31–40 of 113 posts
BIS released a larger report in June that identified AI financing/sustainability as one of the biggest risks for the global economy: https://www.bis.org/publ/arpdf/ar2026e.htm
pre-echos of "too big to fail"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
pre-echos of "too big to fail"
I’m not sure I understand these references. The banks were too big to fail specifically because they were banks involved with the finances of every major industry and government, not simply because their (arguably specious) valuations, or even market caps, had a ton of zeroes on them. What’s the argument for OpenAI being so inherently critical and interweaved with the rest of the economy that it can’t be allowed to f…
Usefulness aside, I see little evidence AI is making money (profit, not revenue) for any firm whose profit doesn't come from the AI itself or the infrastructure, including supply chain. I'd love to hear a counterexample. One such example would be of a hypothetical company that does translations for payment, and with AI they now are making more profit because they use AI to do the translation rather than pay a transla…
I want to add context for Duolingo because I think it's confounded by cultural conversation. Duolingo in some Q1 earnings call stated it was going to go AI-native. They were going to switch from contractors to AI. This led to a huge PR crisis, especially on TikTok, where they used to have a big online presence and GenZ influence. I'm not sure if they ever recovered the image they had after that.
They tried, and they got pushback from their consumer base.
Your Costco example makes a lot of sense to me. Right now at my company we are spending hundreds and thousands per employee, but it's not like everyone has an idea that is meant to be integrated into product. So everyone's just making more vaporware.
I do think this is the year the numbers and projections will start coming down to the ground. We can already see this with the fact that the leaders at the frontier labs have stopped talking about AGI and have started talking about token costs and just direct comparisons. It's no longer pie in the sky.
BIS released a larger report in June that identified AI financing/sustainability as one of the biggest risks for the global economy: https://www.bis.org/publ/arpdf/ar2026e.htm
pre-echos of "too big to fail"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
pre-echos of "too big to fail"
I’m not sure I understand these references. The banks were too big to fail specifically because they were banks involved with the finances of every major industry and government, not simply because their (arguably specious) valuations, or even market caps, had a ton of zeroes on them. What’s the argument for OpenAI being so inherently critical and interweaved with the rest of the economy that it can’t be allowed to f…
But like what happens if the government guarantees open ai's loans if the company is structurally unprofitable? Does the government create an operating subsidy?
I've seen other reports that suggest the level of investment for eclipses the internet buid out in 2000 and the railroad boom more than a century earlier. I wonder if they use different ways of landing on these wildly different assessments
Yes. In inflation adjusted dollars spending on AI dwarfs previous "megaprojects". But as a fraction of GDP it's fairly modest -- comparable to the Apollo Project. It's a sign of how much the economy has grown that under "1% of GDP for a few years" now is far bigger than "over 10% of GDP for a few decades" was in the late 1800s.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44805979
Your estimate of current AI spending is also low. Hyperscaler capex alone is around 2% of US GDP, not including other costs (neoclouds, employee comp, etc.).
Usefulness aside, I see little evidence AI is making money (profit, not revenue) for any firm whose profit doesn't come from the AI itself or the infrastructure, including supply chain. I'd love to hear a counterexample. One such example would be of a hypothetical company that does translations for payment, and with AI they now are making more profit because they use AI to do the translation rather than pay a transla…
So far, there hasn't been a clear win for "software wrapping an existing LLM" - if the AI is good enough, then the users can go directly to the source.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
pre-echos of "too big to fail"
That's obviously how the AI labs are trying to position themselves. But slop generators are not integral to anything. They most definitely should be left to fail, and if the market so dictates, the hundreds of billions invested should go to zero.
Usefulness aside, I see little evidence AI is making money (profit, not revenue) for any firm whose profit doesn't come from the AI itself or the infrastructure, including supply chain. I'd love to hear a counterexample. One such example would be of a hypothetical company that does translations for payment, and with AI they now are making more profit because they use AI to do the translation rather than pay a transla…
That's a different and older kind of AI than chatbots, but it's not fundamentally different, but AI is the engine that makes their ad targeting so effective, and why they're some of the most profitable large companies on the planet.