Technology

He forgot the: Because investors are now the only ones with money to spend.

Well the jerk store called, and they're running out of you!

I'm willing to bet most of the funders are people using AI to replace workers and manipulate the masses. So really; they're paying customers.

Mr. Zitrone 🍋✨☺️😃

When this is all over the world owes Ed Zitron a massive fucking apology.

Yeah and the biggest issue is covered well here: https://www.notesfromthecircus.com/p/the-house-of-ellison-is-on-the-brink

Essentially: the profits are in the infrastructure end (AI companies paying for parts to build the data centres) not the consumer facing end (the actual models - customer paying AI companies). The money is coming from investors buying in to AI in the hope of winning the supposed arms race to be The One True AI. The whole thing depends on the revenues in the consumer facing end going up to show this is a growing market and make people believe they will eventually reach profit. But the revenues in the consumer facing end are fake and being inflated by circular movements of money including companies like Nvidia paying companies like OpenAI to buy product, or OpenAI paying for product in stock. The revenue inflation is very similar to how Enron inflated it's books its revenue appear higher than it really was.

The brutal reality is: there will not be One True AI to Rule Them All. Instead AI is looking increasingly like a commodity - people will just use the cheapest, simplest tool to do the task, rather than play inflated prices for a swiss army knife AI. And people can host those cheap, simple AIs aleady at home, or on servers in the cloud, or companies can also do the same. The whole US bubble is predicated on spending as much money as possible to stake a claim in a future Google, when it's looking more like it'll be like the fast food sector with razor thin margins. Some of these companies may end up profitable but this is going to be a hell of a lot more competitive and less profitable than the valuations assume.

Expect a very nasty correction.

The bubble gonna poof?

Nah, I'm sure all the most valuable companies and richest people are pouring more money in to developing AI to replace the human workforce out of the goodness of their hearts.

Once most humans are no longer needed in order for them to have all of their needs and wants met and they are directly in control of all production and everything else they definitely plan to share everything equally and turn Earth into a utopia for all of humanity. Sharing and caring is what the rich and powerful do best.

Yeah, look at Zuckerberg, who recently burned billions on his crappy virtual reality project, and is now doing the same with AI.

That's pretty much what is driving the entire AI "boom". It's the Amazon effect.

Amazon, and Netflix to a certain extent as well as a number of other early internet startups, lost money for around 10 years before they started making shit tons. And everybody wants to be on that particular ride. So they are queueing up in every AI line they can find to hedge their bets on one of them being the one that survives and thrives. It doesn't really occur to any of them that all of them could fail. Because "AI is the future". Except there is no plan to monetize any of them. And so far every time one of them introduces a charge, people stop using it.

This has Ponzi elements, but it's closer to a multi-company Enron in its structure. They're manufacturing fake revenues through circular investments. Nvidia invests in AI companies and increases their value while AI companies use that investment to buy Nvidia cards increasing its value so, so they invest more in AI, so they buy more cards....

Enron did this by making fake companies to generate fake revenue. Right now the tech sector is all working together on this scheme, so none of the companies are fake, but the revenue is.

Usually it’s because someone needs the line on a chart to go up… no matter what.

American big tech hasn’t had a breakthrough technology equivalent to PCs, Smartphones, internet, etc. in ten years. Their latest forays into smart Watches, Smart glasses, VR that stupid virtual world Meta pushed… none of it has seen real adoption or growth.

They needed AI to be a hit to continue justifying their stock prices. The only way they can justify their stock prices now is if sales for AI become a 2 or trillion dollar industry. The only way you do that is by replacing humans. Human jobs go away and corps pay for AI tokens instead.

But it hasn’t panned out that way and so far and all you have are AI companies passing around the same dollar and booking it as revenue on their P&Ls. That will work for a little while but it isnt a industry.