Something big is coming. The number of startups that investors have poured billions into that do random in-the-middle bullshit to try and scrape pennies from companies’ budgets is incredible. These products aren’t real. All the investment went into carving money off… the investment. It’s self eating.
WeWork was declared a failure when it lost 6 billion in a year. OpenAI is net negative 17 billion a year…
I thought they’re 20 billion below the expected revenue doesn’t say loss. Is this from another source?
Yes, but consider that AI being successful would maybe let your boss fire you, and they super duper want to fire you and everyone.
There is quite a difference from an investor standpoint in a product that replaces all human labor vs coworking space.
I still have yet to see it adequately replace any human labor
I don’t use it but my wife uses it for spreadsheet equations. She has to verifiy and test every answer but then so would anything written by an intern.
So yeah, AI is killing jobs, not in an individual sense, but in aggregate like spreadsheet software did 50 years ago when before that all work was done by hand.
That’s just making one person do the job of more than one. I call bs.
That’s just making one person do the job of more than one.
Capitalism has been doing that long before LLM’S.
That’s just making one person do the job of more than one.
How do you call bs on one person doing the work that used to take two? It was one person and an intern.
Every company had a secretary pool 60 years ago before word processors allowed people to type by themselves without an extra support person.
People could have always learned to type, that part didn’t change much with the switch to computers. I think they just liked having secretaries around back in the day and were willing to pay for it.
Typing quickly on a mechanical typewriter is a skill not easily mastered. It’s not just the typing, it is the extreme accuracy needed. There’s no backspace and no cut and paste. A letter covered in white out isn’t acceptable.
aka ‘Productivity increase’
Productivity has increased for decades without much of it going to wage increases. Instead, it’s gone to the companies/shareholders
I have seen it taken a serious hit at call centers.
“Adequately” I still stand by my assertion
Does your understanding of adequately matter to ex call center employees?
And what about the artists who had their jobs absorbed by AI?
As someone who has attempted to communicate with an AI call center, that tech seems pretty far from prime time
Level 1 support was never a satisfactory experience, the employees there never were allowed to say anything beyond some things that fit into a LLM context.
“It hasn’t affected me so that means it’s the same for everyone else” idiocy level thinking.
Then you haven’t been using the right models or trying.
Let’s say for a moment that AI really is as capable as AI bros want you to believe it is. Having used some AI models at my work (network engineer), I’m not so convinced, but I’ll put that aside for a moment.
The pinch of the AI vise is going to be the cost. All the AI companies are running at loss to try and capture the market, and they’ll need to charge a lot more for access to AI once a winner is determined.
Are you willing to pay 10x what you pay right now for access to an AI agent? Because that’s looking like what they’ll have to do in order to turn these companies profitable.
Our company built an “AI” system that literally only searches our other shitty system and gives a usable interface. It is not AI and im sick of every database interface being called AI.
LLM at least makes sense from a nomenclature perspective.
10 years ago it was “smart thermostats” “smart x” just because they could connect to the internet.
This is the same gilded bullshit these companies always spin.
I’ve already seen it replace people in various roles successfully. It’s getting better – will it replace everyone? No, but it will be disruptive and it seems foolish to not acknowledge what is obvious - jobs will be affected.
You literally said “replace all human labor” though.
Haha I’m not a AI Stan. I am the only one it seems truly worried about never having a job again.
Their investor pitch is this technology replaces all human labor. That’s their framing not mine.
Jobs have already been affected, yes. Not “adequately” done in lieu of a human, though.
And it still takes a human to steer the things.
My honest problem with AI is the hallucinations.
They’ve been shown to be a mathematical inevitability, and that means everything they ever make must be fully reviewed.
And that’s antithetical to everything I’ve known about computers in my career.
The entire reason why computers are so useful and reliable is because, until now, they always produce the same outputs given the same inputs.
One of the AI agents I’ve interacted with was in a GPS monitoring system for fleet vehicles. I was a supervisor of technicians, and I got a report that a company truck with license plate [X] ran a stop sign.
They replaced their standard search function with an AI bot, so I asked it which vehicle in the fleet had license plate [X]. And it confidently responded with a vehicle that didn’t have that license plate.
A standard search function, comparing an input to database values for vehicles wouldn’t have that problem. And that’s why I’m so sure this is a bubble and not a major technological market disruption.
I think you’re probably a couple of orders of magnitude too low.
I pay zero, not even electricity because it’s being generated in this building, for my agent. It’s running entirely on my computer and it’s decent enough. The LLM subscription companies are eventually going to fail because everyone and their dog is going to be able to run their own models.
Not of they can’t buy computers any more.
I’m wondering if we’ll get a rise in old school tech due to high cost of ram, CPUs and gpus.
Windows will struggle if that’s the case.Linux will be fine.
even better is the open weight, free models you can tailor to specific needs, which directly undercuts these massive “ai” companies.
So if/when those hikes happen, those self hosted models are going to look a lot more appetizing too
Inference keeps getting cheaper. “Good enough” is a pretty low bar.
