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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'

#371

Post by amypetrik8 »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #312
SrslyJosh wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The middle class have financially benefited very little from the past 20+ years of productivity gains. More like the last 50 years. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/08/07/for-most-... "For most U.S. workers, real wages have barely budged in decades" The TL;DR is that in 1964 the average hourly wage was $20.27. As of 2018, average hourly wage was $22.65.

1974 median individual income was $28k 2024 median individual income was $45k Over 50 years that’s a decent amount of growth. Obviously it could be better but it’s not nothing. Source: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N

Sure but pretty sure with your 1974 28k you could buy a nice house, whereas with your 2024 (equivalent) 45k you can buy an OK car, not a house

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

#372

Post by consp »

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.

Bitcoin is going to be the next universal payment system anytime now...

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

#373

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

janalsncm wrote: post #348
JoshTriplett wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

How much money should everyone get?

The right answer to this is not a number, but rather a feedback loop that converges on the right number. When everyone is laid off without production of goods slowing down, the result is deflation; when everyone gets too much money relative to production of goods, the result is inflation. So that means you can use the CPI inflation as a feedback variable, and adjust the UBI amount until the CPI is stable.

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

#374

Post by shalmanese »

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.

What evidence do you have that it's driving consumers away from the product? The people who bother to say anything on the internet are the extreme dedicated minority and are often not representative of a silent majority. Unless you have access to analytics, you can't make this inference.

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

#375

Post by WhyOhWhyQ »

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…

The narrative going around in AI skeptic circles at least is that these layoffs are not tied to AI but to covid-era over-hiring, and that companies have an incentive to blame the layoffs on AI rather than admit underperformance/bad planning.

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

#376

Post by pchristensen »

jaredklewis wrote: post #310
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…

> That's completely out of the realm of reality for many young people now and the plummeting birth rates show it. I'm skeptical of this explanation for falling birthrates just because birthrates are falling across the world and there seems to be no correlation between fertility and financial security. America has low birthrates. Scandinavia (usually considered to have generous welfare states) has low birthrates. Hung…

This documentary goes into a lot of detail on the causes worldwide: The Birth Gap - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2GeVG0XYTc

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

#377

Post by boxerab »

macNchz wrote: post #370
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 convi…

Pascal's Wager for tech.

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

#378

Post by boxerab »

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.

the main problem with UBI is it makes people even more dependent on the state, and therefore more easy to control by said state.

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

#379

Post by aurareturn »

consp wrote: post #369
aurareturn wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Given that OpenAI has publicly stated that they're working on monetizing free users (ads), I think they can make ads targeting as good as Meta can.

This is why Meta is all in on AI by the way. With nearly 1 billion users, ChatGPT is a huge threat to Meta's ad empire.

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

#380

Post by heresie-dabord »

ares623 wrote: post #58
burnte wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, it's when. They're hoping to stave it off or maybe stretch out the pop into a correction by all hedging together with all these incestuous deals, but you can't hold back the tide. They debuted this tech way too early, promised way too much, and now the market is wary about buying AI products until more noise settles out of the system.

It’s going to pop as soon as they get confirmation the govt will bail them out. Until then they’re going to give it their all to keep it growing.

The bubble may well burst when the corporations are denied the enormous quantity of energy that they claim they need "to innovate". From TFA:

"""

Mr Pichai said action was needed, including in the UK, to develop new sources of energy and scale up energy infrastructure.

"You don't want to constrain an economy based on energy, and I think that will have consequences," he said.

He also acknowledged that the intensive energy needs of its expanding AI venture meant there was slippage on the company's climate targets, but insisted Alphabet still had a target of achieving net zero by 2030 by investing in new energy technologies.

"""

"Slippage" in this context probably means, "We no longer care about climate change but we don't feel that mere citizens are ready to hear us say it."

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