Technology

I can imagine one - maintaining adversarial interop with proprietary systems. Like a self-adjusting connector for Facebook for some multi-protocol chat client. Or if there's going to be a Usenet-like system with global identities of users and posts, a mapping of Facebook to that. Siloed services don't expose identifiers and are not indexed, but that's with our current possibilities. People do use them and do know with whom they are interacting, so it's possible to make an AI-assisted scraper that would expose Facebook like a newsgroup to that.

Ah. Profitable. I dunno.

It's porn.

It's always porn that decides if a technology lives or dies.

I'm honestly hoping for a repeat. Hopefully Microsoft goes down this time too, since they're heavily into AI. Twitter, Meta, Google and Amazon too. It's really just the worst of the worst.

They remember it too. It's why they try to keep the bubble going by jumping to the next shiny investor lure. Just a few years it was all deep learning, blockchain and NFT. One guess is that they'll go for humanoid robots next.

At least they‘ve wasted their money for research of what doesn‘t work instead of just building silly products as for the .com bubble.

Humanity will gain insights to the kind of AI approaches that won‘t work much faster than without all the money. It‘s just an allocation of human efforts

This is no revelation. THEY KNOW. The play is obvious.

Not one these investors wants to risk missing out on being the next Google or FaceBook or Twitter or Amazon. They know damned well the vast majority will fail. They're gambling on not being the one left holding the bag.

AI is here to stay, will continue to improve, and there will be a killer app, probably a dozen. My money is on life sciences, particularly medicine.

They're different, and I think this one has the capability of being more devastating.

The dot-com bubble was really broad. Hundreds or thousands of companies, all without vowels in their names trying to break new ground. A wild west style gold rush. When it popped a lot of small companies went bankrupt.

This is a handful of companies with billions of capital buying GPUs from NVidia to be make the largest hungriest machine they can. All in the pursuit of being first to create "AGI". If one of them succeeds, the others are toast and multiple 500+B dollar companies will collapse in on themselves. If none of it works, the same thing happens and it takes a large chunk out of $4T Nvidia too.

This makes the dot-com bubble look like a kiddie pool - at least those companies were trying to build actual products, while today's AI spending is burning through more money than the GDP of most countries just to have the biggest model with no clear path to profitability beyond "trust us bro".

Every time you think of something and don't understand why it happens, it does good to ask about every neighboring assumption "what if not".

Why am I saying this?

Because AGI created this way is impractical and economically useless, that's fundamental. One can even say "elementary".

What if they are not trying to create AGI?

What if they are not trying to make money?

What if they want a bubble burst, not fear it, and want it to be as big as the sky, so that Western economies would crumble and their surveillance systems were the only thing standing, together with other functioning machines?

From the answers depends the optimal strategy for other parties, suppose, maybe turning their Big Beautiful Bubble Burst into just another dot-com bubble, via adoption of this technology for actually useful applications, is something we should strive towards.

This is not that. They're all hoping to be the next Google or FaceBook. They know damned well most are going to lose. The gamble is that they won't be the one holding the bag when the bubble pops.

This is as high stakes as tech gets today.

I disagree a bit. Any money the ultra-rich invest into research is better spent than on their next Mega-Yacht. Even if AI cannot meet the expectations of AGI etc.

I think Meta’s AI initiative doesn’t run on investor money since they do share buybacks instead of selling more shares to keep afloat. Meta makes more than a hundred billion of revenue from selling ads on Facebook and Instagram. So Meta’s AI program runs on boomers clicking on ads that have been generated with AI.

Let's be honest here, in reality, it would just made 5 people turbo rich while the rest stayed the same. Maybe make 4 more ships in star citizen, but that's it.

Already starting to, at least for smaller companies and startups that were trying to use it to build things end to end.

If you use it to provide you with content, sure, easy no worries. building a website? sure no problem as long as it doesn't require any sort of logins or security stuff. an application? well now you're going to have some problems.

Most AI can't scale something. and most are absolutely horrible at any sort of security. and all of them can't UX themselves out a wet paper bag.

Now if you utilize them as a tool, a sort of rubber duck, sure they're great. The issue is, and I'm seeing this first hand because of my job, is that many smaller companies and start ups aren't doing that. They're assigning someone, a "vibe coder", to feed the thing prompts to build stuff from end to end. Naturally the end product is an insanely resource heavy, convoluted code, exploitable mess that can't scale. It creates a massive amount of tech debt. All to save a couple grand instead of hiring actual devs. So now when I get a call or email from one of my contacts that "so and so's company/start up needs someone to clean up their app because it's very broken due to a vibe coder" I charge them an arm and a leg.

So you're right, it is going to fail and implode on it's own weight but I'm going to damn well be sure to take advantage of these people before it completely does and I encourage other freelance/consultant developers to do the same.

I definitely hope so, like it will with dotcom bubble. If the bubble burst delays the rise of killer robots, then I am all for another economic recession!

You mean when the bubble bursts and there are lots of people who worked on this available on the job market?

I'd expect them to be big data specialists, mostly knowledgeable in Python and matrix operations, narrow optimizations needed there, and not very competitive for other typical tech specialties.

They'll just have to become data analysts, assistants in labs working on things like genome analysis, and so on. Perhaps medical RnD will get a boost due to all the willing slaves, LOL.

This analyses what’s publicly known: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-gui/?ref=ed-zitrons-wheres-your-ed-at-newsletter

Not these kind of figures. Only a quarter of countries have annual GDPs larger than what's been spent so far this year. This is on a scale not seen before.

What makes it worse is that it's being spent on something which consumes huge resources and has no purpose except giving a few people more power as they would control what these systems would say is true.

Believe it or not I can complain about more than one thing at a time.