Here’s the problem… He says AI was adopted beyond his expectations. Great.
But if somebody is using it at the current price point of super cheap or free, are they going to keep using it when it gets expensive?
You can make a basic chatbot run on a desktop PC, but nobody wants to pay for that. Once you get into things with useful generation and large context windows, or things like video generation, suddenly you need one or more $10,000+ pieces of hardware to run it. So the $10 a month you charge the user is basically an introductory price that doesn’t cover your hardware fees let alone the software engineers to build your AI.
Eventually, the bill comes due. Eventually, you have to look at your customers and how much machine time they use each month and how much your r&d costs and figure out what the actual cost to the customer has to be. And then the customer rethinks how useful the AI is or isn’t.
People will pay $10 a month for chat GPT to write their emails. Will they pay $100 a month?
What about the company that replaced all their software developers with AI. Suddenly the AI cost as much or more as the software developers. Only now the developers who understood the code base work for other companies.
There will be a fun correction when this happens.
People will pay $10 a month for chat GPT to write their emails.
They won’t even pay that in many cases but instead rely on the free offerings. Expect those to go away altogether, to be heavily hamstring, or to become absolutely riddled with advertisements.
wow these guys seem to hate it all of a sudden, what changed…
I think those IPOs are meant to bring in enough money to give the founders and managers golden parachutes before the whole system folds.
They don’t make any money - on the contrary - and they won’t miraculously start making it just because the IPO happened.
Come on now, Nvidia is making money. Nvidia then just gives it back to them to make more money is all.
Yeah, Nvidia invests in Open AI, Open AI uses that money to buy Nvidia chips. More people invest in Nvidia because it’s revenue keeps growing.
Charles Ponzi would be proud.
Alan and Beth, two economists are walking through some woods. They come across s pile of shit and Alan says to Beth “if you eat that shot I’ll give you a tenner”
“Okay,” says Beth. She eats the shit and Alan hands her a £10 note
They walk on for a bit and find another pile of shit. Beth says to Alan “now I’ll give you a tenner of you eat that pile of shit”
“Okay,” says Alan. He eats the shit and Beth hands the £10 note back to him
They walk on a bit further and Beth says “you know, it seems to me like we both just ate a pile of shit and nobody gained anything”
“Ah, that’s where you’re wrong,” says Alan “we’ve increased the GDP by £20”
It’s all a scam. If you can max out now, you can rob the index fund investors.
ERROR: Capitalism has no idea how to deal with this situation.
I’m actually kinda fascinated with how this will shake out. This isn’t like one or two companies making a bet. The entire S&P500 is pushing Ai.
Well, here’s hoping a few investors do a flip before they hit the pavement.
This is capitalism working exactly as intended. People with capital are using it to guide businesses to make them more money.
The mistake is thinking that capitalism is motivated by a healthy economy, when the theory is that if everyone is aggressively selfish then the economy will naturally become healthy and efficient.
The people making money are counting on making their money as investors keep pumping more in. The investors are all aiming to be the last one to sell before the crash. Russian roulette venture capitalism. (In some cases they think the economy will tolerate 1-2 companies and they’re aiming to buy a controlling interest in a company worth 2% current value after the correction, and in others they just have so much money that a few billion is a minor bet - BlackRock comes to mind, with more than $10 trillion to invest)
If you look at 2008, we had a similar-ish situation with a major portion of the economy being invested in mortgage based investments.
People only saw the percentage returns and not the human cost. We haven’t learned our lessons and are doomed to repeat the same scenarios.
That’s not nice. Think of the people who clean that pavement.
Wat? Capitalism knows exactly how to deal with this situation. People who still have faith in the companies will keep loaning them money or buying their stock or investing in them in other ways, and people who don’t have that faith will stop doing those things. Eventually each company will either succeed or run out of believers and die. It’s a very common scenario.
edit: answering the people who mentioned bailouts and government loans, as if to invalidate what I’m saying here.
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Bailouts are infrequent special cases where governments intercede when there’s fear that corporate failures might cause widespread unemployment or other economic consequences. The entire AI industry isn’t even in that leage - it currently employs around 25-30,000 people. The largest one (OpenAI) only has about 8000. The largest of them could fail without disrupting their industry. This is nothing like a situation that would spur an industry-wide bailout.
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Same goes for large government loans or loan guarantees. These aren’t handed out like candy whenever anyone asks. The scale of the consequences from company failures simply wouldn’t justify it.
