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

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

#261

Post by laughing_man » Wed, Jul 22, 2026, 1:34 AM UTC

DANmode wrote: post #259

laughing_man wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone else is literally everyone else. It doesn't matter what you have or what you do for a living, the collapse of the financial system is going to affect you negatively.

If a large private corporation is allowed to grow to the size of “the financial system”, regulators have failed their responsibilities, and need to unwind that immediately. Can’t have your cake and eat it, too.

I agree. We should have dealt with this in 2009, but we didn't. There are still individual banks that are too big.

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

#262

Post by lelanthran » Wed, Jul 22, 2026, 4:22 AM UTC

rmunn wrote: post #255

lelanthran wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But that has absolutely nothing to do with the thing this thread is about. That's how this thread started: >>>> That's the difference between innovating and copying/distilling someone else's innovation. How is distillation by one party okay but distillation by another not okay, even though in the second case the other party is paying the asking fees?

And, as I pointed out elsewhere, the difference I was pointing out was an economic difference. You keep on ignoring that fact and thinking I'm talking about ethics, but I'm not. I'm saying the difference is between spending trillions on training from raw data vs. spending billions on distilling that trained-from-raw-data model.

> And, as I pointed out elsewhere, the difference I was pointing out was an economic difference. You keep on ignoring that fact and thinking I'm talking about ethics, but I'm not.

I am talking about money now;

> . I'm saying the difference is between spending trillions on training from raw data vs. spending billions on distilling that trained-from-raw-data model.

Firstly, they didn't spend trillions on training.

I am pointing out that literal trillions were spent to assemble the data that the AI corps then spent dozens of billions training from.

You ignored that fact completely.

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

#263

Post by danaris » Wed, Jul 22, 2026, 7:54 AM UTC

xtiansimon wrote: post #204

AznHisoka wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who belongs to “all of us”, i vote to not bail us out if shit hits the fan. No need to ask me when it happens, OK? No really, it’s nice of you but we really dont need to be bailed out. You are welcome :)

> “As someone who belongs to “all of us”, i vote to not bail us out if shit hits the fan.” You have alighted onto an interesting topic: “bail out”. I believe a closely related word on the semiotic chain is “retreat”. I don’t feel that our culture would wish to “retreat” from AI. I know quite a few managers and programmers who absolutely delight in the fruits of the industry. No doubt the titans of the AI industry, wh…

> No doubt the titans of the AI industry, who stand to lose their shirts

No they don't.

They stand to lose points on their dollar-denominated high scores. If every one of the AI companies went belly-up, their execs would all live very, very comfortably for the rest of their lives even if they never got another job.

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

#264

Post by dizhn » Wed, Jul 22, 2026, 8:13 AM UTC

ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #221

dizhn wrote: post #172

The whole world's wealth is being siphoned off by these companies. I hope the very probable crash does not happen.

What would be the alternative scenario to a crash? As I understand it, for AI companies to not crash, they have to end up putting us all out of jobs which will end up with us becoming slaves/serfs.

I don't know who gave them that Utopian end goal but they could just settle slowly into a useful function. They didn't have to inflate so much as to make a crash almost inevitable.

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

#265

Post by londons_explore » Wed, Jul 22, 2026, 8:14 AM UTC

preg_match wrote: post #237

londons_explore wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We have similar FDIC insurance in the US. The solution is companies have many, many deposit accounts to still get the insurance, mostly for payroll purposes.

Could easily change the rules so real humans get government insurance, but companies do not.

And perhaps have the insurance pay out only once per year per person too, so that when multiple bank failures happen at once there is not much benefit to splitting funds.

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

#266

Post by ndsipa_pomu » Wed, Jul 22, 2026, 8:34 AM UTC

dizhn wrote: post #264

ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would be the alternative scenario to a crash? As I understand it, for AI companies to not crash, they have to end up putting us all out of jobs which will end up with us becoming slaves/serfs.

I don't know who gave them that Utopian end goal but they could just settle slowly into a useful function. They didn't have to inflate so much as to make a crash almost inevitable.

