Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google boss says AI investment boom has 'elements of irrationality'

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 752 posts

Re: Google boss says AI investment boom has 'elements of irrationality'

#291

Post by JoshTriplett »

janalsncm wrote: post #261
tharne wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem becomes that eventually all these people who are laid off are not going to find new roles. > Who is going to be buying the products and services if no-one has money to throw around? I've wondered about this myself. People keep talking about the trades as a good path in the post-AI world, but I just don't see it. If huge swaths of office workers are suddenly and permanently unemployed, who's going to be…

UBI correctly identifies the problem (people can’t afford housing/clothing/food without money) but is an inefficient solution imo. If we want people to have those things, we should simply give them to them.

How much of them, which ones, to who, at what price, who is forced to provide them, how much do they get, what about other needs...

Or we could just give people money and let them do as they wish with it, and trade off between their needs and wants as they see fit (including the decision of whether they want to work to obtain more of their wants).

Re: Google boss says AI investment boom has 'elements of irrationality'

#292

Post by eitally »

conartist6 wrote: post #27
tow21 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon might get through easily as companies . I don't think all G/M/M/A staff will get through easily.

Microsoft is in a pickle. They put AI lipstick on top of decades of unfixed tech debt and their relationship with their userbase isn't great. Their engineering culture is clearly not healthy. For their size and financial resources, their position in the market right now is very delicate.

I disagree. They're the one place that can get away without investing in frontier model research and still win in the enterprise.

Google is only place that serves the enterprise (Workspace for productivity, Cloud for IT, Devices for end users) AND conducts meaningful AI research.

AWS doesn't (they can sell cloud effectively, but don't have any meaningful in-house AI R&D), Meta doesn't (they don't cover enterprise and, frankly, nobody trusts Zuck... and they're flaky.

Oracle doesn't. They have grown their cloud business rapidly by 1) easy button for Oracle on-prem to move to OCI, and 2) acting like a big colo for bare metal "cloud" infra. No AI.

Open AI has fundamental research and is starting to have products, but it's still niche. Same as Anthropic. They're not in the same ball game as the others, and they're going to continue to pay billions to the hyperscalers annually for infra, too.

This is Google's game to lose, imho, but the biggest loser will be AWS (not Azure/Microsoft).

Re: Google boss says AI investment boom has 'elements of irrationality'

#293

Post by scythe »

Demiurge wrote: post #147
cedws wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't even know what the selling point of AI is for regular people. In the 60s it was possible for a man to work an ordinary job, buy a house, settle down with a wife and support two or three children. That's completely out of the realm of reality for many young people now and the plummeting birth rates show it. The middle class have financially benefited very little from the past 20+ years of productivity gains. S…

> In the 60s it was possible for a man to work an ordinary job, buy a house, settle down with a wife and support two or three children. Every kind of a man, or woman? > Do people really think more technology is going to be the path to a better society? Because to me it looks like the opposite. Well, this probably why statistics exist.

A lot of the people who admire the caricatured midcentury economy are probably actually just nostalgic for the '90s. Case-Shiller was much lower, gas was cheap, college was still relatively affordable. The biggest economic complaints of the present day were not as serious then. (There were still affordable parts of the Bay Area!) The subjection of black people and women that existed in the 60s obviously wasn't necessary for those things to be possible.

But each decade's economy is the product of decades past. The policies of the 90s brought us to the present. So we don't want to repeat the mistakes of the 90s, and the 80s are associated with the iniquities of the Reagan administration. Thus you get this misplaced nostalgia for the 50s-70s without really understanding the problems or the progress that society made even as the highest levels of government seemed to drift off course.

Re: Google boss says AI investment boom has 'elements of irrationality'

#294

Post by JoshTriplett »

rozap wrote: post #160
OptionOfT wrote: post #114

Interestingly I think if the AI succeed at the level that a lot of these CEOs hope we're not much better off either. And the sentiment that goes around is more: reduce the amount of people needed to do the same amount of work: https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/09/mckinsey_ai_monetizat... > McKinsey says, while quoting an HR executive at a Fortune 100 company griping: "All of these copilots are supposed to make work…

Realistically I think there are two outcomes: AGI succeeds and there are mass layoffs, money is concentrated further in the hands of those who own compute. OR AI bubble pops and there are mass layoffs, with bailouts going to the largest players to prevent a larger collapse, which drives inflation and further marginalizes asset-less people. I honestly don't see a third option unless there is government intervention, w…

> with bailouts going to the largest players

> I honestly don't see a third option unless there is government intervention

Bailouts are government intervention. The third option is an absence of government intervention, at least at the business level. By all means intervene in the form of support for impacted individuals, e.g. making sure people have food on the table. Stop intervening to save businesses that fail.

