It’s going to be a bigger bubble than the dot com one.
Yet they are too strapped for cash for raises or to not lay off workers.
Love that the pic associated with that link is Mark “Metaverse” Zuckerberg. A hallmark of successful dubious ventures, if any.
Imagine what we could have achieved globally if we had spent all that money on a different cause.
We could have managed to establish a colony on Mars, or perhaps we could have even finished developing Star Citizen.
Let’s be honest here, in reality, it would just made 5 people turbo rich while the rest stayed the same. Maybe make 4 more ships in star citizen, but that’s it.
Those numbers seem odd to me. I feel like the truth is 1 billion was spent on productive programmers and hardware. The small remainder of 154 billion was used to improvise profit growth through totally valid payment to some CEOs ego account.
Nobody seems to have noticed that the business model here is to funnel as much traffic and spend to the big AI corporations as possible with no foreseeable return (except vague nonsense about “productivity gains”).
Just wait until someone requires one of these things to make a profit, that’s when if you’re a corporation that integrated this shit deeply into your business, you’ll be covered top to bottom in rug burn from the inevitable rug pull of price increases.
All for it to fail and implode on its own weight.
Already starting to, at least for smaller companies and startups that were trying to use it to build things end to end.
If you use it to provide you with content, sure, easy no worries. building a website? sure no problem as long as it doesn’t require any sort of logins or security stuff. an application? well now you’re going to have some problems.
Most AI can’t scale something. and most are absolutely horrible at any sort of security. and all of them can’t UX themselves out a wet paper bag.
Now if you utilize them as a tool, a sort of rubber duck, sure they’re great. The issue is, and I’m seeing this first hand because of my job, is that many smaller companies and start ups aren’t doing that. They’re assigning someone, a “vibe coder”, to feed the thing prompts to build stuff from end to end. Naturally the end product is an insanely resource heavy, convoluted code, exploitable mess that can’t scale. It creates a massive amount of tech debt. All to save a couple grand instead of hiring actual devs. So now when I get a call or email from one of my contacts that “so and so’s company/start up needs someone to clean up their app because it’s very broken due to a vibe coder” I charge them an arm and a leg.
So you’re right, it is going to fail and implode on it’s own weight but I’m going to damn well be sure to take advantage of these people before it completely does and I encourage other freelance/consultant developers to do the same.
Could I ever pay you to help refine my coding ability? I need to talk it out with someone. My adhd makes reading things difficult.
The hype for AI is ridiculous:
https://fortune.com/2025/02/19/hp-humane-deal-ai-pin-shutting-down/
They see Meta paying $200 mil or more to get a single employee and think about half that is a steal for a whole team of failed AI centric people
I definitely hope so, like it will with dotcom bubble. If the bubble burst delays the rise of killer robots, then I am all for another economic recession!
Chatgpt, what is sunken cost fallacy and why are rich people so profoundly stupid?
This is not that. They’re all hoping to be the next Google or FaceBook. They know damned well most are going to lose. The gamble is that they won’t be the one holding the bag when the bubble pops.
This is as high stakes as tech gets today.
Just a few hundred billion more and I’m sure that somebody will figure out a profitable use for AI that isn’t scamming old people.
It’s porn.
It’s always porn that decides if a technology lives or dies.
I can imagine one - maintaining adversarial interop with proprietary systems. Like a self-adjusting connector for Facebook for some multi-protocol chat client. Or if there’s going to be a Usenet-like system with global identities of users and posts, a mapping of Facebook to that. Siloed services don’t expose identifiers and are not indexed, but that’s with our current possibilities. People do use them and do know with whom they are interacting, so it’s possible to make an AI-assisted scraper that would expose Facebook like a newsgroup to that.
Ah. Profitable. I dunno.
This comment is underrated.
Make the internet ‘net’ again.
I’m more about separation of addressing data and data model from addressing services and service model for storing and processing it, to make those uniform, because in uniformity lies efficiency and redundancy and ability to switch service models, and uniformity inside proprietary services is already achieved, so in this case uniformity works for the people.
I mean, that’s probably what you meant, I’m being this specific to fight my own distractions and fuzziness of thought.
Anyone remember the dot-com bubble?
I’m honestly hoping for a repeat. Hopefully Microsoft goes down this time too, since they’re heavily into AI. Twitter, Meta, Google and Amazon too. It’s really just the worst of the worst.
This makes the dot-com bubble look like a kiddie pool - at least those companies were trying to build actual products, while today’s AI spending is burning through more money than the GDP of most countries just to have the biggest model with no clear path to profitability beyond “trust us bro”.
They’re different, and I think this one has the capability of being more devastating.
The dot-com bubble was really broad. Hundreds or thousands of companies, all without vowels in their names trying to break new ground. A wild west style gold rush. When it popped a lot of small companies went bankrupt.
This is a handful of companies with billions of capital buying GPUs from NVidia to be make the largest hungriest machine they can. All in the pursuit of being first to create “AGI”. If one of them succeeds, the others are toast and multiple 500+B dollar companies will collapse in on themselves. If none of it works, the same thing happens and it takes a large chunk out of $4T Nvidia too.
