this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2026
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[–] Doomsider@lemmy.world 14 points 1 day ago (2 children)

"What the industry needs is a wave of innovation"

Narrator: They didn't innovate

[–] heartSagan5@lemmy.zip 4 points 1 day ago

They definitely won't with AI. It's rotting skills.

[–] iocase@lemmy.zip 4 points 1 day ago

The only innovations made are new and unique ways to screw taxpayers and the general public

[–] rizzothesmall@sh.itjust.works 37 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Claude, create an innovation which will dwarf what cloud and mobile unlocked. There we go. I'm a bit of an innovator.

[–] ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world 13 points 2 days ago (1 children)

My preparer randomly told me that he had invested money with a guy who was developing a "reactionless space drive". He then mentioned that the guy had solved all the problems he was having with it by asking ChatGPT about it. I asked him if the guy had a working prototype yet and he said no but it was sure to work.

Time to find a new tax preparer.

[–] GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 5 points 2 days ago

a fool and his money will soon be parted.

[–] nightlily@leminal.space 2 points 1 day ago

You forgot „make it good“. You will never be a prompt engineer at this rate!

[–] GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 15 points 2 days ago

you know where innovation comes from?

independent research.

you know what the oligopolies hate?

independent research.

pick one. you can't have it both ways.

[–] LodeMike@lemmy.today 115 points 2 days ago (2 children)

The MBAs think they can just pull an Internet and mobile device revolution out of thin air 💀💀💀

[–] CompactFlax@discuss.tchncs.de 40 points 2 days ago (1 children)

The Internet was a slow burn starting in the 1960s and gaining momentum through one of humanity’s most productive generations into the 80s and beyond, spurred on by personal computing. Mobile was a (retrospectively) natural continuation.

LLMs have been around for a very long time but they’re just forcing the issue with a product that’s not yet compelling enough to justify its enormous cost. It’s like waiting for the iPhone and the App Store to make smartphones ubiquitous.

[–] LodeMike@lemmy.today 7 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Ehh I don't think mobile was just a continuation of the Internet revolution, it was its own thing that happened to change the internet a lot.

[–] CompactFlax@discuss.tchncs.de 16 points 2 days ago (2 children)

I see it as an extension of the PC combined with the Internet and hardware advances. It certainly changed the Internet and our society. But I’ll leave it to historians to fight over!

[–] Redjard@reddthat.com 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Mobile coincides with the idea of calculations and data being handled by 3rd party cloud servers instead of yourself.
That should be the time where the majority of performance shifted from being in peoples personal devices, to being in data centers owned by fewer large companies renting out access in various ways.

Not sure where else you wanna move the compute now for the next "innovation". Even the bullshit about space datacenters isn't really any different, it's still compute owned by a company rented out.

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[–] Iusedtobeanalien@lemmy.world 10 points 2 days ago

Vibe coding a new dot-com bubble

[–] vane@lemmy.world 11 points 2 days ago
[–] phutatorius@lemmy.zip 51 points 2 days ago (1 children)

What the industry needs is to fail catastrophically and destroy the fortunes of as many billionaires as possible.

[–] HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org 7 points 2 days ago

That would lead to an AI ice age. Surely not the worst development for Gaia and her children.

[–] supcoop@thelemmy.club 72 points 2 days ago (3 children)

Once there is enough adoption, expect token costs to skyrocket and advertising enshitifaction to accelerate. We are still in the "first hit is free" stage of ai drug addiction.

[–] rockerface@lemmy.cafe 45 points 2 days ago

The companies that replaced employees with AI are already entering the "find out" stage.

[–] dgriffith@aussie.zone 30 points 2 days ago (3 children)

Once there is enough adoption, expect token costs to skyrocket and advertising enshitifaction to accelerate

Models on local hardware that give adequate performance and the availability of non-US models mean that path is doomed to failure. If they crank up the price then people will look elsewhere. While they might not get frontier-level performance out of the alternatives, there's plenty of stuff out there that's good enough for 1/4 to 1/10th of the cost. Or just the cost of power, if you're willing to pay for some hardware and are operating on a small scale.

