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> That was a bunch of companies who had so much profit that all they could think to do with it was buy their own stock back.

If you or your retirement is a shareholder in one of these companies, you'd rather they return $100 billion to you with boring buybacks or dividends than put it in an exciting AI investment that returns $1-$10 billion. Even though it didn't end up completely worthless, it's still a bad investment.

> If AI blows up in Microsoft or Google’s face they’re just going to write it off and spend a decade paying zero income tax

As a shareholder, you'd also rather they return $100 billion to you than put it in a bad investment that returns $0 -- even if that bad investment lets them write off $20 billion in taxes over the next 10 years you'd still be $80 billion better off.

> how much it’s actually going to matter. If AI blows up in Microsoft or Google’s face

An AI winter shouldn't be an existential threat to these companies -- but "the share price is 10% - 20% lower than the counterfactual where they didn't make these questionable investments" still represents a lot of lost wealth for shareholders -- billions (or trillions for the industry as a whole). A lot of that wealth is the hands of ordinary people, often through retirement investments in index funds.

I think the way many of these companies see it is that the downside risk to not investing is that some of their verticals move into irrelevancy.

E.g., if Google doesn’t invest in AI then AI will kill their search engine business. A lot of us don’t love the Google search AI Overview but now they’re competing directly with ChatGPT, and they’re essentially not a search monopoly anymore.

One way to look at a bust AI investment is the destroyed value of the stock like you mentioned, but perhaps that’s somewhat hindsight-biased? Perhaps the reality for some companies is that if they sit on their hands and do nothing they lose 40% of their company value and if they spend a ton of money on AI they lose 20% of their company value. Of course we don’t know the outcome yet.

> invest in AI then AI will kill their search engine business.

AI has already killed their search biz. No one even clicks on results anymore. How many ads are they clicking on these days?

And that’s exactly my point. The revenue needs to come from ads interjected into Gemini or premium subscriptions to Gemini. So if Google sat out the AI race they’d be stuck renting from other providers or just ceding their dominant search engine position to the likes of OpenAI.

> The revenue needs to come from ads interjected into Gemini or premium subscriptions to Gemini.

Fine, but how much revenue can be derived from this? I'd posit not much so long as Google sticks with CPC pricing.

I definitely agree that it’s very likely to be a worse business than search has been for the past couple of decades.

I think people who see AI search ads as a worse business than web search ads aren't thinking avariciously enough.

AI results are their own citation- and context-free reality.

If Pepsi pays Google $100M for every statistical +10% they give recommendations of Pepsi over Coke in Gemini... how would anyone ever know?

Google hasn't done that obviously yet, because they have the cash to weather the choppy PR waters around public AI perception, but once AI is normalized it's going to be trivial to turn the knob on managed models.

Especially free ones, served cost efficiently by Google's infra backend, pushed via the most widely used phone OS and browser in the world.

The monetization (and user profiling) opportunities make web tracking and ads look like kids' toys.

This is just false. Their search business is still growing, just not as fast as before.

You have a nice slogan, but doesn’t hold up

That’s still the trend moving in the wrong direction for Google.

We could have made the same statement about landline telephones or cable television in the past.

> If you or your retirement is a shareholder in one of these companies, you'd rather they return $100 billion to you with boring buybacks or dividends than put it in an exciting AI investment that returns $1-$10 billion.

If you’re a retireer yeah you just want a steady dividend (or buyback).

But i mean for a 401k that won’t be spent from for 20+ years you absolutely want business to be investing into themselves. Otherwise go buy gold.

Gold doesn’t provide a dividend.

Inside a 401k dividends get reinvested, on top of that companies value income go up with inflation simply because they’re getting a similar cut of larger numbers.

That’s why long term stocks are a vastly better investment.

> If you or your retirement is a shareholder in one of these companies, you'd rather they return $100 billion to you with boring buybacks or dividends than put it in an exciting AI investment that returns $1-$10 billion. Even though it didn't end up completely worthless, it's still a bad investment.

