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Big Tech Ran Out Of Ideas — And AI Is The Cover Story — We Had To React

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The video centers on a critical debate regarding the financial viability of Big Tech companies and their massive investments in Artificial Intelligence, sparked by commentary from Ed Zitron who argues that the industry has run out of ideas and is merely using AI as a cover story. The hosts acknowledge Zitron's valid points concerning the severe mismatch between astronomical infrastructure costs and meager revenue growth, noting that major players like OpenAI have burned billions with no proven path to improving profit margins. While they agree that current business models are unsustainable due to linear cost increases relative to revenues, they disagree with Zitron's conclusion that AI itself is a dead end or hopeless technology. Instead, the hosts view AI as a revolutionary force capable of transforming society, particularly in fields like medicine and coding, even if the initial investors face significant financial losses similar to those seen during early internet development. A key argument presented involves the historical pattern where first-generation infrastructure projects often bankrupt their original backers before an "inheritance generation" emerges to build profitable businesses on top of that foundation. The hosts draw parallels between AI data centers and obsolete technologies like railroads or canals, suggesting that while current hyperscalers are taking massive risks with debt they may not be able to repay, the underlying technology will eventually become cheaper and more efficient through innovations seen in China and advancements by companies like Elon Musk's ventures. They emphasize that intelligence is rapidly becoming a commodity, which forces these tech giants to pivot from selling proprietary models to leasing compute power or creating unique layers of obfuscation—such as Palantir's Ontology—to help enterprises protect their data and maintain control over how AI outputs are generated without falling victim to hallucinations or IP theft. The discussion also highlights the systemic risks posed by this debt-fueled expansion, warning that if capital markets tighten or investors stop funding these projects due to concerns over non-payment, it could trigger a broader economic crisis similar to 2008. The hosts note that banks are already diversifying their portfolios into insurance and index funds linked to these tech debts, effectively socializing the risk while private companies struggle under the weight of unpaid bills from massive data center initiatives like Oracle's Stargate project. Furthermore, they address the geopolitical dimension, pointing out how governments view advanced AI models as potential weapons systems due to security vulnerabilities, which complicates commercial interests and may force regulatory interventions that alter the industry's trajectory. Ultimately, while acknowledging the current bubble-like conditions driven by inflation forcing capital into risky assets, the hosts conclude that history suggests we must endure a period of creative destruction where many companies fail before sustainable applications emerge. In summary, the video concludes that although Big Tech has exhausted its hypergrowth ideas and is currently relying on hype to justify trillion-dollar investments in unprofitable AI ventures, abandoning the technology entirely would be shortsighted given its transformative potential once costs are optimized. The hosts advise investors and consumers to remain vigilant about where this debt hides within their portfolios and financial systems while recognizing that the true value of AI lies not just in pattern recognition but in deep integration into daily life through smart devices and specialized applications like protein folding for drug discovery. They predict a bumpy ride ahead characterized by market corrections, potential pullbacks on capital expenditure, and eventual consolidation where only those who can innovate beyond generic large language models will survive to harness the full benefits of an intelligent future without being crushed by unsustainable debt loads.
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This one is crazy. So, if you guys don't know Ed Zitron, he's a bear. So, he is um very negative on AI. Thinks that basically the industry is a big nothing burger that people blown it all out of proportion. Uh this is one of the more interesting ones. We're going to go deep on this. So, >> thanks for joining us here. So, you know, we we don't really know at this point in time, right, what the actual financial picture of these companies look like, >> do we? And it they wouldn't be the first with bad financial profiles to to go public. >> Well, they'd be the first to be this bad other than we work. And even then, this is so much worse than that. Open AAI burned $20.9 billion in 2025. That's the auditive financials that the FTI reported. And the problem with these companies is their margins are getting worse and they actually their costs increase linearly with their revenues. There is no proof that they can improve their margins. No amount of specialist silicon or supposed Vera Rubins will bring these costs down. So here's the the big thing that people do not understand about what's going on in AI. Now listen my the final conclusion that Ed makes I actually disagree with. I don't think the industry is hopeless in the way that he does. I think it is the revolutionary technology. I think it is literally going to change the fabric of society. I think even if it asmmptoted right now just the things that it can do