I'm sure other corpos would snatch up all their properties like Threads and IG but still it would be a net positive.
Fiber dailed because the telcos overbuilt and demand lagged. When Amazon introduced AWS it succeeded right away because there was lots of demand.
Jeff Bezos Ted Talk 2003 - https://youtu.be/vMKNUylmanQ
If Meta hadn’t invested in AI recommendations a while back they would have lost against TikTok big time.
I don’t doubt they may destroy their own product (like google search) but I do think it’s going to take a long long time
Why is Oracle going into debt for AI? What are they doing
> Total Cloud Revenue (SaaS + IaaS): $6.7 billion, up 27%. CapEx (Full Year): $21.2 billion. The company is facing supply constraints, unable to meet the high demand for its cloud services, leading to scheduling customers into the future.
Much lower name recognition for smaller customers. But there are some big big name "AI" & B2C companies who have _huge_ spend with OCI. This isnt "rent a couple of instances" its much more like "provide a couple GW of compute for X years."
I don't think ASML was "funded" by American technology, it's actually ASML who has to pay for licencing...
It’s not like the US rose in a vacuum. It sees impressive on its face and to some extent I believe it is, but it has more to do with being a resource rich nation (lots of plentiful raw material within our borders) and the fact the last time we had a foreign invasion was during the war of 1812.
We aren’t some near unbelievable anomaly of history, we built on our British roots
US businesses have had a much larger market to sell to, and that attracts investment and talent.
Charitable donations follow a similar pattern, the USA is a different system so not really comparable to some other developed countries which have public systems in place to cover these cases.
There are no clean hands here. Any attempt to claim the moral high ground by dictating how other people should spend their money (or their machine cycles) will meet with the usual degree of success.
In the United States, starvation doesn't exist so we've expanded the definition to include more people because we really care to feed people. If you've been to countries where actual starvation is a possibility, you'd understand. So tired of this self hating unaware self flagellation.
The “solution” to countries with starvation today is likely massive full-scale invasion and domination; something the modern world doesn’t have an appetite for.
Like right now there is starvation in Nigeria because Islamofascists from the north are hunting Christians in the south. Exactly how will any amount of American money convince religious zealots to stop being zealots? If anything, a large influx of money from infidels will just make the clerics claim that their victims are foreign operatives. There is nothing we can do other than pray or stage a full scale military invasion. At that point we can either choose to fully administer the place (unsustainable) or we would have to destroy the apparatus that made the situation possible, which is going to look a helluva lot like a genocide. An impossible situation and only one of many across the globe.
Can you provide some evidence that that's a cause of hunger problems in Nigeria? It's such a politicized claim onw, it's
> There is nothing we can do other than pray or stage a full scale military invasion.
Warfare doesn't solve any problems, as anyone who knows its history or experiences it will express. It's the worst problem for humanity.
Are you really claiming that problems aren't otherwise solved? It's absurd. Your plan is almost never done and the correlation, between peace (and the outlawing of war) the growth of freedom and prosperity - including in West Africa - is the opposite.
It boggles the mind how anybody over the age of 20 can think this way.
If the government had sold “we are making this place the 51st state and it will take 100 years to make that happen” there would be an entirely different outcome.
I’m not saying that’s what should have happened. I actually feel nothing should have happened. But if you are going to take extensive lethal action like that, at least man up and be honest over what it will take to be successful.
The US populace is bizarrely afraid of admitting they live the amazing lives they do due to empire. It’s politically untenable to actually state the reality of what it takes to subjugate a population, no matter if the death numbers are similar for abject pointless failure versus eventual success.
What we did in Iraq and Afghanistan is an embarrassment and black stain; had we been openly evil and empirical (?) we'd have killed less with a better result.
The colonial Brits weren't trying to feed the world, but aggregate power and wealth. Their former colonies didn't do too well, except wealthy ones like the US, Canada, etc.
After the colonial period ended, many of those countries have utterly transformed economically. Look at Brazil, China, India, South Korea, Taiwan, .... all prospered after embracing democracy (or at least moving in that direction, in China's case).
Such hubris - nobody would have signed up for that
Also, when ideas like yours are tried, it turns out that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, and powers - including the US - serve their own interests. How could you imagine otherwise at this point?
And without democracy, they can't help it - self-determination provides better outcomes because the people who are subject to the 'help' have a seat at the table and they have power. The issues that others dismiss or make secondary (or tertiary) are the ones the self-determined people can insist on in a democracy.
> modern world doesn’t have an appetite for
It's not a lack of appetite, it's counter to our goals of freedom and self-determination, and all experience of prosperity.
https://launiusr.wordpress.com/2012/02/08/why-explore-space-...
