Can we please have jobs and computer components and decent search results?
No job! Only consume! ⚾🐕
Does your ai company bite?
No but it can hurt you in other ways.
Ai company: we’ve got to destroy the planet and world economy to break even, and it still might kill us all even then
No, I reject consumerism and I am happier for it.
I’m sorry Dave. I’m afraid 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.
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
Except Kagi. Kagi is actually good.
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 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.
WeWork was declared a failure when it lost 6 billion in a year. OpenAI is net negative 17 billion a year…
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
I think you’re probably a couple of orders of magnitude too low.
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.
Get help.
“come on bro you’re just holding it wrong”
We’ve started to lean into it at work and I am not exaggerating when I say that I’m probably doing three people’s job right now by utilizing it.
It’s terrifying and amazing and I’m just not sure how far this is going to go.
Now these jobs were not scheduled for anybody. It’s not like jobs were lost. But they are jobs that are never going to be taken by new people. Because those openings don’t exist anymore.
Sad as it is.
Good luck debugging when something goes bad down the line.
I mean that seriously, I wish you luck.
Honestly, this whole “AI software development will make code less maintainable” stance is not an AI problem, it’s a human problem. When you use agents to generate code, you still need to review it, test it and so on. Granted, some devs let their agents manage every step in the pipeline without supervision, but this is as dumb as letting a team of 4 juniors work without supervision. If you have real experience in software development, you will take the time required to validate the code created by your agents and still be able to deploy 5-10 times faster.
Also it’s not like all pre-ai codebases were masterpieces, easily maintainable with no tech debt.
AI doesn’t have a monopoly on slop, humans are perfectly capable of that. AI can just write more of it, quicker
But your job hasn’t been replaced
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.
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.
until they run out of money
When the investors are Microsoft, Google, Meta and Amazon. Then they have some deep pockets
True, very deep, and for a while they had nothing to really spend on, which is why, say it with me! Markets can remain irrational longer than you can stay solvent
But it’s still not infinite
Not if more investors keep throwing more money at it. It only stops when investors are no longer willing to fund continued expenses and they are unable to fund it themselves. At which point if they are spending a lot more than they are earning which appears to be the case currently, they would have to increase income and/or decrease expenses. So expect more and more push to become profitable as investor money becomes harder to find.
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.
Yes, but consider that AI being successful would maybe let your boss fire you, and they super duper want to fire you and everyone.
I thought they’re 20 billion below the expected revenue doesn’t say loss. Is this from another source?
OpenAI promised investors an AI gold rush. Now its projected annual revenue is reportedly $20 billion below earlier expectations. That’s not a rounding error: that’s an entire business empire missing from the spreadsheet. Silicon Valley keeps calling it a revolution, but increasingly it looks like a trillion dollar game of musical chairs, with investors hoping the music never stops.
Maybe he could sleep in the factory for a few weekends? P
Quit ordering the avocado toast.
they’ve really gotta stop offering avocado toast at the company cafeteria. That’ll make up the difference.
That’ll make up the difference.
Now that you bring this up…
Yes, I think you could have found the solution, indeed. Quick, tell them! The world is saved!!
one of his soon to be defunct datacenters.
Its a trillion dollar game of musical chairs with roughly 8.3 billion people playing and only a few thousand chairs.
That’s just life you’re describing. Life in capitalism, that is.
You gotta admit though the tempo of the music is getting pretty fast these days.
Nah, far from everyone wants to be a trillionaire, nor a billionaire. Sure most would want financial independence, but not a lot more than that
Ahh but you are falling into a common fallacy, you probably think that because there is enough money to go around everyone should have a enough to meet their needs, then the excess can be an incentive for people who make outsized contributions to society, like a not sociopathic member of the human race.
The bloodsucking leech class view the existence of other people with needs as a personal insult. They feel every cent of money should be theirs personally, or as a barely acceptable compromise maybe shared around an “elite” class.
If Bezos for instance could have all the money and just issue Amazon Bucks™ based on how useful you are to him he would love that.
