Over the past few weeks, several US banks have pulled off from lending to Oracle for expanding its AI data centres, as per a report.
This is technically job loss caused by AI…
More accurately its caused by AI Mania, not AI proper, directly, but yeah.
This is a very good point. I never had the discussion whether real AI, not transformer-based chatbots, would be a boon or a bane for human workers. I mean, we should already have data about it.
By ‘real AI’, I presume you mean AGI, a digital intelligence that is actually superior to human intelligence, ie, is more intelligent than the smartest human and has all our collective knowledge and is able to comprehend it and evaluate it more consistently than any of us… and also is thus capable of improving itself and becoming more and more superintelligent.
That is still scifi, that is not real.
What we currently call ‘AI’ is basically an extremely expensive, lackluster pantomime of that, that fools fools into thinking it is the other thing… mostly because it is sycophantic and very confident, ie, it uses well known ‘hacks’ in human psychology, where confidence, breadth of knowledge, usage of technical terms… you know, con man techniques … are confused for actual competence.
If we had a real AGI, it would be be capable of both hacking into all the military information systems of the world, and tricking humans into nuking each other… and it would also be capable of making actual novel improvements in software, hardware, engineering, physics, social engineering, etc, and could decide to be a kind of benevolent dictator of the entire economy, that it would command and control.
We have no capacity to model the morality that would emerge in an actual superintelligence, because we definitionally would not be able to keep up with attempting to understand how it thinks.
Thats where the whole ‘is AI the potential best thing ever or would it become SkyNet’ problem comes from.
… But we are not there yet.
We are at… basically, a very fancy autocomplete algorithm that can analyze huge datasets reasonably well, compared to an average human, but also makes all kinds of mistakes, hallucinates ‘facts’ in order to generate more coherent things to say, and these hallucinations routinely trick non subject matter expert humans into just going along with it, again, like a con artist, like a fast talking ‘influencer’ pitching selling you a course or giving you some kind of ‘advice’.
And currently, what is going on, is that we are pouring I think at this point trillions of dollars into ‘AI’, under the premise that it is AGI, that it will be capable of generating massive returns on investment and productivity increases…
… but the actual results are turning out to be, all averaged for everywhere it has been implemented… somewhere between a net productivity loss, to meagre productivity gains.
What that means is that the AI Mania is the biggest bubble, the most severe malinvestment of economic resources in the history of humanity.
When that pops, we basically formally transition into cyberpunk dystopia, technofeudalism.
AI is a tool, a device, a machine. Thus, it depends on how you use it, what you use it for.
Right now, we have a whole lot of companies saying they are laying off workers because we don’t need them anymore… this is broadly a lie.
People are being laid off because the economy, the real economy, is already contracting, basically due to the collapse of the US as the undisputed world hegemon.
AI, as a broad, socioeconomic force… is mostly a smokescreen, the ultimate promise of bread and circuses, that masks a gigantic wealth transfer and restructing of economic and political power.
AI as a tool can be used for good, in specific use cases.
But it broadly isn’t, because people are fooled by the conversation machine into thinking it can do things that there is no evidence it can do, because people do not understand its limitations and flaws, and then they plug it into their immensely shitty business processes, and just assume it will not break things when it tries to use them.
AI, as it currently exists, is essentially a false or trickster God of Capitalism.
No, by real AI I meant what we already had before and that now is “disregarded” as machine learning algorithms.
I know it is not the correct technical definition, but AI is mostly a marketing term anyway.
The bubble popping seems inevitable at this point. Before the Giants were funding this by their core business plus loans backed by their core business. Now they’ve stretched their credit so much that no one’s giving them loans anymore and instead of cutting back on the building spree they’re making cuts to their core business.
They’re betting that their customers are so locked in that they won’t leave despite degradation in service. How deep oracle, AWS, googles hooks are in people remain to be seen, people seem to tolerate a lot of enshitification, but there’s gotta be a tipping point. Once they reach that and the core business crashes all the rest of the dominos will fall.
Once these companies have to start charging what it really costs to maintain and run these huge models. The number of use cases will shrivel.
Perfect time for some foreign company to eat Oracles lunch.
AI, at this point, seems to have been the single largest scam and money laundering scheme in history.
So far! Don’t worry, Silicon Valley will think of another new, even bigger scam in no time!
I believe the war industry will take it over for the next turn.
At least the banks are figuring out what we knew long ago.
You’d think they learned from the dotcom bubble and the hundred other times they gambled and lost. I guess it doesn’t matter when you just get paid back with taxpayer money.
here comes the oh so predictable crash.
Pop that bubble, baby!
This is the fascinating thing about this bubble. Usually people are suspecting a bubble/perceiving it, and are afraid of when it pops, but no one really wants it to pop, they just don’t like the fragility it causes knowing it could pop any minute.
So many people actively want the AI bubble to pop. I can’t recall a bubble so odious that everyone was rooting for it to hurry up and fail before.
Didn’t see THAT coming, huh “oracle”?
I was listening to a finance YT vid last night and the dude said if it wasn’t for the enormous AI spend, the US would be deep in a technical recession now.
obviously the fault of immigrants and those on food stamps though /s
We are in a deep recession?
The enormous AI spend isn’t going to me, or you, or anyone I ever met.
True, but line isn’t going down yet.
Because none of the checks they’ve kited have come due
Those damn immigrants taking up all of the best landscaping, slaughterhouse, roof tarring, and crop picking jobs.
Ironically the only jobs that Anthropic and OpenAI claim AI won’t take. All those newly minted AI billionaires and nobody to maintain their golf courses… How sad is that?
What good is being super wealthy if you can’t feel superior to other people?
You should be able to sue companies for gambling away their employees’ lives like that.
