And it's not even working. Not one of the AI companies is profitable. So they're putting the hope for profits some time in the future over sanity and safety.
Steve Burke (of GN) described the absurdity pretty well, within the context of the currently uncertain Nvidia and OpenAI deal:
Nvidia offered OpenAI $100B in investment, money that it didn't have, as long as OpenAI gave that money back to Nvidia to lease GPUs that haven't been made, to then put in data centres that haven't been constructed, which will be powered by electricity that hasn't come online, to then rent to users who haven't subscribed, to provide them features that haven't come to fruition.
And hope you’ve propped up the economy enough by the end of it that the government has to ~~bail you out~~…sorry i meant provide a “backstop”.
What about all the user data they sell to third parties? I'd be interested in knowing how that contributes to this
So what's the problem? This looks self-correcting to me, if none of the AI companies are profitable then they're going to go away. Short their stock and make a fortune.
So what's the problem?
"What's the problem" with the entire American economy being moored to a bunch of companies all acting as flaky as Enron and friends during the dot-com crash?
Edit: just realized FaceDeer is obsessed with AI stuff, so he's probably here just to troll with questions he already knows the answers to.
Shorting isn't just a bet that a stock will fail but also when
Then invest in competitors, they've got a more flexible timeframe.
Imagine your entire life is viewed through the lens of actions you can take in the stock market. What a sad life.
The problem is the cost of that correction is going to fall on us. Or did we forget that the flavor of capitalism we live under is the "Privatize the profits, socialize the losses" kind. We're not the ones in the casino, but we're the ones who will lose our shirts when they lose.
In the mean time they're soaking up all the RAM, SSD and silicon processing which makes basically everything with any of those cost a lot more (like the RAM I bought for $99, 4 yrs ago thats now $560). Not to mention the power requirements and costs being passed on to the consumers that don't want it anyway.
They're also screwing up the environment in ways it won't recover from.
Which is pouring money into the manufacturers of those things. If you're convinced the AI companies are going to collapse then just wait a little and you'll get all those things way cheaper than they were before.
At the moment, most of that "money" is just stock in the other company. And the type of RAM and "GPU"'s being manufactured are not ones that normal consumers will use. They're very specialized for AI en masse.
Another thing around that is that the major manufacturers being leveraged for that gear have stated that they are not increasing production in the near future because of this. It seems they're mostly in a "wait and see, it might just be a bubble" mode as scale up takes a lot of time and only pays off with continued demand over a long period of time.
I'd love if it was going to be flooding the market with cheaper tech, but thats not been shown to be the case. And it's really not worth the environmental impact in either case.
If anybody leaves an AI company with a fat paycheck, promises to "be honest about the real problems," and then proceeds to regurgitate things the AI company CEOs say: be suspicious.
Exhibit A is Anthropic millionaire Mrinank Sharma, who only mentioned (future) peril from AI and AI-made bioweapons, two fictional scenarios on the short list that Anthropic officially endorses. It's a list of things that please Anthropic investors.
Real-world stuff like AI psychosis, poisoning people's air, or generating CSAM doesn't get a mention from him. There's no profit in acknowledging those things, so he won't.
Maybe Claude Code learned this from its creators: I’ve noticed that when it says “the real issue is…”, that means it has no clue and is about barf out a bunch of slop that I’m going to have to revert.
The only time it ever says “the real issue is” and is right is when I’ve just corrected it and told it the real issue which it then wastes tokens regurgitating back to me. Gods I miss not having to use this crap at work
You HAVE to use it?
Yes, our usage is tracked. Managers have statistics broken down by daily usage per agent
Just another day in corporate America. Putting fake profits over employees’s well-beings, and customer safety and privacy.
The thing that gets me is they just want to get in on this $2Billion investment that keeps changing hands without changing hands. They really are just taking IOUs from… elsewhere? Because apparently, according to Jensen, that money hasn’t actually exchanged hands. Investors are just buying into the new Ponzi Scheme.
The alternative prediction is that this is in fact sustainable and AI companies will in fact have revenue to keep the bubble inflated for a lot longer, just in the worst way - by extracting the value of human-created reliability and trust from the market:
CEOs have also bought into AI almost to a person, and are using it to replace workers, results be damned. AI can't do the things they believe it can, but to them, if they can fake satisfying a need with AI for $5, that is preferable to actually satisfying a need with a real employee for $10.
The CEO is happy because his company saved $5 and he's met his stock option incentive target, the AI companies are happy to pocket that $5 instead of the employee getting $10. Maybe they even raise the customer's price to $12 as AI rent-seeking starts rising, and both companies get $6 each. Win-win, life will go on, just worse for everyone else.
CEOs have also bought into AI almost to a person, and are using it to replace workers, results be damned. AI can’t do the things they believe it can, but to them, if they can fake satisfying a need with AI for $5, that is preferable to actually satisfying a need with a real employee for $10.
Yep that's exactly how me and my entire team were laid off. "Automatization".
I'm sorry. Recently laid off myself and management avoided directly saying AI was the reason, but other statements (C-suite talking about whether AI can do other work months before the layoffs, in front of me) convince me that was the reasoning.
Yeah for us it was "return to office". Entire team was remote and has been the 9 years I worked there.
AI businesses are putting profits over sanity and safety.
All businesses are. That's what a business is. A legal entity that seeks to extract as much wealth from people as possible. They put profits before people as a matter of policy.
Limited liability corporations should be outlawed.
That's not what business is inherently; that's what capitalism is.
It's not even strictly what capitalism is about. It's some stupid bullshit interpretation that came out of the University of Chicago economics department.
Seriously, go look at Adam Smiths wealth of nations. The only mention of the "invisible hand" is so different from what is taught in economics now
… by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.
It's not that we need no regulation. It's just trying to say that if we set things up correctly, we don't need to worry about people pursuing SOLELY their own personal gain. Because the market seeks out the "greatest value", which is not just about money. It's also the value to society as a whole.
Instead, we got the fucking bullshit from Chicago saying that the only / best way of measuring value is by profit.
As a legal requirement.
I believe that's only if you're publicly traded.
Yeah, but it might depend on the company bylaws even if its privately owned.
There's a huge list of eye rolls here but also...what profits?
"They are putting profits over sanity and safety"
Soooooooo, just like every other business in the history of capitolism?
Every company does that. The difference is the AI companies will be broke soon and laying off all their staff so people are getting out before the collapse.
We're so cooked
That’s just every company isn’t it?
Not in my experience. Once their clients budgets get cut by funding cuts due to reality and they notice it doesn't do anything of benefit (on the clients side), they will be all "client first".
"AI businesses are putting profits over sanity and safety".
Remove "AI" from that sentence and you'll see that's just more normal business practices that have been going on for decades.
The real question is: what profit? It's a sink hole in a hope to maximize reach
Oh thank heavens some people still have ethics.
if they had ethics they would have left a long time ago.
It's so nice to see these kind of posts. Because I keep thinking I'm the only one who thinks ai has turned incredibly evil and will only get worse.
“One Program to rule them all, One Program to find them, One Program to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them.”
Don't worry, the Internet keeps telling me that AI is a useless stochastic parrot that hallucinates everything it says anyway.
Both of these things can be true. It still works if it occasionally throws a few innocents in front of the bus.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
