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Google CEO: If an AI bubble pops, no one is getting out clean

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/11/googles-sundar-pichai-warns-of-irrationality-in-trillion-dollar-ai-investment-boom/
70•doctorshady•2h ago

Comments

clickety_clack•1h ago
Sounds like something an extortionist would say in a movie. “We’re all dirty here!”
project2501a•1h ago
Yeah, exactly: it is an implied threat: "If I go, I am taking you down with me"
SpicyLemonZest•42m ago
The context makes it clear that it's not any sort of implied threat. Pichai made his statement in response to an interview question about whether Google might be so well positioned that they're immune to the impact of an AI bubble. (But I don't blame you for being misled - like most headlines these days, this would have been intensely optimized for virality over accuracy, and making tech CEOs sound like supervillains is great for virality.)
pixl97•1h ago
I mean this commonly happens in business/economies. Businesses that are dirty can make more money, at least temporarily out competing those around them. If they play it right they can drive their good competitors out of business or buy them up. Moreso, the crash at the end of a bubble will just as likely drive the good businesses out as the bad.
lo_zamoyski•1h ago
"But everybody's doing it!"
jordanb•46m ago
They really are shameless aren't they?

Makes one think that this was the plan all along. I think they saw how SVB went down and realize that if they're reckless and irresponsible at a big enough scale they can get the government to just transfer money to them. It's almost like this is their new business model "we're selling exposure to the $XX trillion dollar bailout industry."

ignoramous•23m ago
> They really are shameless aren't they? Makes one think that this was the plan all along.

Not really. Sundar is still pretty bullish on GenAI, just not the investor excitement around it (bubble).

  Pichai described AI as "the most profound technology" humankind has worked on. "We will have to work through societal disruptions," he said, adding that the technology would "create new opportunities" and "evolve and transition certain jobs." He said people who adapt to AI tools "will do better" in their professions, whatever field they work in.
estimator7292•22m ago
I don't think it's very difficult to imagine that the usgov is trying to put pressure on industry to make "number go up". Given the general competency level in usgov these days, I also wouldn't be particularly surprised if nobody knew or cared about whether the "up" of the number was real or meaningful, or whether there would be consequences.

Current admin really, really wants the number going up, and is also incapable of considering or is ignorant to any notion of consequence for any actions of any kind.

zdragnar•45m ago
Hasn't it been pretty widely acknowledged that AI funding has created a whirlpool of money cycling between a few players- cloud / datacenter hosts / operators (oracle), GPU (nvidia) and model operators (openai).

To pile on, there's hardly a product being developed that doesn't integrate "ai" in some way. I was trying to figure out why my brand new laptop was running slowly, and (among other things) noticed 3 different services running- microsoft copilot, microsoft 365 copilot (not the same as the first, naturally) and the laptop manufacturer's "chat" service. That same day, I had no fewer than 5 other programs all begging me to try their AI integrations.

Job boards for startups are all filled with "using AI" fluff because that's the only thing investors seem to want to put money into.

We really are all dirty here.

lesuorac•1h ago
> He told the BBC that the company owns what he called a “full stack” of technologies, from chips to YouTube data to models and frontier science research. This integrated approach, he suggested, would help the company weather any market turbulence better than competitors.

I guess but is it better for an investor to own 2 shares of Google or 1 share of OpenAI and 1 share of TSMC?