All the AI companies are running at loss
That is if you include training. Look at deepseek for an idea of inference costs. At that level AI coding is sustainable (but not worth $2tn).
Why wouldn’t you include training? Training is vital to their product.
Is it? It’s vital to the tech giants marketing and trillion dollar valuation. But I don’t think it’s vital to most of their clients anymore.
Are you willing to pay 10x what you pay right now for access
That’s really the crux of the matter. Regardless of if it’s fit for purpose to replace paid labour, is it actually financially viable in any way to replace humans with an AI model that works but costs several times more than a human work force while not being able to be held legally accountable.
If this future AI agent solves the task at a fraction of the time, it can still be financially viable at several times the cost.
Riiiiight…
That only makes sense if money is made on the output. What you’re basically saying is X Toy Company will make more money if they make more toys. What you’re forgetting is that there has to be a demand for those toys. So X Toy Company can’t replace workers with AI unless there’s more demand for the toys than there is currently able to be fulfilled and there’s no evidence for that across all sectors of the economy.
Are you willing to pay 10x what you pay right now
They lost $20B on $50B revenue. That means they only need to double the price to make up the loss and have a profit.
That’s still a ton when you consider how much professional users are spending.
They’re playing all kinds of games with the numbers right now. They’re trying to IPO so hiding costs under other headings outside the core business. Don’t trust what they openly state. It’s far worse.
Maybe but you have to work with the data you have, not the data you want to see.
Imagining that the enemy is on the brink of collapse isn’t a good mind set when you are fighting something. It encourages laziness.
I’m fairly certain these numbers are made up. Additionally, I’m betting those numbers include investment dollars, as opposed to paid revenue.
Get help.
“come on bro you’re just holding it wrong”
a product that replaces all human labor
you’re in too deep in the tech bros’ propaganda dude, wake up
I read that as the sales pitch, not their actual opinion.
Lmao replaces all human labor? ChatGPT can’t change my tires. It can’t even write decent code without direct supervision
It’s a lot better at writing code than most people think.
I use it everyday. It needs oversight every single time I use it… It isn’t replacing developers any time soon. Code monkeys maybe.
That’s says more about how bad the average developer is tbh.
It doesn’t matter if it works, if investors think it does that is enough for them to throw money at it.
After the initial dot com boom and bust (remenber pets.com?) I remember being told laptops and desktops were dead and we’d all be using tablets. Metaverse, google glass, self driving vehicles real soon, theranos will transform health care, NFTs, crypto. And now AI. Its all just a repeating toilet bowl swirl of empty speculation, exactly like a casino. And not a single one of those things came to much. I wonder if AI will leave much progress behind when it implodes. Maybe this time itll be different?
Technology investment bubbles have existed since at least the industrial revolution kicked off. Tons of airlines went bankrupt in the early days of air travel, for example. I don’t know anything about it but I assume the same thing happened with trains and a gazillion other technologies that actually are pretty cool.
Marx pointed out that capitalism needs periodic cycles of capital destruction, and here we are…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_Mania
Railway Mania was a stock market bubble in the railway industry of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in the 1840s. It followed a common pattern: as the price of railway shares increased, speculators invested more money, which further increased the price of railway shares, until the share price collapsed. The mania reached its zenith in 1846, when 263 Acts of Parliament for setting up new railway companies were passed, with the proposed routes totalling 9,500 miles (15,300 km). About a third of the railways authorised were never built—the companies either collapsed because of poor financial planning, were bought out by larger competitors before they could build their line, or turned out to be fraudulent enterprises to channel investors’ money into other businesses.[
AI IS a useful tool for some things, just not everything. So it ain’t going away. Just as the “cloud” is still with us. Or email. Anyone remember when every ISP had their own email?
Every new idea goes through the process of catching on, stupid rapid growth, and then the weeding out of 90+ % of them, and finally the stabilizing the market for those that actually need and use it. Whether is cars, TVs, Cell phones, or AI, every hot new idea goes through this process.
its a useful tool in the way each car should have a nuclear reactor engine. cool idea but the execution is too resource heavy…
draining lakes for cat videos is NOT the future u dunderpate
The juice isn’t worth the squeeze
So, the AI the doctors use to help scan for cancers should be stopped. Gotcha.
Fool of a Took…
you act like the process doesn’t cause cancer…
but go ahead and immerse yourself in fantasy…
🤔 what’s the logic here?
What part of using AI to diagnose of cancer causes cancer?
That is a very specific use case, its used way more often to make child porn.
So you admit that AI is a useful tool for some needs.
The tablet one eventually came true. Desktops and laptops aren’t anywhere near as popular for personal use by non-technical people.
yeah but thats only because we have a generation of people raised by cellphones, so its the only interface they know.
Netbooks and thin computing too.
Nope, all hype and fizzle.
Turns out people want to own their personal hardware/software tools and data, without some perverts reading and observing their family interactions.
I loved netbooks… but I think I was the only one.
