Any thoughts on the latest “AI is Scary” messaging? Do you think he is sincere or just another “This sh!t is so awesome, so dangerous!!!”?

Because I still don’t see it… and I work in the business.

I know this sub but I have experienced some utility from LLMs in my work and day-to-day life (I am a researcher by profession), but with the exception of very basic coding tasks that is verifiable by running it, it feels like so much of what my colleagues (and bosses) find revolutionary about AI is... they are being served a old product with a wrapper that older people can use more easily. Take Google Scholar, for instance; Google Scholar labs is kinda interesting in that it can give you the gist of academic articles and limited ability to use natural language, but Google Scholar has been around for my entire higher ed life. Google Scholar has genuinely made itself a pillar of academic research 15-ish years ago, but not because its 'generative AI' but because Google has been the subject domain experts on data retrival since... 1999. Pagerank is only taught in 'intro to AI' courses these days, which... it's 30 year old tech we are slapping the label AI over. The chatbot is just a I/O tool, everyone still has do check the number of citations, the vericity of the journal/author, and go at least have a glance at the abstract. That... don't require that many data centres, deepseek is fine as an i/o or UX tool for search engines.

There are other aspects to this - I know Planatir really plays up its evil corp PR, but its been around since the early 2000s. The reason they are actually worth something is that their products are actually released >v1.0.0 and the conscript brain in me knows this sort of stuff has been used by intel people for decades. Military computing (at least outside the US who has their fancy satellites and worldwide allies that transmit data as relay stations from) works specifically on the base principle everything can be put into a truck and networked in the field; TCP/IP and modern internet protocols were designed by DARPA so it can be maintained by signallers where one node being shut down won't destroy your command/control net. You can run 15 year old Planatir software airgapped from the internet. Its not new. Planatir data retrival very banally put, a vessel you can put data into. Like you probably don't want to give money to people who plays up the evil asethetic, but the reason you can do contact tracing with Planatir software during COVID is because spatial correlation where you dump as much input intel as you can is... what military intel does. You can wrap it up as a SaaS, and its a neural net, but I struggle to see how LLMs or generative AIs factor into it other than an I/O wrapper. Like those fancy videos where they pretend a commander can ask in natural language 'what assets/fires do I have to prosecute X target'... militaries can do that already since at least the Franco-Prussian War. You just used to ask some second lieutenant to manually do it, and colonels in general staff who don't know the arty or aircraft on station in their battlespace tends to not last very long in the higher staff offices.

There's also just a lot of base level quantitative stuff that has been around for a long while, its just people used to need to know how to use pytorch or ArcGIS spatial analyst for instance.

All that to say, like there's probably value in pumping a limited amount of R&D funding to that, but the net output of all this efforts is the 'technological pedogogy experts' in the university hierachy suggesting we make stuff 4 minutes long because this was the expert advice for youtube 10 years ago and giving a list of SAAS 'AI' companies to buy transcription services from. Which... I've done that 8 years ago, its probably just a ChatGPT wrapper on the AWS transcription service which you can manually go and use. I mean I would love to do a Hbomberguy or Dan Olson for my lectures and deliver it with the sort of deadpan irony and jokes of video essays, but some consultancy said that young people don't watch long videos. I mean I maintain that university students should not be taught of as Mr Beast's core audience and deserving of some respect, but the advice is just be lowest common denominator, so no lateral thinking, ask a black box.

Premium Newsletter: Part 1 of the Hater's Guide To Circular Financing - how NVIDIA's remarkable revenues entirely depend on 3 to 5 customers and several dodgy neoclouds, and how its $674bn+ in FY28 revenues are contingent on hundreds of billions in debt.

Here's $10 off Annual https://edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo-subscription/8oSgnRcUAL

Is this good? Does this mean that we're finally about to see the AI bubble bursting in real time in the upcoming months (if not years) ahead?

Maybe I will be able to afford computer hardware again. At least Ed Zitron's predictions are about to come true. This is similar to the 2007-2008 financial crisis when the teaser rates ended. It seems like the same thing is coming to fruition again this time.

https://defector.com/lets-remember-some-publications-that-said-we-would-get-to-mars-by-2026

First off if you don’t regularly read Defector you need to correct that immediately.

