this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2026
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Fuck AI

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AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.

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Speaking during an interview on CNBC's "Squawk on the Street" segment earlier this week, CEO of cybersecurity giant Palo Alto Networks Nikesh Arora implored the tech industry to lower the cost of AI.

During the segment, the chief executive argued that the cost to use large language models (LLMs) has to drop by 20 percent by 2027 — and 90 percent by 2028 — for the tech to be useful to enterprises.

"We need to see the pricing for AI come down," Arora said.

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[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

Those companies fired the workers and replaced them with AI already, so the benefit they bring to the broader economy is far smaller (might even be negative by now) and them dissapearing is far less likely to cause "economic fallout".

Even though that's what Neoliberal politicians have preached to us for decades now, companies aren't inherently "good for the Economy" - they might, but then again they might not.

Plenty of companies out there add up to a negative to the Economy:

  • Maybe because they have huge Negative Externalities (i.e. for example, emitting lots of Pollution)
  • Maybe because they abuse dominant positions in Markets due to Barriers to Entry in a way that makes things actually worse for most people (reference: enshittification)
  • Maybe because they're mostly extracting wealth from the broader Economy through rentseeking rather than producing wealth (reference: most realestate investors)
  • Maybe because they're actually extrating more from the Economy than they put back in it (for example companies getting billions in subsidies to create literally a handful of jobs, or companies employing people with such low salaries that it's only possible because said people also receive Social Security support)
  • Maybe because almost all the wealth they produce does not end up in that Economy (for example, they're using Tax Havens to avoid taxes and their owners pay tax abroad or even don't pay any tax at all)

Companies aren't there to benefit the Economy in any way form or shape, they're there to benefit their owners. Some companies might happen to benefit the Economy, often because they have no other option (for example, they're forced to employ people in order to actually operate and make money for the company owners, thus indirectly help the Economy) but almost invariably every single thing that helps the Economy is for a company "losing money" which would go to the company owners instead so they generally fight like crazy to actually reduce it: they try to spend less from suppliers, pay less to workers, pay less or no tax at all.

Helping the Economy almost always runs counter the one true goal for the existence of a company - maximizing shareholder profits.

Further, when a company dissapears it doesn't mean that the Market need that they're serving dissapears with them: in almost all the cases the need is still there after they've collapsed (unless they collapsed because the need itself doesn't exist anymore) so existing companies grow or new companies pop-up to serve it.

It seems to me that companies that have replaced workers with AI are by far the most likely to by now not actually be helping the Economy, not even indirectly, and that their dissapearance might actually improve the Economy if only because their share of the Market might be taken over by companies with better far better and less wasteful management (and hence more efficient) and which employ more people, and hence which bring more benefits to the broader Economy.

[–] roboflop@feddit.uk 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I don't disagree with any of you're points. I guess I was more getting at the idea of the seemingly more ever present AI bubble collapse (which I am very much in favour of) will come with some pretty serious down sides for ordinary people (which I'd like to clarify is the fault of the AI industry at large).

I guess I get a bit puzzled when people cheer on the popping of said bubble because I can't see good things happening.

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Economically, the "AI" to where most investment money went to - LLMs - has turned out to be one big value destroying ponzi scheme, hence removing it from the Economy will in overall improve the Economy because things are actually more efficiently done without it than with it.

The area were LLMs shine is entertainement, and in overall Economic terms entertainment can be a good thing or a bad thing - on one side it's a use of time that is not economically productive when said time could instead have been used for productive activities, on the other hand it can indirectly boost other Economic activities because humans work better when they're more relaxed and satisfied. From a lot of what we're seeing, LLMs not only are misused to do work whilst in fact being entertainment (for example, CEOs using LLMs for "research" because it's the ultimate "Bootlicker Yes man" even though its highly unreliable as a research tool, thus leading to a higher rate of bad management decisions) but it also seems to reduce independent thinking capabilities of its regular users.

The second biggest sink of investment money in what is now called "AI" is Generative AI. This comes with job losses and a fall in quality (but it's in areas which don't directly create wealth, hence the Economic impact of that loss in quality is lower). Ultimatelly, the reversion of this area of "AI" being "good for the Economy" or "bad for the Economy" boils down to what one thinks is a "good Economy" - if one sees inherent Economic value in Art for itself, then a fall in the quality of Art and a reduction in the capabilty of producing trully novel Art (which AIs can't do since their models make the initial random noise which is the basis of their output coalesce towards what's statistically closest to that which they have been fed, which by definition must already exist), then a reversion in the use of Generative AI would be an undoubtoubly good thing, otherwise it really depends on the Economic impact of the job losses due to Generative AI versus the gains in speed of production (though with a lowering in quality) of using Generative AI.

As for the rest, yeah, there is a ton of what's called "AI" - let's just use the old terms for it, Machine Learning, aka ML - which does create Economic value which wasn't being created before and if it was lost then there would be a loss of overall Economic value.

This latest kind has by far received the least amount of investment money in this bubble, so this bubble popping and reversing would have very little Economic impact via this pathway.

Anyway, my point is that, as time went by and as the limits and capabilities of the Technology were discovered, it turned out most of the investment money into "AI" went into malinvestments which destroy overall Economic value (but can make a few people extremelly rich, hence why the money went there since they each economic actor only care about themselves, not about the whole Economy), and structural economic shifts to support said mainvestment just spread those economic malallocation further into the broader Economy. This "AI" economic tissue is akin to a cancer in an otherwise healthy body - a self-propagating bad mutation that extracts nourisment from the rest of the body, expanding to extract ever more nourisment whilst destroying the healthy parts - so excising it in it's totallity is not just a good thing but actually a requirement to restore a healthy Economy, and we should not fall into the trap of simplistically thinking of it as "part of the body" when in reality it's a previously healthy part of the body which underwent a carcinogenic mutation that turned it into a parasite that will eventually kill its host.

In simple terms, the harm and hence the damage is already done, and stopping and excissing it from the Economy now would not be the "harming of the Economy" (because that's already done), it would actually be the damage control necessary to save the Economy from suffocating due to excessive malallocation of resources.