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Alphabet's cash burn raises alarm for Big Tech as AI spending climbs

reuters.com

231–240 of 306 posts

Re: Alphabet's cash burn raises alarm for Big Tech as AI spending climbs

#231
post #217
post #84

Looking at cash burn is looking at the wrong end of the horse. Some companies, like Meta, have burned huge piles of cash in pursuit of, for example, the Metaverse and they've got nothing to show for it, not even a slight increment in ad tech, and yet they earned enough to shrug it off. There's a big difference between Google spending tens of billions on AI infrastructure and what Oracle is doing. Oracle is spending t…

Meta glasses are a direct result of this investment, and they're selling like hotcakes

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Re: Alphabet's cash burn raises alarm for Big Tech as AI spending climbs

#232
post #84

Looking at cash burn is looking at the wrong end of the horse. Some companies, like Meta, have burned huge piles of cash in pursuit of, for example, the Metaverse and they've got nothing to show for it, not even a slight increment in ad tech, and yet they earned enough to shrug it off. There's a big difference between Google spending tens of billions on AI infrastructure and what Oracle is doing. Oracle is spending t…

If AI flops, they’re be left holding large pools of useful datacenter/compute capacity and “revert” to one of the most profitable businesses of all time.

Welcome to the world of too big to fail and the rich are beyond mortal judgement.

Re: Alphabet's cash burn raises alarm for Big Tech as AI spending climbs

#233
post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what its worth, SK Hynix CEO has every incentive to show that RAM prices will remain high for as long as possible because that is the only thing which is floating their evaluation to such astronomical amounts. Independent estimates sort of show around 2027-28 from what I remember. I remember reading some article which said that RAM prices are already going down from its peak slowly (IIRC I can be wrong, I usually…

[flagged]

Being wrong on a forecast of future customer demand is not illegal.

Re: Alphabet's cash burn raises alarm for Big Tech as AI spending climbs

#234

I'm thinking Apple has been really smart in their AI strategy here. It seems a mistake to make unprecedentedly large capital expenditures, in a very very crowded space, without much evidence of a moat. Presumably people thought the moat would be singularity-like self-improvement of AI, but the singularity is merely a religious concept, and nobody should take religious myth as fact, it's merely narrative for orientati…

Their strategy to let Siri stagnate for 15 years and let everyone else take that market? Their strategy to put a bunch of not ready for consumer use AI features on their devices and then roll them back? They just have such a strong hardware + os ecosystem that they can sit on the sidelines. They'll be able to negotiate with some LLM provider at a good discount when the time is right and put harnesses around it for ac…

> They just have such a strong hardware

"just" doing a very heavy lifting here

Re: Alphabet's cash burn raises alarm for Big Tech as AI spending climbs

#235
post #2

These alarms have been going off for a long time now. Everyone is already in too deep to admit that there’s a problem.

I see eventuality here as job cuts or salary cuts. Don't think that day is far when "software people" are paid as if they were taxi drivers.

You're probably right but honestly why would anyone stay in software if that happens?

Re: Alphabet's cash burn raises alarm for Big Tech as AI spending climbs

#236
post #84

Looking at cash burn is looking at the wrong end of the horse. Some companies, like Meta, have burned huge piles of cash in pursuit of, for example, the Metaverse and they've got nothing to show for it, not even a slight increment in ad tech, and yet they earned enough to shrug it off. There's a big difference between Google spending tens of billions on AI infrastructure and what Oracle is doing. Oracle is spending t…

If AI flops, they’re be left holding large pools of useful datacenter/compute capacity and “revert” to one of the most profitable businesses of all time.

useful for what? my unemployed neighbours wordpress website?

Re: Alphabet's cash burn raises alarm for Big Tech as AI spending climbs

#237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question will be whether customers can switch. Can you install a near-SOTA model on a cluster in a data center? Of course. Compliance and operations are the sticking points. I work in healthcare IT, and it's amazing how tight the data compliance requirements are. I can't have someone in Canada look at prod data. If we told hospitals that we were handing off PHI/PII to Chinese models, they'd end our relationship d…

My primary role is cybersecurity in a regulated entity in a regulated industry, I am highly confident it is straightforward to do so based on work accomplished in only a couple of weeks. Stand up a router, stand up a Kubernetes cluster if you don't have one, stand up the necessary VMs and compute for serving inference. Two pizza team, in my experience. Customers can switch (although we can argue the speed and pain of…

There's a difference between "It's straightforward to do" and "I can convince a customer to sign a contract allowing us to do it."

