Discussion
Revealed: UK’s multibillion AI drive is built on ‘phantom investments’
Havoc: Sounds a lot like Zuckerberg getting caught on a hot mike at the trump dinner about how many billion meta is investingAll made up bullshit numbers
parliament32: The US is no different. All the deals seem to make sense until you take a step back and realize it's just a bunch of circular investments. This bubble bursting is going to be orders of magnitude funnier than the NFT/web3 implosion, I can't wait.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_bubble
harel: I don't disagree, but I can't join you wishing for it to happen. It's going to be bad for all of us.
embedding-shape: > is going to be orders of magnitude funnier than the NFT/web3 implosion, I can't wait.When was that? Seems I missed it, the market cap of cryptocurrencies in general seems to still be around ~2.5T USD, way above what I thought an "implosion" would mean.
parliament32: Oh crypto is doing fine, no issues there. NFTs however, like all the hype of pictures of monkeys selling for ridiculous amounts of money, that's the implosion I was referring to.
arkensaw: arent they all?
CrzyLngPwd: The current government, like the last one, are just a front for funnelling income tax from the poor to the rich, and of course doing whatever the Epstein Regime wants them to do.But yeah, we need a power-hungry datacenter more than we need proper sewerage, proper water management investment, shorter hospital wait times, decent border patrol, or some of the fucking potholes fixed!Still, it makes a change to just giving the money to the NarcoFührer clown in Ukraine, I suppose.
pu_pe: European AI investment plans are always so timid. This article mentions a couple of investments on the order of $1.5-2.5 billion USD that their government says "would position the UK as a world leader in AI". Hard to imagine you can be a world leader in anything when investing two orders of magnitude less than your competitors.
mrwh: The UK has been chronically bad at providing jobs and training for its young people. I saw that 20 years ago when I was there. That is a key reason, perhaps the primary reason, for its long term productivity malaise. And the response is to lean into a technology that will make this situation profoundly worse? It's another lazy quick fix that is neither quick nor a real fix. The UK needs to invest in its people, not funnel yet more money to big tech.
slavoingilizov: The UK has 3 of the top 10 universities in the world: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankin...It's a talent pool that many big employers want to tap into across a range of skills and industries. Cambridge is the best place to do bio-science and research. That is largely because the UK provides training and opportunities to its young people."I saw that 20 years go" is one data point that ignores the wider statistics. I'm not sure what else you can back your argument with.
mrwh: That's rather the point: the UK has been great at educating a very narrow sliver of its population, decided at 18 years old. Pointing to Oxbridge as a success story is very much like pointing to London as a world city. Yes, it's world class -- now look at the rest of the country.
varispeed: Training is one thing, but wage compression is another. Why study for many years, miss out on life if you can get warehouse job with little training and you won't be meaningfully worse off? You get smaller flat, less organic food and a car few years older than your engineer peer. These talks about productivity always miss the elephant in the room - why people bother to show up in the first place? It's the money. If there is no money, then you can lead horse to water...
varispeed: These rankings are meaningless. If you actually studied in the UK, you'd notice a massive change in the last 5 years. Universities do not teach anymore (perhaps with a few exceptions), they are facilitating visas for foreign students without any expectation they'll be learning anything and nobody cares. They pass the exams barely attending any lectures. Everyone is happy, except home students who get massive debt and no actual useful skills.
katdork: It's actually more like the past 10 years? (Certainly was when I was in university back 8 years ago) Maybe longer.But, I like to reference https://marktarver.com/professor.html on the state of education in the UK.
nickdothutton: These big headline "UK investments" are always and without exception not what you might think they are. When you drill into them, which companies, what was bought, where was the profit realised, what actual _real_ R&D was funded? They balloons are easy to burst. No need to even get as far down the funnel as what products/services were brought to market, what was their adoption, and what shareholder value was created. I have seen almost 30 years of it now.Partly it's because politicians think every dollar (pound) "invested" is the same, whether it goes on bricks and mortar or silicon or software.UK has some of the highest priced electricity for industrial use on the planet. A result of deliberate policy choices. Who in their right mind would want to grow a vast datacentre estate there?
