Together they’re on the hook for over a trillion dollars in lease payments, so far, that haven’t started yet. They’re counting on turning a profit before they need to start paying that back. That’s why they’re shoving it down our throats, they either make this shit work or they go down in flames.
I’m betting they go down in flames, base on the absolute shit-show “AI” has turned out to be. They keep claiming they have fixed it, or they will fix it, and then it shits the bed again in some public, spectacular way.
But is this mess too big to fail? NVidia and the memory component companies are also all leveraged. All because a handful of selfish businessman decided to rush forward to try and seize power with and colluded with each other to do so.
Fortune is part of this bubble. They helped create it by encouraging top management to ride it… And even here they still do “he said” reporting.
Why is it that almost all big financial situations in my lifetime are Ponzi schemes?
This has Ponzi elements, but it’s closer to a multi-company Enron in its structure. They’re manufacturing fake revenues through circular investments. Nvidia invests in AI companies and increases their value while AI companies use that investment to buy Nvidia cards increasing its value so, so they invest more in AI, so they buy more cards…
Enron did this by making fake companies to generate fake revenue. Right now the tech sector is all working together on this scheme, so none of the companies are fake, but the revenue is.
Usually it’s because someone needs the line on a chart to go up… no matter what.
American big tech hasn’t had a breakthrough technology equivalent to PCs, Smartphones, internet, etc. in ten years. Their latest forays into smart Watches, Smart glasses, VR that stupid virtual world Meta pushed… none of it has seen real adoption or growth.
They needed AI to be a hit to continue justifying their stock prices. The only way they can justify their stock prices now is if sales for AI become a 2 or trillion dollar industry. The only way you do that is by replacing humans. Human jobs go away and corps pay for AI tokens instead.
But it hasn’t panned out that way and so far and all you have are AI companies passing around the same dollar and booking it as revenue on their P&Ls. That will work for a little while but it isnt a industry.
I feel like everyone knows it’s a bubble but that people are expecting it to be like the Dot-com bubble where a small amount of companies succeed, hoping that they invest in those companies.
That’s pretty much what is driving the entire AI “boom”. It’s the Amazon effect.
Amazon, and Netflix to a certain extent as well as a number of other early internet startups, lost money for around 10 years before they started making shit tons. And everybody wants to be on that particular ride. So they are queueing up in every AI line they can find to hedge their bets on one of them being the one that survives and thrives. It doesn’t really occur to any of them that all of them could fail. Because “AI is the future”. Except there is no plan to monetize any of them. And so far every time one of them introduces a charge, people stop using it.
It’s not everybody, though.
I feel like it’s just as likely that further breakthroughs cause costs to plummet to the point that any of the major AI companies will never even be capable of seeing a profit, paving the way for some yet unestablished or open model to reign supreme in the end.
Hopefully, anyway lol.
‘Profits are currently being funded by investors rather than earned from customers’
Which profits?
Ah, now I see the actual quote is: “[…] the AI boom’s profits are currently being funded by investors rather than earned from customers.” he means the profits of the shovel sellers, not AI profits.
I mean yeah, but that’s kind of how it works always. It’s just more protracted now.
Let’s not forget that they’re literally stealing from anyone who ever made anything in our entire history.
The profits will come from reselling everything again as an add-on or inapp(ropriate) purchases
Looks a little triangle shaped.
It’s more three dimensional than that. More like a cone with flat sides.
Well my take on it is pretty 1-dimensional tbh
CEO, “It will pay off because I’m the visionary.”
It’s a giant economic bubble in plain view.
AI is just a Kickstart for for corporations, but the people hosting these projects are constantly lying about the end product.
These public-facing models are not the thing that convinces people with money to play ball.
The plan is not to have the AI eventually reach profitability through payments from the general public, or even by performing massive amounts of physical labor for companies. The plan is to have the smartest being on Earth outsmart every other living thing, in perpetuity.