in the medical industry alone are transformative. The amount that has impacted our business is transformative. But he is absolutely right in terms of the mismatch between the revenue that's coming in and how much money these guys are losing because of the infrastructure buildout is absolutely insane. I've done deep dives on this topic, man. If people do not wake up, they're going to get blindsided. I I am nervous about owning tech. I will just tell you that right now. That's just a me thing. You do you. But that people are not being honest about the historical pattern that repeats. We've seen this over and over. I'll talk more about this as we go, but we've seen this pattern play out before. Uh so he he is getting people to look at something that is so important to look at. The mismatch between revenue and debt accumulation uh the losses that they're taking is terrifying and people should be very worried about the rate at which their revenue is increasing. >> It's clear that people are wising up to the problem of generative AI which is there's not really a business there. >> So that was something that was discussed yesterday on Squawkbox. the the comments from Alex Karp, the Palanteer CEO, making their rounds. I think we have a a clip teed up. Take a listen. >> The general way these things were sold. And again, these people are I Sam and and and Dario, you there's nothing more fun than debating Daario in private. So, this is I'm not throwing shade at them, but something has gone completely wrong. And the basic view among enterprises in this country is I'm going to chill lax uh and waste my time with tokens. I'm going to get no value and they're going to get my IP. >> We had talked about this previously. What Alex Alex is banging the drum. So for people that don't know their Palunteer Palunteer has created like a a a middle layer is maybe the right way to think about it. I believe it's called Ontology. And their whole idea is okay, wait a second. I'm I'm a gigantic company. I've got all this proprietary data. I want to take advantage of AI and um when I put it into AI, you're talking your token costs are absolutely ridiculous. So, I'm already getting hammered there. And so, you see corporations pulling back. And on top of that, the companies have learned basically the business model of these companies that are using it. They're training on all the data that they are supplying the agent and then launching competitive companies. They did that against Figma and they're doing it now in um medicine as well in medical. And so it's like Daario was screaming to basically the the creators of AI and saying you guys need to understand you've got a terrible reputation now with the people actually using this technology. You've got to get your [ __ ] together. And so, um, I while I think that feeds in a little bit to what Ed is saying, Daario, uh, not Dario, excuse me, um, uh, Alex from Palanteer Karp is making it clear there's a there there, but these guys have got to understand they've got to put this obfuscation layer in the middle where companies can feed their data to something that they trust, isn't storing it, retaining it, uh, going to mimic them, and then they can basically change the model to match their weights. Now, they've created something proprietary. Thi this is huge. I I don't want to go on too long about this, but understand the future of AI, I guarantee you, is you have to somehow someway be able to turn that AI into something that is proprietary to you. So, that gives different answers. With AI, we're really trying to mimic humans. And just like I can't put anybody random in Drew's seat, you can't put anybody random in my seat. It fundamentally changes the nature of the show. AI must be the same. the second you can just swap it out because they're all the same, you lose. And so that's the point Alex is trying to make. >> Enterprises are bing at this idea that they're going to be tokens. They're not going to be able to control the data usage and how the data is is used and they're not able to really measure ROI. What do you make of those comments? >> I mean, hate to agree with him, but he's right. These companies, Anthropic and Open AI, they encourage waste. They uh he actually said that these companies don't charge on outcomes. They don't charge on success because you can't with large language models. They're inherently hallucinationprone as proven by open themselves. And so they encourage waste. They want you to spend a lot of money and then they try and pill for your ideas. Anthropic already tried it with Claude Design with Figma and I believe they have a relationship with the company and Dylan Field even said he was shocked by it. And what's crazy is as well is their copies of these companies not particularly good. They don't make great software. You'll notice that both Anthropic CEO Darama day and Sam Whman have both said, "We can't wait to see what you build with this." Well, that's because they don't know what you can build with this. They want everyone else to do their innovation for them, spend as much as they can on tokens, and then take whatever's left. In what universe would you expect the telecoms who built out the internet to know what's going to be born of this? No. You look at the technology, and it's a question of what does it allow you to do, but how that's going to play out over time. When the internet was first born, I certainly didn't think, oh, somebody's going to come up with the iPhone and then somebody's going to come up with Uber. I never would have seen those jumps. And then it's going to be, of course, a question of, well, in what specific way are you going to execute against that thing? And everything is going to be