9 ms·

Zuckerberg Caught in Revealing Hot Mic Moment During White House Dinner

167 points by atombender 1y ago

randomname4325 1y ago
This is wild. Meta, OpenAI, MSFT, Nvidia are collectively keeping the AI trade alive, which is propping up the stock market and overall perception of the economy. This admission makes it clear that the AI spends are being made up not based on business value/demand...
- aprilthird2021 1y ago
  > This admission makes it clear that the AI spends are being made up not based on business value/demand... Well, isn't that okay? All the companies are racing to capture a nascent market. It would make sense to spend beyond current demand and even projected 5Y demand if it gives you a larger share of a market that might last 20+ years
  - cmiles74 1y ago
    IMHO, this indicates to me that these numbers are more like a marketing exercise.
    - aprilthird2021 1y ago
      When you are having dinner with the emperor, of course it's just good marketing to say he's wearing clothes
      - cindyllm 1y ago
        [dead]
    - ivell 1y ago
      The problem with corruption at high level is that it forces everything down the chain to be also corrupt even if they don't want to. I think presidential power must be limited, and ways to limit sycophants in government needs to be introduced. May be sometime in the future...
- leptons 1y ago
  Zuck should have asked the AI what the spend number should be, I'm sure it would give him a correct answer.
- gruez 1y ago
  >This admission makes it clear that the AI spends are being made up not based on business value/demand... Because one executive got flustered and gave a random number to Trump, and therefore that's representative of the other 3 companies in the list?
  - lazide 1y ago
    I mean, it seems pretty obvious to me as an industry insider. Having a major exec flat out admit he’s just saying what he things the president wants to hear makes it seem night and day.
- vineyardmike 1y ago
  To be fair, when he suggested $600Bn in spend by 2028, it’s obvious they won’t actually be spending that. That would exceed their yearly revenue each year. They just don’t have that money. This feels like less of an indictment of AI spend, and more of the political process of blatant lying for political favor. For comparison, Google said $250b, Microsoft said $80b, but Apple has said $600bn. Meta currently spends ~$100bn.
  - gruez 1y ago
    >and more of the political process of blatant lying for political favor. Even that's debatable because he walked back on the number shortly after >Once the discussion concluded, Zuckerberg leaned over to Trump to privately admit the president had caught him off guard. "I'm sorry I wasn't ready...I wasn't sure what number you wanted to go with," Zuckerberg said in a revealing moment caught on a hot mic.
    - kamranjon 1y ago
      That statement could mean many different things
    - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 1y ago
      > he walked back on the number And somehow he never lied? Or he wasn't trying to brown nose? Because it literally has to be a lie if he changed his story and it's hard to deny that he appears to be trying to curry favor.
    - aprilthird2021 1y ago
      It would be debatable if we didn't have the Commander in Chief we have now is very blatant and open about demanding things and providing political favor in return constantly
  - belter 1y ago
    Smart lawyers can make a lot of money here for suing shareholders.
- mettamage 1y ago
  But how does it keep that alive? Wouldn't it mean that the marginal utility of each dollar spend would go lower? They are already spending as much as they can and believe is needed since they are diehard AI bulls themselves. If they saw a need to spend 600 billion dollars themselves through 2028, they'd have already done it.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- belter 1y ago
  Its even more wild that is flagged.
  - jaybrendansmith 1y ago
    Agree. This article is completely on point for Hacker News. There seems to be a cabal of Maga-types (or AI) on these forums that reflexively flag any content that seems to smack of exposing the reality of the corrupted and anti-democratic times in which we live.
    - trashface 1y ago
      I believe dang has said there is an auto-flagger which will do that on posts that are getting too many controversial comments. Then a mod has to unflag it, if they want to do that. Of course this does suggest a strategy for censoring topics that you don't want on the front page of HN: deploy a bot army to add inflammatory comments. I feel like I've seen effect on other posts (the tylenol post currently on the front page has that smell) but who knows.
unethical_ban 1y ago
This is not normal. This is not acceptable! Whether this behavior continues for 3.3 more years, or for eight, or more, our collective memory must stay strong: This administration is not normal.