The overwhelmingly likely scenario if AI companies fail is mergers and acquisitions. There’s even a class of investors known as “corporate raiders” who specialize in buying desperate companies and selling off the assets. None of this is new, it’s normal business activity that happens all the time, just part of the ecosystem. Believing AI companies are bulletproof because the government will simply hand them money simply isn’t supported by history. For a counterexample read up on the dotcom bubble of the late 90s, when tens of thousands of web startups went under without getting bailed out.
Yeah, that would be true if there never was a public bailout, or a cheap government loan.
Are you seriously suggesting companies live and die by the free market?? Those poor failing companies need taxpayer bailouts.
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The arc of technology progress since the crash in the early 2000s has been pump and dump scams perpetrated on the entire market.
I would include SpaceX in that category too.
‘At some point you’ve got to make money’
Hey hey hey, now, that’s loser talk. Here, c’mon, let’s snort a ton of coke.
That sounds like something The Wolf of Wall Street would say
Don’t you worry about Wall Street, let ME worry about blank!
Blank? BLANK??! You’re not looking at the big picture!
A lot of people working in finance were not alive when that movie was taking place and like the movie Wall Street the ones who watched it learned all the wrong lessons.
Somebody mentioned today that reddit has been losing money for 17 years.
edit: my bad, apparently they lost money for 17 years before finally turning a profit about a year and a half ago. Anyway the point is that it can take a long time.
The norm for tech companies was to continue to burn cash after IPO for years and years to capture market share and worry about monetization later.
I’m no financial wiz but the Wikipedia says they had half a billion in income on 2.2 billion revenue.
Yeah, it looks like they first turned a profit in 2024, like $25 million and last year it was half a bil. Maybe what I saw was that they lost money for 17 years before that, I dunno.
I want to see everyone hop on the IPOs and ride them all the way down to the floor!
Fuck AI
I think investments, 401Ks and retirement funds will hop on SpaceX and AI and the mass will complain for a bit until the next news cycle.
If I wasn’t convinced the entire financial system was fraudulent I would be shorting the fuck out of all of them
“The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent”
I’m not much of an AI skeptic compared to most on Lemmy. I think the technology is incredibly useful and probably beneficial to society if we can remove the control of the ruling class.
That said I truly don’t understand how the AI business model is supposed to work. I’m sure there is some market for businesses, governments, etc., basically people who have too much money who may want to pay for the latest and greatest models.
But I don’t really see the average consumer doing this when slightly less good versions will almost certainly be available for free. And the above customers will not be able to support the level of investment that’s going on right now.
This isn’t directed at you specifically, but just the broad sentiment that people are coming now OK with AI even though people kinda I guess forgot that like AI stole and ripped all of our information books. Music works of art all of it’s stolen ya know. But I’ll digress it doesn’t matter anymore.
I think it matters. I do think the technology is interesting and useful, but if you create something using AI models based on license violations then what stops someone from taking it? What standing would you have in court to say that it’s yours? Why is the AI model “fair use” but a thing made with it is proprietary? These are things yet to be fully determined, but given that training and running AI is not cheap these companies are building on sand IMO.
But I’ll digress it doesn’t matter anymore.
Exactly. There is no ethical consumption.
The Internet that you’re posting on was built on top of a military network intended to provide redundant communication in the event of a global thermonuclear war. The satellites that provide you with GPS were created in order to more accurately drop bombs and guide armies. The rockets that put them in space exist because of research into methods of delivering nuclear weapons.
Your smartphone likely contains components built by slave labor, you almost certainly consume food products resulting from child labor. Your clothing as well.
The world is built on all manner of immoral things. ‘Stealing’ information (which presupposes the idea that a person can own knowledge, which I disagree with) is incredibly mild.
On top of that, the advances in AI are happening independent of LLMs. The advances in machine learning that made LLMs possible apply to all kinds of different areas that have nothing to do with language, music, or art.
LLMs just happen to be the easiest kind of AI to train because humanity has spent millennia storing language in books and the Internet provides a massive amount of data as well.
The Internet that you’re posting on was built on top of a military network intended to provide redundant communication in the event of a global thermonuclear war.
Responding to this part alone: that’s not actually true.
The intent of arpanet, the direct predecessor to the Internet, was to make it easier for universities to use high powered computer resources located at national laboratories, as well as making it easier to distribute software updates. The person who initially pushed for it’s creation wanted “an electronic commons open to all, 'the main and essential medium of informational interaction for governments, institutions, corporations, and individuals '”. They secured funding for the initial computer science labratories, os research that underpin everything, and the foundation for the “INTERgalactic NETwork”.Arpa was, at the time, the advanced research project agency. They were under the DoD, but they filled a role closer to the NSF today.
