Google boss says AI investment boom has 'elements of irrationality' • Hacker News Board

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

#571

Post by Planktonne » Wed, Nov 19, 2025, 1:17 PM UTC

ako wrote: post #514

roenxi wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 so…

According to Hans Rosling correlation was more between education level of women and the number of children: the higher women are educated, the less children they decide to have.

Another potential framing is that the higher women are educated, the more they get to decide.

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

#572

Post by spicyusername » Wed, Nov 19, 2025, 1:17 PM UTC

ahoka wrote: post #547

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…

"work an ordinary job, buy a house, settle down with a wife and support two or three children" Have you considered that there's more to human existence than to pay a mortgage and women are not something you keep in your house to watch after your offspring so they can do the very same when growing up?

I'm not sure what you're responding to, or why you're responding in such a hostile way. The wife can be the breadwinner, too.

Owning a home and having a parent be able to stay home with your children, husband or wife, are important pillars of a stable life. Who wants a society in which couples don't have time to parent their children or manage their household?

It's a fact that seeing to your children's education and social life, cleaning, cooking, and all of the other non-sexy activities of running a household are a full-time job. It doesn't need to be the wife that does that, but it's best when somebody in the family can.

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

#573

Post by DeathArrow » Wed, Nov 19, 2025, 1:18 PM UTC

belter wrote: post #42

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…

You will be able to rent a whole Meta datacenter with thousands of NVIDIA B200 for $5/hour. AWS will become unprofitable due to abundance of capacity...

That's sounds nice. I can run FLUX or SDXL on all those NVIDIAs and fill the Internet with porn.

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

#574

Post by saxenaabhi » Wed, Nov 19, 2025, 1:20 PM UTC

bossyTeacher wrote: post #562

saxenaabhi wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

In a world where AI automates jobs, arguably any business services you could offer would likely have no customers because those potential customers can automate the services you offer themselves just like AI automates the employment skills employees offer. Not sure why people keep bringing up entrepreneurship as if that couldn't be automated.

> In a world where AI automates jobs, arguably any business services you could offer would likely have no customers because those potential customers can automate the services you offer themselves just like AI automates the employment skills employees offer

Take the POS market for example. It's relatively trivial to setup your POS system in dbase/foxpro/MS-access. Yet almost every shop uses lightspeed/toast/square because they don't want to take on the additional burden of maintaining it and want support. They also hire web developers/designers to make their website even though framer/square space are super easy to use.

With AI I think what's happening is that more competitors are challenging these incumbents leading to downward pressure on pricing. Which is great for customers!

> Not sure why people keep bringing up entrepreneurship as if that couldn't be automated.

Ah, how would you automate entrepreneurship? This isn't the matrix where AI will suddenly wake up one day and start an entrepreneurship journey.

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

#575

Post by lelanthran » Wed, Nov 19, 2025, 1:26 PM UTC

giancarlostoro wrote: post #69

I think it will pop but not in the way everyone thinks it will pop. There's plenty that's not going to go away / anywhere, but I'm sure lots of startups will fail and close their doors.

> I think it will pop but not in the way everyone thinks it will pop.

Everyone thinks it will pop the way the dotcom bubble popped

> There's plenty that's not going to go away / anywhere, but I'm sure lots of startups will fail and close their doors.

Just like the dotcom bubble pop - IOW, just like the way everyone thinks it will pop.

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

#576

Post by saxenaabhi » Wed, Nov 19, 2025, 1:27 PM UTC

jcgrillo wrote: post #535

saxenaabhi wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No. If you're trying to make a causal link between some layoffs and AI tooling you need to bring the receipts. Show that the layoffs were caused by AI tooling, don't just assume it. I don't think you can, or that anyone has.

Most public companies aren't attributing it to AI yet due to fear of backlash, but it's obvious to most of us.

And Startups and SMB's are more open to attributing it to efficiency gains due to AI.

If you aren't seeing it then probably it's because you are in a niche vertical. Which is great for you, but not representative on the whole.

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

#577

Post by notepad0x90 » Wed, Nov 19, 2025, 1:27 PM UTC

They're betting on squeezing more dollars out of the ordinary person's wallet when B2B should have been their main focus. They lay off because of interest rates but gamble like there is still ZIRP.

Their anti-social tendency is the core problem, remember when they were laying off everyone in tech just because it was a trend? here too, they want to reduce head count instead of increase the value of their products and services to generate more revenue. AI has lots of value for sure. Monetizing that without increasing head count would have been sensible. Instead of getting rid of people, they could focus on freeing up the time of existing people so they can do more work and generate value/wealth for the company. Of course, companies like Google are doing exactly what I'm suggesting to the most part (that I know of), but the vast majority on the ai bandwagon are just there to see if they can make more revenue by having less people.

I don't doubt some big companies in this space will fail, but will that trigger a panic/sell-off? And can the US, after cutting off its allies and alienating the whole world recover? What are the social and geopolitical implications of not recovering?

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

#578

Post by lynx97 » Wed, Nov 19, 2025, 1:32 PM UTC

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…

> In the 60s it was possible for a man ... with a wife and support two or three children.

This is borderline sexist.

> and the plummeting birth rates show it

Those or, IMO, mostly due to the invention of the pill.

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

#579

Post by NeutralCrane » Wed, Nov 19, 2025, 1:36 PM UTC

frm88 wrote: post #477

shalmanese wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What evidence do you have that it's driving consumers away from the product? The people who bother to say anything on the internet are the extreme dedicated minority and are often not representative of a silent majority. Unless you have access to analytics, you can't make this inference.

https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2025/09/17/how-americans... That's only one article and with only a small focus: Americans only. U.S. adults are generally pessimistic about AI’s effect on people’s ability to think creatively and form meaningful relationships: 53% say AI will worsen people’s ability to think creatively, compared with 16% who say it will improve this.... Regarding your skepticism about the loss of…

That doesn’t say anything about pushing people away from using products with AI though. People are enormously negative about the effects of social media, and yet social media use is incredibly pervasive and sticky.

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

#580

Post by clbrmbr » Wed, Nov 19, 2025, 1:42 PM UTC

bossyTeacher wrote: post #543

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…

Problem is that in case of divorce, the stay at home partner financially suffers the most

What do you mean, they typically get half the assets and a sizable chunk of the other partner’s salary in alimony that they don’t need to give up if they do become employed, and then if childcare is needed typically this would be an extra child support expense that both parties pay for even if the erstwhile stay-at-home parent has full custody.

How would the stay-at-home parent get a bad deal here?