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

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

#701

Post by roenxi » Wed, Nov 19, 2025, 9:29 PM UTC

piltdownman wrote: post #606

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…

// Plus when only the man worked looking after a home was a full time job If we completely ignore the commonplace role of the maid, nanny or domestic helper — women in 1965 spent the same amount of time on child care and only about 10 more hours on housework a week than women in 2011. According to the 1870 census, “52 percent of employed women worked in ‘domestic and personal service.’” From 1870 through the mid-1900…

And is the summary version that it is just as easy for someone to support a family now as in the 1970s? I'm a bit lost on what view you're invoking those statistics to support.

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

#702

Post by bpt3 » Wed, Nov 19, 2025, 9:32 PM UTC

ethanwillis wrote: post #694

bpt3 wrote: post #624

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your post is just a more verbose version of what I said. Your "concerns" are all well known and accounted for when calculating things like the consumer price index.

You're assuming my "concern" is that the OP is wrong. Which is why i specifically took the time to talk about value being up or down. I get you're just pissed off for whatever reason, but I'll still try to explain more. My point is not addressed when calculating the consumer price index because i'm saying that a single selection of prices and goods to produce a single price index does not tell a person what the value…

I'm not pissed off.

It's tiring watching people with no idea what they're talking about repeat the same "what about ..." arguments when professionals in the field have spent decades developing and maintaining models that have been proven over that time to be helpful.

It's also not a coincidence that nearly 100% of the people trying to poke holes in those models are people who disagree with the results generated from them, and that nearly 100% of those people don't have a clue about the topic at hand.

Of course a broad based index that is designed to represent the behavior of hundreds of millions of people is less accurate for you (or me, or anyone) personally than a model based solely on an individual's behavior. I don't know anyone on earth who would argue otherwise.

As a reminder, you started off by making a very lazy statement broadly criticizing a post that included well cited economic data showing that the inflation-adjusted median household income has increased substantially since the 1960s, which was in response to yet another terminally online doomer incorrectly claiming that your average American is worse off today than they were then.

You're now claiming that your issue with the provided data showing that people are overall financially better off today than they were in the 1960s is that that data isn't tailored to you (or any other individual) personally? I think that just demonstrates the validity of my original comment, because that's an absurd criticism.

FYI, you don't need to "advocate" for a personal price index. Track your spending over time and calculate it. If you want get much use out of it, you're going to want to incorporate the CPI data for your metro area as well (which exists and is publicly available) so you can both compare your spending to the median and backfill missing data as needed (for example, historical childcare expenses when you become a new parent).

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

#703

Post by roenxi » Wed, Nov 19, 2025, 9:33 PM UTC

engeljohnb wrote: post #560

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…

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,…

You've forgotten electricity, depreciation and the need for the house to be wired up to support all the gear. The figures you're quoting are just the price for a one-off purchase, not the total cost of ownership.

> 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?

> $180,000

I'm not familiar with the market you're talking about. What is the median wage in the area that we're comparing $180,000 to?

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

#704

Post by NumberCruncher » Wed, Nov 19, 2025, 9:40 PM UTC

aurareturn wrote: post #364

NumberCruncher wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have infrastructure that serves 800 million monthly active users. Even worse, they train their model(s) on the interactions of those non-paying customers, what makes the model(s) less useful for paying customers. It's kind of a "you can not charge for a Porsche if you only satisfy the needs of a typical Dacia owner".

They have infrastructure that serves 800 million monthly active users. I don't pay Meta any money too. Yet, Meta is one of the most profitable companies in the world. I give more of my data to OpenAI than to Meta. ChatGPT knows so much about me. Don't you think they can easily monetize their 800 million (close to 1 billion by now) users?

> Don't you think they can easily monetize their 800 million [...] users?