In designing the system they referenced work done by people who were studying robust communication networks. At the time that meant the phone system and nuclear weapons. The research, however, was applicable to any unstable network, and so had particular interest to them because computers had terrible reliability and they wanted to not have to call people if they discovered they had turned off a computer halfway between New York and LA.
The closest thing it has to a cold war military objective is to help us win the research race and spite the Soviets. It can withstand a nuclear attack, but that’s just because that’s the easiest way to make it survive a farmer with a backhoe accidentally hitting a wire.
technology is incredibly useful and probably beneficial to society
For what? It’s not reliable enough to actually automate anything and people that use it regularly inevitably stop checking the output and start falling victim to hallucinations. It’s pretty good at rifling through social media posts which I don’t think is good for society and it’s OK as a frontline support system but even that they normally go too far and just make it infuriating
I automate plenty with it, no you cant be an idiot about it but i can do what used to take me weeks in hours with it.
Yeah I think Lenny’s generic take is heavily colored by the absolute morons using it moronically. That’s a large number of people because lots of people are…well, morons. But you can definitely use it in productive ways. Keeping a human in the loop right now I think is very prudent, for cost and reliability reasons, but man does it decrease drudgery in capable hands.
People are scared because they think they could lose their jobs. Even if they say out loud they don’t think it will happen and that they think AI is useless. They need AI to fail for peace of mind.
If anything they’re most at risk for losing their job due to a stubborn refusal to adopt technology. What people don’t realize is that we don’t live in an ideal world where the optimal solution is the only way. Even if LLMs are less than perfect, there’s a scenario where it remains commonplace because it’s what’s in style. The stubborn abstainers will find themselves left behind when everyone else is leveraging it to complete mundane tasks much faster and checking the work.
We already live in a world full of cumbersome enshittified technology. There’s nothing we can do but make do with what we have. At this point people are dreaming if they think the AI bubble will pop and the technology will be shelved. It’s not going away. It’s already demonstrated usefulness. That it’s not turning a profit is a different story.
Maybe some others are simply scared that they don’t have the expertise to check the work of LLMs in the first place.
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It doesn’t need to fully automate anything to make people more productive. And I think there’s ample evidence it can greatly increase productivity in some fields. We’re in the bumpy phase of finding out how much human supervision is needed in each field so you’re bound to hear about ways it has been misused but everyone I’ve talked to who uses it professionally thinks it helps them get a lot more done than without it.
I don’t believe that for a second. Everyone I know that talks about being more productive is just pushing extra work onto more responsible people by making output that looks like work but isn’t sufficient.
It’s not reliable enough to actually automate anything
This is half true. It’s not reliable enough to automate an entire job but it is reliable enough to automate tasks that would otherwise take a lot of time, usually related to sifting or searching data.
If I need to look through a massive set of data like Google for something thst I can only describe with an explanation, the LLM will do a much faster job actually finding what you need rather thsn spending an hour manually sorting through SEO slop.
You don’t even need the cloud models for this, you can slap SearXNG onto a local model at home.
It’s basically just an autocomplete search on steroids which is its biggest advantage. Any documentation you need is immediately accessible, which is especially useful if you have zero experience with something niche or new.
Now actually getting the LLM to consistently generate output is a completely different story lol.
We call that vibe coding.
, usually related to sifting or searching data
No matter the harness, no matter the spell, no matter the model, it is failing me daily in that regard, in my field of expertise. And the failures are random between inconsequential to grandiose.
Heck, the thing it should be doing best - summaries - are constantly either missing the point or focusing on wrong take.
If I need to look through a massive set of data like Google for something thst I can only describe with an explanation, the LLM will do a much faster job actually finding what you need rather thsn spending an hour manually sorting through SEO slop.
You could also use any other search engine since Google intentionally wrecked their search, and use the adblock list that filters out the seo slop. Just as efficient and less glacier melting
How is the technology useful?
For the love of Asimov, someone please explain.
It is useful for programming, I know a lot of people here don’t want to hear that, but denying it now is being willfully ignorant. No it isn’t good enough that you can tell it “just go do the thing” and then accept what it gives you without checking it, but using it as a tool as a professional can very much improve your work and how quickly you do things.
For me recently I used it to unpick a nasty race condition that was occasionally causing a program I was working on to lock up and couldn’t figure out why. It took some back and forth with it but it did help me figure it out when before I had been stumped.
but using it as a tool as a professional can very much improve your work and how quickly you do things.
