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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'

#451

Post by epicureanideal »

byryan wrote: post #302
astura wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the census bureau median family income in 1960 was $5,600, which is $58,946.59 in Jan 2024 dollars. It's $83,730 in 2024. For individual males, in 1960 it was $4,100 ($43,157.33 Jan 2024 dollars) and $71,090 in 2024. Sources: https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1962/demo/p60-03... https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2025/demo/p60-28... https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl The thing is,…

I think you're out of touch with what "almost everyone" considers an acceptable standard of living. I know plenty of people who have a single car or none at all, live in apartments living pay check to pay check with no kids at all because they are afraid they can't afford them. They would love to have what you described, minus the no cell phones/internet.

A random idea I had a few years ago was, what if someone started a “recent modern Amish” community, where they just intentionally keep the community’s tech usage either fixed at 1960s or 1990s, or maybe a fixed number of years in the past like 30 or 50 (meaning, the time target moves forward by a year each year).

So the kids growing up now might be playing the original Nintendo NES, or maybe an N64, they’d have phones and even computers, etc.

It could even be a little more nuanced like, the community could vote in certain classes of more modern goods.

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

#452

Post by akoboldfrying »

jaredklewis wrote: post #435
akoboldfrying wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Birth rates correlate negatively with education of women. I read somewhere that this is one of the most robust findings in all of social science (and when I asked Gemini just now whether there was such a correlation, it said the same).

There’s a (positive or negative) correlation between birth rates and dozens of factors, because over the period birth rates have been falling, the world has changed dramatically. Issue is we don’t know what is causal. education also correlates with all kinds of other factors like income, type of work, marital status, and political views, meaning birth rates are also likely correlated with all of these factors.

>Issue is we don’t know what is causal.

Is it really true that this is not known? Although I only claimed correlation (and am thus surprised that I was downvoted twice, as that claim is obviously true), based on the famous "robustness" of this observation, I strongly suspect that confounding factors like those you mention have already been analysed to death, and found not to eliminate the explanatory power of women's education.

At least, checking these confounders seems an obviously valuable and interesting avenue to explore. If it hasn't been done yet, I wonder what social scientists are doing instead.

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

#453

Post by jcgrillo »

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…

> frontier labs, which had already produced a product that was going to eviscerate Google Search (and therefore, Google ad revenue)

> If Google does nothing, they lose.

Is any of that actually true though? In retrospect, had google done nothing their search product would still work. Currently it's pretty profoundly broken, at least from a functional standpoint--no idea how that impacts revenue if at all. To me it seems like google in particular took the bait and went after a paper tiger, and in doing so damaged their product.

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

#454

Post by jcgrillo »

kergonath wrote: post #426
rockemsockem wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're talking about all of AI with your statement I think you may need to reconcile that opinion with the fact that chat GPT alone has almost 1 billion daily users. Clearly lots of people derive enormous value from AI. If there's something more specific and different you were referring to I'd love to hear what it is.

> Clearly lots of people derive enormous value from AI. I don’t really see this. Lots of people like freebies, but the value aspect is less clear. AFAIK, none of these chatbots are profitable. You would not see nearly as many users if they had to actually pay for the thing.

In the article Pichai is quoted saying:

> "It doesn't matter whether you want to be a teacher [or] a doctor. All those professions will be around, but the people who will do well in each of those professions are people who learn how to use these tools."

Bullshit. Citation very much needed. It's a shame--a shameful stain on the profession--that journalists don't respond critically to such absurd nonsense and ask the obvious question: are you fucking lying?. It is absolutely not true that AI tools make doctors more effective, or teachers, or programmers. It would be very convenient to people like Pichai and Scam Altman, but that don't make it so.

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

#455

Post by rifty »

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…

This has been how I've framed a lot of the expenditure despite lack of immediate substantial new revenues. Everyone including Google is driven to protecting current revenues from prospective disruption. But the vulnerability AI created for Google is to other companies worth positioning themselves to take advantage of if Google falls behind and loses chunks of marketshare.

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

#456

Post by ribosometronome »

crossbody wrote: post #402
tbrownaw wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Government? Or the people? These are local government issues, they're not that far detached from the people who elect them.

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

#457

Post by jcgrillo »

isoprophlex wrote: post #450
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…

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.

This is an excellent metaphor, so don't take this as criticism merely an observation, but it skews heavily towards the techno-utopian narrative that scam artists like Altman and Pichai keep harping on. Your techno-dystopia makes the same fatal assumption that tech matters much at all. The internet has become television. That's it. It's not nothing but it damn sure ain't everything, and it's just not all that important to most folks.

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

#459

Post by ribosometronome »

Balgair wrote: post #281
nabla9 wrote: post #22

Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon will get through easily. They don't have excessive debt. They can afford to lose their investments into AI. Their valuations will take a hit. Nvidia will lose revenue and profits, stock will go down by 60% or more, but it will also survive. Oracle will likely fail. It funded its AI pivot with debt. The Debt-to-Revenue ratio is 1.77, the Debt-to-Equity ratio D/E is 520, and it has a…

> OpenAI, Anthropic, and others will be bought for cents on the dollar. And just like 23andme, so will all that data be sold for dimes.

If it's just like 23andme, that sale would be to Sam Altman.

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

#460

Post by ethanwillis »

bpt3 wrote: post #330
tharne wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've cited and linked their sources. What's the issue?

The issue is that it doesn't support his preconceived notion that everyone is doing terribly.

Actually I outlined what I believed the issue is before you replied and it's not that.
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