Stargate, smargate. We're spending $60B+ on AI this year, Meta's Zuckerberg boasts Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed plans on Friday to blow through as much as $60 to 65 billion in 2025 on plenty more AI resources for his social media mega-corp – and signaled his intention to continue the spending spree for years to come. The announcement comes just days after rival model builder OpenAI unveiled, in a …
For $60 billion I wonder if you could invent “movie goggles,” no seriously, hear me out.
It’s a pair of glasses! But no ordinary glasses. Instead of corrective lenses, they instead feature miniature TV screens!
Why, the effect is so powerful, it’s like a gigantic movie screen… but they’re built into your spectacles!
With SIXTY BILLION we could perfect this revolutionary technology in no time flat.
The problem is only half that the money thrown at AI won't generate the returns wanted by investors, it is equally the squeezing out of genuinely productive investment in the real economy.
So AI investments are a double whammy - huge amounts thrown at a technology that won't deliver much, and reducing investment capacity in things that do have tangible benefits. Some of the money comes from those who have money to burn (Saudis, for example), but a lot seems to come from the totally opaque private equity sector who load up their investments with debt. When the bubble bursts, I suspect the banking sector will as usual run crying to government for a bail out on all the money they lent to businesses that could never repay them
Okay ... so OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle, and MGX are putting $100 billions in AI this year ($500B over 5 years), Meta is putting $60-65 billion for more than 1.3 million GPUs (and a datacenter), xAI is expecting to up Colossus to 1 million GPUs too (from 100k or 200k), and Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are pledging at least $200 billion between them on AI infrastructure over the next year. Even ByteDance is looking to invest $6.8 billion overseas (out of $12 billion total) for the same. Worldwide, that'll be more than $1 trillion for datacenter systems and devices in 2025 ...
Accordingly, should one invest (buy stocks) in Nvidia, AMD, Supermicro, ..., at this time? They were all down a bit today strangely enough (market correction?) ... Any other to consider seriously (in hardware/infrastructure) for the coming year, before the bubble of exuberance bursts (whenever that may be) iyho? Asking this for a friend who would like to retire in a couple of years ...
Forward thinking ... nice! Especially as AI might eventually be used for this very purpose and so there could be a long tail to its eventual demise (robots recycling robots). That'd make it a great investment!
> Any other to consider seriously (in hardware/infrastructure) for the coming year,
AI is moving fast, capability increases are already levelling off. Making models just bigger is not really expected to solve hallucinations and outlier-answers, let alone create AGI.
Lack of genuine human training data from before the AI era is already a limiting factor.
500B$ to just scale up OpenAI GPT style approach? I have no idea what these guys are thinking. Smells like panic...
So: A year until the bubble bursts might already be too optimistic at this point IMHO. And once the AI bubble bursts, the excess capacity in existing datacenters will be enormous.
I am looking forward to extremely cheap cloud hosting in 1-2 years time.
I will not recommend risking money on AI-related bets.
I see your point. But then, that 500B$ has to go somewhere I think, and so if it doesn't end up in hardware/infrastructure, then maybe Electric Power production would be where to invest? (unless these Big-AI announcements are some scam to fool folks into investing where they really shouldn't -- sticking to non-foolish basics would then be the advice for pre-retirement?).
Maybe all the devastation caused by climate change will actually make building supplies and construction a better investment opportunity than AI (with similar governmental sponsorship)?
Thanks! That's what my friend was wondering about and it does look like Nvidia has plateaud (around $140) for the past 3 months. However, AMD's in a bit of a lull ($120) with room to rebound, especially if they put some performant ARM chiplets in some of their MI300A-like devices, diversifying their offerings to meet this broadening in market demand (on top of benefiting from their recent software stack enhancements). I'll let him/her know about this ...
Offshore Tax havens?
You know for when the AI bubble bursts.
Much like the Trump meme coin. No honestly, it is not an investment yet people have done just that with their life savings. The only winner(s) are those who got in on Day 1 and cashed out on Day 2 or just before it crashed. Not, an investment. There be leopards about to eat your face if you believed that.
So the big tech co's are going to destroy themselves by dumping every last dollar into "AI". Ok?
And whatever comes out the other side ..... will be a shadow of their former selves? nVidia will be on top, but grown like a pimple that needs to be popped; Goggle, MS, Meta will be dried out husks, our planet will be 3 deg C warmer, and all tech co's will be about the same size, with no one company standing out. (Probably Oracle - they don't seem to be playing the AI game. Amazon too - they're getting the hardware on someone else's dollar, and they can use it as they please.)
Huh.
Of that 100B that OpenAI claimed, someone else (Musk?) said "I haven't seen the money," but if Meta's throwing them 60B, Softbank 10B, MS 80B, they have 150B so far? Maybe it's not all for OpenAI, but probably a lot of it.