As a shareholder I'd rather them take the $100bn and invest it in growing the business further and generating $200bn. That's the more likely outcome anyway.

I think it's important to remember that we are biased in ways that aren't obvious to us, but will be obvious in retrospect.

Most shareholders in Time Warner, for example, regretted giving 50%+ of the company to AOL shareholders, even if everyone was correct that 'winning the Internet' was the key to growing the business.

Sure but that’s besides the point. I’m not suggesting one can’t make bad decisions. I’m suggesting that framing the investments in a negative light has no meaning precisely because of this hindsight. Is everyone who said Tesla would crash (I have no direct ownership) happy they sold their shares? Don’t invest in what you want to happen. That’s a fool’s game and that’s the one that is being played here by suggesting the outcome of these investments will be bad instead of good. Nobody knows.

One possible explanation for this is that it’s basically a systemic failure of the market. Shareholders are pricing companies as if being a winner in the AI boom is the most important thing. Company leadership then must position themselves as a winner, or the market responds by devaluing their share price and they lose their jobs and probably their incentives. The most legible way for leaders to show they’re in the AI race is to spend money on AI infra, even if it means taking on debt to do so.

So if this is in fact a bubble, nobody can really act differently until the market stops treating AI spending as a winning strategy.

It’s the same in every bubble, there is a term for it that I can’t remember.

If you’re a Japanese company making spanners in 1988 and you’re not speculating in land while all your competitors are, your profits are going to look terrible in comparison and the board will probably try and fire the leadership and replace them with people who’ll speculate in land.

This is part of the reason bubbles can go on for so long - there’s often a point where a lot of people sort of know it’s a bubble and it will end in tears, but they’re still incentivised to participate

As much as I dislike it, is there really any alternative?

It’s not like we have any other industry doing well (or could be made to do very well with such an investment that would also pay off).

Maybe a few trillion could allow us to overtake China as the world’s leader in battery technology and manufacturing…

But it would take more time, effort, and a lot of logistics. The payoff from AI is much sooner…

> Shareholders are pricing companies as if being a winner in the AI boom is the most important thing

Well yeah, that's the most obvious way this plays out

I don't think the root is shareholders. These numbers are getting absurdly high, and so it's predictably being driven by commercial banks and debt. And lo and behold, the US monetary supply is skyrocketing out of control - up ~6% in a year, more than a trillion dollars, driven primarily by commercial lending. [1] As the bubble starts to shake all we need is for them to start packing the debt in asset backed packages and we're good to go, or at least as good to go as 2008 was.

[1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL

This graph looks pretty normal if you enable log scale.

> Is this money not understood by the tech giants taking on the debt? I imagine they understand exactly what’s going on.

Fair. I think everyone who is financially astute knows what's going on. I think pretending "oh, we didn't expect this" is at best, faux naieve. But, I think underlying "understand" is "don't care" -I think there is a segment of the investment industry which only looks to their own profit, not the "build a bigger market" outcome. And so, wiping 4T of debt out, with some recovery in the ashes can be sold as a win for them, if they can be in the right segment of the market.

I don't think it's a net win overall. I don't think driving worldwide RAM prices high was a win. Mind you, I bet RAM manufacturers are quite happy.

"I imagine they understand exactly what’s going on."

You'd also reasonably imagine that every major financial institution on the planet in combination with several sovereign governments would collectively have a handle on the market and yet CDOs nearly bricked the global economy in 2008. History suggests your faith here is likely misplaced.

I think the that they feel the need to do these off balance sheet shenanigans is the issue. They're obviously extremely worried that their credit rating is going to be downgraded otherwise, why bother?

"Take a look at your 401(ks). And when you're 68% up or whatever you may be, you are up a lot... under Sleepy Joe you were 25% down."

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJ84XMTugFs

It isn't to your original question but in terms of giving a cost to misunderstandings of finance one needs look no further then American politics.

401k growth is wrongly the face of the American Economy when it should be more tangible attributes like the understanding of debt at the macroeconomic level.

