This is 100 manhattan projects. Lots and lots and lots of things that can be done. Reminds me of the quote "water water everywhere not a drop to drink" ==> Money, money everywhere, not a cent goes towards something remotely useful.

1) Could've added nifty features to roads (rf beacons?) and make it super easy to build autonomous vehicles. This would've solved so many problems, but most importantly 45,000 lives every year and millions of accidents.

2) Could've given the money to farmers who are getting ethanol subsidies today to add panels, supply tons of power to the grid, creating permanent income to the farmers instead of handouts every year.

3) Could've built many Universities permanently free which is feasible with an endowment that large.

4) Could've built walking/biking infrastructure in most cities, which would help reduce healthcare expenses. Most of the expenses today are lifestyle/metabolic diseases.

5) Could've switched the entire country to clean energy, exporting ALL of the oil and create a sovereign wealth fund.

6) Could've built a city for homeless people with homes, excess energy production (solar) providing the function of a UBI, a massive hospital with health and mental health facilities, de-addiction centers. New city in the middle of nowhere where land is dirt cheap. Army corps of engineers could execute this.

7) Rehabilitate prison (not like George Carlins suggestion of Kansas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkMrFIv_QHk), but more like nordic countries.

8) Build solar over all the interstates.

My understanding of injecting money in education is that it's proven to be extremely ineffective at improving outcomes.

Schools just hire more administrators and build nicer gyms.

> we instead injected $2 trillion dollars into things like infrastructure (real infrastructure, not GPU warehouses), education, helping out communities ravaged by globalization

Even excluding military spending, US governments spend $2 trillion every 10 weeks.

People invest in what would get them the highest ROI. No one is really thinking about “improving the world”* when they invest.

What’s scary about the AI boom is people over investing and not being able to recoup their investment which will lead to knock on effects - companies going bankrupt and people losing jobs, savings gone, … etc.

* As ESG has shown, not everyone agrees on what is considered “improving”.

It won't make much difference. The US has a lot of problem, but "not spending enough money" isn't one.

The US government spend a lot on healthcare ($5.3 in 2024)[0]. More than most European countries per capita. But many people still feel that the US hardly has healthcare at all. Pouring more money without a full structural overhaul will likely make things worse.

And the $2T you mentioned is investors' money, which means that your plan is actually to increase tax by $2T and pour it into a system proven inefficient.

[0]: https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/10.1377/hlthaff.2025.01683

It all sounds great, but unfortunately human nature is that money attracts corruption, so how could a $2T injection be managed in a way that ensures everything is square, without adding significant overhead to the spending?

Governments are often just as bad at this as private entities are.

> but if you want to make a REAL difference as an entrepreneur why not look at parts of the country that are struggling

Why not parts of the world even? There are more countries than "the country". Some of us here aren't even from "the country".

> ...instead of injecting $2 trillion and counting into a few AI companies...

Similar to the "why we spend money exploring space when there are hungry people on Earth?" question, I don't think this is a This Or That argument.

People and companies have different interests, some don't/can't care about education etc so they don't invest in those fields. Forcing these people/companies to invest in areas they don't interested in usually results in bad outcomes that is way worse than just let them be.

But some, do invest in education or civil infrastructure projects. It's not as hot, because... well, usually it makes less money from those things.

The core problem is still that, it is hard to figure out how to invest in such way that it could help the disadvantaged people, while at the same time maintaining a 10 or even 100x growth in the next 5 years.

From the company's perspective, there's no dilemma here, it's 100x growth potential ahead of everything else.

because that's not how this world works, and neither it should. most people figure that out in their early teens.

and fyi, that 2t is not tax money, it's someone's money.

China is showing the world how it's done. Check out how many nuclear reactors they have built in the last 10 years. Turns out having a government that plans long term and actually delivers what they said they would makes a huge difference.

For context, the US alone spends annually a bit more than $2T on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. That money is widely dispersed both geographically and socioeconomically. $2T is not as much as one may think. I think we should let investors put their private money where they wish.

Also, as an aside, the benefits of globalization on the balance far outweigh the drawbacks. Globalization has been the primary force pulling 3rd world countries out of poverty over the last 80 years.

I don't think we don't really know how to do many of these things you list even if we have infinite funds. There is a real chance that we will mess things even more if we have infinite funds...

Just return the taxes instead

I mean, you want to be annoyed at something, be annoyed at Apple for investing 3x the Marshall plan into China, instead of America.

Always loved this from The Big Short (movie): "In the years that followed, hundreds of bankers and rating agency's executives went to jail. The SEC was completely overhauled, and Congress had no choice but to break up the big banks and regulate the mortgage and derivatives industries.

Just kidding.

Banks took the money the American people gave them, and they used it to pay themselves huge bonuses, and lobby the Congress to kill big reform. And then they blamed immigrants and poor people, and this time even teachers. And when all was said and done, only one single banker went to jail."

Edit: I see I'm not the first to quote The Big Short in reply - such a good movie (and book)!

Not this time. This time, we'll bail out them out because they are too big to fail and they need the money and assets. Next time we'll definitely get them. Pinky promise.

Next time it’ll be different though

It’s a different crowd this time. Instead of bankers and traders with fin instruments its Silicon Valley growth first sane economics later playbook just scaled up to dangerous levels

>"I have a feeling in a few years people are going to be doing what they always do when the economy tanks. They will be blaming immigrants and poor people." -Mark Baum, The Big Short

The scapegoats for this plan never change and have never changed in human history.

Which parasites?

Yes, and then you'll build a communist paradise. It's just one purge away.

