Zuckerberg Caught in Revealing Hot Mic Moment During White House Dinner
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Mark Zuckerberg was caught on a hot mic during a White House dinner, revealing a potentially made-up number for Meta's AI investments, sparking discussion about the true value and motivations behind the massive spending on AI by tech giants.
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Well, isn't that okay? All the companies are racing to capture a nascent market. It would make sense to spend beyond current demand and even projected 5Y demand if it gives you a larger share of a market that might last 20+ years
I think presidential power must be limited, and ways to limit sycophants in government needs to be introduced. May be sometime in the future...
Because one executive got flustered and gave a random number to Trump, and therefore that's representative of the other 3 companies in the list?
Having a major exec flat out admit he’s just saying what he things the president wants to hear makes it seem night and day.
For comparison, Google said $250b, Microsoft said $80b, but Apple has said $600bn. Meta currently spends ~$100bn.
Even that's debatable because he walked back on the number shortly after
>Once the discussion concluded, Zuckerberg leaned over to Trump to privately admit the president had caught him off guard. "I'm sorry I wasn't ready...I wasn't sure what number you wanted to go with," Zuckerberg said in a revealing moment caught on a hot mic.
And somehow he never lied? Or he wasn't trying to brown nose? Because it literally has to be a lie if he changed his story and it's hard to deny that he appears to be trying to curry favor.
Of course this does suggest a strategy for censoring topics that you don't want on the front page of HN: deploy a bot army to add inflammatory comments. I feel like I've seen effect on other posts (the tylenol post currently on the front page has that smell) but who knows.
It is, it's just that we can see it now.
I actually happen to firmly believe that this has been the norm for a very long time regardless of party.
I can't tell what you think "both sides" are doing.
Honest question, what about this hot-mic moment, isn't normal? There are lots of reasons to oppose the current administration, but this seems like the mildest revelation possible. The kind of interaction that could happen in almost any media circus event.
Said overlords creating numbers from fantasy-land and selling it to the citizenry as some kind of plan or commitment.
It is mild compared to the other hundred things going on (like the Defense secretary saying women shouldn't have the right to vote), but I can only comment on the ones involving technology.
I don't think Americans would mind someone less radical who could bring the country together next time though. Or maybe everyone would mind, but not enough to feel like its the worst thing in the world. In a way the bar isn't high for anyone I think.
See how oligarchy works in Russia.
Recently spoke to someone who said that most startups in their (very large) portfolio are using AI to write most of their code. I personally know this to be true in several startups I've seen; and I've seen slow but steady adoption in larger companies.
We can debate about spending hundreds of billions per year, but the value is beyond question at this point at least in software.
See the MIT Nanda study, and the other one from a few weeks back on the perceived vs actual productivity increases.
There is value, but so far nowhere near as much as the people pushing AI would like you to believe has actually been delivered
In my team I see examples like yours, but I also see engineers having to clean up slop when one of them got over their skis.
My _belief_ is that it’s a net positive, but we’re far from taking that as a hand wave fact. And it certainly ain’t the 5-10x people are shouting across the board.
I hate it but I don't see how we can stop it.
Also, any kind of charge for securities violation requires more than misleading public statements. There needs to be intention to deceive and intention to capitalize on that deceit, probably neither are here either
Plus how much a company currently expects to spend toward a specific initiative isn't a number likely to cause shareholder litigation like revenue, earnings, margins or share price. You pretty much never hear a public company CEO put numbers on those outside of an earnings call.
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/mark-zuckerberg-inside-hawaii-co...
Edit: Fascinating seeing downvotes over an insightful comment simply calling out the self-absorbed nature of billionaires. Have fun with that, probably my last comment on HN. This place is a circle jerk for techbros with charasmatic professional moderators that algorithmically punish the very things their own guidelines support. Waste of sincere people's time.
> Crankiness about billionaires and "circle jerks for tech bros" and all that just has nothing to do with the intellectual curiosity we're trying to foster on the site.
Sorry, but if we pretend suggesting billionaires not having most people's best interest is "crankiness", we are not running a very intellectually honest community. Convince me this is not a circle jerk when it takes 5 years of commenting to get 50% of the privilege to downvote. I'm out.
If the unexpected side effect of building these giant stochastic parrots is that we usher in an age of decentralized, safe nuclear SMRs, it will have been well worth it, whether or not they are actual productivity boosters.
Indeed. Anyone familiar with public company financials and budgeting (like Wall Street analysts) know any number like this is only a broad estimate at best. For example, is that number counting the full value of capital expenditures (such as GPUs) immediately amortizing that cost over the asset's life? Most accounting methods would say capex should be depreciated over time but in many kinds of purchase transactions NVidia may book the full revenue in the quarter they deliver the card, so in that sense, the money is "in the economy" which may be more appropriate given the context.
And that's just a simple example. It gets much more complex and there are lots of judgement calls about how multi-use assets are booked and employee costs are apportioned across business units. It's likely no one at Meta even has a credible budget number for overall Meta-wide "AI spend over the next three years." If you ask the CFO to come up with a number, they're going to assign a team to make a best estimate under "given assumptions" - and then that team is going to ask you 20 or 30 questions about how you want to count. So... it's understood that numbers cited at a photo opp like this are SWAGs at best. Plus, even if finance penciled out an estimate, that estimate would certainly change substantially during the yearly budget cycle and change meaningfully quarter to quarter. So, such a snapshot in time is pretty worthless in terms of actual predictive value.
And the response from most major press seems to be a simple shrug?
What happened to holding people in power accountable?
These days it's almost certainly just a small army of "AI" powered bots tasked with watching the site for topics to auto-flag or derail with inflammatory comments for their tinfoil-hat-wearing overlords.
I think the tech leaders' presence at the event in the first place is much more damning. There are worse clips that came out of that event, of statements made out in the open.
I mean, just check the numbers they are throwing around, there's no such money and Elon Musk even called it out previously in the context of his spat with OpenAI(how much was that $500B on the stargate project?).
Everything is like that, EU is supposed to invest $600B in US but EU's yearly budget is $200B. Qatar is investing $1.2T but their GDP is $200B. Japan to invest in us $550B but they too don't have such money laying around. Saudi's to invest $600B, that's half of their GDP.
This is just part of the show and people figured that Trump likes multiples of $600B, just I wish it wasn't so damaging.
Yeah pretty on par for HN
No actual discussion allowed if things get spicy for anyone connected to the VC industry