Larry Ellison Bet It All on the A.I. Boom. Will He Be the Face of the AI Bubble? | Hacker News Reader

Larry Ellison Bet It All on the A.I. Boom. Will He Be the Face of the AI Bubble?

nytimes.com

43 pointsCaptainZapp19 comments

My favorite larry ellison story is sensei Ag. 8 years and 500 million dollars later the man could barely grow vegetables.

My favorite Larry Ellison story is "Do Not Anthropomorphize The Lawnmower": https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=2309

> In more recent years, he had been spending time on a quixotic “agtech” start-up that was promising to disrupt the global food chain.

Oh just great. I hope he fails.

Wasn't he also going to build Pre-crime with AI?

https://www.404media.co/larry-ellisons-ai-powered-surveillan...

> […] he and Musk and their respective teams started discussing a plan for Oracle to build and operate a massive A.I. data center for xAI. It would be in Abilene, Texas, and it would be constructed in the shape of an X.

The shape is super important.

Don't worry, his expensive bets on legacy media will save him.

Coming soon, a haircut like none before.

It's not as satisfying when the entire economy and everyone's pension is tied to it.

Only the pensions making risky bets on AI

Or investing in broad funds.

If you want to see some change, you gotta accept a little blood on the streets.

Couldn't happen to a nicer guy.

Yes the capital cycle repeats - https://taikhooms.substack.com/p/the-capital-cycle-theory?r=...

I'm very bullish on AI but I would love to see Larry fail, so I'm quite torn.

It’s not the what, but the how and the what-else.

About time Karma bit him.

> Few people doubt that this technology is going to change everything. What’s less clear is when the profits are going to start rolling in and how big they are going to be... "We are making trillions of dollars in investments on the back of tens of billions of dollars in revenues."

It seems possible that AI will eventually become an abundant commodity, with cheap alternatives available from China and elsewhere. And if that happens, profits will be competed away, just like any other commodity in a competitive market.

One would imagine that a Silicon Valley legend like Larry Ellison - who built his business empire on the basis of proprietary software products and services - would understand this better than anyone.

> One would imagine that a Silicon Valley legend like Larry Ellison - who built his business empire on the basis of proprietary software products and services - would understand this better than anyone.

When you are worth as much money as Larry Ellison is, it is nearly impossible to not believe that you've become a Master of the Universe for whom the usual rules do not apply because of your ability to bend reality to your whims.

Unfortunately that amount of money also tends to be close to self-perpetuating so they rarely feel the full brunt of comeuppance that otherwise should come from such hubris when they are wrong.

It doesn't really matter. You can bet billions and if it was a mistake, you still come out on top. It's easy to do when you just layoff 10,000 people and claim that they weren't the right fit to get AI working correctly. Zero effect on the actual CEOs

> the more you spent building A.I. infrastructure, the more you would earn, or so the logic went. Computer theorists called it the scaling hypothesis.

Good Gell-Mann Amnesia moment.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com