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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025

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a) We didn't.

You don't think $1 trillion has been spent globally on AI so far? I think you're wrong. Revenue of NVDA alone is $60 billion in 2024 (figure 95+% of that is AI spend). But that's just a small percentage of the overall cost, which includes energy, servers, and most importantly salaries. Probably the total spend is less than $1 trillion per year right now, but inching up towards it. Cumulative spend should be well over $1 trillion.

b) it takes time to integrate new tech into business and to figure out how to best use it. Reasoner models are what, 3 months old now?

You'll be a little lucky if you're even alive [in 2030]

It seems like this is a pretty tight path between literally zero economic value in 2025 and apocalypse before 2030. I'm not saying you will be wrong, only that you would be wrong to have any confidence in these predictions. There's still value in Bayesian priors, such as "most years don't have nuclear war" and "no one has created a lab-grown virus that has killed people".

I'll quote Forbes:


ByBeth Kindig, Contributor. Free stock tips and stock research newsletter at https://io-fund.com

Follow Author Nov 14, 2024, 05:29pm EST

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Comment 0 Big Tech’s AI spending continues to accelerate at a blistering pace, with the four giants well on track to spend upwards of a quarter trillion dollars predominantly towards AI infrastructure next year.

Though there have recently been concerns about the durability of this AI spending from Big Tech and others downstream, these fears have been assuaged, with management teams stepping out to highlight AI revenue streams approaching and surpassing $10 billion with demand still outpacing capacity.