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.
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."
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.
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.
Such hubris - nobody would have signed up for that
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.
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 ?
People starve and (almost) no one cares.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
killingtime74•14h ago