Is the AI Conveyor Belt of Capital About to Stop? (gizmodo.com)
from return2ozma@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world on 13 Oct 23:14
https://lemmy.world/post/37312953

#technology

threaded - newest

NaibofTabr@infosec.pub on 13 Oct 23:27 next collapse

Look I’m ready to see people come to their senses about this “AI” crap, but the answer is no.

neukenindekeuken@sh.itjust.works on 14 Oct 21:55 collapse

First thing I thought of after reading it.

Is Betteridge’s law ever wrong?

No.

individual@toast.ooo on 14 Oct 04:06 next collapse

no.

Inucune@lemmy.world on 14 Oct 04:24 collapse

Any article that asks a yes/no question is always ‘no.’

individual@toast.ooo on 15 Oct 02:34 collapse

ah, that makes sense

ToastedRavioli@midwest.social on 14 Oct 10:20 next collapse

I could care less about the immediate “no” answer to the clickbait headline, but the real question posited by the article is “when is it going to stop, since it is clear that this is all hype and nothing more?”

How does one short this clearly impending financial disaster? Assuming that realistically it cannot go on forever, and that when it crashes it doesnt take the entire world economy with it. Although that is surely possible as well, in which case shorting anything would be a waste of time. But seriously, I dont see how more and more on wall street arent taking aim at the biggest hype bubble the world has ever seen

Also, secondly, why the fuck is Ted Cruz on stage in this photo?

teft@piefed.social on 14 Oct 13:31 next collapse

Just remember, the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. Unless you happen to be a billionaire.

poopkins@lemmy.world on 15 Oct 11:06 collapse

So you care a little bit about the clickbait headline? What an odd way of expressing that.

melfie@lemy.lol on 14 Oct 13:18 next collapse

Nvidia announced that it would invest $100 billion into OpenAI, OpenAI announced that it would pay $300 billion to Oracle for computing power, and Oracle announced it would buy $40 billion worth of chips from Nvidia.

I can’t help but feel like we both just ate shit for nothing." “That’s not true”, responded the second economist. “We increased the GDP by $200!”

Except the way it actually works is Larry, Jensen, and Sam keep the money while the rest of us eat shit.

scarabic@lemmy.world on 15 Oct 17:42 collapse

Is anyone going to talk about how the amounts don’t remotely match up? If you just cancel them all out, you still get Open AI buying $160 billion in Oracle compute.

shalafi@lemmy.world on 14 Oct 20:33 next collapse

For those of you cheering for the AI bubble to pop…

AI investments now accounts for about 40% of the United States’ GDP growth in 2025, and AI companies are responsible for 80% of growth in American stocks.

…are you not scared shitless?

This is not the dotcom bust, and it’s far fucking worse than the 2008 housing crisis. And to think when I was young the Savings and Loan crisis was a big deal. We’re on the edge of Great Depression 2.0.

Reygle@lemmy.world on 14 Oct 21:38 next collapse

I personally prefer to rip off the band aid than let it stink and get it infected. I’m scared for the time remaining before the pop. This shit is intolerable. Let it “pop”. Let it burn.

hotdogcharmer@lemmy.zip on 14 Oct 21:42 next collapse

We’re fucked. No point being scared of something we have no control over. A few rich men will come out of this ahead, and the rest of us will fight over the scraps, lose our homes, and starve. 🤷‍♂️

WizardofFrobozz@lemmy.ca on 15 Oct 07:59 collapse

You have control, you just refuse to risk your lifestyle by exercising it.

hotdogcharmer@lemmy.zip on 17 Oct 12:11 collapse

Oh true, lemme just saddle up and fix the US economy myself 👍

captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works on 14 Oct 22:20 next collapse

What? For my third once-in-a-lifetime economic crisis? There’s no way this isn’t going to suck. We’re all doomed no matter what.

shalafi@lemmy.world on 15 Oct 02:25 collapse

You have no clue what “doomed” means if you think what’s coming compares to anything since the Great Depression and WWII.

captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works on 15 Oct 02:27 next collapse

There weren’t any nuclear weapons on earth in 1930.

bigfondue@lemmy.world on 15 Oct 10:49 collapse

The current leadership in the US is, uh, less than equipped to handle day to day functions, let alone a real crisis. It will be quite bad.

