AI could be used to save our planet from catastrophic climate change, to problem solve ways to improve things, to do hard labor so that people don’t have to… but nah let’s use it to make assholes with too much money get more money! That’s fantastic
They didn’t listen to the scientists.
Somehow I think AI would go from “Super Intelligence” to “that libtard tree hugging computer made of parts from commie Chy-na” as soon as it told them to do something legit that would inconvenience them or disagree with their narrative.
“more clear that the real future of AI is small language and open-weight models running on local desktop computers” So where are we with those smaller models? I haven’t been following them. Are they any good?
The lobster is out, read the room. You’re seeing articles of people stating local models are the future in tandem with hardware companies stating prices will go up for hardware and shortages will remain. This is a classic double tap from behind. It’s done. There were some good applications to it, which will continue. But overall it’s a toddler dropping their ice cream cone on the ground.
Please let it happen. Please! Hopefully datacentres gets demolished also or turned into puppy orphanages.
Some datacenters could be repurposed as traditional datacenters focused on networking and cloud storage, infrastructure.
Look, none of use should be cheering for a full on pop of the buble. It will hurt all industries. And we know the oligarchy has insulated themselves in ways that will ensure they feel very little pain. It will be all the workers who will feel it. As for data centers, I don’t think we need the bubble to burst to fight that. Lots of jurisdictions are already banning them. That is what we should be cheering for.
While I am not cheering for the bubble to pop, the longer it goes on the worse it will be so the sooner it happens the better.
I dunno. The market affect is mostly perception. I mean why should unrelated stocks suffer when AI companies fall, yet they do. So I don’t think the length of time actually impacts the severity of the crash. But I’m no economist. That’s more of a “I don’t see why”, rather than a “no it won’t”
The main issue is that increasingly AI companies are making up a big portion of index funds which are required by law to be purchased by mutual fund managers and thus part of retirement accounts, so value will be evaporated out of retirees accounts. The larger the bubble the more the impact.
Also note that the only reason the US is not in recession right now is due to AI market “growth” so the GDP correction that follows will cause companies who have invested in the technology (not just AI companies, but most of the Fortune 500) to contract. The fallout will be unpredictable, but the most likely scenario is layoffs. Further, the Fed will be reluctant to cut interest rates, because inflation is extremely high due to tariffs, so the one lever the government has to stave off the recession has been compromised by the current administration. So the recession will be deeper and worse with a longer recovery than it would otherwise have.So why care? Because grandma’s retirement will disappear, a bunch of people will be laid off and the levers available to mitigate the impact have already been pulled. Oh and inflation will get worse when our government bails out AI tech bros to the tune of $1T.
The funniest part is that the thing that could actually make AI useful at scale might be what wrecks the investment thesis: cheap, local, open weight models. Wall Street funded a trillion dollar server farm to discover that sometimes the answer is a smaller model running on your laptop. The technology might win while the investors lose. Nevertheless, companies such as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft – as well as Nvidia and AMD – are a very long way from simply going under.
Hope the fuckers all burn.
investing in the wrong future
I’m assuming they mean “future” in the same way the stock market (ab)uses the word, because AI had its lower ribs removed on day one. There’s no future there.
We’ve basically got to wait for Anthropic and OpenAI to actually IPO before any of this can get started properly. Once there’s a public expectation for profit from the two biggest AI labs, then the market will start acting against them. We can hope, at least.
Once there’s a public expectation for profit from the two biggest AI labs
I don’t think that it’s necessarily the order things will go.
Anthropic and OpenAI have bills to pay, including obligations to pay a ton of money to partners/vendors in the coming years. They need cash to do that. And the cash can come from 3 main places: revenue from customers, loans from lenders (usually in the form of issuing bonds), and issuing new stock/equity to raise funds.
The IPOs are basically their last chance to raise funds by issuing new equity. Even if each of them raise $100 billion, that’s probably not enough to hit self sustaining profitability. As lenders start to get more skeptical, in a macroeconomic environment with high interest rates and high energy prices, they start to run into a very real possibility that they hit illiquidity issues, even if their core business model actually works by then (and I don’t think it will). There’s just not enough runway for them, even in the most optimistic long term projections.