If the second one were as easy as the first, I wouldn't have to be online at 9:00 to deploy stuff to prod tonight; the team in India would handle it. But customers write into the contracts that only US-based employees interact with prod systems. No amount of cajoling will get them to change their minds; they have data sovereignty, international telecommunications treaties, and HIPAA compliance to worry about. So I'll be pressing buttons tonight.

Could you swap out Anthropic or OpenAI or Google or whoever's models for Kimi? Yes. They're like other software these days, they're modular. What isn't modular is regulatory and geopolitical concern.

Re: Alphabet's cash burn raises alarm for Big Tech as AI spending climbs

#238
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But diversify into what? If we assume this takes down the US economy and bonds, what then? International bonds/stocks? Won't those also be too entangled? Precious metals?

Nobody can tell you what to diversify into without information about what you are concentrated in. Sure, spread investments across stocks and bonds and treasuries from different markets. But you can also diversify more broadly beyond economic capital to cultural and social capital. Learn new skills and build networks of generalized reciprocity with others before you (or they) need help.

> without information about what you are concentrated in.

They said cash.

Re: Alphabet's cash burn raises alarm for Big Tech as AI spending climbs

#239
post #158
post #113

The current commitment by hyperscalers is around 1.7T USD, reported liabilities 1.3T and this year global debt related to AI is 570B. So that’s around 3T total. For this to make sense AI must generate 2T in new revenue per year by the end of the decade. And that would be only a 10% ROIC. For context ROIC for big tech is around 35% so at 10% they will be barely breaking even. The SP500 gives 10-12%. With 10% ROIC from…

H100 is nearing five years and costs more to buy a used one now than a new one when it was released :) You are completely missing the bet these companies are making. They think can outlast their competitors and capture a larger portion of the pie while the cost of inference keeps going down dramatically. If you haven't been paying attention, the cost is about 1/100th of what it was in 2024. This is the trajectory pre…

The fact that supply constrained GPUs holding value is negative indicator. It's like the tulips mania except bubble enthusiasts are buying wilted/dead tulips because live tulips supply constrained due to irrational demand. Now GPUs has more gross utility than tulips but seems like at current revenue/capex spend, every GPU is still negative net financial yield - they lose money - literally buying tulips and watching it wilt. Economically, better off simply not buying and losing more. That's the level of economic irrationality at place sustaining bubble, at least for hyperscaler/big tech balance sheet - small operators logic different and antagonistic to big operator demand/business model.

If cost of inference goes down 100x, would need 100x more demand. This makes overspending on GPU even more irrational. Jevons this, Jevons that but ultimately irrelevant. At end of day, leading players, hungergame winner candidates is saddling themselves with so much debt, even if they survive, post crash they are immediately uncompetitive against new entrant with blank slate and newer gen, more efficient GPUs that will be cheaper to buy/operate post crash when hardware prices will revert to mean.

It doesn't matter if some of the current players survive, they've basically stabbed and weakened themselves so much any healthy upstart in the future can wipe them out unless they lock in legislative protection... safety regulations, ban open source models etc.

That is the new bet, regulatory capture moat, because economic bet is entirely lost, especially with open models eroding mote.

Re: Alphabet's cash burn raises alarm for Big Tech as AI spending climbs

#240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question will be whether customers can switch. Can you install a near-SOTA model on a cluster in a data center? Of course. Compliance and operations are the sticking points. I work in healthcare IT, and it's amazing how tight the data compliance requirements are. I can't have someone in Canada look at prod data. If we told hospitals that we were handing off PHI/PII to Chinese models, they'd end our relationship d…

How long will a SOTA model be necessary? If day to day work can be achieved on an open weight model, the most evaporates overnight. Look at any computer in a big company. It isn't the fastest on the market, nor will it have the most RAM or largest monitor or fanciest keyboard. It is good enough at a good enough price point. Once it becomes possible and cheaper to host your own good enough open weight models, with all…

> How long will a SOTA model be necessary? If day to day work can be achieved on an open weight model, the most evaporates overnight.

Depends on the advantage it gives people and marketing of that advantage. You'd be surprised at how overpowered the average workplace laptop is. Each company I've been at has had at least some people who do non-technical roles using high-end hardware. Why? Because the account executive wants the fast machine and they get what they want.

You can apply the same to GenAI. Humans are notoriously bad at estimating actual needs when it comes to resource consumption. Best to have it and not need it than need it and not have it, especially if your competition just shelled out for SOTA.

And that's not even taking into consideration regulatory and customer concerns about where the AI you're serving requests with came from.

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