AI R&D Spending

The cluster focuses on the massive research and development expenditures by tech companies like OpenAI, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and others on AI and LLMs, with discussions comparing these billion-dollar budgets to other industries and debating their necessity and scale.

➡️ Stable 0.9x AI & Machine Learning
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#5915
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Keywords

e.g IT US DO LLM DAX EY AI BDI BWI billion spending spent spend usd tesla capex year money research development

Sample Comments

cm2012 Nov 7, 2021 View on HN

They are spending insanely on r and d on this compared to companies their size. 10b a year.

naveen99 May 28, 2024 View on HN

$6B seems like not enough ? Google, meta have spent far more, and have less to show for it than openai (which has also spent more).

nothatscool Nov 5, 2022 View on HN

Weren’t they spending almost half a billion a year on r&d?

IamLoading Jan 25, 2025 View on HN

if you say, i wanna build 5 nuclear reactors and I need 200 billion $$. I would believe it because, you can ballpark it with some stats.For tech like LLMs, it feels irresponsible to say 500 billion $$ investment and then place that into R&D. What if in 2026, we realize we can create it for 2 billion$, and let the 498 billion $ sitting in a few consumers.

adventured Mar 16, 2017 View on HN

Sure they do.That's an immense spend by IBM, however lots of big companies spend in the 11 figures on projects.Exxon is spending $20 billion in the next five years to expand its oil refining and chemical operations along the gulf coast.Las Vegas Sands is planning to spend at least $10 billion just to build its Japanese operation.Verizon spent $25 billion or so over 12 years trying to build out FiOS.Wanda Group in China is spending $15 billion to build a Disney park competitor

tericho Mar 21, 2017 View on HN

300k is nothing given the potential profit of this idea working. Tesla probably spends more than 300k on R&D every week.

sofon Aug 23, 2018 View on HN

Valued at 3.2B USD, by investors who have just fired him...It's a sign of how crazy things are when 300M USD can be considered a small amount of money to spend on technology development (particularly for a product that doesn't actually require anything inherently very-very expensive, aside from staffing costs).

luyu_wu Apr 27, 2024 View on HN

A bit curious why you think this. How much do you think the R&D costs were?

foobarian Nov 23, 2022 View on HN

I can't fathom how they managed to spend so much on it, though. The product has been around for quite a while, as well, so it's not some initial ramp-up cost. $3B/quarter $10B/year? Wow.Edit: Maybe things like this happen because there are various nerds who lead these products and are good at talking the businesspeople into funding it. Maybe this was only possible at the big tech growth stage while business wasn't that good at telling the value proposition. So en

backpropaganda Mar 20, 2017 View on HN

DeepMind's expenditure is probably upwards of $1bn/year.