Dr. Collier <3

A lot of the AI industry is powered by VC money at the moment. Which means a lot of the services offered are using very low fixed billing. This loses a ton of money, but is seen as an investment. The idea is to get a lot of customers and lock them into the service. Then slowly raise prices, enshittify the service and thus gain back the money lost in the beginning.

However what we’ve seen in this AI bubble is everything is moving too fast for that to be a good option. VC money is running out fast and the price of AI from the large providers is getting higher by the day. This means a lot of those AI startups that were trying to get customers are losing money much faster than expected and either have to raise prices or shutdown.

Especially in sectors where there isn’t a lot of money to be made. Customer support for example is one of those areas that costs money and doesn’t make money normally. So corners get cut, people don’t get paid much and stuff is outsourced to India for example. When the AI solutions are offered at the low fixed price, it’s a good idea for companies to use it. But when the price goes up and pricing becomes unpredictable if token based billing is involved, suddenly it isn’t as good an alternative as the older solutions were.

This is a large part of the AI bubble when people talk about that. It isn’t just the circular investments, way too high spending commitments and overpromising of the tech. It’s also the huge amount of VC based startups and investment programs that can’t economically exist without that continuous injection of funds. Now that the real price of AI is showing up, it looks like a lot of those startups will go bankrupt and large projects funded by investment will stop. With a lot of the market price of the larger tech companies being based on this huge demand that might evaporate in short order, the fear is a lot of them are way overvalued. When the market corrects for this, the impact will be pretty big and the fallout felt by everyone.

You have been misinformed about fluoride in toothpaste and water. Please take the time to inform yourself and trust in facts, not propaganda.

Not meaning any disrespect or negativity towards you, just a heads up.

My aunt and uncle, double suns

And sippin’ blue milk

My aunt and uncle, double suns

I’m sick of blue milk

And I still wonder if there even is any demand at all. Sure it’s used a lot, but most of that is free or highly subsidized services. And from startups that throw money at the wall and have no chance at all of ever becoming profitable. But there is demand from enterprise tho! Is there? The era of tokenmaxxing is over and enterprise is cutting down on AI costs after seeing spending balloon and no real increase in profits or revenue or even productivity. Some people claim to be more productive, but it’s not by a wide margin and the ROI is hard to see.

All AI is used for is filling the internet with slop. If generating an image of AI lobster Jesus would actually cost what it should cost, I wonder if they would still be generated as much. So these AI companies see high usage, more than they can handle, and claim high demand. They buy all the hardware, hardware producing capacity and force the construction of all these datacenters. Often by bribing officials, speed building, cutting corners and not caring about anything sensible like the environment. Instead of also investing in renewable energy, they just plop down gas turbines, because it’s cheaper and faster. And for what? So we can generate more slop?

But no worries guys, we’ll ask Grok how to solve climate change, not a problem! A little more fucking up the environment now doesn’t matter, we’ll get our magical genie to create a magical solution to all our problems. Which is so fucking dumb, it’s doubtful anyone actually believes that.

We already know how to solve climate change, we just choose not to because it would mean giving up some luxuries.

Spot on, this is the thing people often miss out.

These problems aren’t actual problems in the way most people think about. They are problems in the way that they are exercises. Like the Navier Stokes problem is reporting in the news like one of the biggest problems in maths ever. Leading people to think we are stuck on it and can’t progress in some way without a solution. But in reality the limitations of the equation are well known and don’t impact normal every day use. And in cases where they would, we have other tools at our disposal.

The goal of these problems is to challenge mathematical people and push boundaries. Having a proof pop out of nowhere is like having someone tell you the answer to a question, where the whole goal was to formulate the answer yourself. The answer itself is meaningless, that’s why you get 0 points on the exam unless you show the workings out. It’s like having a movie spoiled for you, the goal wasn’t to know the outcome, the goal was the experience the story yourself.

Working backwards from some proof might lead to insights, but it also might not and be harder than working forwards. It also might pick a certain path, where there were multiple and we would be blind to the other paths. Those other paths might lead to more insights, if we had explored them.

The way OpenAI specifically has approached this is also very weird and awful in my opinion. Like they set their sights on yet again ruining some aspect of the world with AI and then throwing billions of dollars at it to make sure it’s properly ruined. For what purpose exactly? Not to make any money, that’s for sure, they are 2 trillion in the hole and counting.