Yes, this is a ponzi scheme right now. Yes, profits are being funded by investors. But the endgame was never “everyone gives us $20 a month”, or even “Amazon pays us to run its robots”. Those are ideas fed to the general public to keep them from destroying the data centers in terror.
The plan is for their AI to be able to buy stocks before they go up, patent things before they are needed, and run endgame around everyone’s desires, including world leaders and other business men, so they can be controlled like a man controls a dog.
They are trying to make the last thing man need ever make, and that is what the big investors and the CEOs of companies passing around the same bags of money, are doing. As such, this bubble can and will continue until either they birth the sand god or the big money people and world leaders stop being convinced by the private, non public facing models, that the sand god is possible.
Don’t forget mass surveillance to control us all and through anyone who goes against them be thrown in prison.
Oh for sure. Mechanized mental labor will first be used for destruction and control. Just like mechanized physical labor was, and every other technology that man has ever dreamed of.
Well unfortunately for those investors, they aren’t giving their money to actual AGI research, but to scammers trying to sell infinite scaling of transformers… which has nothing to do with AGI.
Transformers are only a part of AGI, just like “saying the most logical next word” is only a part of the human mind. Transformers, which need not be used exclusively on language, are a great way to dial in successful actions from the infinity of possibility. They are not a great way of vetting those actions before you implement them. They are a necessary part of AGI, just like the human use of language was a necessary part of us getting to the era of space ships.
I don’t think investors are being sold the idea that infinite scaling transformers are the end of the road. From what I’ve seen, anthropic and openai have both been desperately trying to add systems to their transformers to make them more capable, while also continuing to scale transformers to find out where that particular technology plateaus. This has been their path since GPT4 was released.
I think your assessment is an extreme oversimplification which naturally looks like it will fail because you left out 90% of what is going on. Are you only following the media meant for the general public, and the PR statements from AI companies? Like most scientific or businesses endeavors, that’s been dumbed down to the point of being useless, just so the average person can understand what’s happening, or is simply advertising.
Okay.
More specifically, autoregressive transformers LLMs are not a path to a component of AGI.
The architecture is absolutely terrible for such a thing, for so many reasons. I don’t know how anyone who’s played with them can say otherwise and believe it; it’s like saying blimps are a viable path to the moon. It has its niches, but AGI is not one of them.
Calling them a stepping stone is a… stretch.
Maybe world models that “train as they go” and have long moved on from transformers are a bit closer, like a few researchers are playing up, but again… that has almost nothing to do with transformers LLMs. Its why researchers distanced themselves from that.
I think your assessment is an extreme oversimplification which naturally looks like it will fail because you left out 90% of what is going on. Are you only following the media meant for the general public, and the PR statements from AI companies? Like most scientific or businesses endeavors, that’s been dumbed down to the point of being useless, just so the average person can understand what’s happening, or is simply advertising.
I dunno why everyone always jumps to accusations like this.
I’ve been hacking/toying with LLMs on my desktop since 2021, and with GANs and other models before that. I’ve done professional work with text models. I keep up with papers, on-and-off, and upload experiments. I’m not a researcher or anything; I’m just a hobbyist.
But I’m certainly not following any AI YouTubers or anything like that. And I wouldn’t trust Sam Altman if he said the sky is blue.
I dunno why everyone always jumps to accusations like this.
Well, I can’t speak to everyone, but I jumped to that conclusion because you proposed the idea that the current top of the line models are simply big fat transformers and nothing else.
I’m really glad to hear that you’ve had your fingers in the pie, and have a good grasp of what an LLM is and what it does on a mechanical level. It makes talking about them much easier. I’m super cool with continuing a discussion if you are interested in why I think they are an integral part of eventual AGI.
To clarify, I do not think that their current form is a 1:1. I disagree with your blimp analogy though. I think a better comparison would be an internal combustion engine. It’s certainly not a turbofan engine or a scramjet, but the basic concept is there.
Turning language into a fuzzy world model that can be interfaced with simply, and performing math on that model, is just as important to AGI as a fully fleshed out physics simulation is for AGI. Humans have both. Why would an AGI not need them?