Maybe it’s just my 20 yoe, but that has so far not been my experience with it. It is improving, but definitely not there yet. Even standard boiler plate I can typically bang out faster than asking the AI to do it and then needing to double check it’s work because it somehow still manages to screw that up occasionally. Sometimes it does manage to be better than one of the juniors, but using it that way also cuts the legs out from under the career development pipeline which will result in an intermediate and senior dev drought down the road.
Even standard boiler plate I can typically bang out faster than asking the AI to do it
The people that claim it helps with boilerplate clearly never took the time to learn how to sed/awk, mustache templates, write a perl/python/etc script, use the regex find/replace in their editor, use the keyboard macro in their editor, use snippets in their editor and I’m sure other ways that aren’t immediately coming to mind that have existed forever and won’t hallucinate. They’re the ones that were not highly skilled in the first place and they’re vexingly successful at convincing newbies and laymen to listen to them about LLMs instead of the actual skilled people that actually know what they’re talking about.
Everyone I work with that uses it is worse at their job than before they started using it, and I’ve lost the ability to teach them how to actually do good work because telling the c-suite they’re 10x now (even though they’re producing only slightly more code and more issues) makes the c-suite happy. I could believe that some people have made small improvements to their workflows but its obvious to anyone competent that it’s not as big as an improvement as they’d have you believe and the vast majority is just people getting addicted to the slot machine, deskilling, and creating inferior output.
I do work in software, and my main focus is on code review, as we work with money, and things have happened due to many factors.
I DO NOT want any more work being done. Fuck that. It’s hard reviewing ‘normal’ amount of code, multiplying it will backfire horrendously.
I do not need people not being able to figure out their bugs. It’s the most important part of the job, and not being able to fix it quickly costs us a lot.
If you need to fix something in a library you don’t understand… maybe you should review it before using? There are situations when it’s not possible, usually in low risk fields, frontends and such, but even then, we (IT in general) produce so much shit for no real gain. And we need LESS of it, not more.
It’s clearly a controversial thing to say on the fediverse, but everyone must realize that AI is another tool - a sometimes faulty, sometimes great tool. A professional can use it well, a careless person can use it carelessly. But it is a tool that can help in certain cases. It’s a nuanced thing, which many people unfortunately have trouble accepting. It has flaws, yes. It also has benefits. This shouldn’t be controversial to say.
That of course doesn’t guarantee that providing that tool must be profitable. It may well be that providing AI models is just too expensive to actually make sense, at least as it is right now.
it’s not useful for programming and it makes code more verbose, poorly structured, and requires too many attempts to get a mildly useful block.
poorly structured,
yes, that’s bad
requires too many attempts to get a mildly useful block.
yes, that’s bad
more verbose,
How is that bad? I can’t count how many times I’ve revisited my work a year or more later, and wondered what I was thinking, having taken 2 minutes to parse something dense that I wrote, and then thought “why didn’t I make this a little clearer at the time?”
More verbose does not imply that is is more clear, it is often rambling and not even accurate.
correct. it’s long winded code that could be written a lot more succinctly.
rambling and not even accurate
Ah yes, that makes sense; thank you.
If you don’t understand why AI is going to be akin to a failed industrial revolution, maybe give this scenario a read. Here a think tank has written a forcast on how AI will potentially unfold and influence the global future.
Is that a forecast or fanfic?
They worked on it in stages—starting with early ideas up to mid-2025, then continuing to build from there. But instead of sticking with that first draft, they threw it out and started over from scratch.
They also didn’t settle on just one ending. After finishing their first version (the one marked in red), they created a second, more hopeful outcome starting from roughly the same point. That version also went through several rounds of revisions.
And this wasn’t made up out of nowhere—it was based on about 25 tabletop exercises and feedback from over 100 people, including dozens of experts who work directly in AI governance and AI technical fields.
including dozens of experts who work directly in AI governance and AI technical fields.
All of those people are fucking clowns and you know it. They’re these morons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalist_community
I didn’t know it and although the read was interesting to me I didn’t immediately make the connection, no divisiveness intended on my behalf. Disregard the post if you like, we are all free to listen to eachother’s point of views, then arrive at our own conclusions .
The business model should be that with economies of scale they could provide compute much cheaper than average consumer can buy to run locally. So yeah, that means they gotta be able to support these $20/mo plans indefinitely.
