Ponzi called, he wants his scheme back.
Well the jerk store called, and they’re running out of you!
Relax Costanza 😂
Well I slept with your wife!
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.
I didn’t go to business school, so take this with a grain of salt: doesn’t business solvency require you to charge more for your product than it cost you to produce it and bring it to market?
in theory, in practice you just need to be convincing enough to get greedier/dumber people to pay for your shit in the gamble they might get more in return later. (they like to call themselves “investors”, but most are just degenerate gamblers) and then cover your own ass if/when the house of cards tumbles.
building and popping bubbles, and fleecing as many people as possible throughout the whole thing, is what the US
financial marketscasino is literally designed to facilitatedeleted by creator
Powerful people are willing to pay a large price to manipulate the masses.
As7de from that, the plan is to lose money for years gobbling up all the data before there’s laws that actually get enforced to protect against it, and to get an entire generation of college kids and workers dependant on using AI, with companies relying heavily on its usage. This is happening to a huge degree right now with data entry, “vibe coders”, Law firms, and healthcare.
Those people won’t really be able to transition back or away from AI. They’ll be dependent on it. And AI will start charging them way more than they are now. And they’ll eat the costs and pay it.
So it’s stealing data while it’s free or nearly free, power to manipulate all the sheeple, create dependency.
The chatbot labs (and Oracle) quite literally don’t have years.
Everybody doesn’t get to win a race…
I seriously doubt you read that article if that was your only takeaway from it.
Nobody is winning the LLM lab race, all of their unit economics are garbage and every new subscriber actually makes that situation worse instead of better. Furthermore, I’m running a open 30 billion parameter LLM on my laptop via Ollama right now, so what the fuck do I need lyin’ Sam Altman for?
At this point I’m just here to watch Oracle crash and burn.
But it doesn’t work! You hear all sorts of anecdotes about a business who retrenched their workforce to replace with LLMs, everything comes crashing down and they have to rehire all their workforce at higher rates.
It would be interesting to see actual verified numbers. I am sure that a lot of useless people can be replaced with computers, but most of the time, all it requires is a very small sh script, it doesn’t need a monstrous data centre that uses more water and power than a human.
It doesn’t work for some people and some businesses and when that happens, it gets blasted all over the place because it makes for a good headline.
Tons of jobs have been replaced by ai, though. Especially customer service chats and online help and a LOT of game production and design art jobs and music and editing jobs.
Plus all the jobs where people are still there but heavily relying on ai.
At least in the tech industry that doesn’t apply if the investors believe that the technology or application is promising enough. Look at Uber’s example. They lost very large amounts of money for many years before turning a profit. They were able to do this because the investors kept sustaining them through their unprofitable years.
The same thing has been happening for years with the AI companies. I heard a while back that OpenAI wouldn’t turn a profit on their services even if they charged end users $100/month.
Good article, thanks! That provides better context for how the major AI companies’ finances compare with Uber’s, but I can’t think of a better example to use for a company that operated at massive losses for many years due to being propped up by investors. If you have a better example I could use, I would be glad to do it. Otherwise, if this question comes up again in the context of AI, I’ll be sure to include a link to that article.
There isn’t a better example. This level of FOMO bullshit hasn’t happened since the Dutch went bonkers over tulips.
Chatbot labs have the worst unit economics of any companies in recent memory. They only reason they still have doors open is VC money & that is now drying up. Unlike Uber, they will never become profitable. That’s why you are seeing the push to IPO so they can loot your retirement accounts via the stock market.
This level of FOMO bullshit hasn’t happened since the Dutch went bonkers over tulips.
Haha, now that’s a great comparison! I mentioned to a co-worker a couple weeks ago that we should get ready to invest in the next bubble coming up after this one pops, probably tulip bulbs (again).
Good points, thanks.
Uber is an example of government corruption leveraged to overthrow a market. The livery industry required special licensing, so only licensees were legally allowed to do it. Uber then started doing it without the $1 million per license overhead, bribed the government to ignore that, and naturally undercut their competitors that had huge government-imposed overheads that Uber didn’t. They were initially unprofitable because they had to compete for business, then became profitable when the government helped then destroy their competitors and structure their pay so as to have no minimum wage.
