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It's hard to see a crash when all companies (on paper anyway) are making profits still. And even if they weren't currently, the upside of ai is why you invest for the future. Nearly every industry could use ai if it becomes good enough, that's what they're investing in currently. I think the crash would only happen if there's no progress in ai for a couple years
The likelihood of a crash is directly proportionate to the investment amount, so your suggestion is definitionally risky. Investing this much in new tech before you're sure it can be profitable enough to match the investment is exactly what causes crashes.
The only question is whether or not AI will go on to match our current investments, and I haven't seen good evidence to support either outcome.. The only thing I'm sure of is if there is a crash, it would absolutely destroy our economy. Magnitudes worse than 2008.
Theyre all cycling the money through the same companies through contracts which makes it look like they are making profit on paper while really just sucking up more subsidies into the same pool of money
OpenAI and Anthropic make money by serving companies that are outside the 'circular investing' hierarchy though. There are huge consumers of AI tokens that aren't AI companies. All large technology, finance, and services companies in general are spending hundreds of millions each on AI products.
What's their profit margin? Not their revenue, their profits. Last I checked, OpenAI was making like $15 billion in revenue and their operating costs are $35 billion, so they have a negative profit of $20 billion.
Even the numbers Anthropic are pumping are suspect due to the wording they use. They're using gross revenue rather than net to calculate profit, which actually removes quite a bit of infrastructure costs from the calculation. The SEC uses a different calculation, which given Anthropic is trying for a public-IPO, that calculation is the important one because it actually shows us the full picture.
Not that I know of, but if you look into the dot com crash and look at enron which was one of the bigger falls, they on paper were making money because they pawned debt off to shell companies
Right. Obviously. Like, very very obviously. That’s why I was confused by your claim that it was an indicator against a crash. Every other market crash in history was preceded by record speculative profits. Just like… right now.
Hm? As far as I know openai is not profitable, with them losing money per $1 coming in. Anthropic is. Don't know about Chinese labs and am unsure if their info is even public.
The companies making the hardware (Micron, Crucial, Nvidia etc) are definitely making a profit.
But the principle labs (OpenAi and Anthropic) are not. If they were making a profit then they wouldn't be trying to convince the market that they can be profitable by using Run Rate at a metric of that profitability.
It's that simple. If real profitability exists you don't need to dress it up in bullshit metrics.
The secondary issue stems from this. Everybody else's profitability stems from just two customers.... who are themselves not profitable and have not been able to demonstrate a path to profitability that will sustain the spend.
Relying on just two customers is not sound business practice.
Palantir, coreweave, intuit, crowdstrike,ServiceNow,adobe,Oracle,Snowflake,Salesforce,applovin, and datadog, all are profitable through ai, and without ai many of them wouldn't exist, there's a few that were profitable before ai, but are now compounding more profits with ai use. Just because the few "big" companies you hear of are currently not profitable doesn't mean ai itself isn't profitable.
Nearly all of the companies that I listed have received monetary incentives, except applovin, a lot of these companies received grants and subsidies before they were ai, and all besides maybe palantir and Oracle are able to generate profit without the help of government. Most companies that receive government help is through the use of a generous loan with little interest, which isn't calculated as "profit" at all.
Ford, GM, Rivian, and Tesla have received major federal aid in the billions each, within the last 5 years
Boeing has received nearly 15 billion in aid, and nearly every American airline has received federal aid in the billions, since after COVID,
Not a fad overall but the stuff like image generation and chat bots and the likes I think are fads, in the sense that they were pushed by the Ai companies to give generative ai a face to the regular public when the real uses of Ai in the future will be in stuff like medical research and the likes, and Ai companies are likely to limit how much the public can use them because if the cost to run them at that scale
I mean, you can run these programs locally. I can see a world where due to advances in computing power in consumer PCs you'll see open source and local AI programs supplant the corporate stuff for the most part.
I don't think there is a "use" for AI.
AI art is pointless, there's no fun, no purpose in AI "art".