The only play the AI companies have got now is twofold :

  • Regulatory capture, hence all the press releases of basic and frankly embarrassing sandbox failures and "we need to slow down" talk to try and get that rolling, and
  • Banning of those nasty, evil, non-US models in the name of national security.

And then what? The rest of the world will just move on to the next most useful thing on the list. There will be ~330 million US citizens to extract wealth out of, to service trillions in data centre debt. That shit's not gonna fly.

[–] melfie@lemmy.zip 10 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

I run Qwen 3.8 27B, which seems pretty comparable to Sonnet 5 for coding and other tasks. Qwen 3.6 was in the neighborhood of Sonnet 4.6. Qwen 4 27B is supposed to drop in the next couple months and we’ll see how it compares to Sonnet 5.5, which benchmarks at Fable / Mythos level.

If the trend keeps up, not sure how useful those data centers will be when a gaming PC is a few months behind the frontier.

[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 7 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Why do you think they're doing ethics promises now? I have a feeling that all the third party models are going to fail the ethics tests and now that nvidia owns huggingface it'll be very easy to ban them in the states.

Download your models now

[–] melfie@lemmy.zip 8 points 2 days ago

Yep, I assume that’s the plan, though HuggingFace isn’t the only game in town. Hugging Bay, ModelScope, and I assume a horde of others will fill the void if HF goes downhill.

[–] supcoop@thelemmy.club 12 points 2 days ago

I'm sure they will keep hardware exorbitantly expensive for as long as possible to push ppl to the subscription model. I would love to run local models, but the cost of hardware versus performance is too high compare to cloud at this point in time. I might break even in 5-10 years, but the hardware may be out of date by then. I hope things will level out in a few years. And I agree the us gov will try to ban non-us models and hardware. They may even bail out the ai companies because they will be too big to fail. Also expect ai and robot companies to get massive military contracts.

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[–] eicker@lemmy.world 57 points 2 days ago (8 children)

AI’s business model is starting to look less like a revolution and more like a $6 trillion IOU. Bain says existing AI services may cover just $1.8 trillion by 2031, leaving a $4.2 trillion hole to justify the data center frenzy. Apparently the killer app is still: »please invent enough revenue before the depreciation schedule catches us!!!«

[–] panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 47 points 2 days ago (1 children)

The killer app is “you can’t build your own cloud because we’re hoarding all the compute”

[–] CompactFlax@discuss.tchncs.de 17 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Also many of the skills for building your private cloud have been forgotten or retired because Amazon and azure.

[–] BeatTakeshi@lemmy.world 9 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)
[–] schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works 15 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Even if AI takes off the way people hope it will, that does not mean that data center investments will pay out.

Local models exist and are a viable alternative (partially to substantially to completely) to sending every query to a centralized data center that is extracting profit from every token.

On top of that, everyone is now aware of the risks of tech dependency, and big players, the ones that would be sending their money to OpenAI or Anthropic, are the ones best able to declare their independence.

[–] Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 2 points 20 hours ago

That's also ignoring the access to data question. Who knows how much the providers are logging. It wouldn't surprise me if "new companies" pop up out of the blue with surprisingly competitive hardware and software sometime in the next decade.

[–] snooggums@piefed.world 8 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Also the vast majority of people don't get any benefit from LLMs and won't be willing or able to afford the actual cost to use them.

Hell, I would be surprised if the majority of people used AI for anything digital assistants or web searches were doing successfuly before they were replaced with AI bullshit.

[–] schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works 8 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Yes, certainly! It's hilarious to me that people think the market broadly adopting a FREE product is somehow indicative of its economic viability. You just have to look at the journalism to see the chasm between use and profitability. And LLM's, unlike almost every other form of modern software-based technology, does not scale. When Facebook doubles their user base, they double their revenue stream, at a fraction of a cost of exanding their costs. But when an LLM doubles its user base, it also doubles its costs.

AI is not a monopolizable product like Facebook, nor a locked-in key infrastructure ecosystem like Microsoft. It is a commodity, like toilet paper or oil or crackers. Anyone can enter the market to compete with you. No company will ever "own" AI--at least not this iteration of it.

