Imagine what we could have achieved globally if we had spent all that money on a different cause.

We could have managed to establish a colony on Mars, or perhaps we could have even finished developing Star Citizen.

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.

It's porn.

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

This research is cooking us alive right now and for what? So machines can do all the creative things while we fight for scraps? I‘d rather the overly rich spend it on something harmless but silly. At least the average joe can make a living producing luxury items. As grim as it sounds but that‘s preferable to what‘s coming.

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.

It's spent on NVidia GPUs. Jensen Huang just buys leather jackets from what I can tell.

Love that the pic associated with that link is Mark "Metaverse" Zuckerberg. A hallmark of successful dubious ventures, if any.

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.

Bill Gates is only leaving $10M to each of his kids (I say "only"...). The rest he is bequeathing to charity. presumably his charity, but i don't know.

I believe that we are not yet in the end stage of AI. LLMs are certainly useful, but they cannot solve the most important problems of mankind.

More research is required to solve e.g.
a) Sustainable Energy Supply
b) Imbalanced demographies of industrialized countries
c) Treatment of several diseases

Like it or not, AI that can do research for us, or even increase efficiency of human researchers, is the most promising trajectory for accelerating progress on these important problems.

Right now, AI has not exceeded this scope. Yeah, AI can generate quite realistic fake videos. But propaganda has been possible before (look at China, Russia or Nazi Germany - even TikTok without any AI is dangerous enough to severely threaten democracies).

As a researcher in the domain, let me tell you that no one who seriously knows about video generation etc. is afraid of the current state of AI

I'm sure that silicon valley executives visualise a future where they own the machines that produce all intellectual property and do most jobs. They see a return to feudalism where they are the lords.

I think this greater vision is about as likely to be realised as it is that Elon Musk will invent full self driving, or robots that aren't obviously remotely operated, or a tesla roadster, or a battery powered articulated lorry with thermo nuclear explosion proof glass, or building a rocket to get the US back to the moon before the Chinese in what is clearly a new space race/pissing match. Or a hyperloop, or ever getting anywhere near to building a colony on Mars, or, or, or.

But I don't think it is just a case of AGI or bust. LLM's augmented with ai agents have a very real potential to replace a capitalism-destabilising percentage of white collar jobs without AGI.

Just like the dot com bubble popping didn't kill the web, I do think it is unlikely that any possible current AI bubble popping will kill capital's push to automate jobs away.

(And as far as I can see the AI bubble is the result of massive capital expenditure rather than rampant speculation, so because I am pretty confident in the 'value' to capital of LLM's + AI Agent's, I don't really see it as the same kind of a bubble as the dotcom bubble.)

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.

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".

Some of them are already Google or Facebook tbh. They could run many safer gambles for the same money. But I suspect investors demand AI right now.

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.

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!

It's going to be a bigger bubble than the dot com one.

The hype for AI is ridiculous:

HP acquiring parts of AI Pin startup Humane for $116 million

HP is acquiring Humane’s AI tech and talent for $116 million—but the AI Pin, once hyped as a smartphone alternative, is officially being shuttered.

Fortune (fortune.com)

Yet they are too strapped for cash for raises or to not lay off workers.

Those numbers seem odd to me. I feel like the truth is 1 billion was spent on productive programmers and hardware. The small remainder of 154 billion was used to improvise profit growth through totally valid payment to some CEOs ego account.