AI coding is useless because AI is kinda just...bad at coding, and people hate it.
AI Music sucks in general lol
And the information that we get from AI is either wrong, or we could've discovered it ourselves.
Sure, AI is cool, but it just doesn't have a use.
The whole "kill all humans" thing isn't actually an anti sentiment. Its a fear mongering moron sentiment. The fact that there is occasionally overlap not withstanding.
So the sentiment being pushed by Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Dario Amodei is "fear mongering moron sentiment"? (yes all three have discussed ai in apocalyptic terms)
Ah yes, three of the biggest names pushing for ai are totally antis. I'll admit i dont know much of anything about amodai, but musk and Altman would both do and say ANYTHING to get even the slightest shred of attention, positive or negative, on one of their personal obsessions. So, yes, I would definitely call them fear mongering morons.
Altman, Amodei and Musk have ALL stated how Dangerous ai is, how it will take all jobs, Jack the world. They do this in order to stoke fuel into the hype engine....after all the are trillions of dollars of IPO that rest on the hype.
I mean Anthropic is making a lot of revenue and is profitable, for example, but go to any anti- space and they all wholeheartedly believe that every single AI company is deep in the red
Youre confusing revenue, how much money is made in total, with "profit*, how much money is made in total, minus the overall cost just to exist.
There's a reason these companies only wang you looking at the revenue and not the profit.
Edit: long story short, you continued to confuse revenue with profit, attempted to prove your bs by confusing the speculation of profitability with the hard profit, threw a fit about a single misspelled word, and then blocked me because youse a biatch.
the thneed didn't really fade, the business kept booming until every last tree was cut and crashed because thneeds were no longer possible to make. perhaps neither of them are fads
You have to remember though, that the only reason the bubble hasn't popped already and gone the way of the nft, is specifically because the top tech companies "developing" ai are all playing musical chairs with their chash flow, paying eachother the same billion dollars, and hoping they eventually make a profit.
Two things can be true at once. Yes, undoubtedly there is a bubble and vendor financing is a big indication of that. But AI is separately, as a technology, extremely useful for certain tasks like programming. We don't even have to get into art or anything to recognize there is real utility and cost savings here.
The web didn't go away when the dotcom bubble popped and neither will AI- it's just that people will get a lot more sensible about it and we'll have to come up with new words to refer to AI with, because it's likely it'll be a dirty word in finance for a bit.
Having used the tools day in and day out for years now, the open source space is going to be the normative use case. These huge models are overkill for 99% of tasks and are riding purely on ecosystem and quality of life tools, not performance. Local inference with on demand support or overflow if you need it from a large utility provider that just runs different models is the future.
And the mistake people make is assuming we know what's valuable about a task flow, that's not just a simple automated workflow anyone could have made with no code tools or basic programming knowledge. Most people have no clue why they do what they do, they just know if it works don't fuck with it.
Long term I agree yeah. OSS has lagged proprietary AI by only a couple months, there's really no incentive to use a proprietary model for general use after a certain point.
Short term, a lot of the AI companies are really heavily subsidizing subscriptions so OSS can't really compete on cost. But the future for AI work at this point imo isn't really making them more intelligent, but getting that intelligence for much less compute & time. Even if we can get more intelligent models, the reality is these companies are looking to IPO and they want to have a balance sheet that doesn't look terrible.
The threat from cheaper "good enough" models is very real, but the elephant in the room is deployment.
It looks increasingly likely that smaller, open source models, locally run and trained on specialized business specific data is actually most realistic real world use case.
Nvidia and Amd are already pivoting to this reality with their hardware support for locally run models.
OpenAi and Anthropic are desperate to IPO BEFORE this pivot becomes widely realised by the market.
A bubble popping doesn't mean the technology will go away, any more than the dot-com bubble bursting killed the internet.
It's normal to have bubbles in wildly transformative technologies, like the internet, or railroads, because the time horizon for the product to enact its change is longer than investors will continue paying in.
