I think Zuckerberg understands something that most people on this forum seem to not understand at all.
Facebook, Instagram, etc... these are all only valuable as network effect monopolies.
Investment into AI can torch billions of dollars and still be worthwhile so long as it's done in the service of protecting those monopolies, because LLMs are both intrinsically threatening to Meta's existence and intriniscally valuable for building better recommender systems when platform monopolists like Apple add privacy protections (cutting Meta off from the data spigot that powers its revenue streams).
Once AIs with no wallets outnumber humans on Facebook, Meta has an existential problem. There is no way to avoid the inevitable, the best one can do is embrace it, and 25 billion is nothing compared to losing your platform.
So, burn tens of billions to infest your own site w/ bots bc it is somehow "inevitable" anyway? Why not spend that to try and make the user experience better for users with wallets? The investors are clearly fed up w/ burning cash and racking up debt w/ no profits to show for it.
Your idea of what would "make the user experience better" can be very different from what actually makes the experience more profitable to Meta.
As far as I can tell, the things that actually drives engagement are ragebait political videos, thirst traps, and fake AI generated videos of cats robbing liquor stores.
The investors have rewarded Meta with something like 5x stock increase since abandoning the Metaverse.
It's time to realize that "embrace the stupid" is indeed a viable business strategy and an accurate reflection of our society.
It started off seemingly innocent - the mission of connecting folks. However, there was no money in that.
Where is the money? Content production. What content generates a continuous growing stream of earnings? Content that appeals to the senses of all kinds - including selling a get rich fast dream to girls promoting their OF pages.
What you have is an environemnt that preys and feeds off of consumers who have a lack of discipline with their money and are easy to manipulate - providing a nice ROAS. This is Meta in a nutshell.
Zuck enjoys roll playing a roman emperor - I have no doubt behind the scenes he laughs at his contribution toward the declining tastes, standards and self control of individuals.
Man, I hate to admit it but there's an element of truth here.
Sometimes I think there's a perspective from which suppliers (politicians, social media producers) are right thinking their customers as idiots and manipulatble even though customer-driven ought to be the goal.
I think Steve Jobs said something along these lines once. That when he was young he thought "the man" was spoonfeeding idiocy to the masses through television to keep them complacent, but as he grew older he realized that the masses wanted stupid content and that rich people simple indulged people's base desires.
This is because put simply, at the core, humans are dumb. We are only intelligent to the extent we acquire knowledge and formalise it to understand the world and make rational decisions to ensure one is better off.
GIven that the majority do not possess this trait, the outcome is nothing but inevitable. The mistake Jobs made was assuming that what he thought about the world should ring true for everyone.
Their financial stability all hinges on having lot's of user engagement. As we've seen, optimizing for engagement tends to be a pretty awful user experience. That doesn't matter to them if the numbers go up that they want to go up.
Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft were a product of very good timing, but I think we should not undersell how high the barrier to entry for Amazon and Microsoft were in the 90s and 70s specifically.
Amazon basically started at the dawn of the internet, and I actually remember using it in 1997 as a fifth grader. It was incredibly well developed for that very early time period compared to just about everything else.
Microsoft's first product was a BASIC interpreter written on a PDP mini-computer in assembly, and was written so quickly, Paul Allen wrote an entire emulator in assembly for the actual chip they were trying to run their software on. The bootloader for the tape loaded program had to be entered in binary onto the machine they were trying to run the software on. There were about a dozen people in position to create this sort of software in the world at the time and only two who could do it in a 6 week timeframe.
Bill Gates and a lot of these other billionaires are in totally different leagues when it comes to origin story.
You see a lot of people start a successful business, and then fail at their next venture. That doesn't mean they're incompetent. Everyone swings and misses sometimes.
But, if there is eventually a patten of failure, either luck was a factor, or perhaps the person themselves has changed.
Bill Gates and Paul Allen were virtually the the only high school students in the entire USA programming on microcomputers when they were in high school. Bill Gates mom regularly sat on IBM boards and advised him regularly in Microsoft's early years. Finally, even though Paul Allen wrote a 12,000 line chip emulator in assembly that was essential to Microsoft's existance, Bill totally threw him under the bus when he had to take time off the work to deal with (checks notes) life threatening CANCER.
This is the type of unicorn ruthless capitalism that it takes to become the richest person on the entire planet. Quite honestly, Gates gets less hate nowadays because of his philanthropy and the fact that there are even shittier billionaires.
Cloud and AI infra already pull in $300B+ a year. Data center vacancy under 1% and they’re power utility constrained. The fiber guys built ahead of demand, these guys are printing money and can’t build new printers fast enough.
But Meta specifically needs returns from AI products to justify the capex. Google and Microsoft eg. have profitable cloud businesses from where they can rent out GPU compute. Meta’s bet is far more risky.
As the Facebook generation dies out, so does Facebook. I just don't see it. Meta will have to continue to buy competition and hope that the ad market stays a racket forever. The only reason Meta is still relevant is advertising, just the same as Google. Eventually enough people will realize it for what it's worth: anti-competitive enshittification in order to preserve multi-billion dollar companies that have products and services that suck so bad you'd have a hard time paying people to use if they were startups today.
The real issue is far more controversial than that. The issue is not even necessarily the corrupt elites but the culture. And specifically that any new elites that might displace the existing one would just do the same.
Think of Afghanistan as an example, where the US really did create a modern tolerant state ... for a while. Locals didn't want to keep it going, or at least, not enough. Because the idea that there aren't very wealthy Afghans is just wrong. There's entire neighborhoods in Kabul full of luxury villas with people going into fancy restaurants constantly. That's effectively what the Taliban are fighting for.
Maintaining a modern tolerant state is probably harder than it looks. Like in the UK we take it for granted but it's the end result of centuries of sometimes bloody trial and error fixes. People think it's silly we still have a king but look what happened to Russia, France, Germany etc after they got rid of theirs.
Afghanistan might have worked out if the US took a king like role sitting in a fort somewhere and saying ok, you're prime minister to some Afgan after each election. The king role may seem like nothing but if a UK prime minister says sod this I'm ruler for life then the king doesn't endorse them and the king is the head of the armed forces which makes it difficult to do such stuff.
Maybe, in Afghanistan Soviet communists invaded and destroyed Afghanistan's state structures and started a massacre that would last years. That's why the Taliban attacked ... and probably why they won, with overwhelming support by the population of Afghanistan, and even US support.
But the details of the story expose a great many painpoints for many ideologies and parties so people don't like to talk about it. First it exposes that the US (and Europe, and many others, but of course not the UN or Russia) supported the Taliban ... because they were better than communists. My favorite stats is that the Taliban, as bad as they are, in 2.5 wars and ... still haven't killed as many people as the communists massacres killed in Afghanistan.
So "capitalist" or more accurately US and UK support for the Taliban did indeed exist (was a lot less than reported though), but yes, that included supporting and training a certain Osama Bin Laden ... Of course what's never mentioned when this is brought up is why people supported the Taliban. It wasn't to destroy socialism ... or at least that wasn't the only reason.
On the other side of the aisle it exposes that there was a time that socialism tried to eradicate religions ... using genocide (not just in Afghanistan). WITH the support of socialists in the west, the same socialist parties that still exist, were violently against immigration and protested against western states saving even one of those muslim men, women and children.
Both ideologies, left, center and right, want to believe they're constant, rational, and right. So an extremely large change in policy ... especially leftist parties who supported Soviet/communist genocides against a decent chunk of their current electorate.
Including famous current politicians like Antonio Guterrez, secretary general of the United Nations, who organised and personally physically attacked and hurt people for trying to give muslims sanctuary 40 years ago (he probably didn't even hate muslims, he just supported communism, including Soviet and Chinese genocides)
So everybody denies it but that's how Afghanistan got where it is.
The Taliban was formed in 1994 and had very little to do with the Soviets. They became popular on a kind of 'tough on crime, say no to drugs' platform, because the US had invested heavily in local war lord drug barons and made a lot of money from drowning the world in the cheap heroin they provided.
If you squint a bit there's a suspicious cadence in the Taliban taking over and eradicating most of the heroin production and the US invading soon after and restarting it.
The Taliban also did messaging along the lines that it's not a good idea to use foreign investment for mining infrastructure and the like when kids are starving to death.
A country that has been destabilized by foreign invasions again and again. The last one from the USA.
It is not about culture, it is about been ruled by outside powers that do not allow for internal development. Except for a few tax havens, former colonized countries struggle with violence, inequality, and corruption. That was the system that was setup for them and it will take decades to fix if they are left alone, it will never be fixed if other countries intervene to keep the status quo to profit from it.
Why blame outside powers again? There are very large differences where you have very limited differences in outside power rule, a big example being India vs Pakistan. And this is very far from the only example.
There have always been and always will be outside powers. Hell, the very first stories we have, from the Epic of Gilgamesj, the oldest stories in the Bible and Greek Legends are all about outside powers intervening, and here we are, over 4000 years later, and there's (checks wikipedia) 32 current wars (and none are "the west" doing that at the moment, China is currently the worst offender, there's of course Russia and Ukraine/Europe) where outside powers are trying to dominate someone else. At some point you have to accept outside powers trying to fuck things up as a basic part of life. So other countries will keep intervening, probably for another 4000+ years.
