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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.
I understand the cringe at @FiveHourMarathon likening it to religion, but there is something apocalyptic about the idea. Not in the sense that it's world-ending, but in the sense that there's something vaguely amazing that's supposed to happen that will change humanity, etc. How are we supposed to know when we've hit AGI? Sam Altman or whoever saying so isn't going to move the needle much, as it will just be perceived as a cynical marketing ploy. If it hits some benchmark that's great but I'm sure by some benchmark we had AGI in 2023. Besides, these benchmarks are all industry inventions, anyway.
OF course, no one in the industry would ever say that we've reached AGI, because that would instantly shut off the money spigot and expose them all as frauds, even if they are true believers. As soon as they describe a product as AGI the expectation level would skyrocket, as this is their supposed end goal, but when the sun goes up, sun goes down, moon goes up, moon goes down, and a month later they're still stuck with a 3% conversion rate, a trillion dollars in debt, and a product that the tech gurus all agree is slightly better than the last iteration, it's over. At that point, no one has any reason to give AI companies any more money.
So if it does happen, it has to happen in a big noticeable way that nobody can ignore. It also has to be an unalloyed good approaching luxury gay space communism, because if it's anything else, Altman et al. are fucked as well. I honestly don't understand the glee with which AI promoters predict that 50% of all "knowledge jobs" will disappear within a year. Hell, the Chief Legal Officer of Anthropic went to Stanford Law School earlier this year and basically told the students that they should all drop out. Do they not understand basic economics? Do they not understand that 50% of the highest-paid workers getting laid off in a year's time would create an economic disaster the likes of which we've never seen? Do they not understand that this will have a ripple effect into non knowledge-work, as cratering demand combined with an employment glut would reduce jobs and depress the salaries of the jobs that remained? Do they not realize that many of the enterprise clients they depend on to pay full-freight for this product will be out of business? Do they not realize that everyone whom they owe money to will also be in a tight spot and will expect to be paid the full amount of the money owed? Do they not realize that the AI companies themselves are likely to go bankrupt in such a scenario? It has to be a messianic vision, because it can't be anything else.
According to Microsoft and OpenAI, AGI happens when OpenAI earns $100 billion in revenue.
Ha!
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