Jhex@lemmy.world on 14 Oct 23:25 next collapse

…are you not scared shitless?

the longer the bubble keeps going, the worse it will be… those of us convinced this is already a massive bubble believe the best time for it to pop was yesterday, the next best time is right now

SlartyBartFast@sh.itjust.works on 15 Oct 10:38 next collapse

Just like the real estate market!

bigfondue@lemmy.world on 15 Oct 10:47 collapse

Yea, the best thing for bubbles is to pop early and often before they start snowballing. These companies have negative net revenue and are burning billions. The tech is neat, but I don’t think text generators are going to completely revolutionize industries the way the industry is presenting them. NVIDIA giving OpenAI money to give to Oracle to give back to NVIDIA just screams house of cards.

Soup@lemmy.world on 15 Oct 01:00 next collapse

Oh no, we won’t be able to afford houses or rent or save for retirement or- hang on just a second…

Wait, we already can’t do those things, and the last thing I want to do is, once again, validate the existence of people I would prefer to see in little pieces scattered all over the street for all the pain and suffering they’ve caused just to get a little more money on top of their billions.

shalafi@lemmy.world on 15 Oct 02:22 collapse

Guessing you have no idea what the Great Depression was like. My parents grew up in it.

Great Depression: 30% unemployment

2008 crisis: 4.2% economic contraction

If you think modern America is bad now, boy oh boy, you’re about to get an education on how bad it can really get.

gian@lemmy.grys.it on 15 Oct 06:34 next collapse

You are right, but you are comparing apples with oranges here, what was the Great Depression economy contraction ? Or what was the unemployment rates in 2008 ?

druidjaidan@lemmy.world on 15 Oct 07:07 collapse

Unemployment around the 2008 crisis peaked around 10%.

You’re delusional if you think the 2008 recession remotely compares to the impact of the great depression. You just have 0 frame of reference to compare. I say that as part of the most impacted group: I was just getting out of college when that crashed and it killed my job opportunities.

gian@lemmy.grys.it on 15 Oct 07:37 collapse

I don’t think it, I was only pointing out that he was comparing two different things.

I know that there is no way the two events have a compatible frame of reference but that does not means that you can compare the two values.

Soup@lemmy.world on 15 Oct 12:32 collapse

Ok? And this is relevant how? I’m Canadian, so pretty tied to the US’s bullshit at the moment, but damn where’s this US bravery I keep hearing so much about?

Deflection isn’t going to solve your problems.

noughtnaut@lemmy.world on 15 Oct 06:07 next collapse

Serious question: what if I am, and have no idea how to prep for it?

My pension and other things are tied up in stocks and such, if there’s a crash coming I’d think cash under the pillow would be better than stocks. But how do you do that, with your pension?

3abas@lemmy.world on 15 Oct 06:57 collapse

I moved the majority of my 401k allocations to international markets and have stopped contributing more than the match minimum. I’ve lost on some serious short term gains but I’m not risking holding the bag with my kid’s future.

gian@lemmy.grys.it on 15 Oct 06:32 next collapse

It would be interesting to know how many resources this growth has taken from others places…

As for now it don’t seems that AI has generated a profit for the companies that bring it to the market and it seems it will not do it even in the near future, so I assume the question is: how many years can your economy be sustained by a sector that is not generating any revenue and is absorbing a monstrous amount of resources ?

We are not talking about a single company (like Amazon back at the time), do you really think that even when Ai will start (if ever) to generate profits these will be able to repay all the investements done today ?

SaraTonin@lemmy.world on 15 Oct 10:01 next collapse

FWIW, part of the OpenAI investment process is signing something to say that you understand that you’re unlikely to get any return on your investment and that you consider it more akin to a donation

gian@lemmy.grys.it on 15 Oct 10:47 collapse

I would think that this warning, in a way or another, is true in every kind of investment, even my bank’s personal investment have something like it.

SaraTonin@lemmy.world on 15 Oct 11:12 collapse

Not framed like that. You have to acknowledge that investments can depreciate rather than appreciate and that you may lose your money, sure. That’s very different to saying that you acknowledge that you probably will lose your money and that you consider your investment a donation.

gian@lemmy.grys.it on 15 Oct 13:36 collapse

I think that this is just a technical difference based on what you are investing into.
A personal bank’s investement is a different thing than a investement in a startup, with different level of risks and revenue.

