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.
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.