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> People do not understand AI is necessary to prevent the U.S. GDP bubble from popping — not the AI bubble, that’s just a sideshow. If AI succeeds, growth of we

> People do not understand AI is necessary to prevent the U.S. GDP bubble from popping — not the AI bubble, that’s just a sideshow. If AI succeeds, growth of wealth per capita continues (while us all working-class folks stay poor, but that’s not anything Microsoft would know or care about); if AI fails, much of the corporate economy shatters into dust, including Microsoft. Don’t we all want Windows to continue existing, etc. It is investment 101 not to put all eggs in one basket. I immediately get it that some years ago an investment into AI (in the sense of NLMs) was a decent idea because in the (rare) event that people actually get NLMs to work decently, it would pay off big. But if you apply some common sense, already from beginning on it was clear that the hurdles to overpass so that AI becomes more than just some experimental toy were huge. So, what Microsoft did was like investing, say, 1 billion USD into one single lottery ticket which with a probability of, say, 0.1 % gives you 50 trillion USD and with 99.9 % probability it gives you 0 USD, i.e. the investment opportunity has a huge expected value, but in all likelihood, it will burn money. In a solid portfolio, you add some of these highly experimental investments to your portfolio, but you base your company on much more solid investments. The same statement hold for betting a big part of the future of the national economy on such a strange lottery ticket. I cannot find any other explanation for this behaviour than stupidity.

yetihehe 11mo ago
> I cannot find any other explanation for this behaviour than stupidity. I can find one other explanation: greed.
- aleph_minus_one 11mo ago
  > I can find one other explanation: greed. If the decision makers were greedy, they wouldn't gamble away the future of the company (or even national economy) because with some very, very low probability the investment will make them insanely rich. Greedy people rather - want to get even much richer with a high probability, and - hate it when an investment that they do is with an insanely high probability a dog. In other words, as I already outlined: such greedy investors would for sure invest some small amount of their investment volume into some insanely high-risk-high-reward opportunities such as AI, so that in the rare event that if this turns out to be huge, they will nevertheless profit insanely from it, but they would never bet most of their money on this single investment area.
  - binary132 11mo ago
    You seem to be mistaking greedy decision makers for highly reasonable decision makers, and assuming they are not convinced that this particular hype wave is their last best hope for big line going up forever.
    - aleph_minus_one 11mo ago
      > this particular hype wave is their last best hope for big line going up forever. No hype wave has ever gone up forever in history, so I think it is legitimate to call such a crazy kind of model assumption for the investment "stupidity".
      - binary132 11mo ago
        You know what I meant. And perhaps you’d like to refer to what some of these people seem to think about AI — things like the idea that it’s going to so radically take over and disrupt society that there won’t be any work left for humans. That roughly approximates Big Line Up Forever for whoever’s building and running the machines. It IS stupid. But it’s very real in both Silicon Valley and corporate America boomer capitalism.
  - altairprime 11mo ago
    > “We have a line of sight to drive approximately $1 billion of gross run rate savings over three years across product development, customer service and support, and many of our operational processes […] through artificial intelligence adoption and enablement.” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46054057 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46054057 HP posted the above today, announcing the layoffs of several thousand workers on the basis that AI may deliver on its promises in the next three years. Whether your argument is valid or not, hundreds of companies now have gambled their future earnings growth on the same AI-hopeful theory of layoffs that HP has so plainly stated. If it ends up being a “significant” investment or not will be determined by future events, so I won’t try to argue either way in that regard. We’ll both find out soon enough!

yetihehe 11mo ago

> I cannot find any other explanation for this behaviour than stupidity. I can find one other explanation: greed.

aleph_minus_one 11mo ago
> I can find one other explanation: greed. If the decision makers were greedy, they wouldn't gamble away the future of the company (or even national economy) because with some very, very low probability the investment will make them insanely rich. Greedy people rather - want to get even much richer with a high probability, and - hate it when an investment that they do is with an insanely high probability a dog. In other words, as I already outlined: such greedy investors would for sure invest some small amount of their investment volume into some insanely high-risk-high-reward opportunities such as AI, so that in the rare event that if this turns out to be huge, they will nevertheless profit insanely from it, but they would never bet most of their money on this single investment area.
- binary132 11mo ago
  You seem to be mistaking greedy decision makers for highly reasonable decision makers, and assuming they are not convinced that this particular hype wave is their last best hope for big line going up forever.
  - aleph_minus_one 11mo ago
    > this particular hype wave is their last best hope for big line going up forever. No hype wave has ever gone up forever in history, so I think it is legitimate to call such a crazy kind of model assumption for the investment "stupidity".
    - binary132 11mo ago
      You know what I meant. And perhaps you’d like to refer to what some of these people seem to think about AI — things like the idea that it’s going to so radically take over and disrupt society that there won’t be any work left for humans. That roughly approximates Big Line Up Forever for whoever’s building and running the machines. It IS stupid. But it’s very real in both Silicon Valley and corporate America boomer capitalism.
- altairprime 11mo ago
  > “We have a line of sight to drive approximately $1 billion of gross run rate savings over three years across product development, customer service and support, and many of our operational processes […] through artificial intelligence adoption and enablement.” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46054057 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46054057 HP posted the above today, announcing the layoffs of several thousand workers on the basis that AI may deliver on its promises in the next three years. Whether your argument is valid or not, hundreds of companies now have gambled their future earnings growth on the same AI-hopeful theory of layoffs that HP has so plainly stated. If it ends up being a “significant” investment or not will be determined by future events, so I won’t try to argue either way in that regard. We’ll both find out soon enough!