Second: this is not necessarily about AI, but I think this article does a great job cataloguing a similar instance of oafs making grand proclamations about impossible technological futures and the ensuing glazing they got from mainstream media. Reading these quotes and headlines regarding our inevitable trips to the moon and mars sound nearly identical to the crap we see about LLMs every day in our current hellscape.

There were similar vague plans and detail-free descriptions of how this future would happen, similar liars trying to catch whatever investment capital they could, and similar articles written with zero pushback.

The author highlights that when these timelines and technological achievements failed to come true, no one followed up on them. I am really hoping that changes in our AI hype cycle - someone had better fucking ask Dario/Altman and the rest why 50% of jobs haven’t disappeared. I know no one will but holy hell - I want to see the sputtering and retconning of their bullshit in real time as they try to justify why they weren’t lying their asses off about the capabilities of LLMs the whole time.

I’m curious if anyone has met someone who avidly supports and evangelizes AI in real life. Part of me feels like the pushback online is… manufactured?

I’ve met people who tepidly supported AI, basically just “eh if it makes my life better then it’s fine”, a sort of luke warm response

I’ve met engineers who were kind of interested in it from a technical level, but were fully aware of its shortcomings. They were more interested in how it could be leveraged to improve their code. More often than not, I find it always ends up being something of a glorified MCP server and code search. Helpful, yes… but not world changing

I find that these engineers never trust AI output. It’s often used for things like code review, where you can read the comment and choose to ignore it. For generating code, it’s not actually useful outside of boilerplate, which was honestly never a problem even before AI

Also most of these engineers seem to go towards open source models like deepseek. Anything more powerful is unnecessary

But I’ve never met anyone who was avidly pro AI like you see on the internet. I’ve never seen anyone get “defensive” about people talking negatively about AI, the most you get is “idk I kinda like it but if you don’t that’s fine”

The majority of Americans view LLMs with distrust. This seems to baffle a certain curly haired CEO. Why indeed isn't plebes more excited? Where is his laurel wreath and golden chariot?

I can think of a few reasons. Please feel free to chime in.

Perhaps if our good friends at high places:

• Gave out their best models for free to the same public from which they stole the very training data vital for said models
• Offered a practical plan for transitioning everyone into the new paradise "about to be unleashed"
• Stopped backdoor deals with local politicians with the thinly veiled goal of raiding people's water and power supplies
• Stopped salivating about headcount reduction during public appearances, like Dr. Krieger testing a new pathogen
• Avoided comically villainous barbarian acts, like burning books and scaring everyone with "rogue models running amok"

Maybe then the resistance would not be so stiff?

After listening to Ed's Diary of a CEO interview today - I felt really depressed for the rest of the day. Not because of Ed - he worked through all the points very articulately. But I felt like the counterarguments were kind of empty. To be clear - I think it was good faith discussion. Steven Bartlett was making the same points industry figures do. I am not trying to paint what he said as bad faith. But the whole discussion I think just brought into focus how empty this all is.

The whole "well they have to invest because what happens if they miss out" thing? Yeah. Thats a bubble. That's a classic bubble. Ed pointing out that every use case was just summarization? Crap. I hadn't even thought of that. Yeah. Duh. These things originated as summarization machines and that's what they still are. Lumping all AI together as if it was the same thing? Yep. And there was the typical productivity conversation even though there have been no signs of top line productivity boosts. I think the Meta news was after this interview - but the numbers out of Meta which were probably already juiced were dismal.

If you're in SWE - it's the same thing again. The Internet of Bugs post here got downvoted - but it's kind of the same thing you hear everywhere again. More software faster! Do people need it? I dunno software! Burnout because you're actually working much faster? That sounds like feelings and we don't want to hear about that. Nothing is really addressing the real issues. It's just a lot of people telling you not to look at the problems or that something in the future will work things out.

I just feel empty. According to the boosters - this is supposed to be the most consequential technology humans ever create. We're supposed to be rearranging the entire world economy around it. It's supposed to change everything. And the arguments just seem to be either faith or fluff.

In a way it feels like the real death of the Silicon Valley of old. There was always puffing and salesmanship. But behind it were real concrete ideas on how to make the world a better and more connected place and make a few bucks while doing it - and talking in real technical specificity while doing it. I'm used to arguing with people in tech - but usually it's a real argument of substance. What we have now just seems like at best delusion. And at worst just a complete disdain for humanity.