- jjulius 1y ago
  >This is not normal. It is, it's just that we can see it now.
  - decremental 1y ago
    When my guy is in office it's good and normal. When their guy is in office it's bad.
    - jjulius 1y ago
      Thanks for assuming my perspective and then snarkily replying based on said assumption. I actually happen to firmly believe that this has been the norm for a very long time regardless of party.
      - unethical_ban 1y ago
        When you say "this", do you mean sycophant-seeking authoritarian leaders demanding the appearance of commitments with fake numbers? Like when our president demanded a foreign leader "look like" he was investigating the presumptive Democratic nominee in 2019? Or when our president demanded certain numbers be made up in the state of Georgia for him to win an election? I can't tell what you think "both sides" are doing.
        jjulius 1y ago
        Politicians and businesses knowingly working together to bullshit the general public.
- quantummagic 1y ago
quantummagic 1y ago
It sounds to me like he was just apologizing for pulling a number out of his butt. Not sure how revealing it is. Doesn't seem surprising that he wouldn't have such a projection on the tip of his tongue, unless expecting to announce it. And nobody should put much stock in such a projection, whether it was a considered number, or off-the-cuff.
- djeastm 1y ago
  Regardless of whether the estimate would be accurate or not, what legitimate reason could he have for saying "I wasn't sure what number you wanted to go with" to the President? Why would the President need to have input on what Meta's spend is going to be if not for some kind of prior arrangement? This all just leaves a terrible taste in one's mouth for someone who wants government and industry at arms length as much as possible.
  - bediger4000 1y ago
    I agree. This makes the whole AI business cycle seem less like the vaunted free market working, and more like some kind of crony capitalism, or merchantilism, except that instead of representative government with voter accountability, Trump decides.
  - anal_reactor 1y ago
    It's simple. Trump is in power, and everyone needs to show respect. This makes him even more popular in the eyes of average person, which reinforces his power, and Zuckerberg doesn't give a fuck that peasants think he's weak, as long as that makes him rich. See how oligarchy works in Russia.
- whazor 1y ago
  Meta is doing very high investments into AI and who knows how successful that would be. His projection assume multiple big successes the next years and bigger follow up investments. Investors prefer a CEO who thinks in success.
- duxup 1y ago
  It's revealing in that it sounds like they're there to deliver a script for Trump. How scripted these sessions are I think is interesting. It sounds like Mark was thinking he was supposed to say a number he was told to say, not anything relevant to what they're actually doing.
bethekidyouwant 1y ago
Well, there are certainly many ways to editorialize this. It seems clear that he was not told what to say and wanting to please the president sounds like a him problem. Also, I would read Facebook’s AI investments as a way to just prop up their own stock with some kind of promise that eventually their AI model will be good which right now it is not
andoando 1y ago
Jesus fuck were spending hundreds of billions in a few years on AI? Slow the fuck down. Lets establish some proof of value first
- aprilthird2021 1y ago
  Pretty sure most of the Mag 7 have on paper already north of $100B in AI infra spend this upcoming year.
- jeswin 1y ago
  > Lets establish some proof of value first Recently spoke to someone who said that most startups in their (very large) portfolio are using AI to write most of their code. I personally know this to be true in several startups I've seen; and I've seen slow but steady adoption in larger companies. We can debate about spending hundreds of billions per year, but the value is beyond question at this point at least in software.
  - Eldt 1y ago
    I find this hard to believe given the quality of code that AI models currently produce. Does the startup have a successful product? Or does it have a spaghetti ball of technical debt waiting to explode?
  - dustrider 1y ago
    Just to make the point. I agree there’s adoption but value is still being figured out. See the MIT Nanda study, and the other one from a few weeks back on the perceived vs actual productivity increases. There is value, but so far nowhere near as much as the people pushing AI would like you to believe has actually been delivered
    - CamperBob2 1y ago
      The Nanda study is junk. Yes, I'm slower as a developer when I use AI. That's because I'm doing things I simply couldn't do before.
johnnienaked 1y ago
