry•29m ago•0 comments

Birth of Prettier

https://blog.vjeux.com/2025/javascript/birth-of-prettier.html
2•thunderbong•30m ago•0 comments

ChatGPT loses half of paid subscribers since April

https://techafricanews.com/2025/10/07/chatgpt-surges-past-800-million-weekly-users-eyes-one-billi...
1•mgh2•42m ago•2 comments

'Circular' mega-deals by Bay Area tech giants are raising eyebrows

https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/circular-deals-bay-area-tech-21089538.php
6•turtlegrids•48m ago•1 comments

North Korea Missile Test Visualization

https://nagix.github.io/nk-missile-tests/
1•latchkey•49m ago•0 comments

AI Friend necklace; like wearing your senile, anxious grandmother around neck

https://fortune.com/2025/10/03/friend-ai-necklace-review-avi-schiffmann/
1•fcpguru•50m ago•1 comments

Leading CA Gov Candidate Katie Porter had a full-blown meltdown at a journalist

https://twitter.com/Rightanglenews/status/1975693521018626340
4•donsupreme•52m ago•0 comments

The Paradoxical Efficient Market Hypothesis (2024)

https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2024/09/the-paradoxical-efficient-market-hypothesis.html
12•tkhattra•55m ago•3 comments

State of the software engineering jobs market, 2025: what hiring managers see

https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/state-of-the-tech-market-in-2025-hiring-managers
4•neilv•57m ago•0 comments

Universities should reject the administration's proposed 'compact'

https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/trump-compact-universities-colleges-free-speech-rcna2...
1•anigbrowl•57m ago•0 comments

Bob Ross paintings to be auctioned to fund US public broadcasting

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly10275v5zo
7•breve•1h ago•0 comments

Farewell letter after 15 years at Meta

https://overturned.substack.com/p/making-the-cracks-visible
5•kellystonelake•1h ago•0 comments

The War over Defense Tech

https://www.nybooks.com/online/2025/10/04/the-war-over-defense-tech/
1•whoisstan•1h ago•0 comments

Qt 6.10 Released

https://www.qt.io/blog/qt-6.10-released
3•jcelerier•1h ago•0 comments

How to Build a Better Suburb: Lessons from Disney, Houten, Japan, and Carmel

https://www.governance.fyi/p/main-street-usa-suburban-yimbyism
2•guardianbob•1h ago•0 comments

You Can't Write Your Own Founder Story (and Why That's Good News)

https://www.startastory.app/blog/why-you-cant-write-your-own-founders-story/
1•blakey_vibes•1h ago•0 comments

Europe's new biometric border checks: what do non-EU travellers need to know?

https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2025/oct/07/europe-new-biometric-border-checks-what-do-non-eu-...
3•bookofjoe•1h ago•0 comments

You can't libel the dead. But that doesn't mean you should deepfake them

https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/07/you-cant-libel-the-dead-but-that-doesnt-mean-you-should-deepfak...
1•pseudolus•1h ago•0 comments

Over 30 Bob Ross paintings to be auctioned off due to PBS federal funding cut

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/bob-ross-paintings-auctioned-raise-money-public-television-s...
8•donsupreme•1h ago•0 comments

Show HN: I made a better Java/Kotlin build tool

https://www.jpmhub.org
4•sunnykentz•1h ago•0 comments

Linux 6.18 UDP receive performance improved by 47%, under DDoS

https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=ce463e435757
5•limoce•1h ago•0 comments

At 200, the Erie Canal Delivers Change to Upstate New York

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-10-07/at-200-the-erie-canal-delivers-change-to-upsta...
2•simonpure•1h ago•0 comments

Show HN: I made ShipAhead so devs can stop wasting weeks setting up SaaS apps

https://shipahe.ad/
1•tomhan245•1h ago•0 comments

Thames Water removes 100-tonne fatberg from west London sewer

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/oct/06/thames-water-removes-100-tonne-fatberg-from-f...
4•pseudolus•1h ago•5 comments