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It’s the latest Big New Thing. Everybody’s trying it on to see if they can make it work for them, even if it’s not particularly applicable. It looks like some of the experiments are over.

You have cut right to the core here. AI is basically Google search on steroids so it's much faster but the brain is addled by steroids so it's also untrustworthy 😮‍💨

I mean, I’m sure there’s a specific event pushing it, but it a really good, clear title. Winds are likely shifting and you have been getting mentioned a lot more.

Damn Ed it's true but do you have to say it.

I have tried IA. It's rubbish. It doesn't get you what you want. You try again: the same output. You explain a little better: same output. You explain again, with more detail and clear demands about some items: same output. You explain step by step, you use 5000 words: same output. ALL of them.

They spent $9bn so I could ask it questions about Minecraft.

The horseless carriage is never going to catch on…

Will I made about $12,000 in a side gig training AI. So it was profitable for me 😁

pastebin.com/LAMqf6pA

I've learned to start search prompts with the word "fucking" to make AI results fucking go the hell away. All it's ever done is shown me lies so I'm in a state of permanent rejection of the entire technology now. It's worthless garbage, and will remain so for years to come.

legless metaverse horrors dont seem so silly now huh

Will companies adopt the Chinese model that was much cheaper?

Re: the ball throwing robot, were you aware of E.A.R.L.? bowl.com/equipment-sp...

I'll check out the one linked article but I need more...my boy is a philosophy major living alone hanging out w Claude all day. Need a real intervention.

Wow a great insightful article

I'm old fashioned I like things made by humans. 🤷‍♂️ Even if the machine could fool me I'd rather interact with real people.

it would be interesting to see side-by-side analysis of this garbage with the timelines and financials of the og burn-it-til-you-earn-it VC-birthed golems of uber etc. - i suspect they'd look fake as fuck even in that context. probably somebody - probably you - has done this already & i missed it.

Open AI's business model has something from Eve and Larry's Alchemy www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0...

Meanwhile, we have GOP congressmen talking about how the fired federal workers can be replaced with untested AI.

And whenever you encounter a problem were you really need AI - like an it problem at home - you soon run out of free questions and has to pay substantial amounts. As a private person is not really attractive. Because you’re very unsure of the quality of responses compared to a human expert.

Current AI is akin to the bursting of the first internet bubble…

Really looking forward to the bubble pop.

Really, MidJourney is unprofitable? Haven't they pulled $200-300 million in revenue per year for the past couple years? And didn't RunwayML do over 120 mil last year?

The worst part is I'm pretty sure they're going to steal my social security to pay for it instead of learning anything.

Is the money being burned on this only being spent on extra computer chips and electricity for the machines? Or are they also spending it on high wages for employees, various products, etc? Because it seems like these billions would otherwise be locked away in the dragon hoards of these corps to rot

That's the thing. Some people want it. I find it useful occasionally. Enough to pay money though? No. At that point I'm spinning up my own private LLM on self hosted hardware.

This is all way above my head, but is this why OpenAI and company are looking to the federal govt for $$$? Like a VC with infinite pockets?

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This is one major reason for the crazy behavior by people around this segment, they are close to a huge bubble collapse and grasping for some way out.

Very interesting!

I wish MS would ditch it faster. I am so bored of trying to write things with Copilot going "Hey, you vant to bouy some toolips?" at me. Burst this annoying bubble already.

I think these people need to go away and think about things that humans are really bad at compared to machines, and make AI that does those things. Trying to make AI that communicates with other humans seems like the opposite of that.

It’s almost like firing all the people who would use GenAI so you can invest in building GenAI so you can sell it to all the people who would use GenAI was a—wait for it—not great idea.

Hardly. There were a big round of articles about their latest begging spree less than 6 months ago. www.reuters.com/technology/a...

Lol

I use ChatGPT a couple times a week for work and I’ve never given them a penny. I’d have to imagine this is the same for most of that 400m

Could they be a successful defense or other government contractor though?

OpenAI has no product strategy. The majority of their revenue is from unprofitable subscription products, their models are commoditized, and they make very little from people plugging their models into other products - suggesting the demand really isn't there. www.wheresyoured.at/wheres-the-m...