Honestly the reason we know Elon isn’t a real gamer is that he doesn’t have a bunch of four “agents” in trenchcoats with neuralinks and miniguns running around cities as he directs them to from an airship overhead. Otherwise that game would be as close to a masturbatory fantasy as someone who can’t get hard after all the Special K would get.
And even the fifty billions may be inflated, as it is “annualized” revenue which can mean “we took a period of peak usage and generalized it to a year”
Didn’t Anthropic calculate it based on the best day and multiplying by 365?
If I reported my income this way it would be fraud (and I would also “make” over 200k).
- They are not reporting their income, but AAR apparently
- Yes, this is a scam.
I didn’t wanna claim it when I wasn’t sure of the source but yeah that’s what I remember too
This account reeks of clanker. Are people just okay with that or am I missing something?
Don’t have the energy to look into the account itself, but this comment does have that “it’s not just x it’s y” stank. It’s everywhere nowadays, it’s fucking exhausting.
In blog posts, in news articles, YouTube videos and now in fucking lemmy comments. Disgusting.
Removed by mod
Same thing just happened with Anthropics numbers. Billions short of their stated numbers.
Sigh. This comment reeks of AI slop
I mean, it’s not a rounding error, but going from 4.5 billion to 80 billion is not shabby either
It’s just revenue, not profit. Don’t worry.
Why do you sound like the House of El?
It’s an LLM adbot, or, at best, someone having LLM craft all of their comments and posts.
The accounts profile heavily advertises services for LLM adbots covertly advertising to people using social media.
Search is garbage now, but I’d bet even money he is lifting text directly from House of El–or they have a common source.
I’ve felt for a while that House of El uses LLMs heavily in their scripts. It’s a pandemic on YouTube feels like.
So yeah, the common source is likely clanker speak.
Removed by mod
c-suite gets cut of everything, they should get their cut of hunger and genocide too.
Don’t forget climate change!
How long has AI been “teetering on the brink“?
Right. It’s literally everyday it’s brought up. Yet here we are, still using it, still funding the losses. Still funding the climate damage.
Depends if you’re asking people who are informed or news headlines. The informed people have been saying the AI bubble is set to burst around Q2-Q3 2027. That’s when loan obligations come due and the majority of investors are set for payouts.
The news will say it’s happening everyday, just like Trump is just about to die everyday, or MAGA is “turning against him” everyday according to the articles.
republicans usually crash the economy right toward the end of their term, yeah. pretty much every single time. So Q3 2027 is perfect.
Ai can crash before then, if people stop investing money or loaning money. It doesn’t mean OpenAI run out of money straight away, but it means the projects they are involved in don’t happen, so the mountain of debt piles up and the sources of revenue dry up. So, it all happens faster and the smaller neo-clouds go belly up first.
Already an Aussie one just pulled its launch IPO due to lack of interest and were considering dropping their price significantly.
If the IPO prices of other companies drop significantly, it means the early investors make very little profit, for a lot of risk, so they start to look elsewhere too.
AI companies need huge amounts of investment over extended periods, so either scenario is problematic for them.
Rome hasn’t collapsed in a day.
Leftists promising AI collapse is like Musk promising full FSD.
AHEM
Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.
Teeter harder, I need to upgrade my graphics card.
And I wanna build a gaming PC!
slow down, there’s going to be enough for everyone once the AI hype dies and they’re scaling back (probably)
That’s not how it works. The ram chips soldered onto the AI accelerator cards, you cannot just take them out and use them in a PC :(
deleted by creator
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.
deleted by creator
Most money isn’t printed anymore. It’s digital and is created by banks when they lend it.
They’re assuming a currency reset to get rid of the debts.
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.
🤮
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.
😆
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 part of using AI to diagnose of cancer causes cancer?
🤔 what’s the logic here?
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.
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 in general (ie in public) 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 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.
Well yeah, that old video card wasn’t built by hand at a socialist commune. It was mass produced in a capitalist factory.