What do you mean by "war", exactly? The US bombing Somalia, Colombia and Venezuela clearly does not count, and neither does the SOF:s in Syria and Iraq, or the proxy wars in Ukraine, Yemen, Palestine and Lebanon. I suppose the trade wars don't count either.
I wonder if there is any difference between the corrupt elites that control impoverished countries and the corrupt elites that control the biggest corporations. If the CEOs had full control over government (which seems to be their aim, and they are succeeding), what would they do with that power I wonder?
There may hope for some AI assisted governance software to improve things? Kind of like how Uber type apps have made if harder for cabbies to rip you off.
My favorite (fiction) book on this topic is Ray Nayler's Where The Axe Is Buried. The premise is that most western democracies have voted to "rationalize", which means installing an AI Prime Minister tuned specifically for their country's culture and economic interests.
Zero. Why do you think AI will overcome human nature in impoverished nations? Smartphone and cheap internet already happened in many, it hasn’t made a huge dent in outcomes.
Unless you're gonna no-true-Scotsman this, plenty of wealthy Christians are deeply unpleasant and selfish people. Going to church does not make people good.
They aren’t good Christians then, and if Christian social shame was still the dominant flavor of social shame we may not see such egregious behavior (not arguing there would be perfection, of course).
So, hypothetically, how many people do you think call themselves good Christians and then turn around a say that homosexuality sends people to hell? What does the Bible have to say about abortion, really?
You say Christian social shame, those are the very first things that come to mind.
Well, morality isn’t universal. It’s basically a distributed operating system for large human groups. Different operating systems exist.
The modern western morality is different from Christianity in a lot of ways. So, yes, a person executing classical Christian morality would shame for those things and consider them wrong. I’m an atheist so I don’t have to agree with them, and I didn’t make their rules, that’s just what they are.
I’m also not claiming that Christianity enforcing a morality would make better “people”. It would just make better (i.e. more consistent and less hypocritical) “Christians”.
Well I’m an atheist, but it’s undeniable that Christianity used to be the dominant moral police in the west and it no longer is. If you stop enforcing morality with shame then people don’t follow it as much. Which part of that is wrong?
Christian morality includes “don’t be selfish” as a high ranking rule.
Being selfish is against the religion, therefore selfish Christians are not implementing Christianity properly, or in other words they are being “bad Christians”.
I don’t think of morality as one thing, I’m not claiming Christians or well functioning Christians are “more moral” because that is a nonsensical framing. It would be like saying that frogs are “more animal” than goats. No, they are just different animals.
> Being selfish is against the religion, therefore selfish Christians are not implementing Christianity properly, or in other words they are being “bad Christians”.
So is a Christian also allowed to own a profitable business? Isn't that pretty selfish, instead of making only the minimum and using the rest to help the needy?
Or is a profitable business OK, but raising prices by more than inflation isn't?
Or can a Christian run a factory that dumps runoff straight into a river?
"Being selfish" is itself poorly defined. The Bible is not much use - when it's not contradicting itself, it's vague.
Christian morality is not one single thing, hence my "no true Scotsman" comment.
People who self identify as Christians these days violate a huge number of rules that didn’t used to be violated frequently when Christianity was dominant.
So yes, it could be the case that the flavor of selfishness we are discussing is on the border and would be debatable. But if the sort of people you are referring to are the same sort of people I’m thinking of, I don’t think most Christians from say 1850 would accept them as Christians. The social bar for calling oneself Christian in current year is practically nonexistent. This is different from no true Scotsman.
The “richest country in the world” is already supposedly “Christian”. Interestingly enough, Christian nonprofits in international aid space are reporting historically low contributions (heard on a recent Russell Moore show). It turns out when secular leadership wants to become insular, many of the religious follow suit.
I donate part of my wealth to the poor every year and whatever more I feel is adequate based on a code of law e.g religion. I am just an individual. If I was a multi billion dollar conglomerate that incentive would be much higher. To bring the world out of poverty is to enrich all of humanity and my work would benefit from that as more people would benefit from the technology I built. But if the incentive is to spend everything and borrow more to build data centers to fuel addictive services and exploit people then this is quite a disservice to mankind.
You’re demonstrating the problem of averages. While what you are saying might be true on average, it doesn’t negate the point being made, which is that millions of people continue to struggle to survive and live without adequate food, heat, water, healthcare, etc.
Also, there are multiple wars going on across the world that are making the problem even worse.
No, really, there are fewer famines. The UN, who defined poverty in terms of basic necessities, had to review their definition because how do you make UN survive if there weren’t enough poor populations in scope.
Shifting the goal. The goal was commiseration for poverty, and you want a stable future.
It’s difficult to reconcile the desires of 8bn people. Some don’t care about climate change, some would like to see their granddaughter, some will live through flooding or an earthquake, some would like better health. Most of misery in the world does not come from the lack of money. If anything, disagreements between people are the cause of the lack of money, not the result.
Quite the stretch when you compare a bike to trillions wasted on products that 1) don't generally benefit humanity 2) could actually be used for real research instead of preserving an ad racket.
But, yeah. Keep comparing the egregious billionaires looking to lock out competition and hold on to their billions with all their might! Clearly it has to be the bike or board games the normies own, though. FFS.
Yes also huge problems and many other industries to speak of. Unfortunately as technology dominates and the most valuable company in the world is producing GPUs we know where it's all headed. I think while gambling and narcotics are very addictive and terrible we have overlooked technology and it's crept up on us in a bad way. Screens are horribly addictive. Maybe even worse than those things mentioned because you can be indoctrinated from birth. Because the cost is almost zero and continuous and the advancements are only trying to drive further addiction e.g Meta's heavy investment in AR and VR. AR/VR plus AI is basically the recipe for virtual worlds which people will prefer over real life. So we'll become even more disillusioned to the worlds problems because we'll prefer to escape to some virtual reality where all our desires are serviced.
Population numbers in all areas where this is widespread exploded after the introduction of efficient agriculture from outside. Like if lack of food was the root problem, we would expect population in these places to be decreasing, not increasing, right? Something other than food scarcity is at play here.
That's a logical fallacy. Population growth can outgrow food supply thanks to high fertility and access to better hygiene and medical treatment from outside combined with a lack of birth control. So you would still see population growth, but a growing fraction of this population could be malnourished.
That being said, the most common reason is simply war. If you look at the famine in Sudan right now, it is a direct consequence of the civil war (which also happens to be the biggest and bloodiest war by far in the world right now). Lost crops from weather or diseases can also restrict local food production, but it only ever really turns into a problem when armed groups prevent outside food supplies from moving to affected areas like the military in Sudan does right now.
More often than people like you realise apparently. But it's not really your fault. If you only consume western news, you might believe that Ukraine or Israel are the worst wars of our time. But that's only because western news doesn't really report on the current situation in Sudan at all, despite it being much, much worse than anything else that's been going on in the world recently.
Last time I commented something very similar thinking it was the least controversial no brainer thing and multiple people reacted as if it was some Leninist ragebait lol
That is partly attributed to being by far the largest single market for much of the 20th century - European countries have at most ~30% of the population - and being the only major economy not destroyed by the end of WWII, which resulted in the US producing half of world GDP at the time.
US businesses have had a much larger market to sell to, and that attracts investment and talent.
A young country that inherited old values, cultural norms, traditions and ethos.
It’s not like the US rose in a vacuum. It sees impressive on its face and to some extent I believe it is, but it has more to do with being a resource rich nation (lots of plentiful raw material within our borders) and the fact the last time we had a foreign invasion was during the war of 1812.
We aren’t some near unbelievable anomaly of history, we built on our British roots
Both of those were funded by and built off of American technology and investment. TSMC as an outsourcing of American made chips and ASML as a direct result of DoD research.
ASML is responsible for all the engineering side of the research from EUV LLC, painting it as "direct result from DoD research" as to minimise the achievement is way backhanded. Without ASML the whole EUV LLC research would be dead in the water, it's a symbiotic relationship, and the amount of engineering R&D that ASML had to do to actually deploy the technology shouldn't be understated like that.
I don't think ASML was "funded" by American technology, it's actually ASML who has to pay for licencing...
People in the USA have to volunteer to provide social services not provided by the government though, stuff like food banks which many other developed countries have services in place to take care of their citizens.
Charitable donations follow a similar pattern, the USA is a different system so not really comparable to some other developed countries which have public systems in place to cover these cases.
Wow! This has aged really, really badly. 50 years and many billions of dollars later and we're neither on the Moon or Mars or have significantly enhanced the distribution of food to those in need, let alone international cooperation.
Higher food production through survey and assessment from orbit, and better food distribution through improved international relations, are only two examples of how profoundly the space program will impact life on Earth.
It didn't age badly at all. This prediction was dead-on accurate. The widespread use of satellite monitoring of the Earth's surface has paid huge dividends for humanity in all sorts of ways including better and cheaper food production. Also the GPS system alone has been hugely important for every human system that involves navigating from one place on the Earth to another, which of course includes food transport as well as many many other things relevant to people's lives and health.
People in other countries starve because the people in charge of them are evil not because the people with resources lack benevolence. If you've ever tried to do charity in a foreign country with a foreign culture and language you would be aware of the issues. No amount of outside money in the world could fix these problems. In fact they will make it worse. People need to grow up.
In the United States, starvation doesn't exist so we've expanded the definition to include more people because we really care to feed people. If you've been to countries where actual starvation is a possibility, you'd understand. So tired of this self hating unaware self flagellation.