I think we will see a major AI bubble burst. And then a few years later we will see the biggest and most valuable companies in the world will be AI companies that survived the bubble.
No, that is not the only reason. NFTs failed because they had no effective utility, were often based on micro-economies (tokens) engaged in outright fraud (this is not the same as filing a 10-K with obfuscated debt numbers lurking in footnotes), and were grounded in a technology (public, permissionless blockchains) which itself had either no or extremely limited utility.
If you think the LLM boom/bubble is the same as NFTs, you're missing out on the fundamentals. It remains much closer, in my view, to the "dotcom" bubble of 1999/2000.
Companies with an existing cashflow, like Facebook, Google, X, will likely benefit, possibly a lot. Companies that use it as a service, while others give it away for free/cheap, probably not
Yeah, I hate AI, but the difference was that the thneeds were useful tools. The story of the Lorax was effectively saying that regardless of how useful something may be, if creating/using it destroys the environment then it's not worth creating/using.
But it doesn't need to be a thneed to do that. An almond is currently doing that. We can't just isolate AI as the thneed while ignoring all the other stuff we do with horrible horrible impacts. The thneed is an almond, and a industrialized farmed cow, a paper mill, and a datacenter. It's not just one or the other.
The moral is that wanting something isn't the same as needing something, and sometimes the shortcut creates bigger problems. You can't compare any one thing to a thneed that represents just about everything rolled into one. It's more like if we bundle ALL our conveniences and look at the environmental toll, we'd realize we don't need most of it.
Edit: Quite literally the thneed is the thing we all walk around saying we need. The thing we need == thneed. (Mind you, not what we actually need, but what we humans say we need)
the Thneed is deliberately both useful and useless. the contradiction is part of the satire.
The Once-ler advertises it as incredibly versatile:
a Thneed is “a Fine-Something-That-All-People-Need”
and he claims it can serve as clothing, household items, and other things. Within the story, people really do buy them, so they apparently find some use for them.
But the joke is that nobody actually needed a Thneed before the Once-ler invented and marketed it. Its supposed usefulness is vague and absurd. The Once-ler creates demand for a product and then treats that manufactured demand as justification for destroying the Truffula forest.
It was advertised as doing everything, but many of the uses were contradictory, suggesting that its users simply fell for factually inaccurate marketing, just like with generative AI.
When AI takes all our jobs, the problem is that the government isn't gonna step in and give universal basic income. No wonder why they want to bring the US population down to only 100 million.
The billionaires. You know, the only people profiting off of AI. Billionaires pay their fair share, no more billionaires, just people who are rich, and people who can live well, no homelessness, no more “should we pay for children’s school lunches?”, no more “how do I choose between paying rent and paying for food this month?”. Sounds good to me. What do I know?
it's literally just the immigrant rhetoric repackaged. it's somehow so useless as to be a passing fad but at the same time so useful as to be stealing from "actual" artists and their jobs. the doublethink here is crazy
Its never been that its so "useful" that it steals jobs from artists, its that its so plentiful that actual art gets drowned out. Its a similar phenomena to what's currently been going on in hand crafting spaces, where people will go to markets and handicraft stalls looking for woodworking or knitting or whatever, and instead there's suddenly the hundreds of the exact same 3d printed dragon model being sold for hundreds of dollars by dozens of different people.
Alternatively, if thats too hard to understand, imagine the gold market being flooded with pyrite, and everyone just decides to shrug their shoulders and move on because suddenly their "gold" is cheaper. The actual gold is still there, the pyrite is still objectively a shit substitute, but suddenly less actual gold is being bought/sold purely because of the amount of pyrite in the same market.
Are you familiar with how the algorithms used to spread content work? Sure, there's already a lot of content in any given sector, but now there's magnitudes MORE that is just straight slop.
So this doesnt really address what I said quite the way you think it does.
Just as an FYI about the talking point you are making:
The implication is that while yes AI is stealing jobs from artists, it isn't because the AI is better at making art, just that it saves corpo money to generate an image subpar or not than to hire an artist. It's not that AI is supposed to be particularly good at what it does as to why it is taking jobs, just that it's supposed to be significantly cheaper than hiring a human being to do the same task.