I am pretty sure they will be able to monetize it. But there is a big difference between "generating revenue" and "generating profit". It's way cheaper to put ads between posts of your friends (like FB started out with ads) then putting ads next to the response of an LLM. Because LLM responses has to be unique, while a holiday photo of yours might be interesting for all of your friends, and LLM inference is quite expensive, while hosting holiday photos is cheap. IMHO this is the reason why the 5th generation of ChatGPT models try to answer all possible questions of the world in one single response, kinda hoping that I am going to be happy with it an just close the chat.

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

#705

Post by DenisM » Wed, Nov 19, 2025, 10:06 PM UTC

lagosfractal42 wrote: post #618

DenisM wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I heard Spain has 20% unemployment among the young and the violence problem did not happen. Didn’t check it though.

Instead of checking and sharing it with us you've decided to pass on the burden of proof to us?

Sorry, I was being lazy and on a phone. I checked now - it’s closer to 25%. Low crime is anecdotal from my personal connections.

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

#706

Post by solace_silence » Wed, Nov 19, 2025, 10:10 PM UTC

moduspol wrote: post #647

gorgoiler wrote: post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Was there some hidden sector of society that suffered considerably more then now? The common theory I've heard is that the rest of the developed world was still recovering from WW2.

That is a common explanation, but it kinda implies the world just sat on its hands for 20 years after WWII. I suspect it's just a distraction from the high tax rates and relatively progressive policy at the time, to instead say "it can't happen again".

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

#707

Post by Ancapistani » Wed, Nov 19, 2025, 10:19 PM UTC

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...

I don’t have data for it, and would love to dig it up at some point. My head is too deep in a problem at the moment to make space for it …but I did just add it to my task list via ChatGPT :)

Anecdotally, I believe they did.

My wife is decidedly not a tech nerd, but had her own ChatGPT subscription without my input before I switched us over to a business account.

My mother is 58, and a retired executive for a “traditional” Fortune 100 company. She’s competent with MS productivity tools and the software she used for work, but has little interest outside that. She also had her own ChatGPT subscription.

Both of them were using it for at least a large subset of what they’d previously used Google for.

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

#708

Post by Ancapistani » Wed, Nov 19, 2025, 10:22 PM UTC

tempestn wrote: post #395

keyle wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

It was a well reasoned response to the question posed. Not everything is AI, and not all "walls of text" are equal.

I didn’t see the comment, but I assume they were accusing me of generating it.

For what it’s worth, I didn’t use AI at all for it. I just tend to sound like an LLM, likely because I have ADHD and grew up very rural (most of my vocabulary and grammar from reading).

I also tend to use a lot of parenthetical phrases, semi-colons, and lists. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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

#709

Post by NeutralCrane » Wed, Nov 19, 2025, 10:33 PM UTC

frm88 wrote: post #619

NeutralCrane wrote: post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I thought that the loss of trust would be self-explanatory in that regard? You don't buy stuff you don't trust, yes? Anyways: https://futurism.com/the-byte/study-consumers-turned-off-pro... Researchers have found that including the words “artificial intelligence” in product marketing is a major turn-off for consumers, suggesting a growing backlash and disillusionment with the tech — and that startups trying to cram “…

My point is that what people say and what people do are not the same thing. It may sound self-explanatory that if people don’t trust AI, they will avoid AI products, but I’m interested in data proving this. Self-reported attitudes regarding AI are not the same as customers actively avoiding products using AI.

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

#710

Post by Ancapistani » Wed, Nov 19, 2025, 10:39 PM UTC

jcgrillo wrote: post #453

Ancapistani wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 see…

> Is any of that actually true though?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I don’t think it matters.

Google has the capital to spend, and this effort needn’t succeed to be worthwhile. My point is that the scope of the potential future risk more than justifies the expense.

> and in doing so damaged their product

Only in objective terms.

The overall size of the market Google is operating in hasn’t changed, and I’m not aware of anyone positioned to provide a better alternative. Even if we assume that Google Search has gotten worse as a result of this, their traditional competitors aren’t stealing marketshare. They’re all either worse than the current state of Search, are making the same bet, or both.