If you only look at modern examples, youre looking at a funhouse mirror reflection of real business operations. Running at a loss for a decade while you create a monopoly is the path to business success today, but this is not a functioning market. Real business success involves making money right out of the gate or at least right after. If your business only works if it is a near-monopoly, it is not a sound one.
I completely agree with your conclusion. Just to be clear, I was in no way saying that what Uber did and OpenAI does is OK. They both suck and should never be allowed to operate as they had and have. I don’t know if Uber was government corruption though, at least I had never heard it described as such. What I have heard is that they found loopholes in taxi laws around the world and employed a global army of lawyers exploit those loopholes.
At least in the USA, livery workers were required to have a “medallion”, which is essentially an onerously expensive license with the stated purpose of restricting competition to the point of profitability for those workers. There was no loophole, and it was ridgidly enforced.
Then, Uber came in and started violating that law so flagrantly that governments seemed stunned into inaction. The government corruption comes in where they then decided not to enforce those rules on Uber for some reason around the same time Uber aggressively contributed to political campaigns around the world.
I went down this line of discussion to point out that Uber is not a good example of organic business success that started out financially underwater. Their ethics or lack of them is an aside to the discussion, but agreed, they are unrepentant scumbags.
Got it, thanks. My memory of how Uber was able to gain a foothold was a little different, but my memory of it was patchy anyway. My recollection was that they essentially said that Uber was not a taxi service. They sold it as just regular people offering to “share” a ride with someone else to an area that they were going to anyway. I have no doubt that heavy political contributions were part of their arsenal in their attack on the taxi industry and regulations, so I agree that this was government corruption. But I also recall that they also had armies of lawyers fighting at every level of government around the world to ram through the idea that this wasn’t a taxi service and shouldn’t be subject to taxi regulations. Maybe my memory is more patchy than I thought, or perhaps both things were true - government corruption and a legal war allowed them flourish.
Enron on the side asking all I had to do is wait for AI?
Fancy being a top economist and therefore being privy to knowledge that is beyond the capabilities of us mortals. We thought the AI was a profitable business, and it turns out it’s a giant scam, who would have thought it?
If you thought AI was profitable that’s on you. Normal people have had the information required since the start.
It’s also expected that new tech companies won’t see profits for the first 10 years. That’s not new.
The other person was being sarcastic.
The problem with capitalism is that morons can get filthy rich and make poor decisions.
Example 1: US president.
Yeah, look at Zuckerberg, who recently burned billions on his crappy virtual reality project, and is now doing the same with AI.
The stupid thing is there are already profitable VR games that basically do exactly what Zuckerberg was trying to do. So despite the fact that he could just copied somebody else’s homework he managed to screw it up.
I mean really the same problem with Monarchy. Once someone somehow gets on top very hard to remove them and their descendants from power even if the original person or their descendants are complete idiots.
There there. Give some credit to the American people. They’re the ones that elected him. Twice.
“Top Economist” states the bleeding obvious.
He forgot the: Because investors are now the only ones with money to spend.
Fuck fortune, here’s the link to the actual write-up: https://www.apollo.com/wealth/insights-news/insights/daily-spark/in-ai-the-41-percent-depends-on-the-59-percent
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.
I literally cannot wait for the correction
It will be interesting, normally you’d expect massive layoffs but companies may be forced to actually re-hire staff due to their over-inflated AI replacement expectations
It’s a giant economic bubble in plain view.
Let’s not forget that they’re literally stealing from anyone who ever made anything in our entire history.
The profits will come from reselling everything again as an add-on or inapp(ropriate) purchases
Funny how the “Top Economist” just parroted what Ed Zitron, also quoted on the piece, has been harping on, since… checks notes always.
Edit: Zitron, the name. Not Zitrone, The German word for lemon.
Mr. Zitrone 🍋✨☺️😃
Sounds like the name of an Arcimboldo painting
Damn, this guy seems all about the healthy lifestyle.
Mr. Fruitone looks exquisite today.
Good God, Lemon!
Mr. Zitrone chuckles in the background. 🤭🍋✨
When this is all over the world owes Ed Zitron a massive fucking apology.
The goal isn’t consumer level profits, the goal is to replace workers, this is the first time capitalists are looking farther than quarterly profits. They’re investing in R&D to replace us, not selling a product. We are not part of the plan.