This is seen in that starvation is effectively solved in the USa (and now runs the other direction; the poor in the US often tend toward obesity instead of starvation).
The “solution” to countries with starvation today is likely massive full-scale invasion and domination; something the modern world doesn’t have an appetite for.
Sure. As if the massive full-scale invasion and domination of Iraq and Afghanistan worked so well. And throwing in more firepower and loosening the rules of engagement won't fix it either.
It boggles the mind how anybody over the age of 20 can think this way.
The primary reason the invasion of Afghanistan failed was because the US tried to pretend it wasn’t an invasion or domination. Telling the local warlords and factions beforehand they just had to outlast things was a plan doomed to failure before it even began.
If the government had sold “we are making this place the 51st state and it will take 100 years to make that happen” there would be an entirely different outcome.
I’m not saying that’s what should have happened. I actually feel nothing should have happened. But if you are going to take extensive lethal action like that, at least man up and be honest over what it will take to be successful.
The US populace is bizarrely afraid of admitting they live the amazing lives they do due to empire. It’s politically untenable to actually state the reality of what it takes to subjugate a population, no matter if the death numbers are similar for abject pointless failure versus eventual success.
Exactly. There's no country on the Earth today with the empire dreams and ability of the British colonial period. And nobody is willing to bring it back (and perhaps for very good reasons, mind you).
What we did in Iraq and Afghanistan is an embarrassment and black stain; had we been openly evil and empirical (?) we'd have killed less with a better result.
> There's no country on the Earth today with the empire dreams and ability of the British colonial period.
The colonial Brits weren't trying to feed the world, but aggregate power and wealth. Their former colonies didn't do too well, except wealthy ones like the US, Canada, etc.
After the colonial period ended, many of those countries have utterly transformed economically. Look at Brazil, China, India, South Korea, Taiwan, .... all prospered after embracing democracy (or at least moving in that direction, in China's case).
> If the government had sold “we are making this place the 51st state and it will take 100 years to make that happen” there would be an entirely different outcome.
Such hubris - nobody would have signed up for that
Can you give an example of that working? The fact is that the 'modern world' - at least before recent phenomena - created by far the greatest expansion of freedom and prosperity, and greatest reduction in poverty, in human history. Way, way beyond anything else, including colonial eras.
Also, when ideas like yours are tried, it turns out that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, and powers - including the US - serve their own interests. How could you imagine otherwise at this point?
And without democracy, they can't help it - self-determination provides better outcomes because the people who are subject to the 'help' have a seat at the table and they have power. The issues that others dismiss or make secondary (or tertiary) are the ones the self-determined people can insist on in a democracy.
> modern world doesn’t have an appetite for
It's not a lack of appetite, it's counter to our goals of freedom and self-determination, and all experience of prosperity.
Yeah America has no ability to colonize other countries. We are not unified enough as a culture to do that. Look at the debacle of Afghanistan.
Like right now there is starvation in Nigeria because Islamofascists from the north are hunting Christians in the south. Exactly how will any amount of American money convince religious zealots to stop being zealots? If anything, a large influx of money from infidels will just make the clerics claim that their victims are foreign operatives. There is nothing we can do other than pray or stage a full scale military invasion. At that point we can either choose to fully administer the place (unsustainable) or we would have to destroy the apparatus that made the situation possible, which is going to look a helluva lot like a genocide. An impossible situation and only one of many across the globe.
> there is starvation in Nigeria because Islamofascists from the north are hunting Christians in the south
Can you provide some evidence that that's a cause of hunger problems in Nigeria? It's such a politicized claim onw, it's
> There is nothing we can do other than pray or stage a full scale military invasion.
Warfare doesn't solve any problems, as anyone who knows its history or experiences it will express. It's the worst problem for humanity.
Are you really claiming that problems aren't otherwise solved? It's absurd. Your plan is almost never done and the correlation, between peace (and the outlawing of war) the growth of freedom and prosperity - including in West Africa - is the opposite.
Their fancy computer's value is a mote compared to the billions of dollars being poured into AI software and infrastructure. It's a dead horse that shouldn't be beaten anymore. Individual choices are so insignificant as to be effectively meaningless in contexts like this.
Their fancy computer is the tip of a trillion-dollar spear, forged by our precursors who were trying to invent new and innovative ways to blow up half the world while keeping that half from blowing our half up.
There are no clean hands here. Any attempt to claim the moral high ground by dictating how other people should spend their money (or their machine cycles) will meet with the usual degree of success.
That is the cart before the horse. Families, and women specifically, need stability and reasonable guarantees that fewer babies will be more likely to survive before they will stop having 4.
No, it is definitely the cart after the horse - kindly check basic facts. The babies are surviving thanks to declining child mortality - population of regions such as Sub-Saharan Africa has grown from 434 million to ~1.3 billion in the last few decades.
Basically your assertion that "reasonable guarantees that fewer babies will be more likely to survive" is completely and utterly wrong. Desperate family planning is needed, but religion stands in the way. No amount of international aid will fix this fundamental problem.
>Zuck... “the right strategy to aggressively frontload building capacity” as part of the tech group’s bid to be the first to build artificial superintelligence.
There's one problem. They seem unlikely to be first to build ASI given that Google and OpenAI seem a fair bit ahead and there's stiff competition from xAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek et al.
The leaderboard seems to have Google, OpenAI and Antropic ahead, then X and four Chinese firms, Z, DeepSeek, GLM and Kimi, with Meta behind that.
I'm not sure if they have a decent strategy to get ahead? It seems to me the best bet would be to have some very smart people do a better algorithm rather than building more data centers.
They have several actually, from computer vision in glasses (RayBan or Quest) to Speech To Text to get commands on such glasses, to "improved" translation via LLMs, to just chat bots in most of their chat solutions. They do integrate into products, it's not just research.
Is it good? No idea as I don't use them but I believe their angle is literally what Zuckerberg said publicly, roughly "Can't miss AI if it's real! Have to be first." which isn't exactly a very deep strategy but they have deep pockets.
More importantly, do these AI integrations they have make money or even have the potential to in the future?
It might surprise you to find out that Ray-Ban Meta glasses don't offer any sort of subscription service, not even as an option. Every Meta AI user is just costing Meta money, Meta isn't even giving them the option to buy the product from them.
I have no idea why. The kind of people who would buy Meta glasses would probably happily blow $10-20 on a subscription they forget about. You can get a subscription service for a robot litter box but you can't get one for AI glasses? Does Meta hate money?
Meta uses AI to search through Facebook and Instagram which...just makes searches cost them more money, I guess?
Sounds like they have pockets so deep that they are going into debt, which is an interesting sort of pocket depth.
IMO Zuckerberg's amateur founder status is more blatant as time goes on. He had his one moonshot and thinks he can do it again just as easily. Nobody told him that a large chunk of his success is owed to fortuitous timing.
I think there's been something of a cancerous ideology that you must be a first mover. It's a bit odd considering that Facebook itself was not a first mover in pretty much everything that it does that is successful and highly profitable.
What is NOT their angle; ads, UGC, entertainment experience (algo etc), Metaverse and gaming, communication (WhatsApp, insta etc) and I’m sure they’ll take advantage anything that’s close to their core areas of interest or anything else big. AI is definitely the tide that lifts all boats but if you’re one of the top 5 tech companies in the world then the prize is incredibly large and not yet known.
The investors don't seem to agree, it seems to be sinking rn... Ads? They already sell ads, is their "AI" algorithm better than the current one developed over years by some of the smartest phds on the planet? I very much doubt that.
Meta's goal is to stop OpenAI, Google and/or Anthropic from shutting them out of whatever AI ends up delivering. This is why they went with open weights for LLama - it prevents the other players becoming gatekeepers.
This is part of a pattern of tech leaders investing in order to avoid getting shut-out of whatever the next paradigm of computing is supposed to be.
- Google building Google+ and stuffing social into everything to avoid getting shut out of social networking. (The fear Larry/Sergey felt about this is why Vic Gundotra could bully and survive scandals until it became clear that Facebook wasn't an existential threat/Google+ was not going to really compete)
- Meta attempting to build an AI assistant because they were afraid Alexa/Google Assistant/Siri would be how everyone accessed computers in the future (due to technical failure, this product only ever launched as control mechanism for Oculus, but the ambition was larger)
Of course this always come alongside other factors that lead others to follow when a new concept is proven; however a tell-tale sign that leadership is worried about market dominance rather than a mere new line of business is that they spend or throw weight around above and beyond what the new line of business alone would justify.
According to Perplexity because instead of going through 20 earnings reports myself, I outsourced the task to Perplexity and then manually checked a few of the numbers to be reasonably sure they were correct.
I would think that no matter what the percentage of AI in the revenue is - mankind keeps automating their work via software. And so far, we automated only very little. We probably can keep increasing it at 30% pa for 10 years. That would mean we just automate 14x more than we do now. In 10 years, that seems not even fast to me.
Do I understand your logic correctly that after 14 years of 30% growth another year is extremely unlikely and after 14.99 years it is almost impossible?
My logic is that we only have to take the next 10 years into account when calculating the probability.
And lots of things grew 30% or more for 10 years.
Bitcoin's market cap grew over 70% pa for 10 over years now.
Amazon's revenue grew over 60% pa for over 10 years in their early days.
I can think of many numbers, but would have to check: global solar installations, smartphone usage are examples that come to mind.