Higher food production through survey and assessment from orbit, and better food distribution through improved international relations, are only two examples of how profoundly the space program will impact life on Earth.
As good counters go, this underperforms.
Extreme poverty from 45% to less than 10% https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty-in-brief
Famine deaths about 1/3 https://ourworldindata.org/famines
Do you argue that money should all go to feeding the hungry?
Nowadays even the poorest countries are not starving, unless there is a war going on.
Also, there are multiple wars going on across the world that are making the problem even worse.
It’s difficult to reconcile the desires of 8bn people. Some don’t care about climate change, some would like to see their granddaughter, some will live through flooding or an earthquake, some would like better health. Most of misery in the world does not come from the lack of money. If anything, disagreements between people are the cause of the lack of money, not the result.
But, yeah. Keep comparing the egregious billionaires looking to lock out competition and hold on to their billions with all their might! Clearly it has to be the bike or board games the normies own, though. FFS.
Think of Afghanistan as an example, where the US really did create a modern tolerant state ... for a while. Locals didn't want to keep it going, or at least, not enough. Because the idea that there aren't very wealthy Afghans is just wrong. There's entire neighborhoods in Kabul full of luxury villas with people going into fancy restaurants constantly. That's effectively what the Taliban are fighting for.
Afghanistan might have worked out if the US took a king like role sitting in a fort somewhere and saying ok, you're prime minister to some Afgan after each election. The king role may seem like nothing but if a UK prime minister says sod this I'm ruler for life then the king doesn't endorse them and the king is the head of the armed forces which makes it difficult to do such stuff.
How did that work out for Russia, France or Germany ?
But the details of the story expose a great many painpoints for many ideologies and parties so people don't like to talk about it. First it exposes that the US (and Europe, and many others, but of course not the UN or Russia) supported the Taliban ... because they were better than communists. My favorite stats is that the Taliban, as bad as they are, in 2.5 wars and ... still haven't killed as many people as the communists massacres killed in Afghanistan.
So "capitalist" or more accurately US and UK support for the Taliban did indeed exist (was a lot less than reported though), but yes, that included supporting and training a certain Osama Bin Laden ... Of course what's never mentioned when this is brought up is why people supported the Taliban. It wasn't to destroy socialism ... or at least that wasn't the only reason.
On the other side of the aisle it exposes that there was a time that socialism tried to eradicate religions ... using genocide (not just in Afghanistan). WITH the support of socialists in the west, the same socialist parties that still exist, were violently against immigration and protested against western states saving even one of those muslim men, women and children.
Both ideologies, left, center and right, want to believe they're constant, rational, and right. So an extremely large change in policy ... especially leftist parties who supported Soviet/communist genocides against a decent chunk of their current electorate.
Including famous current politicians like Antonio Guterrez, secretary general of the United Nations, who organised and personally physically attacked and hurt people for trying to give muslims sanctuary 40 years ago (he probably didn't even hate muslims, he just supported communism, including Soviet and Chinese genocides)
So everybody denies it but that's how Afghanistan got where it is.
If you squint a bit there's a suspicious cadence in the Taliban taking over and eradicating most of the heroin production and the US invading soon after and restarting it.
The Taliban also did messaging along the lines that it's not a good idea to use foreign investment for mining infrastructure and the like when kids are starving to death.
A country that has been destabilized by foreign invasions again and again. The last one from the USA.
It is not about culture, it is about been ruled by outside powers that do not allow for internal development. Except for a few tax havens, former colonized countries struggle with violence, inequality, and corruption. That was the system that was setup for them and it will take decades to fix if they are left alone, it will never be fixed if other countries intervene to keep the status quo to profit from it.
There have always been and always will be outside powers. Hell, the very first stories we have, from the Epic of Gilgamesj, the oldest stories in the Bible and Greek Legends are all about outside powers intervening, and here we are, over 4000 years later, and there's (checks wikipedia) 32 current wars (and none are "the west" doing that at the moment, China is currently the worst offender, there's of course Russia and Ukraine/Europe) where outside powers are trying to dominate someone else. At some point you have to accept outside powers trying to fuck things up as a basic part of life. So other countries will keep intervening, probably for another 4000+ years.
Citation needed.
$940 million to the Congo.
People starve and (almost) no one cares.
Even just to save face, I would have expected one of the billionaires to have started a foundation tackling the problem in some way.
Basically your assertion that "reasonable guarantees that fewer babies will be more likely to survive" is completely and utterly wrong. Desperate family planning is needed, but religion stands in the way. No amount of international aid will fix this fundamental problem.
