Why So Much Money on "AI"?
There are a lot of possible explanations for why so much money is being spent on "AI" right now. Those scare quotes probably tip you off that the most obvious one (maybe it will bring us true artificial intelligence, which will solve all our problems and be worth the expense) is not one I believe is plausible. However, there are multiple alternatives to this theory.
- ▪There are a lot of possible explanations for why so much money is being spent on "AI" right now.
- ▪Those scare quotes probably tip you off that the most obvious one (maybe it will bring us true artificial intelligence, which will solve all our problems and be worth the expense) is not one I believe is plausible.
- ▪However, there are multiple alternatives to this theory.
Hacker News (AI / LLM) files mainly under ai. We currently carry 5,890 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Rosshartshorn |
| Canonical URL | https://www.rosshartshorn.net/stuffrossthinksabout/why_so_much_money_on_ai/ |
| Publication time | Mon, 21 Sep 2026 21:27:59 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-21T21:38:49.228Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-21T21:38:49.228Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | None |
| Cluster logic | Not yet clustered, or no peer story found in the clustering window. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
19 September 2026 Why So Much Money On "AI"? There are a lot of possible explanations for why so much money is being spent on "AI" right now. Those scare quotes probably tip you off that the most obvious one (maybe it will bring us true artificial intelligence, which will solve all our problems and be worth the expense) is not one I believe is plausible. However, there are multiple alternatives to this theory. One which I have written about recently is the idea that it's all a cover story for stockpiling chips in case China invades Taiwan in 2027 (as they are rumored to be planning to). But, there is another one, which my background in neural networks (I have worked with them on and off since the mid 90's) makes obvious, but I realized recently might not be as obvious to others.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Rosshartshorn.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from Rosshartshorn