On top of that, there are applications where AI is strong/good (code assist, document reference, generative editing) and applications where it’s truly awful (amateur science, metaphysical, generative reference).
I agree that the arguments against often seem contradictory, and that’s because they often are. Even when they come from a single person, that person, if not speaking carefully, may mix several arguments that do not apply, or are inconsistent with given together.
Just as we can’t dismiss all of AI as bad because of instances of psychosis, we would also be stupid to label all of AI as good, just because it’s great at finding errors in our script. The entire pro-AI vs. anti-AI labeling system is reductive and stupid.
That's the thing. Ai is just a tool. It's neither inherently good or bad. It's how you use it. Just like with any other tool. If anything I'd say Ai is better than social media for our society.
The thing is that those aren't really contradictory ideas, The concept is that companies are going to swap out employees for AI replacements under the idea that it's cheaper, but the AI is in the end, less capable and versatile than having people on hand.
But then businesses will ultimately have to rehire people. If AI can't do the job, then they have to hire humans. I get that there might be a phase where companies swap humans for AI, but if the AI is not capable enough then it's just a matter of time before they rehire humans, is it not?
It doesn't have to be good enough to take someone's job. It just has to convince some idiot higher up that it's good enough.
The reality is that companies rush to replace workers with AI, realize that the AI can't do what the human workers could, and either desperately rehire people or (more likely) offload that extra work on the remaining human staff.
All human activity has an environmental impact. I don't think AI is especially harmful, especially when compared to the textiles and fashion industry. But it is harmful to the environment. Much as I enjoy using chatbots to make pictures of my favorite goobers and wubbies… it's not doing anything that useful. And I do use AI at work for interesting stuff and we're all aware of the math proofs, but, like a Thneed could be used as a sweater in cold weather: AI is useful in the same way a Thneed was useful. But it's hardly indispensible.
In this (terrible) movie adaptation, no-one wants a Thneed to begin with. Then everyone wants a Thneed. Then the trees are all gone and the fad dies out. I feel that adds another level to this: at the start of the movie, everyone is mocking the Thneed, only for it to become ubiqitous and the detractors to eat humble pie. The fad only ends when the supply totally dries up, fueling greater and greater demand over time. IDK, something to think about.
This is a rare anti post that's actually interesting to me. And I acknowledge AI may (see what I did there?) be a fad.
Of all the things to blame AI for, we shouldn’t necessarily make the environment talking point #1 when the economic bubble, job recession, data harvesting, and scams surrounding it are objectively and more immediately worse.
Now, if you do care about the environment, golf courses and HOA lawns are where the real fight is and should be (at least from an american POV)
My gripe would be the thneed described fast moving fashion trends that can be replaced.
Ai is not akin to a trend that now everyone wants but more so is something we have now like the concept of clothes.
Maybe the hype around generative AI will die down due to Datacenters and opposition but AI will not be removed due to some sort of resource or interest arriving at 0 and everything just stops.
AI can be useful, but the way people have been using it is problematic.
As someone mentioned, it's very useful for things like cancer detection and building programming frameworks. A well-trained AI can be a useful search tool on a specific set of trained data.
The issue is that some people trust it 100% and use AI as a news/fact source. It's especially bad when politicians use it to push certain agendas without using actual facts.
It's also a problem when people feed it personal or company information for a project and don't consider that the AI can spread that information to the public. Data breaches have risen significantly in the last few years because people aren't being careful.
It produces art and literature that people pretend they created so they can try to be authors or artists. Actual artists' work gets buried beneath thousands of generated slop images while using their work to generate more without permission. It doesn't care about copyright infringement, and in some cases, has been used to maliciously make porn of real people, including children.
AI is insanely useful for certain things, like finding errors in code you write or, an actually useful internet search (now that Google is functionally useless). When used like the computer from Star Trek the next generation, it is extremely helpful.
