Tech Giants Are Set To Spend $200 Billion This Year Chasing AI

Three months ago, Wall Street punished the world's largest technology firms for spending enormous amounts to develop artificial intelligence, only to deliver results that failed to justify the costs. Silicon Valley's response this quarter? Plans to invest even more. Bloomberg: The capital expenditures of the four largest internet and software companies -- Amazon, Microsoft, Meta and Alphabet -- are set to total well over $200 billion this year, a record sum for the profligate collective.

Executives from each company warned investors this week that their splurge will continue next year, or even ramp up. The spree underscores the extreme costs and resources consumed from the worldwide boom in AI ignited by the arrival of ChatGPT. Tech giants are racing to secure the scarce high-end chips and build the sprawling data centers the technology demands. To do so, the companies have cut deals with energy providers to power these facilities, even reviving a notorious nuclear plant.

AI Winter is coming

[ebunga]

Headline should read "waste" not "spend"

Re:

[VeryFluffyBunny]

I wonder if these "investors" really understand what they're buying into. Are the people signing the contracts & cheques doing sufficient due diligence & making sure they understand what GPT LLMs & the like can do & how they work, & most importantly what the already known limitations are, or are they just listening to hype & being wooed by the likes of Sam Altman? I suspect the latter & that this isn't going to end well for anyone... except for those who understand the opportunit

Re:AI Winter is coming

[Baron_Yam]

Our economies' histories are full of good things being replaced by crappy but much less expensive things. AI is going to replace good people with crappy code, but the price point on the final product will be so attractive we will choose AI even as we complain endlessly about the quality issues with it.

Re:

[VeryFluffyBunny]

Nope. Not even that. So far, only highly knowledgeable & experienced coders can get LLMs to work more efficiently for them. For everyone else, it makes coding take longer, more buggy, & ultimately more expensive.

Re:

[Baron_Yam]

That's one use of AI. There are plenty of others.

And I disagree even on that one; my whole point was that the quality drop won't be an important factor in the switch.

AI Porn ranges from lame to nightmare fuel

[Somervillain]

if ai porn is to judge by, i would agree.

You must have found much better porn than I did. All AI porn I've seen ranges from lame and inaccurate for the parameters to nightmare fuel of women with fused fingers. FFS, they can't even render a convincing breast.

So the point of AI porn is that you can customize it for your preferences. Want a 40yo Latina with natural breasts, unwaxed, in the pose of your choice?...that's an example of why we want AI. Really, the best use case would be getting ultra-precise...like a 45yo woman with indigenous Sou

Re:

[jhoegl]

So, the whole thing is a circular jerk of sorts in that they spend investor money on hardware that they can use in other instances besides "AI", and when the eventual colapse happens because the hype train will let everyone know that its really just a dumber search engine, then the stocks will fall, but they will have sold off stocks, and bought on the dip while also owning hardware that can improve the business in other ways.

Its a stimulation of the tech industry that saw a huge fall from the 2020/2021 t

Tech History Repeats

[Tablizer]

spend investor money on hardware that they can use in other instances besides "AI", and when the eventual collapse

Similarly the dot-com bubble of the early 2000's paid for lots of internet cabling to the masses that was eventually put to use. It's just that the original investors didn't get a cut because the original companies bellied up.

Railroad build-out in the late 20th century also built lots of tracks that were later put to good use, but the original investors got screwed by the bubble poppage.

Oh they absolutely do

[rsilvergun]

They are signing into a massive automation boom that is going to replace tens of millions of jobs with computer software. Bare minimum we are looking at 7 million taxi drivers going away and losing their jobs and their livelihoods in about 5 to 10 years. The only thing holding it back is getting people used to the idea of a self-driving car and working out a few legal problems.

That is worth trillions. The people investing in it are the ultra wealthy and they've set the system up so that they can't lose.

Re:Oh they absolutely do

[jhoegl]

It absolutely will not do this in the next 10-15 years at least.

