@cstross I wish they should focus on America need remodel fixing important than shit AI!

@cstross

I'm not sure #SEC of last few decades would have ever investigated this kind of #Investment #capitalism. Company #Stock #buybacks have became a major #marketplace #engine without any real scrutiny.

@cstross
Imagine if they had to pay for their training materials too!

@cstross

Bubble's gonna burst? Please let me know when. I would send you a lovely gift of thanks.

@cstross I wonder if part of the thinking of people like Sam Altman is that **1) **All those data centers are being built with other people's money. **2) **When the bubble does burst, all that hardware is available for other uses. Open AI then competes with AWS, Azure, Google Cloud. Waste not, want not.

@cstross Ain’t no way OpenAI is gonna 10x it’s revenue in four years to pay off those $100bn checks it’s been writing lately.

No way it’s going to make 8x alone what the whole industry makes today by 2030. No fucking way.

The company is pulling numbers out of a hat.

@cstross
The AI bubble bursting can't happen soon enough. That it's lasted this long is a testament to human gullibility.

@cstross Can't come soon enough for me, maybe then I can quit fielding bullsh&t AI projects and get on with my job. Except I just *know* governments will bail the losers out at taxpayer expense again and we'll all be more f&^ked. Feeling cynical today 😠

@cstross watching this whole bubble play out just as genuine smart people had predicted.

How much, time, money and energy have we as a species wasted on this hustle? Is crap like this the Great Filter?!

@cstross You can (or at least some Swiss researchers could around 2012) identify the US firms which are "made guys" by building an influence graph; the empire grants some (by no means all, but some) firms disproportionate influence, and careful analysis finds them.

Enron collapsing was such a shock because Enron was made; it was as surprising as a rich man going to jail. It's plausible the Bush fils administration dropped the ball on Enron because they had no idea.

The current admin, well.

@cstross AI isn't even a bubble. It's a scam to increase energy demands by adding extra processing power to every click. Scraping data that we don't need. Generating content that we don't need. Adding an unnecessary middleman to every query.

Fossil fuel lobbies dumped a ton of cash into these firms to get them to create/implement/adopt this garbage into their infrastructure to drive up the "demand" for energy. Now they use that fugazi to charge everyone more for their electric bill.

@cstross How much of this became concrete in the form of data-centre ownership, that would retain value? I'm hoping a lot, so the bubble just springs a leak (;-))

@cstross how on earth can anyone think a valuation of over 100 times the revenue make any sense ?!?!? This whole thing seems to be just riding on greater fool theory...

@cstross that's a lot more revenue than I would have expected, frankly.

@cstross It's feeling more like a race these days. Better, smaller LLMs, consumer grade hardware starting to appear which can run local models, the plateau of LLMs being reached and these companies going bust or being sued into non-existence. I hope local is good enough by then, I suspect it'll converge on a hybrid model with local and cloud.