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.
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.
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.
I want a convertible, a laptop that folds all the way back and gives a tablet/stylus interface, but has stiff enough hinges to hold the screen like a laptop at any angle with a keyboard, and that closes and covers the screen like a laptop. They played around with some form factors like that 10 years ago but they never really took off. Plus they tended to be Windows only, with poor Linux support on the hardware.
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.
Whatever the reason, it’s basically become true.
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…
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.[
Yes this time it will be different, please purchase ETFs with names like “AI, Metaverse and Blockchain” (they actually exist)
/s
Yeah, just like, after the Segway bubble burst, we’re all riding them now.
Burst, baby, burst!
I believe the implosion of the AI bubble will essentially torpedo the only thing still supporting the US economy?
Yes. When the bubble finally pops it means AI is here to stay and the remaining companies will probably climb 100x over the next two decades, but all the people currently invested will lose almost everything. The people not invested will still feel the effect as the layoffs and bankruptcies start rolling out, and anyone pension or retirement that is tied to bubble will lose a lot of value.
This will come right as the bond market is reaching the point of no return, and the US won’t be able to pay back the debt. A lot of people are going to lose everything, including their retirements during the debt liquidation that is coming.
AI will “stay” in what form? Local models? The companies selling it are almost certainly going to lose their over 100 lawsuits of copyright infringement they’re 100% guilty of. I’m sure local models will be utilized, but not these LLM snake oil salesman’s products anymore.
AI will be in everything you do. The companies that remain after the Bible pops will become the largest companies in America.
it means AI is here to stay
Maybe. Or maybe LLMs will just go tits up. Don’t pretend you can predict the future.
I’m just going oFf history of bubbles. Usually when something becomes a bubble, it becomes a part of life after the correction.
Yes the only thing propping up the USD is the AI bubble. A lot of it is held by non US investors who, in the event of a market crash, would sell dollars to repatriate back home, sending the dollar tanking, which would encourage foreign holders of US Treasuries like Japan to dump them as well. This would force up bond yields and create a US debt crisis.
Or, after a nasty hangover, it’ll free up capital and people that can be put to more socially productive uses.
About time finally
The company I work does pretty basic analysis. Its certainly an “every day” application. It’s been two or three years they’ve been Investing large amounts of money into this, and it can’t do shit. We have been “training” it for faaaaaar longer than it would take to train a human to do these things. Plus, they’ve torn it apart and completely restarted the process at least twice, to my knowledge. Zero efficiencies, very little practical capability. I hear that it’s great at coding and math, I’ve seen it do word processing pretty good, but these assholes oversold it’s capabilities to the managerial class, and they fucking took it. Hook, line, and sinker.
It’s not even that good at coding. It has to be heavily curated and focused to output somewhat “correct” code, it is full of gaps that lead to lots of bugs and missed scopes that a human would bring up if they wrote it themselves, and the output is incredibly verbose and inefficient (and harder for engineers to read).
It’s subpar at everything, there are no areas it shines.
It shines at interpolation. It fails at extrapolation.
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)
Edit: see second comment below from partydisc explaining why the even the lower figure wasn’t well calculated.
they’ve both cut api costs drastically and reduced what the 200 plan got you since that article was slopped together, so not sure how accurate the data is anymore
also the margin percentage includes amortized training costs, which is a crazy thing to just multiply by a different usage value afterwards. the actual cost of one of these plans is far lower
they obviously are still losing money, but that article physically pains me
The article I posted explains why a previously floated estimate of €14,000 was a gross miscalculation and instead claims that the cost to open AI is closer to €4,000 (for a €200 account used to its full capacity).
Which figure(s) are you disagreeing with?
