This has been cooking for a while, like since the alarms started getting sounded about an AI bubble; but I had a dream recently where the AI bubble popped, and we were all happy, and the industry really did bottom out, but then peter goddamned thiel ends up basically owning the entire market share, then buys up artistic supplychains and stores and shuts them down entirely to force people on the slop machine.
and reflecting on it, that’s when i kinda came to the conclusion: that’s a real ass possibility.
I think of the 2000s dot com bubble, levelled the landscape, and the companies that survived and the ones that emerged in its wake had staying power, and dominate the technological social landscape to a frankly dangerous degree
the money behind this AI shit is immense, and some of these guys are deranged enough to just force the matter, like who could even contest this?
I’d love to get talked down from this position if it’s more unreasonable than i think but… yeah im kinda anxious about it now.
You’re underestimating how expensive AI is. These GPUs cost thousands of dollars per unit and only last 3 years. The government would have to give huge subsidies to the AI industry for it to remain where it is now. I think that might actually cause a revolution in America if that were to happen. Absolutely no one would tolerate that.
And probably overestimating how useful generative models are. A lot of what is being sold (and bought) is not fit for purpose and will not deliver the promised gains in efficiency and surplus value.
A stunning amount of discourse around generative models is essentially fiction. AI companies are actively spinning the biggest and most exciting story possible to entrench the idea that this tech is super powerful.
The same AI companies employ or fund the NGOs of the loudest voices warning about the dangers of AI, but again those dangers are a fiction built within the boundaries of the AI boosting narrative.
The hustle bros are just happy to be included and are riding the hype train hoping it represents similar opportunity to scalp profit as crypto currency did and (while the illusion lasted) NFT were expected to.
The media do human interest pieces warning about harmful impacts of LLMs. Given their non existent domain knowledge they miss probable compounding factors that lead to these harmful outcomes and in lieu of those complexities once again these serve to amplify the significance of generative tech.
Government bureaucrats and politicians are no more knowledgeable and just as prone to buying slickly packaged bullshit. The AI companies are (or were) themselves encouraging regulation of their brand new industry. They use the apocalyptic warnings pushed by their AI-is-dangerous pet critics to argue that if the existing companies in the space aren’t gifted a legally enforced cartel, then it poses a national security risk on the scale of untracked nuclear weapon production.
When that gambit failed the same manufactured sense of urgency (and the coincidental slump in US productivity) helped sell LLM research and development as a new arms race, securing massive capital investment that enabled the circular deals that instantly inflated the value of these companies to the “too big to fail” scale.
I declare it all bullshit. I’ve seen self deluded CEOs survive for years selling promises and vapor. This is startup grifting writ large.
None of this is intended to be copium, wealth is already being transferred from public to private hands and regardless of the specific series of events and their conclusion, capitalist leeches will find ways to exert more power and control over the rest of us.
And as capital starts to lose interest in LLMs, it looks like quantum computing is lining up to be the next speculative hype bubble. We’ve seen this before, we’ll see it again, this isn’t new. The emperor has no clothes.
Tens* of thousands of dollars per unit, actually
Oh and they drink an absurd amount of power to do the compute required for AI algorithms, too, and then have to be cooled besides (which is very much non-trivial; those things spew a ton of heat and have to be packed pretty close together for maximum space efficiency)
100%, it’s an insanely expensive business. The cost to use a cutting edge LLM will be forced into the range of hundreds of dollars a month.