Zuckerberg Caught in Revealing Hot Mic Moment During White House Dinner

This is wild. Meta, OpenAI, MSFT, Nvidia are collectively keeping the AI trade alive, which is propping up the stock market and overall perception of the economy. This admission makes it clear that the AI spends are being made up not based on business value/demand...

> This admission makes it clear that the AI spends are being made up not based on business value/demand...

Well, isn't that okay? All the companies are racing to capture a nascent market. It would make sense to spend beyond current demand and even projected 5Y demand if it gives you a larger share of a market that might last 20+ years

Zuck should have asked the AI what the spend number should be, I'm sure it would give him a correct answer.

>This admission makes it clear that the AI spends are being made up not based on business value/demand...

Because one executive got flustered and gave a random number to Trump, and therefore that's representative of the other 3 companies in the list?

To be fair, when he suggested $600Bn in spend by 2028, it’s obvious they won’t actually be spending that. That would exceed their yearly revenue each year. They just don’t have that money. This feels like less of an indictment of AI spend, and more of the political process of blatant lying for political favor.

For comparison, Google said $250b, Microsoft said $80b, but Apple has said $600bn. Meta currently spends ~$100bn.

IMHO, this indicates to me that these numbers are more like a marketing exercise.

But how does it keep that alive? Wouldn't it mean that the marginal utility of each dollar spend would go lower? They are already spending as much as they can and believe is needed since they are diehard AI bulls themselves. If they saw a need to spend 600 billion dollars themselves through 2028, they'd have already done it.

>and more of the political process of blatant lying for political favor.

Even that's debatable because he walked back on the number shortly after

>Once the discussion concluded, Zuckerberg leaned over to Trump to privately admit the president had caught him off guard. "I'm sorry I wasn't ready...I wasn't sure what number you wanted to go with," Zuckerberg said in a revealing moment caught on a hot mic.

I mean, it seems pretty obvious to me as an industry insider.

Having a major exec flat out admit he’s just saying what he things the president wants to hear makes it seem night and day.

That statement could mean many different things

Smart lawyers can make a lot of money here for suing shareholders.

Its even more wild that is flagged.

Agree. This article is completely on point for Hacker News. There seems to be a cabal of Maga-types (or AI) on these forums that reflexively flag any content that seems to smack of exposing the reality of the corrupted and anti-democratic times in which we live.

When you are having dinner with the emperor, of course it's just good marketing to say he's wearing clothes

> he walked back on the number

And somehow he never lied? Or he wasn't trying to brown nose? Because it literally has to be a lie if he changed his story and it's hard to deny that he appears to be trying to curry favor.

I believe dang has said there is an auto-flagger which will do that on posts that are getting too many controversial comments. Then a mod has to unflag it, if they want to do that.

Of course this does suggest a strategy for censoring topics that you don't want on the front page of HN: deploy a bot army to add inflammatory comments. I feel like I've seen effect on other posts (the tylenol post currently on the front page has that smell) but who knows.

It would be debatable if we didn't have the Commander in Chief we have now is very blatant and open about demanding things and providing political favor in return constantly

The problem with corruption at high level is that it forces everything down the chain to be also corrupt even if they don't want to.

I think presidential power must be limited, and ways to limit sycophants in government needs to be introduced. May be sometime in the future...