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This is wild. Meta, OpenAI, MSFT, Nvidia are collectively keeping the AI trade alive, which is propping up the stock market and overall perception of the economy. This admission makes it clear that the AI spends are being made up not based on business value/demand...
This is not normal. This is not acceptable! Whether this behavior continues for 3.3 more years, or for eight, or more, our collective memory must stay strong: This administration is not normal.
It sounds to me like he was just apologizing for pulling a number out of his butt. Not sure how revealing it is. Doesn't seem surprising that he wouldn't have such a projection on the tip of his tongue, unless expecting to announce it. And nobody should put much stock in such a projection, whether it was a considered number, or off-the-cuff.
Well, there are certainly many ways to editorialize this. It seems clear that he was not told what to say and wanting to please the president sounds like a him problem. Also, I would read Facebook’s AI investments as a way to just prop up their own stock with some kind of promise that eventually their AI model will be good which right now it is not
Jesus fuck were spending hundreds of billions in a few years on AI? Slow the fuck down. Lets establish some proof of value first
All throughout Arizona they are popping up directly next to substations--UPstream of communities. I wonder if in the near future we'll be getting electricity bills from Meta
It’s a sign of just how much the current AI hype cycle is a house of cards not backed by any logical business fundamentals.
Not sure I'm asking this correctly: As an officer in a Public Company, does this behavior impugn him as CEO or the company in any legal way?
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I am no fan of Zuckerberg or Trump, but I didn't find this hot mic to be particularly shocking or outrageous.

I think the tech leaders' presence at the event in the first place is much more damning. There are worse clips that came out of that event, of statements made out in the open.

This type of story kind of summarizes my feelings towards these mega rich people in general, it's not a coincidence they're spending most of their time self-preserving and building bunkers [1].

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/mark-zuckerberg-inside-hawaii-co...

Edit: Fascinating seeing downvotes over an insightful comment simply calling out the self-absorbed nature of billionaires. Have fun with that, probably my last comment on HN. This place is a circle jerk for techbros with charasmatic professional moderators that algorithmically punish the very things their own guidelines support. Waste of sincere people's time.

I thought this is obvious by now? It's just a show, no one is actually investing such money - this is to spice up the casino and run a news cycle for Trump.

I mean, just check the numbers they are throwing around, there's no such money and Elon Musk even called it out previously in the context of his spat with OpenAI(how much was that $500B on the stargate project?).

Everything is like that, EU is supposed to invest $600B in US but EU's yearly budget is $200B. Qatar is investing $1.2T but their GDP is $200B. Japan to invest in us $550B but they too don't have such money laying around. Saudi's to invest $600B, that's half of their GDP.

This is just part of the show and people figured that Trump likes multiples of $600B, just I wish it wasn't so damaging.

I think (hope?) that the best thing that will come from tye AI hype will be innovations in power creation and delivery.

If the unexpected side effect of building these giant stochastic parrots is that we usher in an age of decentralized, safe nuclear SMRs, it will have been well worth it, whether or not they are actual productivity boosters.

"I wasn't sure what number you wanted to go with" doesn't sound to me necessarily like making a number up. There are different ways to measure this like how many years and what counts as an "AI investment" and it sounds like this number he chose is just one particular way of measuring it.
So much of what is going on with big tech and the US government at the moment is either wildly corrupt or completely bewildering.

And the response from most major press seems to be a simple shrug?

What happened to holding people in power accountable?

People really shouldn’t read too much into these numbers, particularly in that kind of forum rather than an analyst call. Is M&A an investment? What about hiring a team with stock? Commitment or actually transacted? As cash, equity, debt? Other than the sheer orders of magnitude being bandied around, and that being an indicator of the kind of phase we’re in right now.
I hope the community continues to flag these kind of banal news stories.
He's still his awkward self. Amazing to see a software engineer make it to this level (unlike all the other CEOs who are managers)
Why the fuck is this flagged? It's completely relevant to this site, and very much worthy of debate. Who are you assholes who do such persistent, completely capricious flagging?
Zuckerberg does a Trump and just invents numbers.
I dont know about this. You can look up a video on YouTube but when you search for valid sources I just find magazines I never heard of. Is there a valid source?
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Yeah pretty on par for HN

No actual discussion allowed if things get spicy for anyone connected to the VC industry