Oh my god thank you. Somehow despite being engulfed in this stuff being an I.T person while having affection toward Ed Zitran and full agreement on almost all arguments living this weird ying yang over the topic.
This is the succinct detail I hadn’t clued into until this moment of what the core motivation is for all of the crazy spending that makes zero sense. It’s literally this. There is no amount of money, lying, cheating or stealing that cannot be justified by the most cynical of capitalist if they believe this is the outcome.
It’s such an obvious thing when you put it like that and I’m even sure I’ve seen it said before but it really hit me for some reason from your comment. They would move mountains if they thought there was even the smallest chance and bet the entire farm over it.
First you have recognize there is no barriers to their cynicism I guess but this is the only root cause conclusion that could be rationalized. That or fomo and temporary wins but for those spending and not on any receiving end, I couldn’t make sense of the rational until you said it so plainly.
They are paying for fantasy about rendering people redundant, the sik fuks.
It’s not even capitalism anymore, assuming they expect their peers in corruption to actuallg pay each other and themselves a fair amount.
Why is it that almost all big financial situations in my life are Ponzi schemes?
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.
The scheme requires an every increasing amount of new “investment” or the whole thing collapses. Is it more then a ponzi scheme? Sure, most normal schemes can’t do what these companies can do but at the end of the day the scheme is still very much a ponzi structure.
These (non hardware) companies are not relying on fake revenue, they all post massive losses in AI on the regular and yet like some sort of massive lost cost fallacy the markets still keep investing. Maybe next quarter (insert AI) will start making money, but more likely it will all pop before. And the hardware companies making money hand over fist? They are getting bodied on the market (see the South Korean situation).
None of this is even unexpected or seen as odd anymore, the financial systems, markets, private equity and most funds seem to just treat the situation as normal. I have seen nothing but once in a lifetime financial fuckups every few years since I was in high school, and almost every one is in the end is just some ponzi style scheme that was always doomed to collapse.
The key difference with a Ponzi scheme is that the Ponzi/Madoff investors weren’t in on the schemes. They though they were investors in a legitimate enterprise. They had a central figure as the fraudster, wheras Enron and the AI bullshit are institutional-level fraud requiring multiple companies to be complicit.
The new one is the most elegant, because they don’t have to break the law to make money on the grift. It also makes it the biggest by far because everyone wants in on the action.
This bursting of this bubble with be catastrophic. Maybe tens of trillions (there’s estimated to be about 125 trillion dollars in assets total worldwide).
And the .com bubble the hosing crisis, the banking collapse etc. etc. It all seems like the same scam being redone over and over. Never the same but always alike. And now it seems crime is legal (if you have the capital backing).
I really hope at some point in my life the fuck ups have some lasting consequences.
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.
I feel like everyone knows it’s a bubble but that people are expecting it to be like the Dot-com bubble where a small amount of companies succeed, hoping that they invest in those companies.
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.
I feel like it’s just as likely that further breakthroughs cause costs to plummet to the point that any of the major AI companies will never even be capable of seeing a profit, paving the way for some yet unestablished or open model to reign supreme in the end.
Hopefully, anyway lol.
Let’s all short AI! Dimond hands!
How? The chatbot labs don’t have the unit economics to be taken public.
I guess you could short Nvidia and AMD.
I think nvidia is going to be one of the only sure winners here. They’re making hand over fist selling shovels during the gold rush.
Together they’re on the hook for over a trillion dollars in lease payments, so far, that haven’t started yet. They’re counting on turning a profit before they need to start paying that back. That’s why they’re shoving it down our throats, they either make this shit work or they go down in flames.
I’m betting they go down in flames, base on the absolute shit-show “AI” has turned out to be. They keep claiming they have fixed it, or they will fix it, and then it shits the bed again in some public, spectacular way.
I bet they get bailed one last time by the government, then people start dying fast.
For some reason, I find this satisfying and funny. The landscape has been changing. The open-weight models from Chinese labs are getting really good and becoming a serious threat to the closed models from American AI companies.
Interestingly, Google, Meta, and Microsoft — who all have revenue streams outside of AI — recognize the threat are getting more supportive about open-weight models. Anthropic and OpenAI support keeping models closed for “safety” reasons.
