179
AI boom adds more than half a trillion dollars to wealth of US tech barons in 2025
(www.theguardian.com)
Have faith. It will trickle down, any second now.
this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2025
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Who is paying for xAI anything?
.... How is everyone so dense. They sell your information and you are the product. And the best part is they can say they don't because they are not making a profit.
They sell all of your information.
Gotta be a giant circlejerk with all that tracking. The same old info being bought and sold over and over again.
I don't even know who is paying for most of it, to be honest. I know some people that buy an LLM subscription. I know companies will pay for per-seat licenses to things like Copilot.
But I see LLM use in Duckduckgo. I see it jammed into every product we are already paying for at work - MS stuff, Slack, hell, I lost track of all the places where some AI bubble has popped up saying how X product has added AI to help me summarize things. But who is really paying extra for any of that?
And don't get me started on how I can download and run various models via Ollama or the like on even older GPU(s) and get decent performance for a lot of problems, all without handing over a CC# to someone, along with all my data for them to mine.
My 87 yr old landlord had looked up some info the other day. I looked over her shoulder and saw she was reading it from DDGs AI bubble, so then had to explain why she shouldn't do that anymore.
Yeah on paper. I can't tell you anyone that I know who is paying for AI. The company I work for does have a Chatgpt subscirption. So i guess thats one.
My point is that we keep hearing about the AI spending, but im not noticing anyone who is paying or even enthusiastic about AI. Its a corporate buzzword and C suites dont understand it yet.
Yet it accounts for 60-70 percent of the growth in the US markets. Does anyone want to take a guess at how this AI boom is gonna end?
This is the most predictable house of cards ever.
That's because you're (data is) the product.
Thats been the game for years. I don't think thats enough to offset the cost of electricity. I think their goal was to sell AI to business to replace workers. The problem is that it cant YET.
Eventually it will get good enough to replace some entry level folks, but this whole think is one great big fucking swindle. When it does start to unravel everyone is going look back and see how obvious it was in hindsight.
Because leveraged debt = “wealth”.
They are human centipede-ing the money to keep the bubble inflating.
I hear tulips are a better investment
At least you could eat the bulbs as famine food.
I feel there's not enough regulation around imaginary money.
Straight up robber barons.
Wealth is finite.
They didn't "add" money, no one can.
They redistributed it.
Half a trillion dollars to a handful of billionaires, from everyone else.
Call it what it is.
Nah. Wealth isn't finite. It hasn't been for a long time.
You think more physical representation of money means more wealth?
Like, would you trade a $20 for 5 nickles since it's a 5 for 1 trade?
They print paper money, but that doesn't create more wealth, it makes paper money worth less...
Which is called "inflation" and requires for our exonomy to kind of function...
Wealth is finite.
Well, no. Work increases the value of material. Someone will pay more for a calzone than for its ingredients. More value, when distributed, becomes wealth.
That's not what's going on here. The value is all speculative and fake. But wealth is able to be created.
Someone will pay more for a calzone than for its ingredients. More value, when distributed, becomes wealth.
Bro...
Do you have a magic pocket that makes money whenever you want a calzone?
Because that's pretty cool.
In the real world no wealth is created. Some was moved from the calzone maker to the store for ingredients, then some other people paid more for a calzone than ingredients cost.
No wealth was created, it was redistributed.
If you spent $2 on ingredients and sold a calzone for $5, somebody just paid you $3 of their own dollars for you to do it.
How the fuck did sonmany people up otw you for just completly missing the point?
Yes and to add to that, wealth is always created by labour, it is only redistributed via ownership.
All investors just give labourers access to resources, it’s needed cause they hoard the resources and keep them scarce so they can leverage them for more.
The whole theory of what constitutes value is somewhere between tautology and handwaving.
Yes, we are still trading on the same five acorns that were originally used as currency. /s
Yes, most of the wealth here is stolen, but the statement that wealth is zero-sum is absurdly inaccurate.
There is no value added, only an inflated $ value and malprovisioned funds. Everyone is worse off, but the rich who's bank accounts go brrrrr faster than the world enshittifies.
The debate used to be:
Should we let rich people exist if they produce great products.
Now the second part isn’t true anymore, but to be fair, those who understand capitalism knew this was always the endgame.
I’m very disappointed this cyberpunk dystopia doesn’t have the cool gadgets to match, at least let me have that.
THE PLANET OWNS ITSELF MONEY, IN THE TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS, AND YET, WE MAKE MORE? EEAT THE RICH!
boom
Yeah, that’s the sound it’s gonna make soon
Somehow I feel like they will be fine when the bottom drops out and ordinary people will be the ones who pay.
Dilligas