different. And many of them will fail. And it takes, you know, one person to just hit it right in terms of what the world wants at that moment. And so the fact that Sam Alman doesn't know what you're going to do with AI or Daario Amade doesn't know what you're going to do with AI obviously as as it should be, but these guys have to start thinking about the these guys being the AI companies have to start thinking about themselves differently. And so one is intelligence is rapidly going to become a commodity. So where am I going to get my intelligence? And so again, this goes back to Alex Carput's such a banger thing. We talked about it when it first came out, but it was a really brilliant drum that he was beating. You must create that layer in the middle where people can make that unique to them. That's going to be the the thing that makes this work. That's the thing that I think that Ed is missing is just because the the fundamental business model of what AI is today isn't going to be the thing. It's not going to survive uh in the same way that the railroads went bankrupt, the canals went bankrupt, the internet went bankrupt, and then it was the inheritance generation of investors actually built on top of it. It is almost certainly going to play out like that with AI. But that doesn't mean that AI isn't real. >> Then what do you think should happen? Do you believe that these are companies that should be nationalized? As we read in the intro, there's discussions reportedly that the administration and potentially some sort of sovereign wealth fund would take a 5% stake in open AI. I mean, is that a situation that you would like to see happen or do you think that's more disruptive? >> No, I don't think there's any need to. They talk about I think Sam Orman said, well, we can share the benefits of AI and the profits of AI. What profits? What returns? That 5% will have to get congressional approval. The sovereign wealth fund is still an idea at this point, but fundamentally large language models are not the future. The only reason big tech is investing in this is that they've run out of hyperrowth ideas. They don't have a next iPhone. They don't have a new Google search. So they've put over a trillion dollars with trillions more to come. >> So when people say that LLMs are not the future, basically what they're putting forward is the argument that pattern recognition is not going to be the game. I don't know that that's true. And this is really going to come down to whether or not because what AI has already done, this is the part that I I really want to get people on board with whether AI um will make the initial investors their money back. Probably not. That that would be ahistoric. Okay. So when you look back when revolutionary technologies come on board that have massive infrastructure buildouts, they almost always bankrupt the first generation of investors. And it's what's called the inheritance generation that comes along that's like, "Oh, cool. You built out all the fiber. Oh, cool. You built out the railroad network. Got it. And then they build successful businesses on the back of that because they don't have to deal with the debt, right? Same thing. US right now under all this debt weight. We've got to get out from under it somehow. You sure as hell not going to pay it back. So AI definitely faces that problem. You have a cost problem. But China's already showing us that you can drive the cost down dramatically. uh even some of the the companies themselves I think Elon has talked about driving the cost down um and so there you can look back at history and say when these technologies come on board in the beginning people don't know how to do it well they don't know how to make it very efficient but over time these are the exact kind of problems that get solved and so we can expect that on a long enough timeline it is going to get cheaper and so if you just sort of go we may lose uh you know a lot of money to people that have gone and invested in this But the technology has been invented. You're not going to put that um toothpaste back in the bottle. And even if we even if LLM's asintote meaning they they stop getting better. So if they stop getting better right now today, the capabilities are already extraordinary and they don't seem to show any signs of stopping. I don't know about you guys, but these things keep getting better. Um there you're not going to see just like this only up phenomenon where um without any um either building things out bigger breakthroughs in the way that they actually do the algorithms that make these things more efficient. Uh you it's not just going to go up to artificial super intelligence in the next six weeks. But in terms of the things that we use here at the company like new things keep coming online. For us, it was a big step forward with the ability to edit blueprints. Um, the amount of our C++ now in the game that's being written by AI. It's just like I keep seeing that we're using it for things now. It falls down. There's no question. You hit limits and it's like, oh, it sucks once you get to this part. Um, but I would say that makes it great. This is the what I call the golden age of AI because you're still necessary. If it ends up completely erasing us as being needed, that isn't necessarily going to be fun, but that's a problem for another day. All right. >> So, you think AI LLM's overall is a dead end? You see no business model here. You see no no utility from AI whatsoever. >> I see this as in the future as a boring hardwarebased business. The kind of the Oracle licensing hardware model. I think this is a 10 to30 billion TAM industry pretending to be a trillion dollar one. And because everyone's propping it up