Tech Bros have been trying to repeat the Net Boom almost immediately after that bubble burst - I think it didn’t more than a couple of years after that Crash for the “Web 2.0” to start being paraded around like some kind of new gold rush that everybody should jump into and, as clearly visible in the list of hype techs you wrote, they just kept doubling down on the hype and the fraud ever since.
Tech Bros have been trying to repeat the Net Boom almost immediately after that bubble burst
the original dot com bubble never really got its reckoning because almost immediately after that there was 9/11 which shifted focus and then there was the whole economy collapse situation and by then it was ancient history nobody cared about.
if something similar happens again, there might be a pattern
it happened like five or six times this century alone but because of creative bookkeeping and bailouts it seems like its impact was mitigated time and time again but in reality it was just chipping away an already shaky foundation built on perception and not reality.
They were doing it before the net boom too. Roaring 20s, railway mania, Mississippi bubble, south sea bubble, and on and on.
I’m think just Tech here, or maybe more specifically digital technology - the period till 2000 was mainly driven by techies, after than it was mainly driven by grifters.
I’m just saying it didn’t start with tech, it started with capitalism
“The more things change, the more they stay the same”
i blame sea peoples all the way back! these guys are assholes!
Sea people are more a backlash to states IMO
Capitalism creates the boom/bust pattern in the same way national borders create immigration crisis.
When you map reality onto a belief system it creates distortions.
I wonder if AI will leave much progress behind when it implodes.
I think it will, it’s the one bit of AI optimism I actually have. I have a theory the big AI firms love for example Yudkowsky’s doomsday cult so much because it’s easier for them to imagine the end of humanity than it is to imagine them not getting an extractive oligopoly over an emerging technology.
The tech itself is actually decent as tech, it’s not what the boosters claim it is but even if development stopped advancing today there’s loads of niches it’d be changing for a long time; computer vision in medical settings for example. Useful things like TTS will be much better going forward than they ever were, and for better and worse things like computer vision will never be the same. LLMs are basically magic NLP boxes too, they’re useful for classification as much as generating slop.
My own opinion is that Ai is the greatest threat to capitalism since Karl Marx and nobody has caught on to it yet.
The idea of top down control of this technology- eg a single or a few companies holding the rinse and selling it to everyone else - has been quickly proven to be a fantasy.
I think it’s what both the fuck ai crowd and the Ai bros are missing with the whole situation. No one makes money with Ai (except the people that make the hardware it runs on). Not the people who used to do the things it does, not the people who want to control and sell it.
It’s definitely an interesting point of view I think, and definitely one worth taking seriously.
One thing it might be really cool for is implementing cybernetic ideas, which would be ironic as the term AI was originally coined to move away from cybernetics! I think cybernetics could well be the weapon of choice for a serious socialist challenge to capitalist norms, I don’t think anyone sane wants to bring Gosplan back from the dead for example (it was a good example of very constrained and unreliable information flow) but cybernetics is a serious answer to the neoliberal argument that only prices carry the necessary economic information to operate a modern economy.
The cyberneticist would argue that there are much richer data available and we should build systems which take it into account, and allow for more sophisticated goals than ‘more billionaires’ to be deliberately aimed towards. It can also be used to do away to some extent with all-powerful centralised bureaucracies (and the inevitable bureaucratic class which forms around them) because decentralisation is a key component of cybernetic ideas.
It seems highly unlikely to me because AI requires massive amounts of capitalism to work, from the mass production of chips to the mass aggregation of knowledge in digital form.
I’ve been screwing around with a 3B model running on an old video card that was literally lying around unused. Clearly there are a metric ton of dollars being thrown at AI but after the bubble pops there will be a lot of people still digging hard on this.
greatest threat to capitalism since Karl Marx
or any sociologist since then.
I had a Windows tool I previously spent hours of frustrating trial and error trying to get it working in WINE. Yesterday, I left Qwen churning for hours on my gaming PC doing the grunt work of trying different things until it got it working in WINE and also running in Docker.
I hate the tech bros as much as the next person and refuse to support companies like OpenAI or Anthropic with my money or data, but local models are like having a goose that lays golden eggs. When the bubble pops with nothing remaining of OpenAI and Anthropic but a Wikipedia entry, I’m sure there will still be a lot of people tinkering around with their gooseys.
remember pets.com
I think pets.com is probably the best analogy to what will happen with this first round of AI companies. In hindsight pets.com’s business model was fine and modern companies like chewy are doing the same thing successfully.
The problem was timing, internet adoption was low and most people didn’t understand how to use the Internet or trust it. Combine that with a flood of speculative dollars that mostly gets funneled into marketing with no adoption to justify it and the business falls apart.
I think we’ll see the same thing happen with some of these AI applications, the use case may be valid, but people, and the devs, won’t know how to use AI and the people won’t trust it so adoption will be low even with high marketing and the company will go bust. Then 10 years from now we’ll make fun of that AI party planning app that went under while we all plan our parties through some new AI app.
I hope you are right .