This is no revelation. THEY KNOW. The play is obvious.
Not one these investors wants to risk missing out on being the next Google or FaceBook or Twitter or Amazon. They know damned well the vast majority will fail. They’re gambling on not being the one left holding the bag.
AI is here to stay, will continue to improve, and there will be a killer app, probably a dozen. My money is on life sciences, particularly medicine.
It’s the most inefficient technology but praised as the most efficient because it simply runs on investor money. But that well will run dry eventually and who will bear the cost then? Consumers without jobs?
I think Meta’s AI initiative doesn’t run on investor money since they do share buybacks instead of selling more shares to keep afloat. Meta makes more than a hundred billion of revenue from selling ads on Facebook and Instagram. So Meta’s AI program runs on boomers clicking on ads that have been generated with AI.
Unimaginable amounts of money spent just to provide a free service to help improve the human race by sharing knowledge. Such marvellous gentlemen.
Spend it all and fail
I hate these fucking articles. That’s how it works with every new tech/industry etc. Everyone spends billions and billions hoping it becomes profitable 10-20 years from now, maybe it does maybe it doesn’t, we can’t know but that’s how this shit has always and will always work for basically every new tech or research that happens.
Maybe complain about countries not taxing corporations enough, but not how new industries and technologies are funded.
Not these kind of figures. Only a quarter of countries have annual GDPs larger than what’s been spent so far this year. This is on a scale not seen before.
What makes it worse is that it’s being spent on something which consumes huge resources and has no purpose except giving a few people more power as they would control what these systems would say is true.
That just shows that some parts of the economy have far too much money. And it’s all going to nvidia
Transatlantic telegraph, I think, was very expensive, or Panama channel projects. Before they were finished to any useful degree.
In this particular case - I don’t think it’s more expensive than Soviet attempts at turning Kazakh steppe into agricultural land, let alone all the space and defense projects.
It’s an ideology-driven effort all right - an idea that you can create an inherently totalitarian technology. Probably caused by the popular (in the 90s and early 00s) belief that the Internet is inherently anti-totalitarian, so there’s a need to compensate. Both are wrong.
I think there was an inherent demand behind those examples though. Just the number of lives lost looking for the northwest passage showed how useful the Panama canal would be.
You’re also comparing government spending in a lot of those cases Vs private capital. That fact shows how much power has shifted in the world already.
Well, in the Soviet example everything was government.
And governments seem to be so excited by the prospects of this “AI” so it’s pretty clear that it’s still their desire most of all.
EDIT: On telegraph and Panama you are right (btw, it’s bloody weird that where it sounds like canal in my language it’s usually channel in English, but in the particular case of Panama it’s not), but they might perceive this as a similarly important direction. Remember how in 20s and 30s “colonization of space” was dreamed about with new settlements supporting new power bases, mining for resources and growing on Mars and Venus, FTL travel to Sirius, all that. There are some very cool things in Soviet stagnation - those pictures of the future lived longer than in the West against scientific knowledge. So, back to the subject, - “AI” they want to reach is the thing that will allow to generate knowledge and designs like a production line makes chocolate bars. If that is made, the value of intelligent individuals will be tremendously reduced, or so they think. At least of the individuals on the “autistic” side, but not on the “psychopathic” side, because the latter will run things. It’s literally a “quantity vs quality” evolutionary battle inside human kinds of diversity, all the distractions around us and the legal mechanisms being fuzzied and undone also fit here. So - for the record, I think quality is on our side even if I’m distracted right now, and sheer quantity thrown at the task doesn’t solve complexity of such magnitude, it’s a fundamental problem.
Believe it or not I can complain about more than one thing at a time.
Proper AI or LLM?
I wanna see a breakdown of cost vs revenue for each big tech and their AI stuff.
I know it’s all negative, I wanna know who is the most negative. My money is on google.
This analyses what’s publicly known: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-gui/?ref=ed-zitrons-wheres-your-ed-at-newsletter
This snippet summarizes my AI forced into everything experience, especially when I was prompted to have my text message summarized. I said no, and the message was “Ok”
What text messages are being sent that need to be summarized?
which mostly means that Apple aggressively introduced people to the features of generative AI by force, and it turns out that people don’t really want to summarize documents, write emails, or make “custom emoji,” and anyone who thinks they would is a fucking alien.
Great analysis. I still have no idea how they think they will ever make their money back.
Ironically, Apple has some of the best odds of coming out of this reasonably healthy. “Apple Intelligence” follows the trend of most Apple services products, in that it is really intended to lock people into their ecosystem and keep buying iPhones. I’m just waiting for someone in the big 7 or whatever they’re called to publicly bow out of AI. I suspect the first one to do it might benefit a lot.
There are people who both get llm summaries of their emails and get llm to rewrite what they send. It’s amazing that anyone can’t see how incredibly stupid it is