If they jack up the prices i can just buy a 128gb ryzen ai machine for the price of $200/mo claude for a year. I supposed there’s some room there --they could charge $50/mo and it still makes sense.
but even at $100/mo i can buy a machine to run it at home do a 24 month payment plan and come out ahead.
I’m not an expert but my understanding is most of the computation is in the training. The actual queries are not too difficult to manage. So I think that’s what makes it more difficult to monetize because you’re trying to position yourself as a digital gatekeeper for work that has already been done. Yes, some industries have survived in this position but it limits the amount of profit you can make because there are always ways to copy someone else’s homework. So if prices are too high people will opt out because they have other options even if they’re slightly less quality or convenience.
Probably the least controversial take on the threadiverse but i stumpled upon Ed Zitrons Blog like maybe two years ago. I’ve read a few posts of him since then and i just watch the shitshow unfold tbh. Its not that i 100% believe in his predictions. But he has made his point. I’m just an average fuck. I dont know shit. But it was so far the most believable and backed up assessment of the current AI situation.
I make barely enough money to afford my rent in bumfuck europe. How the fuck am i more informed about AI then some CEO? WTF.
- replacing human workers is their fondest dream so they want to believe so hard
- they have FOMO “everyone else is doing it and I don’t want to lose out”
- everyone else is doing it and if they didn’t do it and were wrong, it would be worse for their reputation than following the pack and being wrong
- c suite types talk to each other and they’ve formed an echo chamber
In summary, CEOs (of large public companies anyway - your mom and pop plumber could also be a CEO) are not smarter than the average person. Just more amoral and having the connections to be CEOs
The last 2 bullets are so damn true. And trying to argue that is just pointless. So I’ve shifted to the money part of it and have asked “how are you preparing for the bubble to burst?” and back it up with that data.
It’s not that you’re more informed. It’s simply that you have to worry about consequences of mismanaging money where a CEO… well, hasn’t.
so if they actually find a way to get offered it would make sense to short the fuck out of them, right?
or…would it be the opposite because the market is clearly broken?
No matter what choice you make as a small investor, it’s the wrong one. Brokers and market makers make sure of it.
Currently reading Enshittification.
AI will make money, it’s currently in the make users happy stage which is the least profitable but most important lock in stage.
Stage two comes post IPO when they shift value from users to businesses. They will start printing lots of money at this point.
Stage 3 is where they start to squeeze everyone to their own benefit and start generating cash to the moon and everyone bemoans how they miss the old days of answers without product hints or other nonsense and husinesses miss the old days when they could do anything on top of AI that could make a profit.
Don’t worry, it’s coming, AI stocks are going to drop post IPO because of a surplus of hype and cash but mid to long term they will go crazy high as stage 2 and 3 come online.
This has happened so many times with new tech, it will happen again. Don’t bet against it.
they havnt been making money since 19-'23, if they havnt made any in that timeframe they wont make any now. especially since openai has been operating for the last 10 years.
Will it? The cloud models have to fight with the cost of third parties hosting Deepseek and other open weight models.
AI will make money, it’s currently in the make users happy stage which is the least profitable but most important lock in stage.
Stage two comes post IPO when they shift value from users to businesses. They will start printing lots of money at this point.
The problem is, they’re starting to run out of real money. They’re having to start jacking rates up already, before the IPO stage. They thought it would monetize more than it has, and they didn’t have enough runway to make it to stage 2 before they started enshittifying.
The thing is they’re currently trying to sell as a business oriented tool. They’re not going to make money off of individuals.
Google is positioned to come closest because they’re already an advertising company.If you think their focus isn’t businesses then you’re not paying attention to their strategy. The pressure to drive profitability is increasing as their business customers are reporting that investment in AI capabilities isn’t converting into measurable financial returns. That’s the type of news that makes investors wary.
If you operate at a loss, you need to be providing a value to your customers that you can leverage. You need more than high interest, you also need demonstrable utility.
There have also been plenty of times that a new technology just … Didn’t pan out. This specifically happens with AI technology, and we even have a term for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter The tech won’t go away, it’ll just be market infeasible for a while until it’s no longer called AI and is just a feature in some other product.
Take your comment and apply it to someone marketing “spell check as a service”.
Or they don’t make it to stage 3. There’s no reason they are guaranteed to succeed. I’m not saying that is what I expect to happen but it feel weird to me that this is so matter of fact
Though they’re should always be people in support of stuff to succeed so I don’t blame you. But there are a lot of tech solutions that didn’t make practical sense in a global revolution kinda way. Think of all the hype around VR just a few years ago.