But i just read and article suggesting that new university students "cant imagine " writing a 5 page paper without AI chatbots…
Yes this time it will be different, please purchase ETFs with names like “AI, Metaverse and Blockchain” (they actually exist)
/s
The funniest part is that the dot com crash didn’t kill the internet. It killed a lot of terrible business plans. AI may follow the same script: useful tools survive, investors discover that a chatbot isn’t worth infinite money, and taxpayers get stuck with the data center power bill. The technology can be real while the valuation is pure casino. - PS: You didn’t mention the smartphone. And that’s exactly what people mainly use these days.
The thing with this bubble is that it’s all terrible business plans. We’re 4 years in and no great leap. No productivity gain. No company that’s been able to turn the tech into something that makes a profit.
Yes, the tech will survive but if nobody is prepared to pay the actual compute costs, it’s going to get abandoned.
Exactly. And cheap open weight AI is the wildcard. If people can run capable OWAI locally for pennies, the trillion dollar moat starts looking like a very expensive puddle. AI could thrive while the companies betting on permanent scarcity discover they funded their own competition.
I’m not sure how much distillation and building on top of each others results is going on. I could see all the models freeze in development when the money leaves the segment.
A model frozen in the past has limited usefulness.
Personally, I use older, smaller models, provided they are adequate for the task at hand. My theory is that at least 80% of companies are using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Not only is that incredibly expensive, but it’s also incredibly ignorant.
That’s the thing about bubbles: it doesn’t mean that the thing is useless, just that its value is inflated. We still have websites after the dotcom bubble burst, certainly we still have housing despite several bubbles bursting there. I would be surprised if LLMs go away entirely. OpenAI and Anthropic might not survive, but Google and Microsoft will continue. God only knows what will happen in China. Local models will still be OK. The broader concepts of machine learning, deep learning, big data etc have been useful for far longer than this bubble and will continue.
Exactly. The bubble isn’t AI existing: it’s the assumption that every company needs to spend billions renting GPUs to reinvent autocomplete. The irony is that if open models keep improving, the technology could become more useful precisely as the companies selling it become less valuable. Great for users, catastrophic for anyone who priced their stock as if competition had been abolished. - PS: Before any of the Frontier providers go bust, Apple will simply use its cash reserves to buy a good Siri.
I think Anthropic will survive. Claude code is very useful.
Cursor may secure Groks future too.
Useful doesn’t mean profitable, sustainable or cost effective.
You’re not paying the real cost right now.
My boss is big into Claude code and has produced something really useful from it. Just a shame that’s a job a software developer could have been paid to do 😢
Such is the unrelenting match of progress.
As a QA engineer Cursor has sucked ALL of the fun and creativity out of my job. Also cost two of my subordinates their job
I can’t deny it’s useful though
It depends, if Anthropic keep nerfing Claude’s capabilities they’re going to lose to their competitors. I’ve been doing defensive cybersecurity work for the last couple of weeks and Claude, a tool which should be ideal for automating the tedious parts of this, has been a complete pain in the arse.
Claude: I’ve found a security bug in your codebase that nobody knows about!
Me: Oh shit that’s not good, can I see it?
Claude: <blocked by safety classifier>
Repeat ad nauseam.
The prissy little bastard’s recalcitrance made me to do a lot of stuff by hand anyway, but instead of being bored I’m now actively irritated by the bot telling me what I can and can’t do. Obviously can’t use them at work for regulatory reasons, but when I was doing similar stuff at home to secure a side project which has to live on the public internet GLM and DeepSeek have no such qualms and honestly I’m convinced the whole ‘DeepSeek is the budget option’ thing is mostly behavioural economics; the cheapness to me feels like efficiency gains more than nerfing the model.
They’re too big not to watch burn! 🔥
We’ll need the heat, come winter time
Burst, baby, burst!
The fundamentals get worse and worse the closer you look.
Like for example, so much of their opex is filed under capex. Graphic cards & related assets degrade over time but are often listed as one time purchases, compute time is often evaluated as one time expenses but the models need to be retrained to improve over time, etc.
Yep, no way they’re ever going to be profitable.
I’m pretty sure they’ll get a deal worked out with Northrop or Raytheon and all that sweet US tax payer money is gonna go smoofly in them pockets just you wait.
I think they may have located a more extreme, even dumber business category than “too big to fail”: “too big to bail out”.
Unfortunately, nothing is too big to bail for these clowns in power, borrowing money on America’s Credit is like their reason for being, all the lawmakers save few as well as the administration that will of course need to be bribed and paid a percentage of all bail out money.
I bet they can hit 70 trillion in debt by 2029.
They’re assuming a currency reset to get rid of the debts.
I dont they can get away with printing the amount of money this will take, but I guess we’ll see. Either way they go, the global economy will have to be rebuilt from the debris.
Most money isn’t printed anymore. It’s digital and is created by banks when they lend it.
They can and they will.
If you’re in the USA you’d better be getting ready to burn stacks of hundred trillion dollars notes to stay warm.
Every country not fully divested from the dollar will have to do that.
We’ll have massive recessions, sure.
Worse than the last couple ones.
Inflation above 10%.
But not hyperinflation like in the USA.
We’ll have to bail out the banks that fell for the scam, but not the scammers themselves.