My logic is that past results don't indicate future results, and assuming that the growth rate from the last 5 years will stay the same for the next 10 years is a big "if". For new companies, new products, high growth rates over many years are normal, but we're talking about an established market that has already seen big growth rates over a long time (as the other commenter pointed out). Smartphone sales today are the same as in 2015, because there's an obvious ceiling to growth in that market, and it has been reached a long time ago. Number/power of solar installations is also a very different thing than revenue, because the growth in that market is caused by the rapidly falling prices (~10x in the last 15 years), so the installed power grows much faster than the cumulative cost of that power. As the computing power is still getting cheaper, and cloud usage is already high, with many competitors, I'd expect the revenue growth to slow down in the next 10 years.
Look at all the stuff people do. Almost none of it is automated via software. Look at people on construcion sites, cashiers, cleaning stuff, cab drivers ... all of it is done manually. I am writing this manually, even though I would prefer to just say it while doing the dishes. But there is no good voice interface for browsers yet. And hey, why do I even do the dishes?
I would say we haven't even started automating the world via software.
10 years of 30% growth just means we will spend 14x more on software in 10 years than we do now. Considering we have not even really started using software for automating work, I would be surprised if we stay below that.
You may be right, especially with the growth of applications of software. Personally I'd rather bet on slower revenue growth than the current 30%. Not necessarily much slower, but even 25% yearly growth over 10 years would be a big difference in the end compared to 30%. My thinking is that usage of cloud compute can grow greatly, but with revenues growth lagging behind, because of falling costs of compute (more powerful/efficient CPUs etc), economies of scale, and competition putting pressure on prices. For example AWS operating margin is 34% currently, I expect that to fall as the market matures (but Google's cloud margins are much lower right now).
> Usage their customers would not pay for if it did not have a positive ROI.
I don't think we can assume that's true. Their customers are paying for it, but we don't know how profitable they are being with the AI compute they pay for.
Ok, Metaverse and AI didn’t work out. But maybe betting billions on the Next Big Thing, while your actual product is descending into anarchy will pay off!
It used to have some survival instincts. It was gobbling young companies such as whatapp and insta to keep itself alive. But with metaverse they lost the plot and now desperate to cling on to AI wave. Yep, this dino is gone.
I think everyone has a right to opt out of politics. Nobody should have to pay attention or have opinions or be an activist. But that doesn’t mean their actions aren’t affecting the politics, nor does it make them immune from being judged.
> Total Cloud Revenue (SaaS + IaaS): $6.7 billion, up 27%. CapEx (Full Year): $21.2 billion. The company is facing supply constraints, unable to meet the high demand for its cloud services, leading to scheduling customers into the future.
Much lower name recognition for smaller customers. But there are some big big name "AI" & B2C companies who have _huge_ spend with OCI. This isnt "rent a couple of instances" its much more like "provide a couple GW of compute for X years."
It seems Cloud and Datacenter is still in demand and are outstripping supply. Something I just dont understand. Where are they all coming from? It cant just be AI. I really wish there is some explanation of these capital investment.
It really is crypto and AI, and NVidia will suffer greatly if the AI bubble bursts before something new that demands their GPUs arrives. Right now AI is being shoehorned into everything, and the hunting season has to end at some point.
The numbers are stupid yes but it's weird to me that Meta is bearing the brunt of it while Nvidia, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic and all the rest continue to be rewarded by investors. If/when the bubble bursts everyone is going down.
1. Meta has released primarily open models until now.
2. Meta's models have always been somewhat behind the cutting edge, and the gap has grown wider as of Llama 4.
3. The AI orgs at Meta are in well-publicized shakeups, so investors are naturally skittish about the chaos there.
Meta has $43 billion in cash and cash equivalents as of December 2024 [0]. What is the reason for not using part of those reserves, and issuing debt instead, costing them hundreds of millions in fees to investment banks and bondholders?
Also, if they are issuing bonds to the public, does that mean that private lenders aren't lending any more?
I think Zuckerberg understands something that most people on this forum seem to not understand at all.
Facebook, Instagram, etc... these are all only valuable as network effect monopolies.
Investment into AI can torch billions of dollars and still be worthwhile so long as it's done in the service of protecting those monopolies, because LLMs are both intrinsically threatening to Meta's existence and intriniscally valuable for building better recommender systems when platform monopolists like Apple add privacy protections (cutting Meta off from the data spigot that powers its revenue streams).
Once AIs with no wallets outnumber humans on Facebook, Meta has an existential problem. There is no way to avoid the inevitable, the best one can do is embrace it, and 25 billion is nothing compared to losing your platform.
So, burn tens of billions to infest your own site w/ bots bc it is somehow "inevitable" anyway? Why not spend that to try and make the user experience better for users with wallets? The investors are clearly fed up w/ burning cash and racking up debt w/ no profits to show for it.
Your idea of what would "make the user experience better" can be very different from what actually makes the experience more profitable to Meta.
As far as I can tell, the things that actually drives engagement are ragebait political videos, thirst traps, and fake AI generated videos of cats robbing liquor stores.
The investors have rewarded Meta with something like 5x stock increase since abandoning the Metaverse.
It's time to realize that "embrace the stupid" is indeed a viable business strategy and an accurate reflection of our society.
The evolution of Meta/FB is quite interesting.
It started off seemingly innocent - the mission of connecting folks. However, there was no money in that.
Where is the money? Content production. What content generates a continuous growing stream of earnings? Content that appeals to the senses of all kinds - including selling a get rich fast dream to girls promoting their OF pages.
What you have is an environemnt that preys and feeds off of consumers who have a lack of discipline with their money and are easy to manipulate - providing a nice ROAS. This is Meta in a nutshell.
Zuck enjoys roll playing a roman emperor - I have no doubt behind the scenes he laughs at his contribution toward the declining tastes, standards and self control of individuals.
Man, I hate to admit it but there's an element of truth here.
Sometimes I think there's a perspective from which suppliers (politicians, social media producers) are right thinking their customers as idiots and manipulatble even though customer-driven ought to be the goal.
I think Steve Jobs said something along these lines once. That when he was young he thought "the man" was spoonfeeding idiocy to the masses through television to keep them complacent, but as he grew older he realized that the masses wanted stupid content and that rich people simple indulged people's base desires.
Agree ... there is a heavy element of truth in Job's observation.
I sometimes push back like this mentioning Marshal Tucker lyrics:
I heard it in a love song.
I heard it in a love song.
I heard it in a love song.
Can't be wrong.
No, the whole point is it is wrong: you were told what you wanted to hear. They got their's now where are you? Stop believing the nonsense!
Fleetwood Mac's players only love you when they're playin' is the same sentiment.
Where oh where is our vaunted common sense? Atticus had it in to kill a mockingbird. Alas Job reminds Atticus is the exception.
This more so applies to current American politics ... which has been on my mind of late.
This is because put simply, at the core, humans are dumb. We are only intelligent to the extent we acquire knowledge and formalise it to understand the world and make rational decisions to ensure one is better off.
GIven that the majority do not possess this trait, the outcome is nothing but inevitable. The mistake Jobs made was assuming that what he thought about the world should ring true for everyone.
Their financial stability all hinges on having lot's of user engagement. As we've seen, optimizing for engagement tends to be a pretty awful user experience. That doesn't matter to them if the numbers go up that they want to go up.
Or, the guy who cheats at Catan just needs the constant ego boost to be able to say "yeah I'm kind of a big deal in Next Big Thing"
Facebook Libra, Metaverse, etc.
Zuck is having a real hard time admitting to himself that Facebook was just luck.
Bezos is also having a hard time admitting amazon was just luck and gates is having a hard time admitting windows was just luck and … :)
Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft were a product of very good timing, but I think we should not undersell how high the barrier to entry for Amazon and Microsoft were in the 90s and 70s specifically.
Amazon basically started at the dawn of the internet, and I actually remember using it in 1997 as a fifth grader. It was incredibly well developed for that very early time period compared to just about everything else.
Microsoft's first product was a BASIC interpreter written on a PDP mini-computer in assembly, and was written so quickly, Paul Allen wrote an entire emulator in assembly for the actual chip they were trying to run their software on. The bootloader for the tape loaded program had to be entered in binary onto the machine they were trying to run the software on. There were about a dozen people in position to create this sort of software in the world at the time and only two who could do it in a 6 week timeframe.
Bill Gates and a lot of these other billionaires are in totally different leagues when it comes to origin story.
You see a lot of people start a successful business, and then fail at their next venture. That doesn't mean they're incompetent. Everyone swings and misses sometimes.
But, if there is eventually a patten of failure, either luck was a factor, or perhaps the person themselves has changed.
Bill Gates and Paul Allen were virtually the the only high school students in the entire USA programming on microcomputers when they were in high school. Bill Gates mom regularly sat on IBM boards and advised him regularly in Microsoft's early years. Finally, even though Paul Allen wrote a 12,000 line chip emulator in assembly that was essential to Microsoft's existance, Bill totally threw him under the bus when he had to take time off the work to deal with (checks notes) life threatening CANCER.
This is the type of unicorn ruthless capitalism that it takes to become the richest person on the entire planet. Quite honestly, Gates gets less hate nowadays because of his philanthropy and the fact that there are even shittier billionaires.
I suspect you're responding to the wrong post, as none of the parent posts mention Bill Gates.
The post by bdangubic that you replied to mentioned Gates along with Bezos and Zuckerberg.
