“AI businesses are putting profits over sanity and safety”.
Remove “AI” from that sentence and you’ll see that’s just more normal business practices that have been going on for decades.
The real question is: what profit? It’s a sink hole in a hope to maximize reach
Ho, you can trust OpenAI and Nvidia to make a profit. You and your pension funds? What pension funds?
This is a ball and cup game designed to create cashflow where there is none. The ‘profit’ is the assets, dividends and capital gains the shareholder class will syphon out before the bubble bursts.
And it’s not even working. Not one of the AI companies is profitable. So they’re putting the hope for profits some time in the future over sanity and safety.
“Fuck me Sam, I don’t have anymore ideas on how to turn a profit. We’ve tried everything. How about we just give the AI its own infrastructure and bank account with the instructions ‘make money’ and see what it does? I know that safety guy advised against it before, but he no long works here. I mean if it becomes a singularity event, at least it’s our singularity event to control”
Didn’t they do this with an AI vending machine already and it started selling tungsten cubes at a massive loss?
Steve Burke (of GN) described the absurdity pretty well, within the context of the currently uncertain Nvidia and OpenAI deal:
Nvidia offered OpenAI $100B in investment, money that it didn’t have, as long as OpenAI gave that money back to Nvidia to lease GPUs that haven’t been made, to then put in data centres that haven’t been constructed, which will be powered by electricity that hasn’t come online, to then rent to users who haven’t subscribed, to provide them features that haven’t come to fruition.
And hope you’ve propped up the economy enough by the end of it that the government has to
bail you out…sorry i meant provide a “backstop”.
Midjourney is profitable
Source?
Midjourney are the worse of the worse when it comes specifically training on stolen work from artists who dedicated their lives to it. They opened the floodgates to what we see now with mass theft of content by not getting sued into oblivion. Fuck them and their creepy little fuck face of a CEO.
They’re also not providing a large language model, so they actually did have a path to profitability. It’s keeping LLMs updated and running that costs so much money that companies trying to do so are losing billions, and Midjourney doesn’t have that problem.
It’s just that their path to profitability was built on plagiarism on an astonishing scale. You’re spot on, they should have been utterly destroyed right at the start.
Couldn’t agree more. They did really help greenlight “stealing everything is fair game” mentality. They came out before chatGPT gpt3 at the time LLMs were not hoovering everything including copyrighted content.
So what’s the problem? This looks self-correcting to me, if none of the AI companies are profitable then they’re going to go away. Short their stock and make a fortune.
Shorting isn’t just a bet that a stock will fail but also when
Then invest in competitors, they’ve got a more flexible timeframe.
Imagine your entire life is viewed through the lens of actions you can take in the stock market. What a sad life.
what competitors? competitors to AI as a technology?
The companies that continue with human staff where others are replacing theirs, for example. Outsourcers providing those staff.
I’m not sure what bubble you live in, but not everybody can be a Bay Area nepo baby like you, and not being one doesn’t make them less correct.
If you’re not investing anything in anything then this really isn’t your problem.
It’s only self correcting if the powers that be are losing money, which they aren’t because they are either liquidating important assets to pad their pockets or just using economic magic to make trillions appear out of no where. They’ll only feel it when their company or the economy collapses, and at that point they make off with their ill gotten gains
Where’s this infinite well of investment money coming from? “Economic magic” is pretty vague.
Have you not heard of inflation? It is literally the creation of new monies that the government gives to banks to give loans.
that’s… not at all what inflation means… it is 1 of many causes of inflation
and the government doesn’t “give” it to banks
the reality is far more complex in both cases, even if sometimes the simplified version of things looks like that
Define “talent”. Software developers focused on squeezing llms into everything regardless of necessity? I’m likely jaded as an infra monkey but you’ll have to pay me x3 as much to fix your broken servers after the bubble pops.
I sure hope they secretly sabotage on their way out to protect society
This is many companies right now.
