Big Tech's AI spending is the 'greatest capital misallocation in history,' Gary Marcus says

Oh, *wonderful*. Gary Marcus — the AI community's perennial party pooper — has taken to X to declare that Big Tech's AI spending spree is the 'greatest capital misallocation in history.' Because nothing says 'measured critique' like slapping a superlative on a multi-trillion-dollar gamble before the receipts are even in. Marcus, whose career has been a long, weary sigh at the industry's hype cycle, is specifically aiming his crosshairs at Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft — the four horsemen of the capex apocalypse. He's not wrong to raise an eyebrow when these companies are collectively burning cash on AI infrastructure like trust-fund kids at a casino, but the man is also a known quantity: if Gary Marcus says it's a bubble, you can bet the bubble will inflate for another three years just to spite him.

The real joke, of course, is what 'misallocation' even means in this context. Is it a misallocation because the ROI won't materialise? Or because the money could have gone to, say, actually fixing the internet? Marcus is simply the guy yelling at the parade that the emperor has no clothes — but the parade is too busy buying more sequins to care.

And yet, there's a sliver of dark comedy in watching the same people who brought us the smartphone glass ceiling and the surveillance economy now pivot to 'AI everything' with the reckless abandon of a teenager with a credit card. The greatest capital misallocation in history? Possibly. But it's also the greatest case study in corporate groupthink we've seen since the dot-com boom. At least then we got some cool pet food delivery startups out of it. This time we'll get a few more chatbots that can write mediocre poetry and a planet full of e-waste. Cheers, Gary. Don't hold your breath.