This is fine. https://www.brethorsting.com/blog/2025/10/the-data-center-bu...
AI build out is more of an extension of datacenter build out though. All the hyperscalers lead AI build out.
Fiber dailed because the telcos overbuilt and demand lagged. When Amazon introduced AWS it succeeded right away because there was lots of demand.
Jeff Bezos Ted Talk 2003 - https://youtu.be/vMKNUylmanQ
Cloud and AI infra already pull in $300B+ a year. Data center vacancy under 1% and they’re power utility constrained. The fiber guys built ahead of demand, these guys are printing money and can’t build new printers fast enough.
But Meta specifically needs returns from AI products to justify the capex. Google and Microsoft eg. have profitable cloud businesses from where they can rent out GPU compute. Meta’s bet is far more risky.
True. But then again they own the consumer side.
If Meta hadn’t invested in AI recommendations a while back they would have lost against TikTok big time.
As the Facebook generation dies out, so does Facebook. I just don't see it. Meta will have to continue to buy competition and hope that the ad market stays a racket forever. The only reason Meta is still relevant is advertising, just the same as Google. Eventually enough people will realize it for what it's worth: anti-competitive enshittification in order to preserve multi-billion dollar companies that have products and services that suck so bad you'd have a hard time paying people to use if they were startups today.
While facebook does seem to decline somewhat in use in my younger friendcircle, Instragram and Whatsapp seem to be larger than ever.
Being skeptical of all the numbers I see - it still seems instagram is on roughly even footing with TikTok for upcoming generations.
I don’t doubt they may destroy their own product (like google search) but I do think it’s going to take a long long time
And now threads which apparently is quietly growing
Maybe the plan is to buy up all the companies that currently pay them for ads?
Very vibes based take.
I agree with that. It's a bet they have to make. They are just in a worse position to make it than some of the other companies.
Is the edge node revenue in the customer/infra graph from investor spend or customer spend? Almost certainly the former, right?
Tens of billions spent on AI data centers. But people still starve across the planet. Amazing.
Capital misallocation do be like that, but I don't think that capital would be feeding children in the Congo if it wasn't for Facebook's latest folly.
The issue is mostly the corrupt elites that control these impoverished counties, not foreign aid or lack thereof.
The real issue is far more controversial than that. The issue is not even necessarily the corrupt elites but the culture. And specifically that any new elites that might displace the existing one would just do the same.
Think of Afghanistan as an example, where the US really did create a modern tolerant state ... for a while. Locals didn't want to keep it going, or at least, not enough. Because the idea that there aren't very wealthy Afghans is just wrong. There's entire neighborhoods in Kabul full of luxury villas with people going into fancy restaurants constantly. That's effectively what the Taliban are fighting for.
Maintaining a modern tolerant state is probably harder than it looks. Like in the UK we take it for granted but it's the end result of centuries of sometimes bloody trial and error fixes. People think it's silly we still have a king but look what happened to Russia, France, Germany etc after they got rid of theirs.
Afghanistan might have worked out if the US took a king like role sitting in a fort somewhere and saying ok, you're prime minister to some Afgan after each election. The king role may seem like nothing but if a UK prime minister says sod this I'm ruler for life then the king doesn't endorse them and the king is the head of the armed forces which makes it difficult to do such stuff.
> and the king is the head of the armed forces which makes it difficult to do such stuff.
How did that work out for Russia, France or Germany ?
Stalin, Napoleon and Hitler but they got over it eventually apart from Russia.
Maybe, in Afghanistan Soviet communists invaded and destroyed Afghanistan's state structures and started a massacre that would last years. That's why the Taliban attacked ... and probably why they won, with overwhelming support by the population of Afghanistan, and even US support.
But the details of the story expose a great many painpoints for many ideologies and parties so people don't like to talk about it. First it exposes that the US (and Europe, and many others, but of course not the UN or Russia) supported the Taliban ... because they were better than communists. My favorite stats is that the Taliban, as bad as they are, in 2.5 wars and ... still haven't killed as many people as the communists massacres killed in Afghanistan.
So "capitalist" or more accurately US and UK support for the Taliban did indeed exist (was a lot less than reported though), but yes, that included supporting and training a certain Osama Bin Laden ... Of course what's never mentioned when this is brought up is why people supported the Taliban. It wasn't to destroy socialism ... or at least that wasn't the only reason.
On the other side of the aisle it exposes that there was a time that socialism tried to eradicate religions ... using genocide (not just in Afghanistan). WITH the support of socialists in the west, the same socialist parties that still exist, were violently against immigration and protested against western states saving even one of those muslim men, women and children.
Both ideologies, left, center and right, want to believe they're constant, rational, and right. So an extremely large change in policy ... especially leftist parties who supported Soviet/communist genocides against a decent chunk of their current electorate.
Including famous current politicians like Antonio Guterrez, secretary general of the United Nations, who organised and personally physically attacked and hurt people for trying to give muslims sanctuary 40 years ago (he probably didn't even hate muslims, he just supported communism, including Soviet and Chinese genocides)
So everybody denies it but that's how Afghanistan got where it is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Afghanistan
The Taliban was formed in 1994 and had very little to do with the Soviets. They became popular on a kind of 'tough on crime, say no to drugs' platform, because the US had invested heavily in local war lord drug barons and made a lot of money from drowning the world in the cheap heroin they provided.
If you squint a bit there's a suspicious cadence in the Taliban taking over and eradicating most of the heroin production and the US invading soon after and restarting it.
The Taliban also did messaging along the lines that it's not a good idea to use foreign investment for mining infrastructure and the like when kids are starving to death.
History is messy I guess. I see the Brits did some Afgan invading in the nineteenth century.
> Think of Afghanistan as an example, where the US really did create a modern tolerant state
Citation needed.
> Think of Afghanistan as an example,
A country that has been destabilized by foreign invasions again and again. The last one from the USA.
It is not about culture, it is about been ruled by outside powers that do not allow for internal development. Except for a few tax havens, former colonized countries struggle with violence, inequality, and corruption. That was the system that was setup for them and it will take decades to fix if they are left alone, it will never be fixed if other countries intervene to keep the status quo to profit from it.
Why blame outside powers again? There are very large differences where you have very limited differences in outside power rule, a big example being India vs Pakistan. And this is very far from the only example.
There have always been and always will be outside powers. Hell, the very first stories we have, from the Epic of Gilgamesj, the oldest stories in the Bible and Greek Legends are all about outside powers intervening, and here we are, over 4000 years later, and there's (checks wikipedia) 32 current wars (and none are "the west" doing that at the moment, China is currently the worst offender, there's of course Russia and Ukraine/Europe) where outside powers are trying to dominate someone else. At some point you have to accept outside powers trying to fuck things up as a basic part of life. So other countries will keep intervening, probably for another 4000+ years.
What do you mean by "war", exactly? The US bombing Somalia, Colombia and Venezuela clearly does not count, and neither does the SOF:s in Syria and Iraq, or the proxy wars in Ukraine, Yemen, Palestine and Lebanon. I suppose the trade wars don't count either.
I wonder if there is any difference between the corrupt elites that control impoverished countries and the corrupt elites that control the biggest corporations. If the CEOs had full control over government (which seems to be their aim, and they are succeeding), what would they do with that power I wonder?
"Corrupt" doesn't mean what you seem to think it means.
Well, we in the US saw what happened when Elon Musk was handed a ridiculous amount of control and it wasn't good.
Are we feeding any impoverished Congo families? The problem isn't just 'the elites', its us.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Agency_for_Inter...
$940 million to the Congo.
There may hope for some AI assisted governance software to improve things? Kind of like how Uber type apps have made if harder for cabbies to rip you off.
My favorite (fiction) book on this topic is Ray Nayler's Where The Axe Is Buried. The premise is that most western democracies have voted to "rationalize", which means installing an AI Prime Minister tuned specifically for their country's culture and economic interests.
Zero. Why do you think AI will overcome human nature in impoverished nations? Smartphone and cheap internet already happened in many, it hasn’t made a huge dent in outcomes.
Which corrupt leaders are going to give over their control to a machine?
You'd have to get rid of them first, but it might help the new lot stay straight?
If you have the power structure to get rid of a corrupt leader, you've already solved the problem. You don't need to install an AI.
Only if you think AI will be god.
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Unless you're gonna no-true-Scotsman this, plenty of wealthy Christians are deeply unpleasant and selfish people. Going to church does not make people good.
They aren’t good Christians then, and if Christian social shame was still the dominant flavor of social shame we may not see such egregious behavior (not arguing there would be perfection, of course).
So, hypothetically, how many people do you think call themselves good Christians and then turn around a say that homosexuality sends people to hell? What does the Bible have to say about abortion, really?
You say Christian social shame, those are the very first things that come to mind.
Well, morality isn’t universal. It’s basically a distributed operating system for large human groups. Different operating systems exist.
The modern western morality is different from Christianity in a lot of ways. So, yes, a person executing classical Christian morality would shame for those things and consider them wrong. I’m an atheist so I don’t have to agree with them, and I didn’t make their rules, that’s just what they are.
I’m also not claiming that Christianity enforcing a morality would make better “people”. It would just make better (i.e. more consistent and less hypocritical) “Christians”.
No True Scotsman it is.
Well I’m an atheist, but it’s undeniable that Christianity used to be the dominant moral police in the west and it no longer is. If you stop enforcing morality with shame then people don’t follow it as much. Which part of that is wrong?
