Colossus 1

Search Engine

PJ Vogt

Society & Culture, Business, Technology

4.8 • 4.1K Ratings

🗓️ 21 November 2025

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Tech billionaires have made an enormous bet on AI, the biggest bet that tech has made on anything in a very long time. Reporter Sruthi Pinnamaneni goes on a journey – from Data Center Alley to the shadow of Colossus – to see what the money’s being spent on, and to learn what happens if things go wrong. Support Search Engine! To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	The
0:07.0	The This is search engine.
0:27.0	I'm PJ Vote.
0:28.9	Lately, the canniest 15-year-olds I know are putting all of their allowance towards buying fractions of invidia stock.
0:36.5	It only goes up, they tell me, with the wisdom of people
0:39.5	who have finally figured everything out in life. My teenage investment advisors inform me that
0:44.6	it keeps going up because the AI companies have promised that one day soon will reach a kind of
0:49.6	machine superintelligence that, among other things, justifies these vast oceans of investment.
0:56.9	It's funny, I do actually believe AI is a very useful, certainly socially transformative
1:02.0	technology for bad and for good. I believe that. And I also believe that we're probably in a bubble.
1:10.4	Because a bubble would just mean that once again,
1:12.5	investors have gotten a little too excited
1:14.3	about a genuinely promising new technology.
1:17.4	The sheer fortunes being spent on AI
1:20.0	already are so large,
1:21.9	it's hard to find the right precedence to compare to.
1:25.0	The 90s tech bubble,
1:26.6	the 1800s railroad bubble. And what we know is that the size
1:31.0	of the bet means we're all to some degree in this. Whether this pays off or crashes or lands in
1:36.9	between, the AI bet is one of the big stories of our time. But as big as it is, it can also
1:44.0	feel abstract. And so a reporter here wanted to go
1:47.3	see it, visit the most prominent real-world manifestations of all this money, the data centers,
	...

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