All throughout Arizona they are popping up directly next to substations--UPstream of communities. I wonder if in the near future we'll be getting electricity bills from Meta
JCM9 1y ago
It’s a sign of just how much the current AI hype cycle is a house of cards not backed by any logical business fundamentals.
- int0x29 1y ago
  Can't question the hype cycle. Of course the post is flagged
ncr100 1y ago
Not sure I'm asking this correctly: As an officer in a Public Company, does this behavior impugn him as CEO or the company in any legal way?
- rwmj 1y ago
  I think only if anyone believed him. Since no one does it has no material effect on the stock price.
  - skort 1y ago
    So if nobody believes him, why is he a highly compensated executive? Shouldn't he be relieved of all responsibilities? Even if he owns a majority of controlling shares, that should be a red flag that the guy in charge has no clue what he's doing. It's wild that we just treat this behavior as normal.
    - aprilthird2021 1y ago
      Well, sorry, the point is that if no one believed him, it's clear he misspoke because he is highly competent. People are not jailed for misspeaking. Also, any kind of charge for securities violation requires more than misleading public statements. There needs to be intention to deceive and intention to capitalize on that deceit, probably neither are here either
- greekrich92 1y ago
  Not sure if you've noticed, but laws aren't real for them anymore as long as they're at that table
  - tempodox 1y ago
    True, not even limited to that table only, but disappointing uncle Donald could have consequences.
- mrandish 1y ago
  I don't know about "impugn him" but there are SEC regulations and legal standards for when a public company CEO makes "forward looking statements", however the standards are looser when speaking casually vs in an earnings call or in regulatory filings. Plus how much a company currently expects to spend toward a specific initiative isn't a number likely to cause shareholder litigation like revenue, earnings, margins or share price. You pretty much never hear a public company CEO put numbers on those outside of an earnings call.
elcapitan 1y ago
https://archive.ph/1gc2Z https://archive.ph/1gc2Z
pluc 1y ago
[dead]
asveikau 1y ago
I am no fan of Zuckerberg or Trump, but I didn't find this hot mic to be particularly shocking or outrageous. I think the tech leaders' presence at the event in the first place is much more damning. There are worse clips that came out of that event, of statements made out in the open.
bezier-curve 1y ago
This type of story kind of summarizes my feelings towards these mega rich people in general, it's not a coincidence they're spending most of their time self-preserving and building bunkers [1]. [1] https://www.wired.com/story/mark-zuckerberg-inside-hawaii-compound/ https://www.wired.com/story/mark-zuckerberg-inside-hawaii-co... Edit: Fascinating seeing downvotes over an insightful comment simply calling out the self-absorbed nature of billionaires. Have fun with that, probably my last comment on HN. This place is a circle jerk for techbros with charasmatic professional moderators that algorithmically punish the very things their own guidelines support. Waste of sincere people's time.
- bezier-curve 1y ago
  This comment was cited based on > Crankiness about billionaires and "circle jerks for tech bros" and all that just has nothing to do with the intellectual curiosity we're trying to foster on the site. Sorry, but if we pretend suggesting billionaires not having most people's best interest is "crankiness", we are not running a very intellectually honest community. Convince me this is not a circle jerk when it takes 5 years of commenting to get 50% of the privilege to downvote. I'm out.
darepublic 1y ago
He forgot to put the tape over it
mrtksn 1y ago
I thought this is obvious by now? It's just a show, no one is actually investing such money - this is to spice up the casino and run a news cycle for Trump. I mean, just check the numbers they are throwing around, there's no such money and Elon Musk even called it out previously in the context of his spat with OpenAI(how much was that $500B on the stargate project?). Everything is like that, EU is supposed to invest $600B in US but EU's yearly budget is $200B. Qatar is investing $1.2T but their GDP is $200B. Japan to invest in us $550B but they too don't have such money laying around. Saudi's to invest $600B, that's half of their GDP. This is just part of the show and people figured that Trump likes multiples of $600B, just I wish it wasn't so damaging.
claytongulick 1y ago
I think (hope?) that the best thing that will come from tye AI hype will be innovations in power creation and delivery. If the unexpected side effect of building these giant stochastic parrots is that we usher in an age of decentralized, safe nuclear SMRs, it will have been well worth it, whether or not they are actual productivity boosters.
