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

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651–660 of 752 posts

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

#651

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.

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.

I’m not sure this is the whole story.

Kodak operated in a region that was a manufacturing and technology hub until the mid 1900s. The region started to decline significantly in the 1960s. By the 1990s it was basically a ruins compared to the 1950s.

So by the time Kodak made this strategic mistake, I imagine they already would have had a hard time recruiting talent into that obviously dying region for a decade or so, and many people who were there already were actively leaving the region by that time.

I suspect that in the counterfactual where the region stayed as it was in the 1950s in terms of economic prosperity, Kodak probably could have successfully played catch up once it was clear where the game was going.

So yes they made a strategic mistake, but they did so while simultaneously “brain drain” bleeding out due to other unrelated factors.

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

#652

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This ridiculous lie needs to end. I can get a microwave for ~$60. I can get a decent used cell phone for ~$100. Appliances are a little more expensive, but I can get a washing machine for ~$300, less if I go to facebook marketplace. But in my area, a victorian house that's litterally crumbling with no central cooling and not up-to-code wiring where you can't run a hair dryer and coffee machine at the same time? $180,…

It's fascinating and depressing how despite me being in a different country on the other side of the world to you, if I swap the $ for £, your comment is still accurate based on the current situation in the UK.

the 1 bed attic apartment I lived in london - rent 1550 - cost to buy £300k.

that's when I knew it was time to leave the uk.

at least the us & most non eu countries have cheap power. which means better standards of living.

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

#653
post #137

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 work an ordinary job and support a house, wife and two kids thing is down to economic policy rather than tech. Houses have been treated as financial assets where you have to restrict supply to keep the prices up.

You could build a manufatured house for ~$60000 or a couple or years salary like https://siphouse.co.uk/product/insulated-summer-house-with-v... if it wasn't for planning laws preventing it.

or https://www.claytonhomes.com/homes/36TRU28684RH/ Maybe 2x that for govt sponsored high rises like they have in Asia

That may look basic but is similar to what you could get in the 1960s. I mean what do you actually need?

I think we may need a return to slightly more lefty policies - still free enterprise but everyone has a right to a reasonable home and ok income (healthcare etc)

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

#654
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…

Why was it possible for a man in the 1960s to have an ordinary job, a family, and a house? Was there some hidden sector of society that suffered considerably more then now? Is there some sector of society now that prospers proportionally more at the expense of others? The answer that immediately springs to mind is that women, ethnic minorities, and the urban poor all did relatively badly in the 1960s. With the latter…

You're going to have a difficult time arguing that the economy was good for white men in the 1960s because it was bad for everyone else. Prosperity is not zero sum.

Perhaps it has more to do with the lower ratio of people crippled by household debt to pay for housing, healthcare, and education. There's nothing more K-shaped than debt, which is a lever for those with wealth and a weight for everyone else. It's a combination of bad policy and greed that put us where we are.

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

#655
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?

The alternative view would be that differences of culture and values do not materially impact one's chances of becoming financially successful, right?

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

#656

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…

> More supply isn't helping much either,

that's because "more supply" hasn't been anywhere close to enough supply, judging by historical housing needs by population age demographics. More supply is absolutely the key thing missing, but it needs to be a lot more supply.

https://www.axios.com/2023/12/16/housing-market-why-homes-ex...

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

#657

> He told the BBC that the company owns what he called a “full stack” of technologies, from chips to YouTube data to models and frontier science research. This integrated approach, he suggested, would help the company weather any market turbulence better than competitors. I guess but is it better for an investor to own 2 shares of Google or 1 share of OpenAI and 1 share of TSMC? Like I have no doubt that being vertic…

In more traditional industries investors seem to prefer less integration. One example being Siemens, who divested their Healthineers and Energy divisions and all their share values increased by a lot. Maybe this is because these industries are better understood and there is less risk involved, but I wonder if the current big software companies will take similar paths in the future.

Investors often prefer stocks that are not themselves a portfolio (like AWS and Amazon retail being bundled; or your Siemens example). Lots of people would like to buy into AWS's margins without also buying Amazon retail's margins. But this is different from vertical integration that creates competitive advantage.

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

#658

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.

Deficit spending central banks and treasury finance the welfare state, we're not on a metal standard anymore.

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

#659
post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It doesn't help that new builds seem to focus on the high end for housing (because that is where the profit is). If we keep building more expensive housing it shouldn't be surprising that the average cost of housing increases.

No, what doesn't help is that the new builds aren't nearly enough. If they were quantitatively sufficient, it wouldn't matter if they all targeted the high end, because the people moving in to it would be pulling demand away from other existing units, with a ripple effect across the whole market.

What many people don't realize is how badly the total housing inventory has fallen behind what is needed for the population since the Great Recession.

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

#660
post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, because Europe is so innovative. The mother of invention is idiomatically necessity, not comfort. Ultimately, increased levels of competition should lead to higher levels of innovation. Btw, what is "the GCC era" a reference to?

Europe is quite innovative on per-capita basis. Not like US but the workers there have much happier lives and their societies don't have extreme inequality and resulting violence like the US. China is arguably more innovative than all and has terrible work life balance, but their society is stable and you won't go from millionaire to homeless just because you had to get cancer treatment. GCC = global consulting compa…

You don't understand what's happening in China. Advanced cancer treatments are generally not even available to poor people. Instead of becoming homeless due to medical expenses they just die. The US healthcare system has serious problems with access and efficiency but it's at or near the top worldwide in terms of cancer survival rates.

Chinese society is more "metastable" than really stable. The Cultural Revolution and Tiananmen Square massacre weren't that long ago. Chinese history going back millennia is full of violent revolutions and civil wars. Xi Jinping has been able to keep a lid on things lately through brutal purges of all other potential power centers but times may get "interesting" again when he leaves power.

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