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Five US tech giants' hidden debts soar to $1.65T on opaque AI funding

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Re: Five US tech giants' hidden debts soar to $1.65T on opaque AI funding

#191

Post by justacrow »

mike_hearn wrote: post #133
lelanthran wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's the difference between innovating and copying/distilling someone else's innovation. Aren't the models from Anthropic and OpenAI simply the distilled work of everyone else who ever put their work online, or in books? Why is their distillation okay, but other distillations not ok?

Not at all. At this point, a large amount of the work is in reinforcement learning where they are effectively generating their own data.

Ah, so it's okay to copy and distill all human-produced works evee, except for reinforcment-learning data generated by OpenAI/Anthropic etc

Re: Five US tech giants' hidden debts soar to $1.65T on opaque AI funding

#192

Post by hparadiz »

pfannkuchen wrote: post #186
hparadiz wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is everyone just glossing over the fact that the feds make a profit on bailing the banks out? Seems like a win win to take over ownership in the event of a bank failure.

Was this definitely not accounting trickery? Like even the way money is created is intentionally convoluted and approximately 1% of the population even attempts to understand it. Can we really trust the accounting of bank bailouts which stood to be unpopular when the accounting produced a convenient outcome? Has anyone plausible analyzed this to a convincing level of detail?

This was explained by Jon Stewart on The Daily Show ad neausum in 2008 and was common discourse for years after. No. It's not accounting trickery. Rather than allow the company aka the bank to go fully bankrupt the government simply forces a sale of the shares of the bank to the government. The original stock owners basically take a cap gains loss (potentially based on their cost basis). The bank then continues to operate as normal. This prevents a run on the bank and keeps it stable. Then 2-3 years later the stock recovers and the government sells its shares. Since they bought low this is highly profitable. Anyway yes and yes. The 2008 bailout ended up making a profit for tax payers. Thanks Obama.

Re: Five US tech giants' hidden debts soar to $1.65T on opaque AI funding

#193

Post by blitzar »

alwaysanoobie wrote: post #167
blitzar wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the "Read Next" section: SoftBank's Son says calling AI a bubble is 'blasphemy' Softbank always has their finger on the hype pulse ... I will go against the grain of everyone else - be a hype beast, every crash I have seen they make more and get better jobs on the flip side. Counter Oracle at a higher salary and ask about bonus guarantees for when this all goes to the moon (you have to really really appear to be…

The 15% delta is after negotiations. They didn't allow quarterly vests either.

Take what you have learnt from a layoff (assuming it is your first time) - we are all one big happy family in it together till we are not, then we are all mercenaries and it is onto the next master. Time to get back in the game.

Re: Five US tech giants' hidden debts soar to $1.65T on opaque AI funding

#194

Post by thin_carapace »

senordevnyc wrote: post #183
thin_carapace wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

are you looking for a fight? I love fighting but I never said any of that. so I can't really defend the position, it isn't mine.

[flagged]

I don't know how to respond to your comment with decorum so I'm going to say goodbye, and pray that you mentor your juniors better than the way you treated me today mr senor dev

Re: Five US tech giants' hidden debts soar to $1.65T on opaque AI funding

#195

Post by microtonal »

hparadiz wrote: post #171
sciencejerk wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about cheap healthcare? Or affordable housing, water, electricity and food? Is AI improving human quality of life?

Objectivly. Yes. Not only am seeing it being used to increase farming yields it's also improving healthcare. Both water and electricity are the lowest they have ever been as a percentage of income and only getting lower. People keep looking at flat dollar figures like inflation isn't a thing and it's still 1995 or something. In reality we're accelerating to an abundance economy. https://finance.yahoo.com/economy/arti…

I must be living in a different universe. Where I am, people under 40 cannot afford to buy a house. This was certainly very different in the 80ies of 90ies.

