"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.
The whole AI bubble is just one big bet: "AGI is around the corner and will replace all white collar jobs"
Now, LLMs get slowly better but aren't AGI and it's unclear if our current approach is even capable of reaching AGI.
Sadly the US went 'all-in' on the bet and everyone except the ultra rich will feel the pain.
The lack of progress is one thing.
The value for money is another: AI companies are still burning through vast sums of capital, while users are indeed using the products more and more... but still nowhere near at a price that would even cover the companies’ costs, let alone be profitable. If each token costs a few dollars, demand is likely to shrink significantly again... because as long as the systems operate stochastically and, logically, produce erroneous results, it may take a very large number of tokens to obtain a result that’s actually usable (this is especially true when using AI to replace workers whose tasks and skills you actually have no clue about).
AGI will never happen with LLMs, but if you think in terms of a human brain out can be effective language and output and image recognition module. But there's no there there. Something else entirely is needed for true thought and sentience. But llm ai is already sufficient to translate machine thought into language sentences. You just need the spark of life that can actually think for itself.
Best thing about this whole AI bubble is that the mask is off and everyone can see. The rich will dump us in a instant.
So even if the bet materializes, we lose. If it doesn't, we also lose because the economy implodes. Fun times.
Don't worry, they'll use your taxes to make it profitable. Then, when AI can do your job by being trained by your data, they'll fire you and throw you to the curb and suddenly start talking about sustainability and the issue of overpopulation.
If they were at all serious about AGI there would be less focus on ever-improving the dead end of LLMs on that. They just want employers to think they can pay robots less than their workers, full stop.
No shit, Sherlock!
thats rich coming from the IMF.
DUH. The Great Depression of 1929, and it took the world economy, and it fomented into World War.
Yeah the "business" tycoons do that every decade or so. Some busts are bigger than others. Not much any of us can do about it unless we tax the hell out of corps and wealthy so that they can't build enough self serving shit to then dump the economy once they've scraped as much money as they can in the current cycle.
I'm convinced at this point the goal is to just not use money. Why do we have to be tied to this shitty fiat currency that isn't directly tied to physical worth?
Yep, that's the point at which people will recommend gold (which I've never trusted, either) or real estate so you're not homeless when everything goes poof.
if the promised profits fail to materialize.
What profits? Nobody has money to spend and llm companies lose money on $200/mo subscriptions.
The economy isnt going anywhere its just going into a recession again, nothing you havent seen before if you were born before the Bush administration.
COVID took the global economy with it.
Losing AI would be like... I don't even know, insignificantly small compared to that.
If AI up and disappeared tomorrow when I clocked into work, it might actually make my job easier. I could be even more productive without having the slop floodgates open every day.
The problem is not the "losing of AI", it's the loss of human and physical resources that went into AI and will ultimatelly yield little or no Economic value when they could have been gone into productive Economic activities.
The human part is similar to COVID - people's time that could have been used in Economically productive activities was lost and will never come back - however the AI bubble differs in that actual physical resources have been wasted (mainly building and equiping datacenters) whilst during COVID fewer physical resources were used (mainly in vaccines and PPE).
Also the AI bubble is mostly concentrated in the US, whilst COVID was global, which means that the damage of it blowing up will probably be worse in the US, whilst that of COVID was much more diffused.
But the really big things is not even the AI bubble blowing up per-se - it's that there are other bubbles which are ready to blow (such as realestate Worldwide and auto-loans in the US) plus a worldwide Oil crisis caused by America's war against Iran, so the Economic shock of the AI bubble blowing will be amplified by the latter and will likely make the former blow up, almost certainly adding up to even more damage that the 2000 and 2008 Crashes (possibly as much as both put together).
COVID was a slowdown of Economic productivity, this shit will probably be the Find Out stages all on top of each other of years of Fuck Around misallocating resources in multiple Economic domains.
Then we riot.
Buffett Index: total stock valuation vs. GDP
1928: 130%
2007: 130%
2025: 220%
Now guess where most of that stock growth and GDP came from? I'll give ya three guesses, but you're only going to need one.
Propane and propane accessories?
unexpectedly good churro sales?
The Legend of the Whopperito™?
I can't believe it's not salsa?
Yeah, well I warned them, but did they listen?
Burn it all down!!! Shits not sustainable nor stable for 90% of the world population!!! Burn it all down, tech dweebs!
It’s not just sustainability. Dicks who think they can rule the world need a reminder of thier mortality.
Good.
If so, the technobros did this. The technobros should receive most of the consequences. There should be dire consequences but we all know who will receive most of that. The system is broken.
That's why the techbros made sure to buy the politicians.
This will be like 208-2012 but this time around it's the techbros businesses which will be deemed "Too big to fail" and get saved with public money and the central bank printing money to buy their bonds, whilst everybody else pays for it with Austerity.
you will have to dish out those consequences otherwise it won't happen.
Sorry. The techbros will get bailouts. Its the pensioners that will starve.
*Techbros
in a sane world. in this world, where the system is working as intended, tech bros will reap rewards at our expense. hopefully the working class response will be of a scale commensurate with the scale of the injustice.
I'll stand with you! ✊
Could????
Find out by tuning into the next season of The Economy!
TBH I don't see how it could take anything with it. The money invested will still exist except for interest on loans and unrealized gains which don't actually exist because of overvaluation.
This isnt like the mortgage crisis. Anybody who gets fucked over by this crash deserves it.
2 exceptions to what you said.
The money loaned still exists, you're right. Trouble is it's not in the AI companies anymore. It's been spent. It's gone through them out to other companies (like Nvidia, MS Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, etc).
"Greedy shitbag tech bros pushed it. Greedy shitbag investors threw every penny at it. So whoops, the whole world is held hostage. Sorry fuckos, you, John and Jane public, are going to pay to save the global economy. Greedy fucksticks aren't allowed to lose."
...can't wait.
🤞🤞🤞
don't stop, i'm so close
The economy as it stands is a house of cards built on promises no one keeps but enough people believe.
I have never claimed to be an expert on anything but the moment you let the fate of something rest on the guess of how much it will cost if everything goes the way you think it will, when the other half of the room hope it goes the other way seems mad.