The guarantee allows lenders to behave partly as though they're lending to NVIDIA, Meta or Broadcom rather than to an AI startup or single-purpose data-center company.
The interesting question isn't "Is the debt hidden?" (it isn't), but is who ultimately owns the downside risk of the AI infra boom?
More interesting headline would be "Big Tech is using its creditworthiness to finance the AI boom without taking on equivalent amounts of direct debt."
I generally don't see many cons to it.
1. Big tech was just using profits to buy back shares before AI build out. Would you rather they buy back shares with their profits or finance the AI build out?
2. If there is an AI bubble, great, when it pops, we'll all have ultra cheap tokens and we'll have all these amazing AI infrastructure built for the next wave of innovation.
3. Even if AI progress stops here and models hit a wall in intelligence, we'll still have AI good enough to solve millennium problems.
My theories on why people are so anti-AI:
1. It threatens their jobs.
2. They want AI stocks to drop so they can buy the dip.
3. Their identity is being challenged because AI makes what they do easier.
They are moving too fast and using too much dirty energy
They are committing crimes to trick people into thinking they've created god
None of your three theories are correct at all
Too fast? So it’s getting too smart too fast to you. But at the same time, they are going to need a bailout to you.
I don’t think they’re tricking anyone at all. Most normal people don’t care. They just use AI when it’s helpful to them. It’s only people who are on HN or X who care.
Why would you be suprised there is opposition?
There is something very contradictory about these posts.
For example, you seem to suggest that it doesn’t benefit people but AI is can also replace workers. So which is it? AI is very useful to people to a point that one person can do the job of many? Or AI is useless?
Do we have mass unemployment because of AI? No. Our unemployment rate has been very low since ChatGPT.
That poster is so clueless.
This statement is factually wrong. AI isn't financed by profits, it's financed by debt - the "$300B AI exposure off balance sheets" in the title refers to debt. The buy-back grift isn't legit either, but it's not as a damaging as the AI buildout.
> My theories on why people are so anti-AI: 1,2,3
Wrong theory again. The sky-high AI debt causes inflation, asset extraction and market scalping by front-running it. The opportunity cost prevents the rest of the economy from allocating capital to competing ventures and from increasing capacity - part of the reason for inflation.
That's what an honest economics analysis would tell you.
> 2. If there is an AI bubble, great, when it pops, we'll all have ultra cheap tokens
Wrong again. We already have ultra-cheap tokens from China but the bubble continues unimpeded, feeds on inflation and if that's not enough, bailouts are certain. Inflation is a way to silently pop the bubble at the expense of consumers leaving the perpetrators whole, that's where it's all going.
2) i want them to fail and disappear forever. Let open models stay. Let the VC fuckers starve to death before they use MY retirement fund without my consent because they bribe regulator to include them in protected indexes even if they have not followed the process, just because they are the future and too big, trust me bro
3) fuck me if i identify myself with my job, and only my job.
You should really reevaluate your perspectives .
But instead of attacking me, why don’t you engage with me.
You seem to be neglecting the economic impact question and assuming only the ai companies themselves are impacted in a burst.
2. Because there is still no convincing way how AI giants would make profit. Whatever impressive and useful tricks the stochastic parrot is able to do will never pay back enough to make a breakeven.
3. Because AI giant CEOs are a bunch of galactic-scale douchebags who keep saying "this is far too powerful for a mere mortal, but as long as we hold this power it's okay" with a straight face while presenting us with the stochastic parrot. No, seriously, I'm very impressed. Someone actively subverting the tech narrative couldn't do a better job.
2. Personally, I think the people who say LLMs are stochastic parrots are themselves stochastic parrots. They heard this term from someone online once and now they keep repeating it. Anyways, I’d love to see your math on why you think AI can’t make a profit.
3. You must be new to tech if you think it’s only AI. Many tech CEOs have always been out of touch. I personally don’t care too much about the CEOs. If AI CEOs had better PR, would you be less anti AI?
You’re progressively entering the delusional territory.
That is the backdrop against which real life AI that's actually happening and is here today has to compete with. If I was in the horse carriage industry when the car came out, I would be up in arms about it as well. People are scared, and rightly so. If I don't have a job, because they don't need me, because AI can do it, then how do I pay my rent or for food? If we lived in a world where we treated poor people well, and they're just down on their luck, they just need a helping hand that we're happy to give. Then the coming jobpocalypse wouldn't be so scary, and people wouldn't be so up in arms against AI. We only have to look at the history of coal miners to realize that there's no one coming to save us though.
Hearing the ghoulish haunting noise that the jet turbines that Elon Musk put down, and thinking: that could be your future; is enough to get everyone and their mom off the couch and dead set against the entire concept. That noise, non-stop, for the rest of forever.