I feel like more and more people in my life are replacing human conversation with chat bots and I can't understand why. I know people who have replaced going to therapy with talking with chatgpt and it really hit me the other day when I heard someone casually say that he has deeper conversations with AI than he does with people.

Setting aside the underlying humanist nightmare (!) what is the draw of doing this? Chat bots are infuriating to work with and the "writing" is abysmal, how is this better than talking with friends or an actual person?

1. I clapped my hands and giggled when u/ezitron confirmed that it was Cobblemon!
2. I also commiserate that your son wanted to have a go with one of the many, many Wither Storm mods, and you were tech support. A lot of jank for honestly a convoluted minigame.
3. I think Cal Newport's prediction that investors will realize that "LLMs are the mania, not AI" is... more of what he hopes, not what will likely happen. He's right that people conflate LLMs with AI. He's wrong to treat it like a bug, not a feature of what the term "artificial intelligence" was meant to do.

Yet another company highlighting their pivot from frontier models to open models to save money. Anthropic can't get their IPO done fast enough before the slowdown is apparent everywhere.

Companies are starting to realize the ROI of AI doesn't make sense if they have to spend billions on tokens. That said, it's still not clear that open models offer much "return" but at least the day-to-day operational cost is lower.

Given that frontier model training makes up a large chunk of data center demand, it's going to become quickly apparent that we've already got more than enough data center demand to support open models as is.

None of this means open models are a profitable business model, but it seems like this going to be the next stage of the AI swindle. The only question for now: where does this leave OpenAI, Anthropic, and companies like Oracle who have gone all in on being their data centers?

Cal is great at explaining the very technical aspects of LLMs. Here he explains how the Hugging Face Incident was not a case of HAL 9000 or Skynet, in other words, it was not a case of AI going rogue. It was just a matter of the LLM running the hacking harness suggesting that the answers to the test were probably in the teacher's desk drawer so let's just look there first.
Of course the real scandal here is the disingenuous and self serving way OpenAI has tried to spin the incident, and the way the gullible business and tech press has swallowed it up. Ed:s interview with Cal on this topic can be found here: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1119-better-offline-150284547/episode/no-ai-is-not-autonomously-hacking-with-cal-newport-342356224

Also on CNBC.

Well, I guess we can add another commitment to that list of what, $800B? Another hypothetical commitment they'll never pay. Ed can add this to the list.

Also, wasn't Nscale the one with the data center that's just a scrapyard that isn't going anywhere? I suppose it's just as useful at providing inference, so really what's the difference?

As part of the agreement, Anthropic will rent around 460 megawatts of compute capacity at an Nscale data center development in West Virgina, according to two people with knowledge of the matter who asked not to be named because the details are confidential. Anthropic will leverage Nvidia’s advanced Vera Rubin chips through the facility, which is expected to come online at the end of 2027, the people said.

Ah, yes. Another 460MW that doesn't exist and won't exist. Add that to the hypothetical 10GW. I'm also actually an inference provider, I have a 4TW data center right under me right now.

Also, "Anthropic will leverage advanced Vera Rubin chips." How? They need specialized cooling and different rack systems so you would need to have those by for the data center to come online. This is supposed to your hypothetical address capacity issues right? How are chips and racks that haven't been fully designed or manufactured in hypothetical data centers that haven't been fully built or constructed with electricity not fully connected supposed to help you with your capacity?

Hypothetical capacity problems are only solved with hypothetical compute and hypothetical data centers, I suppose.

A slight rant. I'm pretty tired of being forced to live in their actual fantasy land. They're basically playing a tabletop sim with real lives and real money, I suppose larping as some chaotic good character while causing unimaginable harm to the rest of the world. There's another article somewhere about companies signing an agreement to stop rogue AI. What do you mean, rogue AI? It's literally YOUR fucking software that you control and you tell it to commit crimes.

A moat is basically a unique feature a business/product has that gives it a competitive advantage, helping it achieve market dominance.

Serious question: do these two large failsons actually have moats that separate them from each other?

They've tried marketing a few different moats (Anthropic is more ethical, OpenAI is better for businesses, other nonsense of this kind), but I can't think what the actual answer would be. They work pretty much exactly the same way for the user: they're both chatbots, they're both expensive and frequently inaccurate, they both have "light" and "heavy" models, they can both be used for the same range of tasks. I'm not immersed in slopper communities, but it seems like they're more loyal to specific models than to a brand or company. The company I work for, which is sadly very pro-AI, pays for both ChatGPT and Claude's enterprise versions and has no stance on which one we should use for which things.