Like I have no doubt that being vertically integrated as a single company has lot of benefits but one can also create a trust that invests vertically as well.

jmalicki•1h ago
There may be firm specific risk etc., but there is also a concept of double marginalization, where monopolies that exist across the vertical layers of a production chain will be less efficient than a single monopoly, because you only get a single layer of dead weight loss rather than multiple.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_marginalization?wprov=s...

pphysch•1h ago
OpenAI going poof would have a negative impact on TSMC demand (revenue), right?
wmf•27m ago
Yeah, TSMC demand might go down from 300% to 100%.
nradov•18m ago
OpenAI is privately held. Regular retail investors can't buy shares.
ChrisArchitect•1h ago
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45961886
ghostpepper•1h ago
Does anyone really think it’s “if” and not “when” ?
burnte•1h ago
Agreed, it's when. They're hoping to stave it off or maybe stretch out the pop into a correction by all hedging together with all these incestuous deals, but you can't hold back the tide. They debuted this tech way too early, promised way too much, and now the market is wary about buying AI products until more noise settles out of the system.
ares623•1h ago
It’s going to pop as soon as they get confirmation the govt will bail them out. Until then they’re going to give it their all to keep it growing.
pksebben•52m ago
I think they already have that confirmation. When we bailed the banks out in 08 we basically said "If you're big enough that we'd be screwed without you then take whatever risks you like with impunity".

That's a reduction of complexity, of course, but the core of the lesson is there. We have actually kept on with all the practices that led to the housing crash (MBS, predatory lending, Mixing investment and traditional banking).

n8cpdx•41m ago
> If you're big enough that we'd be screwed without you then take whatever risks you like with impunity".

I know financially it will be bad because number not go up and number need go up.

But do we actually depend on generative/agentic AI at all in meaningful ways? I’m pretty sure all LLMs could be Thanos snapped away and there would be near zero material impact. If the studies are at all reliable all the programmers will be more efficient. Maybe we’d be better off because there wouldn’t be so much AI slop.

It is very far from clear that there is any real value being extracted from this technology.

The government should let it burn.

Edit: I forgot about “country girls make do”. Maybe gen AI is a critical pillar of the economy after all.

exasperaited•37m ago
Which of these firms is too big to fail though?

It all depends on whether MAGA survives as a single community. One of the few things MAGA understands correctly is that AI is a job-killer.

Trump going all out to rescue OpenAI or Anthropic doesn't feel likely. Who actually needs it, as a dependency? Who can't live without it? Why bail out entities you can afford to let go to the wall (and maybe then corruptly buy out in a fire sale)?

Similarly, can you actually see him agreeing to bail out Microsoft without taking an absurd stake in the business? MAGA won't like it. But MS could be broken up and sold; every single piece of that business has potential buyers.

Nvidia, now that I can see. Because Trump is surrounded by crypto grifters and is dependent on crypto for his wealth. GPUs are at least real solid products and Nvidia still, I think, make the ones the crypto guys want.

Google, you can see, are getting themselves ready to not be bailed out.

bigbuppo•21m ago
If Meta or Google disappared overnight, it would be, at worst, a minor annoyance for most of the world. Despite the fact that both companies are advertising behemoths, marketing departments everywhere would celebrate their end.
project2501a•1h ago
They got enough slush money to make this go on for a couple of years.

I am shocked at the part they know it is a bubble and they are doing nothing to amortize it. Which means they expect the government to step in and save their butts.

... Well, not that shocked.

bigbuppo•20m ago
They're floating 40 year bonds for technology with a three year lifecycle. They do not have the actual cash for this.
dylan604•40m ago
> They debuted this tech way too early, promised way too much,

finally, some rational thought into the AI insanity. The entire 'fake it til you make it' aspect of this is ridiculous. sadly, the world we live in means that you can't build a product and hold its release until it works. you have to be first to release even if it's not working as advertised. you can keep brushing off critiques with "it's on the road map". those that are not as tuned in will just think it is working and nothing nefarious is going on. with as long as we've had paid for LLM apps, I'm still amazed at the number of people that do not know that the output is still not 100% accurate. there are also people that use phrases as thinking when referring to getting a response. there's also the misleading terms like "searching the web..." when on this forum we all know it's not a live search.