Also given the nature of the internet 400 million doesn't mean 400 million individual people are using it, wouldn't surprise me if bots are inflating the number, probably closer to 100 million and that's me being nice to them

@mcuban.bsky.social This is the article (or at least the thread) I’d ask you to read to understand those of us who are very skeptical of there ever being an AI industry, let alone a globally transformative one.

Please, please, make it like car alarms and make it go away!

That would imply AI has legitimate use cases

Grateful for this, I used your reporting to inform a lot of the profit/loss explanation in the second part of my writeup on AI for writers

It's just a web scraper they keep forcing down our throats

Fascinating

yay soundtrack

Same goes for my old Macbook, which I just upgraded with a SSD. 13 years old and now runs like she's factory fresh!

Do you have any revenue / expenditure numbers for Cursor?

and it looks like he lied again, Grok is not 'open source' in the sense that you can download it to your computer like Deepseek or Llama, you can't, and there isn't a 'distilled' smaller version...not that anyone should want to use it anyway

If they can't make money now, then what happens when the inevitable copyright lawsuits start to happen?

AI is all smoke and mirrors nonsense

You hate to see it

There's some good news.

Can't see why not. AI is just the latest string in the age old tradition to sell "the future" to many people with more money than smarts, in general terms. AI however is already leaving lots of collateral damage as is.

They have run out of those im afraid www.wheresyoured.at/rotcombubble/

their current plan is to get the government to invest 400 billion dollars by using red scare tactics of falling behind the chinese

loving every single bit of their failure every single day :)

Honestly? This is a relief.

Ed, Is the play re AI that it can replace human labor and that they are just offering inexpensive entry-level fees to get people hooked and then will raise them once AI is seen as indispensable for saving labor costs, sort of a Jevons Paradox?

The big use cases in AI are not consumer, they are business processes and I can tell you from my own work adoption of AI in business if probably much stronger.

That’s good. I will no longer worry about the doomsday alliance between big tech, big oil, and the war machine.

I think it’s turning a corner and people are looking for the people who predicted it. But that’s all I got.

I hope this is true

I legitimately believe the only real future AI has in financial success is legitimately the porn industry

good. lets hope this trend continues.

Such a negative attitude. Next thing you'll be arguing that cyber currencies are actually worthless.

No monetisation ... yet

I think the frat boys got competitive about making more money than the others. Baby men are polluting the world for nonsense

Polluting and stupid. Don’t use it.

🙂

Need the bubble to burst asap. We’re trying to boil the oceans and for what? To make the internet increasingly unusable and destroy art?

Another example of a shiny new toy pushed out on us before it was ready and can be increasingly damaging to real people. Shocking.

Thank you.

GEN AI ISNT ALL AI. GEN AI ISNT ALL AI!! Those thieving gypsies with their illiterate mechanical Turk are a side show! Look at Alphafold, look at a thousand verticals that will benefit from ASI. The revolution is happening, people are just distracted by the freakin' puppet show!!.

Who do you want to play you when we get an AI equivalent of "The Big Short"?

I love Mac Glocky and Snow Patrol, so you've picked an incredible track for this.

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Does anyone know how much of all that wasted money is from their pockets compared to government grants and subsidies by any chance ?

That's my concern. I can't help but think the real reason for the LLM push is not to make a profit, but rather to create a generation of people wholly without critical thinking skills who will believe anything oligarchs tell them (indirectly through chatobots and social media).

Counterpoint: General Mills (GIS) says it is saving millions of dollars using AI to streamline its logistics process. I'm seeing that from other companies as well. I think AI is too diverse to make broad statements. Some things work; others don't.

Meh. So about the same as the adoption of the Web in 1995 then 🙄

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fair and definitely annoying

Oh jeez. I'm glad I switched to Libre Office then.

Ugh. I really don’t want it interrupting my flow, slow as it may be.

Microsoft aren't pulling anything, don't lie. I didn't listen to the last call but on the previous (October?) call they said they can't keep up with demand. www.cnbc.com/2025/02/24/m...

Related: cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog...

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AI is another nail in the coffin of this country. Unregulated and uncontrolled source of power to the billionaires. White collar jobs decimated this time. Wake up America.

This is going to make the dot com bubble look like a hiccup isn’t it?

Sometimes I wonder if the developers are blinded by the use of genAI for code generation, which is indeed very useful from my experience. There are also some promising enterprise applications. But that is probably nowhere near enough to justify the huge investments.

This will not age well.

Yep.