Larry Ellison Bet It All on the A.I. Boom. Will He Be the Face of the AI Bubble?

34 pointsposted 15 hours ago
by CaptainZapp
(nytimes.com)

19 Comments

Avicebron

13 hours ago

My favorite larry ellison story is sensei Ag. 8 years and 500 million dollars later the man could barely grow vegetables.

petre

10 hours ago

> In more recent years, he had been spending time on a quixotic “agtech” start-up that was promising to disrupt the global food chain.

Oh just great. I hope he fails.

Wasn't he also going to build Pre-crime with AI?

https://www.404media.co/larry-ellisons-ai-powered-surveillan...

> […] he and Musk and their respective teams started discussing a plan for Oracle to build and operate a massive A.I. data center for xAI. It would be in Abilene, Texas, and it would be constructed in the shape of an X.

The shape is super important.

cdrnsf

10 hours ago

Don't worry, his expensive bets on legacy media will save him.

euroderf

11 hours ago

Coming soon, a haircut like none before.

nicbou

9 hours ago

It's not as satisfying when the entire economy and everyone's pension is tied to it.

sph

4 hours ago

If you want to see some change, you gotta accept a little blood on the streets.

euroderf

8 hours ago

Only the pensions making risky bets on AI

nicbou

7 hours ago

Or investing in broad funds.

diogenes_atx

10 hours ago

> Few people doubt that this technology is going to change everything. What’s less clear is when the profits are going to start rolling in and how big they are going to be... "We are making trillions of dollars in investments on the back of tens of billions of dollars in revenues."

It seems possible that AI will eventually become an abundant commodity, with cheap alternatives available from China and elsewhere. And if that happens, profits will be competed away, just like any other commodity in a competitive market.

One would imagine that a Silicon Valley legend like Larry Ellison - who built his business empire on the basis of proprietary software products and services - would understand this better than anyone.

bayarearefugee

9 hours ago

> One would imagine that a Silicon Valley legend like Larry Ellison - who built his business empire on the basis of proprietary software products and services - would understand this better than anyone.

When you are worth as much money as Larry Ellison is, it is nearly impossible to not believe that you've become a Master of the Universe for whom the usual rules do not apply because of your ability to bend reality to your whims.

Unfortunately that amount of money also tends to be close to self-perpetuating so they rarely feel the full brunt of comeuppance that otherwise should come from such hubris when they are wrong.

thraway3837

9 hours ago

It doesn't really matter. You can bet billions and if it was a mistake, you still come out on top. It's easy to do when you just layoff 10,000 people and claim that they weren't the right fit to get AI working correctly. Zero effect on the actual CEOs

d_burfoot

12 hours ago

> the more you spent building A.I. infrastructure, the more you would earn, or so the logic went. Computer theorists called it the scaling hypothesis.

Good Gell-Mann Amnesia moment.

jeffrallen

14 hours ago

Couldn't happen to a nicer guy.

nisegami

13 hours ago

I'm very bullish on AI but I would love to see Larry fail, so I'm quite torn.

browningstreet

10 hours ago

It’s not the what, but the how and the what-else.