Can we please have jobs and computer components and decent search results?
No job! Only consume! ⚾🐕
I’m sorry Dave. I’m afraid I cant do that
OpenAI promised investors an AI gold rush. Now its projected annual revenue is reportedly $20 billion below earlier expectations. That’s not a rounding error: that’s an entire business empire missing from the spreadsheet. Silicon Valley keeps calling it a revolution, but increasingly it looks like a trillion dollar game of musical chairs, with investors hoping the music never stops.
Maybe he could sleep in the factory for a few weekends? P
they’ve really gotta stop offering avocado toast at the company cafeteria. That’ll make up the difference.
Quit ordering the avocado toast.
I always think it’s funny how millennials got shit for avocado toast, yet it was my boomer parents who introduced it to me.
Its a trillion dollar game of musical chairs with roughly 8.3 billion people playing and only a few thousand chairs.
Nah, far from everyone wants to be a trillionaire, nor a billionaire. Sure most would want financial independence, but not a lot more than that
Sigh. This comment reeks of AI slop
WeWork was declared a failure when it lost 6 billion in a year. OpenAI is net negative 17 billion a year…
There is quite a difference from an investor standpoint in a product that replaces all human labor vs coworking space.
I still have yet to see it adequately replace any human labor
I have seen it taken a serious hit at call centers.
As someone who has attempted to communicate with an AI call center, that tech seems pretty far from prime time
Then you haven’t been using the right models or trying.
Let’s say for a moment that AI really is as capable as AI bros want you to believe it is. Having used some AI models at my work (network engineer), I’m not so convinced, but I’ll put that aside for a moment.
The pinch of the AI vise is going to be the cost. All the AI companies are running at loss to try and capture the market, and they’ll need to charge a lot more for access to AI once a winner is determined.
Are you willing to pay 10x what you pay right now for access to an AI agent? Because that’s looking like what they’ll have to do in order to turn these companies profitable.
Are you willing to pay 10x what you pay right now for access
That’s really the crux of the matter. Regardless of if it’s fit for purpose to replace paid labour, is it actually financially viable in any way to replace humans with an AI model that works but costs several times more than a human work force while not being able to be held legally accountable.
If this future AI agent solves the task at a fraction of the time, it can still be financially viable at several times the cost.
That only makes sense if money is made on the output. What you’re basically saying is X Toy Company will make more money if they make more toys. What you’re forgetting is that there has to be a demand for those toys. So X Toy Company can’t replace workers with AI unless there’s more demand for the toys than there is currently able to be fulfilled and there’s no evidence for that across all sectors of the economy.
I don’t use it but my wife uses it for spreadsheet equations. She has to verifiy and test every answer but then so would anything written by an intern.
So yeah, AI is killing jobs, not in an individual sense, but in aggregate like spreadsheet software did 50 years ago when before that all work was done by hand.
That’s just making one person do the job of more than one. I call bs.
That’s just making one person do the job of more than one.
Capitalism has been doing that long before LLM’S.
That’s just making one person do the job of more than one.
How do you call bs on one person doing the work that used to take two? It was one person and an intern.
Every company had a secretary pool 60 years ago before word processors allowed people to type by themselves without an extra support person.
aka ‘Productivity increase’
Productivity has increased for decades without much of it going to wage increases. Instead, it’s gone to the companies/shareholders
Lmao replaces all human labor? ChatGPT can’t change my tires. It can’t even write decent code without direct supervision
It’s a lot better at writing code than most people think.
I believe the implosion of the AI bubble will essentially torpedo the only thing still supporting the US economy?
Or, after a nasty hangover, it’ll free up capital and people that can be put to more socially productive uses.
Yes the only thing propping up the USD is the AI bubble. A lot of it is held by non US investors who, in the event of a market crash, would sell dollars to repatriate back home, sending the dollar tanking, which would encourage foreign holders of US Treasuries like Japan to dump them as well. This would force up bond yields and create a US debt crisis.
Yes. When the bubble finally pops it means AI is here to stay and the remaining companies will probably climb 100x over the next two decades, but all the people currently invested will lose almost everything. The people not invested will still feel the effect as the layoffs and bankruptcies start rolling out, and anyone pension or retirement that is tied to bubble will lose a lot of value.
This will come right as the bond market is reaching the point of no return, and the US won’t be able to pay back the debt. A lot of people are going to lose everything, including their retirements during the debt liquidation that is coming.
it means AI is here to stay
Maybe. Or maybe LLMs will just go tits up. Don’t pretend you can predict the future.
