Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

491–500 of 752 posts

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

#491

Post by roenxi »

uniq7 wrote: post #314
jaredklewis wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

In which of those countries is it possible for a man to work an ordinary job, buy a house, settle down with a wife and support two or three children?

If they're happy to do it to 1970s standards, probably most of them. The standard of what an ordinary life looks like has gone up a lot. Plus when only the man worked looking after a home was a full time job - much less in the way of microwaves and washing machines and whatnot. It is worth remembering that in the early 1900s there were a lot of houses that didn't even have electricity.

The trends [0] are clear. As society offers people more comfort they have less children. Often radically so, having a GDP per capita of above $30k basically means that people stop having enough babies to hit the replacement rate.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility

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

#492

Post by Iulioh »

DeathArrow wrote: post #472
brainwad wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eastman Kodak tried your implied proposed strategy, of ignoring technological developments that undermine their core product. It didn't go so well. Naturally technology companies have learned from this and other past mistakes.

Kodak developed a prototype digital camera in 1975. In 1990 they started selling digital cameras. They manufactured their own sensors. How did they ignore technological advancements?

Having the shinyest toys is useless if you don't play with them.

They had the tech but didn't see the danger in it, they belived that the lower quality digital camera would fail and investing in them would mean exploring a new market and they choose the safe corporate move, buisness as usual.

Turns out that low quality but way more pratical and cheaper on the long run really sells

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

#493

Post by WmWsjA6B29B4nfk »

nairboon wrote: post #407
jaredklewis wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You might be confusing Switzerland with something else. Switzerland is low tax, private and expensive healthcare and childcare.

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

#494

Post by [deleted] »

tdeck wrote: post #394
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? Hey now, Google Plus was more than a decade ago. I didn't like it either, but maybe it's time to move on? I think they learned their lesson.

[deleted]

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

#495

Post by philipallstar »

tdeck wrote: post #394
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? Hey now, Google Plus was more than a decade ago. I didn't like it either, but maybe it's time to move on? I think they learned their lesson.

Stadia was pretty recent, though.

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

#496

Post by saxenaabhi »

Pingk wrote: post #480
cm2187 wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The economy has never worked like that. When you increase productivity, you create wealth and you enable other industries to appear. We have gone through numbers of those cycles. The industrialisation of agriculture, then machines in manufacturing, then introduction of computers (think of all the secretarial jobs, computers - as in engineers making calculations, accountants that have disappeared), then outsourcing of…

Western employment has survived because automating and outsourcing labour has pushed people to take up knowledge/services work. If AI is somewhat successful at automating knowledge work, what feasible job could exist that doesn't require your mind or body? Services like healthcare and plumbing aren't going away of course, but there's not enough demand to support an economy on those jobs. In my opinion the whole econo…

> If AI is somewhat successful at automating knowledge work, what feasible job could exist that doesn't require your mind or body?

Very few office jobs in bigcos, but it does mean that you'll not need as much capital as before to start a business and compete with existing incumbents.

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

#497

Post by saxenaabhi »

janalsncm wrote: post #259
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…

Intuitively, the whole economy cannot be B2B SAAS companies funded by VCs. At some point you need to provide value to consumers or the government. If those consumers don’t have any money and/or aren’t willing to spend a paycheck making studio ghibli profile pics, you have a problem. I guess Sam Altman has been asking for a government bailout so maybe he is going for the b2g option in a backwards sort of way.

These consumers will have to stop being entitled salaryman and show some entrepreneurship to survive.

I think that's good thing.

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

#498

Post by willis936 »

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…

This is what I feel is the case. That is putting a lot of customers on the table. Valve / GabeN get it. In 2025 they make a marketing point about how their hardware runs arch and you can put whatever software you want on it. Valve is positioned to eat Microsoft's and Google's lunch if they're not careful. While chasing the fear of losing customers they are actively losing customers.

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

#499

Post by willis936 »

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 makes sense, but if the goal was to avoid business failure from disruption / losing customers, then why would the companies not be behaving in ways that maximize their customers? Intermediate value theorem applies here. There is no number of net negative customer base that can be spun in a good way. There is no path to recouping their lost customers. These fundamentals must be seen by the decision makers.

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

#500

Post by i386 »

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 is very revisionist. While they have been catching up quickly there was no master 4D chess strategy here. Google was incredibly late to this game - Sergey had to come back from retirement because most of the research team had a Sarah Connor complex and couldn’t ship. The saving grace is that AdWords picked up the tab again and founders shook the place up when it became clear the golden goose was being cooked.
Post reply on HN