> Oracle - they don't seem to be playing the AI game
Lesurie Suit Larry is literally part of the 500 beeelion dollar OpenAI & Softbank deal mentioned in the article.
Oracle are touting their cloud as the best for AI.
They are very much rolling the dice and moving the top hat round the AI board.
Capitalism 101 does not suggest spending a tonne of cash on something that few people want, hardly anyone trusts and fewer will pay for.
That goes double considering the half life on a GPU or NPU nowadays. These data centres will burn money to produce e-waste.
The VC gambit, spend now, make it essential and people will pay for it, just doesn't seem valid.
They may be hoping that Trump will consider this a national security issue and take over the whole thing with taxpayers' money. National interest pissing competitions have a long history - the most aircraft carriers, the most powerful supercomputers, more nukes etc.
I agree with the first comment. Think of the good they could do with this cash - green transition, healthcare, poverty reduction, ending wars. Instead they waste it on crap we don't want, don't need and make an effort to disable on our systems.
This is a tech forum, and there is no more love for the AI scam on here than there was for Harpo's Metaverse.
AI is an unreliable, experimental tech, repackaged and sold as a magical cure for everything. Tech snake oil.
AI is making a difference, but not the one they want. The next generation of GAFA tech - Recall, Clippy AI - is something we actively need to avoid. We need an alternative. We need a new mainstream OS, without the political drama, bloat and geek arrogance of Linux holding it back.
Capitalism 101 does not suggest spending a tonne of cash on something that few people want, hardly anyone trusts and fewer will pay for.
The point is not to make money for investors. Fuck them. The point is to enable the companies' management to extract tens of millions - or more - personally before the bubble bursts. And it's not as if the US has a president who would see anything whatsoever wrong with that.
Pres 47 is leading the way with his $TRUMP coin !!!!
Nicely lined his pockets with that one, from Day One !!!
Don't expect Pres 47 to have ANY scruples regarding how you get 'RICH' !!!
Legal/illegal doesn't matter if your Bank Balance is getting bigger & bigger !!!
Now it has been proven beyond doubt that being 'President' means you are beyond the law, there are no limits ... it also helps if you have 'loaded the bases' so to speak by appointing the 'right' sort of people into the highest courts !!!
'Law & Justice' is up for grabs for the people with the deepest of pockets !!!
The lie of the US of A being the 'Beacon of Democracy and the home of Law & order' is now manifest.
There have been real doubts for generations, if you were the wrong Demographic, BUT now there are no more attempts to hide/deny the truth.
The US of A is ruled by Oligarchies, some very familiar ... some not !!!
Power/Money/Influence works just the same in EVERY Country !!!
National boundaries mean little, if you have enough money !!!
Welcome to the 'Dystopian future' you thought was a hackneyed old Hollywood script !!!
:)
These guys see things differently than you, You might stop to consider there is a bigger, more insidious plan at work here.
Larry Ellison enters stage left, and now open ai and he are in talks to buy tik tok, and all that data goes right into the skynet.
Every thought, every face, every location, every home, every view, every child.
Right into big brother you go.
Looks like open ai, what ever musks deviant abomination is called, and google are all aiming towards the same data, and that's tiktoks.
I'm fairly sure meta is paying people to walk around collecting data with those illegal glasses of his at this point. Tax software, and all kinds of businesses use meta data, so he probably feels like he has the data collection he needs, and will just take advantage of the situation. As long as people use whatsapp, and insta.... he has his. He might have the world's largest depository of data. He's been collecting it longer. He'll probably just keep selling it off to whoever wants it for the rest of his days, and paying off the mob to look the other way.
This is like Y2K when advertising impressions were going to make everybody billionaires. Nobody ever considered whether or not the revenue could scale. During an all-hands with my Y2K employer, it was pointed out that customer growth projections crossed global population projections. Investors didn't care about math or logic because they were,on paper, making money. The truth was that the market had already saturated years ago and nearly all of the projected revenue was a massive math error caused by circular cycles in advertisement resales.
AI is amazing. I use it, and there are lots of uses for it, but how is Meta is going to recover over $60B from it? Maybe a fraction of that if their VR headset was doing better. The money makers will be low budget stealth companies that use it to assist with generating video entertainment. That's movies, games, and porn.
So this is how black holes are created.
For this amount of money, some AI Service Provision is made, which swallows data+money, and those providing that data and money are hopefully looking to the event horizon for something remotely usefull coming out....
Meta is the only winner here.
Icon to picture the Hope of the Customer.
As far as AI goes I expect a lot of it will result in nothing useful with few actual useful applications. A lot of people on these comment sections seem to be as pessimistic about AI or more too. So surely we should all see this as a good thing as those with vast quantities of money spend it on something that works through the economy and into peoples pockets and for those envious of the wealthy, the wealthy lose money on it.
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