The morality that Christianity pushes is not necessarily what's best for society, or even better than what we have now.
Did I say it was?
Christian morality includes “don’t be selfish” as a high ranking rule.
Being selfish is against the religion, therefore selfish Christians are not implementing Christianity properly, or in other words they are being “bad Christians”.
I don’t think of morality as one thing, I’m not claiming Christians or well functioning Christians are “more moral” because that is a nonsensical framing. It would be like saying that frogs are “more animal” than goats. No, they are just different animals.
> Being selfish is against the religion, therefore selfish Christians are not implementing Christianity properly, or in other words they are being “bad Christians”.
So is a Christian also allowed to own a profitable business? Isn't that pretty selfish, instead of making only the minimum and using the rest to help the needy?
Or is a profitable business OK, but raising prices by more than inflation isn't?
Or can a Christian run a factory that dumps runoff straight into a river?
"Being selfish" is itself poorly defined. The Bible is not much use - when it's not contradicting itself, it's vague.
Christian morality is not one single thing, hence my "no true Scotsman" comment.
People who self identify as Christians these days violate a huge number of rules that didn’t used to be violated frequently when Christianity was dominant.
So yes, it could be the case that the flavor of selfishness we are discussing is on the border and would be debatable. But if the sort of people you are referring to are the same sort of people I’m thinking of, I don’t think most Christians from say 1850 would accept them as Christians. The social bar for calling oneself Christian in current year is practically nonexistent. This is different from no true Scotsman.
The “richest country in the world” is already supposedly “Christian”. Interestingly enough, Christian nonprofits in international aid space are reporting historically low contributions (heard on a recent Russell Moore show). It turns out when secular leadership wants to become insular, many of the religious follow suit.
You cannot be both a good Christian and a good Capitalist. It is an "or", not an "and".
Christian capitalist is an oxymoron.
No doubt you have a nice bike or computer or you spend money on something often like movies or board games or something.
Do you argue that money should all go to feeding the hungry?
I donate part of my wealth to the poor every year and whatever more I feel is adequate based on a code of law e.g religion. I am just an individual. If I was a multi billion dollar conglomerate that incentive would be much higher. To bring the world out of poverty is to enrich all of humanity and my work would benefit from that as more people would benefit from the technology I built. But if the incentive is to spend everything and borrow more to build data centers to fuel addictive services and exploit people then this is quite a disservice to mankind.
Humanity is enormously rich. Compare to the state of humanity 200y ago. Pretty much everyone was struggling to survive, to get food and some heat.
Nowadays even the poorest countries are not starving, unless there is a war going on.
You’re demonstrating the problem of averages. While what you are saying might be true on average, it doesn’t negate the point being made, which is that millions of people continue to struggle to survive and live without adequate food, heat, water, healthcare, etc.
Also, there are multiple wars going on across the world that are making the problem even worse.
No, really, there are fewer famines. The UN, who defined poverty in terms of basic necessities, had to review their definition because how do you make UN survive if there weren’t enough poor populations in scope.
yeah but what's it worth if our riches in 2025 are lent from the future with no way to pay back? That's climate change.
Shifting the goal. The goal was commiseration for poverty, and you want a stable future.
It’s difficult to reconcile the desires of 8bn people. Some don’t care about climate change, some would like to see their granddaughter, some will live through flooding or an earthquake, some would like better health. Most of misery in the world does not come from the lack of money. If anything, disagreements between people are the cause of the lack of money, not the result.
Even in the supposedly richest countries a lot of people are starving, homeless or otherwise immiserated.
Poor argumentation. If I spend 25 billion on movies and still have enough money to never care you should ask me again.
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Quite the stretch when you compare a bike to trillions wasted on products that 1) don't generally benefit humanity 2) could actually be used for real research instead of preserving an ad racket.
But, yeah. Keep comparing the egregious billionaires looking to lock out competition and hold on to their billions with all their might! Clearly it has to be the bike or board games the normies own, though. FFS.
It's always so easy to argue about spending someone else's money, especially if you can present it as a moral crusade, isn't it?
Gambling market in US has $100bn+ revenue. Tobacco sales in US is $70bn+
People starve and (almost) no one cares.
Yes also huge problems and many other industries to speak of. Unfortunately as technology dominates and the most valuable company in the world is producing GPUs we know where it's all headed. I think while gambling and narcotics are very addictive and terrible we have overlooked technology and it's crept up on us in a bad way. Screens are horribly addictive. Maybe even worse than those things mentioned because you can be indoctrinated from birth. Because the cost is almost zero and continuous and the advancements are only trying to drive further addiction e.g Meta's heavy investment in AR and VR. AR/VR plus AI is basically the recipe for virtual worlds which people will prefer over real life. So we'll become even more disillusioned to the worlds problems because we'll prefer to escape to some virtual reality where all our desires are serviced.
Michigan has plenty of water. But California still has droughts sometimes. Amazing (if you're 14).
Population numbers in all areas where this is widespread exploded after the introduction of efficient agriculture from outside. Like if lack of food was the root problem, we would expect population in these places to be decreasing, not increasing, right? Something other than food scarcity is at play here.
That's a logical fallacy. Population growth can outgrow food supply thanks to high fertility and access to better hygiene and medical treatment from outside combined with a lack of birth control. So you would still see population growth, but a growing fraction of this population could be malnourished.
That being said, the most common reason is simply war. If you look at the famine in Sudan right now, it is a direct consequence of the civil war (which also happens to be the biggest and bloodiest war by far in the world right now). Lost crops from weather or diseases can also restrict local food production, but it only ever really turns into a problem when armed groups prevent outside food supplies from moving to affected areas like the military in Sudan does right now.
You are telling me that every infomercial I’ve ever seen about starving children in Africa was from war? How often are these people at war?
>How often are these people at war?
More often than people like you realise apparently. But it's not really your fault. If you only consume western news, you might believe that Ukraine or Israel are the worst wars of our time. But that's only because western news doesn't really report on the current situation in Sudan at all, despite it being much, much worse than anything else that's been going on in the world recently.
Last time I commented something very similar thinking it was the least controversial no brainer thing and multiple people reacted as if it was some Leninist ragebait lol
Conditioning- America is a capitalist social experiment and I mean that literally
Seems pretty successful then no for being such a young country. America is literally where all the major tech and internet companies are.
Where I'm pretty sure that the definition of "successful" that you have in mind is one given by America itself.
Yep- this is my point- it's becoming far more obvious how the game is being run now everything is going to shit and they're pulling the plug.
That is partly attributed to being by far the largest single market for much of the 20th century - European countries have at most ~30% of the population - and being the only major economy not destroyed by the end of WWII, which resulted in the US producing half of world GDP at the time.
US businesses have had a much larger market to sell to, and that attracts investment and talent.
A young country that inherited old values, cultural norms, traditions and ethos.
It’s not like the US rose in a vacuum. It sees impressive on its face and to some extent I believe it is, but it has more to do with being a resource rich nation (lots of plentiful raw material within our borders) and the fact the last time we had a foreign invasion was during the war of 1812.
We aren’t some near unbelievable anomaly of history, we built on our British roots
"Hub for all the major tech companies" isn't the only metric that matters, not in the face of its current administration. It so is not.
Like TSMC and ASML?
Both of those were funded by and built off of American technology and investment. TSMC as an outsourcing of American made chips and ASML as a direct result of DoD research.
ASML is responsible for all the engineering side of the research from EUV LLC, painting it as "direct result from DoD research" as to minimise the achievement is way backhanded. Without ASML the whole EUV LLC research would be dead in the water, it's a symbiotic relationship, and the amount of engineering R&D that ASML had to do to actually deploy the technology shouldn't be understated like that.
I don't think ASML was "funded" by American technology, it's actually ASML who has to pay for licencing...
One great thing about America is that we won't shoot you at the border for trying to leave.
It's also one of the countries with the highest percentage of people who give to charity and volunteer, fwiw.
People in the USA have to volunteer to provide social services not provided by the government though, stuff like food banks which many other developed countries have services in place to take care of their citizens.
Charitable donations follow a similar pattern, the USA is a different system so not really comparable to some other developed countries which have public systems in place to cover these cases.
i think a good counter to this sort of argument is :
https://launiusr.wordpress.com/2012/02/08/why-explore-space-...
Wow! This has aged really, really badly. 50 years and many billions of dollars later and we're neither on the Moon or Mars or have significantly enhanced the distribution of food to those in need, let alone international cooperation.
Higher food production through survey and assessment from orbit, and better food distribution through improved international relations, are only two examples of how profoundly the space program will impact life on Earth.
As good counters go, this underperforms.
I agree the space program was a bit of a flop but food distribution and poverty stuff has improved
Extreme poverty from 45% to less than 10% https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty-in-brief
Famine deaths about 1/3 https://ourworldindata.org/famines
It didn't age badly at all. This prediction was dead-on accurate. The widespread use of satellite monitoring of the Earth's surface has paid huge dividends for humanity in all sorts of ways including better and cheaper food production. Also the GPS system alone has been hugely important for every human system that involves navigating from one place on the Earth to another, which of course includes food transport as well as many many other things relevant to people's lives and health.