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[–] andrewrgross@slrpnk.net 10 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

I've heard theories that I find convincing that the real plan is to transition us to a surveillance-based tiered economy in which the wealthy hoard control over the means of production and then spend generously to pay the largest segment of the economy -- tech surveillance -- to police the restless masses.

In this framing, the technology becomes profitable in the same way as healthcare: it's essential. Once something is essential, its demand is unconstrained, and so its price-setting power isn't based on the price customers consider a good value, it's based on what fraction of their wealth and income they are able to hand over.

If the top 10% of Americans who participate in the investment economy conclude that ongoing real-time tracking of every American's location and sentiments is necessary to prevent a revolution, paying to build and maintain datacenters is a must. It doesn't matter what it costs.

This 10% then becomes the new real economy, and everyone in the 90% just become essentially livestock.

[–] NotASharkInAManSuit@lemmy.world 5 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

This is exactly what I’ve been saying. They aren’t building a product to sell, they are building a machine to replace and contain you. They don’t care about ROI, they care about the idea of complete control and they won’t stop chasing it until it kills them or they achieve their goals, the rest of us just get to die in the cogs along the way.

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[–] RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world 20 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Innovation?

That’s just code for “Find a way to fuck consumers out of their money without actually giving them anything.”

Time to call the great innovator, Donald trump.

[–] schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works 25 points 2 days ago (1 children)

The time bomb is society's total prostration to the ruling class, of which tech journalism's enabling vassalage is but a subset.

[–] BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 11 points 2 days ago

That's changing, people are getting way fed up. The best years of the wealthy are behind them. The next two years are going to be violent chaos, as MAGA tries to increase their grip on power, and abolish elections, but that will be their downfall, and their oligarch slavemasters will go down with them.

[–] okwhateverdude@lemmy.world 21 points 2 days ago

It's fine. All of this is borrowed money and commitments. The reason prices on RAM and GPUs are through the roof is because all of the future capacity has been spoken for. But when the datacenters all that silicon is supposed go into don't arrive, all of that booked demand evaporates. I think we'll see a very nice market correction. Big tech will be fine, but stock prices will tank. The US AI labs will continue to exist, but the chinese labs will gut their competitive advantage. US put all their eggs into this stupid AI basket and China will be happy to give away the tech to spit in the US's soup.

[–] CosmoNova@lemmy.world 10 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I take a market crash of apocalyptic proportions over a cloud dystopia any day.

[–] logi@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

You're in luck because you're going to have both!

[–] humanspiral@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

the financial logic behind the data center buildout simply doesn’t hold up.

need to change assumptions that it requires a decent end ROI, or good economic proposition, when analyzing logic.

  1. Greater fool theory. Hype hype hype to cash out at IPO or buyout. Circular financing is your friend. Outright fraud of 5x more expensive data centers in space that are only useful for slow inference.

  2. There's nothing else for the US to spend on, and aspirationally seek economic competitiveness with China. A race to end US employment for higher oligarch profits, as a bribe to narcissist in chief, becomes somehow MAGA.

  3. Skynet government surveillance, fascism, and geopolitical dominance. Government will buy all of the tokens or China wins. US fascism/oppression will increase to protect Israel first establishment power, or China wins. There can be no guardrails on US government, or AI bond villain, use of models, or China wins. Zero regulatory discussion exists on preventing the pursuit of Skynet, and "whoever wins AI, wins" is only/purely a Skynet goal, and it is policy unanimity. https://naturalfinance.blogspot.com/2026/09/a-global-prosperity-manifesto.html

An irony in 2nd/3rd point is that industry is fully aware that about 90% of tokens in SEA area datacenters are consumed in China, and it is one of biggest areas of new datacenter developments. So some chain of control in the profit/revenue flow from token sales to China is a near term priority over skynet dominance over China.

[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)
[–] eicker@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

💪😎✌️

[–] Cheebus@lemmy.world 6 points 2 days ago

A message to the industry:

Fuck yourselves, you traitorous, awful, slimy, scummy, pee brained, flee bitten, rabid, child raping, terrorist, ego driven, scumbag, sacks of monkey shit. Holy shit; hallelujah

[–] chocrates@piefed.world 7 points 2 days ago (2 children)

That's the problem and why they are desperate for AI. They don't have a world changing idea like the smartphone or the Internet.

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