Zaskoda•55m ago
Sort of? My thoughts are that there's something of an AI arms race and the US doesn't want to lose that race to another country... so if the AI bubble pops too fiercely, there may likely be some form of intervention. And any time the government intervenes, all bets are off the table. Who knows what they will do and what the impact will be.
nitwit005•49m ago
I can see them intervening to preserve AI R&D of some sort, but many of the current companies are running consumer oriented products. Why care if some AI art generation website goes bust?
nicce•47m ago
More like that when it happens, how big the pop is.
tetris11•44m ago
It'll be fine. When the banks burst in 2008, they were gifted 7 trillion to make up the shortfall and life went on for the rich.

This time they'll be gifted 70 trillion to make up for the shortfall, and life shall continue on for the rich.

It's win-win for them, there's no risk at all

cjbgkagh•30m ago
I think the economic background has changed, in 2008 it was after a big run up in wealth so the reversion wasn’t so bad, there was some fat to cut. Since then people have been ground down to the breaking point, another 2008 wipeout will cut into the bone. I do think this time it could be different.
jghn•26m ago
privatize profit, socialize risk. same as it always was
techblueberry•33m ago
I've been trying to grok this idea of - when does a bubble pop. Like in theory if everyone knows it's a bubble, that should cause it to pop, because people should be making their way to the exists, playing music chairs to get their money out early.

But as I try to sort of narrative the ideas behind bubbles and bursts, one thing I realize, is that I think in order for a bubble to burst, people essentially have to want it to burst(or the opposite have to want to not keep it going).

But like Bernie Madoff got caught because he couldn't keep paying dividends in his ponzi scheme, and people started withdrawing money. But in theory, even if everyone knew, if no one withdrew their money (and told the FCC) and he was able to use the current deposits to pay dividends a few years. The ponzi scheme didn't _have_ to end, the bubble didn't have to pop.

So I've been wondering, like if everyone knows AI is a bubble, what has to happen to have it collapse? Like if a price is what people are willing to pay, in order for Tesla to collapse, people have to decide they no longer want to pay $400 for Tesla shares. If they keep paying $400 for tesla shares, then it will continue to be worth $400.

So I've been trying to think, in the most simple terms, what would have to happen to have the AI bubble pop, and basically, as long as people perceive AI companies to have the biggest returns, and they don't want to move their money to another place with higher returns (similar to TSLA bulls) then the bubble won't pop.

And I guess that can keep happening as long as the economy keeps growing. And if circular deals are causing the stock market to keep rising, can they just go on like this forever?

The downside of course being, the starvation of investments in other parts of the economy, and giving up what may be better gains. It's game theory, as long as no one decides to stop playing the game, and say pull out all their money and put it into I dunno, bonds or GME, the music keeps playing?

burnte•1h ago
And there we have the reason for all of these interdependent deals between all these firms, they're all hedging with each other they can keep this set of plates spinning.

They can't, not firever. Bubbles pop.

nickff•1h ago
How is what they’re doing a ‘hedge’? It seems more like alternative financing, or keiretsu.
viccis•1h ago
Very cool and healthy for the CEO of a company investing massive amounts into a given technology to casually refer to it as a "bubble" at the same time. I guess he softens the statement a bit by calling it "an AI bubble" instead of the "the AI bubble", but it's still interesting to see everyone involved in this economic mess start to acknowledge it.
sgroppino•1h ago
It’s not a bubble until it bursts
barbazoo•51m ago
Gave our kids a bath last night, can confirm, a bubble is a bubble even before it pops.
jmount•59m ago
Tons of companies survived the dot com bubble pop. Corrections are when the market does some sorting.
estimator7292•19m ago
Wow, this is such a unique and beautiful insight literally nobody has ever heard before. Good job!
giancarlostoro•59m ago
I think it will pop but not in the way everyone thinks it will pop. There's plenty that's not going to go away / anywhere, but I'm sure lots of startups will fail and close their doors.
hypeatei•49m ago
What way do you envision it popping? Nvidia has tons of investments on their books in smaller companies. If a couple of them start showing poor earnings, it could cause a death spiral for NVDA because 1) their investment just tanked, and 2) those companies are no longer buying chips from them therefore reducing revenue.