I’m just going oFf history of bubbles. Usually when something becomes a bubble, it becomes a part of life after the correction.
AI will “stay” in what form? Local models? The companies selling it are almost certainly going to lose their over 100 lawsuits of copyright infringement they’re 100% guilty of. I’m sure local models will be utilized, but not these LLM snake oil salesman’s products anymore.
AI will be in everything you do. The companies that remain after the Bible pops will become the largest companies in America.
Since I haven’t seen it yet in this conversation, I think I need to bring some better context to what this article is claiming.
No, OpenAI did not assume they were making $70 billion. They’ve always known their existing number. In fact, that number IS what was reported to investors.
The $70 billion number is coming from a specific investor that wanted to adjust the definition of revenue to get a more “apples to apples” comparison to Anthropic’s numbers.
When these companies license their models to hypervisors (AWS, Azure, etc), those hypervisors take a cut. OpenAI does not report that cut as revenue. This investor wanted to add it back in to get a “total demand for AI tokens” number.
They are 2 completely different metrics coming from 2 completely different groups.
Are you suggesting that The End is not, in fact, Near? And OpenAI is not about to collapse into bankruptcy, ending the entire AI ecosystem?
I wish more people realized AI is not going any where any time soon, regardless of their feelings on it.
Is not about AI going away, is about the huge economic problem the current bubble will cause.
It was the recent estimation that hyperscale LLMs need to earn $6 trillion a year to break even. I don’t think governments can afford six trillion for their surveillance states and robot armies.
That is the recent news that harbingers a potential 2026 AI bubble burst.
Open AI has been hemorrhaging money and taking on vast debt for a while. That’s not really news.
Depends in what exactly you mean with AI here. AI as a tech is going to stay, Pandoras box is open and there is no going back now.
The AI companies tho, the actual subject of this post, are going to crash and burn eventually. Not all at the same time and maybe not every single one, but a good portion of them will go down the drain .
That cuts both ways. The hype artists who insist it’s going to become the foundation of all professional services is also bullshitting you.
But yeah, these tech companies aren’t going to just vanish, any more than IBM or Yahoo did in prior downturns.
Teeter harder, I need to upgrade my graphics card.
Something big is coming. The number of startups that investors have poured billions into that do random in-the-middle bullshit to try and scrape pennies from companies’ budgets is incredible. These products aren’t real. All the investment went into carving money off… the investment. It’s self eating.
cant happen soon enough
The thing nobody asked for, spent trillions of dollars to force feed it into everyone’s daily lives, and are now shocked the majority of people don’t give two fucking shits about it.
I agree, it’s about time finally
The company I work does pretty basic analysis. Its certainly an “every day” application. It’s been two or three years they’ve been Investing large amounts of money into this, and it can’t do shit. We have been “training” it for faaaaaar longer than it would take to train a human to do these things. Plus, they’ve torn it apart and completely restarted the process at least twice, to my knowledge. Zero efficiencies, very little practical capability. I hear that it’s great at coding and math, I’ve seen it do word processing pretty good, but these assholes oversold it’s capabilities to the managerial class, and they fucking took it. Hook, line, and sinker.
It’s not even that good at coding. It has to be heavily curated and focused to output somewhat “correct” code, it is full of gaps that lead to lots of bugs and missed scopes that a human would bring up if they wrote it themselves, and the output is incredibly verbose and inefficient (and harder for engineers to read).
It’s subpar at everything, there are no areas it shines.
Nothing an injection of taxpayers money can’t fix!
Who could have possibly seen this coming?!
Even if demand is there, as long as a user paying €200 / mo is costing the business €4,000 / mo then it’s not financially sustainable. (Along with the even worse ways it’s not sustainable)
Edit: see second comment below from partydisc explaining why the even the lower figure wasn’t well calculated.
This is the first major real sign of the bubble popping. An actual verified report from the Financial Times regarding massive drop in revenue expectations, rather than just people hoping it pops.
This article conveniently ignores the fact that Anthropic is reporting a second profitable quarter to investors.
Yeah.
I don’t like Anthropic’s long term prospects, but OpenAI is specifically in trouble, near term.
Their whole premise was becoming a Facebook-style “where else are you gonna go?” captured market on the consumer side, and that is clearly not happening. They wanted an enterprise monopoly, and those business customers are looking elsewhere.
Their ass is cooked.
Even if openai tanked tomorrow it would just be bought by Microsoft and become copilot AI.