I mean that’s 4 companies though, so we’re like saying “Microsoft has something like 250 billion in leases”… But they are “worth” over 3 trillion and hold assets worth 2-3 times those leases. Don’t think it’s enough to sink those large companies, it’s just general investing at their scale now I guess.
Personally I think they are all overvalued, but unless all their shit flops quickly, they’ll be around in 10 years still.
I think when they start feeling the flames, they’ll also pull us into it. Like selling LLMs meant for exploits and cyberwarfare to the public.
I think AI could have a good tool for specific purposes and also a very lucrative business if only they had not thrown all that money at it.
The extreme investments forced them to roll it out prematurely over a much larger market that it could ever supply in a meaningful way.
They’re trying to force a camel through the eye of a needle.
They have been able to use it on less powerful deceives lately. I’m waiting for something like an ebook reader to be able to run an LLM. Imagine you forget who a character is and the on device AI parses the whole book and explains what you have forgotten.
‘Profits are currently being funded by investors rather than earned from customers’
Which profits?
Ah, now I see the actual quote is: “[…] the AI boom’s profits are currently being funded by investors rather than earned from customers.” he means the profits of the shovel sellers, not AI profits.
nvidia is the only one that is making money from this?
Not just Nvidia.
For a start of who the shovel sellers might be, you can take a look at the list in his post that Torsten Slok used to calculate his margin numbers:
Note: Data as of 2Q 2026 and for OpenAI (1Q 2026 estimate from PitchBook) and Anthropic (2Q 2026 estimate from Financial Times). Averages are equal-weighted bucket averages of Energy & Grid (Constellation Energy, Vistra, NextEra Energy, Vertiv, Eaton, Arista Networks), Silicon & Equipment (Nvidia, AMD, Broadcom, Marvell, TSMC, SK Hynix, Samsung Electronics, Micron), Compute & Cloud (Super Micro, Dell Technologies, Foxconn, Equinix, Digital Realty, Amazon/AWS, Microsoft/Azure, Alphabet/Google Cloud, CoreWeave, Nebius) and Models & Applications (OpenAI, Anthropic). Sources: Bloomberg, PitchBook, Apollo Chief Economist
In short according to his research the people currently making a profit or at least positive margins, are the people who build chips and memory, who build energy infrastructure, and who build servers and data canters.
I would like to see the distinction between Servers (Super Micro, Dell Technologies, Foxconn) and Datacenters (Equinix, Digital Realty, Amazon/AWS, Microsoft/Azure, Alphabet/Google Cloud, CoreWeave, Nebius) but he seems to have put them together.
Also I heard from our local news that ABB (which is Swiss, Edit: apparently also Swedish) is profiting too, they belong in the power category.
And I wonder why Arista goes in the Energy category, I’d see them and Cisco, and Juniper, and Extreme, and Nokia in a separate network category.
Soon™
The bubble gonna poof?
Either that, or the rich and corps will go all in. The point was always to replace human labor, just depends how far from that they think we are. People still see a report an AI did something stupid and laugh at the idea of it replacing us, but just 5 years ago we wouldn’t have believed the things it can do today.
We can’t believe what it does not, or six agos what it does then. The shit is moving faster then literally anyone really seems to understand.
The avg person that makes fun of ai, seems to still think they have the same problems they had 2-3 years. Because the cheap free models they have access to are extremely out of date, or very limited.
The actual real deal big boy models are so far beyond what your avg even extremely technical user understands. Unless you are actively watching following and using the models you just flat out have no clue just how fast this shit is sprinting.
It’s got plenty of problems and the growth is not across every aspect of it equally. So it’s really easy to point and laugh at a particular point it’s struggling with while it skips ahead in other regards.
It’s wild. The progress is just as unsustainable as the profits are bad. As long as that progress keeps sprinting the bad profits flat out don’t matter.
IT WILL hit critical mass to replace your avg idiot long before the profit problem really hits at this rate.
The bigger problem is that even if it replaces people that profit problem doesn’t go away. So it will just hit AFTER people are replaced. And that’s a even worse outcome then replacing people.
We NEED the bubble to pop before that point and the industry recalibrates to a sustainable model.
Else we will have mass job loss promptly followed by a massive bubble popping and economy collapse AND companies flopping and job opportunity losses as places closing shop so there won’t even be jobs to back to.
It could get REALLY fucking bad.