That being said, the most common reason is simply war. If you look at the famine in Sudan right now, it is a direct consequence of the civil war (which also happens to be the biggest and bloodiest war by far in the world right now). Lost crops from weather or diseases can also restrict local food production, but it only ever really turns into a problem when armed groups prevent outside food supplies from moving to affected areas like the military in Sudan does right now.
More often than people like you realise apparently. But it's not really your fault. If you only consume western news, you might believe that Ukraine or Israel are the worst wars of our time. But that's only because western news doesn't really report on the current situation in Sudan at all, despite it being much, much worse than anything else that's been going on in the world recently.
I totally understand what OpenAI and Google are trying to do with AI but I never understood Meta's angle.
What's Meta's AI product?
They have several actually, from computer vision in glasses (RayBan or Quest) to Speech To Text to get commands on such glasses, to "improved" translation via LLMs, to just chat bots in most of their chat solutions. They do integrate into products, it's not just research.
Is it good? No idea as I don't use them but I believe their angle is literally what Zuckerberg said publicly, roughly "Can't miss AI if it's real! Have to be first." which isn't exactly a very deep strategy but they have deep pockets.
It might surprise you to find out that Ray-Ban Meta glasses don't offer any sort of subscription service, not even as an option. Every Meta AI user is just costing Meta money, Meta isn't even giving them the option to buy the product from them.
I have no idea why. The kind of people who would buy Meta glasses would probably happily blow $10-20 on a subscription they forget about. You can get a subscription service for a robot litter box but you can't get one for AI glasses? Does Meta hate money?
Meta uses AI to search through Facebook and Instagram which...just makes searches cost them more money, I guess?
Sounds like they have pockets so deep that they are going into debt, which is an interesting sort of pocket depth.
IMO Zuckerberg's amateur founder status is more blatant as time goes on. He had his one moonshot and thinks he can do it again just as easily. Nobody told him that a large chunk of his success is owed to fortuitous timing.
I think there's been something of a cancerous ideology that you must be a first mover. It's a bit odd considering that Facebook itself was not a first mover in pretty much everything that it does that is successful and highly profitable.
This is one of the most important future uses of what we today call chat bots and "AI".
This is part of a pattern of tech leaders investing in order to avoid getting shut-out of whatever the next paradigm of computing is supposed to be.
- Google building Google+ and stuffing social into everything to avoid getting shut out of social networking. (The fear Larry/Sergey felt about this is why Vic Gundotra could bully and survive scandals until it became clear that Facebook wasn't an existential threat/Google+ was not going to really compete)
- Meta attempting to build an AI assistant because they were afraid Alexa/Google Assistant/Siri would be how everyone accessed computers in the future (due to technical failure, this product only ever launched as control mechanism for Oculus, but the ambition was larger)
Of course this always come alongside other factors that lead others to follow when a new concept is proven; however a tell-tale sign that leadership is worried about market dominance rather than a mere new line of business is that they spend or throw weight around above and beyond what the new line of business alone would justify.
Facebook, Instagram, etc... these are all only valuable as network effect monopolies.
Investment into AI can torch billions of dollars and still be worthwhile so long as it's done in the service of protecting those monopolies, because LLMs are both intrinsically threatening to Meta's existence and intriniscally valuable for building better recommender systems when platform monopolists like Apple add privacy protections (cutting Meta off from the data spigot that powers its revenue streams).
Once AIs with no wallets outnumber humans on Facebook, Meta has an existential problem. There is no way to avoid the inevitable, the best one can do is embrace it, and 25 billion is nothing compared to losing your platform.
Zuck is having a real hard time admitting to himself that Facebook was just luck.
Amazon basically started at the dawn of the internet, and I actually remember using it in 1997 as a fifth grader. It was incredibly well developed for that very early time period compared to just about everything else.
Microsoft's first product was a BASIC interpreter written on a PDP mini-computer in assembly, and was written so quickly, Paul Allen wrote an entire emulator in assembly for the actual chip they were trying to run their software on. The bootloader for the tape loaded program had to be entered in binary onto the machine they were trying to run the software on. There were about a dozen people in position to create this sort of software in the world at the time and only two who could do it in a 6 week timeframe.
Bill Gates and a lot of these other billionaires are in totally different leagues when it comes to origin story.
But, if there is eventually a patten of failure, either luck was a factor, or perhaps the person themselves has changed.
This is the type of unicorn ruthless capitalism that it takes to become the richest person on the entire planet. Quite honestly, Gates gets less hate nowadays because of his philanthropy and the fact that there are even shittier billionaires.
As far as I can tell, the things that actually drives engagement are ragebait political videos, thirst traps, and fake AI generated videos of cats robbing liquor stores.
