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Comment by simonw

11 hours ago

They don't publish their AI spending, revenue, and profit - but they do tend to break out other non-AI segments of their companies which can demonstrate that at least part of their growth isn't relevant to AI.

Page 24 of Amazon's 2025 report for example https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000101872426... separates AWS from the rest of the company.

Or Google/Alphabet's 2025 report https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204426... page which breaks out search revenue and YouTube revenue.

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simonw

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solid_fuel  9 hours ago

> They don't publish their AI spending, revenue, and profit - but they do tend to break out other non-AI segments of their companies which can demonstrate that at least part of their growth isn't relevant to AI.

So the previous statement that "As public companies, the megascalers publish pretty detailed financial reports" is incorrect and irrelevant to the question that was asked.

GlacierFox  10 hours ago

[flagged]

  • simonw  10 hours ago

    Consider this original comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49526069#49527546

    I'll expand the section of the article that it quotes:

    > Although this wouldn't be in the spirit of Zitron's statement, one could argue that Meta is actually dying, it just hasn't died yet. However, the reasoning in Zitron's argument is incorrect here—the Meta, Google, and Microsoft ecosystems are not dying. Given how fast these companies are growing (in terms of revenue and profit), it doesn't seem that AI is, as Zitron implied, some kind of desperation move they're reaching for because "they don't know how to grow" and are all out of ideas.

    So the argument here is that Ed says those companies are dying, but Dan Luu points out that their economic figures show that they are not.

    The counter-argument is "Growth isn't a valid rebuttal, unless we can also sus out how much of that growth is tied up in circular financing of AI projects"

    My point is that the public reports of these companies, while not helping us unwind the circular financing, do at least show us that their non-AI businesses are growing at a healthy pace. Which supports Dan's argument that these companies are not dying.