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  senshan
  As long as this debt does not make it into life insurance and pension funds, we are fine. The trouble is that private credit is taking control of some life insurance companies and off-loads this debt to these. When these fail, it will become everyone's problem.> Risks to financial stability may also stem from entities with particularly high exposure to private credit markets, such as insurers influenced by private equity firms and certain groups of pension funds. The assets of private‐equity‐controlled insurers have grown significantly in recent years, with these entities owning significantly more exposure to less‐liquid investments than other insurershttps://www.imf.org/-/media/files/publications/gfsr/2024/apr...https://www.imf.org/-/media/files/publications/gfsr/2024/apr...
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  wongarsu
  Do they? Is a company with $200 billion annual revenue and earnings (EBITDA) of $100 billion having $420 billion of off-balance-sheet debt really staggering?In many other industries that would be a perfectly normal amount of debt to have. It's only unusual because we are used to tech companies having so much cash on hand they don't know where to put it
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  chasd00
  Are they really "trying to hide" this debt? I think it's pretty common knowledge that a lot of these companies are using debt/bonds for funding. The debt not showing up where the author wants is a reporting formality not an attempt to hide it.
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  Havoc
  Would have been nice if the article had any substantive facts in it
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  lardosaurusrex
  "No you guys it isn't actually an issue because it isn't."Why?"Because it isn't; okay?!"oh ok.
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  simonw
  Something doesn't quite smell right about this story. Here's a key paragraph from the Nikkei story that this Futurism story re-tells:> Companies disclose such future debt not in their balance sheets, but in annotations to their quarterly financial statements. This is a legitimate practice under accounting rules, but may make it difficult for retail investors to recognize risks.Does that justify a "tries to hide" headline?This is also one of those cases where the headline is free but the details are behind a paywall.I do think the story itself is notable, but I expect the discussion is going to lack some nuance.
• u1hcw9nx
  Only Oracle is in any kind of danger from their debt load, though. I have not checked SpaceX situation.Meta, Google, Amazon, .. they can take the hit and go on.
• 1970-01-01
  The crux of the problem is models are not evolving anymore, they're iterating. Cheaper, faster, better. We're only seeing better, and that's because there is fierce competition with massive debt behind it. The "cheaper and faster" part is all taking place with local models. All of this adds up to a big red flag for a bubble.
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  softwaredoug
  Really feels like the govt + industry, through protectionism and fear-mongering, are propping up a "Too big to fail" situation.Long term, I think the best thing the economy could do is to make training on model outputs fair-use, as suggested by Ben Thompson[1]. Short of that, the companies should enter into distillation agreements with other US labs to let them make near-Fable models.As it stands now, the companies want to hold all the upside. While also being culturally so safety focused - "only we have the right to regulate this" that its IMO counterproductive to US leadership in AI.A different universe where X.ai, Meta, and everyone were also building Fable competitive open weights models - because they can distill - would probably be better for the US long term. But there's too much capital on the line right now behind OpenAI / Anthropic for them to do this.They're really in a bind IMO.1 - http://stratechery.com/2026/whos-afraid-of-chinese-models/
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  elmer2
  It won't pay off if LLMs efficiency gets good enough to make those data centers obsolete.It's a huge gamble.
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  __natty__
  Is the bubble bursting? Amount of the news about bad shape of companies highly invested in AI in the past days are quiet alarming or is it just bias?
• mrbluecoat
  Alternative title: Memory, GPUs, and SBCs are about to become affordable again :)
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  dude250711
  I guess "try to hide" means to be posted about all over the news weekly.
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  Xalutiono
  And? Its not my debt.If they continue investing in compute, memory, memory bandwidth, network infrastructure, etc. it makes a relevant contribution of progress in all of these fields which I will leverage.A small form factor PC with 100gb fast memory and being able to run something like sonnet or opus level LLM would be massive.I have so many things i want to do and still sitting it out due to cost.
• Noaidi
  It would be better if you all read the article this article was referring to:https://asia.nikkei.com/business/technology/five-us-tech-gia...
• ChrisArchitect
  [dupe] Discussion on source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48987863
• anon
  undefined
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  roschdal
  Is it time to short AI companies?
• roymasad
  [dead]
• martinbfine
  [dead]
• ck2
  with US Government owning huge chunks now "too big to fail"bailout incomingwill make subprime crash seem like child's playsure you won't be able to ever afford a home but we'll have tons of cheap super-hardware barely used