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

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

#361

Post by kjkjadksj »

willis936 wrote: post #326

Forget the talk about bubbles and corrections. Can someone explain to me the rationale of investing in a product, marketing it, seeing that it drives consumers away from your product and erodes trust, and then you continue to invest at an accelerating rate? Good business would have driven us very far away from this point years ago. This is very deep in the "because we can" territory. It's not FOMO.

The golden goose is not you or I. It is our boss who will buy this junk for us and expect us to integrate it into our workflows or be shown the door. It is the broccoli headed kids who don’t even have to crack open cliffnotes to shirk their academic responsibilities anymore. It is universities that are trying to “keep up” by forcing an AI prompting class as a prerequisite for most majors. These groups represent a lot of people and a lot of money.

It doesn’t have to work. It just has to sell and become entrenched enough. And by all metrics that is what is happening. A self fulfilling prophecy, no different than your org buying redundant enterprise software from all the major vendors today.

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

#362

Post by aurareturn »

j_w wrote: post #46
aurareturn wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenAI, Anthropic, and others will be bought for cents on the dollar. OpenAI is existential threat to all big tech including Meta, Google, Microsoft, Apple. Hence, they're all spending lavishly right now to not get left behind. Meta --> GenAI Content creation can disrupt Instagram. ChatGPT likely has more data on a person than Instagram does by now for ads. 800 million daily active users for ChatGPT already. Google -…

> Apple --> OpenAI can make a device that runs ChatGPT as the OS instead of relying on iOS. Yeah... No they can't. I don't agree with any of your "disruptions," but this one is just comically incorrect. There was a post on HN somewhat recently that was a simulated computer using LLMs, and it was unusable.

I find myself doing more and more inside ChatGPT. When ChatGPT inevitably can generate GUIs on the fly, book me an uber, etc. I don't see why iOS wouldn't have competition.

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

#363

Post by kjkjadksj »

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…

Its not even about reducing headcount but offshoring too. I see that in my industry. Major orgs are all hiring in bangalore now. Life is good if you are in bangalore or hyderabad. Ai is seen as something to smooth over the previous language/skill/culture gaps that may have been plugging the dam so far.

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

#364

Post by aurareturn »

NumberCruncher wrote: post #222
aurareturn wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They consistently have the best or second best models. They have infrastructure that serves 800 million monthly active users. Investors are lining up to give them money. When they IPO, they'll easily be worth over $1 trillion. There's price competition right now. They're still surviving. If there is price competition, they're the most likely to survive.

They have infrastructure that serves 800 million monthly active users. Even worse, they train their model(s) on the interactions of those non-paying customers, what makes the model(s) less useful for paying customers. It's kind of a "you can not charge for a Porsche if you only satisfy the needs of a typical Dacia owner".

  They have  infrastructure that serves 800 million monthly active  users.
I don't pay Meta any money too. Yet, Meta is one of the most profitable companies in the world.

I give more of my data to OpenAI than to Meta. ChatGPT knows so much about me. Don't you think they can easily monetize their 800 million (close to 1 billion by now) users?

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

#365

Post by aurareturn »

arunabha wrote: post #71
aurareturn wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we are in 1995 of the dotcom bubble for AI.

Clearly, a lot of people here disagree with you. Doesn't mean you cannot be right, but in general, the HN crowd is a pretty good predictor of the trends in the tech industry.

The mass is usually wrong on predicting these kinds of events. I don't see why HN is any different than Reddit group think.

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

#366

Post by aurareturn »

nixosbestos wrote: post #308
aurareturn wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, do you have a model for this? Or is it just regurgitating mass media that it's a bubble? If hyperscalers keep buying GPUs and Chinese companies keep saying they don't have enough GPUs, especially advanced ones, why should we believe someone that it's a bubble based on "feel"?

> why should we believe someone that it's a bubble based on "feel"? because leaders in the space also keep saying it? And then making financial moves that us pleebs can't even dream of, which back that up? This whole "the media keeps reporting it" as a point against the credibility of something is utterly silly and illogical.

The same people who are saying it are also the same people increasing capex?

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

#367

Post by strange_quark »

Octoth0rpe wrote: post #336
willis936 wrote: post #326

Forget the talk about bubbles and corrections. Can someone explain to me the rationale of investing in a product, marketing it, seeing that it drives consumers away from your product and erodes trust, and then you continue to invest at an accelerating rate? Good business would have driven us very far away from this point years ago. This is very deep in the "because we can" territory. It's not FOMO.

> Can someone explain to me the rationale of investing in a product, marketing it, seeing that it drives consumers away from your product and erodes trust, and then you continue to invest at an accelerating rate? I'll take a stab at this. It's not 100% clear to me which product you're referring to, so I'll try to answer as if the product is something that already has customers, and the maker of the product is shoving…

Correct. More succinctly, this what happens when the share price becomes the product.

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

#368

Post by [deleted] »

willis936 wrote: post #326

Forget the talk about bubbles and corrections. Can someone explain to me the rationale of investing in a product, marketing it, seeing that it drives consumers away from your product and erodes trust, and then you continue to invest at an accelerating rate? Good business would have driven us very far away from this point years ago. This is very deep in the "because we can" territory. It's not FOMO.

[deleted]

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

#369

Post by consp »

aurareturn wrote: post #364
NumberCruncher wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have infrastructure that serves 800 million monthly active users. Even worse, they train their model(s) on the interactions of those non-paying customers, what makes the model(s) less useful for paying customers. It's kind of a "you can not charge for a Porsche if you only satisfy the needs of a typical Dacia owner".

They have infrastructure that serves 800 million monthly active users. I don't pay Meta any money too. Yet, Meta is one of the most profitable companies in the world. I give more of my data to OpenAI than to Meta. ChatGPT knows so much about me. Don't you think they can easily monetize their 800 million (close to 1 billion by now) users?

Meta has the giant advantage that other people interact with your data. I think that is widely more valuable than what chat engines have.

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

#370

Post by macNchz »

willis936 wrote: post #326

Forget the talk about bubbles and corrections. Can someone explain to me the rationale of investing in a product, marketing it, seeing that it drives consumers away from your product and erodes trust, and then you continue to invest at an accelerating rate? Good business would have driven us very far away from this point years ago. This is very deep in the "because we can" territory. It's not FOMO.

There are at least a few stories from the 90s where companies that readily could have invested in “getting online” instead decided that it would only harm their existing business. The hype at the time was extraordinary to be sure, but after the dust settled the internet did change the shape of the world.

Nobody can really know what things will look like in 10 years, but if you have the capital to deploy and any conviction at all that this might be a sea-change moment, it seems foolish to not pursue it.

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