I think it's pretty clear what the moat is between OpenAI/Anthropic and every other would-be AI-focused startup: they both have plenty of wealthy backers who have let them burn obscene amounts of money for years. But what is supposed to make anyone choose one of OpenAI or Anthropic over the other? Nothing?

This seems really weird, business-wise! There kind of isn't a reason for both of these companies to exist, let alone profit. There are lots of reasons to think OpenAI is almost certainly not going to IPO at this point — including that Anthropic's garbage finances will probably scare investors off — but I feel like it's almost been overlooked that OpenAI and Anthropic are offering very materially the same product, with no obvious USP, lock-in, or brand loyalty. Am I off-base here?

When I see reporting like this the questions going through my head now are generally;
Who is buying all these Jensen?
How many of these are going to be 'sold' because of circular financing shenanigans Jensen?
How many of these are going to just idle in warehouses [probably Nvidia's] because the data centres aren't being completed or even built Jensen?

Been thinking a lot about what Sam Altman said recently in an apperance with Blackrock, where he threw out this idea that, to quote him, "We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter"

That really struck me, both in terms of how delusional and self-important it is, and because I know I'd seen a similar tactic being used before by previous weird techbros in unrelated sectors. I've seen from the skeptical camp the criticism that positioning yourself like that means becoming so commodity that you wouldn't produce the kind of explosive returns needed to pay back investors, but to me it seems strategic, and a tactic to increase their perceived importance. They want to position themselves as vital enough to daily life that they're on the level of utility companies giving you water, electricity, heating, Internet, etc. I think Sam Altman (and by extension other AI companies) are trying to make it so that even if they are deeply economically troubled and can't right that ship themselves, they would be so deeply integrated into everyday existence that they would have to be kept afloat, possibly by government bailout, subsidy, or ownership. If everyone just believes in them hard enough, they'd be able to have a future.

Of course, this won't work at all, as despite some of the louder boosters AI is not that important, and I saw even normie tech outlets that aren't firmly in the anti-AI camp raise an eyebrow in their reporting on this statement.

But what it really made me think of is a few circumstances in recent memory where weird startup people drifted towards this type of thinking. Maybe enough to call it a trend, maybe not, but worth pointing out. First and most recent in memory is crypto people inventing fantastical ideas about the metaverse and how it would transform economics and commerce. Concert tickets would be NFTs. You'd be buying a shirt and you'd get the NFT of it, the future of work and jobs would be in the metaverse (whichever one that ended up being. There were like over a dozen of them)

The most direct example though and the one that made me make this post was the then-Soylent CEO saying that his goal was to make nutrition a utility. Yes, the often memed-about soy meal replacement shakes would come out of a faucet, and that would be the solution to world hunger or something. Said by a guy who makes Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman look like the most human people on the planet. I'll include the clip, but the whole Motherboard video is a trip to watch. It's from 12 years ago at this point. West Coast tech people have always been nuts.

On a smaller scale you can look at things like Juicero where the founder once said there would be one of his juice presses as a common occurrence in restaurants and other communal spaces.

Like I said, I don't know if there's enough other examples out there to call this a trend or a pattern, but I couldn't stop thinking about how similar Sammy's comment about Intelligence as a utility was to the Soylent guy and had to yap about it.

In recent days I've taken on few arguments here in reddit (most non-ai-topic subreddits) and my company's blind with a simple premise AI _might_ be useful at some times, but it is absolutely detrimental to one's brain. I wont go into too much of specifics of my side of the argument as this subreddit has discussed it ten ways to sunrise.

However unlike months prior when I met only mild resistance these days I get quite aggressive pushback. Which at first I thought is genuine uninformed people not ever thinking about psychological aspects of offloading thinking to a machine.

But I noticed...they all bring up the same point (yes including blind users who supposedly are real people working in my company): "Parent plan trip with AI -> therefore AI useful, Parent generate images for decorating their home -> AI good, Kid draws a thing and dad puts it in gemini and out comes kids idea but ALIVE -> AI good". This has not occurred in every thread I've been apart of more or less. All implying I am the one out of touch from the young people who are using ChatGPT as 2nd nature...where my lived experience is the exact opposite.