And many spent hundreds of dollars on a dinner when they could feed x poor people. Slipery slope
We need dinners, we don’t need AI
People in other countries starve because the people in charge of them are evil not because the people with resources lack benevolence. If you've ever tried to do charity in a foreign country with a foreign culture and language you would be aware of the issues. No amount of outside money in the world could fix these problems. In fact they will make it worse. People need to grow up.
In the United States, starvation doesn't exist so we've expanded the definition to include more people because we really care to feed people. If you've been to countries where actual starvation is a possibility, you'd understand. So tired of this self hating unaware self flagellation.
This is seen in that starvation is effectively solved in the USa (and now runs the other direction; the poor in the US often tend toward obesity instead of starvation).
The “solution” to countries with starvation today is likely massive full-scale invasion and domination; something the modern world doesn’t have an appetite for.
Sure. As if the massive full-scale invasion and domination of Iraq and Afghanistan worked so well. And throwing in more firepower and loosening the rules of engagement won't fix it either.
It boggles the mind how anybody over the age of 20 can think this way.
The primary reason the invasion of Afghanistan failed was because the US tried to pretend it wasn’t an invasion or domination. Telling the local warlords and factions beforehand they just had to outlast things was a plan doomed to failure before it even began.
If the government had sold “we are making this place the 51st state and it will take 100 years to make that happen” there would be an entirely different outcome.
I’m not saying that’s what should have happened. I actually feel nothing should have happened. But if you are going to take extensive lethal action like that, at least man up and be honest over what it will take to be successful.
The US populace is bizarrely afraid of admitting they live the amazing lives they do due to empire. It’s politically untenable to actually state the reality of what it takes to subjugate a population, no matter if the death numbers are similar for abject pointless failure versus eventual success.
Exactly. There's no country on the Earth today with the empire dreams and ability of the British colonial period. And nobody is willing to bring it back (and perhaps for very good reasons, mind you).
What we did in Iraq and Afghanistan is an embarrassment and black stain; had we been openly evil and empirical (?) we'd have killed less with a better result.
> There's no country on the Earth today with the empire dreams and ability of the British colonial period.
The colonial Brits weren't trying to feed the world, but aggregate power and wealth. Their former colonies didn't do too well, except wealthy ones like the US, Canada, etc.
After the colonial period ended, many of those countries have utterly transformed economically. Look at Brazil, China, India, South Korea, Taiwan, .... all prospered after embracing democracy (or at least moving in that direction, in China's case).
Imperial is the word you are looking for.
> If the government had sold “we are making this place the 51st state and it will take 100 years to make that happen” there would be an entirely different outcome.
Such hubris - nobody would have signed up for that
Exactly the point he was making. Americans have no will to colonize or empire build
Can you give an example of that working? The fact is that the 'modern world' - at least before recent phenomena - created by far the greatest expansion of freedom and prosperity, and greatest reduction in poverty, in human history. Way, way beyond anything else, including colonial eras.
Also, when ideas like yours are tried, it turns out that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, and powers - including the US - serve their own interests. How could you imagine otherwise at this point?
And without democracy, they can't help it - self-determination provides better outcomes because the people who are subject to the 'help' have a seat at the table and they have power. The issues that others dismiss or make secondary (or tertiary) are the ones the self-determined people can insist on in a democracy.
> modern world doesn’t have an appetite for
It's not a lack of appetite, it's counter to our goals of freedom and self-determination, and all experience of prosperity.
Yeah America has no ability to colonize other countries. We are not unified enough as a culture to do that. Look at the debacle of Afghanistan.
Like right now there is starvation in Nigeria because Islamofascists from the north are hunting Christians in the south. Exactly how will any amount of American money convince religious zealots to stop being zealots? If anything, a large influx of money from infidels will just make the clerics claim that their victims are foreign operatives. There is nothing we can do other than pray or stage a full scale military invasion. At that point we can either choose to fully administer the place (unsustainable) or we would have to destroy the apparatus that made the situation possible, which is going to look a helluva lot like a genocide. An impossible situation and only one of many across the globe.
> there is starvation in Nigeria because Islamofascists from the north are hunting Christians in the south
Can you provide some evidence that that's a cause of hunger problems in Nigeria? It's such a politicized claim onw, it's
> There is nothing we can do other than pray or stage a full scale military invasion.
Warfare doesn't solve any problems, as anyone who knows its history or experiences it will express. It's the worst problem for humanity.
Are you really claiming that problems aren't otherwise solved? It's absurd. Your plan is almost never done and the correlation, between peace (and the outlawing of war) the growth of freedom and prosperity - including in West Africa - is the opposite.
It won't give them profits
In their own country, even.
Even just to save face, I would have expected one of the billionaires to have started a foundation tackling the problem in some way.
And there you are with your fancy computer! Sell it and feed the poor.
Their fancy computer's value is a mote compared to the billions of dollars being poured into AI software and infrastructure. It's a dead horse that shouldn't be beaten anymore. Individual choices are so insignificant as to be effectively meaningless in contexts like this.
Their fancy computer is the tip of a trillion-dollar spear, forged by our precursors who were trying to invent new and innovative ways to blow up half the world while keeping that half from blowing our half up.
There are no clean hands here. Any attempt to claim the moral high ground by dictating how other people should spend their money (or their machine cycles) will meet with the usual degree of success.
What if what I donate every year is 100x the value of a laptop I've owned for 5 years? Your logic is illogical.
Well, you know, we're all doing what we can.
There is no shortage of food anymore. Unless genocide, no one is starving.
Birth rates are >4 in most of those starving regions. Family planning needed first.
That is the cart before the horse. Families, and women specifically, need stability and reasonable guarantees that fewer babies will be more likely to survive before they will stop having 4.
No, it is definitely the cart after the horse - kindly check basic facts. The babies are surviving thanks to declining child mortality - population of regions such as Sub-Saharan Africa has grown from 434 million to ~1.3 billion in the last few decades.
Basically your assertion that "reasonable guarantees that fewer babies will be more likely to survive" is completely and utterly wrong. Desperate family planning is needed, but religion stands in the way. No amount of international aid will fix this fundamental problem.
Climate change will sort that out.
Technological innovation veils our failed morality. I don’t ever see this resolving without God literally showing up to Earth.
Matt Levine's take on this: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2025-10-29/put...
>Zuck... “the right strategy to aggressively frontload building capacity” as part of the tech group’s bid to be the first to build artificial superintelligence.
There's one problem. They seem unlikely to be first to build ASI given that Google and OpenAI seem a fair bit ahead and there's stiff competition from xAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek et al.
The leaderboard seems to have Google, OpenAI and Antropic ahead, then X and four Chinese firms, Z, DeepSeek, GLM and Kimi, with Meta behind that.
I'm not sure if they have a decent strategy to get ahead? It seems to me the best bet would be to have some very smart people do a better algorithm rather than building more data centers.
A better strategy would be to just focus and expand on what they do well while their competitors burn money with potentially no decent outcome.
What was their vision for AI to begin with?
I totally understand what OpenAI and Google are trying to do with AI but I never understood Meta's angle.
What's Meta's AI product?
> What's Meta's AI product?
They have several actually, from computer vision in glasses (RayBan or Quest) to Speech To Text to get commands on such glasses, to "improved" translation via LLMs, to just chat bots in most of their chat solutions. They do integrate into products, it's not just research.
Is it good? No idea as I don't use them but I believe their angle is literally what Zuckerberg said publicly, roughly "Can't miss AI if it's real! Have to be first." which isn't exactly a very deep strategy but they have deep pockets.
More importantly, do these AI integrations they have make money or even have the potential to in the future?
It might surprise you to find out that Ray-Ban Meta glasses don't offer any sort of subscription service, not even as an option. Every Meta AI user is just costing Meta money, Meta isn't even giving them the option to buy the product from them.
I have no idea why. The kind of people who would buy Meta glasses would probably happily blow $10-20 on a subscription they forget about. You can get a subscription service for a robot litter box but you can't get one for AI glasses? Does Meta hate money?
Meta uses AI to search through Facebook and Instagram which...just makes searches cost them more money, I guess?
Sounds like they have pockets so deep that they are going into debt, which is an interesting sort of pocket depth.
IMO Zuckerberg's amateur founder status is more blatant as time goes on. He had his one moonshot and thinks he can do it again just as easily. Nobody told him that a large chunk of his success is owed to fortuitous timing.
I think there's been something of a cancerous ideology that you must be a first mover. It's a bit odd considering that Facebook itself was not a first mover in pretty much everything that it does that is successful and highly profitable.
What is NOT their angle; ads, UGC, entertainment experience (algo etc), Metaverse and gaming, communication (WhatsApp, insta etc) and I’m sure they’ll take advantage anything that’s close to their core areas of interest or anything else big. AI is definitely the tide that lifts all boats but if you’re one of the top 5 tech companies in the world then the prize is incredibly large and not yet known.
The investors don't seem to agree, it seems to be sinking rn... Ads? They already sell ads, is their "AI" algorithm better than the current one developed over years by some of the smartest phds on the planet? I very much doubt that.
Meta's goal is to stop OpenAI, Google and/or Anthropic from shutting them out of whatever AI ends up delivering. This is why they went with open weights for LLama - it prevents the other players becoming gatekeepers.
This is part of a pattern of tech leaders investing in order to avoid getting shut-out of whatever the next paradigm of computing is supposed to be.
