Derek Thompson

Maybe some of it's still around the 1950s, right?

The fiber optic cable that was laid still works for years.

But I keep seeing news headlines about GPUs getting better all the time, right?

So I wonder, like, are companies buying something they're going to have to replace in like three years?

Talk a little bit about how AI is just fundamentally different than steel rail or fiber optic cable in a way that's really important in understanding what it is that we're building here.

So when people look at the fact that these hyperscalers are spending 200, 300, almost $400 billion a year on, we can call it CapEx, we can call it, you know, just AI infrastructure.

There's a way in which if you're rooting against a bubble, you could say, well, it's like building a railroad.

You can use it forever.

So the $300 billion that's being spent right now can be made useful 10 years from now, 20 years from now.

That's the railroad analogy.

On the opposite side of railroads, there's like bananas, right?

If you spend $300 billion on bananas today, your CapEx isn't worth shit in like two weeks because all the bananas are brown.

And like, I don't think GPUs are like entirely like bananas, but they're also not entirely like- They're closer to bananas than anything else.

It's worrying that they're closer to bananas than steel.

And so like, what does this tell us at a high level about the value-

of this kind of spending and the threat that these companies are just not going to be able to return capital from all this upfront investment.

And before we talk really deeply about how this could lead to a bubble or a crash, I do want to talk about how this is affecting the economy right now.

It's eating tech jobs.

There was a University of Maryland study that found that if you subtract out AI jobs from all IT jobs, basically all IT is declining when you subtract out AI.

Like tech is just in large part becoming an enormous employment bet in the future of artificial intelligence.