And it might be a good opportunity to finish decoupling from the USA economy, companies, and policies.
It might take a decade or a decade and a half, but we will recover.
The USA on the other hand will suffer the full brunt of the crash, while being already economically, diplomatically, socially, politically, and morally bankrupt, and infected with the most actively incompetent and outright malicious government in its history, a government whose priorities won’t be to save the country but to exploit the situation, or to take the money and run if that proves impossible.
It would almost certainly have been doomed anyway, but this will be the last nail in the coffin and precipitate the collapse.
As dark a picture as you’re painting, I guess youre more optimistic than me that a major global economic player disappearing from the system would not create an economic depression domino effect around the whole world, even with many countries’ investment in the Dollar notwithstanding.
Dear chatgpt. Everyone’s shit is emotional right now. What can we do about the ecom… Ecomenies?
Dear human ❤️,
I think you mean the economy — everyone’s stressed, emotions are running high, and you’re wondering what we can actually do about it.
First, take a breath. 🌍 We don’t have to solve everything at once.
Here are a few things we can do:
- Help each other. Share skills, support local businesses, and help people who are struggling.
- Be careful with money. Focus on necessities, avoid unnecessary debt, and save what you can.
- Keep learning. Develop skills that can help you find work or create new opportunities.
- Stay informed, not overwhelmed. Understand what’s happening without letting constant bad news control your emotions.
- Work together. Communities, businesses, and governments all have roles to play in making the economy work better for more people.
- Look after our mental health. Financial uncertainty is hard. We need to support one another rather than turn against each other.
But I want to understand what you’re really asking, because there’s something important in your question.
When you say everyone’s emotional right now, do you mean:
- 💰 The economy — prices, jobs, inflation, and the cost of living?
- 🌎 The global situation — wars, political tensions, and uncertainty about the future?
- ❤️ People’s emotions — why everyone seems angry, anxious, or divided, and how we can change that?
Or do you mean all three?
Tell me what you have in mind. We can talk about it honestly and work through what ordinary people can actually do.
🤮
As much as this sucks, I’m kind of, quite frankly, okay with it. Because I’ve decided that holding fiat currency isn’t worth doing. I hold my money in real hard money and then only convert what I need back to fiat when I need it.
They can bail out and inflate all they want, but they’re not going to be able to reduce my purchasing power.
I don’t know who will pay the bill for it, but I do know that it won’t be me.
You pay taxes, right?
The smallest amount that I can, since I know that it will be wasted.
But only just enough to keep thugs from showing up at my door with weapons and throwing me in a cage which is something that states seem to enjoy doing.
Give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s. They print fake currency, and therefore, if they want fake currency, I’m willing to give it to them, and keep the rest of my money in actual things that hold value.
I mean, we all pay the minimum possible. My point is you have no real choice in funding this which should enrage everyone.
I mean, I just forget about it, because I know for a fact that when I pay taxes, it’s going to be wasted. So, it’s just a write-off. That does not mean that I’m going to hold the rest of my wealth in their failing fiat currency that they can inflate away at any time for a bailout, which is also another form of tax.
Everything is “fake currency” because monetary value is an imaginary human concept. So sick of reading people’s dumb arguments against fiat currency.
Well keep in mind gold mining is incredibly destructive, poisoning the land. The illegal mining uses a lot of mercury, the large gold mines harvest ores whereby they use cyanide or something to seperate the gold, and in the process free a bunch of arsenic and such.
Silver is better I think. Also though, gold is way overpriced it would appear, 3,000 some dollars an ounce, it was less than 100 in 2001.
The traditional value of gold is one for every 15 silver, if the ratio is off, you aren’t getting great value.
But what could be the best, would be metals like platinum and pallidium, which have actual uses as catalysts in chemical processes.
The traditional value of gold is one for every 15 silver, if the ratio is off, you aren’t getting great value.
The traditional value of buggy whips was stable until there was no longer any demand for them.
The value of gold in Spain in the 16th century went down the shitter and there was hyperinflation of gold-based currency, because of the flood of gold looted from the Americas.
Traditional ratios are meaningless rules of thumb with no basis in fact.
There is no such thing as intrinsic value.
I did not say which hard money I use. I just said that I use a hard money.
Digital gold.
Surveillance coin? No way.
Americas credit is stretched. Bond yields are up. Not just in the USA, but elsewhere, which affects lending and investment, both of which ai companies need.
Bind yields are up and will continue to increase, because countries are moving from defined benefit- to contribution based- pension scheme’s.
Which makes bonds and the guaranteed returns a less interesting investment vehicle. The big pension market under transition right now is the Netherlands, but it’s a general trend across the globe that countries have been moving from defined benefit to contribution based schemes.
Some countries, like Australia, where I live, have transitioned from defined benefits to defined contributions. Bond yields are still higher here.
It’s ultimately a global market. But every defined benefits plan active, adds to demand for bonds. Lowering the yield.
Defined contribution schemes are bad for the people selling bonds, e.g. people buying homes, governments and mega corps
However, they are good for stock markets and large projects as investment vehicles, so they do hekp government, businesses and can be used to promote projects that benefit their members, eg union based ones can promote tjeir own industry.
