AI projected cost build out
 

Casually listening to Bloomberg, one of the personalities just said the investment to build an AI architecture will be $3 to $4 trillion, that's trillion, dollars by the end of the decade.

Can anyone here lay that out in broad strokes? What's the return? What can and certainly will, go wrong? Where does this money come from? What will the impact on humanity be?

How is $4 trillion better spent over the next 5 years?

Skynet.


There. I said it.

I'm not an AI adopter yet. It seems like it's lacking. I hear lots of "use it for coding" but then I also hear lots of "I used AI for coding and none of the code worked". I guess if you're a coder and needing to create something from scratch, maybe asking AI for code and then being able to take the AI framework and fix it is better than having to start from scratch yourself. I don't know. AI does do a lot of stuff well that is hard to do without AI.

The problem as I see it is that if we decided to save some dough rather than spending it on AI, we'd end up way behind and that would put us at a distinct disadvantage when it is mature. And by that point, I believe the uses for it will be considerable.

Not investing in AI today would be like being in the world in the stone age and thinking "metal work looks like something really expensive and hard. Metal will never catch on. We shouldn't invest in learning metal work." At some point, you'd be using stone axes and knives and points and your neighbors will be using swords and guns and you'll be screwed.

I think I read somewhere that the “intelligence” of AI is doubling every 6 months or so, so akin to the early days of the processor. I really think the potential is there for this to be every bit as transformational as the internet in terms of impact to our everyday lives.

I am not a coder by any means. I know some SQL and VBA and that’s all - and those skills have significantly dwindled since I don’t really use them anymore. Never knew HTML or any other languages. That said, using some of these new AI tools, I was able to build an actual working website in minutes, complete with search tools, mapping functionality, etc. I was pretty amazed at what it was able to crank out so quickly. As you said, even if you use it just to generate a basic framework and then hand code to finish it, it’s still a tremendous time saver. Now, I don’t have the knowledge to know if the code it wrote was junky and inefficient, maybe it is, but that will just get better and better by the day.

Automation is another key area that I see a ton of use cases for. A lot of people are just using Chat GBT as sort of an enhanced google search, but uses go far beyond that. Claude by Anthropic is pretty cool, you can do a youtube search on that and find some pretty amazing things people are doing. All this to say, I’m all in on it and trying to learn as much as I can as an old guy that’s not super technical. I’m investing now, but really should have been 10 yrs ago….

Keep in mind AI is trained on, among other thing, reddit posts and itself.

Governments and businesses have been, are and will continue to invest in AI infrastructure.

Not sure how one might define "better spent."

This is like everything we have seen before and nothing like what we have seen before at the very same time.

exactly. Not investing in AI (a lot of which will be done by the likes of Google, Amazon, Apple, etc...) would be like "not investing" in PCs back in the 70s/80s because "that'll never catch on" or not investing in cars or industrialization or...

We can't NOT do it.

Although I am hopeful that it doesn't put half of the world out of work. It'll drive things like no more drivers (trucks, busses, trains, taxis, pilots), no more IT except for the guys that bolt things into racks and run cables, etc...

"I really think the potential is there for this to be every bit as transformational as the internet in terms of impact to our everyday lives."

AI tech may already be much more impactful than the internet in the every day lives of many humans.

Everything happening everywhere all at once, faster than the speed of light.



Humans could see this well before 1956. We could also predict when we were a gonna get here.
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1756396822.jpg

https://www.pppl.gov/news/2025/finding-shadows-fusion-system-faster-ai

Example.

True, but when companies use the same tech, the same “engine” if you will and use it on their own proprietary data, or industry data that is not available to the general public, there are some cool applications that are being developed to speed up data analysis and research, generate new ideas, etc..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQ4ZzCGmoQw

Around 2:45.

Example:

https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/using-ai-lab-jab-how-did-artificial-intelligence-help-us-develop-and-deliver-covid

Almost exactly five years ago I attended a teleconference and this topic came up. One panelist was CFO of a vaccine manufacturer, another ws a board member of a cpvid vaccine developer. They knew each other because of their daughters' grade school or HS car pool. They did not know each other in college, though they were on campus at the same time.

One of them had a grown daughter that worked in a data analytics company... and that company was engaged in the big effort.

Another example:

https://www.itnonline.com/article/ge-healthcare-acquire-caption-health

I met with the founder of Caption years ago. Things progressed very quickly.

Proprietary AI will be a couple orders magnitude more useful than what the general user will use.

AI does have uses, it is a great tool for some complex Excel stuff, basic code etc. But in general it has plateaued a bit and has started poisoning itself. The current safeguards are a joke. Most of the long term chats turn into a joke.

There are some fundamental changes that need to take place for it to continue to advance in the future as it has in the past.

A forum like this is hard to go through it all, but I would urge people (not singling you out) go read some security forums and see how immature AI really is at this point.

Here's an anecdote; Brother has prostate cancer which was then targeted for treatment via a full body Cat Scan. They turned AI loose on the Cat Scan afterwards which noted a heart anomaly.
Follow up angiogram indicated a "widowmaker" vein blockage. They sedated him for 24 hrs. and then preformed open heart surgery and saved his life.

One use I'd like to see is AI applied to traffic signals, so that I don't constantly find myself sitting at red lights when there's no cross traffic in sight :mad:

Wow, hits home.

During a break from college in the Spring of 1980, I worked in systems engineering at GE... we were developing the company's second whole body CT machine.

The community of academics and company tech folks were already working on methods, algorithms and approaches to use the information that CT images are based on to extract information to enhance and expand their diagnostic capabilities.

The very next year I did some design work on the company's first digital subtraction angiography system.

Prostates... some are removed via surgical intervention... these days quite frequently with the assistance of the Davinci robot. Folks with whom I worked started that company and developed that tech. And some got quite wealthy.

When I started in medical imaging we had mini computers and were just starting to employ microprocessors. We could already see how AI and ML could help in medical imaging and diagnostic medicine.

Things are gonna pop more quickly now... exponentially faster.

The ongoing "build out" of AI likely has, and will continue to enable the discovery and development of technologies that can contribute to improvements healthcare-- both dx and rx.

And we always think of two things... better outcomes and lower costs.

One use I'd like to see is AI applied to traffic signals, so that I don't constantly find myself sitting at red lights when there's no cross traffic in sight

See, e.g.,

https://www.tractiontechnology.com/blog/traction-five-how-ai-is-revolutionizing-traffic-management

These things have been underway for some time... and where there is one there are more.

See also:

https://investorplace.com/hypergrowthinvesting/2025/08/jensen-huangs-4-trillion-vision-why-nvidia-earnings-signal-the-next-ai-rally/

"If you needed more proof, CEO Jensen Huang gave it to you on the company’s conference call.

Therein, he said he expects the world’s largest companies to spend $3- to 4 trillion on AI infrastructure in the next five years and positioned Nvidia to capture as much as 70% of that spend.

Now, let’s pause for a moment. That doesn’t imply just another year or so of strong growth. We are talking about multi-trillion-dollar capital commitments – possibly bigger than the cloud and smartphone build-outs combined. (While this isn’t a simple calculation, Kearney concludes that “The total investment in mobile Internet connectivity infrastructure, averaged over the past five years, is $244 billion annually, including spend on end-user devices.”)

And, of course, those trillions won’t just stop at Nvidia. They’ll filter into the entire AI supply chain: servers, networking, cooling, rare-earth magnets, batteries, robotics, software…"

And don't forget chips.

I am learning just a little about next-level chips for boards that go into AI data centers (reviewing some start up pitches) ... tons of investments already made and more coming.

And of course everything related to the expansion of data center infrastructure.