I wouldn't have a problem if they were actually investing the money in something useful like R&D

Nearly all the investment is in data centers. Their approach for the past 2 years seems to be just throwing more hardware at existing approaches, which is a really great way to burn an absurd amount of money for little to nothing in return

One of our biggest bookstores contracted with a local artist for some merch. That artist used AI with predictable results. Now everyone involved is getting raked over the coals for it.

No surprise, they just announced a 4th round of layoffs too. 😟

https://lithub.com/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-powells-ai-slop-snafu-and-what-we-can-all-learn-from-it/

https://www.koin.com/news/portland/powells-layoffs-employees-10292025/

Investment is done really to train models for ever more miniscule gains. I feel like the current choices are enough to satisfy who is interested in such services, and what really is lacking is now more hardware dedicated to single user sessions to improve quality of output with the current models.

But I really want to see more development on offline services, as right now it is really done only by hobbyists and only occasionally large companies with a little dripfeed (Facebook Llama, original Deepseek model [latter being pretty much useless as no one has the hardware to run it]).

I remember seeing the Samsung Galaxy Fold 7 ("the first AI phone", unironic cit.) presentation and listening to them talking about all the AI features instead of the real phone capabilities. "All of this is offline, right? A powerful smartphone... makes sense to have local models for tasks." but it later became abundantly clear it was just repackaged always-online Gemini for the entire presentation on $2000 of hardware.

If you owe the bank $100, that’s your problem; if you owe the bank $100 million, that’s the bank’s problem.

they will somehow shift the cost on the consumer and continue on

Well actually there is a long and rich history of companies that are able to operate at a loss using funds appropriated from sale of shares to investors, and this process continues so long as new investors keep buying in such that anybody selling out is covered by the new funds until enough people try to sell out that the price starts to plunge, although the collapse can be delayed by the company strategically buying back and occasionally splitting or reorganizing, meaning everyone gets their money back unless they sell too late.

You know.

A fucking Ponze Scheme.

Oh honey, that hasn't been true since 2008.

The government will bail out companies that get too big to fail. So investors want to loan money to companies so that those companies become too big to fail, so that when those investors "collect on their debt with interest" the government pays them.

They funded Uber, which lost 33 billion dollars over the course of 7 years before ever turning a profit, but by driving taxi companies out of business and lobbying that public transit is unnecessary, they're an unmissable part of society, so investors will get their dues.

They funded Elon Musk, whose companies are the primary means of communication between politicians and the public, a replacing NASA as the US government's primary space launch provider for both civilian and military missions, and whose prestige got a bunch of governments to defund public transit to feed continued dependence on car companies. So investors will get their dues through military contracts and through being able to threaten politicians with a media blackout.

And so they fund AI, which they're trying to have replace so many essential functions that society can't run without it, and which muddies the waters of anonymous interaction to the point that people have no choice but to only rely on information that has been vetted by institutions - usually corporations like for-profit news.

The point of AI is not to make itself so desirable that people want to give AI companies money to have it in their life. The point of AI is to make people more dependent on AI and on other corporations that the AI company's owners own.

Would be nice, I want to buy some ETFs at a discount

I wish. Even knowing it's all a gigantic scam, they'll first protect themselves before letting it burst and screw everybody else. The rich get a buffer period.

Yes, lol.