- Google building Google+ and stuffing social into everything to avoid getting shut out of social networking. (The fear Larry/Sergey felt about this is why Vic Gundotra could bully and survive scandals until it became clear that Facebook wasn't an existential threat/Google+ was not going to really compete)
- Meta attempting to build an AI assistant because they were afraid Alexa/Google Assistant/Siri would be how everyone accessed computers in the future (due to technical failure, this product only ever launched as control mechanism for Oculus, but the ambition was larger)
Of course this always come alongside other factors that lead others to follow when a new concept is proven; however a tell-tale sign that leadership is worried about market dominance rather than a mere new line of business is that they spend or throw weight around above and beyond what the new line of business alone would justify.
Many, but one often overlooked is experiences of a pornographic or erotic character.
This is one of the most important future uses of what we today call chat bots and "AI".
It seems like the next straw he is grasping after the Metaverse embarrassment.
I have not looked into Meta, but when I look at the growth of Alphabet's cloud revenue, it looks pretty solid:
https://x.com/JonathanBeuys/status/1984882268817519036
That is revenue from real world usage of their datacenters. Usage their customers would not pay for if it did not have a positive ROI.
A pretty stable growth of 30% per year for the last 5 years. At a current level of about $50B per year.
What is the value of it, if it continues like this for another decade? Revenue would be at roughly $1T/year then.
In the face of this real usage and the growth of it, spending tens of billions of dollars on building out infrastructure looks ok to me.
That's literally just a line go up graph with no details whatsoever? Also, "According to Perplexity" why is it not "according to Alphabet"?
Which additional details would you like to see?
According to Perplexity because instead of going through 20 earnings reports myself, I outsourced the task to Perplexity and then manually checked a few of the numbers to be reasonably sure they were correct.
Oh, gotcha. I thought it was Perplexity themselves reporting about Google's earnings or something.
Like how much of it is actually the "AI" part of the business for a start?
I would think that no matter what the percentage of AI in the revenue is - mankind keeps automating their work via software. And so far, we automated only very little. We probably can keep increasing it at 30% pa for 10 years. That would mean we just automate 14x more than we do now. In 10 years, that seems not even fast to me.
Wow
> What is the value of it, if it continues like this for another decade? Revenue would be at roughly $1T/year then.
That's a big "if", usually things don't grow at 30% per year for 15 years.
Do I understand your logic correctly that after 14 years of 30% growth another year is extremely unlikely and after 14.99 years it is almost impossible?
My logic is that we only have to take the next 10 years into account when calculating the probability.
And lots of things grew 30% or more for 10 years.
Bitcoin's market cap grew over 70% pa for 10 over years now.
Amazon's revenue grew over 60% pa for over 10 years in their early days.
I can think of many numbers, but would have to check: global solar installations, smartphone usage are examples that come to mind.
My logic is that past results don't indicate future results, and assuming that the growth rate from the last 5 years will stay the same for the next 10 years is a big "if". For new companies, new products, high growth rates over many years are normal, but we're talking about an established market that has already seen big growth rates over a long time (as the other commenter pointed out). Smartphone sales today are the same as in 2015, because there's an obvious ceiling to growth in that market, and it has been reached a long time ago. Number/power of solar installations is also a very different thing than revenue, because the growth in that market is caused by the rapidly falling prices (~10x in the last 15 years), so the installed power grows much faster than the cumulative cost of that power. As the computing power is still getting cheaper, and cloud usage is already high, with many competitors, I'd expect the revenue growth to slow down in the next 10 years.
Is cloud usage really high?
Look at all the stuff people do. Almost none of it is automated via software. Look at people on construcion sites, cashiers, cleaning stuff, cab drivers ... all of it is done manually. I am writing this manually, even though I would prefer to just say it while doing the dishes. But there is no good voice interface for browsers yet. And hey, why do I even do the dishes?
I would say we haven't even started automating the world via software.
10 years of 30% growth just means we will spend 14x more on software in 10 years than we do now. Considering we have not even really started using software for automating work, I would be surprised if we stay below that.
You may be right, especially with the growth of applications of software. Personally I'd rather bet on slower revenue growth than the current 30%. Not necessarily much slower, but even 25% yearly growth over 10 years would be a big difference in the end compared to 30%. My thinking is that usage of cloud compute can grow greatly, but with revenues growth lagging behind, because of falling costs of compute (more powerful/efficient CPUs etc), economies of scale, and competition putting pressure on prices. For example AWS operating margin is 34% currently, I expect that to fall as the market matures (but Google's cloud margins are much lower right now).
Ok, let's say 25% growth over 10 years. That is a factor of 9.
9*$50B = $450B yearly revenue.
What could be the margin Alphabet makes from that? Last quarter, Alphabet had $100B revenue and $35B net income. So 35% margin.
$450Bx0.35 = $158B
What is $158B in annual profit worth? Currently Alphabet's p/e is about 30. If we take that, it would be $158Bx30 = $4740B. So around $5T.
If we are heading towards the creation of $5T in value via cloud revenue, investing $100B per year to build it seems not particularly high to me.
Cloud spend overall has - CAGR of 30-35% from 2007 to 2025.
> Usage their customers would not pay for if it did not have a positive ROI.
I don't think we can assume that's true. Their customers are paying for it, but we don't know how profitable they are being with the AI compute they pay for.
Think of your 401k getting wiped out, they will let your 401k pay for these data centers. Think about it, these bonds have a 40-year lifespan.
"The social media group had hired Citigroup and Morgan Stanley to raise up to $25bn in debt, ranging from five to 40 years in maturity, "
AI will either steal retirement funds by making scams more realistic, or it will steal them by purchasing OpenAI's IPO.
Ok, Metaverse and AI didn’t work out. But maybe betting billions on the Next Big Thing, while your actual product is descending into anarchy will pay off!
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Waiting for the lack of returns on LLM investments to come and bite back.
Together with the debt payments needed then, this will do wonders for the stock. I’m sure.
If Meta manages to die in the coming AI apocalypse it will make me extremely happy. They are an absolute cancer on society.
It used to have some survival instincts. It was gobbling young companies such as whatapp and insta to keep itself alive. But with metaverse they lost the plot and now desperate to cling on to AI wave. Yep, this dino is gone.
Not even a cloud platform to keep it going indefinitely. At least IBM had enterprise customers.
You say that like IBM is gone. They are an enterprise platform and cloud giant (tooling), among many other things. (Quantum, O/T division, etc.)
I honestly think the world would be better without Meta if it did die.
I'm sure other corpos would snatch up all their properties like Threads and IG but still it would be a net positive.
But I just use Instagram to look at photography content. Am I helping to destroy society?
I think everyone has a right to opt out of politics. Nobody should have to pay attention or have opinions or be an activist. But that doesn’t mean their actions aren’t affecting the politics, nor does it make them immune from being judged.
Every click you send to Meta is used to build your personal profile to generate ad revenue. So yes, you’re helping them in a very small way…
Unironically yes? A very small amount, sure. But every eyeball counts.
How on earth are you still getting Instagram to serve you photos and not month old tiktok videos? I haven't seen a photo in Instagram in years.
> Oracle sold $18bn of bonds in September.
Why is Oracle going into debt for AI? What are they doing
financing huge deals for use of OCI https://finance.yahoo.com/news/oracle-corp-orcl-q4-2025-0701.... See Q4 FY25
> Total Cloud Revenue (SaaS + IaaS): $6.7 billion, up 27%. CapEx (Full Year): $21.2 billion. The company is facing supply constraints, unable to meet the high demand for its cloud services, leading to scheduling customers into the future.
Much lower name recognition for smaller customers. But there are some big big name "AI" & B2C companies who have _huge_ spend with OCI. This isnt "rent a couple of instances" its much more like "provide a couple GW of compute for X years."
Building data centers for OpenAI, but it requires a lot of upfront capital.
Pumping the stonk one last time.
https://archive.is/qlPU9
It seems Cloud and Datacenter is still in demand and are outstripping supply. Something I just dont understand. Where are they all coming from? It cant just be AI. I really wish there is some explanation of these capital investment.
It really is crypto and AI, and NVidia will suffer greatly if the AI bubble bursts before something new that demands their GPUs arrives. Right now AI is being shoehorned into everything, and the hunting season has to end at some point.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-30/meta-plat...
How is going metaverse?
The numbers are stupid yes but it's weird to me that Meta is bearing the brunt of it while Nvidia, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic and all the rest continue to be rewarded by investors. If/when the bubble bursts everyone is going down.
1. Meta has released primarily open models until now. 2. Meta's models have always been somewhat behind the cutting edge, and the gap has grown wider as of Llama 4. 3. The AI orgs at Meta are in well-publicized shakeups, so investors are naturally skittish about the chaos there.
> Meta readies $25B bond sale as soaring AI costs trigger stock sell-off
Insider trading ? /s
Meta has $43 billion in cash and cash equivalents as of December 2024 [0]. What is the reason for not using part of those reserves, and issuing debt instead, costing them hundreds of millions in fees to investment banks and bondholders?
Also, if they are issuing bonds to the public, does that mean that private lenders aren't lending any more?
[0] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/META/balance-sheet/
It offloads some risk, less directly onto meta, and more shared by outside investors.
Why risk your own money when people are lining up to risk theirs?
It's a bond sale. They get preferential treatment in case of insolvency.
Sure, but they aren't insolvent until (at the very least) they spend that $43B on hand.
I don't forsee it happening to Facebook anytime soon, but companies going to $0 isn't unprecedented.