Re: Five US tech giants' hidden debts soar to $1.65T on opaque AI funding

#196

Post by alwaysanoobie »

baxtr wrote: post #188
alwaysanoobie wrote: post #155

Oh man,this makes my stomach churn with anxiety. It's a tough job market out there and it took 4 months to land job offers after being laid off. I have a competitive offer from Oracle OCI with a team adjacent to this initiative and I am seriously considering it. How long do you guys think it will take to blow up (if it does) To the experienced devs out there; would you take a 15% less offer from a medium sized compan…

I am not sure why, but many people (news / media outlets?) love end of world scenarios. too often pessimists are treated as serious, critical thinkers, while optimists are dismissed as naive or foolish. remember this guy Michael Burry who saw the 2008 housing crash coming, bet everything against it, and made a fortune? but then he spent the next 15 years trying to pull off the exact same trick, lost a ton of money fi…

Thanks a bunch, this is really nice advice! Jobs would come and go, One should focus on building skills (the thing we can control!)

Re: Five US tech giants' hidden debts soar to $1.65T on opaque AI funding

#197

Post by ItsBob »

Gareth321 wrote: post #182
ItsBob wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Further, unlike during the dotcom crisis, most of this spending is not driven by debt. Unfortunately, that's not the case. Between the big 5 (Microsoft, Meta, Amazon etc.) they're spending more than $600 Billion in 2026! They don't have that much cash lying around so they're selling bonds! That's debt! Not only that, they're increasing the bond sales in Europe! I assume that means they're tapped-out in the US! All…

Bond sales are pretty normal for companies, AI or not. Leverage is in very low ratios compared to the dotcom era. Much of the dotcom era telecom expansion depended on debt and projected future demand, but the resulting networks were so overbuilt that only about 2% of North American long-distance capacity was being used. Falling prices left numerous operators unable to service their debts. Today’s AI expansion is led…

I don't think Microsoft would fail if it all crashed. Nor would Google or Amazon as they all have alternate revenue streams.

It's the pure AI companies like OpenAI that will hit the wall.

However, the tech companies are increasing their debt enormously. That's the issue.

Re: Five US tech giants' hidden debts soar to $1.65T on opaque AI funding

#198

Post by tchalla »

elictronic wrote: post #96
tchalla wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The advantages of being a reserve currency and then also blaming your peer competitors as “manipulators”.

China is a currency manipulator who steals patents and ideas from other countries. The US uses the reserve currency as it's most beneficial soft power. The Petrodollar is the clearest example of this by a large margin. Both are true.

The US also stole patens and ideas from other countries. So did Germany and Italy and pretty much every other country on this planet. Yeah, it is true that the US doesn't like a challenger here and when someone doesn't play by the rules that they want to set, they get upset. Everything is true, yes.

Re: Five US tech giants' hidden debts soar to $1.65T on opaque AI funding

#199

Post by surgical_fire »

alwaysanoobie wrote: post #155

Oh man,this makes my stomach churn with anxiety. It's a tough job market out there and it took 4 months to land job offers after being laid off. I have a competitive offer from Oracle OCI with a team adjacent to this initiative and I am seriously considering it. How long do you guys think it will take to blow up (if it does) To the experienced devs out there; would you take a 15% less offer from a medium sized compan…

> To the experienced devs out there; would you take a 15% less offer from a medium sized company for job security?

In a hot job market, no.

In the current job market, yes.

It's one of the main reasons I am sticking to my current employer. I could likely make more money by moving jobs right now ; I still get the odd recruiter reaching out here and there; but I fancy the security when I see dark clouds on the horizon.

And oh boy, those clouds are very dark. Foreboding indeed.

Re: Five US tech giants' hidden debts soar to $1.65T on opaque AI funding

#200

Post by bulbar »

londons_explore wrote: post #100
laughing_man wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is if large banks fail they take everyone else with them. We should have dealt with this in 2009, but for some reason it didn't happen. But money talks, I guess.

Iceland let it's banks default, and is now doing rather well. In fact, bank failure and then having the government only guarantee ~$50k of funds per person is a good way to hand wealth to the people and take it from corporations and the super wealthy.

Big corporate borrowed the money already, so it will stay with some (other) big corporate in this scenario. The bankers who did it will see that coming and move their money elsewhere and keep their money as well.

What you suggest will hit normal persons.

What we really need is people going to jail that let stuff like that happen. Let them bear actual responsibility for their 1,000k+ salary.

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