Who knew that spending billions of dollars to put a cognitive shit generator into every corner of the world was a bad investment?
Fuck AI
"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
I agree, but this isn't that shoe falling yet.
This is a bunch of people that don't have experience assuming everything will work and lots of little things not coming together derailing all this stuff. No water, inadequate power, a lack of some local contractors, a disgruntled community, some permitting problem. Any one of these problems surprising them and many many millions of dollars of stuff suddenly in limbo....
Lots of people with more sense than money, unfortunately.
They have perfect sense. The problem is they simply have too much money. Tech monopolists have already maxed out their markets, but their corporate valuations depend on endless explosive growth. So they need to always be chasing the next big thing. They need to find new world changing products, or at least been seen as on the path to such products.
They really don't have any good places to invest all their money. What good investments does Zuckerberg really have to throw his profits at? Facebook and Instagram really don't have a lot of growth potential anymore. The market is tapped out. So instead Zuck throws his billions at long shot projects like LLMs and the Metaverse. He's at the point where the only investment left to him is to buy lottery tickets.
What good investments does Zuckerberg really have to throw his profits at?
He could throw billions at a sad vr waiting room that nobody wants.
Ok, so they bought billions of dollars of ram/storage, to put inside servers that haven't been bought yet, to put inside data centers that haven't been built yet, in order to run AI that doesn't work yet, in order to chase profits that are impossible to achieve.
And now, despite driving ram prices up to absurd prices, you've begun to realize the same thing all of us knew from before day one. NOBODY WANTS THIS SHIT!!!
CEOs want it, and will fire anyone who looks like they do not. Also anyone who actually gives it to them, or does not give it to them. Does this make sense now? 🤯
Yup and this is all going according to plan.
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Corner the Market
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Raise prices
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Sell High - The bubble will not burst until they're ready to leave us holding the bag. The burst will be triggered by the sell off.
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Buy low - All these assets will be liquidated during bankruptcy for pennies on the dollar; to the same shareholders as before.
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Rinse
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Repeat
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Fuck you (and me)
You forgot to throw a couple bailouts in there and some regulatory capture mandating AI slop in you cars or something for "safety."
I agree with you completely, but,
I wouldn't say "no one wants this" though. The oligarchs have poured in billions and bought off every media company to constantly spout off about ai companies so your general normie thinks its "the future". Almost every single (normie) person I know (except 1 who is anti AI, and he's a geek) is using some form of slopbot for tons of things. Easy excel formulas (that anyone can do), turning pictures black and white (that literally any photo program has been able to do for 30+ years) , to summarize documents (because people are idiots now and have no reading comprehension) etc. The normies LOVE it and eat up the slop. Especially if they were stupid at computers before, now they think they're on the level of woz because they told a chatbot to make slop code.
The company I'm in can't go 3 seconds without bringing up "ai innovation" and "being future ready".
Its only here on Lemmy that people dislike it. The rest of the world is already addicted, and we are screwed.
I've seen quite a few people who make casual use of it. The key point is that it is currently free to them. As soon as it starts costing money, a lot will bail on it.
Several people I know have decided to already start paying for it.
Nowhere near the actual cost, however. Estimates range from $5 to $10 compute cost for every $1 compute revenue for LLMbecile subscriptions.
Will the people using a $20 subscription now be copacetic with a $200 one (needed for the slopmongers to just break even)? Somehow ... I don't think so. $20 is still in the realm of 'mad money' spending for the middle class. $200 is not.
GREAT counterpoint.
The only people who are excited for AI are twitter users and rich people. It's not just in Lemmy.
None of that RAM (or the GPUs) have been purchased. All that is just letters of intent or even flimsier agreements, there’s no contracts or actual money changing hands.
Doesn't matter, they've captured the entire supply chain which was their goal.
This is not about AGI... its about monopolizing the future of computing.
All that is just letters of intent or even flimsier agreements, there’s no contracts or actual money changing hands.
Not quite. So while none of it has been made the pre-production, procurement, scheduling machine time, that is what's going to make retooling to make consumer RAM take forever. TSMC or whomever can't just flip a switch and produce a different product. It takes weeks to months to change over production that complicated. Money will change hands, work has already been done and agreed upon.
Fucking Ed Zitron stated very loudly and very clearly for basically the last year that this was happening or would happen.
He "scooped" all of this by actually running the numbers, talking to sources, and not acting as a middle part of a human centipede for AI news and hype.
Ed and his colleague Robert Evans are on the precipice of being the Cassandra’s of our era
Here in Springfield IL we just had a city meeting.
4 hours long. They let anyone talk who wanted to. And you could even go twice (with 2 min limits ).
I really respected that.
Most counsel is Republican. Which is concerning.
We did manage to get them to table the vote after it came to light that the water they were planning on using is slated to come from a local lake that is already in the deficit (waterly lake).
And that they filed the wrong zoning. They filed it as agriculture.
But want to hear something super shitty. ?
About 1/5 of the people there ,(packed house with people standing) were from local unions in support of the data center.
These data center fuckers have been going to local unions and telling them how it's going to give them all jobs and all this b.s.
And a lot of speakers mentioned how low it was for the billionaire companies to turn our union members against their own communities.
There was only like 5 of them that spoke and they honestly sounded like selfish pricks.
One guy said the centers were going up rather we liked it or not so why not get the money.
Another said he didn't care if AI made other people lose their jobs because his job was more important.
Another idiot , in response to an example of a previous company who left asbestos that needed cleaned up, that the city had to pay for said "I worked on that clean up and it was good money".
Yeah. Really did not help their image. I was super disappointed in them.
They really think these data center companies are their buddy.
Also. Sangamon county can't provide the power they need. So they were planning on putting like 50 diesel generators that would run 24/7.
I can't believe the council members were ready to allow this.
Someone there also said the company had been threatening to sue council members if they didn't pass it. The speaker reminder them that we would sue them if they did. And investigate their finances like others are doing already in other cities with these awful data centers.
Not a data center, but this sounds very reminiscent of a fight I was in the middle of in 2024-2025. If you've heard of Coney Island, a vulture capitalist named Thor Equities was seeking to demolish the heart of it to build a casino, at the same time as two other casino proposals in NYC. Naturally, they pissed off entire artist communities. We railed against it, we attended every 4 hour community hearing, and we were eventually able to convince them to vote against it.
But at the same time, Thor Equities was literally bussing in people and paying them to feign support for the casino. They would show up in coach busses with matching tshirts and talk endlessly about the magical "job creation". It felt like an episode of Parks and Rec
It's dystopian that they can do this shit.
You would have thought the Union guys might have asked how many jobs the data center was going to create. As from what I can see it's a handful.
AI crash wen.
Bubble pop when song end

good news, and good for the environment.

Good. Let them all die
Wish it was all of em!
Do not let perfect be the enemy of good
good
Gee it's almost like the shit that tells you to roast your turkey at 375c isn't ready for prime time.
Yes, you're right! You can roast your Turkey at 3750 degrees Celsius to make it nice and crispy in 5 minutes instead of the usual, significantly longer time.
Would you like me to give you a foolproof 5 minute turkey recipe?
You're absolutely correct! Roasting your turkey at 11242217175 Cm/s will have you drooling in just 0.000000000000001764889392582815 seconds per meter of turkey! That's a savings of 2.855703037924800e17%!