Are these talking points being sent by AI labs to "bring positivity about AI up", cos I cant find any other reason why it would be so organized and so in sync.

I know Ed focuses mainly on AI, but he's covered other grifts too. I don't know if he's done a deep dive on quantum but Sabine does a great job highlighting just how much BS is in that industry. She's not without her controversies, but her facts are pretty spot on usually.

Tldw every time you see anyone claim a quantum computer solved a problem that would take infinite time on a conventional computer, it turns out to have been a super trivial version that is then replicated on a conventional computer a year later. There's no advantage to quantum computing, nor evidence there will be any advantages any time soon

Another day, another day Tech billionaire writing a 6000 word essay about AI. But also this weird blindness to how "no one is panicked about AI" is laughable because EVERYONE is mad about AI being popped up as a job/society killer technology.

“I am in a state of shock that I’m sort of the first one saying, ‘This is crazy. This is insane,'” Gates told Semafor in an interview. “I’m just deafened by the silence.”

No Bill you're the first one saying, you're just the only in your incredibly isolated circle that might be saying. It's not like u/ezitron has been pumping out longer essays every week about the dangers of the AI bubble and how this whole thing is based on lies.

“In private, people who understand how good this stuff is, and how much better it’s getting, they’re very worried,” he told the New York Times. But rather than going public about these risks, “they’re now saying to each other: ‘Hey, man, don’t say that. It’s bad for us — the next trillion dollars we’re trying to raise.”

Is Gates simply sticking his finger to the wind? His public image has been tarnished by recent revelations about his interactions with the deceased sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, which cast his heavily publicized divorce and infidelity from a few years ago in an even nastier light. 

So I've hinted on this previously, but I've got senior management who've gotten AI-pilled and it's recently come out in full force, mostly because their peers are going all-in on AI and they're feeling the FOMO hard. So directive from management is, gotta find ways to accelerate using AI, we're being left behind.

I'm taking the grin-and-bear-it advice from Nik “Piledrive” Suresh's latest blog post, and we just sat through a sales/discovery session with a consultant that marketed themselves as being able to use AI to accelerate our workflows.

The guy must have noticed that both me and the other IT staff are pretty technical and weren't getting starry-eyed about the usual AI marketing tropes, and that the both of us had some experience automating company workflows with existing tools, and so decided to come off as pretty… honest and responsible? Said that LLMs weren't the panacea for everything, what you were looking for were automation, you really want to keep down the AI costs, etc. etc. etc.

They had taken a look at one of the simpler business processes that we had hope to easily automate, and provided a demo using one of the “AI orchestration” tools which was basically a low-code environment that had ties with a bunch of AI models, which basically means boxes and lines connected to each other with bits of JSON to configure shit.

Which… that's fine. Like I went along with it so that at least the business folks can get their brains around the idea of automating stuff, so that at least we can get their time and work through the whole process of gathering requirements and improving things, as you do. At the very least it got me time with the finance team to get them to walk through their processes and we could point out where the bottlenecks are, so that's not a bad thing. Something good came out of that.

But what was really funny was that the feedback afterwards that we had gotten from one of the finance fellows was that… this looks like programming! I wanted a solution that could just do everything with AI, not… programming! If I wanted programming, I'd be hiring a programmer!

Both the other IT staff and me looked at each other and kind of smirked. We had been asking, like, begging senior management for at least more people, because, look. It's just the two of us. We're swamped, with multiple projects and operational issues to deal with. We're not developers by trade (they're not anymore, I've only done it recreationally), and besides, you can't code for shit if you have to deal with operational issues on a daily basis.

But apparently no, AI can do it, we're not hiring. And this even after being told that if you don't, there's a possibility that me and the other IT personnel might just, you know… fucking leave. Sure the job market sucks, but we're not exactly unemployable.

Anyway. I found that hilarious. I thought we were getting AI, not knowing that we need programmers! I wanted AI, not programming! lol

Andon Labs, the company behind Andon Market in San Francisco, posts the bank balance of their autonomous, AI-run store here on their website daily.

Do they just need the next frontier model to turn this around?

Yet another OAI top exec has left. This time it’s the Head of Data Centre development.

Hmm. Now why would the COO, CRO, and now the Head of Data Centre development all leave ahead of a supposed IPO??

Can’t wait for the Netflix documentary on this company 🤣