You as in who, the shareholders that indirectly voted for it?
Fuck the shareholders.
Who is doing the lawsuit, some unrelated third party, the employees?
The people that were laid off.
Investors are already suing Oracle right now btw, of course the legal system wouldn’t have let them down.
Ah I see, that would be an interesting law. Maybe it will happen one day, and we will take it for granted like we do 8 hour work days.
What does Oracle even do?
They sell software that sits so deep in people’s stack that replacing it takes tons of effort. Companies calculate that it’s cheaper to keep paying Oracle than to rewrite crucial services.
Specifically, they have had a popular expensive DBMS for last 30ish years.
Which even they saw as a diminishing opportunity, so they bought Sun so they also have Solaris and Java and a bunch of other miscellaneous crap.
They get non trivial amounts of money by punishing anyone with a business relationship with them with audits and superfluous invoices.
Story time, a product at my company used to provide a Java webstart application from a web GUI. We did not use any oracle software including any of their Java editions so we paid it no mind (though I hated the applet demanding Java, but at least it wasn’t active x).
Anyway several of our customers said we needed to purge it, because oracle detected JSPs served by our software, and their audit said that if JSPs were served but no Java runtimes detected, obviously the company must be “hiding” the JREs and invoiced the company for every employee to have their paid Java runtimes. Happened to multiple of our clients.
So that’s what drive us to finally purge Java and embrace modern html capabilities, and a way that Oracle makes money and also any no one who knows anything wants to willingly end up with an Oracle business relationship.
It took three years but we’ve almost rooted it all out.
There’s still one ancient product that will (theoretically) decommission in mid 2028. It makes enough money to cover the Oracle licensing but isn’t worth reworking to migrate.
Knowing how decom goes, I’m sure it’ll still be running in 2035 with that one last client who “can’t move to the newer, better, easier project because… Reasons (I don’t wanna)”
Create a db that sucks so bad you have to hire them to maintain it.
I’ve been a software engineer for over 20 years now and tbh I couldn’t tell you even if my life depended on it. I know it’s a shit tier hosting service that people use because they offer 5$ worth virtual server for free with a valid credit card but that’s about it.
It’s one of those ancient paper shuffling IT companies that is 95% sale/middle mamager leeches, 5% wizard engineers carrying everything on their shoulders.
Is this hyperbole? I really doubt someone can be a SWE for even 2 years and not know what oracle does…
Nope, I’m not an american and oracle is really not that well known outside of american corporate tech.
Mysql and Java were very big in Europe but as developer you don’t really interact with Oracle at all and even then everyone’s using openjdk since early 2010s so really if you’re not working in american enterprise you never even going to encounter Oracle’s name let alone interact with them.
My only interaction was calling their support trying to explain what a debit card is because Oracle is so brokenly american that they don’t understand the difference between debit and credit.
I work with banks, insurance companies, telecoms, manufacturers and ocassionally retailers in Europe, they all use Oracle for well over half of their applications.
Sues their customers
Makes Larry Edison rich
Years ago, they were the go to solution for databases. No CIO would ever be fired for picking Oracle over competitors regardless the pain that would follow, same as having Windows as the OS on all employees computers.
If there’s an issue with the world’s most popular solutxon: “Shits happens, we all know”, if there’s an issue with that alternative solution: “You see what bappens with your toy-thing? Let’s be professional and use a professional solution!”.
Years have passed, the alternative slowly made a name for themselves, but OracleDB didn’t evolve much because of inertia and the high maintenance that locks existing customers.
So now they’re going all-in on data centres for AI, that means to me the end is near.
Destroy popular and useful companies.
“You know what the trouble is, Brucey? We used to make shit in this country, build shit. Now we just put our hand in the next guy’s pocket.”
They fired people for AI, now they fire them without AI. Please tell me how they plan on sustaining an economy where only the 1% has discretionary income?
But Oracle was building those data centers for OpenAI. OpenAI is going to be used by the Pentagon. Bailing Oracle out is now a matter of National Security!! If this has to come off of the taxes paid by the people they just laid off, that’s unfortunate but… have I mentioned National Security?
Real jobs or AI jobs.
That’s a good point to remember when future job numbers are shared.
I cannot wait for this bubble to finally burst.
It’s gonna suck for the working class WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY more than the people who will lose their fortunes as a result of the bubble popping
sorry
it always does
Michael Saylor, one of the biggest owners of one of the other “doesnt actually do anything” bubbles - Bitcoin - is a great example. He made a fortune during the dot com bubble.
With that said, if I have to eat hard tack and canned beans and use leftover charcoal from the park BBQ grills instead of toothpaste in order to never have another AI bullshit feature shoehorned into my existence, it might be worth it
Yes, I am well aware that we live under capitalism.
The big bubble. May it pop before we do.
This looks desperate. They already sold $300B worth of data center capacity to OpenAI and this move will save them up to $10B.
They’re supposedly depreciating their GPUs over 7 years. Apparently these data center GPUs are only used for about 3, as the generational improvements in efficiency almost dictate you replace them + the first stragglers start failing around that mark anyway
They could actually be proper fucked financially if they’re cooking their books like that to seem more profitable than they are.
Also, I doubt a GPU that’s been on blast 24/7 for the last couple of years will be worth much at auction. Might as well bury them in the same landfill as the data center.
These GPUs are useless outside of data centers anyway. Take the current gen, the B200. No DirectX or Vulkan support or even OpenGL I believe. Power usage about a kilowatt. SXM rather than PCI-E so it’s not like you can run it on a desktop motherboard.
They’re literally e-waste after a few years. And they’re 40-50k per GPU, but often bought as a full system with 8 GPUs in it, for a couple hundred thousand.
Hate for the job losses but happy that data centers are starved to death
