Giants of Silicon Valley Are Having a Midlife Crisis over AI

20 bookofjoe 7 5/10/2025, 10:42:55 PM wsj.com ↗

Comments (7)

atonse · 20h ago
I honestly felt google is dying a slow death before the recent Gemini models came out. Their search product was pretty reviled. They had very little innovation anywhere.

But after a comically bad start with Bard, they’ve been totally kicking ass with Gemini, and Waymo is become a submarine hit threatening Uber and Lyft. It’s to a point where I think those business will eclipse their cloud and workspace products. (maybe YouTube will become the next wasteland like the google search index, with AI video growing, I hope not though)

In fact, I’d be more worried about MS and Apple. MS started so strong and then stagnated, who even knows what they’re up to now?

Apple is moving at a glacial pace and has had a comically bad time with anything AI so far. “Apple Intelligence” is a joke. Tim Cook has been great at the long term investment stuff, except Siri has seen no meaningful improvements in a decade.

It’s just so early to tell who the winners and losers are going to be. This feels like the early years of iPhone/Android/Blackberry/Windows Mobile.

bookofjoe · 22h ago
metalman · 9h ago
It's about relevance.There is an inevitability that is expliset in our technology and human nauture, which is that our devices become extensions of the idividual, rather than the desperate attempts to turn all human activity into asymetric relationships with corporations that we are fielding now.litteraly freedom VS feedom. Right now, big tech and government are doubling down on denying people the right to self selected peer to peer groups and contacts in an unsensored format that allows financial transactions and barter in the things they want and need. IE: everybody gets webspace, with a blog and store and can then connect through open groups of there choice. There is absolutly no reason for "platforms" to exist , they are hurting society ,undermining our productivity and offer no advantage in the tasks that we must accomplish to achive a long term sustainable civilisation. Big tech and government are attempting to build an AI powered system that will institutionalise everybody in there own lives, puppeted and controlled through there devices. Luckily this is impossible, but we have to live through the maddness of the attempt, which if you are a student of history and human behavior, is tedious.
techpineapple · 21h ago
This midlife crisis preceded AI, it’s sort of an inability to see the future. AI has made that more stark, but there still seems to be wide disagreement on the role of AI in any future.
techpineapple · 21h ago
Also - We kind of have everything. The only thing we don’t have, and actually the thing that’s getting worse is our basics are more expensive. I think that’s why AI is sold as the end of scarcity. Because the one big thing everyone for sure wants, and the one big thing tech kind of can’t solve. It can give you endless entertainment to click through - and oddly that may be the only thing AI ends up good at, but It can’t make manhattan cheaper to live in.
klipt · 21h ago
Maybe if we built a hundred Manhattans, they'd be cheaper to live in
yeeshh · 6h ago
Exactly. Boomers and Silent Generation built an iron grip around the real economy and handed everyone else a virtual one to service debt in.

Automation in the US could have provided our essentials going back to the 1950s.

Instead of living our lives we’re told to chant made up essentialist nonsense about the stock market and corporate. American Civic Religion gibberish.

Tacit ageism against next generation. We don’t owe fealty to the dying.