Spending for AI’s pot of gold – powering profit?

High hype … trippy chips … gooey guardrails … pending legislation … the electric grid … pay, pay, pay, payday … cloudy cloud forecasts …

“Everyone wants to save the world, they just disagree on how.” – Fallout Season 1, Amazon Prime Video 2024 (Image credit: pixabay.com)

• Washington Post > “Big Tech keeps spending billions on AI. There’s no end in sight.” by Gerrit De Vynck and Naomi Nix (April 25, 2024) – Much of the money is going to new data centers, which are predicted to place huge demands on the U.S. power grid.

In quarterly earnings calls this week, Google, Microsoft and Meta all underlined just how big their investments in AI are. On Wednesday, Meta raised its predictions for how much it will spend this year by up to $10 billion. Google plans to spend around $12 billion or more each quarter this year on capital expenditures, much of which will be for new data centers, Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat said Thursday. Microsoft spent $14 billion in the most recent quarter and expects that to keep increasing “materially,” Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood said.

2 comments

  1. Employee burnout

    Yeah, the dark side of the AI gold rush. It’s all about rollout $speed$ (for whatever, eh) – with “an overall lack of concern … about real-world effects.”

    Whimsical projects … “hectic pivots” … zero work-life balance … zero testing … sink-or-swim training … du jour priorties (with “no time to think critically”) …

    • CNBC > “AI engineers report burnout and rushed rollouts as ‘rat race’ to stay competitive hits tech industry” by Hayden Field (Friday, May 3, 2024) – From Big Tech to startups, the “AI rat race” keeps rolling on.

    KEY POINTS (quoted)

    • Artificial intelligence engineers at top tech companies told CNBC that the pressure to roll out AI tools at breakneck speed has come to define their jobs.
    • They say that much of their work is assigned to appease investors rather than to solve problems for end users, and that they are often chasing OpenAI.
    • Burnout is an increasingly common theme as AI workers say their employers are pursuing projects without regard for the technology’s effect on climate change, surveillance and other potential real-world harms.

  2. Do mischief and then ask for forgiveness

    A corporation’s – particularly a mega-corp’s – public facing narrative (and mission statement) need not align with its internal playbook. For AI, there’s so much hype, so much impetus to move fast and break things (make legal messes) and then ask for forgiveness later. It’s a time for buccaneers, eh.

    So, this article asks, “What [do] the power players of Silicon Valley really think these days?”

    • The Verge > “Eric Schmidt says the quiet part out loud” by Alex Heath (Aug 16, 2024) – The AI industry is running the same playbook Silicon Valley pioneered a long time ago.

    Sometimes, though, a slipup still happens and the quiet part is said out loud. Such was the case during ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s recent talk at Stanford University, which has mostly garnered headlines for his now-walked-back comments about Google’s slowness to compete with OpenAI. The more eye-popping thing he said during the talk, however, was his advice for AI startups: that it’s okay to steal content if you’re successful because you can just hire lawyers to “clean up the mess.” As he told the room full of students: “If nobody uses your product, it doesn’t matter that you stole all the content.”

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