The parts of this article that really had me shaking my head at these hubristic tech muppets were the reports of how much they were spending to build tech centers and how gormless the private equity pinheads are being in their rush to invest money in them.
And then we have this:
The tech firm makes an investment in the data center, outside investors put up most of the cash, then the special purpose vehicle borrows money to buy the chips that are inside the data centers. The tech company gets the benefit of the increased computing capacity but it doesn't weigh down the company's balance sheet with debt.
The return of the "special purpose vehicle" for financing. So very bubble.
I'd say we are better off investing in tulip bulbs, but at the rate those data centers will swallow up water and warm the planet, you'd never get those tulips to grow, and the Netherlands will be entirely underwater - just like all those mortgages were the last time we let the promise of easy money gull us.
2 weeks ago
Side note from the AI front lines...:
I have in the past dealt with AI hallucinated sources, and with AI suggested secondary sources that were either inappropriate to the paper at hand, or that were misrepresented by the AI synopsis...
This week, however, marks the first time I have had a student submit a paper where the AI has hallucinated quotations for the primary source and made up a new plot for the story. And this is also the first time the student turning in an AI generated paper has not recognized that AI has made up shit about a story that they had supposedly annotated, and that we had discussed at length in class.
Meanwhile, several of the students are writing projects that worry over the effects of AI on the fields that they are currently studying to become a part of, fearing that their future jobs may be transformed into something unsustainable by the time they get out of college despite it seeming like a good choice when they started.
College is a much bigger investment and a much bigger risk for them than it was for us. The cost has exploded, and the state governments are happy to allow that to happen so long as they can pass that expense on to students in the form of loans.
It's impossible for them to make an informed decision. People like Mr. Pichai are telling them that in order to prepare for the future they will need to learn how to use AI, but they are also worried that using AI will prevent them from learning the skills they will need to be able to adapt in a changing world. Not an easy bind to resolve for a brain in its early twenties. They lack the experience needed to make good judgments about these things.
In comments echoing those made by US Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan in 1996, warning of "irrational exuberance" in the market well ahead of the dotcom crash, Mr Pichai said the industry can "overshoot" in investment cycles like this.
"We can look back at the internet right now. There was clearly a lot of excess investment, but none of us would question whether the internet was profound," he said.
In the middle part of the interview he muses about the huge energy costs of AI, only to conclude that new energy sources are going to be necessary to avoid constraining the economy. The environmental cost seems already to have been written off as a concern there. No doubt that will be taken care of automagically by the power of The Singularity.
As for the jobs thing:
AI will also affect work as we know it, Mr Pichai said, calling it "the most profound technology" humankind had worked on.
"We will have to work through societal disruptions," he said, adding that it would also "create new opportunities".
"It will evolve and transition certain jobs, and people will need to adapt," he said. Those who do adapt to AI "will do better".
So if it works it's going to suck up tons of energy and put people out of jobs, and the irrationality surrounding its growing pains will crash economies and ruin small investors and a lot of the less secure AI firms.
And once the survivors finally get AI off the ground we can look forward to them enshitifying it as thoroughly as they have the internet, which was probably at its best in the brief moment just before every idiot with an MBA and an in with a venture capitalist kicked off the boom with a fuzzy business plan and a dream of early retirement.
Here's another piece that I ran across on NPR:
https://www.npr.org/2025/11/23/nx-s1-5615410/ai-bubble-nvidia-openai-revenue-bust-data-centers
The parts of this article that really had me shaking my head at these hubristic tech muppets were the reports of how much they were spending to build tech centers and how gormless the private equity pinheads are being in their rush to invest money in them.
And then we have this:
The return of the "special purpose vehicle" for financing. So very bubble.
I'd say we are better off investing in tulip bulbs, but at the rate those data centers will swallow up water and warm the planet, you'd never get those tulips to grow, and the Netherlands will be entirely underwater - just like all those mortgages were the last time we let the promise of easy money gull us.
Side note from the AI front lines...:
I have in the past dealt with AI hallucinated sources, and with AI suggested secondary sources that were either inappropriate to the paper at hand, or that were misrepresented by the AI synopsis...
This week, however, marks the first time I have had a student submit a paper where the AI has hallucinated quotations for the primary source and made up a new plot for the story. And this is also the first time the student turning in an AI generated paper has not recognized that AI has made up shit about a story that they had supposedly annotated, and that we had discussed at length in class.
Meanwhile, several of the students are writing projects that worry over the effects of AI on the fields that they are currently studying to become a part of, fearing that their future jobs may be transformed into something unsustainable by the time they get out of college despite it seeming like a good choice when they started.
College is a much bigger investment and a much bigger risk for them than it was for us. The cost has exploded, and the state governments are happy to allow that to happen so long as they can pass that expense on to students in the form of loans.
It's impossible for them to make an informed decision. People like Mr. Pichai are telling them that in order to prepare for the future they will need to learn how to use AI, but they are also worried that using AI will prevent them from learning the skills they will need to be able to adapt in a changing world. Not an easy bind to resolve for a brain in its early twenties. They lack the experience needed to make good judgments about these things.
From the BBC: Google boss says trillion-dollar AI investment boom has 'elements of irrationality'
In the middle part of the interview he muses about the huge energy costs of AI, only to conclude that new energy sources are going to be necessary to avoid constraining the economy. The environmental cost seems already to have been written off as a concern there. No doubt that will be taken care of automagically by the power of The Singularity.
As for the jobs thing:
So if it works it's going to suck up tons of energy and put people out of jobs, and the irrationality surrounding its growing pains will crash economies and ruin small investors and a lot of the less secure AI firms.
And once the survivors finally get AI off the ground we can look forward to them enshitifying it as thoroughly as they have the internet, which was probably at its best in the brief moment just before every idiot with an MBA and an in with a venture capitalist kicked off the boom with a fuzzy business plan and a dream of early retirement.
Lovely.