because they have no hyperrowth ideas, everyone's just kind of pretending it's the kayfabe of the tech industry that really has run out of ideas. >> I think that's the the sharpest thing that he says is that that's really going to be the question that plays out like are I really think that the people investing in this are out over their skis in terms of um you're pulling in the case of uh SpaceX AI, if I remember right, you're you're pulling forward like hundred years. I mean, it was some insane number. Maybe I'm misremembering that, but it was an absolutely ridiculous number of years at their current revenue rate that they were pulling into today. I did a a deep dive on this if you want to watch it. I think that one is crazy. Uh I don't think that that's going to make people their money back in anything approaching near-term. And we'll see if they end up surviving all of this. Um this is a debt game. I think what you're unfortunately going to live through is um because this is following the traditional trajectory of a revolutionary new technology with a very expensive um infrastructure buildout. What you're going to see is we're going to run the 2008 playbook where we try to hide all of that debt. The banks are going to diversify. The banks are going to diversify into your insurance. They're going to diversify into your index funds. They're going to diversify into your retirement program. that's going to be the way that the banks like mitigate the risk on their side. Uh it's entirely possible that that debt gets packaged up and given a high credit rating, but it's certainly going to be it's already being sliced up and hidden in other places in the economy. And so that's the part that worries me is making sure that people understand what they own because I think we're in for a rocky ride in terms of this is this is a super known pattern that these kind of technologies go through. And so it doesn't mean that the tech doesn't end up continuing to have incredible application, but his idea of like this is going to be tied to the hardware. That is very interesting. Now, I think ultimately it it is it's going to be tied to the hardware because that's how they build these gigantic brains. But I think that we've already seen the evidence uh from the US and especially from China that you can make these things more and more and more efficient, which drives the cost way down. So I think tokens are going to get a lot cheaper. I think the ability to store more tokens in memory at once is going to get more massive, which creates more applications. I think we're going to find that LLMs don't work for everything, but it's so remember it's so good at coding that when they dropped Mythos, they treated it as a weapon system that couldn't be exported to our allies because it could hack basically everything. So, these are things that have extraordinary capabilities and it just becomes a question of can we make them more efficient over time. And so, um, Ed is putting his finger on something that I think is very important. Uh, myself and countless other people, um, have not been paying enough attention to how can this go wrong. I started to a few months ago, just looking at the investing and the debt and being like, uhoh, there's a potential problem coming here. I think Ed is maybe a little unjustified in just how bearish he is, but he's making people face something very, very difficult. Um, one more thing about this. He said he was completely right. Is that when he was talking about the total adjustable market is only 10 to 30 billion, not this trillion dollar thing or >> I don't remember when I said that, but there's a couple things that Ed is very right. One of them is that this is currently very much tied to hardware. Uh, he's very right that right now the rate at which they're spending money, just losing money outright versus the rate at which they're bringing in capital or or revenue is is so insane. I don't know what people are thinking. Like, listen, as a a very paranoid investor who does not think he sees the future well enough to go all in on one thing, I'm captain diversify and I totally understand that's not how you get rich. The way that you get rich is to have a concentrated bet and it pays off. It's all true, but that's also how you go broke. So, the show will be right back in a second. But first, let me tell you about something that happened to me. I was traveling abroad. My phone got hacked. It was a nightmare. That was the moment I really understood exactly [music] how exposed we all are. The hack is just the entry point. Once your data is out, it gets sold to data brokers who then sell it again and again. Your name, your address, your phone number, your social security number, sitting on hundreds of sites available to anyone willing to pay for it. 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And then another thing that he said that I think I won't say that he's completely right. I'll say, "Oo, you got my attention. I want to look more at that." Is are these tech companies out of ideas? >> Like, where's our new iPhone? >> The the thing that hits like the iPhone hit, right? >> We're going Yeah, we're going on 20 years. >> Yep. So, is that going to be robotics? That's like when you start getting into Elon territory. So, Elon is thinking big. You You can say that he's a fool, but you certainly cannot say that he doesn't have a vision for how this all ends up paying off. So, he's switching over. Like if you want to think about, okay, wait a second, these hyperscalers are out of ideas. It's like, no, they're not. We're just at a this I'm channeling Elon here. Uh, no, they're not. We're just at a different part of that curve. And so now we're leveraging AI to