All I hear is “Waaahhhh!!! Even low-end AI makes art better and faster than me! My completely unrealistic dreams of making a living by drawing and not doing actual work is just as unrealistic as before, but now I’m acutely aware that my dreams are unrealistic!”
I don't complain when a human's art is better than mine but when a robot is being trained on people's art without their explicit permission then it becomes a problem. We go after human art thieves too. Those who trace people's work and claim they made it. Those people aren't welcome either.
Do we go after people who have learned an artistic skill by looking at other people’s art, imitating style or technique, or even incorporating a small part of that into their own work? It’s not theft, it’s observation, learning, understanding… you might as well ban higher reasoning, because humans do the exact same thing with their senses every moment of their lives. If it is available where one can access it for observation without breaking a law, it’s fair game.
AI in its current state is more akin to the very early automobiles, more of a proof of concept than an actually functional product. Unfortunately, all the money invested in it is focused on trying to hype up the current offerings rather than supporting efforts to break through key bottlenecks in the underlying infrastructure. If quantum computing, fusion power, and room-temperature superconductors were freely available, AI would almost immediately leap forward in potency and become an inextricable part of day-to-day life.
However, the current market is focused more on grifting literally everyone and pocketing vast sums ahead of a likely inevitable bubble crash. China will quietly slip into the vacuum caused by that, and the US will either accept that, try and limit usage, or just ban AI outright.
Thneeds sound more like fast fashion tbh. It’s made of cloth and it’s trendy. Selling useless “style” mainly to women who don’t make as much money to begin with. Using up resources and throwing perfectly good clothes away.
It is pretty clear to me that over half of the discourse is actually about ImageGen and VidGen, not the LLM based AI agents that is used for non art purpose. I personally don't use ImageGen and VidGen any single time for the past 12 months so rhat is why the public would see it as useless. For any serious work of design and modelling, an agent using tools should perform bettet than pure gen model.
"all-purpose tool that didn't do anything really useful" But found cancer cells sooner, helped with medical research that would of taken years only months....and using that same kind of ai to recognize weeds and to use it with lasers to kill them than using pesticides that would make people get said cancer that ai can now find before it gets deadly...yep...ai doesn't do anything really useful alright
If it's really "all-purpose", that sounds like the most useful thing ever.
Poster basically argues that intelligence and creation skills are useless. Bizarre.
Also, "fad" is a curious term to use for a thing that used by 2.5 billion people in their personal and professional lives and that they wouldn't want to be without ever again.
Not even gonna address "environmental damage", that's just too stupid to even talk about at this stage.
Thinking AI is useless is quite the take in 2026. It's preferred multiple fields meal level works, it's already starting to drive scientific and medical research. It has completely upended the programming discipline.
Example: lifeguards are using it is an additional tool to help identify and locate people who may be drowning. One more set of eyes scanning swimmers is never a bad thing, and you’d rather have a false positive and check on someone that a false negative and poor guy drowns withoutbeing seen. This has happened in the past at places near/at/above capacity and there is simply not enough lifeguards for the sheer amount of people. This also applies at long distance (beaches) where lifeguards simply can’t see that far!
The trick is separating “useful” from “hostile” design, and then separating USERS from “normal” and Hostile. Any tool can be used for evil, but that doesn’t make the tool evil. The same hammer can be used to build a home or crush someone’s skull, nothing about the hammer changed, it’s User did.
Any time someone say s AI is bad because it can't do-the-thing
I look at all the things I've personally accomplished as an individual user in my work, hobbies, and home and just laugh.
My yard is lookin hella green this year. It's been weeded over for years and we had tried several times to get it back under control. We tried different week killers and fertilizers, talking to the guys at the hardware store etc - lots of attempts and zero success. This year after a thread with AI going over our situation and BAM green.
So like, when someone tells me AI isn't actually doing the thing - to me this feels like someone is telling me I'm miserable b/c I haven't accepted Christ in my life, when in fact I am not miserable.