- esseph 1y ago
  I think the exact opposite of that is what is most likely to happen.
garbawarb 1y ago
"I wasn't sure what number you wanted to go with" doesn't sound to me necessarily like making a number up. There are different ways to measure this like how many years and what counts as an "AI investment" and it sounds like this number he chose is just one particular way of measuring it.
- conception 1y ago
  Yeah that’s definitely what it was. Definitely. Lots of thought and research went into the number.
- fabian2k 1y ago
  In a different setting, with a different person on the other side that might potentially be plausible. But with Trump, why would you expect him to know or care about any details like that.
- Stevvo 1y ago
  Sure, but $600 Billion did sound very made up. Even without the hot-mic it would not be believable.
- greekrich92 1y ago
  Gimme a break
- mrandish 1y ago
  > There are different ways to measure this like how many years and what counts as an "AI investment" Indeed. Anyone familiar with public company financials and budgeting (like Wall Street analysts) know any number like this is only a broad estimate at best. For example, is that number counting the full value of capital expenditures (such as GPUs) immediately amortizing that cost over the asset's life? Most accounting methods would say capex should be depreciated over time but in many kinds of purchase transactions NVidia may book the full revenue in the quarter they deliver the card, so in that sense, the money is "in the economy" which may be more appropriate given the context. And that's just a simple example. It gets much more complex and there are lots of judgement calls about how multi-use assets are booked and employee costs are apportioned across business units. It's likely no one at Meta even has a credible budget number for overall Meta-wide "AI spend over the next three years." If you ask the CFO to come up with a number, they're going to assign a team to make a best estimate under "given assumptions" - and then that team is going to ask you 20 or 30 questions about how you want to count. So... it's understood that numbers cited at a photo opp like this are SWAGs at best. Plus, even if finance penciled out an estimate, that estimate would certainly change substantially during the yearly budget cycle and change meaningfully quarter to quarter. So, such a snapshot in time is pretty worthless in terms of actual predictive value.
skort 1y ago
So much of what is going on with big tech and the US government at the moment is either wildly corrupt or completely bewildering. And the response from most major press seems to be a simple shrug? What happened to holding people in power accountable?
- clipsy 1y ago
  People in power bought the press.
nickdothutton 1y ago
People really shouldn’t read too much into these numbers, particularly in that kind of forum rather than an analyst call. Is M&A an investment? What about hiring a team with stock? Commitment or actually transacted? As cash, equity, debt? Other than the sheer orders of magnitude being bandied around, and that being an indicator of the kind of phase we’re in right now.
ChrisArchitect 1y ago
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45142587 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45142587
tolerance 1y ago
I hope the community continues to flag these kind of banal news stories.
frays 1y ago
He's still his awkward self. Amazing to see a software engineer make it to this level (unlike all the other CEOs who are managers)
southernplaces7 1y ago
Why the fuck is this flagged? It's completely relevant to this site, and very much worthy of debate. Who are you assholes who do such persistent, completely capricious flagging?
- blooalien 1y ago
  > "Who are you assholes who do such persistent, completely capricious flagging?" These days it's almost certainly just a small army of "AI" powered bots tasked with watching the site for topics to auto-flag or derail with inflammatory comments for their tinfoil-hat-wearing overlords.
  - southernplaces7 1y ago
    Sure, maybe, but the site's human moderators and admins could also maybe dedicate just a modicum of extra effort to counteracting this nonsense seeing how evident and common it's become. HN doesn't have an enormous number of submissions that gain traction on its main page. It wouldn't be hard to keep an eye on idiotic flagging with fairly modest effort, if they gave a damn about doing it.
amai 1y ago
Zuckerberg does a Trump and just invents numbers.
vlan121 1y ago
I dont know about this. You can look up a video on YouTube but when you search for valid sources I just find magazines I never heard of. Is there a valid source?
alex1138 1y ago
[flagged] Yeah pretty on par for HN No actual discussion allowed if things get spicy for anyone connected to the VC industry

