Can #AI companies become profitable?
https://epoch.ai/gradient-updates/can-ai-companies-become-profitable
Yes, in the same way plantations were.
[…] When executives are threatening to replace your job with AI tools, they are implicitly threatening to replace you with stolen data and the labor of overworked, traumatized workers making a tiny fraction of your salary.
— Bender, Emily M., and Alex Hanna. The AI Con: How to Fight Back Against the Tech Robber Barons.
The gross margin calculation treats some human workforce as basically zero. Kenyan workers paid under $2/day to label child sexual abuse material and gore, workers whose families “fell apart” and who became unrecognizable to their loved ones “after only five months of this work,” working for companies that cynically “profit from catastrophe by chasing economic crises” in Venezuela, Kenya, and Uganda.
Epoch AI’s $1.2 billion “staff compensation” figure only counts OpenAI’s 3,000-4,000 direct US employees earning $150,000-$685,000 (average $310,000), completely excluding the hundreds of thousands of outsourced data workers in Kenya, Venezuela, and Uganda earning under $2/day.
But it’s not just labor of course that’s stolen or under valued. If you paid data workers fair wages ($2-3 billion), compensated for trauma (hundreds of millions), licensed the stolen content legally ($15-20 billion), and accounted for environmental destruction (another billion+), OpenAI’s real numbers would show catastrophic losses. The “profitability” only exists through the same accounting trick slaveholders used, where you just don’t count certain humans as deserving to be counted.
Under the U.S. Constitution (Article I, Section 2), three-fifths of the enslaved population was counted for purposes of congressional representation and taxation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_and_the_United_States_Constitution Enslaved people appeared on balance sheets as “property” with monetary value - dehumanized, but at least acknowledged. As far as I can tell, in Epoch AI’s analysis they’re not.
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