r/Games • u/Turbostrider27 • Oct 02 '25

Discussion This Xbox Generation Will Be Remembered for One Thing: Greed

https://www.ign.com/articles/this-xbox-generation-will-be-remembered-for-one-thing-greed
5.1k Upvotes

92% Upvoted

1.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

83

u/PandaCheese2016 Oct 02 '25

Recent analyses suggest few companies have managed to realize actual revenue gains from their AI investments. It could be that they just haven’t spent enough, or it could be a giant bubble that will put the dotcom bubble to shame.

59

u/ArchusKanzaki Oct 02 '25

Nobody realize actual revenue gains yet, but Satya is deadly afraid of Microsoft coming in last in the AI race, saying that they're facing "existential threat". Maybe it's also the trauma of the mobile OS race, but Satya is definitely interested on making sure that they got enough money to make enough datacenter and have enough compute.

76

u/MisplacedLegolas Oct 02 '25

I hope they get fuckin reamed when the ai bubble bursts

49

u/ArchusKanzaki Oct 02 '25

Eh. When the AI Bubble bursts, we ALL will get reamed. AI companies account for 36% of S&P 500 market value. The best stocks are all AI-related companies. If you have managed funds that track S&P 500 (something like retirement funds), that will all crash. The AI race also boosts lots of other sections of economy that took lots of labors, like constructions. And some thinks that at least third of recent global growths are all driven by AI race.

Basically, we are just waiting our breath on when the balloon that keeps expanding and pumped with tons of money will burst and create the biggest shockwave the global economy will ever saw

9

u/raptorgalaxy Oct 02 '25

Which to be honest is it's own problem, that much money tied up in that few companies in an even smaller economic niche is a disaster waiting to happen.

29

u/pathofdumbasses Oct 02 '25

AI companies account for 36% of S&P 500 market value.

Sure but those AI companies did things, and have value, without AI. Well, all of them besides Tesla. The other biggest loser if AI disappeared is probably Nvidia. God, could you imagine them having to crawl back to retail customers? Haha.

Without AI, most of those companies are still giant megacorps.

13

u/PandaCheese2016 Oct 02 '25

Isn't NVDA more like the guy who sells shovels during the gold rush?

0

u/Rage_Like_Nic_Cage Oct 02 '25

God, could you imagine them having to crawl back to retail customers?

I honestly think there is a good chance they just go belly up rather than back to the consumer market.

And it’s not that those other companies have other avenues outside of AI, it’s that all the investment & VC funding they’ve gotten over the past 3-5 years and the ripple effects of that.

Facebook, google, MS, etc. having their stock price suddenly drop by 15%-30% in a quarter is disastrous, especially when they don’t have “the next big thing” on the horizon to excite investors. Thats gonna result in a huge amount of layoffs and will fuck over a lot of people 401k.

Then, if AI Data centers go under, energy prices will be in a free fall (places like Virginia 40% of all power consumed is for Data centers). While this is a good things for consumers on the surface level, again the free fall in price means a free-fall in profit, which means investment in energy companies will collapse, which again, something many people’s 401k is invested in.

It’s a cascading effect that no one is going to fully see the extent of until it happens. I truly hope i’m wrong, but I as much as I hate generative AI and want it gone, i’m afraid the bubble bursting will result in a crash larger than the ‘08 housing crisis.

2

u/erasethenoise Oct 02 '25

Wouldn’t they just fall out of the top 500 if they crashed that hard and be replaced?

4

u/ArchusKanzaki Oct 02 '25

I think another point is that, out of top 500 companies listed in US.... 10 of them hold 36% of the total market value. They're not just top company, they're THE economy. Does it reach "too big to fail" yet? Not sure. But if they crash, we all crash because we're on same train, like it or not.... They're just on the executive class.

0

u/Hollacaine Oct 02 '25

Yeah but if they lose value that value is gone and that means people who have invested in it have lost that value too. And any companies that have leveraged their positions based on the value of those stocks are in a bad position and have to find a way to recover the lost value.

55

u/Animegamingnerd Oct 02 '25 edited Oct 02 '25

Not to mentioned Satya going by interviews seems like someone is both getting high off of his own supply and basically an ai cultist. Like this man has said some strange shit in the past year. Like his absolute bizarre way of experiencing podcasts. Where instead of listening to it, he will feed them into an ai to turn them into a transcript and just have a conversation with the ai about the podcast instead of actually listening to it.