Nvidia also makes up ~7% of the S&P 500 so if their stock price falls substantially, that's a big chunk of capital just... gone for a lot of people.

scottLobster•48m ago
Silicon Valley! Unprofitable debt and marketing all the way up until you get bailed out by the taxpayers, apparently.
Barrin92•24m ago
I'm not seeing that happening. Unlike banking and housing there's not much systemic or political risk in letting these companies crash. It's mostly going to hit a very small number of high net worth people who don't have a lot of clout and are oddly disconnected from the rest of the economy.
bogomipz•11m ago
This is incorrect. A lot of these companies are raising debt to pay for these datacenter build outs. And that debt has already been sold to pension funds. The risk has already been spread. See Blue Owl Capital and how Meta is financing its Hyperion datacenter. They raised 30 billion in debt. Main street is already exposed as those bonds are in funds offered by the usual players BlackRock, Invesco, Pimco etc.
rchaud•45m ago
Most bubbles occur due to excessive levels of credit offered too cheaply, resulting in a whole bunch of defaults happening at the same time. All the major AI players have borrowed money to buy GPUs and build data centers and have used Special Purpose Vehicles to do it so the debt doesn't fall on their own balance sheet, probably using a certain amount of stock as collateral. If the SPV defaults, could that trigger a big sell-off?
vineyardmike•33m ago
The question is, a sell off for who?

If they’ve securitized and sold their data center buildout, will the big clouds and AI labs actually face any severe impact? While the sums are huge, most of these companies have the cash on hand to pay down the debt. The big AI labs have said their models earn enough to cover the cost to train themselves, just not the next one. This means they could at any time walk away from the compute spend for training.

With the heavy securitization of all these deals, will the “bubble pop” just hurt the financial industry?

If a company like CoreWeaver sees their SPV for a Microsoft-specific data center go bankrupt, that means MSFT decided to walk away from the deal. Red flag for the industry, but also a sign of fiscal restraint. Someone else can swoop in and buy the DC for cheap, while MSFT avoids the Opex hit. Seems like the losers will be whoever bought that SPV debt, which probably isn’t a tech company.

Irishsteve•20m ago
It’s an insurance company so basically pensions.
badgersnake•41m ago
Every CEO is reading from the same script right now. It might be a bubble but it’s just like the internet, it’s still going to be relevant and it’s just the crap companies and grifters who will die.

I wonder who’s writing the script.

partiallypro•36m ago
I think AI is a bubble, but I don't think we're close to the peak yet.
hylaride•27m ago
Ever literally blow bubbles? You never really know how big each one will be.

My biggest worry is that what will be left standing after all of this is the organizations that are quietly all the AI slop everywhere, be it the normal web or YouTube.

helterskelter•31m ago
I'm curious what HN is doing with their portfolios right about now. I'd be dumping NVDA and reallocating to more bonds for the time being.
josefritzishere•29m ago
This sub is the most important question in the thread. Where do you put your money to hedge against an AI market crash?
hirako2000•25m ago
Commodities.
ajross•23m ago
You can't hedge against a whole market. And you can't time bubble pop events anyway. You can dump NVDA today, sure, because it's overvalued at $180. And most of us agree. But that won't prevent it from going to $300 before it pops (which is totally reasonable too!), so dumping it today might hurt as much as it helps. Run-ups at the end of a speculative bubble are by definition irrational and produce in-hindsight-ridiculous numbers.

If you're young and invested for the long term, just leave all your junk in broad index securities. You can't do better than that, you just have to ride the bumps.

On the other hand, I'm approaching retirement and looking seriously at when to pull the trigger. The aggregate downside to me of a large market drop or whatever is much higher than it is to a 20-something, because losing out on (to make a number up) an extra 30% of net worth is minor when compared to "now you have to work another three years before retiring" (or alternate framings like "you have to retire in Houston and not Miami", etc...).

