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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]

#141
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> Have you been trashing the non-replaceabe SSD with constant AI workloads?

Your other point is valid, but you're either vastly underestimating how many reads/writes a modern SSD can take or vastly overestimating how much output a typical LLM is capable of.

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

#143
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…

And I know very few white collar workers who are, beyond "I guess Google Search is AI now". Each their own bubble, I guess.

AI has some value in some scenarios. Most models still fail badly enough often enough that I personally would not pay $80 for it. I would make use of it if it were free, or $10 / month, but it would have to significantly improve if I were to ask my employer to pay $150 / month for it - let alone $1500 / month.

The evidence is obvious: everyone and their dog has access to highly subsided AI agents right now. Literally every single company is pushing its employees to trial AI - some even forcing AI use. So why aren't we seeing a giant white-collar productivity boom yet?

The idea that every single white-collar worker is going to get a $800 / month AI subscription is ludicrous. The big question is, can the AI companies survive off everyone getting a $5 / month subscription, with a handful of workers getting a $500 / month one?

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

#144
post #81
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The railway bubble and the optical fiber bubble left the world with lots of railways and optical fibers. Once their original owners went bankrupt, the assets themselves were quite useful and changed the world. The cryptocurrency bubble, however, didn't. Not really. At best you can use it to buy drugs. Some of the GPUs may have been repurposed for AI, but not enough to make a dent in AI, and the AI reesarchers who kic…

Many of those assets were useless - like railways from nowhere to nowhere. Only some ended up being used. And many innocent people ended up being hurt in the process. Bubbles are not good. They are harmful. The ability yo recoup some of the losses in the span of next 15 years does not make the bubbles something positive.

  > Bubbles are not good. They are harmful.
bubbles are bad for society too; families get thrown out on the street, big players/individuals buy all the cheap/discounted assets furthering economy divisions, and depending on the size civil unrest etc....

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

#145
post #135
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…

> Did Uber die when a trip across town went from $3 to $13? No. It's giving more rides than ever, 10x more than when it was $3. Uber has a fairly large moat: the regulatory mess they’ve waded through and the collection of drivers willing to drive for them. Sure, it’s probably easier to start a competitor now than 20 years ago, but there’s still a substantial network effect — a transportation service needs a lot of ca…

There were so many comments[1][2][3] at the time saying that Uber has no moat, there’s no switching cost, the only value is the $3 rides, etc, etc.

I suspect it’ll play out the same.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8987827

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6137542

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9984619

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

#146

Wall Street makes money from issuing debt, trading debt, and IPOs. They need to get the last two mega IPOs off before the curtain call on this era. But they can only partially influence the market, they can’t control it. The question is if the market will let them get these IPOs off or if the jig is up. Here’s an exercise for anyone curious: pull up the median stock in the S&P 500. Look at its P/E. Take 15 minutes an…

its almost as if we over-financialized our economy...

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

#147
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 problem is the value you speak doesn't seem to be materializing. I barely know anyone who sings the praises of saving time with AI, but I know plenty of people who complain about peers doing a shoddy job because they used AI to do their work, or having to clean up someone else's AI generated slop.

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

#148
post #76
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Won't the Chinese providers have to raise their prices as well due to the economics of serving inference at scale?

Buy an M5 max for $4k and you have a portable Deepseek 0731 for life.

models are stuck in time. eventually the world moves forward and it is trained on too much obsolete data.

training cannot end for LLMs intrinsically. it's not some fixed cost. it's an ongoing one.

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

#149
post #4

TINA, There Is No Alternative

That's funny because this still tracks when you use the Craiglist-interpretation of "Tina" – still, there is no alternative when you're smoking it [0]...

[0] I do not recommend smoking it, with well-over a decade "clean" (currently watching a good neighbor succumb to it, which is awful to witness)

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

#150
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Won't the Chinese providers have to raise their prices as well due to the economics of serving inference at scale?

Yes. People keep thinking that Chinese models are free or near free for some reason.

In reality, they're raising prices too. I was looking at Kimi K3 prices on OpenRouter and it's nearly the same as Anthropic and OpenAI.

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