build things like self-driving cars. I have ridden in a Tesla that took me like, I don't know, five or six miles up into the Hollywood Hills without the driver ever once touching the steering wheel. I could not believe it. So, I was like, whoa, this stuff is getting good. It's going to keep getting better. They just need more training data. more training data, more training data. Elon almost always misses timeline, but ends up being right in terms of what the technology can do. And what he's saying about robotics, man, listen, the technology may not come as quickly as we want, but the robotics is being driven by AI. And so it's like these things, one of I I don't think he is this over is that the >> uh we got a little bit more. >> Okay. Okay. So, I don't remember if he talks about it here, but um he has done interviews where he talks about how um the guys building the big data centers, he was like if they had ideas, they would just use the compute themselves, but they don't. They're starting to like lease it out to other people. And so, uh the big data center that Elon built, he's like leasing that out to Anthropic. And so, he's like, "Bro, that tells you like nobody needs this stuff. These guys built this all in hype. They everybody thought this was the next big thing. Uh Capital is always seeking a return." And uh now this is me. When you inflate the currency the way that you're doing it, you force VCs and stuff to go, we've got to have somewhere to put money. And so they'll they he doesn't say this explicitly, but he's intimating this that the VCs will trick themselves into thinking, no, no, no, this is real. We just got to like keep putting money, keep putting money, keep putting money. And because of the abuses of government deficit spending, you are making the number go up. So you look like a genius. And so it's like, "Oh my god, this is all like incredible. This is going to go up forever." Then you get someone like Ed who's like, "Wait, hold on. What are you actually building with this again?" Like, remind me, you you just built out a massive data center, Elon. You're saying you got to go to space and you got to build more, but you're leasing your unused cycles to another company. Like, why the hell would you expect me to believe that there's really a there there? Like, so I think it is very important to be able to step into Ed's shoes and other bears and articulate why they're so nervous. And if I were going to put a really fine point on it, it's really two beats. You've got they're leasing out their own intelligence, if you will, because they don't have anything to do with it. They're not pointing at anything. Right out of ideas. Uh, and then you've got bro, the cost versus return is so insane. You can't do that. You can't do that. it is guaranteed to um hit a wall of problematic debt before the revenue reaches something that makes it self-sustaining. >> Quote, "Some of our customers, OpenAI may be highly leveraged. We may experience risks of non-payment in our dealings with such parties. Are the are we going to see this from a market standpoint first in shares of hyperscalers? I think we might, but Oracle is a particularly scary one because they are building 7.1 gawatt of capacity just for one customer. And they even said in their annual report that the risk was they might not get paid. Open AAI only loses money. And I think I estimate it's like $75 billion of revenue annually that they will have to pay for the full Stargate data center project in annual compute revenue. Open AI can't afford that. And if they can't, Larry Ellison can't afford to pay back those bills and Oracle stock will be in jeopardy along with the margin loans that Mr. Ellison holds. It's genuinely dangerous and it's dangerous across the board for Neoclouds, for hyperscalers, for every associated party of the LLM industry. >> Not only not only is it dangerous, it it is historically to be expected that we're going to obliterate. I mean, Drew, is it in the trillions? It's hundreds of billions of dollars of investment that is likely to get wiped out because they won't be able to make the payments on the debt. Is this is this some of the reason why like X money might be a thing that Elon is taking? Like all right, I need to kind of hedge my bet. See if I can do some type of >> I'm just saying as anybody that's the first new idea in the X AI in the space as I was talking about. >> Well, that's definitely not a new idea. China's been handing us our ass on that for god knows how long. >> I'm just saying though as as a AI company with all the four of them together, they're going this way. Meta is now making uh do-it-yourself video game apps uh to kind of come up with a new Instagram for video games that's built with their compute. So, they're trying to do these side quest. I guess I'm just saying is that something that they're trying to do to kind of fill the coffers a little bit to help the revenue or is it >> Yeah, everything that they do is trying to make a little bit of money, but the the numbers here are staggering. These guys, the odds that they'll be able to make their money back by building a thing themselves is effectively zero. That's why I think right now the right way to think of this is I'm a hyperscaler. I build data centers and I build the intelligence itself and then the intelligence is a commodity that we sell to other people. And the bet that we're making is that everybody is going to want that intelligence in the same way that people want electricity. So if you think of of the the um actual eye in AI as that's what we sell, we sell intelligence and we're neutral. We're not. This is Alex Karp trying to convince people stop. Don't be a company that actually builds