Comment by JumpCrisscross
1 month ago
> These tech giants need AI to continue to grow
This is unfalsifiable. AI is juicing the tech majors’ growth. And in the modern economy, it may be necessary for them.
But did Disney need the internet to grow in the 1990s? No, probably not. Did streaming give it all kinds of new growth victors? Yes. And would ignoring the internet for that last three decades have probably killed it? Also yes.
How much did Disney invest in backbone Internet technologies in the 1990s?
> How much did Disney invest in backbone Internet technologies in the 1990s?
Disney invested billions in dot-com nonsense.
Starwave [1]. The Go.com debacle [2]. (Pets.com [3]!)
I think they even built a data center in Orlando.
[1] https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/19980501/2748296/di...
[2] https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/disney-to-sh...
[3] https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/go-com-shapes-allian...
I said backbone internet technologies on purpose. I don’t think those things qualify.
Irrelevant. If AI turns out to be a short-lived fad, a bubble that pops and we all laugh at in a few year's time, Google's investments in AI were simply wasted, it does not follow that Google itself will die from having made the investment. Same for Meta, whose current name is due to a previous bad investment we laugh at.
The popping of the investment bubble of AI, that might kill Tesla and SpaceX, perhaps also Anthropic and OpenAI, but most of the tech giants won't be all that badly hurt.
Maybe, but it does make the analogy poor. Also what was said was they need AI to continue to grow, not that they will die without it. Some big companies just hit a ceiling and do consulting or become a bank. Look at GM or IBM. Apple is already halfway there.
> If AI turns out to be a short-lived fad, a bubble that pops and we all laugh at in a few year's time
I think you can be even more precise here, because “AI” can be a wild success, and the Anthropic and OpenAI product strategy can blow up at the same time. Transformers, LLMs, and harnesses are all technologies with amazing utility like many machine learning methods before them. But there may be no moat that justify the current investments in “AI” - I would reckon if there is no proper moat for OpenAI and Anthropic they may be 100x (give or take an order of magnitude) overleveraged. That’s still a pretty catastrophic bubble given the figures we’re discussing.
VR still has a path to utility / viability. Meta (Zuck) just made an absolutely terrible product strategy around it. That can’t be overstated. Just atrocious judgement on display.
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