sanitation'At some point you've got to make money': Goldman's top AI skeptic warns the clock is running out ahead of OpenAI and Anthropic IPOs
magnueCome on now, Nvidia is making money. Nvidia then just gives it back to them to make more money is all.
SpaceCowboyYeah, Nvidia invests in Open AI, Open AI uses that money to buy Nvidia chips. More people invest in Nvidia because it’s revenue keeps growing.
Charles Ponzi would be proud.
Alan and Beth, two economists are walking through some woods. They come across s pile of shit and Alan says to Beth “if you eat that shot I’ll give you a tenner”
“Okay,” says Beth. She eats the shit and Alan hands her a £10 note
They walk on for a bit and find another pile of shit. Beth says to Alan “now I’ll give you a tenner of you eat that pile of shit”
“Okay,” says Alan. He eats the shit and Beth hands the £10 note back to him
They walk on a bit further and Beth says “you know, it seems to me like we both just ate a pile of shit and nobody gained anything”
“Ah, that’s where you’re wrong,” says Alan “we’ve increased the GDP by £20”
Isn’t this just the broken window fallacy but with a poop fetish?
Not quite. The point of the broken window fallacy is that had the money not been spent on the window, it would have been spent on something else. So breaking a window does generate revenue, but not necessarily more than not breaking a window
Whatever happens, the shopkeeper is in a worse position than he otherwise was
Here the point is that they’re passing the money back and forth. That’s like the AI companies right now - passing money round in a circle and that being presented as if it were the same thing as the industry as a whole making money
NVidia gives money to OpenAI, who give it to another company to build datacentres, who give it back to NVidia and NVidia’s Number Goes Up
But wouldn’t that be velocity of money, not GDP? GDP is a measure of final goods and services, not money. Unless you have a poop fetish and consider the eating of poop to be a final service, then this wouldn’t impact GDP.
Here the point is that they’re passing the money back and forth. That’s like the AI companies right now - passing money round in a circle and that being presented as if it were the same thing as the industry as a whole making money
The stock market value isn’t the same thing as GDP though. The GDP measurement is never really a great measurement of economic well being because of inequality, but even then, we really don’t know what it is in the US because Trump fires anyone that gives out a bad report.
The people handing money back and forth quickly was actually what happened when the pandemic ended, the increase in the velocity of money resulted in inflation but people blamed it on Biden. Now Trump is President, the economists have been fired and fraud has been decriminalized.