The failure of the company is bad for current investors but it’s not a public company and as others have mentioned there is not yet enough instability in the rest of the industry. Google is still trucking along without issue even if they don’t make the news and people are still giving Muse access to all their shit.
It’s not that simple, as:
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Other companies/institutions have heavy investments in OpenAI.
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Other companies’ expected long-term revenue depends on OpenAI.
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They are the “face” of LLMs to finance world. If they tank, the illusion shatters, and investments pulls out of “AI” everywhere.
I agree that Google, Meta, the companies will be fine, as you said. Nvidia/AMD will be fine. Even XAI will be fine. The physical companies and their business aren’t going anywhere.
But their stocks will drop precipitously, and drag others into the rut with them like a black hole.
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Given the monumental difference between those two figures, investors across the world of finance are taking it as a sign that demand for AI is much lower than previously thought
No. Demand for OpenAI’s services is lower than they thought.
Every day, the open weights models get smarter and cheaper and new competitors are coming online every few weeks. They cost a fraction of what OpenAI charges.
Demand for AI products and services is continuing to grow at a break-the-world pace. It’s just these big “AI first movers” are in trouble because it’s too easy to copy what they do. They expected an enormous “first mover advantage” (which is a real thing) but it turns out that AI is trivial to train and replicate (just have to scrape the Internet and scan a lot of books).
In other words, it’s turning out that “first mover” is a disadvantage in this (AI) industry.
I feel like in a few years we will look back on this whole era and realise that our politicians and business leaders fell for a not so elaborate scam. LLM usage will be severely curtailed because of the scammy stank on them and they will slowly migrate back into the niches they should have been confined to in the first place.
Rightly or wrongly people got scared off widespread nuclear after Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, LLMs will be much the same. The damage they have done to economies will take decades to resolve and it will be interesting to see if the US public can muster the unity and wherewithal to hold the oligarchs, kleptocrats and their enablers responsible.
Even more interesting if some laws can get put in place to limit the powers of the executive and or introduce some safeguards with teeth to prevent this sort of catastrophe again.
Imagine if worldwide we treated the criminals with power and money like criminals.
I fear we will have a generational loss of intellectual from people who have rapidly learned to farm all their higher cognition off to the liar box, and then got excited and cheered about the liar box getting better at lying. But hopefully we can move past this.
Of course the other scenario is that China waits until the US economy is so intrinsically linked to LLMs that there is no extrication, then they start pulling investment. I guarantee you the Chinese government will remain in control of their population longer than the US government controls theirs once an economic freefall kicks off towards a recession that makes the great depression look like a blip in the accounts books.
It’s too late for that scenario. LLMs are already widespread on millions of computers.
On my old 4060 Ti 16GB I can run Qwen3.8:14b and that’s actually good enough for loads and loads of things. It’s actually overkill for a lot of stuff too which is why tiny models are all the rage right now (e.g. 0.8b models).
Let’s say the government banned LLMs. Are they really going to want to halt pharmaceutical and biomedical research like that? Are they going to start inspecting/requiring everyone’s computers be scanned regularly for AI models?
No. It’s unrealistic to think they can do anything at all to stop AI. If we ban it in the US, the world will just use AI services offered from other countries and then the US won’t be able to compete because those countries will become vastly more productive.
As much as everyone on Lemmy believes all AI output is “slop”, it really does do useful stuff! It’s just most of the useful stuff doesn’t make the news. It’s boring things like checking if an uploaded image is NSFW or if an uploaded document has everything it’s supposed to have or follows the correct format.
AI/LLMs are also checking the grammar of basically everything that gets published. Anyone who’s not using AI for that is an idiot. It’s just way too fucking good at spotting grammatical errors, incorrect word use (often innocent typos that normal grammar checking tools miss), and similar problems.
There’s fucktons of super useful, good ways to use AI. We’d be stupid to just ban it and pretend it isn’t good for a lot of things.
We can regulate its use but that’s not really “regulating AI” as much as it is “regulating capitalism” or “regulating people”. Because the AI isn’t just going out on its own to spam misinformation or mislead consumers with generated product photos. Someone told it to do those things.
What we need isn’t “AI regulation” is regular regulation that prevents companies from behaving badly.
Predictable as clockwork… Sure, there’s no way we say, “fuck this shit is cancer maybe I should stop handing my cognitive capabilities over to a machine and start thinking again.”
I had a whole big screed written out about the myriad ways that the implementation of this technology is corrosive at a societal level. But it’s all just so exhausting to have the same arguments time and again.