Increasingly more prominent is this new genre of activist hacker who thinks all big tech guys are bad parasites and if only they didn’t exist and we would have world peace and prosperity. That’s about the biggest virtue they know to signal.

The took the antithesis of the “great man” theory and ended up believing in a nonsensical version of it - every great thing in the world was done by normal people working 9-5. This is a kind of crude Labour Theory Of Value.

So you see these kind of comments signalling hatred in an attempt to show solidarity. But ultimately it is simply a signalling thing, a way to LARP as an activist because what else might one do as a simple rank and file employee. One wants to have a greater purpose to life and being an activist is a path for it.

I can’t help but notice the “if it stalls” still assumes AI is successful, only that China beats the US. What if AI in general can’t do any of the things you mention?

It's obvious to more people every day that "AI" has never delivered on what it promised. Until now nobody cared because the costs were cheap and it pays to appear cutting edge. Now the price is rising, and the delayed cost of AI-addiction and broken outputs are starting to sting. Not that employers care about the individual harms of course, but a workforce so deep in collective delusion that they can't see the train coming is only useful when the market is delusional too.

Once this snaps, and it will snap suddenly, companies will be climbing over each other to rip out AI as fast as possible. They won't call it that, of course, you're not going to get a CEO on the news talking about how they made a mistake and it was wrong to invest so much in AI tech. But they'll mean it.

The win scenario is that the crash reduces "AI" use to near zero. Spat out into the graveyard of VC hype like blockchain and metaverse before it. Banished to an eternal unlife of scammers running call centre scams, deepfake porn producers, and the occasional "we made AI safe!" startup trying to reignite the bubble again. While companies with their business on the line clamber to announce that they don't use it.

why am i looping back in the captcha when confirming?

I just checked 2007 and 1999 reports [1] a a bit and doesn't seem like they made such obvious warnings at those times.

I don't know much about economy and I just did some ctrl + f skimming, but this new 2026 warning is obviously more clear to me.

[1] https://www.bis.org/annualeconomicreports/index.htm?annualec...

> it has inflated so much, the risk of it deflating slowly is a pipe dream. if AI doesn't turn into AGI, global financial crash

Whether overvaluation can deflate gradually or suddently has to do entirely with debt and almost nothing to do with magnitude. AI is, currently, mostly equity financed.

I sold in May. I'm in the largest cash position (t-bills) I've ever had. I might be completely wrong. I just looked at the situation with the oil crisis, and without any obvious way to end it, I just figure, if there was every a more obvious "sell in May and go away" year, this is it.

Maybe I miss out on some gains and buy back in December or January. Maybe I'll increase my Berkshire position. I don't know. But companies tend to push the bad news till the end of the year, and boy, howdy there could be some bad news this year.

Step 1. Get a Costco or Sam's Club membership

I think it’ll be the printing press, not least because of moonshot executive pay tied to $price

It's ether going to be one catastrophic crash or decades of stagnation and decline.

Extract rents? I don’t think you’re using the term rent correctly here.

Yeah but the investments arent aiming for churning out SaaS apps. Its to automate large swathes of intellectual labour. Of which only SWE has been cracked yet. There is a question mark as to if the others will crack. If they arent then these investments will collapse from speculation down to reality. That possibility is what is being discussed here

As to whether that will happen, I think that risk is real. Because claude code isnt made by the generalozed capabilities of the tech but by good old non-generalozable hueristics and rule based engines. I dont think that will scale to other feilds at the factor these investments assume. Its the bitter lesson again. It scales with deliberate and specific design, not data, so it wont scale

We learnt this with ibm watson. Deepblue achieved chess supremacy but the last mile wasnt data driven, it was heiristic driven, and so watson, its successor, couldnt scale/generalize.

My prediction is that this speculation on LLMs with harnesses will collapse since they wont scale. We'll have another winter where the reasearchers will be leaft alone long wnough to come up with the next breakthrough (probably game theory based data driven agency) which might then create what this hypecycle is speculating

While I don't agree with your premise at all, even if it could one shot a SaaS product (a statement so vague it's meaningless) I don't think there's much of an argument for why that's economically useful. A lot of SaaS has free software/open source equivalents anyway (how else do you think the clanker's are able to plagiarize it?). People still pay for Office even though you could easily use LibreOffice, or GitHub when you could self host Forgejo. It's like when anthropic made a big deal out of making a broken compiler. Neat, so, after ingesting all of open source and burning a trillion tokens you ended up with something worse than what's already out there; and instead of doing something economically useful like giving a person money to build it or supporting the open source ecosystem, you're just wasting energy on datacenters.

Why even build SaaS apps? AI can just do what a SaaS app can

So good at it that I’m right now in the process of building instead of buying.

Here’s how that plays out in the economy:

- My company spent $50 on my tokens to build this internal tool

- Anthropic spent $XXX to deliver those tokens to me.

- The company I was going to buy the tool from lost $XX,XXX per year that I would have paid them.

I dunno, kind of sounds like the economy just got smaller.

I could usually accept the idea that software getting cheaper generally increases demand for software and expands the economy surrounding it, but I’m not sure if we have precedent for what happens when software becomes positively worthless.

that is not production ready

What does that have to do with the article?

> Meanwhile AI has gotten so good it can just about one shot a SaaS app.

There isn't a direct correlation between AI improvement or stagnation and whether or not the amount being spent by AI labs and the associated ecosystem will result in a financial crash.

Look into the history of railroads and the internet itself to see how massive levels of investment can result in economic crashes even when the thing being invested in produces real, widespread societal value.

One could argue that one of the nightmare economic scenarios for AI is actually that it gets too good too fast and results in a wipeout of the white collar worker that we are currently nowhere near ready to deal with given how propped up our economy is on consumer spending.