- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
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And it’s not even working. Not one of the AI companies is profitable. So they’re putting the hope for profits some time in the future over sanity and safety.
“Fuck me Sam, I don’t have anymore ideas on how to turn a profit. We’ve tried everything. How about we just give the AI its own infrastructure and bank account with the instructions ‘make money’ and see what it does? I know that safety guy advised against it before, but he no long works here. I mean if it becomes a singularity event, at least it’s our singularity event to control”
Didn’t they do this with an AI vending machine already and it started selling tungsten cubes at a massive loss?
Steve Burke (of GN) described the absurdity pretty well, within the context of the currently uncertain Nvidia and OpenAI deal:
Nvidia offered OpenAI $100B in investment, money that it didn’t have, as long as OpenAI gave that money back to Nvidia to lease GPUs that haven’t been made, to then put in data centres that haven’t been constructed, which will be powered by electricity that hasn’t come online, to then rent to users who haven’t subscribed, to provide them features that haven’t come to fruition.
And hope you’ve propped up the economy enough by the end of it that the government has to
bail you out…sorry i meant provide a “backstop”.
What about all the user data they sell to third parties? I’d be interested in knowing how that contributes to this
In a way this is what’s most scary. Because they are desperate. Any safety concerns will be damned and they are all racing to be the first who makes a breakthrough in the direction of AGI.
If we ever get there, this is not the way it should be done. I hope they remember that we need to have a world where they can spend their money.
That’s a talk ask for desperate people to consider.
So what’s the problem? This looks self-correcting to me, if none of the AI companies are profitable then they’re going to go away. Short their stock and make a fortune.
Shorting isn’t just a bet that a stock will fail but also when
Then invest in competitors, they’ve got a more flexible timeframe.
Imagine your entire life is viewed through the lens of actions you can take in the stock market. What a sad life.
The original comment that this subthread descends from was about the profitability of AI companies.
Profitability has pretty much nothing to do with stock prices these days.
what competitors? competitors to AI as a technology?
The companies that continue with human staff where others are replacing theirs, for example. Outsourcers providing those staff.
I’m not sure what bubble you live in, but not everybody can be a Bay Area nepo baby like you, and not being one doesn’t make them less correct.
If you’re not investing anything in anything then this really isn’t your problem.
The problem is the cost of that correction is going to fall on us. Or did we forget that the flavor of capitalism we live under is the “Privatize the profits, socialize the losses” kind. We’re not the ones in the casino, but we’re the ones who will lose our shirts when they lose.
So what’s the problem?
“What’s the problem” with the entire American economy being moored to a bunch of companies all acting as flaky as Enron and friends during the dot-com crash?
Edit: just realized FaceDeer is obsessed with AI stuff, so he’s probably here just to troll with questions he already knows the answers to.
It’s only self correcting if the powers that be are losing money, which they aren’t because they are either liquidating important assets to pad their pockets or just using economic magic to make trillions appear out of no where. They’ll only feel it when their company or the economy collapses, and at that point they make off with their ill gotten gains
Where’s this infinite well of investment money coming from? “Economic magic” is pretty vague.
Have you not heard of inflation? It is literally the creation of new monies that the government gives to banks to give loans.
I wrote it intentionally vague because the reality is that we don’t know exactly how they are doing it, but we don’t need to to be able to see that there is a positive feedback loop between ai companies, cloud service providers and compute hardware manufacturers. Likely what they are doing is simply lying about their books and since the regulators have been bought already, or are simply incompotent, there is no one to say otherwise.
In the mean time they’re soaking up all the RAM, SSD and silicon processing which makes basically everything with any of those cost a lot more (like the RAM I bought for $99, 4 yrs ago thats now $560). Not to mention the power requirements and costs being passed on to the consumers that don’t want it anyway.
They’re also screwing up the environment in ways it won’t recover from.
Which is pouring money into the manufacturers of those things. If you’re convinced the AI companies are going to collapse then just wait a little and you’ll get all those things way cheaper than they were before.
At the moment, most of that “money” is just stock in the other company. And the type of RAM and “GPU”'s being manufactured are not ones that normal consumers will use. They’re very specialized for AI en masse.
