cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/21121074
OpenAI, a non-profit AI company that will lose anywhere from $4 billion to $5 billion this year, will at some point in the next six or so months convert into a for-profit AI company, at which point it will continue to lose money in exactly the same way. Shortly after this news broke, Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati resigned, followed by Chief Research Officer Bob McGrew and VP of Research, Post Training Barret Zoph, leaving OpenAI with exactly three of its eleven cofounders remaining.
This coincides suspiciously with OpenAI’s increasingly-absurd fundraising efforts, where (as I predicted in late July) OpenAI has raised the largest venture-backed fundraise of all time $6.6 billion— at a valuation of $157 billion.
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Or maybe we’ll just move on to the Next Thing, like we did after the VR and Crypto markets flopped.
So long as you can print new cash faster than bag holders can go bankrupt, we can keep running this thing forever.
If anyone important gets caught holding a bag, bailout and move on.
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It’s fine, it won’t affect normal people
Camera cuts to your pension fund manager with four GPUs taped to their head watching NVDA on their Bloomberg terminal
I am in fact developing a distinct feeling that if it pops hard enough it will be the final crisis. AI is really the last gasp of the USA in terms of trying to outpace the crisis of capitalism, they have nothing else and will have nothing else.
AI is really the last gasp of the USA in terms of trying to outpace the crisis of capitalism
People said this in 2020 during COVID and 2008 with the housing bust.
The US can outpace the collapse because it controls an international currency that commands trade markets. That’s why we can just keep buying more widgets forever, for the next widget milling project to make fake economic activity.
The real thing that will kill the American economy is a collapse in the price of fossil fuels. But I wouldn’t hold my breath on that one.
I have a more rigorous analysis than this but it probably needs to be its own effort post.
Obviously this alone won’t bring things down. But it is the last gasp of capitalism in its attempt to expand accumulation. Without “innovation” (ie. New openings for exploitation) the iron laws of the falling rate of profit begin to really bite
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I think the broader tech market can escape the AI crash if it abandons or significantly scales back on its investments in this garbage. If they continue on the road they’re on, I can see a tech stock crash on par with the dotcom bubble popping in the early 2000s.
If the tech stocks crash like they did back then, it will cause a lot more damage to the whole economy, though. Tech companies are seen as a whole lot less speculative than they were back then, a lot more “safe” investment money is tied up in companies like Amazon and Google.
Unfortunately, I think these companies are pretty incompetent and desperate to get back that exponential growth. I think it’s more likely than not that they’ll try to ride AI off the cliff.
Hopefully mostly Billionaires who bought into it.
As much as I’d like to see big tech die, and bazinga billionaires to lose money, I’m afraid of what a market crash would do to regular people. Lots of pension funds and retirement savings are tied up in the stock market.
The very rich always find a way to come out of market turmoil with a larger share of the wealth, even if the total wealth is smaller. That’ll be another opportunity to do layoffs to “discipline the labor market” and jack up prices, and the working class will once again pay the price for the hubris of the rich.
Its gonna hurt a lot of people directly related to the “computing industry” (haha i’m in danger) but I don’t see it effecting the average person.
My company has its fingers in a lot of pies overall. The most we’re doing “ai” is basically advanced parsing of data. The type of stuff that the average joe would never see ultimately. If the llm beasts decided to die tomorrow, then we’d have to reassign like 3 people. In an organization with at least 10 teams of 4+ people. In a company with thousands and thousands of employees. And specifically, we’re the type of company that IF it were to collapse, average joe would 100% hear about it and be effected in a somewhat meaningful way.
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I’d respect the VC grift of “rich people give us way too much money and we do nothing with it and become moderately well off” if it didn’t cause so much damage.
Like, its basically the idea of paying people to do stuff that might not be “productive” but gets them to try things out. But there is no oversight, no regulation, no incentive to care what happens as a result in 3 years time, let alone 50. We should be doing it, but with like restaurants and FOSS programmers and engineers. Move landscapers to public lands to clear out invasives. Move the spacex dorks to nasa and work on an actual 50 year plan to get men on mars in an actually smart way. Have the ‘AI’ dorks actually work to resolve problems that COULD be solved with neural nets/LLMs. Pay them to just do something weird and unique that might not be the “best” but employs them and offers something unique to the community.
Instead, its ultimately grift, useless movement of capital and resources to appear as growth, fumbling about blindly hoping to hit the next dotcom bubble. Real “Useless jobs” when actually productive meaningful work exists, with the same skills that these people have, but isn’t “good” enough for the demons of capitalism to invest in.
