Technology

Sounds reasonable.

Does it, though? Feels like we're just rewriting the sales manual without thinking about what "learning from video" would actually entail.

Doesn’t make sense to build a lot of compute capacity, then spend fifteen years banging on research before you have something to utilize that capacity.

There's an old book from back in 2008 - Killing Sacred Cows: Overcoming the Financial Myths That Are Destroying Your Prosperity - that a lot of the modern Techbros took perhaps too closely to heart. It posited that chasing the next generation of technological advancement was more important than keeping your existing revenue streams functional. And you really should kill the golden goose if it means you've got a shot at new one in the near future.

What these Tech Companies are chasing is the Next Big Thing, even when they don't really understand what that is. And they're so blindly devoted to advancing the technological curve that they really will blow a trillion dollars (mostly of other people's money) on whatever it is they think that might be.

The real problem is that these guys are, largely, uncreative and incurious and not particularly intelligent. So they leap on fads rather than pursuing meaningful Blue Sky Research. And that gives us this endless recycling of Sci-Fi tropes as a stand in for material investments in productive next generation infrastructure.