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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'

#401
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why trade individual stocks anyway? Cost averaging ETFs is a proven way to building wealth. S&P goes down 20%, you average down, it recovers and you get another 2-3 years of growth. This goes on until civilization collapses.

If you buy ETFs, you basically hold some stocks you don't want. For example, stock from war profiteering companies (lockheed, raytheon). Note that investing in war profiteers is a proven way to build wealth. I just don't want to do that. This argument not only applies to evil companies, but also dumb ones. For example, I have no interest in investing in IBM or Oracle even those both of those are also money makers.

That only works if you wear horse blinders and subconsciously ignore or make up excuses for evil by association. There is absolutely no way to invest anything ethically.

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

#402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Supply is driven by demand unless there is a monopoly in house building (there isn't). If this wasn't the case, one could quickly become a billionaire by starting first company that build small houses that are supposedly in demand but not provided by the market

> Supply is driven by demand unless there is a monopoly in house building (there isn't). There is, however, a monopoly on issuing building permits.

Bingo! And that's on government. Remove (or relax) those now by decree and rent prices drop tomorrow

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

#403
post #160

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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…

Does the USA even have enough money to rescue the tech giants at this point? We could be talking multiple trillion dollars at worst. And the AI only companies like OpenAI and Anthropic would be the most vulnerable in comparison to say Google or Microsoft, because they have no fallback and no sustainability without investor money. And Nvidia would be left in a weird place where the vast majority of their profits are c…

Microsoft, Google, etc are printing money despite the bubble, not because.

Don't see why they would need rescuing.

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

#404
post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So "social capital" == "education"? The US has pushed a shit ton of money into education. I mean an unreasonable amount of it went to administrators. But the goal and the intent was certainly there.

Education is part of it. But a lot of the social capital which makes societies prosperous is separate from what we usually consider to be education. On an individual behavior level that includes things like knowing how to show up for work on time, sober, and properly dressed, and follow management instructions without arguing or taking things personally. These are skills that people in the middle and upper classes ta…

This seems to be saying that a large fraction of poor people are poor only because of bad habits, which they have only because nobody taught them any better?

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

#405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is developers maximizing profit per lot. All this means is there are enough buyers who can afford 2,800 sqft houses to keep builders from wasting a lot on a 1,600 sqft house. There could be a lot more people who want a cheaper 1,600 sqft house (including some of the 2,800 sqft house buyers!) than who want 2,800 sqft houses, but the market will keep delivering the latter as long as the return is better (for the r…

> All this means is there are enough buyers who can afford 2,800 sqft houses to keep builders from wasting a lot on a 1,600 sqft house. So there's a limited supply of lots (or of permission to use those lots).

Exactly. Zoning laws affect lot sizes, remove them as in Houston or most other countries and the problem disappears.

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

#406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Supply is driven by demand unless there is a monopoly in house building (there isn't). If this wasn't the case, one could quickly become a billionaire by starting first company that build small houses that are supposedly in demand but not provided by the market

You're still presupposing that there's a linear (or at least linear enough to be significant amongst the myriad other factors involved) relationship between square footage of house and cost. And that that relationship extends arbitrarily downwards as you reduce the square footage.

It's one of the main factors. And it can be reduced to almost nothing if a small single family housing zone is turned into a skyscraper providing accommodation for thousands

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

#407
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…

A generous welfare state (like the Nordics or Switzerland) does not necessarily mean that the middle class is well off with lots of resources for kids. Usually it's the middle class (+upper class) that pays for the generous welfare state, but gets almost none of the benefits. You don't get/need the welfare, if you earn enough to be considered middle class.

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

#408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So tell us the economics of it? The vast majority of AI doomers in the mass media have never used tools like v0 or Cursor. How would they know that AI is overvalued?

Are the companies making a profit on every prompt I give it (factoring in the cost of upgrading GPUs every year or two)?

According to OpenAI, yes. They're "very profitable" on inference. It is the training and capex (driven by competition) that is driving loss.

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

#409

People predicting a crash and pulling back due to a bubble indicates the beginning of the bubble. If I were the gambling man, I would grab my PETS.AI stock and sit tight.

I'm inclined to agree.

I don't think we're anywhere near the 2000 peak.

At least let OpenAI IPO, and then a few of the LLM wrapper companies to IPO with a ton of hype first.

We're calling the top without an OpenAI IPO first? That seems crazy to me.

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

#410
post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? Sure! Google began investing heavily in AI (LLMs, actually) to catch up to the other frontier labs, which had already produced a product that was going to eviscerate Google Search (and therefore, Google ad r…

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