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

Post by WarmWash » Sun, Aug 09, 2026, 4:23 PM UTC

oblio wrote: post #72

jrflo wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But AI use translates directly to time savings (if it works). You only need 1-2 hours of time savings per employee per week to break even on a $100/seat/month subscription.

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?

Post by api » Sun, Aug 09, 2026, 4:26 PM UTC

lkjdsklf wrote: post #35

api wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After using it a bit I’m convinced it’s not, as a whole, a bubble. Bubbles exist around it. Data center construction may end up overbuilding, much like the dark fiber thing during dot.com, since better chips and models will shrink power and space requirements over time. But the core tech is the most powerful new thing I have seen since discovering the Internet, at least. Maybe more.

A bubble doesn’t mean a technology is useless. It just means it’s overvalued In the last 30 years, we’ve had multiple bubbles in the tech industry. Every one of them was backed by real stuff that we still use today. They were still bubbles and a ton of people were hurt when they popped.

Post by WarmWash » Sun, Aug 09, 2026, 4:39 PM UTC

tobinfekkes wrote: post #75

jrflo wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing that's a bit different about AI from a CRM is it translates pretty directly into time savings. You only need each employee to save 1-2 hours of work per month to break even with a $80/seat subscription.

It's true that it can easily save 1-2 hours per month, but it only seems worth it if those hours saved are spent doing something else productive/profitable. It appears that a lot of the time saved is spent either 1) doing nothing instead, 2) waiting for the AI to finish, or 3) increasing the hours spent elsewhere down/up the chain for reviewing, fixing, auditing. The obvious benefit of anything offering to save time…

Post by root-parent » Sun, Aug 09, 2026, 4:44 PM UTC

WarmWash wrote: 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…

    Google funds Anthropic
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 Anthropic promises to rent Google's TPUs
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 Google guarantees the infrastructure
 needed to fulfil Anthropic's promise
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 Wall Street lends against Google's guarantee
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 Borrowed money buys Google-designed TPUs
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 The TPU purchases "prove" demand for Google TPUs
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          v
 Anthropic's compute capacity and valuation rise
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          v
 Google's investment in Anthropic rises in value
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 Higher valuations justify still more financing
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          +--------------------------------------+
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                                           DO IT AGAIN

Post by rdedev » Sun, Aug 09, 2026, 5:02 PM UTC

porridgeraisin wrote: post #77

rdedev wrote: 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…