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Why Wall Street is ignoring big tech's debt [video]

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Re: Why Wall Street is ignoring big tech's debt [video]

#101
post #21
post #9

I don't know a single white collar worker who isn't using AI for their job. Not like forced, but like "Oh damn, this bot thing can do a lot of tedious leg work for me". To think that people won't pay $60-$80/mo to continue using it is wild to me. In a white collar environment it pays for itself in a few hours of use. If you focus on how much value AI brings to people (mostly in time saved), the bubble hardly looks bu…

The reason uber didn't loose that much business is because it replaced the established businesses and left most consumers with little alternative. That's not the case with AI - unless the frontier labs achieve AGI or some sort of super intelligence that lets them create infinite economic value (at which point, any further discussion is pointless for obvious reasons), the average worker can do most of their tasks with…

> the average worker can do most of their tasks with 5% of the api costs using an open source model from China and achieve the same results.

Are you also going to tell me that everyone will be switching to their favorite Linux desktop distribution over Mac & Win because it's "free"?

Re: Why Wall Street is ignoring big tech's debt [video]

#102
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it won't last for life. It will probably last about 4 years so that equates to about 100/mo.

M1 is finishing it's 6th year of life and going strong ...

Have you been trashing the non-replaceabe SSD with constant AI workloads? Do you have any idea how much electricity it uses over it those 4 years?

Re: Why Wall Street is ignoring big tech's debt [video]

#103
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They dont need to scale down anything. AGI is a red herring. Even Deepseek at its absurd prices is a very healthy business. Regarding their return on capex multiple, their CEO said they make a six-fold profit on their compute capex with 10 month recuperation. Because of this, all of them are spending aggressively on compute. Apart from that, user acquisition and data labelling are the major costs that are preventing…

> their return on capex multiple, their CEO said they make a six-fold profit on their compute capex with 10 month recuperation I am not familiar with chineese model companies as much as I am with US based ones so I don't have much to say beyond that the CEO is incentivced to pump up those numbers. > By limiting the number of tokens you use per month? per week, per hour? And by limiting the inference time compute dedi…

Return on compute capex is tied mostly to gpu lifetimes so I don't think it will be different for the American companies, who also charge much more being closed source.

> If this was so simple...copilot...

Github copilot still has subscriptions. They moved away from request based accounting to token based accounting for the usage limits, as did cursor, and everybody else.

Re: Why Wall Street is ignoring big tech's debt [video]

#104
post #9

I don't know a single white collar worker who isn't using AI for their job. Not like forced, but like "Oh damn, this bot thing can do a lot of tedious leg work for me". To think that people won't pay $60-$80/mo to continue using it is wild to me. In a white collar environment it pays for itself in a few hours of use. If you focus on how much value AI brings to people (mostly in time saved), the bubble hardly looks bu…

But the question is how much are people willing to pay for AI. I use AI every day at work, but I only pay $20. That's the most I will ever want to pay. And, so far, it gives me everything I need. If OpenAI or Anthropic suddenly said "Sorry, the game is up. You'll have to pay $100/month now", I would 100% look into cheaper Chinese solutions. I suspect the AI subscription (or API) economy is whale economy. You have a s…

>I'm sure there will be some losers,

This is the way it is on Wall Street more each century, and for AI to go public on that exchange it's going to have to go big or go home. Considering the amount of money that has already been spent privately.

There is no alternative pipeline to replenish those reserves, and different people have different ideas about capacity and bottlenecks relative to ambitions and what they are supposed to get for their money.

As has been mentioned in another comment, there is no alternative foundation other than optimism either. The exchange wouln't exist if it weren't originally intended to trade only shares that were all worth holding otherwise. Naturally some worth holding more than others. This is so big it will be necessary to be able to fool way more people with way more money than usual, otherwise those that prevail will have nowhere near their wildest dreams come true.

Naturally AI is never going to fly off the shelf like it could until it starts getting cheaper all the time for huge jumps in performance. Cheap home computers will need to be able to do quite a bit more than they can only do today while connected to a massive AI data center, without ever having been connected to anything outside the home at all. Otherwise AI can not ever be considered "general" any more than computing could be considered personal, until you were no longer reliant on a remote mainframe in a huge out-of-state data center somewhere tied by a thread leading through a squeaky modem over monopolized communication lines. This differential between clunky (clanky?) old data centers' overall computing power relative to the amount held freely within homes & businesses is something that looks like it could be regaining exploitability like never in decades. I know one day Woz jumped right in without needing to be a greedy businessman because there was no possible downside, and he could let just about any dedicated growth leader make as much money as they wanted off his technology. Plus Jobs was no slouch in many ways and Woz never needed to worry with a product that sells itself to begin with, putting Jobs in hog heaven where he could persuasively bring it to the next level almost whenever he wanted like you can do few other ways.

So not just dot-com related hardware & software.

That goes for memory and storage too, people should do the math on how affordable nominal amounts are supposed to be by now. If everything were still normal 16GB of DDR4 would be about $10, at least by 2027, so it hasn't merely doubled in the last year which is the most obvious part, it has skyrocketed to 10x what it would have been. And still rising not falling, so all this is going to have to be reversed for consumers to even afford what they used to be able to do.

For people who didn't want to spend a thing on AI until it's naturally way more capable and constantly getting cheaper like it should be, it's pretty frustrating when it's already been unavoidably costing "indirectly" more than they have been willing to pay if they were getting maximum benefit, when most of them have only gotten more surveillance. One day "indirectly" was just no longer true through no fault of millions of people. And growing as fast as the money stream will allow.