167 points by atombender 1y ago

This is wild. Meta, OpenAI, MSFT, Nvidia are collectively keeping the AI trade alive, which is propping up the stock market and overall perception of the economy. This admission makes it clear that the AI spends are being made up not based on business value/demand...

aprilthird2021 1y ago
> This admission makes it clear that the AI spends are being made up not based on business value/demand... Well, isn't that okay? All the companies are racing to capture a nascent market. It would make sense to spend beyond current demand and even projected 5Y demand if it gives you a larger share of a market that might last 20+ years
- cmiles74 1y ago
  IMHO, this indicates to me that these numbers are more like a marketing exercise.
  - aprilthird2021 1y ago
    When you are having dinner with the emperor, of course it's just good marketing to say he's wearing clothes
    - cindyllm 1y ago
      [dead]
  - ivell 1y ago
    The problem with corruption at high level is that it forces everything down the chain to be also corrupt even if they don't want to. I think presidential power must be limited, and ways to limit sycophants in government needs to be introduced. May be sometime in the future...
leptons 1y ago
Zuck should have asked the AI what the spend number should be, I'm sure it would give him a correct answer.
gruez 1y ago
>This admission makes it clear that the AI spends are being made up not based on business value/demand... Because one executive got flustered and gave a random number to Trump, and therefore that's representative of the other 3 companies in the list?
- lazide 1y ago
  I mean, it seems pretty obvious to me as an industry insider. Having a major exec flat out admit he’s just saying what he things the president wants to hear makes it seem night and day.
vineyardmike 1y ago
To be fair, when he suggested $600Bn in spend by 2028, it’s obvious they won’t actually be spending that. That would exceed their yearly revenue each year. They just don’t have that money. This feels like less of an indictment of AI spend, and more of the political process of blatant lying for political favor. For comparison, Google said $250b, Microsoft said $80b, but Apple has said $600bn. Meta currently spends ~$100bn.
- gruez 1y ago
  >and more of the political process of blatant lying for political favor. Even that's debatable because he walked back on the number shortly after >Once the discussion concluded, Zuckerberg leaned over to Trump to privately admit the president had caught him off guard. "I'm sorry I wasn't ready...I wasn't sure what number you wanted to go with," Zuckerberg said in a revealing moment caught on a hot mic.
  - kamranjon 1y ago
    That statement could mean many different things
  - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 1y ago
    > he walked back on the number And somehow he never lied? Or he wasn't trying to brown nose? Because it literally has to be a lie if he changed his story and it's hard to deny that he appears to be trying to curry favor.
  - aprilthird2021 1y ago
    It would be debatable if we didn't have the Commander in Chief we have now is very blatant and open about demanding things and providing political favor in return constantly
- belter 1y ago
  Smart lawyers can make a lot of money here for suing shareholders.
mettamage 1y ago
But how does it keep that alive? Wouldn't it mean that the marginal utility of each dollar spend would go lower? They are already spending as much as they can and believe is needed since they are diehard AI bulls themselves. If they saw a need to spend 600 billion dollars themselves through 2028, they'd have already done it.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
belter 1y ago
Its even more wild that is flagged.
- jaybrendansmith 1y ago
  Agree. This article is completely on point for Hacker News. There seems to be a cabal of Maga-types (or AI) on these forums that reflexively flag any content that seems to smack of exposing the reality of the corrupted and anti-democratic times in which we live.
  - trashface 1y ago
    I believe dang has said there is an auto-flagger which will do that on posts that are getting too many controversial comments. Then a mod has to unflag it, if they want to do that. Of course this does suggest a strategy for censoring topics that you don't want on the front page of HN: deploy a bot army to add inflammatory comments. I feel like I've seen effect on other posts (the tylenol post currently on the front page has that smell) but who knows.

unethical_ban 1y ago

This is not normal. This is not acceptable! Whether this behavior continues for 3.3 more years, or for eight, or more, our collective memory must stay strong: This administration is not normal.

