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Comment by scoofy | Hacker News Reader

You are describing altruistic gifts, not investment meant to generate a return.

All this money is being deployed to try and turn a dime into a dollar.

The biggest area I can see where money could be deployed into building something useful -- while generating a positive return -- is real estate development in cities with massive housing shortages. That's basically not allowed in the same cities. In large part, because people who yearn for an more altruistic world care very much about their own quality of life and property values than they do about the well-being of their community in the long run.

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It doesn't generate private returns but investing in your worker population definitely nets returns for the public.

Also, some might say that upending the de facto copyright regime in favour of AI companies was an altruistic gift.

If you want to "invest" in society and get a return, by all means, buy government bonds and support the government's policies to do these things. You get a return, and the government gets money to invest in society. It's a $30 trillion dollar industry.

I'm not sure I understand your point. What benefits does treating social/national governence as an industry bring to society? Besides the govt funds it operations through taxation in addition to debt.

Your unstated assumption that investments in AI were private and therefore beyond question simply isn't true.

The AI industry's profits depend to a large degree vast textual corpuses that they acquired and trained on in either straight up illegal or at the least in legally murky contexts; public and private knowledge form the backbone of these enterprises. Said industry then serves AI models to customers via data centers that again off load the cost of inference to the public.

Of course, AI companies could step up pay up their fair share and people will happily treat the prerogatives of private enterprise as private. But until then I think certain quarters of society will continue to believe, rightfully so in my opinion, that AI companies are on the hook for unacknowledged debt.

Of course morality doesn't inform law so the current situation isn't illegal despite how egregious it is. But the law can only attempt to deliver justice, it can't guarantee it. Which is why open, honest, collaborative discussions are important to have exactly now.

If you think AI is built on copyright infringement, that's fine, and I somewhat agree with you. That's immaterial to the argument.

My point is that investment here -- "the outlay of money usually for income or profit" -- isn't just giving people stuff altruistically. Investors, here investing in AI, are trying to get a return on their investment.

They aren't just spending money to spend it.

Yes, that is what the money could have been used for. Altruistic or otherwise, this is what could have been done with that degree of money.

Let’s pull on this thread though. This money is investment, in the hope that it grows into more than a trillion.

Right now, this looks like it’s mostly going to displace workers. Some of it will address demand that cannot be addressed directly; you couldn’t afford an editor to look over your emails, now you can.

Much of it will wipe out intern level work across the entire economy, reducing the opportunities for people to learn and develop.

This tech is already devastating education across the globe, and has been built on outright theft of creative work by people who can expect nothing in return.

There was an article on HN how authors of self-help books are seeing a reduction in revenue from book sales, so this is wiping out multiple sources of revenue via automated harvesting of content.

What, precisely, is there to be happy about here? The convenience of writing more code, at the cost of everyone else’s happiness?

There is a LOT better, that could be done with $1 tn.

>Yes, that is what the money could have been used for. Altruistic or otherwise

If we take peoples' retirement investments, and spend it on puppy dogs and ice cream for veterans and children, we're going to be in a worse place than we started a few years down the road.

Maybe the market will crash. Maybe it will grow. It's hard to say, but that's the point if investing.

That isn't what is happening though.

None of this is based on anything that stands up to scrutiny. This isn't investing, this is buying the story being sold for AI.

Lest we forget, A story whose bull case, automates the jobs of many people who are currently employed, creating a gig economy for white collar work.

Anyone who is buying this, is buying this for the potential future payoff. The firms themselves bleed money at scales that makes the destruction in outright war look like a responsible use of resources.

> This tech is already devastating education across the globe, and has been built on outright theft of creative work by people who can expect nothing in return.

Not sure you realize how divorced from reality this statement appears (at least to me). These things make fantastic personal tutors for material up though the bachelor's level that are available around the clock and never tire of your inane questions. Currently google offers this for free on their home page without even needing to log in (at least from a residential ISP in the US).

Multiple educators and institutes are grappling with a plague of cheating. This is just a recent article : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48708991

LLMs are found to erode skill

> https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872

LLMs have largely been a net negative on human education systems.

If some subset of people use calculators to cheat or their skills atrophy how does that have anything to do with whether or not they serve a useful purpose?

LLMs will revolutionize education for those that care to learn. They will have at least as large an impact on access to knowledge as wikipedia had ~25 years ago.

I went down this rabbit hole, and if you see the MIT study, its not calculators anymore.

Also - which kid (or adult) wants to study instead of just play?

Furthermore, Wikipedia (and calculators) were largely free, nor did they come with a side of white collar work automation.

Typically the best return on investment is to build proper separated active travel infrastructure (e.g. cycle lanes).

From https://www.cyclinguk.org/briefing/case-cycling-economy:

> For every £1 invested, walking and cycling return an average of around £5-6. A ‘benefit to cost ratio’ (BCR) greater than or equal to 4 is considered to be ‘very high’ value for money. Putting this in some context, the predicted BCR for the HS2 (high speed railway) wasn’t nearly so impressive at about £2.30 for every £1 invested.

The 'return' in these cases is social return, not profit.

> All this money is being deployed to try and turn a dime into a dollar.

Probably not. Its better explained here: https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/ai-economics-for-dummies

One of the examples from the article: Xavier owns an apartment that he rents out at a loss of $1 billion/month. Seeing this success, he decides to make financial commitments to construct $850 billion in new apartments in places nobody wants them. He convinces Ted to leverage everything he owns to help him build the apartments, telling him that once they are built, every human being on Earth will live in them. Ted contributes $100 billion, part of which immediately goes toward paying off Xavier’s $1 billion/month loss. Forbes gives Xavier and Ted a cover feature, likening their building project to God creating the Heavens and the Earth. Many Fortune 500 CEOs take this comparison literally and establish a new religion around Ted and Xavier, with themselves as high priests. Soon, they start a Holy War with the pope, declaring “Ted and Xavier the One True Gods on Earth” and promising to “purge the nonbelievers” in an official press release. They annex, then subsequently demolish, Vatican City, committing another $900 billion dollars to build new apartments in its place. Forbes hails this as “disruptive,” though it’s not clear how Ted and Xavier plan to finance the project.

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