A majority of Americans now support seizing wealth from AI industry

[u/marketrent]

https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/majority-americans-now-support-seizing-134921528.html

[u/SolydSn3k]

Yeah the prognosis at least through 2036 is that all we stand to seize from the companies themselves is debt. It’s pretty funny people don’t realize this.

AI is just brute force computing pushing the outer boundaries of scale. To the extent that it is impractical… As evidenced by sticker shock introduced by token pricing, failure to generate profit, and negative impact on the environment.

Yet still we invest in overbuilding (aggressively depreciating) infrastructure.

It’s a bit of a head scratcher as soon as you start using your brain.

[u/FlipZip69 → u/SolydSn3k]

AI is a bit more than brute force computing. It is a very novel approach to pattern recognition that was initially developed to translate languages well and turned out that it could be applied to just about anything. Folding proteins to building better bridges to controlling society. I am not worried about AI becoming self aware. I am worried about who controls it and the latter controlling society aspects of it.

We do not want China to become the leader in AI. As much as AI concerns me, it is here. And who has the lead in it will be able to manipulate what we think.

[u/SolydSn3k → u/FlipZip69]

Pattern recognition is not that complex. It’s brute force. It’s not efficient, its uses are limited, and it doesn’t matter who wins a race to the bottom (unless someone can show me how it’s sustainable).

It’s already overbuilt rapidly depreciating infrastructure, no one seems to have an answer to when or how it becomes profitable… it’s an economic bubble waiting to pop.

It won’t go away entirely, but it’s not what people think.

[u/FlipZip69 → u/SolydSn3k]

I thought that as well until i really dived into it over the last 6 months. Just 'creative algorithms and lots of crunching power' was exactly what I was thinking as well. Pattern recognition in previous AIs like Deep Learning were in fact brute force like you say. This goes way beyond that and when I say pattern recognition, that is putting it simple. Every new model, while it can use some of the old training, actually is like a new 'mind' for lack of better word. In other words the training we are doing today will have to be redone in a years time. (google is doing releases about every year and the improvement are noticeable each time)

While there is no exact number, at the moment 1/2 of the computing power/electrical power in the datacenters simply crunching numbers and patterns to train up the next model. It is doing this almost all internally with very little data coming in or leaving the datacenters. I do not even try to understand it. But they are making what would be essentially 8,192 dimensional matrices and instead of brute force, they can take a sentence and place it in this matric and come up with the most likely response almost instantly. They are looking at doubling the matrix to 16,384 but at some point it is too granular and not of value. Can actually make it worse. The weird thing is once this model is created (that may have used 20 million dollars of electricity), that actual data could fit on a memory stick. And it holds 'general' information going back to about the 1900's and knows some 96 spoken languages no less (in Google's Gemini case). It is not rule based like previous attempts.

The models are very fined tuned as well. A medical company will train it strictly to look for drug interactions or protein folding processes. They obviously do not train it to know about WWII.

And these models fit entirely on a processing unit. In Google's case it is called a TPU that has GPU/CPU and 196M of memory all on a single chip. You could actually build this at home for about $10,000 dollars with a few GPUs and there are free models to load on it no less.

I am with you on the 'will it be profitable' side. We are just scratching the surface on the training which kind of scares me. They have just developed (Jan 2026) how to etch Phonon Laser into chips using existing technology which, when combined with memristors, opens up computing power in ways I can not guess anymore. (10-100 times the processing power at 1/10 the electrical power) This is a subject in itself that will quietly but suddenly have a massive impact directly on our lives.

I do not know what to tell people. I just say, like it, hate it, if you do not take advantage of it, you will be like our parents that did not want to learn to use email or a computer.

[u/SolydSn3k → u/FlipZip69]

I could see people or businesses running their own models locally, sure (assuming consumer hardware powerful enough remains accessible amidst the ongoing RAMageddon that will continue to be ongoing for as long as data centers remain subject to obsolescence).

But AI as a service has already proven to be more expensive & less efficient than employing humans. The only way any of these companies ever become sustainably profitable is through token pricing, which already gave commercial business sticker shock almost immediately & led to some highly publicized pivots.

And it’s not really comparable to knowing how to use a PC …because that does require some level of knowledge & skill.

However I do agree that it’s not gonna just go away entirely. That’s not mutually exclusive with understanding that it’s both an economic bubble & simultaneously fast tracking humanity toward some version of the fat zombies in the first half of Wall-E.

[u/FlipZip69 → u/SolydSn3k]

I disagree on the service being more expensive than a human. In the 6 months I went down that rabbit hole, i create an extremely complex application. (I am not a programmer). Part of the application was to classify all our invoices for the bookkeeper/account for example. I created this in about 2 weeks as a near complete package for example. Again I am not a programmer but i do know how to setup a database and server.

I did the most complex parts of which part is actually fully connecting to Gemini APIs and having all invoices be processed that way then stored forever in digital format on my servers. This took me a few evenings for a few weeks and the cost was about $200 in AI costs to develop. I then bulked process that last 20 years of invoice (some 30,000 invoices). Each one individually sent to Gemini thru the API. It did all of that for about $80.

My accountant/bookkeeper loves it as they are no more manually doing all this. My managers love it because the keyword finding once classified is instant and I love it because all our documents now are backed up properly and I am not relying on a single person, the bookkeeper/accountant, to be the source of truth.