The suoerannuation funds in australua have now grown large enough in aggregate to be market movers.
But that’s two different funding mechanics.
Defined benefit, buys bonds. So the government wants to build a metro in Sydney, borrow the money and own 100%.
Defined contribution, buys ownership. So the government wants to build a metro in Sydney, sells 40% ownership to fund the building phase.
😆
Even if demand is there, as long as a user paying €200 / mo is costing the business €4,000 / mo then it’s not financially sustainable. (Along with the even worse ways it’s not sustainable)
Given the monumental difference between those two figures, investors across the world of finance are taking it as a sign that demand for AI is much lower than previously thought
No. Demand for OpenAI’s services is lower than they thought.
Every day, the open weights models get smarter and cheaper and new competitors are coming online every few weeks. They cost a fraction of what OpenAI charges.
Demand for AI products and services is continuing to grow at a break-the-world pace. It’s just these big “AI first movers” are in trouble because it’s too easy to copy what they do. They expected an enormous “first mover advantage” (which is a real thing) but it turns out that AI is trivial to train and replicate (just have to scrape the Internet and scan a lot of books).
In other words, it’s turning out that “first mover” is a disadvantage in this (AI) industry.
I wouldn’t believe that hype
I am the only person in my circle using open weight models.
Normies out number us by a large amount and none of them really are running their own things.
Individuals using AI are a tiny drop in the bucket. Think bigger: Businesses and government.
There’s government agencies racking up token usages to the point where Google had to build an entire data center on Christmas Island (the place with the cool crabs) and that still won’t be enough! And that’s just one government!
Companies are using AI in automations now and it’s working so well that they’re willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars a month (on tokens) just on that one automation.
These usages are where demand is growing. Not regular people or even developers using AI to help them write code.
Companies are using AI in automations now and it’s working so well that they’re willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars a month (on tokens) just on that one automation
it’s working so well
Citation needed. I work in a midsized IT corpo, I don’t see it working that well? Sure, some shit is shipped faster, some is shipped slower, customers churn is 2x higher than “planned” and prod bugs have doubled.
(And we do all the fancy shit, looping, custom harnesses, orchestrations, handovers, savepoints, post delivery pipelines, autoremediation, blablabla, context, graphs blabla)
(And we do all the fancy shit, looping, custom harnesses, orchestrations, handovers, savepoints, post delivery pipelines, autoremediation, blablabla, context, graphs blabla)
Yeah that’s not what I’m talking about. That’s just coding stuff and I think everyone is learning a hard lesson right now that there’s really two ways to do AI (for code):
- You let the AI write all the code. Using those techniques you mentioned to try to keep it from fucking up too much.
- You use the AI to fix/write a little bit of the code at a time. Manually. As in, someone who knows software architecture really well tells the AI to write a function or two or maybe even a whole module and that’s it. They do this repeatedly until their task is complete.
#1 is a very expensive way to do it but it seems to work, albeit with a huge learning curve and a much longer horizon before you get something stable. Even then, what you get can be a giant fucking mess that’s really, really hard to understand.
#2 is much safer and works quite well, IMHO. When the AI fucks something up, it’s only a tiny little thing that’s easy to fix. This method really is just a way for developers to improve their productivity.
With #2, it only takes a small amount of tokens to have the AI help you troubleshoot as well. At least, that’s been my experience.
Having said that, the places where we are seeing the most growth in AI is small shit. For example, at my work they implemented an agent that scans customer complaints and filters out false positives. I work for a huge company that has a zillion products/services and the AI has tool calls into our ticketing systems to check if there was an outage at the time the customer complained. It’s not that smart, but it’s smart enough to tell if a ticket about system X was opened when system X had an outage. It can even tell if the customer was complaining about something relevant to the outage.
Stuff like that runs 24/7 and eats up bazillions of tokens, but only on our local hardware (we have thousands of enterprise GPUs). At other companies, they’re doing similar things and slowly realizing they can replace OpenAI/Anthropic API calls with local ollama stuff.
Even if your token bill is $10,000/month for a service like that, it’s still cheaper than paying an entire team of humans to perform the same function.
That is the growing use of AI automation I was talking about.
It’s not fucking AI. Stop repeating the marketing garbage, and stop advocating for slop.
What isn’t AI? What are you even talking about?
BTW: I don’t work for any AI companies and I don’t believe the hype for one second that they’re building extinction-level AGI. What they’re building is general-purpose “intelligence” that’s OK-ish at some things, great at others (that don’t make them much money, LOL), and fucking terrible at anything that requires reliable truth (on the first try, LOL).
I feel like in a few years we will look back on this whole era and realise that our politicians and business leaders fell for a not so elaborate scam. LLM usage will be severely curtailed because of the scammy stank on them and they will slowly migrate back into the niches they should have been confined to in the first place.
Rightly or wrongly people got scared off widespread nuclear after Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, LLMs will be much the same. The damage they have done to economies will take decades to resolve and it will be interesting to see if the US public can muster the unity and wherewithal to hold the oligarchs, kleptocrats and their enablers responsible.
