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LB: it's funny to me that in the context of that AI bubble story is the Google CEO out there saying "The risk of underinvesting is dramatically greater than the risk of overinvesting for us here" -- like looking at the Google of 10 years ago, they were the company to beat in conventional AI natural language processing and pre-LLM machine learning as part of an actual product or service millions of people use every day,
like if anyone can say there is a risk of overinvesting in some new unproven experimental direction compared to existing stuff _they_ know works, it should be those guys
it's like all of a sudden they decided their remaining existing products and services were worth zero and they urgently have to invest whatever they can in LLM like just another monster-of-the-week venture effort
@rakslice Did you see Sequoia Capital's analysis of what's going on in game-theoretic terms? Not the AI startup grifters, or the GPU manufacturers selling shovels during the gold rush, but the existential terror that's got Microsoft/Google/Amazon/Apple/Facebook and hangers-on all panicking and shovelling billions into the sector?
This made sense of it to me—the missing piece of the picture. The implications are terrifying.
https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/ai-optimism-vs-ai-arms-race/#
Sequoia Capital's analysis of the AI arms race in game-theoretic terms is chilling by implication.
Not the AI startup grifters, or the GPU manufacturers selling shovels during the gold rush, but the existential terror that's got Microsoft/Google/Amazon/Apple/Facebook and hangers-on all panicking and shovelling billions into the sector?
Our biggest corporations are locked in a prisoner's dilemma game. And when this bubble bursts it'll swallow about a trillion dollars.
https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/ai-optimism-vs-ai-arms-race/
@cstross I guess I'm missing the part where these corporations are going to set a trillion dollars on fire is anything other than "don't threaten me with a good time".
@swelljoe@mas.to@jwz @cstross the problem is that a lot of that money is going to go into the pockets of the very grifters who started the bubble, and who are currently working to elect a fascist regime by hook or by crook. It's going to wreck the "normie" economy, in a way that Bitcoin tried and mostly failed to do, and a bunch of money will be relocated from productive use by companies that employ people to grifters who'll replace those workers with vastly inferior technology that pretends to do the work.
@swelljoe @cstross But like, a trillion dollars isn't real, it's "too big to Economy". If google loses the confidence of its investors, how do the consequences differ than if that didn't happen? They aren't going to suddenly care about data center carbon footprints. No executive will have any fewer swimming pools. No neck will have any fewer boots on it. But maybe as they move the chair around, the AI grift will go away. (To be replaced by some other grift, sure.)