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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'

#441

Post by antonvs »

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.

> because leaders in the space also keep saying it?

They have a lot of reasons for saying that, including to give themselves cover in the event of a crash.

What’s happening now is a classic land grab. You’re always going to get inflated prices in that situation, and it’s always going to correct at some point. It’s difficult to predict when, though.

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

#442

Post by bluescrn »

xnx wrote: post #298
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…

> 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.

That ended in around 2010, IMHO.

Now technology mostly divides and manipulates us, enshittifies things, and works to turn billionaires into trillionaires.

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

#443

Post by schnitzelstoat »

Ancapistani wrote: post #335
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? 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…

Yeah, like imagine if the LLM's don't advance that much, the agentic stuff doesn't really take off etc.

Even in this conservative case, ChatGPT could seriously erode Google Search revenues. That alone would be a massive disruption and Google wants to ensure they end up as the Google in that scenario and not the Lycos, AltaVista, AskJeeves etc. etc.

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

#444

Post by schnitzelstoat »

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…

The main problem there is soaring housing costs which have nothing to do with technology and everything to do with extremely restrictive planning regulations that make it impossible for the housing supply to keep up with population growth.

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

#445

Post by terminalshort »

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.

> seeing that it drives consumers away from your product and erodes trust

Where is your evidence for this part of your claim?

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

#446

Post by sampullman »

Frieren wrote: post #437
macNchz wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Nobody can really know what things will look like in 10 years, 100% true. Do not invest trillions on such an uncertainty in the long term is always a bad investment. > 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. Gamblers argument: "But what if this is the winning ticket?"

Then aren't most forms of investment based on a "gambler's argument"?

A risky investment is obviously akin to gambling, but to get things built and make a profit you have no other choice.

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

#447

Post by 5d41402abc4b »

rockemsockem wrote: post #345

There's a weird gleefulness about AI being a bubble that'll pop any day now both in this thread and in the world at large. It's kinda weird and I find most of the predictions about the result of such a bubble popping to sound highly exaggerated.

>There's a weird gleefulness about AI being a bubble that'll pop any day now both in this thread and in the world at large

All i want is some cheap RAM for my PC.

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

#448

Post by isoprophlex »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #361
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…

> broccoli headed kids

now that there's a prime quality rare insult

anyway i totally agree with your reasoning. one might as well ask "why is MS Teams so bad? it's bloated, slow, buggy, nasty to use from a UX pov... yet it's everywhere"

this shitware -- ms teams, llm slopguns, whatever -- never had to work, they just have to sell.

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

#449

Post by epicureanideal »

rr808 wrote: post #356
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is far from true. Aside from Valley pay, which also has Valley housing costs, a "tech job" will barely pay for healthcare and housing for one, much less healthcare and housing for four.

Median dev salary in USA is $133k, most likely with healthcare already. You can easily afford a mortgage on a median home which is about $24k/yr. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/... https://www.zillow.com/home-values/102001/united-states/ https://www.calculator.net/mortgage-calculator.html?chousepr...

The median dev doesn’t work in a city with a median cost of living. The jobs are concentrated where there’s a high cost of living.

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

#450

Post by isoprophlex »

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…

We're disappearing up our own assholes made of misery, loneliness and consumerism.

If you want a picture of the future: imagine a robotic boot, stamping on a human face that's begging for more techno-stamping, forever.

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