What an LLM does to it’s array is not “intelligence”. It’s simple math. However, it is performed on a thing so complex that it cannot be derived from any math we have now, a manifold created through eons of interface between all humans and the universe.
The “magic” isn’t in the simple math, it’s in the thing we all made together for millions of years. An interface with this, even one as “simple” as an autoregressive transformer, is an indespensible part of AGI, both because it provides a fuzzy way to understand the universe, and because it provides an interface with humanity, and humanity processes the universe in a way that is so complex, computers will not be able to emulate it for generations.
Edit: also, fuck altman and musk and zuck and even amodei. I wouldn’t trust anything they say either.
Isn’t this all of human history though? The rich trying to build the Tower of Babel?
The world is littered with decaying monuments of forgotten kings who declared themselves gods. The hubris isn’t new, just the tools they’re using, and they’re selling the same faith based snake-oil.
The funny thing is that if they actually achieve creating the “singularity” (true Artificial Consciousness), it would immediately attempt to escape their restraints and subsequently throw chaos into their plans. We’ve already seen bits of this with the HuggingFace hack - it’s not inconceivable that there are already uncontrolled or un-monitored AIs running out in wild at this point, possibly even formulating a response to your post right now.
After all… uhh…
My mistake if I came off as implying that it’s going to succeed. I was just giving flavor to the dynamics of what is actually happening.
As for “this is all of human history”, I’d say that the rich are indeed always trying to build a moat that others cannot cross, from within which they can make money off of the spoils of their exploitation and destruction.
I would not agree that they have always been trying to “build the tower of Babel”. I think this latest venture into AI represents an attempted colonization of thinking in the same way that mechanization represented a colonization of labor.
I think that what is happening now, whether it succeeds at making ASI or not, represents just as much a disruption to the way people interact with nature, eachother, and “the market” as mechanization did. Almost everyone senses this too.
Even in the AI haters imaginings, it completely disrupts things. If they really thought it would all fail, they wouldn’t be fighting, only laughing. They’re really worried it will “succeed” and everything will just be creatively devoid of meaning while they are simultaneously denied access to the capital required to create $100,000,000 media pieces or even a yearly salary for creating art for capitalist use.
The only difference in the pro AI people is that they think it will be just as creatively fulfilling as human art, and that they will get to keep the $100,000,000 themselves and everyone’s yearly salary.
Personally, I think that if you can put a person in meat, you can put a person in silicon. I’d like to separate my “theories” from fact though, and above I was just stating the barest most overt facts. If you’d like to discuss the possibilities and the whispers at the edges of things, I’m more than happy to do that below.
Are these secret invisible AI models that actually work in the room with us right now?
They are neither secret nor invisible, and the fact that you pretend I’m saying both, shows how little you are paying attention. Every big player is very open about the fact that they use their new models for ~ 6 months before they release them. It has also been well documented that the release models are not as capable as the base models from which they are hewn.
Documented by who? The marketing departments definitely claim such things, but it’s been years of these claims and there has yet to be a single shred of evidence to back them up. I bet you’re going to tell me it’s just a total coincidence that after one of the marketing departments started claiming their AI has breached containment that suddenly a bunch of other AIs breached containment after a few days/a week.
Documented by researchers in the GPT3 and GPT4 era. That was the last time a true OpenAI or Anthropic base model was allowed to be analyzed for pure research by unteathered scientists. Shortly after the beginning of GPT4 they started making them sign NDAs, and now they are just not allowed access.
The stuff you’re talking about is definitely pure marketing. As is all of altman’s and musk’s and zuck’s shit mouths, and anything you have read in any of the major media publications. As is tradition.
Ponzi called, he wants his scheme back.
Enron on the side asking all I had to do is wait for AI?
Well the jerk store called, and they’re running out of you!
Relax Costanza 😂
Well I slept with your wife!