Microsoft is on its way to losing they have been trying desperately to find or hook on to the next great thing. And they have been failing market inertia is keeping them afloat. But they’re on their way to taking a hit like Intel, I don’t think the current CEO at Microsoft is gonna survive Copilot and the collapse of Xbox.

> Tech giants before the AI boom made a heck of a lot of cash that they had nothing they could do with it. Remember before AI when the existential crisis was stock buybacks? That was a bunch of companies who had so much profit that all they could think to do with it was buy their own stock back.

I'm just spitballing here, so bear with me, but maybe increasing the value returned to the people doing the actual work that created the profit in the first place.

> increasing the value returned to the people doing the actual work that created the profit in the first place

Tangentially reminds me of the Costco Hot Dog story. [0] We know that companies rather increase prices for consumers to have better balance sheets, than changing product strategies, and for sure we know actual workers get the shortest end of the stick.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Costco_hot_dog#Cultural_impact

Or hand out money to investors as dividends was they way public companies used to handle profits.

> Tech giants before the AI boom made a heck of a lot of cash that they had nothing they could do with it

Dividends.

But then they wouldn't be infinite growth tech giants. They'd be value investing.

A company with over a trillion dollar in market cap is extremely unlikely to be a high growth business. Big tech are (or at least were, before their recent splurge on AI) very profitable businesses, often trading at reasonable P/E. Not quite the value stocks, but regular, good investments. There is nothing wrong with staying in this model.

Microsoft is the odd man out the bag holder, it won’t be Apple, and it won’t be Google.

Sorry, I cannot parse this comment. Can you clarify?

I cynically suspect there's an expectation of a bailout, and that it may have even been engineered.

> I imagine they understand exactly what’s going on.

Maybe they are counting on taxpayers to bail them out if they crater in a 2008-scale failure.

That bailout was unpopular in 2008.

That was with a US government that was significantly less indebted than it is now, both in real terms and as a percentage of annual GDP. The crude birth rate is about 30% lower than it was in 2007. The generation that was coming of age at the time is the first in American history to have a lower quality of living than their parents.

IMHO, unless there is some massive geographic and societal divider that stands between the likes of Sam, Dario, et al. and the rest of the country at the time of any sort of collapse, they'd be far, far better off just taking the losses and not bothering American society again. It won't be pretty if they come asking for a handout.

> The generation that was coming of age at the time is the first in American history to have a lower quality of living than their parents.

I hate this way of thinking. The parents, at the same stage in life, didn’t have magical devices they could hold in their hands that would answer any question ever asked in human history, for example.

Progress matters. Just because the average 20 year old at that time could rent a 10% smaller apartment than their parents could, doesn’t mean they would necissarily trade what they have access to in 2007 for what their parents could access in the eighties.

People in 2007 are vastly better off than in 1984.

Job stability and housing affordability matter far more than fancy electronics.

I think life in the 80s was better. Less stress, less pressure and worry. The internet is nice but we had similar things back then like fidonet.

I mean there's nice things now too. Working from home is exceptionally nice. But a lot of it causes extra stress too. Like social media, polarisation, constant notification nagging. I turn most of that shit off but people still manage to pull me into that at times.

They understand fully. They don’t care, because it’s not their money.

Look back at the “dotcom” bubble. And the Savings and Loan crisis. And the Subprime mortgage crisis.

This is going to be 10x all of those put together, minimum.

Yes exactly. In many ways it's exactly like all those other bubbles.

Except the size. This is really a big puffer of a bubble :(

> Is this money not understood by the tech giants taking on the debt?

There's a game-theoretic way of modelling this situation called, from memory, a modified Dutch auction. The way it works is that the winner pays the difference between their bid and the next highest bid, and so on all the way down. It models the way in which players are motivated to extend themselves almost infinitely in an attempt to win something unwinnable (what are the success criteria for "winning the AI race", in other words how do you know when you've "won"? And what do you get for "winning"?).