Recently I realized that US are very close to a centrally planned economy. Meta wasted 50B on metaverse, which like how much Texas spends on healthcare. Now the "AI" investments seems dubious.
You could fund 1000+ projects with this kinds of money. This is not an effective capital allocation.
how would you pick those 1000 projects? this is the problem with NIH grants too, for example - lots of appeal to authority, lot of noise, not a lot of signal.
AI might be a bubble, but at least there are people (who value their reputation) who decided on the investments, and in the end if (when?) things don't work out with these insane bets they will be the ones looking stupid, not some faceless committee.
and sometimes we feel that feedback cycles are too short (managers only think in quarters) but here we have a pretty long cycle for this moonshot, and yes, this leads to bonkers numbers (and real systemic risks, which need to be managed - and alas neither laws and regulations nor the lawmakers and the regulators are even remotely capable and ready for managing this)