Up until recently AI was way more niche and fewer ordinary consumers were exposed, where now there are millions more aware of its influence and growing fast. But the more aware more ordinary people become, millions more opinions are going to come to the surface and need to be dealt with.

>whale economy.

Thar she blows!

One pervasive opinion is that so far it's made by rich people for rich people, and more so than most those who want to get rich quick are joining the bandwagon. Of course what consumers see in the media is only the "band directors" who are already rich to begin with, they set the example because they now want to get richer quicker and this is the vehicle they have chosen to do that. This is not unexpected, after all they always get what they want when it's things you have to be ungodly rich to do.

This makes for company valuations based more on optimism than anything else and once that has eclipsed underlying worth then any unforeseen bottlenecks or financing stumbles become highly magnified.

For one thing there may not be enough momentum to even fully build enough data centers to fulfill some players' plans for recouping such large investments, but at the same time AI's not going to really get good until data centers are not needed at all, which is so ominous there appears to be even more force being applied to encourage people to ignore things like this. Otherwise it could get too shocking.

This disparity in upside just plain instinctively sidelines more ordinary people as it builds, so the number of people who are just going to have to wait for AI and everything associated with it to start getting cheaper all the time becomes a force in itself. It'll be easy to notice without being a finance guru.

Until then gamble at your own risk :\

Re: Why Wall Street is ignoring big tech's debt [video]

#105

Capitalism works with debt for growth. Strange HN doesn't understand this

And capitalism also works with crashes taking unprofitable companies down. And frauds, eventually, gets companies valuation like Enron and FTX to zero. And people go to jail. Now I'm not saying OpenAI or Anthropic are frauds. What I'm saying is that, eventually, things revert to what is just. The late 90s SV tech-bros behind pets.com or webvan for example faked it for 18 months to 36 months or so. At some point when…

Yes and since there is no fraud there is no reason for this panic they know what they are doing

Re: Why Wall Street is ignoring big tech's debt [video]

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, actually. Anthropic has gross margins of 40%+, hit $75B ARR last month, and (as of this quarter) is profitable.

As Ed Zitron pointed out, that "quarter" of profitability is EBITDA profitability and comes with plenty of creative accounting. When they do it for a year, we can say "They have found profitability"

Why are you citing old news? Zitron wrote that months ago when Anthropic was reported to have ~30B ARR. Anthropic now has more than double that, at even higher margins.

There's no doubt at this point that Anthropic is profitable.

Re: Why Wall Street is ignoring big tech's debt [video]

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As Ed Zitron pointed out, that "quarter" of profitability is EBITDA profitability and comes with plenty of creative accounting. When they do it for a year, we can say "They have found profitability"

Why are you citing old news? Zitron wrote that months ago when Anthropic was reported to have ~30B ARR. Anthropic now has more than double that, at even higher margins. There's no doubt at this point that Anthropic is profitable.

Because again, we haven't seen further reports. As always, we are debating financials on a company that doesn't have to disclose them regularly.

Re: Why Wall Street is ignoring big tech's debt [video]

#108
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US. With how much they've invested in AI they need the entire planet to pay, and pay lots. What's the capex expenditure of Magnificent 7 just this year? Close to $1tn?

They need it to be roughly as popular as first world cell phone usage for a 5-7yr ROI.

1. Cell phone usage was never free.

2. Cell phone usage was always localized. You had local telcoms and that was about it. Deutsche Telekom Germany didn't have to compete all the time with NTT Docomo Japan.

And there are probably 20 other economic differences I'm missing.

Re: Why Wall Street is ignoring big tech's debt [video]

#109
post #9

I don't know a single white collar worker who isn't using AI for their job. Not like forced, but like "Oh damn, this bot thing can do a lot of tedious leg work for me". To think that people won't pay $60-$80/mo to continue using it is wild to me. In a white collar environment it pays for itself in a few hours of use. If you focus on how much value AI brings to people (mostly in time saved), the bubble hardly looks bu…

At my $day_job we are forced to use a shared virtual machine for all work activities. The Windows instance has 64gb of RAM, 8 virtual cores of old EPYC CPU and no GPU acceleration. It is also shared between 6 users.

They will not spend extra 20$ per user per month to add compute and increase productivity.

Re: Why Wall Street is ignoring big tech's debt [video]

#110
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These companies have spent billions of investor dollars and they will need to recoup that cost soon. And then show year over year growth on top of that. Unless they can massively scale down training and inference cost or implement AGI I don't know what their plan is. Just provide a subsidized plan for the next 10 or 20 years? Their costs are directly proportional to the amount of tokens the LLM produces. How is a mon…

They dont need to scale down anything. AGI is a red herring. Even Deepseek at its absurd prices is a very healthy business. Regarding their return on capex multiple, their CEO said they make a six-fold profit on their compute capex with 10 month recuperation. Because of this, all of them are spending aggressively on compute. Apart from that, user acquisition and data labelling are the major costs that are preventing…

> Even Deepseek at its absurd prices is a very healthy business. Regarding their return on capex multiple, their CEO said they make a six-fold profit on their compute capex with 10 month recuperation.

That's "theoretical profit" - in some imaginary world where the free subscribers would pay the top tier cost.

https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/01/deepseek-claims-theoretica...

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