When this is all over the world owes Ed Zitron a massive fucking apology.
Voroxpete
joined 3 years ago
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.
More circular financing. Definitely a sign that everything is going great.
This article is seriously underselling the problem.
Yes, all of this is accurate, and its good data for people fighting back against data centres. They produce shockingly few jobs, and the most highly paid of those will likely be experts moved in from elsewhere.
But there's a far bigger problem; AI data centres have no path to profitability. The cost of GPUs is so astronomically high and the depreciation so insanely fast that even if 3,000 - 4,000 data centres worth of AI compute demand materializes (it won't; companies like Meta are already selling their own unused compute because demand is so weak), they still won't be profitable, ever.
The article talks about how the permanent employment offered - on paper - is in the tens to low hundreds and that's true, but the real employment is mostly going to be zero. In five years time 99% of these projects will be abandoned before completion, or turned into skate parks.
The issue is that everyone thinks computers operate on magic, so they just ignore the idea that there might be practical limitations on doing the things that they want to do.
In reality there is no means of age verification that isn't also a form of identity verification. And if you asked people "Should everyone have to hand over their government ID to private companies in order to use the internet", you'd see much lower numbers of positive responses.
You mean the "AI boom" that's already in the process of becoming an AI crash? That AI boom?
Yeah, unerring faith in the magical powers of Elon continues to be a hell of a drug. Tesla does not remotely justify its current valuation either.
They would have to realize that profit and to do that they'd have to sell. Any meaningful quantity of "average buyers" cashing out would certainly result in most of them selling at a loss as the price dips below their break even.
Could you tell us what that app is?
And yes, the fact that they blast out amber alerts at the same level as "imminent nuclear attack" is unbelievably stupid. There's no justification for it whatsoever.