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It's hard to comprehend the scale of these investments. Comparing them to notable industrial projects, it's almost unbelievable. Every week in 2026 Google will
by Kon5ole 8mo ago
It's hard to comprehend the scale of these investments. Comparing them to notable industrial projects, it's almost unbelievable.
Every week in 2026 Google will pay for the cost of a Burj Khalifa. Amazon for a Wembley Stadium.
Facebook will spend a France-England tunnel every month.
- nine_zeros 8mo ago[dead]
- bogzz 8mo agoHaters will say Sora wasn't worth it.
- jsheard 8mo agoIncredible how quickly that moment passed. Four months on it's barely clinging to the App Store top 100, below killer apps such as Gossip Harbor®: Merge & Story.
- mimischi 8mo agoOk I’ll bite. Was it worth it? What have people missed that haven’t used it.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- askl 8mo agoWhat is Sora?
- fogzen 8mo agoIt's incredibly sad and depressing. We could be building green energy, parks, public transit, education, healthcare.
- renewiltord 8mo agoWe could, but perhaps people want AI data centers more than one more month of healthcare spending. Though it’s a tough thing choosing between 3.5 rail lines between SF and LA and LLMs.
- don_esteban 8mo agoThe thing is that is is not the 'people' who decide these things. Its the uber rich, who prefer investing to get uber richer (although I am not sure how will that work in this case) to investing in improving the health of the plebs.
- hunterpayne 8mo ago> building green energy Fun fact, we have already spent about $10T on renewables and it still provides a very tiny amount of global energy. Learn about why before complaining about it in public. While you are at it, perhaps learn why health insurance is so expensive while also increasing the cost of healthcare. In many matters of public policy, lack of money isn't the problem. Its ignorance of what makes good policy that is missing and that isn't fixed by throwing money at problems.
- peterlk 8mo agoI have been having this conversation more and more with friends. As a research topic, modern AI is a miracle, and I absolutely love learning about it. As an economic endeavor, it just feels insane. How many hospitals, roads, houses, machine shops, biomanufacturing facilities, parks, forests, laboratories, etc. could we build with the money we’re spending on pretraining models that we throw away next quarter?
- uejfiweun 8mo agoThere is a certain logic to it though. If the scaling approaches DO get us to AGI, that's basically going to change everything, forever. And if you assume this is the case, then "our side" has to get there before our geopolitical adversaries do. Because in the long run the expected "hit" from a hostile nation developing AGI and using it to bully "our side" probably really dwarfs the "hit" we take from not developing the infrastructure you mentioned.
- mylifeandtimes 8mo agoHere's hoping you are chinese, then.
- thesmtsolver2 8mo agoWhy?
- uejfiweun 8mo agoWell, I tried to specifically frame it in a neutral way, to outline the thinking that pretty much all the major nations / companies currently have on this topic.
- A_D_E_P_T 8mo agoAny serious LLM user will tell you that there's no way to get from LLM to AGI. These models are vast and, in many ways, clearly superhuman. But they can't venture outside their training data, not even if you hold their hand and guide them. Try getting Suno to write a song in a new genre. Even if you tell it EXACTLY what you want, and provide it with clear examples, it won't be able to do it. This is also why there have been zero-to-very-few new scientific discoveries made by LLM.
- baq 8mo agoInflation adjusted?
- Symbiote 8mo agoSeems to be. Facebook's investment is to be $135bn [1]. The Channel Tunnel was "in 1985 prices, £4.65 billion", which is £15.34bn in December 2025 [3], or $20.5bn at current exchange rate. That is staggering. (I didn't check the other figures.) [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn8jkyk78gno https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn8jkyk78gno [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_Tunnel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_Tunnel [3] https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/inflation-calculator https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/in...
- ttoinou 8mo agoSo, now you understand you can’t compare things with how much they cost
- jaccola 8mo agoNot really your point but I think the skills to create these things are much slower to train than producing chips and data centres. So they couldn't really build any of these projects weekly since the cost of construction materials / design engineers / construction workers would inflate rapidly. Worth keeping in mind when people say "we could have built 52 hospitals instead!" or similar. Yes, but not really... since the other constraints would quickly reveal themselves
- mtrovo 8mo agoRemember the good old days of complaining about Bitcoin taking the energy output of a whole town.
- mjevans 8mo agoIt has never _not_ been time to build all the power plants we can environmentally afford. More power enables higher quality of living and more advanced civilization. It will be put to use doing something useful, or at the very worst it'll make doing existing useful things less expensive opening them up to more who would like those things.
- WarOnPrivacy 8mo ago> It has never _not_ been time to build all the power plants we can environmentally afford. The US' challenge is that new energy sources are waiting 3-5 years before they can connect to the grid. refs: https://kagi.com/search?q=how+long+are+new+energy+sources+waiting+to+connect+to+the+grid+in+2026%3F&r=us&sh=3AJpUrrcxKro7EbFd-FfOg https://kagi.com/search?q=how+long+are+new+energy+sources+wa...
- saalaa 8mo agoI'm a simple man, I just want these companies to pay taxes where they make money.
- WarOnPrivacy 8mo ago> I'm a simple man, I just want these companies to pay taxes where they make money. The folks who bankroll elections work tirelessly to insure this doesn't happen.
- int_19h 8mo agoEspecially when they make money off the free work of all the people who contributed to those training sets. There really needs to be some kind of "commons tax" for that kind of thing.
- speleding 8mo agoProfits = revenue - costs. Costs include depreciations and write offs of investments, and capital costs (what they pay to service debt), before you get to a taxable profit for accounting purposes. It's going to be many years before they pay taxes, if ever. They do have to pay Value Added Tax on their sales in many countries (all of the EU), but not in most of the US. (The basis for Trump's claim that the EU is robbing the US. Sigh.)
- jsemrau 8mo agoIts like we are transcending to a new state of the world.
- jiggawatts 8mo agoSure, but the end-state of this isn't just chat bots! Bipedal robots are the real target application for this technology, and at least three big players have invested many billions each into base model training. The "GPT 2 moment" for robotics will happen likely later this year, next year at the latest. Then, the company that scales up from there to the equivalent of GPT 3.5 -- the first properly useful model -- can start selling androids by the tens of millions. It'll be the next automobile, every well-to-do household will want one eventually. Every hospital, to assist/replace nurses. Every retirement home for the same reason. Japan and China alone, with their ageing populations in dire need of nursing, will easily pay for the investment with that one use-case.