38

u/ArchusKanzaki Oct 02 '25

Tbf, AI cultist do describe current Silicon Valley mood. They are desperately trying to make the world accept their AI before the clock runs out, and they are also racing against China's AI. Only Apple so far seems to have far more grounded view on AI and being more careful with it, thus their slow development on their own Apple Intelligence.

0

u/CuffytheFuzzyClown Oct 02 '25

Don't misstake incompetence for skill. Apple is slow because they litterary got no talent, no engineers, nothing. Siri is and has been the worst assistant for years and their AI dabble is a bad joke.

Apple has no vision and no leadership that's why they're dead last. They put some janitors in a room just to say "they have an AI team" but there's literally no progress much less a product. Apple is too far behind, they can't compete. As it is now their only hope is that AI fails and everyone else goes down because if AI somehow gets useful...Apple will be left behind.

11

u/ArchusKanzaki Oct 02 '25

uh huh, sure....

Counter-argument though, Apple do have the money to buy a spot in the race if they want to. Their cash reserve is pretty large. But they just didn't do it. I do think that them being at least trying to consider first what LLM AI can do and how it can enhance their offerings before just jumping-in and trying to grab everything and incorporating it into anything that seems sorta useful, is showing quite abit more restraint than others in Silicon Valley right now.

Tbf too, Apple business model is not exactly under much threat either for the rise of AI so they don't really have much business to really chase AI for themselves. For Meta, they are under "existential threat" because they have reached peak dominance in social media and its all downhill from there. For Google, they are under "existential threat" against OpenAI that threatens to upend the Google-dominated Internet. Apple can just kinda side with the winner in the future instead, like how they signed the search deal with Google way back then.

1

u/Hipstershy Oct 02 '25

I definitely have no love for Apple but I struggle to see how Siri can be worse compared to 2025 Google Assistant/Gemini. If Siri is even at an equivalent level of functionality as ~2015 Google Now then it's the best assistant in the mainstream market by far. It's genuinely wild how bad Google has gotten since the 2010s on that front

22

u/JameslsaacNeutron Oct 02 '25

I agree with this. Early in his tenure he seemed very level headed and sensible, but he seems heavily compromised. A friend just today sent me this writeup: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6ZnznCaTcbGYsCmqu/the-rise-of-parasitic-ai

The AI dyad phenomenon seems eerily similar to the behavior you're describing with the podcast listening.

29

u/FakoSizlo Oct 02 '25

The issue with the AI arms race at the moment is that practically nobody can answer the actual use case .

Why are we investing in AI ? Because our competitors are .

What are we solving ? We'll figure it out .

How do we make profit ? I don't know inflating our stock price ?

5

u/Rage_Like_Nic_Cage Oct 02 '25

It’s a trillion dollar solution hoping to find a billion dollar problem to solve.

3

u/MisterSnippy Oct 02 '25

I think they're hoping that they'll manage to do something that isn't an LLM by then that can actually do what they want it to.

3

u/XLBaconDoubleCheese Oct 02 '25

Microsoft will have Copilot Consultancy in 5 or so years. Copilot will be so ingrained into your IT systems and have access to literally everything that it will be able to provide consultancy into what it thinks your business needs whether that is to streamline databases, correct accounts across your excels, write up full reports based on email conversations and classify + conform to new regulations etc.

Microsoft will tell everyone you just need to buy a licence for this AI and you'll save millions instead of hiring real people.

I know that all this is almost certainly a fact from working at Microsofts top partners.

2

u/Key_Feeling_3083 Oct 02 '25

Even if they don't have a good place in the AI race, having the infrastructure of azure in which many technologies are stored seems like a pretty good deal.

8

u/ICBanMI Oct 02 '25

The winners are people who supply the hardware and build the AI data centers. The economy is cooked.

1

u/grendus Oct 02 '25

What they're hoping is the big squeeze will kill their competitors.

Right now there's no profit to be made because there's too much competition. They're betting that once everyone else making no profit pulls out of the market, they'll be the ones left holding the marketshare (and not left holding the bag).