- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
I won the Pulitzer Prize for History for Lords of Finance, my account of how four central bankers’ decisions triggered the Great Depression. I have just completed 1873, a book on America’s railroad boom of the 1870s — the last time private capital flooded into a transformative new infrastructure technology at a scale comparable to 2%–3% of GDP. That research is why, when I look at the AI buildout today, I am genuinely frightened.
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I was in Tech for the .Net Crash and in Finance (in Lehman Brothers, no less, so front row) for the 2008 Crash.
To me what’s going on now stinks of both, because there’s not just one bubble but several, the biggest of which being the Tech Bubble around AI and the Realestate bubble responsible for the several fold higher house prices (in terms of house price to income ratio) than then historical average.
I expect that when one blows it will most likely unballance the broader Economy enough to cause the rest to blow.
While I do respect this guy’s perspective, I don’t think you need to be a historian to see just how terrifying this is.
You’ve got multiple top members of the Fortune 100 over-leveraging their finances multiple times over and laying off staff like no tomorrow, all so that they can dump billions upon billions of dollars into a technology that hasn’t so far even made a single penny of profit.
And then, just to prove how wild all this speculation has gotten, in walks fucking Elon Musk with SpaceX - which for reference in 2025 made $20 billion gross with a net loss of $5 billion - being valued at damn near $2 trillion, a figure it cannot possibly make back with its current rate of progress.
Its maddening. Investors are playing with the dollar like it’s monopoly money, but at some point somebody is going to have to pay the bills, and who do you think that’s gonna be? Cause it certainly isn’t going to be them stupid fucks.
It basically is Monopoly money at this point. And if they can keep loaning dollars into existence that only the richest have access too, then the money consolidates among a handful of very rich individuals.
Even if the bubble pops, it’s the retail investors who will get screwed and the rich people will loan themselves more money to buy up the scraps.
I’m not hopeful at all about a bubble popping creating societal turnover. It will just push money into the hands of a few while increasing the sized of the impoverished class.
I haven’t seen it heard of anything close to a feasible plan to somehow make ai make money. Other than trying to get everyone dependant on it and then what Charge a ludicrous amount of money for them to keep going?
The closest American company seems to be Google. Even then, they aren’t trying to sell AI to extent that other companies are. That seem to me selling more trimmed down and optimized AI solutions integrated with existing products.
Apple has spent 5 years selling products with neural cores in them, they are well placed to add functionality that runs on device
They were also smart enough to realise a few years back that the tech was half baked and held of until now
Google has the capital to try it out without leveraging too much debt I assume. They were wildly profitable before, so it makes a bit more sense.
I am really referring to the companies that are mostly invested in AI. Whether that’s the developers, or just investors with majority holdings. Either way, what’s the plan?
All the AI companies have the same plan that other tech companies had. Set VC funding on fire until you shrink the market to the point where you can set monopolistic prices. The problem right now with AI is the same problem Uber and Lyft have; the market won’t pay the break even price.
