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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'

#521

Post by jcgrillo »

saxenaabhi wrote: post #513
skydhash wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Productive how? If you’re not measuring the thing, how can you tell that the thing improved?

Feature velocity has increase manifold. And this is despite decreased team size. A small startup now has the chance to compete with incumbents without raising from VCs. Not talking about you, but I think cynics just look at it with too much pessimism and therefore can't see it.

It's not really about optimism or pessimism, it's effect vs no effect. Self reported anecdotes like yours abound, but as far as I'm aware the effect isn't real. That is, it's not in fact true that if a business buys AI tools for its developers their output will increase in some way that impacts the business meaningfully. So while you may feel more productive using AI tooling, in fact you probably aren't, actually.

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

#522

Post by formerly_proven »

ThunderSizzle wrote: post #509
zdragnar wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two of my friends with relatively ordinary jobs have stay at home spouses. The cost of daycare is so high that it would basically eat up one of their salaries, and this way they get to actually spend time with their children, which they find to be more filling than a BS career. It is definitely doable in the US, and I would imagine most Western countries as well. My knowledge outside of them isn't current enough to s…

It's do-able, but the housing crisis needs to be resolved. People will never own a house if they didn't have skin in the game by 2021. Salaries are not rising to match housing price inflation. Specifically, both house prices and interest need to go down heavily. Sadly, they used higher interest to try to lower prices, and that didn't really bring prices down. More supply isn't helping much either, as there is no dive…

> It's do-able, but the housing crisis needs to be resolved.

Why? Almost everywhere a majority of people (and certainly the majority of voters) are already invested in housing and do not want their investment to loose value.

> Specifically, both house prices and interest need to go down heavily. Sadly, they used higher interest to try to lower prices, and that didn't really bring prices down.

People are more willing to spend an ever-growing share of their dual-incomes on housing, which drives housing prices modulo interest. So interest has no actual effect on housing affordability, since it doesn't influence how much people are willing to spend. If you lower interest, prices are simply going to rise such that people spend the same % of their income on housing. If you increase interest, prices will (eventually, slowly, since this is a seller-dominated market) fall to match.

> More supply isn't helping much either, as there is no diversity of supply, and builds aren't undercutting the market yet.

New builds will never be cheaper than existing housing stock. Low-cost new housing is a mirage; new housing is premium by construction.

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

#523

Post by philipallstar »

tbrownaw wrote: post #404
nradov wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There will be some people like that (e.g. middle class kid has terrible work ethic; communicates it to his kid and now that kid has bad habits), but in the large it's more about culture than individual habits.

If one person doesn't show up on time, that's a bad habit. If no one shows up on time then that's a cultural issue[0], and much more devastating.

As an example, Zim dug itself a huge hole by kicking out the productive white farmers in 2000-2001. One of the key issues charitable foreign people trying to help Zimbabwe addressed was in re-educating the local population in why it matters that all the planting work is done by a certain time of year. The white farmers had all that knowledge, and cultural experience of hard work, and had made Zimbabwe the breadbasket of Africa.

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

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

#524

Post by jcgrillo »

big-and-small wrote: post #467
jcgrillo wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 see…

Even before recent "AI improvements" for us tech nerds Google search was broken ad invaded something. But for average Joe up until recently it's was still okay because it served purpose of whatever normal people use search for: find some rumors about their favorite celebs, find some car parts information or just "buy X". Problem for Google is that for a good chunk of normal non-techy people LLM chats looks like talki…

I wonder is Google's AI investment a rational reaction to real competition or something else? My strong suspicion is that it's in fact delusional beliefs held by their management--something to do with "AGI"--that drives this activity, perhaps combined with the effects of information monoculture/social isolation/groupthink. It seems the simpler explanation that a very small group of people are behaving insanely than a very large number.

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

#525

Post by coffeebeqn »

crossbody wrote: post #339
p1necone wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The average home in 1960 was like 1600 sq ft, now its like 2800 sq ft. Statements like this are not particularly meaningful unless there is actually a supply of 1600 sqft houses that are proportionally cheaper, otherwise you're just implying a causal relationship with no evidence.

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

Why build a 500k house on your expensive lot when you can build a 1.5M house. Capitalism does not in any way optimize for the middle class

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

#526

Post by 4ggr0 »

ThunderSizzle wrote: post #518
4ggr0 wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Its in the nature of men to work and provide. That's how men seek fulfilment in life. i'm sorry, what? it's ingrained in men to be worker-drones and every man sees this as his fulfillment? yikes. as the kids say, 'touch grass'. translated for older people, "maybe expand your world-view and don't extrapolate your idea of a man to all of men."

Men are workers. Not all work needs to be a "worker-drone", but yes, all men are built towards some form of work, and that work typically is around an item of sorts. Men can work all sorts of ways, and that can include raising kids. Women tend to be a lot less happier leaving their kids to go toil with the dirt.

> Men are workers

What are women, then? Baby-machines, cooks and cleaners, which I guess you don't see as work?

I mean it's not the first time I encounter a dude with the same opinion as you have, but every time I'm surprised by the casual reductionism of our societies. Men make work, Women make baby. Men hard, Women soft. Men strong and powerful. Women weak and emotional.

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

#527

Post by oblio »

jcgrillo wrote: post #465
oblio wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Users still googled before. Now they just move to chatbots. Regular people don't really notice the search degradation as much and enshittification helps Google, as revenues kept going up. Chatbots are an existential threat since they will add ads and that's where Google's ad revenue dies.

Did any users actually move to chatbots? By which I don't mean the 0.001% of tech nerds who buy chatgpt subscriptions, but in aggregate did a meaningful number of google searchers defect to chatgpt or other llm services? I really doubt that. Data would be interesting but there's a credibility problem...

Gemini, ChatGPT and probably all of the others have free tiers that can be used as an enhanced web search. And they're probably better in many regards, since they do the aggregation directly. Plus regular users don't really check sources, can't really verify the trustworthiness of a website, etc, so their results were always hit or miss.

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

#528

Post by saxenaabhi »

jcgrillo wrote: post #521
saxenaabhi wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feature velocity has increase manifold. And this is despite decreased team size. A small startup now has the chance to compete with incumbents without raising from VCs. Not talking about you, but I think cynics just look at it with too much pessimism and therefore can't see it.

It's not really about optimism or pessimism, it's effect vs no effect. Self reported anecdotes like yours abound, but as far as I'm aware the effect isn't real. That is, it's not in fact true that if a business buys AI tools for its developers their output will increase in some way that impacts the business meaningfully. So while you may feel more productive using AI tooling, in fact you probably aren't, actually.

If there was no effect we wouldn't be seeing so many mass layoffs and people complaining about this job market being worst than even dot com crash.

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

#529

Post by [deleted] »

coffeebeqn wrote: post #525
crossbody wrote: post #339

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

Why build a 500k house on your expensive lot when you can build a 1.5M house. Capitalism does not in any way optimize for the middle class

[deleted]

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

#530

Post by croes »

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…

AI and robots have the same problem.

If they work they will ruin a any society where income is based on labor.

So AI either destroys capitalism or society.

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