Mine is run from the top down (all executives) by people who use LLM’s for fucking everything.
Everyone fucking hates them at this point. We all think they are fucking trash.
The MBA class has long been this way.
Maybe it’s time to grab some fellow employees and make an employee owned business.
AI businesses are putting profits over sanity and safety.
All businesses are. That’s what a business is. A legal entity that seeks to extract as much wealth from people as possible. They put profits before people as a matter of policy.
Limited liability corporations should be outlawed.
That’s not what business is inherently; that’s what capitalism is.
It’s not even strictly what capitalism is about. It’s some stupid bullshit interpretation that came out of the University of Chicago economics department.
Seriously, go look at Adam Smiths wealth of nations. The only mention of the “invisible hand” is so different from what is taught in economics now
… by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.
It’s not that we need no regulation. It’s just trying to say that if we set things up correctly, we don’t need to worry about people pursuing SOLELY their own personal gain. Because the market seeks out the “greatest value”, which is not just about money. It’s also the value to society as a whole.
Instead, we got the fucking bullshit from Chicago saying that the only / best way of measuring value is by profit.
It’s kind of funny how Adam Smith saw the need for moral philosophy to constrain greed in the economics of capitalism yet for most modern capitalists, capitalism is their moral philosophy 🤣
Spot on. I wrote an essay on this exact topic
What profits?
Now what does that tell us about the sanity and safety?
After $1T poured into global warming, why can’t AI replace them ?
We’re so cooked
Just vibe code the AI. I’m sure it’ll work perfectly.
Oh thank heavens some people still have ethics.
That’s just every company isn’t it?
Not in my experience. Once their clients budgets get cut by funding cuts due to reality and they notice it doesn’t do anything of benefit (on the clients side), they will be all “client first”.
If anybody leaves an AI company with a fat paycheck, promises to “be honest about the real problems,” and then proceeds to regurgitate things the AI company CEOs say: be suspicious.
Exhibit A is Anthropic millionaire Mrinank Sharma, who only mentioned (future) peril from AI and AI-made bioweapons, two fictional scenarios on the short list that Anthropic officially endorses. It’s a list of things that please Anthropic investors.
Real-world stuff like AI psychosis, poisoning people’s air, or generating CSAM doesn’t get a mention from him. There’s no profit in acknowledging those things, so he won’t.
Maybe Claude Code learned this from its creators: I’ve noticed that when it says “the real issue is…”, that means it has no clue and is about barf out a bunch of slop that I’m going to have to revert.
The only time it ever says “the real issue is” and is right is when I’ve just corrected it and told it the real issue which it then wastes tokens regurgitating back to me. Gods I miss not having to use this crap at work
You HAVE to use it?
Yup. Lots of managers are forcing people to use AI so they can report doing so in their metrics.
Yes, our usage is tracked. Managers have statistics broken down by daily usage per agent
Just another day in corporate America. Putting fake profits over employees’s well-beings, and customer safety and privacy.
The thing that gets me is they just want to get in on this $2Billion investment that keeps changing hands without changing hands. They really are just taking IOUs from… elsewhere? Because apparently, according to Jensen, that money hasn’t actually exchanged hands. Investors are just buying into the new Ponzi Scheme.
The alternative prediction is that this is in fact sustainable and AI companies will in fact have revenue to keep the bubble inflated for a lot longer, just in the worst way - by extracting the value of human-created reliability and trust from the market:
CEOs have also bought into AI almost to a person, and are using it to replace workers, results be damned. AI can’t do the things they believe it can, but to them, if they can fake satisfying a need with AI for $5, that is preferable to actually satisfying a need with a real employee for $10.
The CEO is happy because his company saved $5 and he’s met his stock option incentive target, the AI companies are happy to pocket that $5 instead of the employee getting $10. Maybe they even raise the customer’s price to $12 as AI rent-seeking starts rising, and both companies get $6 each. Win-win, life will go on, just worse for everyone else.