jjulius 1y ago
>This is not normal. It is, it's just that we can see it now.
- decremental 1y ago
  When my guy is in office it's good and normal. When their guy is in office it's bad.
  - jjulius 1y ago
    Thanks for assuming my perspective and then snarkily replying based on said assumption. I actually happen to firmly believe that this has been the norm for a very long time regardless of party.
    - unethical_ban 1y ago
      When you say "this", do you mean sycophant-seeking authoritarian leaders demanding the appearance of commitments with fake numbers? Like when our president demanded a foreign leader "look like" he was investigating the presumptive Democratic nominee in 2019? Or when our president demanded certain numbers be made up in the state of Georgia for him to win an election? I can't tell what you think "both sides" are doing.
      - jjulius 1y ago
        Politicians and businesses knowingly working together to bullshit the general public.
quantummagic 1y ago

quantummagic 1y ago

It sounds to me like he was just apologizing for pulling a number out of his butt. Not sure how revealing it is. Doesn't seem surprising that he wouldn't have such a projection on the tip of his tongue, unless expecting to announce it. And nobody should put much stock in such a projection, whether it was a considered number, or off-the-cuff.

djeastm 1y ago
Regardless of whether the estimate would be accurate or not, what legitimate reason could he have for saying "I wasn't sure what number you wanted to go with" to the President? Why would the President need to have input on what Meta's spend is going to be if not for some kind of prior arrangement? This all just leaves a terrible taste in one's mouth for someone who wants government and industry at arms length as much as possible.
- bediger4000 1y ago
  I agree. This makes the whole AI business cycle seem less like the vaunted free market working, and more like some kind of crony capitalism, or merchantilism, except that instead of representative government with voter accountability, Trump decides.
- anal_reactor 1y ago
  It's simple. Trump is in power, and everyone needs to show respect. This makes him even more popular in the eyes of average person, which reinforces his power, and Zuckerberg doesn't give a fuck that peasants think he's weak, as long as that makes him rich. See how oligarchy works in Russia.
whazor 1y ago
Meta is doing very high investments into AI and who knows how successful that would be. His projection assume multiple big successes the next years and bigger follow up investments. Investors prefer a CEO who thinks in success.
duxup 1y ago
It's revealing in that it sounds like they're there to deliver a script for Trump. How scripted these sessions are I think is interesting. It sounds like Mark was thinking he was supposed to say a number he was told to say, not anything relevant to what they're actually doing.

bethekidyouwant 1y ago

Well, there are certainly many ways to editorialize this. It seems clear that he was not told what to say and wanting to please the president sounds like a him problem. Also, I would read Facebook’s AI investments as a way to just prop up their own stock with some kind of promise that eventually their AI model will be good which right now it is not

andoando 1y ago

Jesus fuck were spending hundreds of billions in a few years on AI? Slow the fuck down. Lets establish some proof of value first

aprilthird2021 1y ago
Pretty sure most of the Mag 7 have on paper already north of $100B in AI infra spend this upcoming year.
jeswin 1y ago
> Lets establish some proof of value first Recently spoke to someone who said that most startups in their (very large) portfolio are using AI to write most of their code. I personally know this to be true in several startups I've seen; and I've seen slow but steady adoption in larger companies. We can debate about spending hundreds of billions per year, but the value is beyond question at this point at least in software.
- Eldt 1y ago
  I find this hard to believe given the quality of code that AI models currently produce. Does the startup have a successful product? Or does it have a spaghetti ball of technical debt waiting to explode?
- dustrider 1y ago
  Just to make the point. I agree there’s adoption but value is still being figured out. See the MIT Nanda study, and the other one from a few weeks back on the perceived vs actual productivity increases. There is value, but so far nowhere near as much as the people pushing AI would like you to believe has actually been delivered
  - CamperBob2 1y ago
    The Nanda study is junk. Yes, I'm slower as a developer when I use AI. That's because I'm doing things I simply couldn't do before.

johnnienaked 1y ago

All throughout Arizona they are popping up directly next to substations--UPstream of communities. I wonder if in the near future we'll be getting electricity bills from Meta