Re:

[VeryFluffyBunny]

GPT LLMs & other computational statistics models have nothing to do with actually controlling physical machines in the real world. In the USA, they're prematurely rolling out autonomous taxis & hoping that they can get away with it. They cite general traffic accident statistics rather than anything more representative, like professional driver accident statistics, like those from taxi & limousine drivers. It's just more sales-hype bullshit. Human taxi drivers aren't going anywhere for the forese

Re:

[taustin]

I wonder if these "investors" really understand what they're buying into.

They rarely do, especially with tech companies.

Re:AI Winter is coming [and will catch you!]

[shanen]

Okay and I hope you get your Funny mods, but the joke I was looking involves how we are getting chased by AI-driven spam. The clickbaity title of the story is asking for such... Especially getting chased political garbage spam just now. Should I predict a xitter-storm?

We did the same thing with the .com boom

[rsilvergun]

And while lots of people lost a lot of money it didn't really matter because they were the ultra ultra wealthy and they made it all back by investing in the winners.

One of the things people don't understand about how the world works is that the super rich always win because they're the house and the house always wins.

So if you're somebody like Warren Buffett you throw money around like crazy and lose a ton of money on most of your bets. But the ones that succeed make so much money and give you so mu

Re:

[Darinbob]

Personally, I'm waiting on the next big winner, the AI generated NFTs!

Bloat & spin buys the boat & gin.

[Tablizer]

Ssshhh, my mortgage is funded by hype. It's the dirty secret of IT. Our "Sacklers" will go longer without getting caught because the mayhem is spread thinner and wider than opiate addiction.

Re: 2 Billion making Left Wing Rewriting Of Histor

[drinkypoo]

Fox is the MSM, and they owe that to Bill Clinton.

You don't know how anything works.

Good news, bad news

[MpVpRb]

The good news is that some of that investment will lead to really useful stuff
The bad news is that most of it will be used to create crap generators

Next dot bomb

[sheph]

This is going to be the new dot com bubble. Everybody and their dog with a hair brained scheme throwing around buzzwords to secure venture capital to fund their new startup. When the music stops the results will be the same and there will be a small number of really good ideas to come out of it but most people will lose a bunch of money.

Re:

[Z80a]

I find funny the many that are basically just chatGPT with a "please pretend to be the product we're too arsed to actually make" pre prompts

In a gold rush...

[Drethon]

Don't hunt the gold, sell the tools.

Mine the miners

[hwstar]

New tools are subscription only. Sorry, no perpetual licenses are granted for these tools.

"Look at all this crap!"

[Dr.Dubious DDQ]

..."That means there has to be a pony under here somewhere! Keep digging!"

And yet the world still has poverty

[xack]

Again showing poverty is deliberate, as we have the technology, just not the politcal will to solve it.

Re:

[hwstar]

It isn't political will.

It's lobbying from the Business Lobby.

They need a reserve army of hungry workers who are ready to take any job to house, clothe and feed themselves.

Yes, I know this is from Marxism but it really does apply.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour

Re: And yet the world still has poverty

[drinkypoo]

That's how fascism works. The corporations take control of the government through bribery and then they CONTROL the political will.

Re: And yet the world still has poverty

[zawarski]

No one gives a shit about poor people. If we did, we wouldnâ(TM)t be wasting time posting drivel on slashdot.

Fools and their money are soon parted

[Rick Schumann]

How many trillions will be wasted on this nonsense before everyone wises up and realizes they've been taken for fools?

What does Wall Street know

[larryjoe]

"Three months ago, Wall Street punished the world's largest technology firms for spending enormous amounts to develop artificial intelligence, only to deliver results that failed to justify the costs."

What does Wall Street know? Reading articles pretending to understand stock movement makes my head spin. Sometimes an article will state a reason for the market's rise, followed one hour later by the exact opposite reason for the sudden fall in the market. The articles are mainly to generate online clicks.

T

Tax the power spent on AI

[Photo_Nut]

You can fix the USA economy with a 10 cent per kilowatt hour tax on power used to train AI. Maybe with 20 cents, you can also reduce the national debt.

Seriously. There needs to be something good coming out of all this wasted power.