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Software giant Oracle corporation is laying off thousands of workers and killing their Texas data center plans, per Reuters and Bloomberg. It appears that their capital expenditures have gotten ahead of their ability to pay for them and now they face the regrettable need to say it out loud shortly before markets close on a Friday afternoon.
This may be indirectly tied to the Iran conflict as Mid East sovereign wealth funds have begun pulling back from investment.
I'm interested to see the fallout of this one. My understanding is that the Ellison clan is fairly tight with the Trump admin.
Beyond that, I have concerns that this may be the match that lit the fuse on AI spending. I have spent the last six months trying to figure out why these valuations made any sense whatsoever. The expense profile of companies like Anthropic and OpenAI looked a lot more like Caterpillar to me than Salesforce. When it came to Oracle, I couldn't make sense of it at all.
In terms of explanations, I only had three explanations I had were that I was:
I still don't know which one it is.
Some of you here are clearly smarter and more educated than me. What do you think I'm missing here? My gut prediction is that this spirals into an even bigger flight from capital in the next six months, which causes holy hell on the retail market because the average investor is more leveraged now than they have been at any point in my lifetime. I'm also assuming it'll kill quite a lot of "LLM Wrapper" companies, like the one run by fear porn expert Matt Shumer.
I assume Google will be OK.
Beyond that, I don't have any idea.
Any predictions?
How many important actors in the AI space need to be religious fanatics for it to start to alter the spending patterns?
There's some subset of people you run into who genuinely believe in the Singularity, that the moment AGI is cracked nothing else matters. The whole concept of worrying about debt load after your company cracks AGI is silly, if another company cracks AGI first then having good profit margins won't save you. If it ushers in the end times, or Gay Luxury Space Communism, worrying about whether you lied to shareholders? Stupid.
The religious fanatics will say whatever they need to in order to push ahead.
Believing that AGI is possible doesn't really require any kind of religion. Certainly it's speculative, but so is a belief that modular nuclear can reduce cost down to make starting a modular nuclear startup reasonable. really by this standard any startup is a religion. Really I think you're just sneering because you don't have any actual arguments. The argument in favor of AGI is reasonable and fits well into our general shared understanding of material reality. Maybe we'll find out that LLM architecture doesn't scale up to human level general intelligence and we can update our model, but that update requires information not in evidence.
Believing that after AGI is cracked nothing else matters is the religion.
Much like fanatical Jehovah's Witnesses my father grew up with didn't save money because they thought the world was going to end in 1975.
In the same way you can't really examine the financial strategies of someone who thinks the world will end in 1975; you can't examine a company making decisions about investment and debt load based on immanentizing the eschaton.
Believing that if we can automate all labor for pennies on the dollar then there will be a major economic step change doesn't require faith. It all follows from some pretty simple reasoning. Calling it religion proves too much.
Still if there's a societal wide gamble and a small sector of people think the potential payoff for slamming as much investment as possible into AI is 'infinity wellbeing' for humanity. That then distorts a ton of decision making especially if it turns out they're some combination of wrong and/or don't actually have sufficient resources to get to the promised land
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