So let’s just leave it at, sure buddy, you and your ilk have the mandate of heaven to topple the world. Have fun, but please don’t be surprised where the road you’re on takes you.
No, no. You’ve got the wrong idea.
Will AI completely ruin a zillion people’s ability to think (beyond what social media already accomplished)? Quite possibly!
I’m just saying there’s nothing we can do to stop it at this point.
You’re about to head down a long, lonely road as normies start using and accepting AI more and more into their lives while you scream into the abyss. I’ve been there with fossil fuels, copyright, software patents, and Linux.
People saying “Just use AI!” Is about to live rent free in your head as your most-hated phrase. Just like, “stop driving gas guzzlers!” Or, “stop bitching about Windows and just install Linux already!” Lives in so many others.
At least most people don’t think of AI as a core part of their identity (e.g. pickup trucks) 🤷
Eventually we are bound to take steps to mitigate it. Like Radium, or Asbestos, or Lead in bloody everything, or cigarettes. Eventually the winds of change blow and the shitheels in power pivot to something new. It will be imperfect and it won’t reach everywhere and we will be pulling it out of places we never suspected we would find it in 50 years.
I can even imagine some far fetched scenarios where people start seeing Dune as a prophetic vision, especially with the idea of LLMs targeting weaponry in conflict zones. We seems to have a fairly accepting view on people committing genocide… Will we be so open minded about LLMs doing a bit of genocide… Especially if it’s gets its target wrong, maybe engages in a bit of friendly genocide on the aggressor countries own civilian populace.
I wouldn’t believe that hype
I am the only person in my circle using open weight models.
Normies out number us by a large amount and none of them really are running their own things.
Individuals using AI are a tiny drop in the bucket. Think bigger: Businesses and government.
There’s government agencies racking up token usages to the point where Google had to build an entire data center on Christmas Island (the place with the cool crabs) and that still won’t be enough! And that’s just one government!
Companies are using AI in automations now and it’s working so well that they’re willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars a month (on tokens) just on that one automation.
These usages are where demand is growing. Not regular people or even developers using AI to help them write code.
Companies are using AI in automations now and it’s working so well that they’re willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars a month (on tokens) just on that one automation
it’s working so well
Citation needed. I work in a midsized IT corpo, I don’t see it working that well? Sure, some shit is shipped faster, some is shipped slower, customers churn is 2x higher than “planned” and prod bugs have doubled.
(And we do all the fancy shit, looping, custom harnesses, orchestrations, handovers, savepoints, post delivery pipelines, autoremediation, blablabla, context, graphs blabla)
(And we do all the fancy shit, looping, custom harnesses, orchestrations, handovers, savepoints, post delivery pipelines, autoremediation, blablabla, context, graphs blabla)
Yeah that’s not what I’m talking about. That’s just coding stuff and I think everyone is learning a hard lesson right now that there’s really two ways to do AI (for code):
- You let the AI write all the code. Using those techniques you mentioned to try to keep it from fucking up too much.
- You use the AI to fix/write a little bit of the code at a time. Manually. As in, someone who knows software architecture really well tells the AI to write a function or two or maybe even a whole module and that’s it. They do this repeatedly until their task is complete.
#1 is a very expensive way to do it but it seems to work, albeit with a huge learning curve and a much longer horizon before you get something stable. Even then, what you get can be a giant fucking mess that’s really, really hard to understand.
#2 is much safer and works quite well, IMHO. When the AI fucks something up, it’s only a tiny little thing that’s easy to fix. This method really is just a way for developers to improve their productivity.
With #2, it only takes a small amount of tokens to have the AI help you troubleshoot as well. At least, that’s been my experience.
Having said that, the places where we are seeing the most growth in AI is small shit. For example, at my work they implemented an agent that scans customer complaints and filters out false positives. I work for a huge company that has a zillion products/services and the AI has tool calls into our ticketing systems to check if there was an outage at the time the customer complained. It’s not that smart, but it’s smart enough to tell if a ticket about system X was opened when system X had an outage. It can even tell if the customer was complaining about something relevant to the outage.
Stuff like that runs 24/7 and eats up bazillions of tokens, but only on our local hardware (we have thousands of enterprise GPUs). At other companies, they’re doing similar things and slowly realizing they can replace OpenAI/Anthropic API calls with local ollama stuff.
Even if your token bill is $10,000/month for a service like that, it’s still cheaper than paying an entire team of humans to perform the same function.
That is the growing use of AI automation I was talking about.
