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Big tech has spent $155 billion on AI this year. It’s about to spend hundreds of billions more
(www.theguardian.com)
Go broke
this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2025
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Do so please, dump some more money! No need to make jobs, but destroy them from AI.
Chatgpt, what is sunken cost fallacy and why are rich people so profoundly stupid?
This is not that. They're all hoping to be the next Google or FaceBook. They know damned well most are going to lose. The gamble is that they won't be the one holding the bag when the bubble pops.
This is as high stakes as tech gets today.
It’s the most inefficient technology but praised as the most efficient because it simply runs on investor money. But that well will run dry eventually and who will bear the cost then? Consumers without jobs?
I disagree a bit. Any money the ultra-rich invest into research is better spent than on their next Mega-Yacht. Even if AI cannot meet the expectations of AGI etc.
Anyone remember the dot-com bubble?
At least they‘ve wasted their money for research of what doesn‘t work instead of just building silly products as for the .com bubble.
Humanity will gain insights to the kind of AI approaches that won‘t work much faster than without all the money. It‘s just an allocation of human efforts
Not really. None of what has been going on with transformer models has been anything but hyper scaling. It's not really making fundamental advances in technology it's that they decided what they had at the scale they had makes convincing enough demos that the scam could start.
It has been more than just hyperscaling. First of all, the invention of transformers would likely be significantly delayed without the hype around CNNs in the first AI wave in 2014. OpenAI wouldn‘t have been founded and their early contributions (like Soft Actor-Critic RL) could have taken longer to be explored.
While I agree that the transformer architecture itself hasn‘t advanced far since 2018 apart from scaling, its success has significantly contributed to self-learning policies.
RLHF, Direct Policy Optimization, and in particular DeepSeek‘s GRPO are huge milestones for Reinforcement Learning which arguably is the most promising trajectory for actual intelligence. Those are a direct consequence of the money pumped into AI and the appeal it has to many smart and talented people around the world
I'm honestly hoping for a repeat. Hopefully Microsoft goes down this time too, since they're heavily into AI. Twitter, Meta, Google and Amazon too. It's really just the worst of the worst.
They remember it too. It's why they try to keep the bubble going by jumping to the next shiny investor lure. Just a few years it was all deep learning, blockchain and NFT. One guess is that they'll go for humanoid robots next.
Suck it berg produced a platform for spreading hate snd constant relationship drama. Nothing he produces is good or helpful. He jumped on the Trump bandwagon like a little bitch the second he could. He's a real piece of work.
Why such wealth got into his hands is sick. It could be used for some real good if it went to someone with some compassion. At least Gates is trying to save his soul.
Just a few hundred billion more and I'm sure that somebody will figure out a profitable use for AI that isn't scamming old people.
I can imagine one - maintaining adversarial interop with proprietary systems. Like a self-adjusting connector for Facebook for some multi-protocol chat client. Or if there's going to be a Usenet-like system with global identities of users and posts, a mapping of Facebook to that. Siloed services don't expose identifiers and are not indexed, but that's with our current possibilities. People do use them and do know with whom they are interacting, so it's possible to make an AI-assisted scraper that would expose Facebook like a newsgroup to that.
Ah. Profitable. I dunno.
I hate these fucking articles. That’s how it works with every new tech/industry etc. Everyone spends billions and billions hoping it becomes profitable 10-20 years from now, maybe it does maybe it doesn’t, we can’t know but that’s how this shit has always and will always work for basically every new tech or research that happens.
Maybe complain about countries not taxing corporations enough, but not how new industries and technologies are funded.
Believe it or not I can complain about more than one thing at a time.
Not these kind of figures. Only a quarter of countries have annual GDPs larger than what's been spent so far this year. This is on a scale not seen before.
What makes it worse is that it's being spent on something which consumes huge resources and has no purpose except giving a few people more power as they would control what these systems would say is true.
That just shows that some parts of the economy have far too much money. And it's all going to nvidia
Transatlantic telegraph, I think, was very expensive, or Panama channel projects. Before they were finished to any useful degree.
In this particular case - I don't think it's more expensive than Soviet attempts at turning Kazakh steppe into agricultural land, let alone all the space and defense projects.
It's an ideology-driven effort all right - an idea that you can create an inherently totalitarian technology. Probably caused by the popular (in the 90s and early 00s) belief that the Internet is inherently anti-totalitarian, so there's a need to compensate. Both are wrong.
I think there was an inherent demand behind those examples though. Just the number of lives lost looking for the northwest passage showed how useful the Panama canal would be.
You're also comparing government spending in a lot of those cases Vs private capital. That fact shows how much power has shifted in the world already.
And I haven't touched any of it.
Kinda hard to touch bits
What? I touch mine all the time!
Proper AI or LLM?
that's a lot of ephemeral tech jobs, hope everyone has plan B
You mean when the bubble bursts and there are lots of people who worked on this available on the job market?
I'd expect them to be big data specialists, mostly knowledgeable in Python and matrix operations, narrow optimizations needed there, and not very competitive for other typical tech specialties.
They'll just have to become data analysts, assistants in labs working on things like genome analysis, and so on. Perhaps medical RnD will get a boost due to all the willing slaves, LOL.
I wanna see a breakdown of cost vs revenue for each big tech and their AI stuff.
I know it’s all negative, I wanna know who is the most negative. My money is on google.
This analyses what’s publicly known: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-gui/?ref=ed-zitrons-wheres-your-ed-at-newsletter
This snippet summarizes my AI forced into everything experience, especially when I was prompted to have my text message summarized. I said no, and the message was "Ok"
What text messages are being sent that need to be summarized?
which mostly means that Apple aggressively introduced people to the features of generative AI by force, and it turns out that people don't really want to summarize documents, write emails, or make "custom emoji," and anyone who thinks they would is a fucking alien.
Great analysis. I still have no idea how they think they will ever make their money back.
There are people who both get llm summaries of their emails and get llm to rewrite what they send. It's amazing that anyone can't see how incredibly stupid it is
Ironically, Apple has some of the best odds of coming out of this reasonably healthy. “Apple Intelligence” follows the trend of most Apple services products, in that it is really intended to lock people into their ecosystem and keep buying iPhones. I’m just waiting for someone in the big 7 or whatever they’re called to publicly bow out of AI. I suspect the first one to do it might benefit a lot.
Where they get their money from ?