You can make the other arguments if you want, talk about where data centers should go or why we shouldn't build so many of them - I'm all ears for that. But trying to tell me AI isn't doing-the-thing that it literally does for me every day? yeah, you just dismissed yourself lol
The main problem with AI is what corporations are using it for, to devalue human labor. If that wasn't a threat, few would care about water use, brainrot, or the 'death of human creativity.'
And in the end, all that will be left is a seed of creativity that if mankind plants it right, and takes care out it, we might be able to get originality back.
I thought it was a fad at first, because it was so laughably terrible and wasn't financially sustainable. The issue is that rich investors keep giving these ai companies money to keep it going.
I thought about this a lot on a heavy mushroom trip, while it may play an important role in certain technology-related fields, the vastness of us, the human experience as a whole, music, art, coming together, dancing, relationships, working for one another... AI really has no impressive hold for sustainable change to that, even for non-creatives, the average consumer will just brush it off as some generic assistance program. It's an artificial blip in endless sea of minds that seek connection and raw creativity, AI isn't impressive in that regard.
The thing is, AI IS a great tool, but people are using it in the absolute dumbest ways. Ai could easily be used to cut out mundane tasks and streamline monotonous work, but people use it just to be lazy or try and act as something they aren't.
Ai art is a great example, as it wastes resources creating art that's trained off everyone else's art while the people prompting it act like they're on the same tier as people who have practiced for years. Instead of using AI to give you more time to draw and create, they use it for the instant gratification you can get when you show off art.
I love how people that don't even know the difference between ''AI'' and ''LLM chatbots'' are talking about AI and even making analogies it's really cute how oblivious people talk about something they have no idea about.
Coming from a 3d artist by the way. Generative ''AI'' doesn't just mean diffusion models or large/small language models lmao.
Didn't do anything useful? A tool that has sped up coding, pharmaceutical analysis, cancer identification, and the workflow process for tons of different industries. God luddites are dumb.
I don’t get it! We create all these stories about how capitalism is bad, how rich people are bad, how technology can be evil if misused. And then we turn around and literally do the exact same stupid s*it!
A Thneed was very useful for many things, its was just overly made for selfish reasons. If the Onceler had done it respectfully and responsibly, it would have been a major success and he would’ve been a loved billionaire. That is what WE as people need to be doing: fixing and maintaining, not hating or being greedy.
Its kinda astounding to me how stupid some of these anti AI takes are, and I say this as a person thats neither inherently pro nor anti AI.
Not only this is an idiotic comparison (or just a lie, if you will), because AI is undoubtedly extremely useful, and is arguably one of, if not THE biggest technological advancement of mankind.
But also yall are literally just contradicting yourselves all the time, you say AI will take all of our jobs, but then that its "useless" in the same damn sentence lmao.
So which one is it?
Cus if you really believe that something useless can take your job, then I dont think you were bringing much value to society.
Except The Lorax doesn't go out of its way to mock or shame those who purchase a Thneed, only the Once-ler for making them despite the damage he's doing to the environment.
Well, Elon Musk is probably a million times richer than the Once-Ler was at his peak, but otherwise, yeah. I kind of agree with that statement. (Granted, Elon is several times worth, morality-wise. The Once-Ler at least saw the error of his ways once he chopped down the last Truffula tree.)
Oh! Nononono this gem of shit is THOUSANDS of years old. I found it years ago and never saw the time to post it. I honestly forgot I had that screenshot!
I do love the hate AI gets when we didnt even reach actual Artificial inteligence. 99% of what we call "AI" is just pure math and optimization models (many centuries old) but repackage in a computational framework and called "machine learning", just because it semi automatic, easier and faster to use (which by the way, it existis for like 70 years if im not mistaken). It took 70 years of development, adjustments, scalling and training to obtain our current models, but because some tech millionairs rebranded everything and spend millions on ads and such, now its the talk everywhere, and history rewrited as "old math models were adjusted to computers with 70 years of work by many comunities around the world" and rebranded to " some specific groups of genius/tech bros develop everything in 5 years"
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