So the the test of capitalism is whether any of the executives who pushed the AI roll out have gotten fired or had their bonuses slashed… My guess is none of them.
If this were actually about competition, then people would be punished for not paying attention to all of the naysayers who predicted this exact phenomenon. If accountability were a key feature, then corporations would have set up their bonus structure to look for 5-year or 10-year benefits from the AI push because of this exact issue.
Of course we haven’t seen that anywhere because AI was and always is a bubble and everybody knew it and the only goal was short-term profits for whoever can claw them out of the employees or the minor shareholders fingers.
This, plus if we had any kind of political will or intelligence (as a nation; meaning the USA) we’d force AI companies to pay their extenalities: treat and sanitize every drop of water they use, and build the infrastructure to bring it back to communities; pay for their electrical infrastructure in advance and pay their electricity bills to the tune of “nobody else’s bill goes up”; some kind of massive carbon capture tax for their use (this one might not be possible to actually do; it’s too much); and of course paying royalties and copyright violation fines.
As at least one AI CEO has said, if they had to pay for all the laws they’ve broken and resources they’ve stolen, all AI companies currently existing would go out of business. let’s say they didn’t: The cost per token would be quite high, and very few people would use it.
It runs on theft and planet-scale destruction.
As at least one AI CEO has said, if they had to pay for all the laws they’ve broken and resources they’ve stolen, all AI companies currently existing would go out of business.
I find those terms acceptable.
It runs on theft and planet-scale destruction.
You could argue that this is the very nature of capitalism: theft because it always means owners extracting value from other people’s work, and ultimately planet-scale destruction because it depends on infinite growth while externalizing (not paying for) the true costs of its activity.
In that sense, AI companies are just a faster-growing strain of the global cancer that is capitalism.
I think that is a reasonable take. It is s huge jump, in many ways, so I believe it is much more dangerous than other capitalist “innovations”.
What’s the most expensive thing one can do with AI and how do we do it on a mass scale to one company at at time?
I know a company that burned $100k in tokens after they they let like 50 worker bees using general AI for OCR, simply converting images and PDFs to text.
They didn’t bother to create a skill, or teach the AI how to reuse a shared script so every request resulted in it writing a new python project, pulling libraries, using a frontier model rather than offloading a dumb one etc.
Basically find a business process that happens often and let em at it inefficiently, it’ll happily chew through the budget.
Thats pretty much what people freaked out about llms doing at my work and all they use it for. I’m here like…we have had OCR for over 20 years.
People are duuumb.
There has been some serious leaps in terms of quality. It couldn’t read human writing or half the fonts for that matter like 5 years ago, let alone 20.
OCR libraries have undoubtedly improved but LLMs are using the same open source libraries and tools available to anyone… there’s few cases where sending the work through general models is worth it for text conversion. Employees just needed a front end to upload, run something like tesseract behind the scenes, and spit out the result. It’s an egregiously stupid use of resources.
have undoubtedly improved but LLMs are using the same open source libraries and tools available to anyone…
I read a surprising article on Lemmy just a week ago that explained that that is not how LLM’s do OCR. LLM’s convert images into tokens and then treat them like text input. I can’t see how it works but it does. It’s why they are better than classic OCR neural nets but at the trade off of enormously larger computation cost.
Burn your AI tokens and get promoted for using more AI!
I sadly don’t find the GitHub repo with the bash script anymore, but that thing seems to do the same thing
(Maybe I’ve misread though, I’m just going to sleep)Edit: ha! Found it!
https://github.com/dtnewman/burn-baby-burnThus transferring their money to openAI, Anthropic etc? How does that help?
those companies arent profitable either and they have same problems in which it costs them more to run their products than they are currently charging people to use it.
What do you mean by either? Walmart and Amazon make tens of billions in profit a year if not a quarter.
i thought we were talking about OpenAI, antrhropic, etc, not Walmart?
Did you read the title? It says to spend Walmart and Amazon’s money on AI. And you said “those companies aren’t profitable either” which would mean, using normal rules of English grammar, that “Walmart and Amazon aren’t profitable and OpenAI and Anthropic aren’t profitable either”. So what are you talking about? What does “either” mean?
ooh I see. my bad. erase the word either from my comment, it wasn’t necessary.
okay, thanks for clarifying. Sorry about having to be kind of pedantic.
