• partial_accumen@lemmy.world
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      4 hours ago

      Google isn’t in financial trouble from this spending. Cash Flow Negative just means in a specific period they’re spending more than they bring for that period. Google and other tech giants have been sitting on mountains of unused cash at $242.5 billion for years. This is a rare time where they’re finally dipping into it to the tune of $5.9 billion.

  • SCmSTR@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    6 hours ago

    Keep going! AI is the future!

    We all love AI. I wish it were smarter and made it so I could have it do anything.

    I don’t want to spend anything on it though, that’s your investment. Keep going, though! Don’t let your dreams be dreams!

  • scytale@piefed.zip
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    8 hours ago

    These companies mortgaging their future because of FOMO on something that doesn’t show any evidence of profit for the foreseeable future.

    • 4am@lemmy.zip
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      6 hours ago

      The plan was that LLMs would fool the masses into thinking that “AI” was here and could do anything they desire, create art and stories, fix photos, solve problems…replace workers, engineer first-to-market solutions, find novel inventions, solve systemic problems. Do the budget instantly. Write better code than senior developers.

      And the plan was that since this was so good, all the computing resources on the physical world would need to go to those companies. Everyone would be beholden to them, forever. If you can’t afford your own desktop then you have to use a tablet and rely on the cloud AI service to do your compute for you! Only $200 a month with 500GB storage. They want to become the arbiters of your mind, they want to have the ultimate control over everything.

      But the AI oligarchs? they all saw each other going for it - so they built out so hard they’re stealing people’s homes. They’re actually getting governments to pull eminent domain for this shit, probably through the promise of a huge payout when they control everything.

      And every lead poisoned dipshit boomer fell for it, they think the flying car future is here and that this is all “inevitable” while the worst of Gen X’s pathological hatred of humanity race to consume all the resources first in order to shut out their competition over a fake tech that doesn’t do what they claim it does.

      • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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        4 hours ago

        And that’s why almost all of the AI companies are American or Chinese. Because most other countries aren’t stupid enough to let the corporations have that much control.

    • partial_accumen@lemmy.world
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      4 hours ago

      There are better targets for the anger for not paying enough taxes:

      Alphabet (Google parent company) earned $132.17 billion in profits in 2025 and paid $26.656 billion in US taxes for an effective tax rate of 20.1%. Sure this could be, and historically was, higher before trump cut the corporate tax rate from 35% in 2017.

      Tesla, on the other hand at the same time in 2025, paid $0 in US taxes in 2025 on profits of $3.794 billion for an effective tax rate of 0%.

    • Zarobi@aussie.zone
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      4 hours ago

      There’s an alternate reality where Google was good. They improve the world and push humanity forwards with creative and helpful technology. Instead, we get Gemini

      • Abyssian@lemmy.world
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        4 hours ago

        It’s all those damn bastards at CERN to blame for this mess. They just had to try sending a message back in time, and suddenly history changed. Nelson Mandela lived a long and respected life instead of dying in prison.

        They didn’t expect it, but they felt like they had made the world better. Then the next message only caused the Monopoly Man to lose his monocle. The next time the Barenstiene Bears changed their name. Such random, stupid little changes.

        So they went for the gold, and tried to stop the skirmish some folk called World War 1.5. But this time Hitler gave up on painting and blowing dudes in back alleys for nickels and instead of WW1.5 we got WW2.

        Of course they had to keep trying to fix that and change things back. Now the US and Israel commit genocide, China beats the US in personal freedoms and the relatively low level of constant government espionage of it’s own citizens, Crime is legal in the US, we’re dropped the War on Drugs in exchange for the War on Science and Medicine, crime is officially legal for the wealthy, the bulk of the sitting US administration including the President and folks like the King of England’s own Brother raped loads of kids and almost definitely killed some of them and everyone in the world knows it but no one does a thing about it… and also Sinbad’s Shazaam movie never happened and Darth Vader no longer says “Luke, I am your father.”

        Those last two aren’t quite on the same scale as some of the rest, but I liked that fucking Shazaam movie as a kid and it never even existed now.

        • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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          4 hours ago

          It’s an interesting choice, do you take their bones and go with a saw style punishment, or take their names and go with a black mirror style punishment?

          • Abyssian@lemmy.world
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            3 hours ago

            Idk. Didn’t think about it much. That person up there ⬆️ said that the evil was done by people with names and bones. If we took their names away they might be confused on what to call each other for a while, but they’d figure it out. Stealing their bones seems like it would teach them a much more severe lesson.

            Plus evil tech nerds shouldn’t get to have awesome spooky skeletons living inside of them like we do.

      • jballs@sh.itjust.works
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        2 hours ago

        We were also pretty naive then. An editor for Wired magazine attended a party with Larry Page, Google’s cofounder. He asked how Google was able to offer their services for free - and Page told him how their long term plan was to gather as much data as possible through their free services in order to build artificial intelligence.

        So while we all thought a free GB of storage and searchable email was awesome in 2004, we were just blindly feeding what’s happening today with the AI craze.

      • Abyssian@lemmy.world
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        10 hours ago

        Getting that invite made email cool again. And they promised to not be evil, and started to develop loads of cool things and phones you could do anything with… then realized being evil is more profitable.

        Should have seen it coming. Of course a company who’s main source of revenue is selling ads and positions in search results is going to end up fucking the entire Internet up for money.

        • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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          4 hours ago

          I like the company from the Upload TV series’s motto “don’t be evil, obviously”

      • [object Object]@lemmy.ca
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        9 hours ago

        Remember watching your storage capacity increase like some sort of fucking witchcraft? That was the good era of the internet.

      • fizzle@quokk.au
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        9 hours ago

        I think the early days of Google docs were peak google-love for me.

    • Tetsuo@jlai.lu
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      9 hours ago

      And to say they had “Don’t be evil” as their official motto in the early days…

      • Abyssian@lemmy.world
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        9 hours ago

        Yeah, if you need to remind yourself not to skin puppies it’s probably something you’ve considered more than once and you’re not a good person.

  • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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    4 hours ago

    Why don’t they get the current AI that they already have to work out how to optimize itself so that they don’t need to consume all of the oceans on the planet in order to run it?

    Also maybe don’t give me a summary of every email I receive unless I explicitly ask for it, what should save a couple of hundred billion tokens.

    • KyuubiNoKitsune@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      3 hours ago

      You haven’t disabled that shit? No ways am I letting that privacy nightmare read my emails, it’s bad enough that they’re hosted by Google.