AI Companies Lose $190 Billion After Dismal Financial Reports

Daft_ish , 4 months ago

No shit that was a bubble. Fun for all of two seconds but application in its current form is niche/sketchy at best. There is lots of promise for the future of AI but right now it just makes things more complicated and end results are unreliable.

iAvicenna , 4 months ago

bubbles like this can set back that future by decades though...

Daft_ish , 4 months ago

I think AI is going to be ok.

iAvicenna , 4 months ago

lets hope so

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter

Matriks404 , 4 months ago

I remember YouTube videos or podcasts where presenters said that we'd have very advanced AI by GPT-5 and singularity is just around the corner. Marketing stuff of these companies pushing language models made us all fools (including me). Now finances are catching up to all this bullshit.

ShepherdPie , 4 months ago

The same thing was said about self-driving. I recall arguing with people on reddit back in like 2018 who called me an idiot because I didn't believe we'd have full autonomous driving within the next few years. I swear these people jump from one fad to the next and dive into each one head first.

Traister101 , 4 months ago

Uh yes, they do. It's the same group of people falling for this stuff over and over. Crypto, NFTs, Self Driving, AI now. What's important to them is being able to point at this stuff and make a wojack face

Rooter , 4 months ago

This is such clickbait. They just added up the total stock decline in every company that has any involvement in AI. They call Google and Microsoft AI companies.

ShepherdPie , 4 months ago

AI is clickbait, too, so does that mean they cancel each other out or is the clickbait twice as strong?

Tangent5280 , 4 months ago

By the way errors are dealt with in physics, I think the error only adds up. So double the clickbait.

xantoxis , 4 months ago

The companies didn't lose that money. Their investors didn't even lose that money. A number went down temporarily, that's all.

recapitated , 4 months ago

If the last 40 years has taught us anything, it's that the time is always right to short ai companies

Yewb , 4 months ago

If / then / switch / while

All of these are examples of what executives are calling AI there are many scams its hilarious.

Grifters gunna grift they face no clawbacks from lying to investors.

kromem , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

That's a weird take given the actual numbers and relative results per company, but ok.

Microsoft's price didn't change much at all and is still trading at a 35 P/E ratio (17% higher than Apple's) despite being neck and neck in the race for the largest company in the market and allegedly not having its AI efforts actually change product usage. Clearly the market is still pricing it as if it's going to grow more somehow.

AMD is down, but since when is AMD an "AI company"? That's Nvidia through and through, who is still double digit percentage points up from a month ago, and trading at a 81 P/E ratio. The market losing faith in Nvidia's competition seems more like the opposite of this headline, given it's the key area where Nvidia has a market advantage over AMD.

Google, whose revenue is 90% ads, is down in response to falling short on ad sales. Which if anything may be a result of increased chatbot usage reducing search volume and Google's chat offering being the Bing of AI chatbots.

This is clickbait analysis.

realharo , 4 months ago

not having its AI efforts actually change product usage

Are you ignoring Github Copilot?

archomrade , 4 months ago

Microsoft's performance was actually strongest in their Azure services in their earnings report, and I can't think of any AI products tied directly to that part of their business

Although to be fair, their big push now is baking copilot directly into Windows 12, so it would be fair to think their long term outlook is tied to that service

RippleEffect , 4 months ago

Didn't they already bake it into 11? I'm not caught up with 12 having only recently gotten 11 but dang.

drdabbles , 4 months ago

All scams come to an end when they run out of marks to steal from.

nick , 4 months ago

lol rekt

RootBeerGuy , 4 months ago

based

mPony , 4 months ago

23 skidoo

LarmyOfLone , 4 months ago

Does that have anything to do with the IP power grab that is apparently under way? I've seen the propaganda and the mood seems to be that AI should be monopolized by the few super rich.

mPony , 4 months ago

I thought the mood was that everything should be monopolized by the super rich.

bmsok , 4 months ago

Artificial Intelligence at this stage is Artificial Ignorance. It's not ready to be unleashed onto anyone who blindly trusts anything they read.

HopeOfTheGunblade , 4 months ago

Listening to Peter talk about GPT as if it was an all comprehending oracle when he was interviewed on Hannah Reloaded was unsettling, because I know he's not alone in thinking it's (paraphrased) "a pattern detecting intelligence, that can see things we can't" my brother in Christ it is a better Markov chain engine.

Copernican , 4 months ago

Look at the reuters article cited: https://www.reuters.com/technology/ai-companies-lose-190-billion-market-cap-after-alphabet-microsoft-report-2024-01-31/

Jan 30 (Reuters) - AI-related companies lost $190 billion in stock market value late on Tuesday after Microsoft (MSFT.O), opens new tab, Alphabet (GOOGL.O), opens new tab and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD.O), opens new tab delivered quarterly results that failed to impress investors who had sent their stocks soaring.
The selloff following the tech giants' reports after the bell underscored investors' elevated expectations following an AI-fueled stock market rally in recent months that propelled their shares to record highs with the promise of incorporating the technology across the corporate landscape.