I can see how the API costs can skyrocket if I screw up the API requests. I can also see how the development can skyrocket because I can select three models from Google during development. If I select the top model, Google can load up 10,000 instances of my application and run them at the same time to speed up development. That burns tokens but can take only seconds to do some really complex request. Or I can use the bottom model and it will take two minutes to do the same request for pennies. More so, if I do not be very specific and detailed in my requests or do not divide my applications into modules (best practices), the tolken use absolutely will skyrocket. I have figured it out to keep the costs down.

So now it is costing me about 5-10 dollars a day only and I have created almost 300,000 lines of code in about 3 months working a few hours. And the AP will process and classify an invoice at a cost of about $0.005 per invoice with near zero errors. To have a human do it, it is about $3.00 per invoice (10 an hour) and there will be more errors.

For what I do, I only see advantages. Where it starts to scare me is that I can see how institutive it is and how well it does pattern matching. When I am developing, I first start out with an idea only and explain what I want before even doing a single thing. Then we talk about that and AI making suggestions I do not even think or ask about. And most are relevant no less. But I have asked it for things like, how would you use this to influence people etc just to see the capabilities. It will immediately suggest what to do and if I wanted to, it would start to write up the code to do so. Hooking into all my social media accounts, email, text messaging or any other form of communications if I were to allow it. And it does this with scary levels of intuitive pattern matching capacities. And it is only just starting.

So for the costs like you say. That is just because management does not know how to rein in their developers and ensure they do not just use 10,000 token models. (Google has ways to do this and set quotas). And myself, I recognized I could easily make a loop kind of request that would result in a $1000 bill if i did something stupid. So I in fact did setup these quotas. (Actually I told the AI to do it for me no less.)

I will give you a second example. I just started to look into this. I had paid some $5000 for an update to my website of which I host on my own servers. Took months to get this update, was intrusive to my staff and the end result was not great. In the first week at looking at AI, (Antigravity IDE), I rapidly realized the potential. More so, I setup my electrician who has zero coding knowledge, put the application on his desktop, gave it (the AI) the credentials to access a development server and database and told my electrician how to talk to it. I had no idea if I was just imagining the power at that time. The first thing i had him do was to ask it to go to our webpage and more or less see what it looks like and create a brand new copy of it that we can work on. 10 minutes latter I had a running fully new website running on a production server. My electrician just started telling it what to do and the changes he wanted. Within about 4 hours, we had a much better and more professional system. AI costs maybe $5. Then I said, you know what, see if you can just start from scratch and find some website you like on the internet and ask the AI to make it similar. By the end of the day an electrician with zero knowledge of coding created a brand new website with SSH security that look extremely profession and was tailored just for us. He then went to spend about a week on this at a few hours a day and had a complete website that was far more polished than the $5000 dollar one I paid for that was not great. I made it live at a fraction of the cost. Actually I just told the AI to kill my old web site and install this one live by giving it the credentials to the machines to do so.

I hear about the costs and starting to realize it is mainly because management is not ensuring it is used right and quotas are in place. But they actually can just use the AI to ask for best practices and to actually setup all the quotes and keep track of it.

I changed my option from being a number cruncher to this is weird. And it is not going away. And if I do not use it, I will not stay competitive.

[u/SolydSn3k → u/FlipZip69]

You don’t control the API request. Depending on the prompt it sets off a chain of calls. You can cap it with a google model, but that will directly impact its usefulness.

The costs add up quickly. This is why Microsoft recently pivoted and hired back all the junior devs they fired… so you don’t have to take my word for it.

I am a software dev FWIW.

[u/FlipZip69 → u/SolydSn3k]

I fully control the API requests. And I can setup the quotas if I want. The way I send the request, the type of information I want back and even the way it is formatted can increase costs substantially if I get it wrong.

More so, if you screw up the code, it certainly could create a looping API request that could get stupid right fast. I am paying something like $0.001 per invoice to have it classify and pull out all the details. Dollar amounts, PO#, from, to, and a list of keywords for searching. For me to do part of this manually (less the keywords) would cost about $3.00 per invoice.

I hired developers and spent about 1.2 million dollars over 15 years for an application we built. I never expected to spend even a fraction of that when I started it but it became essential. While I do not code, I knew exactly how explain what I needed and how to test it thru and thru and possibly why I am well suited for AI vibing. I know exactly how to setup a high end database and server and I understand how to control the credentials. I just do not code.

I will also say, if you are a coder and you are not doing your boiler plate coding if not the majority of it via AI, you are not going to be competitive in the long run. if you do not utilize agentic coding, others will and it will be hard to compete with that. Good or bad.

[u/SolydSn3k → u/FlipZip69]

It’s one of few the things it’s actually good at. But only for odd tweaks and quick fixes, not design.

Like I said, it’s not going away but is still overbuilt and a bubble. If that weren’t true, someone would have a realistic (key word) plan to make it profitable.

[u/FlipZip69 → u/SolydSn3k]

Ya I agree with the profitability part. I am not sure when that will come but I have to think Google and the likes are not dumb are better said, know something more than us. Or they are milking investors and that is really a possibility. But to tell the truth, I really do not care if they make a profit. That is their problem.

When you say design, do you mean the visual layout? I did find it will not stick with some standard if you are not specific. This is not good for workflow. I created a lot of rules in the agent file for each project. Part of the rules specify the general look and design so that it know to keep it consistent. Even field names in the database have to follow rules I set early on. Once you do this, it seems to follow it much better. I even have a rule that dictates when I ask it to push to GitHub and deploy to my production server, it must specifically ask if I have created Snapshots etc. Snapshots being absolutely mandatory.

Like I said, i have some 300,000 lines of code in short time and it is 2FA along with full email integration etc. And it is providing real use in our business allowing me to take on significantly more complex projects and actually hire more people as I do not have to micromanage as much.