Tech Giants Are Set To Spend $200 Billion This Year Chasing AI (bnnbloomberg.ca) 34
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.
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 (Score:5, Funny)
Headline should read "waste" not "spend"
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Re:AI Winter is coming (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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 (Score:2)
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
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Its a stimulation of the tech industry that saw a huge fall from the 2020/2021 t
Tech History Repeats (Score:1)
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 (Score:1)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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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!] (Score:2)
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?
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Personally, I'm waiting on the next big winner, the AI generated NFTs!
Bloat & spin buys the boat & gin. (Score:2)
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 (Score:2)
Fox is the MSM, and they owe that to Bill Clinton.
You don't know how anything works.
Good news, bad news (Score:3)
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 (Score:3)
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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
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This is going to be the new dot com bubble.
Let's not forget though that the dot.com bubble was built on a real and fundamental shift in how technology, business and society worked. After the dot.com bubble exploded, the internet had radically changed - from something of interest mainly to nerds and academics to something that touched everybody's lives and changed the way we live, communicate, entertain ourselves, shop and so on.
I believe we're at a similar stage with AI: the current froth of startups, competing models, speculative investments and so
In a gold rush... (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't hunt the gold, sell the tools.
Mine the miners (Score:2)
New tools are subscription only. Sorry, no perpetual licenses are granted for these tools.
"Look at all this crap!" (Score:2)
And yet the world still has poverty (Score:3)
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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 (Score:2)
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 (Score:2)
Fools and their money are soon parted (Score:2)
What does Wall Street know (Score:2)
"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 (Score:2)
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.
They can afford clean power. (Score:1)
If these companies can throw this kind of money at AI make them build nuclear plants to power all the datacenters they’ll need. We can push AI back ten years to get a few plants approved and built.