“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” Frank Herbert, Dune

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

#267

Post by DrScientist » Wed, Jul 22, 2026, 10:01 AM UTC

JohnFen wrote: post #241

DrScientist wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But aren't you confusing the means of exchange with the creation of value. The creation of value is me taking energy from the sun and converting that into a chair. You lending me money is you extracting value from artificially being a middleman. It would have been more efficient to write an IOU to the tool maker, make the chair and pay back the tool maker directly. Now sure that IOU isn't that fungible - however that…

> The creation of value is me taking energy from the sun and converting that into a chair. Which requires money to do. If you borrow that money to enable using solar to make furniture, then you can repay that money with interest and keep a profit for yourself. Both the borrower and lender come out with more money than they had when they started. That's not a zero-sum game. Now, it's 100% true that borrowing and lendi…

>> The creation of value is me taking energy from the sun and converting that into a chair.

> Which requires money to do.

No it doesn't require money. It requires energy. Money is often involved as a means of exchange, but it's not required.

If what you said is true it would be impossible to live off grid and make a chair.

By focusing on the money you are focusing on the means of exchange rather than the fundamentals - which is energy, knowledge and collaboration.

Let's take a concrete example - the development of Linux - did that require some large VC backed funding models or was it simply people sharing spare cycles for shared benefit? Here the underlying resources required was people's time [1] - not money per se.

[1] Sure some value was exchanged using the medium of money ( Red Hat existed, large companies shared larger cycles by explicitly paying employees etc ) - but that's not lending and interest with money somehow being the time limiting resource. Again don't confuse the means of exchange with the thing being exchanged.

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

#268

Post by mlrtime » Wed, Jul 22, 2026, 10:56 AM UTC

DrScientist wrote: post #184

mlrtime wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are trying to define zero sum without saying it. The market is not zero sum, a loan isn't zero sum. There isn't a winner and loser.

Why not? What am I missing. If you loan me 10 pounds and I simply keep it or spend it but refuse to pay you back - aren't I the winner and you the loser? Claiming that the market is a positive sum system, because I use that 10 pounds to invent something that changes world productivity is missing the fact that there is a constant stream of huge energy inputs from the sun - that's ultimately what allows the local entro…

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

#269

Post by mdnahas » Wed, Jul 22, 2026, 11:27 AM UTC

harry8 wrote: post #52

throwup238 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Technically, from an economic perspective, it's debt. Isn’t the important difference that it doesn’t trigger bankruptcy on default? Economically it might not be that different but it has some significance legally because the courts have some fast tracks that trigger bankruptcies (IANAL but that’s my layman’s understanding). If they “default” in this case it will lead to lawsuits that they will almost certainly lose…

if you can't meet your obligations as and when they fall due, you're insolvent. Contractual specification from there.

Economist here. There are 3 parties and I’d focus on the investor’s perspective. The investor gives money to the intermediary company that signs a contract with the using company. If the contract fails, the intermediary still has the asset and can still make money. It can still payback the investor.

If the investor was given a bond, it is possible they aren’t paid back in full. And that’s where I would worry. The Great Recession was so bad because bond rating agencies marked bad bonds as investment-grade. That is, bonds you could rely on. When “sure future money” isn’t sure, the system glitches.

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

#270

Post by harry8 » Wed, Jul 22, 2026, 12:31 PM UTC

vasco wrote: post #163

harry8 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's regulation update and work around. The point of channeling the 1980s is because it was simple for the 101 explanation. Investment bakers will structure it for you if you need it, inline with the current regulatory environment. At one time cross border leases were fashionable for tax purposes. I don't keep up with such things to know if they still are.

How will they structure that for you to not show up on the balance sheet then? I'm not aware of a way, and the way you described wasn't true. All you now offered is "bankers can do it", but how without having to report it?

This isn’t something in which I’m an expert on any of the current details.

You can borrow a million dollars and use it to buy gold. An asset and a liability on the balance sheet each ba million dollars.

You can buy futures contracts with an underlying value of a million dollars. Nothing on the balance sheet. Zero dollars on both assets and liabilities.

The two are economically indistinguishable.

There are regulations around leases, for example, about what you have to capitalise on the balance sheet and when. Then there are workarounds for those rules. New rules cause the investment bankers to go to work. For a fee.