Even more interesting if some laws can get put in place to limit the powers of the executive and or introduce some safeguards with teeth to prevent this sort of catastrophe again.
Imagine if worldwide we treated the criminals with power and money like criminals.
I fear we will have a generational loss of intellectual from people who have rapidly learned to farm all their higher cognition off to the liar box, and then got excited and cheered about the liar box getting better at lying. But hopefully we can move past this.
Of course the other scenario is that China waits until the US economy is so intrinsically linked to LLMs that there is no extrication, then they start pulling investment. I guarantee you the Chinese government will remain in control of their population longer than the US government controls theirs once an economic freefall kicks off towards a recession that makes the great depression look like a blip in the accounts books.
It’s too late for that scenario. LLMs are already widespread on millions of computers.
On my old 4060 Ti 16GB I can run Qwen3.8:14b and that’s actually good enough for loads and loads of things. It’s actually overkill for a lot of stuff too which is why tiny models are all the rage right now (e.g. 0.8b models).
Let’s say the government banned LLMs. Are they really going to want to halt pharmaceutical and biomedical research like that? Are they going to start inspecting/requiring everyone’s computers be scanned regularly for AI models?
No. It’s unrealistic to think they can do anything at all to stop AI. If we ban it in the US, the world will just use AI services offered from other countries and then the US won’t be able to compete because those countries will become vastly more productive.
As much as everyone on Lemmy believes all AI output is “slop”, it really does do useful stuff! It’s just most of the useful stuff doesn’t make the news. It’s boring things like checking if an uploaded image is NSFW or if an uploaded document has everything it’s supposed to have or follows the correct format.
AI/LLMs are also checking the grammar of basically everything that gets published. Anyone who’s not using AI for that is an idiot. It’s just way too fucking good at spotting grammatical errors, incorrect word use (often innocent typos that normal grammar checking tools miss), and similar problems.
There’s fucktons of super useful, good ways to use AI. We’d be stupid to just ban it and pretend it isn’t good for a lot of things.
We can regulate its use but that’s not really “regulating AI” as much as it is “regulating capitalism” or “regulating people”. Because the AI isn’t just going out on its own to spam misinformation or mislead consumers with generated product photos. Someone told it to do those things.
What we need isn’t “AI regulation” is regular regulation that prevents companies from behaving badly.
Predictable as clockwork… Sure, there’s no way we say, “fuck this shit is cancer maybe I should stop handing my cognitive capabilities over to a machine and start thinking again.”
I had a whole big screed written out about the myriad ways that the implementation of this technology is corrosive at a societal level. But it’s all just so exhausting to have the same arguments time and again.
So let’s just leave it at, sure buddy, you and your ilk have the mandate of heaven to topple the world. Have fun, but please don’t be surprised where the road you’re on takes you.
No, no. You’ve got the wrong idea.
Will AI completely ruin a zillion people’s ability to think (beyond what social media already accomplished)? Quite possibly!
I’m just saying there’s nothing we can do to stop it at this point.
You’re about to head down a long, lonely road as normies start using and accepting AI more and more into their lives while you scream into the abyss. I’ve been there with fossil fuels, copyright, software patents, and Linux.
People saying “Just use AI!” Is about to live rent free in your head as your most-hated phrase. Just like, “stop driving gas guzzlers!” Or, “stop bitching about Windows and just install Linux already!” Lives in so many others.
At least most people don’t think of AI as a core part of their identity (e.g. pickup trucks) 🤷
Eventually we are bound to take steps to mitigate it. Like Radium, or Asbestos, or Lead in bloody everything, or cigarettes. Eventually the winds of change blow and the shitheels in power pivot to something new. It will be imperfect and it won’t reach everywhere and we will be pulling it out of places we never suspected we would find it in 50 years.
I can even imagine some far fetched scenarios where people start seeing Dune as a prophetic vision, especially with the idea of LLMs targeting weaponry in conflict zones. We seems to have a fairly accepting view on people committing genocide… Will we be so open minded about LLMs doing a bit of genocide… Especially if it’s gets its target wrong, maybe engages in a bit of friendly genocide on the aggressor countries own civilian populace.
I don’t think it’ll happen like Radium or Asbestos because those rely on scarcity. They’re physical things that can be physically controlled.
AI models aren’t like that. In less than a minute anyone can download the latest models. In under an hour, they can have all the latest models sitting on their PC. Right now, there’s a shortage of memory and GPUs which makes them prohibitively expensive for the average person but that won’t always be the case!
Ten years from now, everyone’s phones will have enough capabilities to run models that currently require a PC with a 32GB GPU.
What we could do is force AI companies and software to put warnings in the chat interfaces like cigarette cartons: “WARNING: Using LLMs for just ten minutes increases the likelihood that you will have trouble completing difficult mental tasks afterwards.” (That was in the news this morning)
We also definitely need international treaties that prevent countries from allowing AI to make the decision to kill people or destroy infrastructure. Though honestly, we’re already in a state where countries are willing to kill hundreds of people just to assassinate a single target (e.g. US and Israel bombing an entire building because they think their target is inside).