Another thing around that is that the major manufacturers being leveraged for that gear have stated that they are not increasing production in the near future because of this. It seems they’re mostly in a “wait and see, it might just be a bubble” mode as scale up takes a lot of time and only pays off with continued demand over a long period of time.
I’d love if it was going to be flooding the market with cheaper tech, but thats not been shown to be the case. And it’s really not worth the environmental impact in either case.
And the type of RAM and “GPU”'s being manufactured are not ones that normal consumers will use.
They’re using the same foundries that would make those things. I’m not saying that there’ll be a flood of “used” equipment (though there would indeed be some of that too, other companies could set up data centers much more cheaply), I’m saying that the foundries will switch back to consumer products.
The stock is worth a lot because it can be sold for a lot. If the manufacturers don’t think the AI companies will stick around they should be selling the stock they’re receiving from them. It’s money either way. What do you think they’re doing with that money?
They’ll just declare bankruptcy and get away scott-free
That’s not how bankruptcy works. The investors don’t get their money back.
thanks for pointing that out.
I’m not sure how this benefits the big corporations then. Surely they don’t have a deathwish? And aren’t stupid/incompetent enough to not see that? Else they’d not have gotten this big, right?
If anybody leaves an AI company with a fat paycheck, promises to “be honest about the real problems,” and then proceeds to regurgitate things the AI company CEOs say: be suspicious.
Exhibit A is Anthropic millionaire Mrinank Sharma, who only mentioned (future) peril from AI and AI-made bioweapons, two fictional scenarios on the short list that Anthropic officially endorses. It’s a list of things that please Anthropic investors.
Real-world stuff like AI psychosis, poisoning people’s air, or generating CSAM doesn’t get a mention from him. There’s no profit in acknowledging those things, so he won’t.
Yep there is a deep attachment amongst AI boosters to certain doom and gloom scenarios that stem from their philosophical “think tanks” which use imaginary problems (e.g. “AGI ‘misalignment’ destroying the world through turning everything into paperclips”) to lobby and alter our laws to benefit their real bosses – anthropic, open ai, and friends.
“AI businesses are putting profits over sanity and safety”.
Remove “AI” from that sentence and you’ll see that’s just more normal business practices that have been going on for decades.
The real question is: what profit? It’s a sink hole in a hope to maximize reach
This is a ball and cup game designed to create cashflow where there is none. The ‘profit’ is the assets, dividends and capital gains the shareholder class will syphon out before the bubble bursts.
What profits?
Now what does that tell us about the sanity and safety?
This is many companies right now.
Mine is run from the top down (all executives) by people who use LLM’s for fucking everything.
Everyone fucking hates them at this point. We all think they are fucking trash.
Maybe it’s time to grab some fellow employees and make an employee owned business.
I would love for this to happen in so many industries but everything takes so much capital to get started :/
The MBA class has long been this way.
“They are putting profits over sanity and safety”
Soooooooo, just like every other business in the history of capitolism?
It worked for airline manufacturers, it can work for you too!
I hate to hand it to airline manufacturers, but at least when they cut corners, they actually make money. The whole AI industry still hasn’t turned a profit yet…
🌎 👨🚀 🔫 👨🚀
There’s a huge list of eye rolls here but also…what profits?
After $1T poured into global warming, why can’t AI replace them ?
Oh thank heavens some people still have ethics.
if they had ethics they would have left a long time ago.
So they only now figured out that all Corporations and their sick shareholders are shit evil and doesn’t care about anything else than profits ?! Wtf do they think activists are doing ?
Imagine being a Demis Hasabi, or similar cunt, voluntarily giving/developing AI technology - the most extreme power in human history - to the most evil corporation in human history, run and owned by the most evil people in the world, placed in the most evil lying empire of all times ! Wow - that is a great idea… cough…
Well, better late than never I guess. Even for normal naive, dumb slow-thinking AI researchers. Let’s hope they start waking up from their business/market psychosis, and do some open source work - real mutually beneficial work - for us all instead of boosting the psychopath Oligarchy that runs our little world.
Publicly traded companies are legally required to put profits over sanity, safety, and everything else. It’s a truly insane system we’ve put together for ourselves.
I sure hope they secretly sabotage on their way out to protect society
Talents leave
Tell me a “journalist” has no concept of mass nouns without using those words.