I don't know that I would say this has anything inherently to do with AI...

The reuters article for AMD specifically: https://www.reuters.com/technology/high-flying-chipmakers-hit-after-amds-forecast-falls-short-2024-01-31/

Jan 31 (Reuters) - High-flying semiconductor stocks slipped on Wednesday after Advanced Micro Devices' (AMD.O) disappointing current-quarter revenue forecast added to investor worries over sluggish demand for non-AI chips

...

That overshadowed the company near doubling its AI processor projections to $3.5 billion for 2024.

drmoose , 4 months ago

What a clickbait "article". The whole stock market is correcting insane growth of last year and in fact the company with the biggest AI investments (Microsoft) crashed the least!

It's rewording the real article from Reuters: https://www.reuters.com/technology/ai-companies-lose-190-billion-market-cap-after-alphabet-microsoft-report-2024-01-31/

TheBat , 4 months ago

growth

Swelling, more like

ShepherdPie , 4 months ago

It's not a toomah!

OpenStars , 4 months ago

Maybe they should try making products that work instead of trying to shove ads down our throats? How's that for a business model: give the customer what they want?

FaceDeer , 4 months ago

Many of their customers want them to produce ads.

OpenStars , 4 months ago

Fair - but I would hope for a functional product supported by delivery of ads, rather than ads that exist for the purpose of ads so that there can be more ads delivered along with the ads (oh yeah, and somewhere in there, a product... which itself is little more than merely another thinly-disguised advertisement).

Google is the perfect example: it made its name bc it WORKED, then it started to be supported by ads - okay fine so far - then the ads took over and now very often, it merely passes on SEO "ads" (except crucially: remember that was supposed to be the product) rather than show actual results. Plus on top of that, it also shows the ads. The latter are fine but the former are most definitely not, especially when it pushes out real results so that like even on page 5 you can't find what you were looking for, which might still be the very top result of DuckDuckGo hence cannot be that hard to produce. It exemplifies the process of enshittification for us all.

FaceDeer , 4 months ago

Those products exist. There are plenty of AI products that don't involve ads at all, you pay for a service that uses AI to help do whatever it is the service is about (for example GitHub Copilot). There are open source products that give you those services for free, even.

Some people use those services to create advertising, but it's not like advertising is the only field that this stuff is useful for.

OpenStars , 4 months ago

Believe it or not, but at one point Google (and similarly many of the products that it owns now, like YouTube) did not have ads in them either...

I am okay with adding ads to them though, to help support future product development. And likewise contributing packages delivered as open source, ofc I am happy with that.

I just do not like watching products, like Google search, lose out on services, not b/c of traditional ads but rather the newer style of ads in the form of SEO, i.e. not "ads" so much as "misinformation", which Google made far too easy to game the system with as compared to the previous incarnation, where it was based more on "reputation" e.g. linking to & from other sites. Though similar to ads in that it is a way for companies to promote themselves, jumping straight to the front of the line rather than play "fair".

Nowadays you can zoom in on Google maps and not see the store you are looking for until you are practically on top of it or manage to click it directly - instead Google prioritizes what it wants to show you, based on who ponies up what amount of dough to Google, rather than what you as the customer want to see.

And as for AI, it simply was not ready. It was itself an advertisement to executives from people trying to sell it before having made a viable product yet. Thus I am not surprised that they lost billions due to mismanagement of this highly interesting and promising field, that will eventually offer everyone a great deal, one day.

Shurimal , 4 months ago

How’s that for a business model: give the customer what they want?

They're doing just that, alright.

But people buying the products are not the customers of these big publicly traded companies.

OpenStars , 4 months ago

That's the same reason that the Windows OS sucks so bad: the "customer" is the companies paying for licenses, not individuals wanting things to "just work" without an entire IT department at their backs.

Although I would guess that even stockholders would not like the fact that these companies lost billions of dollars.:-|

SatanicNotMessianic , 4 months ago

“AI Winter is coming”

-Ned Stark

Ep1cFac3pa1m , 4 months ago

I’ll never forgive D&D for what they did to that show. It was omnipresent in public consciousness for like a decade, and they fucked the last couple seasons so badly it’s now all but forgotten. It’s almost impressive in a depressing kind of way.

thanks_shakey_snake , 4 months ago

Oh we try to forget...

Ep1cFac3pa1m , 4 months ago

I was a huge fan. Watched it from season one on. Even had a House Stark banner. Now I don’t even think about it unless I see it mentioned on social media. Married with Children and Aqua Teen Hunger Force spontaneously pop into my mind 10 times more often than Game of Thrones.

mPony , 4 months ago

That nice lady is in the Beacon 23 show.

ShepherdPie , 4 months ago

Shame.

thanks_shakey_snake , 4 months ago

Tbf, I don't think we as a society think about Aqua Teen Hunger Force nearly enough.