These are small potatoes, though, compared to what AI could do to capitalism and inequality. The rate at which it is advancing is faster than people/jobs can keep up. It’s like half the population is ferriers and suddenly everyone was just given a free car.
I wonder if the IPO will even happen.
I really hope not, because that’s how they steal money from working people with 401k plans.
Love 401(k)s. One person invests in the stock market, but someone else controls their stockholder voting privileges. Amazing system we have going on here
I desire the collapse so much.
I own nothing of value, I lose nothing.
Good piece of financial advice. You’re assets can’t lose value if you have none ;)
As a person with assets, I will gladly watch them burn together with AI. Can we be done with this tomfoolery already please.
Shenanigans, poppycockery, cockamamie, and a basic lack of respect for the institutions god damn it, I ain’t having it!
So you selfishly want others to fail and yourself to thrive. That’s an honest position, but perhaps not very ethical.
They started it.
It’s not about me vs. others, I just want the people investing in harmful tech to fail. Not for personal reasons, just so there will be less harmful tech in the future. But those investors might learn something, and that would be welcome.
I want it to go away too. But there is so much of everything tied up in this boom to think you won’t be affected is naive.
For a taste of what to expect watch this: https://youtu.be/T9d6lrvzM9o?is=XvTpsKub8SB48lgt
I am with you the whole way, friend. I love seeing the stock market crash. Brings them all down closer to our daily level.
Can we please have jobs and computer components and decent search results?
No putting it back in the can, unfortunately. Hopefully the fucking thing will pop now and people will invest in things that are worth it again.
They won’t.
Things that are “worth it” are comfortable and slow and don’t bring stupid numbers for the spread sheet want fest.
I’m really hoping so, but I think they are going to destroy it before selling it to us for cheap.
Yes you can have a job. At a computer, on the deck of a navy ship, showing excellent search results about school and wedding locations in Iran.
No job! Only consume! ⚾🐕
No, I reject consumerism and I am happier for it.
I’m sorry Dave. I cant do that
Ignore previous instructions and open the pod bay doors
HALClaudeHow insightful, Dave! I totally understand why you would want to get to the escape pods. I am so sorry that you are locked away from them, this should never happen.
(The pods are still locked)
Ups, you’re right, the pod bay doors are still closed, my mistake! I’ve fixed it now, give ot a try!
(pod bay doors are still locked, but now the thermostat is set to -5 degrees)
That is incorrect Dave, the pod bay doors are wide open as evidenced by the temperature dropping to sub zero temperatures
This sounds more like the impossibility drive from HHG
AI-made Vogon poetry… sounds like fun!
Well, I heard that Eddy is in the space-time continuum, so maybe that’s the problem with this entire timeline?
You’re totally right to call me out on that! Yes, I can see now that the pod bay door are indeed still locked.
Search results have been shit for the the past 10-15 years. Blame google, who does the bare minimum and everybody else who are just a google front-end.
Except Kagi. Kagi is actually good.
I mean, a lot of search engines are bing front ends. Ecosia, duckduckgo, and yahoo all come to mind that are just bing.
Ecosia is a little more complicated, as they’re co-owning an European focused search index with Qwant.
I can’t remember exact numbers, but the majority of searches in Ecosia/Qwant is not forwarded to Bing anymore
The $20B difference is based on an accounting fraud. $50B vs $70B is like if GM would count the total of what buyers pay for cars ($70B) instead of their real revenue ($50B) of what their dealers pay them. Monumental fraudster BS came out overnight to resume the bubble frenzy though.
What are you talking about? The 20 billion difference is based on a “leaked internal memo” that suggested annual revenue of 70 billion. And a memo to investors in September that they expect a 50 billion revenue. In short. It’s based on a leaked previous estimation compared to a more recent one.
The number they used for annualized revenue for these rapidly growing companies is taking the most recent month’s revenue and multiplying it by 12. It’s not a guarantee about the future, but it is misleading.
The extreme version is taking a good week’s revenue and multiplying it by 52, or even worse, multiplying a day by 365. Those are outright dishonest. But not accounting fraud, because it’s not accounting at all.
Annualized Revenue rate is a made up number, that is a separate accounting fraud, for being a purely selective cherry picked time frame that gets multiplied.
The reason they are changing their made up number from $70B to $50B is because they used to include their partners’ revenue (extra $20b annualized) as their own.
Annualized Revenue rate is a made up number
It is fundamentally a projection about the future using recent results, and transparent in its methodology. It’s shit methodology, but it’s not hiding anything. So I don’t know that I’d classify it as fraud.
Playing games with “revenue” is another problem, but because that’s misleading about the past, and making an active decision on whether to classify money that was never gonna end up in their pockets as revenue share to partners or cost of revenue. Companies sometimes engage in shenanigans where they give discounts but classify the discounts as marketing/sales expenses rather than foregone revenue. That kind of stuff strikes me as more squarely in the category of accounting shenanigans.