The investors have rewarded Meta with something like 5x stock increase since abandoning the Metaverse.
It's time to realize that "embrace the stupid" is indeed a viable business strategy and an accurate reflection of our society.
Sometimes I think there's a perspective from which suppliers (politicians, social media producers) are right thinking their customers as idiots and manipulatble even though customer-driven ought to be the goal.
I sometimes push back like this mentioning Marshal Tucker lyrics:
I heard it in a love song.
I heard it in a love song.
I heard it in a love song.
Can't be wrong.
No, the whole point is it is wrong: you were told what you wanted to hear. They got their's now where are you? Stop believing the nonsense!
Fleetwood Mac's players only love you when they're playin' is the same sentiment.
Where oh where is our vaunted common sense? Atticus had it in to kill a mockingbird. Alas Job reminds Atticus is the exception.
This more so applies to current American politics ... which has been on my mind of late.
GIven that the majority do not possess this trait, the outcome is nothing but inevitable. The mistake Jobs made was assuming that what he thought about the world should ring true for everyone.
It started off seemingly innocent - the mission of connecting folks. However, there was no money in that.
Where is the money? Content production. What content generates a continuous growing stream of earnings? Content that appeals to the senses of all kinds - including selling a get rich fast dream to girls promoting their OF pages.
What you have is an environemnt that preys and feeds off of consumers who have a lack of discipline with their money and are easy to manipulate - providing a nice ROAS. This is Meta in a nutshell.
Zuck enjoys roll playing a roman emperor - I have no doubt behind the scenes he laughs at his contribution toward the declining tastes, standards and self control of individuals.
"The social media group had hired Citigroup and Morgan Stanley to raise up to $25bn in debt, ranging from five to 40 years in maturity, "
Together with the debt payments needed then, this will do wonders for the stock. I’m sure.
https://x.com/JonathanBeuys/status/1984882268817519036
That is revenue from real world usage of their datacenters. Usage their customers would not pay for if it did not have a positive ROI.
A pretty stable growth of 30% per year for the last 5 years. At a current level of about $50B per year.
What is the value of it, if it continues like this for another decade? Revenue would be at roughly $1T/year then.
In the face of this real usage and the growth of it, spending tens of billions of dollars on building out infrastructure looks ok to me.
According to Perplexity because instead of going through 20 earnings reports myself, I outsourced the task to Perplexity and then manually checked a few of the numbers to be reasonably sure they were correct.
Like how much of it is actually the "AI" part of the business for a start?
That's a big "if", usually things don't grow at 30% per year for 15 years.
My logic is that we only have to take the next 10 years into account when calculating the probability.
And lots of things grew 30% or more for 10 years.
Bitcoin's market cap grew over 70% pa for 10 over years now.
Amazon's revenue grew over 60% pa for over 10 years in their early days.
I can think of many numbers, but would have to check: global solar installations, smartphone usage are examples that come to mind.
Look at all the stuff people do. Almost none of it is automated via software. Look at people on construcion sites, cashiers, cleaning stuff, cab drivers ... all of it is done manually. I am writing this manually, even though I would prefer to just say it while doing the dishes. But there is no good voice interface for browsers yet. And hey, why do I even do the dishes?
I would say we haven't even started automating the world via software.
10 years of 30% growth just means we will spend 14x more on software in 10 years than we do now. Considering we have not even really started using software for automating work, I would be surprised if we stay below that.
9*$50B = $450B yearly revenue.
What could be the margin Alphabet makes from that? Last quarter, Alphabet had $100B revenue and $35B net income. So 35% margin.
$450Bx0.35 = $158B
What is $158B in annual profit worth? Currently Alphabet's p/e is about 30. If we take that, it would be $158Bx30 = $4740B. So around $5T.
If we are heading towards the creation of $5T in value via cloud revenue, investing $100B per year to build it seems not particularly high to me.
I don't think we can assume that's true. Their customers are paying for it, but we don't know how profitable they are being with the AI compute they pay for.
There's one problem. They seem unlikely to be first to build ASI given that Google and OpenAI seem a fair bit ahead and there's stiff competition from xAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek et al.
The leaderboard seems to have Google, OpenAI and Antropic ahead, then X and four Chinese firms, Z, DeepSeek, GLM and Kimi, with Meta behind that.
I'm not sure if they have a decent strategy to get ahead? It seems to me the best bet would be to have some very smart people do a better algorithm rather than building more data centers.
Insider trading ? /s
Also, if they are issuing bonds to the public, does that mean that private lenders aren't lending any more?
I don't forsee it happening to Facebook anytime soon, but companies going to $0 isn't unprecedented.
killingtime74•3mo ago