Discussion
Reminder that EVERYTHING Anthropic or OpenAI announce in public is propaganda designed to boost their market cap when they hit the IPO they're aiming for.
It's marketing, folks. There is no intelligence behind the artifice, it's just spicy autocomplete and hucksters in $5000 suits trying to pick your boss's pocket.
https://mastodon.social/@arstechnica/115548040527129225
@cstross Plus most people in the world are literally evaluating this thing based on vibes and what the rich & powerful are saying. They don’t know enough and can’t learn fast enough.
Then there’s the issue of job insecurity as a threat that’s skewing their response towards anxiety about their jobs. Silicon Valley exploits this anxiety 250%
Grand Theft Autocorrect would have been a better term that LLM or GenAI 😉
Since the 1990s every tech wave has been a pump and dump bubble laying the groundwork for the next pump and dump bubble. The staggering inefficiency of such a Ponzi economy, channelling capital into mega-billionaires pockets instead of productive growth is why China is rolling out 400 kph mag lev trains while we are shoveling brain dead software into toasters.
@cstross not sure how I feel about the fact that "hey this thing we made is incredibly dangerous & can steal from you all on its own!" is regarded as a VALUE PROPOSITION.
@cstross Someone posted a financial podcast the other day in which they believe OpenAI is likely to IPO in '26 or '27 based on the state of their finances. I'd say that is about right, and I'd also suggest that OpenAI or Anthropic IPO'ing will be the beginning of the AI bubble bursting: the 'wizard' will no longer be able to hide behind the curtain.
While it absolutely is marketing - in some situations it also is an effective tool. When used by a skilled operator, a *good* AI (something very large and recent) can increase coding speed significantly - I can do in a day what would have taken me a week. The hackers are using it too, and it's effective, and that's a real problem in computer security.
But for human/creative stuff, especially with an unskilled user? Yeah it's a joke. And for unskilled technical folks it can actually be a negative, leading you down unproductive paths. And yes they're built on theft. A bazillion problems.
But: AI is not entirely useless. Dismiss it at your peril.
@cstross AI in general. Companies like Amazon are mowing down employees and saying it's because of AI. It's not because of AI. It's because they want to fuck with their workforce for some reason. Amazon has a lot of open positions. They say it's because of AI because they want to create the illusion that AI is far more advanced than it is, and that it's already eliminating 10s of 1000s of workers.
So you better get onboard.
The bubble is going to burst. It will have a wide blast zone, but I don't think it will be as devastating as the dot-com bubble burst.
@arrrg I think the blast zone this time will be worse: the dot-com boom put a *lot* of dark fibre in the ground, and it got used over the next decade or two. Whereas current-generation Nvidia GPUs are obsolete in 5 years, and the ones in LLM data centres run hot and begin to fail after 2-3 years.
@cstross @arrrg Consider the difference in size of the tech industry in 2000/2001 and today, and its place in our economy today versus 2000/2001. It's going to be so much worse.
When the dot-com bubble burst, it was a much smaller percentage of the overall economy/workforce/whatever. That bubble had built up for a few years, its impact was fairly contained. When this bubble pops it will take plenty of people's retirement accounts/401Ks with it. It will lead to a bloodbath of layoffs, which are going to cascade through the economy.
The silver lining, if there is one, is that maybe this bubble will burst and kill off some of the mega-datacenters that are be consuming water and pumping more pollution into the environment, as well as the ones in planning stages now.
I mean, I hope I'm wrong -- because I am envisioning a pretty dark outcome.
@cstross @arrrg There's little plausible other purpose for them, either, other than reclaiming the raw materials once the LLM related uses stop because the bubble bursts, they become obsolete or burn out. You can't stick them in a box and game with them. They're not really GPUs.
In financial terms, I've heard that about 4x as much money is tied up in these companies which have zero plausible routes to profitability than in the Dotcom bubble.
@cstross Just another mechanical turk
@cstross
Don't look behind the curtain.
Ignore that guy.
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, 1900
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age
A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, 1995.
The AI was fake.
@cstross I mean, you have right to have your opinions as all of us, but saying that AI is "autocomplete… is too much. An autocomplete would never suggest new names, new implementation and architectural ideas, and so on, and so forth. Yes, it's not "intelligence" as we perceive our own intelligence, but not autocomplete either.
@menelion It's autocomplete on whole paragraph scale, not whole word scale.
@cstross agreed. tho I do think its funny that much (but not all) of what CEOs do seems like it could be done much more cheaply by a well-trained LLM
@synlogic4242 I speculate that CEOs are so gung-ho on LLMs to replace jobs because they have a gut recognition that LLMs can replace *their* jobs, and they don't fundamentally understand that key workers are not doing the same things they've been taught to value (because they get paid a bundle to do them).
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