14,000 is high for reasons in the article. 4,000 is high since it flows from the inappropriately applied 70% margin. the actual cost of one new person signing up for a 200 plan and using it to full capacity is much lower. the 70% margin is based on a fixed income of the company, a small operating cost per token, a large fixed cost to the company spread over every token generated, and the api price.
it’s a bit like saying I pay 100 for my car payment, 100 for gas, and drive 200 miles, every month. simple math, cost is 1 per mile (margin is this divided by sale price, then the article multiplies by sale price to cancel it out). if I start driving for a ride share company on top of my normal driving, is it correct to say (ignoring depreciation since none of openai’s assets depreciate based on use) that I only break even if they pay me ≥1 per mile?
spoiler
of course not, you already need the car, cost to you is .5. you only lose .5 per mile doing the thing you’re selling. the rest is operating costs that stay fixed.
it costs the same to have trained the model whether you use your 200 plan or not. we don’t have those numbers for openai. we can’t just multiply the operating costs that have been calculated based on the price and volume of a different product.
you need to account for the car price in profits somewhere, but it’s not increasing based on the usage
EVEN WORSE: that 70% margin is before compute. so it is absolutely meaningless even without trying to convert it back to cost of goods. once you try and convert it back it represents everything but the part that scales with usage lmao. absolute clown article. their citations are just links to home pages of random news sites.
I think I understand now. Good points, thanks for taking the effort to elaborate.
This is the first major real sign of the bubble popping. An actual verified report from the Financial Times regarding massive drop in revenue expectations, rather than just people hoping it pops.
It hasn’t been people hoping. There are quite a few analysis papers out there doing the math of the impossibility of achieving profitability of the current US model. Chinese models offering equivalent performance for 10x lower cost, and near frontier level open weight models to run in house for the cost of the hardware, and this hardware being way more modest, makes the bubble pop a certainty. As with data loss, the question is when, not if.
massive drop in revenue expectations
This is still future predictions.
The pop happens when the bonds cannot be repaid.
On September 21st OpenAIs sponsor, BB+ issuer Softbank, placed an $11 billion single bond sale to fund an AI infrastructure bet, and it was oversubscribed.
The bubble is still inflating.
Sounds like it’s almost bailout time again.
I favor incarceration with no bail.
I favour incineration
Since I haven’t seen it yet in this conversation, I think I need to bring some better context to what this article is claiming.
No, OpenAI did not assume they were making $70 billion. They’ve always known their existing number. In fact, that number IS what was reported to investors.
The $70 billion number is coming from a specific investor that wanted to adjust the definition of revenue to get a more “apples to apples” comparison to Anthropic’s numbers.
When these companies license their models to hypervisors (AWS, Azure, etc), those hypervisors take a cut. OpenAI does not report that cut as revenue. This investor wanted to add it back in to get a “total demand for AI tokens” number.
They are 2 completely different metrics coming from 2 completely different groups.
Are you suggesting that The End is not, in fact, Near? And OpenAI is not about to collapse into bankruptcy, ending the entire AI ecosystem?
Maybe I’ll go out on a limb and say this specific piece of news is not indication of the AI apocalypse. There are still plenty of things to be skeptical of long term, but this itself is not an indication of an inevitable crash.
I wish more people realized AI is not going any where any time soon, regardless of their feelings on it.
I agree, it truly is going nowhere. This tech is exactly as useless and uninspiring as it’s always been.
Is not about AI going away, is about the huge economic problem the current bubble will cause.
It was the recent estimation that hyperscale LLMs need to earn $6 trillion a year to break even. I don’t think governments can afford six trillion for their surveillance states and robot armies.
That is the recent news that harbingers a potential 2026 AI bubble burst.
Open AI has been hemorrhaging money and taking on vast debt for a while. That’s not really news.
Depends in what exactly you mean with AI here. AI as a tech is going to stay, Pandoras box is open and there is no going back now.
The AI companies tho, the actual subject of this post, are going to crash and burn eventually. Not all at the same time and maybe not every single one, but a good portion of them will go down the drain .
That cuts both ways. The hype artists who insist it’s going to become the foundation of all professional services is also bullshitting you.
But yeah, these tech companies aren’t going to just vanish, any more than IBM or Yahoo did in prior downturns.
Totally agree!!