Disagree.
It is true there were massive strides in the last 8 years. But fundamentally, the tech is still the same large language model it was before, just bigger and better optimized.
It’s like going from an ancient, slow, Ford Model T that topped out at 45mph to a Bugatti that can do 260mph in 8 short years. It’s impressive, it boosts productivity, it is a marvel of modern technology, but that’s not my point of contention.
The issue is that AI companies have been funded on the promise that with enough advancements and upgrades this tech will achieve AGI. Which is an absurd statement to anyone in the field actually developing these things. That is the equivalent of promising that this 260mph Bugatti, with a few years of upgrades and advancements, will become a Harrier Jump Jet!
It’s just not happening, a fundamental shift in model architecture or technology used is needed. And from what we’ve seen so far, no one has discovered any.
They’re not even better optimized. Hallucination rates are up. Inference costs are up. There’s only an AI industry at all because they’re selling a highly subsidized product, but when they try to raise prices even a little the market collapses. Companies that were encouraging employees to up their AI use are now rationing tokens like chocolate in wartime. This isn’t like Uber where they can push out the old providers and then obtain market capture on something everyone needs. AI is not, and cannot be, essential, because you can always just get a human to do it.
I disagree. AI is enabling doing things that are not worth paying a human to do, yet still have value. the question is, whether the infrastructure costs can realign to hit that sweet spot.
Exactly this, especially the last sentence.
I only have pretty basic machine learning knowledge, based on a few Master’s classes at college while I was doing gamedev, and even with that I can tell that the way they are expecting to get AGI by just feeding more data into a language model is simply not happening.
I remember a comparison from one of the AI-pilled tech-bros when AI was starting to get attention, and his metaphor about AGI was something along the lines of “Imagine a difference between a medieval commoner and Albert Einstein, that’s the difference in inteligence AI will soon have to the smartest people we know now”.
But that doesn’t make sense with the current approach. Imagine Einstein writing his cutting-edge theories, and the commoner is watching him behind his shoulder and vetting anything he does. Scratching his ideas, forcing him to redo it, if he doesn’t like it, pointing to a reddit thread about why. There’s no way he would ever finish anything new.
Unless they figure out a completely new way how to do AI reasoning, there is no way we’re getting anywhere near AGI. And that is also becoming more unlikely the longer we go with this approach, because every AI-pilled company is heavily outsourcing all of development to the current models, reducing their employee (and the whole worlds) innovation potential and skill. This is probably the last generation that can do serious academia, unless there are drastic measures done to limit access to AI in education. It’s fucked.
The issue is that AI companies have been funded on the promise that with enough advancements and upgrades this tech will achieve AGI. Which is an absurd statement to anyone in the field actually developing these things. That is the equivalent of promising that this 260mph Bugatti, with a few years of upgrades and advancements, will become a Harrier Jump Jet!
A better analogy is promising that a toddler will, with enough knowledge and training, eventually become a heart surgeon.
15 years ago the assumption with AGI was that we needed some paradigm shift in technology to create it, but after transformer technology was invented (the T in GPT), and it was trained on a lot of information, we discovered an emergent property that it could take natural language queries and answer them with its knowledge base-- which was unexpected and unintended.
While science can always end up going down the wrong path, the current mainstream stance is that we were wrong about needing new technology for AGI; it seems that AGI may be a function of information and training, on hardware we already have. Hence all the data centers being built.
Anyone who says with certainty that it will result in AGI is just as wrong as someone who says with certainty that it won’t.
That analogy makes the assumption that LLMs are dormant baby AGIs. There is no evidence that AGI is just a bigger and better curated LLM.
That is where the evidence points. Now, I don’t want to oversell it: “where the evidence points” is wildly different than “exactly how it works”.
We have an emergent property that we don’t understand, but we can reliably increase the functionally and complexity of that emergent property as a function of training data and available compute. Does that mean that there isn’t some threshold where that stops working? No, there certainly could be a point where throwing more information and compute has no effect. We just don’t know. However, so far, there is no evidence such a barrier exists, and everyone is racing to find out.
We have math PHDs with proofs current LLMs can’t become AGI, because they’ll always have a context issue
I would love it if you’d point me at these mathematical proofs.
