I do wonder why HN thinks it understands risk better than the people hired at multi trillion dollar companies whose whole sole job it is to understand and minimize these risks - people who also understand the company way better than anyone on HN.

Is it possible that these companies feel they have more to lose by missing out on AI than by taking on debt? Or that they genuinely are in a race to superintelligence, which easily justifies this debt and far more?

When I worked at Apple, I remember seeing the commentariat insisting that <project> was bound to fail, that we didn't know what we were doing. When in fact extremely competent people knew precisely what they were doing. Of course, the commentariat were wrong and I'd wager most of them use what I had a part in building. The same story tended to repeat across my subsequent jobs in big tech. All this seems quite similar to me.

The FOMO argument is exactly what was used by banks in GFC: as long as the music is playing need to dance.

But current era also has echoes of capex financing (eg cisco lending to its buyers) and Enron (eg use of SPVs).

I don’t think that most people who are concerned about a bubble think people and orgs fueling it are stupid, but they’re operating with local incentive structures that can result is systematic problems.

And for folks who have lived through multiple of these (and maybe lost paper wealth, retirement savings, or homes), I think being concerned is reasonable.

Hard won lessons and all that.

Go watch "The Big Short." Why should we trust the people that analyze risk? I was working during the dot com boom. I remember the 2008 housing crash and the fallout. Then combine that with Enron style fraud.

Also many of us are working in these AI / data center companies.

Does this thinking apply to tech's VR bet, for example?

They might have a conflict of interest so that they shouldn't be trusted implicitly even if they can theoretically do a better job. Also, we live in a democracy, and these are public companies. With that much money on the line, they become quasi-governmental in shaping the economy and such. If they don't like public scrutiny, probably best not to be a public company. The workings of a public company should probably be a public interest, so the public can support laws and regulations appropriate for them

The world is run by completely average people making series of mundane decisions. There is no super genius who’s job it is to understanding the risk of investing in AI.

It’s just some nameless regular guy crunching some numbers and feeding to another regular guy who interprets the numbers. And so on

Because history shows time and time again that these folks you speak of who’s job it is to manage risk are actually pretty shit at managing risk.

Smartest guys in the room

How's Project Titan doing? Was that a good use of corporate funds and energy?

HN? Are you talking about KOHEI YAMADA at Nikkei?

> understand and minimize these risks

Since when did any employee ever do that? "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it". The higher up the food chain often relates in great part to accepting anything thrown at you with a nod and a smile. 6-7 figure incomes don't arise from sounding the alarm and creating problems for everyone within range

HN has devolved considerably. It is practically general Reddit-tier kneejerk contrarianism now. I'm getting literal "Cool story bud" replies to me within the last day.

Year after year of the advent of LLM's has repeatedly shown HN overall consensus gettings things wrong again and again. AI lab employees aren't here they're on Twitter/lesswrong. 6 months ago Mythos was announced and it has been an absolute deluge of "it's just marketing stunts." Practically 75% of many threads had that take. Strange, we don't hear much about that anymore, now that the plethora of hacks has taken place and increasing. There will be no mea culpa, just moving on to the next kneejerk dismissal as peoples' subconscious fearfully grapples with our immediate future. They want the AI boom to fail, because the implications of what happens next when it doesn't fail is unknown and vaguely frightening to them, for now.

OR they think it is a no lose situation. (aka the US Govt will step in and buy their debt if they falter, aka privatize the profits, socialize the losses)

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