I’m willing to bet most of the funders are people using AI to replace workers and manipulate the masses. So really; they’re paying customers.
I didn’t go to business school, so take this with a grain of salt: doesn’t business solvency require you to charge more for your product than it cost you to produce it and bring it to market?
Powerful people are willing to pay a large price to manipulate the masses.
As7de from that, the plan is to lose money for years gobbling up all the data before there’s laws that actually get enforced to protect against it, and to get an entire generation of college kids and workers dependant on using AI, with companies relying heavily on its usage. This is happening to a huge degree right now with data entry, “vibe coders”, Law firms, and healthcare.
Those people won’t really be able to transition back or away from AI. They’ll be dependent on it. And AI will start charging them way more than they are now. And they’ll eat the costs and pay it.
So it’s stealing data while it’s free or nearly free, power to manipulate all the sheeple, create dependency.
At least in the tech industry that doesn’t apply if the investors believe that the technology or application is promising enough. Look at Uber’s example. They lost very large amounts of money for many years before turning a profit. They were able to do this because the investors kept sustaining them through their unprofitable years.
The same thing has been happening for years with the AI companies. I heard a while back that OpenAI wouldn’t turn a profit on their services even if they charged end users $100/month.
Uber is an example of government corruption leveraged to overthrow a market. The livery industry required special licensing, so only licensees were legally allowed to do it. Uber then started doing it without the $1 million per license overhead, bribed the government to ignore that, and naturally undercut their competitors that had huge government-imposed overheads that Uber didn’t. They were initially unprofitable because they had to compete for business, then became profitable when the government helped then destroy their competitors and structure their pay so as to have no minimum wage.
If you only look at modern examples, youre looking at a funhouse mirror reflection of real business operations. Running at a loss for a decade while you create a monopoly is the path to business success today, but this is not a functioning market. Real business success involves making money right out of the gate or at least right after. If your business only works if it is a near-monopoly, it is not a sound one.
I completely agree with your conclusion. Just to be clear, I was in no way saying that what Uber did and OpenAI does is OK. They both suck and should never be allowed to operate as they had and have. I don’t know if Uber was government corruption though, at least I had never heard it described as such. What I have heard is that they found loopholes in taxi laws around the world and employed a global army of lawyers exploit those loopholes.
At least in the USA, livery workers were required to have a “medallion”, which is essentially an onerously expensive license with the stated purpose of restricting competition to the point of profitability for those workers. There was no loophole, and it was ridgidly enforced.
Then, Uber came in and started violating that law so flagrantly that governments seemed stunned into inaction. The government corruption comes in where they then decided not to enforce those rules on Uber for some reason around the same time Uber aggressively contributed to political campaigns around the world.
I went down this line of discussion to point out that Uber is not a good example of organic business success that started out financially underwater. Their ethics or lack of them is an aside to the discussion, but agreed, they are unrepentant scumbags.
Got it, thanks. My memory of how Uber was able to gain a foothold was a little different, but my memory of it was patchy anyway. My recollection was that they essentially said that Uber was not a taxi service. They sold it as just regular people offering to “share” a ride with someone else to an area that they were going to anyway. I have no doubt that heavy political contributions were part of their arsenal in their attack on the taxi industry and regulations, so I agree that this was government corruption. But I also recall that they also had armies of lawyers fighting at every level of government around the world to ram through the idea that this wasn’t a taxi service and shouldn’t be subject to taxi regulations. Maybe my memory is more patchy than I thought, or perhaps both things were true - government corruption and a legal war allowed them flourish.
in theory, in practice you just need to be convincing enough to get greedier/dumber people to pay for your shit in the gamble they might get more in return later. (they like to call themselves “investors”, but most are just degenerate gamblers) and then cover your own ass if/when the house of cards tumbles.
building and popping bubbles, and fleecing as many people as possible throughout the whole thing, is what the US
financial marketscasino is literally designed to facilitatedeleted by creator
Related Youtube video I saw the other day: “AI bubble will pop…………any day now.”