JCM9 1y ago

It’s a sign of just how much the current AI hype cycle is a house of cards not backed by any logical business fundamentals.

int0x29 1y ago
Can't question the hype cycle. Of course the post is flagged

ncr100 1y ago

Not sure I'm asking this correctly: As an officer in a Public Company, does this behavior impugn him as CEO or the company in any legal way?

rwmj 1y ago
I think only if anyone believed him. Since no one does it has no material effect on the stock price.
- skort 1y ago
  So if nobody believes him, why is he a highly compensated executive? Shouldn't he be relieved of all responsibilities? Even if he owns a majority of controlling shares, that should be a red flag that the guy in charge has no clue what he's doing. It's wild that we just treat this behavior as normal.
  - aprilthird2021 1y ago
    Well, sorry, the point is that if no one believed him, it's clear he misspoke because he is highly competent. People are not jailed for misspeaking. Also, any kind of charge for securities violation requires more than misleading public statements. There needs to be intention to deceive and intention to capitalize on that deceit, probably neither are here either
greekrich92 1y ago
Not sure if you've noticed, but laws aren't real for them anymore as long as they're at that table
- tempodox 1y ago
  True, not even limited to that table only, but disappointing uncle Donald could have consequences.
mrandish 1y ago
I don't know about "impugn him" but there are SEC regulations and legal standards for when a public company CEO makes "forward looking statements", however the standards are looser when speaking casually vs in an earnings call or in regulatory filings. Plus how much a company currently expects to spend toward a specific initiative isn't a number likely to cause shareholder litigation like revenue, earnings, margins or share price. You pretty much never hear a public company CEO put numbers on those outside of an earnings call.

elcapitan 1y ago

https://archive.ph/1gc2Z https://archive.ph/1gc2Z

pluc 1y ago

[dead]

asveikau 1y ago

I am no fan of Zuckerberg or Trump, but I didn't find this hot mic to be particularly shocking or outrageous. I think the tech leaders' presence at the event in the first place is much more damning. There are worse clips that came out of that event, of statements made out in the open.

bezier-curve 1y ago

This type of story kind of summarizes my feelings towards these mega rich people in general, it's not a coincidence they're spending most of their time self-preserving and building bunkers [1]. [1] https://www.wired.com/story/mark-zuckerberg-inside-hawaii-compound/ https://www.wired.com/story/mark-zuckerberg-inside-hawaii-co... Edit: Fascinating seeing downvotes over an insightful comment simply calling out the self-absorbed nature of billionaires. Have fun with that, probably my last comment on HN. This place is a circle jerk for techbros with charasmatic professional moderators that algorithmically punish the very things their own guidelines support. Waste of sincere people's time.

bezier-curve 1y ago
This comment was cited based on > Crankiness about billionaires and "circle jerks for tech bros" and all that just has nothing to do with the intellectual curiosity we're trying to foster on the site. Sorry, but if we pretend suggesting billionaires not having most people's best interest is "crankiness", we are not running a very intellectually honest community. Convince me this is not a circle jerk when it takes 5 years of commenting to get 50% of the privilege to downvote. I'm out.

darepublic 1y ago

He forgot to put the tape over it

mrtksn 1y ago

I thought this is obvious by now? It's just a show, no one is actually investing such money - this is to spice up the casino and run a news cycle for Trump. I mean, just check the numbers they are throwing around, there's no such money and Elon Musk even called it out previously in the context of his spat with OpenAI(how much was that $500B on the stargate project?). Everything is like that, EU is supposed to invest $600B in US but EU's yearly budget is $200B. Qatar is investing $1.2T but their GDP is $200B. Japan to invest in us $550B but they too don't have such money laying around. Saudi's to invest $600B, that's half of their GDP. This is just part of the show and people figured that Trump likes multiples of $600B, just I wish it wasn't so damaging.

claytongulick 1y ago

I think (hope?) that the best thing that will come from tye AI hype will be innovations in power creation and delivery. If the unexpected side effect of building these giant stochastic parrots is that we usher in an age of decentralized, safe nuclear SMRs, it will have been well worth it, whether or not they are actual productivity boosters.