We’ve already had a month now of Psychiatrists writing articles backpedaling over all the times they’d insisted AI couldn’t genuinely be thinking as we do and moving the goal posts to something else. Maybe there are researchers in the frontier labs who feel like they have a grip on what’s happening, but the ‘experts’ on forums have no idea.
The issue is that AI companies have been funded on the promise that with enough advancements and upgrades this tech will achieve AGI. Which is an absurd statement to anyone in the field actually developing these things.
You genuinely believe that the people in frontier labs under such severe NDAs we’ve had articles about how unusual they are believe it’s absurd to think that what they’re working on could lead to “AGI”?
What would the goal of that be in your mind? Getting as much investment as humanly possible before everyone figures out the leading specialists have been being paid insane amounts of money just to act like what they’re doing matters and the valuations all plummet to nothing over night? Why?
With all the money poured in to this from all the sources it’s coming from that would end in a lot of the most powerful companies, government bodies, and individuals in the world extremely unhappy and blaming the people running those frontier labs.
Getting a lot of news and attention and then saying “psych, lol” and being imprisoned for life or murdered doesn’t seem like a great long term plan.
I believe the people in frontier labs are doing their best to push in that direction.
I believe the investors believe they will have AGIs in a few years.
I believe the human species has throughout history repeatedly proven the height of its hubris and the depth of its stupidity.
I agree with all of those things, but for the last one I see a big example in all of the people not taking the news of a demonstrable global workspace in AI, including models that have been around for years now, as anything big.
People have been insisting that AI can’t possibly actually be thinking or have any of the most vaunted aspects of the human mind and that LLMs are a dead end that won’t go anywhere for years. We want to be different and special and unique. We always have.
Many of us here went to school when it was still taught that animals weren’t really conscious and couldn’t be self-aware. Being unwilling to look at new information and honestly assess is hubris and insistence on holding to the thing you’ve been insisting, it’s not a logical analysis.
Over the years we’ve pointed to several things to insist that AI wasn’t special like us, and that it couldn’t possibly be because it lacked aspects of the human mind needed for that. Somehow it kept turning out that every thing we pointed to in ourselves ended up being shown to have a very surprisingly similar to nearly direct analogue in those modern LLMs. Last month was jaw dropping, but the bulk of the world has been so focused on the entire world going to hell it hasn’t gotten near the attention it deserved yet.
The actual real deal big boy models are so far beyond what your avg even extremely technical user understands. Unless you are actively watching following and using the models you just flat out have no clue just how fast this shit is sprinting.
You evidently do not understand the technology. LLMs inherently cannot reach AGI or anything resembling a thought process. And they scale poorly. Tons of compute are thrown at it to make the illusion marginally better. None of the inherent problems have been solved.
You could just as well burn money in front of a photorealistic painting in the hope it turns alive. No matter the amount of money you burn, it never will. Same with LLMs.
I don’t think the person you’re responding to is making any claims about AGI. But the fact is, the models are far, far more capable then they were even 3 years ago. I think that has more to do with the harnesses we have now that it does with the models. The models are a bit better (and way bigger) but the harness is where the capability comes from. Software dev has changed significantly in most places because the fact is, this shit is useful for those tasks. People, appropriately or not, are trying to apply that to every office job basically.
I don’t think that’s gonna pan out for anthropic or open AI financially, especially in the long term. But there has been a lot of progress in capability in the last 2-3 years. I think they’re right that if the timing works out badly, many employers could overcommit to AI and then collapse before they can correct once the bubble pops.
If you assume Sam Altman is telling the truth everytime he talks then yeah, AI is probably going to replace us it’s just a matter of time. But have you considered Sam is full of shit?
Let’s give AI control of cars… until they crash and nobody wants to use them anymore. Let’s let AI represent you in court, until you get the max jail time. Rinse and repeat with any industry really. If they jump the gun, and AI is not at good as they claim, it will REALLY turn people off to the idea of using it at all.
IT WILL hit critical mass to replace your avg idiot long before the profit problem really hits at this rate.
Up until this point you made a lot of sense.
But this, nobody knows at the moment: which one will happen first? And that’s already the investor’s problem. RIGHT NOW.
Btw CEOs and managers might be the first “average idiots” 🤫
I’ve used Opus 5. It’s nothing. It does the same shit 4.6 did, but burns more tokens doing it.