So most of my assets are moving out of volatiles entirely.

_zoltan_•1m ago
into? bonds?
oulipo2•22m ago
Cash or bonds I assume
nradov•20m ago
In a crash everything gets positively correlated for a while. You can go to cash temporarily but of course no one can consistently time the market.
coldpie•19m ago
Same thing as always. Stick with your plan and rebalance if you need to. If your plan is 80% stock 20% bond (or whatever ratios), and the increased stock prices are putting you significantly out of balance, then sell your stock funds and buy bonds to put it back to where it should be. If the crash happens, sell your now too-high bonds and buy stocks. Or just buy into one of those funds that does all this for you, or hire a fiduciary financial advisor to do it for you.
hylaride•16m ago
With even the SP500 being super concentrated in AI-exposed companies, probably a combination of bonds and foreign equities. But hedging does mean being OK with watching any (perceived or real) bubble madness continue. I wanted to put all my wealth into Apple circa 2005, but chose not to because blah blah blah diversification. Obviously I wish I did, but I'm ok with the perfectly sensible decision I made - and I'd be retired many times over had I done it.

Personally speaking, as somebody that was 100% in equities until earlier this year (I'm in my early 40s and had most of my wealth in VOO), I shifted to a 60-40 portfolio - there are ETFs that maintain the balance for you. I did this knowing full well that this could attenuate my upside, but I figured it's worth it than being so concentrated in a single part of an industry (AI within tech) and so much upside was already acquired up until that point. Also, I figured the chances of the 2nd Trump term adding to volatility weren't going to help tamper volatility. On top of that, my income is tied to tech, so diversifying away further from it is sensible (especially the equity parts of my compensation).

But if you're in your 20s, your nest egg is likely small enough that I'd just continue plugging away in automatic contributions. Investing at all is far more important than anything else at that stage.

mrtesthah•2m ago
AAPL is chronically undervalued, and at the same time derives no revenue from generative AI.
ndriscoll•1m ago
Do you live in a home with a paid off mortgage? Do you have a fully electrified home, only EVs, and solar? You can make real, concrete capital investments instead of abstract, financial ones to reduce your required living/"operating" expenses. Then a market crash doesn't matter to you as much.
nurettin•20m ago
Why trade individual stocks anyway? Cost averaging ETFs is a proven way to building wealth. S&P goes down 20%, you average down, it recovers and you get another 2-3 years of growth. This goes on until civilization collapses.
gretch•17m ago
If you buy ETFs, you basically hold some stocks you don't want.

For example, stock from war profiteering companies (lockheed, raytheon).

Note that investing in war profiteers is a proven way to build wealth. I just don't want to do that.

This argument not only applies to evil companies, but also dumb ones. For example, I have no interest in investing in IBM or Oracle even those both of those are also money makers.

nradov•5m ago
Buying index funds (either mutual funds or ETFs) has been an effective approach for retail investors. But the concern now is that some US stock index funds are so heavily weighted to the "Magnificent 7" stocks that much of the previous benefit of diversification has been lost.

https://www.fidelity.com/learning-center/smart-money/magnifi...

There are other index funds which are equal weighted rather than market weighted. Those have underperformed lately but might be less volatile if the AI bubble pops.

binary132•24m ago
if only there were some way for THE ENTIRE MARKET to not have quite so much exposure to hype bubbles
OptionOfT•15m ago
Interestingly I think if the AI succeed at the level that a lot of these CEOs hope we're not much better off either.

And the sentiment that goes around is more: reduce the amount of people needed to do the same amount of work:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/09/mckinsey_ai_monetizat...

> McKinsey says, while quoting an HR executive at a Fortune 100 company griping: "All of these copilots are supposed to make work more efficient with fewer people, but my business leaders are also saying they can't reduce head count yet."

The problem becomes that eventually all these people who are laid off are not going to find new roles.

Who is going to be buying the products and services if no-one has money to throw around?

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