the business. Create the intelligence. Create an obfuscation layer so that the people can go in and make this their own thing. Uh that their AI is unique to them. It gives outputs that nobody else can get. And you're not trying to pill for that. You're like trying to be a highly trusted um always on provider of intelligence. And when I look out into the world, basically everything will be imbued with intelligence. There's no reason to have a dumb chair if you can have a smart chair. Uh there's no reason to have a dumb TV if you can have a smart TV, right? So it's just going to keep getting better and better and better in terms of integrating into your daily life. Um but right now there just isn't enough appetite for what AI can deliver. So to me, this just feels like a timing thing. So the base assumptions that I ride on the back on are you're not going to get the revenue fast enough. So the early investors are going to get destroyed. By the way, that's going to be terrifying to the global economy, but I'm setting that aside for now. So that's one thing. The second assumption is that people will figure out in the same way they figured out how to integrate the internet in ways we never would have thought of in like the late 90s. Forget it. We didn't see this coming. And we're at that stage of AI. We're in the late '9s of AI compared to where we're going to be. You know, 2007 becomes the iPhone moment. Uh when does Uber come along? 2014, 2015, something like that. So, it's like you got a lot of years of people being like, well, what about this? No, that doesn't work. What about this? Well, that doesn't work. And then slowly it's like, oh wait, it's AI plus this. Like, oh, now that my microwave has it, now I can make, right? And it becomes like it needs to start permeating. It needs to get out there in order to be a thing. But one of the um things that one of the base assumptions that Ed has is that the LLM as the progenerator of the intelligence is just always going to be dumb. Now that's me putting words in his mouth, but I think that's pretty close. So he thinks that's going to tap out. And if he's right and this is like as good as it's ever going to get and it's like yeah, you get some efficiencies and but you know, you can't just turn your whole company over to AI and walk away. Um, I get why he would think AI is cool, but it isn't this multi-trillion dollar industry. I don't share that assumption. I think that even if you can't just keep making it smarter and smarter and smarter and smarter that just integrating what we already have, just making what we already have more efficient and cheaper will transform things. I don't know if he's not close enough to the medical side and doesn't understand things like protein folding. I'd be very interested to ask him that question because just seeing what's happening in medicine >> based on some of uh the things that are coming out because AI can just look at an unimaginable number of um patterns and so the fact I forget how many tens of thousands of proteins it has like folded in its mind to know this goes with this goes with this goes with this that will play out in drugs and all kinds of things uh in ways that I don't think we yet fully understand and it's already happened. That's the thing. You don't need another breakthrough. >> I think it could be the neoclouds because with this rumor of meta selling their AI capacity, I think companies like Core and especially Nebus and Iran and Cipher Mining and all of them, Terowolf as well, they are all very they're basically outgrowths and they're subsidiaries of Nvidia. Nvidia is now according to the information going to be paying them to rent back their GPUs when they install them in the data center. This is the this is something that only happens in an industry without diverse and real demand. >> Meta is an interesting uh case in this instance because they don't as yet have the third party cloud services revenue propping it up. But people point to their own top line having accelerated in the first quarter of this year from like 23% to 33% presumably because they're implementing these AI tools or somehow making their platform more productive along those lines. Um, and at the same time it shows you the fallback option. We're creating all this capacity even if it's not a business model. The capacity is there. We've gotten the kind of the power and the compute in place. Maybe that helps society down the road. Well, the thing is with Meta is I don't necessarily agree. AI is not driving Meta's revenue growth. the fact that they have an effective monopoly on social media is Microsoft, Google, and Meta and Amazon are all doing a funny little I don't want to call it a scam, but it's a a trick where because their other businesses are still growing, but they never disclose their AI revenues, everyone conflates that with AI driving their growth. In reality, their other businesses are growing and AI is losing them money across the board. You'll notice that neither Microsoft or Amazon, who both share their run rate of AI, will share the actual AI revenues. That tells you that these companies are afraid. Public companies love good news. If they had good news, why wouldn't they share it? Because they've only got bad news here. >> So, what do you think then is the straw that ultimately breaks the camel's back? You've got trillions potentially at stake in terms of just overall capex investing through the years. I mean, it seems like there is a a collective desire for this to work. what ultimately pro provides the challenge or presents the challenge in your in your mind that that kind of reverses all that. >> So I heard a Goldman analyst say recently that the first hyperscaler to pull