Inevitable.
I expect it to get really bad.
Most people haven’t taken a top end frontier model, integrated it to a memory framework so it can save whatever information it wishes directly in context and save even more in a separate database that it can search with keywords to pull in to context temporarily.
You don’t need something like Claw or Claude Code with their extra dozen pages of coding specific system instructions. You can use a blank context window, explain the function calls for the memory framework, and give a complex task and complete autonomous control of it’s own memory system and free reign of the open internet to learn whatever it needs to accomplish it.
It’s insane to me to see people in tech who still hold on to that insistence that LLMs of today aren’t “really” AI. When you can send one message and the result is the AI running for hours on end researching, saving the information that seems necessary for the task in whichever type of memory each bit seems best to put in, hitting errors, debugging and researching to do so if needed, etc… that isn’t next token prediction.
And there’s a reason it’s the most well funded tech advancement ever and already such a huge part of the market. They want to replace human labor. We all know that. If they manage to do any of us honestly see all the billionaires and corporate leaders behind this saying: “Ok, we got it, guys! No one has to work any more. Now that that’s done we’re going to split all of our wealth and power evenly so all of humanity will live in paradise with all needs and wants met and free to spend their time doing whatever makes them happy.”
lol. But we do see news of AI inventing new viruses. And the people with all the money can pay humans to do that sort of thing as well. Say Elon Musk spends $100 billion using AI and human researchers in cutting edge labs to do gain of function research working to make an extremely deadly virus that transmits through humans quickly and easily but doesn’t live more than a day or so outside a host. And also to make a vaccine to keep people from catching it and cure those who have it in the early stages.
Once AI and robotics can take over labor and produce all the needs and wants of the wealthy, that’s the perfect use for those doomsday bunkers they all have. Vaccinate themselves, hide, and release it all over the world at once. Monitor the state of the world from their techy bunkers, and have fleets of drones deliver the vaccine and instructions once the bulk of humanity is dead.
Way less goods to produce, way less people, way less pollution and crowding and riffraff on the beaches. The bunker billionaires would control the AI that runs and makes everything, so they’d control everything. The poor survivors would have them to thank for sending out the cure they managed to make just in time to save anyone at all. They’re heroes and Gods and blah blah blah.
I don’t know if it would manage to succeed, but that doesn’t really make me feel better. I don’t put it past a lot of them to try. If they manage to replace enough of us they’re going to have to do something big to keep everyone from rioting. The only thing I don’t see them trying is sharing. :/
that isn’t next token prediction.
Yes it is. It’s elaborate. It’s repetitive. It’s a solid illusion. But is, fundamentally, token prediction. That’s all it is, just at a level impractical for humans to run at. I could do that math. It’s not hard. It’ll just take me years to get through a single layer. Hence a level of complexity that implies something magical like consciousness.
Source: data scientist
And there’s a reason it’s the most well funded tech advancement ever
Because some rich assholes wanted to get richer and the dream of AGI was close enough (even though it was never in reach) that they went rabid for the tech that would make them kings over us serfs forever.
once the bulk of humanity is dead
And then what? They live in paradise? For a year or two maybe before their machines inevitably break down? The “kill off humanity” conspiracy has never made sense from the capitalist angle. They want slaves not corpses. They’re huffing their own farts, but they know that these things can’t do everything needed to keep humanity going. And lording over robots isn’t nearly as fun as upping human suffering even if they could.
Yes it is. It’s elaborate. It’s repetitive. It’s a solid illusion. But is, fundamentally, token prediction. That’s all it is, just at a level impractical for humans to run at. I could do that math. It’s not hard. It’ll just take me years to get through a single layer. Hence a level of complexity that implies something magical like consciousness.
Calling what LLMs can accomplish today next token prediction is technically accurate, yes. In the same way it’s accurate to call the human brain a prediction machine. As data streams in from our senses it causes unconscious awareness, activating the chains concepts we’ve learned from past data to correlate with the data of the moment in order to predict what’s coming next.
When most people use terms like next token prediction they’re often trying to use it with an implication that it’s a simple thing and nothing big or important could grow out of it. That’s not the case. The fact that we can now study a global workspace in AI models that have been around for years is shocking. It’s already causing consternation in neuroscience and psychology researchers. Over the last several years we’ve insisted that AI cannot possibly share the most important aspects of the human mind, but one by one everything we pointed to in order to differentiate ourselves was shown by research to have a strikingly similar allegory in modern AI.
