[automatic6131]

This is the crux. A cool thing has been invented, with real usages. Unfortunately, it's cost hundreds of billions of dollars and it has absolutely zero hope of making the trillions needed to justify that.

Now someone will respond about how it's just a stepping stone, and how the billions are justified by _something completely imaginary, and not invented yet, and maybe not ever_ e.g. agents.

[trhway]

>it's cost hundreds of billions of dollars and it has absolutely zero hope of making the trillions needed to justify that.

The BigTech companies have been flush with liquidity and poured those hundreds of billions into the promising tech, and as result we got a wonderful new technology. There is not much need for those trillions in return - just look at liquidity positions of those companies, they are just fine. If those trillions come in eventually - even better.

[automatic6131]

>There is not much need for those trillions in return

Whilst you are correct that big tech cos do not need the return to survive, that's not how public markets work at all, and thus not how the incentives for those in charge of the companies work, and so making you actually wrong.

[trhway]

If i were wrong, those companies would be distributing that cash to shareholders instead of chasing any promise of any big chance.

If investment in AI don't pan out (i do think that it will pan out, and those trillions will come) then those companies would just pour even more billions into whatever big thing/promise would come next. Rinse and repeat. Because some of those things do generate tremendous returns, and thus not playing that game is what really constitute true loss of money.

[ben_w]

Markets are funny things.

US right now is run by someone whose explicit promises, if actually implemented, have an obvious immedidiate 13-14% reduction in GDP — literally, never mind side effects, I'm not counting any businesses losing confidence in the idea that America is a place to invest, this is just direct impact.

DOGE + deportation by themselves do most of that percentage. The tariffs are a rounding error in comparison, but still bad on the kind of scale that gets normal politicians kicked out.

And yet, the markets are up.

[whatshisface]

If you factor in the inflation and the worldwide trade crisis, trading dollars for shares that will lose 10% real value doesn't sound so bad.

[leovingi]

What timeframe are you working with, as in, when do you expect to see this reduction in GDP?

I just want to know so that I can set a reminder and check back on your comment when the time arrives.

[krainboltgreene]

Funny, I had been told we had to lay off all those workers because they weren’t flush with cash.

[TheOtherHobbes]

They're convinced they no longer need them.

Just as they were convinced after Covid that they needed to put hiring into overdrive.

Tech management has the collective IQ of a flock of sheep.

[Aeolun]

Nobody has ever been punished for choosing IBM. It’s the same story here. Nobody is going to blame them for following the zeitgeist, but you bet they’d be punished if they didn’t and it doesn’t pan out.

The whole thing is like bitcoin. There’s too many people that benefit from maintaining the collective illusion.

[trhway]

cash on hands GOOG - 100B, AMZN - 80B, FB - 70B, and their core businesses are basically printing money, so they pretty much do have to invest into new things. If somebody sees a multi-billion dollar sink better than AI right now ...

[Hasu]

> If somebody sees a multi-billion dollar sink better than AI right now ...

I think if they could find a way to make their software good, instead of bad, like it increasingly is, that would be a good use of that money.

[krainboltgreene]

Workers, infrastructure, taxes…

[SZJX]

They’ll be fine and will survive regardless, but their current astronomical valuations probably won’t be.

[SubiculumCode]

To train. Inference is much cheaper...and getting cheaper by the day

[hoseja]

I see it a little differently. What was the direct economic return of the Manhattan Project?

[whatshisface]

Ideally it was thought to have shortened a very expensive war, and may have prevented the USSR from taking over Europe by leveraging its unquestioned postwar conventional forces advantage.

[hoseja]

Well sure but how much cash did the MaPr corp. make selling their new and improved model implosion-type-u-235?

[godelski]

I don't know how to tell you this, but the government isn't a business and has completely different objectives and operating conditions

[mostlysimilar]

If more people understood this we might have avoided the carnage happening in the US right now.

[godelski]

I don't know why it is so hard to understand. I mean money doesn't really exist without a government[0] and while government plays a role in the market and economy, this role is VERY different than that of a business. A government isn't trying to "make money", is isn't trying to make investors happy, and it certainty can't take existential risks that could make "the company" go bankrupt (or it shouldn't lol).

But I do think (and better understand) there is a failure to understand this at a higher abstraction. One part is simply "money is a proxy." This is an uncontestable fact. But one must ask "proxy for what?" and I think people only accept the naive simple answer. Unfortunately, this "is a proxy" concept is extremely generalization. Everything is an estimation, everything is an approximation, and most things are realistically intractable. We use sibling problems or similar problems to work with that are concrete, but there are always assumptions made and ignoring these can have disastrous consequences. Approximations are good (they're necessary even) but the more advanced a {topic,field,civilization,etc} gets, the more important it is to include higher order terms. Frankly, I don't think humans were built for that (though by some miracle we have the capacity to deal with it).

My partner and her dad are both economists, and one thing I've learned is that what many people think are "economics questions" are actually "business questions". I think a story from her dad makes this extremely clear. A government agency hired him to look at the cost benefit analysis of some stuff (like building a few hospitals and some other unambiguously beneficial institutions), and when he presented everyone was happy but had a final question "should we build them?" The answer? "That's not the role of an economist." The reason for this is because money can't actually be accurately attributed to these things. You can project monetary costs for construction, staffing, and bills, and you can make projections about how many people this will benefit, how it can reduce burdens elsewhere, and as well as make /some/ projections about potential cost savings. But you can't answer "should you." Because the weight of these values is not something that can be codified with any data. It is an importance determined by the public and more realistically their representatives. Very few times can you give a strong answer to a question like "should we build a new hospital" and essentially in only the extreme cases. I'll give another example. In my town there was an ER that was closed due to budget constraints. This ER was across the street to the local university, which students represent ~15% of the population. The next nearest ER? A 15 minute ambulance ride away and in the next town over. Did the city save money? Yes. Did the sister city's ER become even busier? Also yes. Did people lose access to medicine? Yes. Did people die? Also yes. Have economists put a price on human life? Also yes, but they are very clear that this is not a real life and a very naive assumptions[1]. It is helpful in the same way drawing random squiggles on a board can help a conversation. Any squiggles can really be drawn but the existence of _something_ helps create some point to start from.

[0] okay crypto bros, you're not wrong but low volatility is critical as well as some other aspects. Let's not get off topic

[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/04/23/843310123/how-government-agen...

[whatshisface]

The profit was made by the private sector in supplying goods to the program. Today, private companies do a lot and earn a lot of money from stockpile maintenance.

[square_usual]

The Manhattan Project was driven by the U.S. Government, which doesn't need a VC-tier return. The entire business model of VCs is based on the idea that they'll have the occasional 100x return, and if none of the AI companies do that it would destroy the VC model.

[namaria]

About the GDP of the US and Europe over the past 80 years so a few quadrillion dollars.

[hoseja]

That's not direct return of VC-invested cash that people are refusing to see past in here.

[namaria]

Doesn't matter. The Manhattan project was a breakthrough in fundamental science that changed the world. Current generative AI are a solid degree improvement on previous technology that is not remotely as big a leap as the amount of money poured into it assumes it to be.

[tempodox]

“people … in here” seeing “past it” or not is irrelevant, the VCs won't see past it once they realize that money is lost.

[jcgrillo]

Wait, what? The Manhattan project produced something--multiple somethings in fact. What has this "project" produced?

[TeaBrain]

Completely irrelevant. The Manhattan Project wasn't funded by VCs with an expectation of a return.