Hacker News Reader

Comment by bodge5000 | Hacker News Reader

The AI industry, and arguably at this point the tech industry as a whole, isn't concerned with sustainability, as long as they can profit today tomorrow is tomorrow's problem. Who will buy the services, where will data for AI training come from, these are perfectly valid questions but they're questions that don't have an immediate effect on profit, so easier to ignore it until we can't apparently.

The same could be said about environmental concerns. It'll be a lot cheaper to deal with today than deal with when it becomes a problem, but its easier to ignore that and collect the cash from oil and gas whilst its going

View on HN

Going green is much cheaper now than it was. That may invert at some point but it's hard to predict when that might be.

Thats certainly true, but to prevent the worst of the effects of climate change we also need to do much more now than before (its debatable at this point whether its even reversible, that wasn't always the case). I suppose the point is that what was enough a decade ago costed more then than it does now, but thats no longer enough

The entire tech industry has morphed into ponzinomics, and it’s been like that for at least my entire career.

It seems like none of these SV companies make money, or even have a realistic plan to ever make money. Instead the strategy appears to either a) hope that the investors have infinite funds and keep pretending to grow, b) get bought out by a larger, also unprofitable company, or c) go public and make it so that all of our retirement funds depend on it.

But it’s fine, as long as you brand it as “tech” and give some vague promises of it being “the future”.

Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Nvidia, Cisco, Oracle, et al make a bajillion dollars a year. The faangs are the most profitable companies in the world (swap Nvidia for Netflix)

Even with those companies, the stock prices are stupidly inflated, but even granting them being profitable that’s still only like six companies. Thats like 1% of the s&p 500.

A ton of SV companies, and I think maybe the majority, especially startups are not profitable.

> "Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?

> That's not my department!" says Wernher von Braun

"I'll be gone, you'll be gone" - Wall Street phrase.

"Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.” - J.M. Keynes

It’s not tech or AI, it’s unregulated capitalism.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com