Because some rich assholes wanted to get richer and the dream of AGI was close enough (even though it was never in reach) that they went rabid for the tech that would make them kings over us serfs forever.
You genuinely believe that the researchers under tight NDA in the frontier labs agree with you on AGI not being anywhere near reach? Or do you think you have a deeper understanding of the topic?
If it doesn’t get to that, as soon as that thought begins to take hole the massive amount of money poured in to it will virtually evaporate over night. It would create a massive financial crisis and the most powerful companies, government bodies, and individuals would be extremely unhappy with the leaders of those labs and researchers who knew but gave no warning. Pushing for it without believing in it would be setting themselves up to be universally hated at best.
once the bulk of humanity is dead
And then what? They live in paradise? For a year or two maybe before their machines inevitably break down? The “kill off humanity” conspiracy has never made sense from the capitalist angle. They want slaves not corpses. They’re huffing their own farts, but they know that these things can’t do everything needed to keep humanity going. And lording over robots isn’t nearly as fun as upping human suffering even if they could.
There’s a huge difference between the bulk of humanity and the entirety of humanity. Saving .1% scattered through the world with a vaccine that was developed “just in time” to save anyone would give plenty of people to lord over who are grateful for the wonderful people who stepped in and helped save them, leave them in control of production with far less people in need of a share of that production, and reduce global emissions enough that it would likely help the environment recover from the damage we’ve caused in relatively short order.
When most people use terms like next token prediction they’re often trying to use it with an implication that it’s a simple thing and nothing big or important could grow out of it.
I’m saying that as much as we dress it up and pretend it’s a silver bullet that can cure all ills, it isn’t. They can be very useful and powerful in specific instances, but this will not achieve AGI.
Over the last several years we’ve insisted that AI cannot possibly share the most important aspects of the human mind, but one by one everything we pointed to in order to differentiate ourselves was shown by research to have a strikingly similar allegory in modern AI.
Citation needed. AI is trained to pretend to be human and it’s real good at that. It’s why we say it’s thinking when it fundamentally is not. It’s anthropomorphization writ large. It’s just very repetitive math. Maybe brains are too, but it hasn’t reached our level. And it’s wrong all the time, which is a bit of a problem.
You genuinely believe that the researchers under tight NDA in the frontier labs agree with you on AGI not being anywhere near reach? Or do you think you have a deeper understanding of the topic?
My degree and I do think that while I’m not a doctor (a mere masters), I know enough to look at what they’re doing, how they’re doing it, what they’re promising, what they aren’t actually delivering, what damage AI* is doing, and what it is under the hood to know that what’s been promised cannot happen with things as they are and may work to kill us all along the way (ecologically speaking).
plenty of people to lord over who are grateful for the wonderful people who stepped in and helped save them
Pure Hollywood. If you think anyone could engineer something with that level of precision AND manage to somehow dominate the world after such wildly fictitious devastation, I have AGI to sell you.
It isn’t complicated. It’s the oldest thing in the world. Grifters found a shiny and they want to get as much money as they can get and run before the bill shows up.
In the same way it’s accurate to call the human brain a prediction machine
I have seen no evidience presented that the human brain is simply making statistical predictions.
This seems to be a relatively new thing some people are asserting, because they see the LLM behavior and have decided that absolutely it looks so human like it must act the same, and since we understand that LLM is fundamentally statistical prediction of a token, then obviously human consciousness must operate on the same principle.
Even the latest models generate the sort of mistakes that stem from the fundamental limitations. A lot has been done in some contexts for making that not matter so much (e.g. in software development, the strategy is that code may have some verifiable goal, and the models can let the mistakes fly, then take the feedback from the goal, and iterate more). So it still can be very useful, but clearly it isn’t human like because of some of the completely dumb behaviors that result from it not actually thinking about it. It is at it’s best when either mistakes don’t matter (particularly fiction) or at least first mistakes don’t matter and can be automatically reconciled with facts.
By nature, the meme examples will get better because everyone talks about it and suddenly having all that discussion in training data and in search results, the statistics fix. However the operating principle behind them remains the same.