SaraTonin@lemmy.world on 15 Oct 13:58 collapse

VCs typically want a return on their investments

gian@lemmy.grys.it on 15 Oct 14:42 collapse

With a bank investement I get something back, even if less than what I invested. Could OpenAI pay back even half of what received ?

Which send us back to the starting point: what will happen when the VCs will start to ask for their money back or for their share of the revenue ? Inevitably the bubble will pop.

SaraTonin@lemmy.world on 15 Oct 16:03 collapse

At the moment OpenAI can’t pay back anything, becuase they’re hemmorhaging money. Losing billions a year. And there’s no path to profitability.

That’s why they make investors confirm that they’re considering their investments a donation. That’s also why it’s unusual.

It’s not unusual for the opening phases of big tech companies to be “operate at a massive loss until the competition has gone out of business”, as companies like Netflix and Uber can attest, but it is unusual for that to be done where the investors aren’t expecting to make a profit.

humanspiral@lemmy.ca on 15 Oct 14:03 collapse

do you really think that even when Ai will start (if ever) to generate profits these will be able to repay all the investements done today

First, actual investments that have been done are relatively modest. It’s still a substantial portion of TSMC fab capacity. All of the deal announcements for datacenters are 50x-100x growth. I doubt all of this capacity will be built for a long time. Coding/reasoning models can have more demand, but openAI (most of the deal announcements) is not that good at those. 100x power growth is also 200x every 2 years token output growth, and if models get better, users need less tokens by getting it right on fewer tries.

Second, they are losing money at current levels. Oracle leaked it lost $100m on existing AI datacenter operating losses. Coreweave is fully levered at 10% interest rates. Everyone is operating like social media startups from 10-20 years ago. Only revenue growth and market share, and being cool, matters. Enshittification will come much later.

Third, datacenters are fundamentally flawed, and local AI has competitive advantage to them. AI is good at datamining the datacenter traffic for output that could be profitable to steal.

Fourth, the only business model is US military and disinformation control. They will pay infinitity, and support infinity investment. Giant datacenters are about Skynet. Not market profits. That US government would protect their oligarch partners in stealing your ideas/llm outputs, and amplify current media’s messaging that anti-genocide views are treasonous anti-American sentiment.

how many resources this growth has taken from others places…

If all the money goes towards skynet, energy bills for everyone else will go up, including what little manufacturers there are in US. Insisting on war on China and Russia is helped by forced unemployment, and fascist response to the unemployed’s uppityness. Datacenter AI’s primary certain value is as a new cold war Arms and disinformation race.

Kolanaki@pawb.social on 15 Oct 07:02 next collapse

Are you not scared shitless?

No.

I’m too fucking stupid.

Squizzy@lemmy.world on 15 Oct 14:26 next collapse

The best thing about this shit show is el spastico’s trade war having readied other countries for hard times and pushed them to diversify and make new trade deals. The US deserves its suffering completely, and now they will drag the world down less when they shit the bed.

RagingRobot@lemmy.world on 15 Oct 14:40 collapse

I think you should only be scared if you own AI stocks and I would guess not a whole lot of common people can even afford to invest in stock. Let those rich idiots lose their money. Maybe they will learn a lesson

yakko@feddit.uk on 15 Oct 14:51 collapse

Unfortunately, stocks tend to move in sympathy with each other due to various factors, such as large ETFs and algorithmic trading. Natural price action is kind of broken at the moment.

Zink@programming.dev on 15 Oct 15:20 collapse

Absolutely, plus since index funds are cap weighted, ordinary retirement fund investing folks are very much vulnerable to it.

If I pull up VTSAX (vanguard total stock market index fund) what I find is…

Sectors: Technology is 38% of the fund and I see 11 sectors listed.

Top 10equity holdings, in order from the top:

NVDA MSFT AAPL AMZN META AVGO (Broadcom) GOOGL TSLA GOOG BRK.B (Almost like its own index fund)

This is fine!!

Reygle@lemmy.world on 15 Oct 15:08 next collapse

reads title of article
Verbally said “god I hope so.”

Then I read the article, and now I’m just thinking I hope it all burns immediately. I want to see the data center fires from my house.

return2ozma@lemmy.world on 15 Oct 16:28 collapse

Have you seen this?

youtu.be/zkGk_A4noxI

Reygle@lemmy.world on 15 Oct 16:42 collapse

I’m at work right now but holy @#%^ that’s one hell of a title. I’ll be sure to check it out when I can.

HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org on 15 Oct 16:55 next collapse

On the other side of the deal, OpenAI will have to pay about $60 billion per year to fit the bill for the agreement. It currently generates about $10 billion in revenue, which, statistically speaking, is less than $60 billion.

ok.

BackgrndNoize@lemmy.world on 15 Oct 16:56 next collapse

Are brown shoes like a fashion thing among these people, kind strange that in the photo they all have brown shoes

BanMe@lemmy.world on 15 Oct 17:56 collapse

The powerbrokers have gotten into fashion trends, they absolutely do shit like this.

HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org on 15 Oct 17:02 next collapse

The company’s development and expansion of its services will rely in no small part on massive data center projects, which will require the same amount of energy to operate as New York City and San Diego combined—energy that currently isn’t even available.

In that case, there is a little but fundamental problem. It is based on basic physics: You can fake securities or earnings, or you can print money. But you can’t fake energy because that violates the laws of physics.

BanMe@lemmy.world on 15 Oct 17:54 collapse

What if we turned off all the poor people’s power nation-wide, would that be enough?

altphoto@lemmy.today on 15 Oct 17:16 next collapse

Why are politicians fat? Nobody respects fat politicians do they? Outside people respect sexy toned politicians.

I don’t know, should we vote the fat ones out just to try it? Wait, would that make us all fatzists? Or weightzists? I’m at the restroom and felt that I had to bring it up since we’re thinning down our country’s defences. Relevant.

sarcasm I’m fat too.

scarabic@lemmy.world on 15 Oct 17:38 next collapse

I’ll just offer some facts as a counterpoint to the prevailing narrative here.

My employer, a major multinational tech company, is pushing AI use internally so hard it hurts. After studying it they announced it was saving our software engineers about 4 hours a week net, or half a day. Thats as of now with adoption still growing and new tools being explored constantly. Half a day weekly is 10% of our software engineering budget which is a large number, and the company will without a doubt pay a significant sum to continue getting that benefit to get more out of their staff, who are their biggest cost of doing business.

I live in the dissonance between, on the one hand, the narrative in places like Lemmy that AI is shit and doesn’t do anything right and these companies have no monetization plan, and on the other hand, seeing it dramatically change my enterprise workplace and provide real value.

Yes engineers are confirming to my very own ears that they are using AI tools and they have their uses and save them time and toil. For example, we had one version update to push through hundreds of teams all with disparate front end code, and it was not possible to just script the update for them all because custom integration work would always be needed, but we did come up with a prompt that could use a set of documentation and entity mappings to accomplish the update in under a minute with a high rate of success. This is just how things are staring to get done. It hasn’t replaced engineers, but it is fast becoming one of their most powerful tools.

1984@lemmy.today on 15 Oct 19:18 collapse

Lemmy users dont know shit about how Ai is used. Most are probably still in school. :) My experience is the same as yours - companies are pushing for Ai because it allows employees to work faster and get more done. Significantly so.

I can ask it to create a script to do a task that would have taken hours or days to put together. Things like that are major wins and very, very easy to do.

I frequently ask it to compare tools as well, saving days or weeks of work. Whoever says this technology is not useful is just not using it right.

That being said, making money from this is the question. Companies are subscribing their employees to this stuff, so I think revenue is going to go way up in the coming years, not just from buying chips, but from companies paying for Ai models for their employees.

Any company still doing manual work is gonna be much much slower than the others.

scarabic@lemmy.world on 15 Oct 23:29 collapse

I think the Lemmy perception of AI boils down to just a few things:

  1. but it hallucinates!
  2. I hate tech bros
  3. but the MIT report!

Of course there’s more, like underlying fear of losing jobs, stealing from artists, and being dehumanized in general.

I happen to care a lot about those things too, but ranting on about 1-3 doesn’t actually help and is just people repeating each others points in a circle jerk. Meanwhile AI is on the move.

phoenixz@lemmy.ca on 16 Oct 01:02 collapse

If so, what will the next bubble be? Because there is always a next bubble standing ready to go! Virtualization bubble, cloud bubble, container bubble, web 3.0 bubble, bitcoin bubble, block chain bubble, AI bubble… We’ve had a few over the past 20 years