AI boom expected to make half of US GDP growth
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/08/04/big-tech-ai-spending-economy/
U.S. GDP growth is estimated to be around 1.4% this year, and AI driven capital expenditure is expected to make up half of that.
Amazon, Alphabet/Google, Meta/Facebook, Microsoft ... all expect to spend over $70 Billion each on data centers this year. NVIDIA making $44 Billion a quarter selling chips for AI.
NVIDIA, and now also Microsoft, crossed the $4 Trillion threshold in market capitalization.
The entire Apollo program cost "only" an inflation-adjusted $180 Billion.
There is still skepticism on whether there will be sufficient returns for all these investments, whether the growth can be sustained after the infrastructure is built.
It's going to be traumatic if this whole thing turns out to be a bubble that pops.
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So ... quick check: who here pays subscription to use AI service (e.g., AI-specific subscriptions like ChatGPT or Grok or Anthropic, or through more general services like Microsoft/Office365 or Adobe Creative Cloud that now comes with AI services)?
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Not me. I can’t figure out what I’d do with a paid version.
Everything I do with it is available free.
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I don’t pay at the moment, but may in the future. The free versions available currently are pretty useful. Junior (a software engineer) uses it all the time, both at work and for his hobbies. He says it helps him (code wise) work faster and far more efficiently at work. It’s not going away, and it’s only going to get better at what it does.
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"AI" as it's known may not go away, and it may be helpful to some people, but it will continue to be little more than an expensive, fancy-pants data retrieval system that steals copyrighted material for profitable ends. Hopefully, our lawmakers will do their job and make sure it is appropriately and strongly regulated and that they put a stop to the wholesale theft.
The last copilot-generated search result I looked at (I always prefix my searches these days with "-ai -copilot" but I forgot this time) said something coherent followed by a parenthetical, "According to Wikipedia". Had me LOLing.
I recommend the following opinion as a counter to the constant hype...
https://unherd.com/2025/08/how-to-stopper-the-ai-genie/?lang=us
But as recent tests and studies of LLMs have shown, this technology is not the pathway to AGI that we were promised. The hopes that “scaling”, “emergent properties” and “reasoning” would lead to AGI have all failed. The path to AGI lies elsewhere, if anywhere. As Yann LeCun, chief AI scientist at Meta, has said: “There’s absolutely no way that autoregressive LLMs… will reach human intelligence. It’s just not going to happen.”