esseph 1y ago
I think the exact opposite of that is what is most likely to happen.

garbawarb 1y ago

"I wasn't sure what number you wanted to go with" doesn't sound to me necessarily like making a number up. There are different ways to measure this like how many years and what counts as an "AI investment" and it sounds like this number he chose is just one particular way of measuring it.

conception 1y ago
Yeah that’s definitely what it was. Definitely. Lots of thought and research went into the number.
fabian2k 1y ago
In a different setting, with a different person on the other side that might potentially be plausible. But with Trump, why would you expect him to know or care about any details like that.
Stevvo 1y ago
Sure, but $600 Billion did sound very made up. Even without the hot-mic it would not be believable.
greekrich92 1y ago
Gimme a break
mrandish 1y ago
> There are different ways to measure this like how many years and what counts as an "AI investment" Indeed. Anyone familiar with public company financials and budgeting (like Wall Street analysts) know any number like this is only a broad estimate at best. For example, is that number counting the full value of capital expenditures (such as GPUs) immediately amortizing that cost over the asset's life? Most accounting methods would say capex should be depreciated over time but in many kinds of purchase transactions NVidia may book the full revenue in the quarter they deliver the card, so in that sense, the money is "in the economy" which may be more appropriate given the context. And that's just a simple example. It gets much more complex and there are lots of judgement calls about how multi-use assets are booked and employee costs are apportioned across business units. It's likely no one at Meta even has a credible budget number for overall Meta-wide "AI spend over the next three years." If you ask the CFO to come up with a number, they're going to assign a team to make a best estimate under "given assumptions" - and then that team is going to ask you 20 or 30 questions about how you want to count. So... it's understood that numbers cited at a photo opp like this are SWAGs at best. Plus, even if finance penciled out an estimate, that estimate would certainly change substantially during the yearly budget cycle and change meaningfully quarter to quarter. So, such a snapshot in time is pretty worthless in terms of actual predictive value.

skort 1y ago

So much of what is going on with big tech and the US government at the moment is either wildly corrupt or completely bewildering. And the response from most major press seems to be a simple shrug? What happened to holding people in power accountable?

clipsy 1y ago
People in power bought the press.

nickdothutton 1y ago

People really shouldn’t read too much into these numbers, particularly in that kind of forum rather than an analyst call. Is M&A an investment? What about hiring a team with stock? Commitment or actually transacted? As cash, equity, debt? Other than the sheer orders of magnitude being bandied around, and that being an indicator of the kind of phase we’re in right now.

ChrisArchitect 1y ago

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45142587 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45142587

tolerance 1y ago

I hope the community continues to flag these kind of banal news stories.

frays 1y ago

He's still his awkward self. Amazing to see a software engineer make it to this level (unlike all the other CEOs who are managers)

southernplaces7 1y ago

Why the fuck is this flagged? It's completely relevant to this site, and very much worthy of debate. Who are you assholes who do such persistent, completely capricious flagging?

blooalien 1y ago
> "Who are you assholes who do such persistent, completely capricious flagging?" These days it's almost certainly just a small army of "AI" powered bots tasked with watching the site for topics to auto-flag or derail with inflammatory comments for their tinfoil-hat-wearing overlords.
- southernplaces7 1y ago
  Sure, maybe, but the site's human moderators and admins could also maybe dedicate just a modicum of extra effort to counteracting this nonsense seeing how evident and common it's become. HN doesn't have an enormous number of submissions that gain traction on its main page. It wouldn't be hard to keep an eye on idiotic flagging with fairly modest effort, if they gave a damn about doing it.

amai 1y ago

Zuckerberg does a Trump and just invents numbers.

vlan121 1y ago

I dont know about this. You can look up a video on YouTube but when you search for valid sources I just find magazines I never heard of. Is there a valid source?

alex1138 1y ago

[flagged] Yeah pretty on par for HN No actual discussion allowed if things get spicy for anyone connected to the VC industry