Re: Google boss says AI investment boom has 'elements of irrationality'

#295

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

cedws wrote: post #137
OptionOfT wrote: post #114

Interestingly I think if the AI succeed at the level that a lot of these CEOs hope we're not much better off either. And the sentiment that goes around is more: reduce the amount of people needed to do the same amount of work: https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/09/mckinsey_ai_monetizat... > McKinsey says, while quoting an HR executive at a Fortune 100 company griping: "All of these copilots are supposed to make work…

I don't even know what the selling point of AI is for regular people. In the 60s it was possible for a man to work an ordinary job, buy a house, settle down with a wife and support two or three children. That's completely out of the realm of reality for many young people now and the plummeting birth rates show it. The middle class have financially benefited very little from the past 20+ years of productivity gains. S…

> "In the 60s it was possible for a man to work an ordinary job, buy a house, settle down with a wife and support two or three children."

In the 1930s, it wasn't possible so what's your point? (History time: What happened on October 24, 1929?) Choosing the 1960s as a baseline is artificially cherry-picking an era of economic growth (at the expense of the rest of post-WW2 Europe and Asia who were rebuilding) instead of an era of decline or normalcy.

Re: Google boss says AI investment boom has 'elements of irrationality'

#296

Post by johnnyanmac »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #227
jimbokun wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well congratulations! We have succeeded in having stagnating wages and stagnating standard of living for everyone now!

Do you want to take a 20% pay cut so I can take the marginal benefit? Who wants to volunteer to be barred from working so I can negotiate better salary?

I have no full time job, so I already took the cut. You're welcome.

Re: Google boss says AI investment boom has 'elements of irrationality'

#297

Post by xnx »

jitix wrote: post #164
Demiurge wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the 60s it was possible for a man to work an ordinary job, buy a house, settle down with a wife and support two or three children. Every kind of a man, or woman? > Do people really think more technology is going to be the path to a better society? Because to me it looks like the opposite. Well, this probably why statistics exist.

Thanks for pointing out this skewed view of economic history common in North America. The short period of boom in 50s/60s US and Canada was driven by WW2 devastation everywhere else. We can see the economic crisis' in the US first in the 70s/80s with Europe and Japan rebounding, then again in 90s/00s with China and East Asia growing, and now again with the rest of the world growing (esp Latin America, India, Indonesi…

> In short, its easier to have high standards of living in your secure isolated island when the rest of the world (including historical industrial powers) are completely decimated by war.

Don't give them any ideas.

Re: Google boss says AI investment boom has 'elements of irrationality'

#298

Post by xnx »

cedws wrote: post #137
OptionOfT wrote: post #114

Interestingly I think if the AI succeed at the level that a lot of these CEOs hope we're not much better off either. And the sentiment that goes around is more: reduce the amount of people needed to do the same amount of work: https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/09/mckinsey_ai_monetizat... > McKinsey says, while quoting an HR executive at a Fortune 100 company griping: "All of these copilots are supposed to make work…

I don't even know what the selling point of AI is for regular people. In the 60s it was possible for a man to work an ordinary job, buy a house, settle down with a wife and support two or three children. That's completely out of the realm of reality for many young people now and the plummeting birth rates show it. The middle class have financially benefited very little from the past 20+ years of productivity gains. S…

> Do people really think more technology is going to be the path to a better society?

It has been for the last few thousand years.

Re: Google boss says AI investment boom has 'elements of irrationality'

#299

Post by paxys »

lesuorac wrote: post #49

> He told the BBC that the company owns what he called a “full stack” of technologies, from chips to YouTube data to models and frontier science research. This integrated approach, he suggested, would help the company weather any market turbulence better than competitors. I guess but is it better for an investor to own 2 shares of Google or 1 share of OpenAI and 1 share of TSMC? Like I have no doubt that being vertic…

With those 2 shares of Google you are also buying a piece of their money printer, i.e. the advertising business.
Post reply on HN