capex will get rewarded by the markets. I think that capex pullbacks are they're the sign. I also think any financing falling through AI or anthropic would be a sign. But I think we're going to start seeing AI companies kind of start falling out of favor and not being able to raise money. But the big thing is debt. when data center debt stops being issued, [clears throat] that will be when it's bedtime for this industry. Because >> even if they think AI is going to win, we've got 100 gawatts or so of data center capacity allegedly under construction or in planning. That's trillions of dollars of money needs to come from somewhere. And we are tapping out the debt markets. We saw that with Google raising that $85 billion equity race. >> I'll be very interested to see what ends up happening because you also have the arms race aspect of this if Fable 5 really was as scary. Um because the version that ended up getting released to the public was nerfed so hard. But the version that made Anthropic go to the government and say, "Hey, listen. We can hack basically anything. There's all these legacy bugs that people didn't realize. We're taking advantage of them. We're shutting it down." And that made the US government go, "Okay, whoa. We can't even let our adversaries have access to this." There's a big habaloo about um OpenAI and Google selling technology to Chinese companies via um Singapore, I think. Uh, so and the government's saying technically it's legal but they don't like it and blah blah blah. So they they are treating this as a weapon system and so um I haven't heard Ed talk about that. But it's an interesting angle on all of this like will the government be able to um stop themselves from going all right we've got to keep these guys going some way or the other because from an arms race perspective this becomes incredibly important. All right I don't think we need to keep going on this. We get the idea. I I have a feeling that um we we are not going to um see less of Ed in the future. I think we're going to see more. We are all going to have to contend with what the bare case is for this uh in terms of if we're going to survive AI and we're really going to get to the other side and we're going to figure out um what this is going to be in our lives. We've got to have a long runway. There's got to be time for this to play out for innovators to try things and fail and the company just completely goes under and then the next person comes along and tries something new. That whole process the creative destruction of a new technology we have to go through and I think that the internet is our guide and I think that we have expected AI came in like a storm and improved so fast. I think that people really and we needed that next big thing from an investment perspective because again you've got all this economic pressure due to inflation forcing people into the markets. They want to know where they're going to get their returns from. And so that because there weren't just a endless bevy of ideas that money was just going heavier and heavier into AI. And so now you've got yourself in a position where um the debt is accumulating so fast, the revenue is coming in slow. It's systemically important to the entire economy and certainly to any individual investor, you've got to really pay attention. And I think where um what Ed said about the debt is the real thing. And if you think about this as the market starts to pull back and says, "Ooh, like when um Deep Seek first launched, I think we lost almost a trillion dollars in value in a single day." So people were like, "Wait, I thought America was going to win the AI race. Now all of a sudden, maybe it's going to be China." Yo, investors got spooked. So what's going to be the story that spooks the market? That I don't know. But if the market starts getting spooked, that's when you start seeing people say, "I'm not willing to pay for that debt anymore." which then is going to force companies to pull back on the capex. Now, uh capital expenditure for people who don't know, so it's you investing in your business, you're going to build a data center. That would be a capital expenditure. So, when somebody says capex, that's what they mean. Uh Ed is saying the first person to not do it because they're getting pressured or not do it because they failed to raise debt where they just go, "We don't need anymore. We're good. We're not going to keep expanding." That that's going to be the winner. I think they might take a bigger hit. I think people might go, "Uh-oh, you're in trouble. You're the first one to admit problems." And they'll probably say, "No, no, no. This is an industry-wide thing." But it becomes a question of whether investors buy it or not. And so now, I think it will be difficult to be the first mover because, you know, if you say, "Eh, we're all out of ideas, but we're the first ones backing out." Maybe people buy it or maybe they just go, you're the only one that's out of ideas because investors are still incentivized for this to be the next big thing to keep pouring capital in. Uh and so this one is going to be a bumpy ride. I've been saying this now for a couple months. So people need to Yeah. keep your wits about you. I'll leave you with one last thing and that is where is the debt hiding? Where is all of this debt? The banks are already diversifying. Is it hiding anywhere in your portfolio that you're not aware of? It's certainly worth digging in and taking a look. If you like this conversation, check out this episode to learn more. Boys and girls, things are popping off in China and they have a goal to get out from under the dollar. I don't think anybody's confused about that. They also want to be the global