We don't do subtleties at all, because if you give them an inch, they're going to take a mile, so in a different world it would be possible to be pro AI data centers while also being for upholding regulations on water and noise pollution, along with not raising the cost of electricity, but that doesn't seem to be the world we live in. People don't trust their local politicians to make sure that doesn't happen, so I can't blame people for being against AI data center build outs entirely.
I think people here have stated a variety of reasons. Many go at it from an economics standpoint saying they are anti-AI because they don't think AI will make a profit because it isn't/won't be that smart.
Yet, you are saying something complete opposite. You're saying that AI could become so smart that it makes many people unemployable.
I think your reason is completely different than just about everyone's here. I think it's more honest. I think people here who hate AI for different reasons actually have the same fear inside but they don't want to admit it for some reason.
The only contradiction is in your words because workers are (the) people and they don't benefit from being replaced. In other words, you contradict yourself by claiming contradiction where it doesn't exist.
> Our unemployment rate has been very low since ChatGPT
The unemployment rate includes only a small portion of the unemployed, it's a made-up number gated by many other conditions.
The real measure is the LFPR - labor force participation rate - since 2006 it has fallen from 67% to 61%, that makes 18 million less employed today compared to 20 years ago.
Also, official IT unemployment rate today is almost twice the average and it's gotten considerably worse compared to 2022.
Golf courses are stupid too, but the scale is nowhere close. The difference is that new golf courses are not financed by an too-big-to-fail infinite money glitch, so they are limited by how many people are willing to spend their money building golf courses.
> If AI CEOs had better PR, would you be less anti AI?
I'm not against AI. I'm against companies blowing up a bubble. Notice that the question "is it a bubble" is orthogonal to "is it useful".
> why you think AI can’t make a profit.
AI can make a profit - in niches. Automatic translation. Mathematic proofs - but yes math is more than proofs and there never were much money there. Maybe code generation in some cases, but I don't see "programmers becoming obsolete" any time soon - spewing out code was never the problem for me, domain knowledge was and still is. And yes, all that doesn't make it any less of a stochastic parrot. A useful parrot, but still a parrot.
But OpenAI and Antropic can't generate the profits they promise at the scale they need to break even. Because
a. Most of their use cases yet demonstrated are self-defeating. Text generation is useless once everyone hates slop and long texts stops becoming a useful signal. The whole story is basically "I can generate infinite gold, I'm now can buy anything". No, your gold is now worth very little. And everyone whose pay was indexed in gold is now fucked too.
b. They have no real moat aside from loads of money. Their entire plan is "growing too big to fail, then engage regulatory capture." And people engaging in in regulatory capture deserve nothing but slow and painful death. Not that it would work anyway, we've got China fixing that, for better or worse.
No, it is not getting too smart. Moving too fast means exactly the opposite, they are doing idiotic and destructive things because the models are not as smart as they want us to think
It's clear from reading your posts in this thread you are just trolling and not trying to have good faith discussion
No, it is not getting too smart. Moving too fast means exactly the opposite, they are doing idiotic and destructive things because the models are not as smart as they want us to think
Do you have good faith discussion? You haven't acknowledged anything that is a pro of AI.
Hiring requires financing, and that's reserved for monopolies only, especially now with the AI trust-like, circular monopolies sucking every available dollar out of the debt markets.
Are you just trolling?
1) i write code for a living.
Let the VC fuckers starve to death before they use MY retirement fund without my consent because they bribe regulator to include them in protected indexes even if they have not followed the process
3) fuck me if i identify myself with my job, and only my job.
The other poster is right, i took the bait (willingly)
Like I said, bad faith trolling
I'm blown away by what I'm able to accomplish today that I could not have just three years ago. I'm also quite worried about the societal impact of where all this is going.
Most of the AI hater arguments genuinely sound more motivated by fear at their core than any kind of rationality. The people I respect who are concerned about AI risk do not make the wildly exaggerated and emotional claims that I see constantly on HN. It's hard not to conclude that people's fear is driving them.
Fusion has been given a ton of money since AI.
Also, since AI demand is so high, what do you suggest we do? Not do the buildout and just let people fight over tiny capacity?
I also don't feel threatened. I think AI is going to either create even more tech jobs or make tech jobs stay flat.
But my point was that type of energy matters in this context.
I’m wondering if you are just trolling.
Do you think this is valid concern or trolling?
I’m personally going to invest in Anthropic and/or OpenAI outside of index funds. I’m not concerned personally.
And they said no.
Why do you think anthropic is postponing their IPO?
I think Anthropic is postponing their IPO because OpenAI is killing it.
Looks like its time to finish discussion.