It’s a pleasant morning here in the Santa Cruz mountains overlooking Silicon Valley and Monterey Bay. So what better time to think of AI and video?
According to the Guardian, our beloved tech overlords – Meta, Microsoft, Amazon and Google – have spent a whopping $155B on AI development this year alone. As the Guardian notes, this is “more than the US government has spent on education, training, employment and social services” the same period. Oddly enough, these are also the very areas where AI is expected to take over from all that expensive and pesky “skinware” (that’s people, in case you didn’t know). Such a coincidence.
Most of this money falls under the capital expenditures category, which is not an expense but an investment in infrastructure, R&D, semiconductors, and so forth, and hence runs under very different tax rules. Most of these investments I would say fall under the AI rubric only tangentially, but are categorized as “AI” to make investors happy. And happy they are. Big Tech (sans tariff goblins) have lots of money to spend on themselves.
From a Silicon Valley perspective, many of these investments are long-overdue, particularly in semiconductor design and datacenter platforms, along with requirements for low-latency low-loss networking. So this is actually a good thing for a broad swathe of hardware and software engineers and designers.
On a more amusing note, Musk announced yesterday that the Vine archive will be restored after seven years in cold storage after Twitter dumped it. I’d hate to be on the restore team. The bit rot coupled with mind rot would be formidable. But if you’re wishing you’d grabbed Aunt Martha’s six second blowing out the candles on her birthday cake over and over, now’s your chance, if it’s really still there. Industry and customers have long moved on to other video pastures, so this seems just another fair weather balloon soaring on bluster.
It’s still a beautiful day. Take a walk. Breathe the free air. Remember that nothing lasts forever. So take a chance today.