323
Big tech has spent $155 billion on AI this year. It’s about to spend hundreds of billions more
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2025
323 points (99.7% liked)
Technology
73581 readers
3317 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
They're different, and I think this one has the capability of being more devastating.
The dot-com bubble was really broad. Hundreds or thousands of companies, all without vowels in their names trying to break new ground. A wild west style gold rush. When it popped a lot of small companies went bankrupt.
This is a handful of companies with billions of capital buying GPUs from NVidia to be make the largest hungriest machine they can. All in the pursuit of being first to create "AGI". If one of them succeeds, the others are toast and multiple 500+B dollar companies will collapse in on themselves. If none of it works, the same thing happens and it takes a large chunk out of $4T Nvidia too.
I'm sure that silicon valley executives visualise a future where they own the machines that produce all intellectual property and do most jobs. They see a return to feudalism where they are the lords.
I think this greater vision is about as likely to be realised as it is that Elon Musk will invent full self driving, or robots that aren't obviously remotely operated, or a tesla roadster, or a battery powered articulated lorry with thermo nuclear explosion proof glass, or building a rocket to get the US back to the moon before the Chinese in what is clearly a new space race/pissing match. Or a hyperloop, or ever getting anywhere near to building a colony on Mars, or, or, or.
But I don't think it is just a case of AGI or bust. LLM's augmented with ai agents have a very real potential to replace a capitalism-destabilising percentage of white collar jobs without AGI.
Just like the dot com bubble popping didn't kill the web, I do think it is unlikely that any possible current AI bubble popping will kill capital's push to automate jobs away.
(And as far as I can see the AI bubble is the result of massive capital expenditure rather than rampant speculation, so because I am pretty confident in the 'value' to capital of LLM's + AI Agent's, I don't really see it as the same kind of a bubble as the dotcom bubble.)