Even the street corner hustler knows you give the first rock out for free.
They also know not to spend trillions making the product.
Hey, cocaine and baking soda ain’t cheap you know. Plus you got to have a microwave and shit. Overhead is crazy like that.
/s
I think those IPOs are meant to bring in enough money to give the founders and managers golden parachutes before the whole system folds.
They don’t make any money - on the contrary - and they won’t miraculously start making it just because the IPO happened.
You’re thinking too long term. IPOs are the C suite cashing out.
I’m excited to see the PE Ratios after these IPOs. We’re already well into dot.com absurdity, but throw in some multi-trillion market caps with negative earnings?
Here’s the problem… He says AI was adopted beyond his expectations. Great.
But if somebody is using it at the current price point of super cheap or free, are they going to keep using it when it gets expensive?
You can make a basic chatbot run on a desktop PC, but nobody wants to pay for that. Once you get into things with useful generation and large context windows, or things like video generation, suddenly you need one or more $10,000+ pieces of hardware to run it. So the $10 a month you charge the user is basically an introductory price that doesn’t cover your hardware fees let alone the software engineers to build your AI.
Eventually, the bill comes due. Eventually, you have to look at your customers and how much machine time they use each month and how much your r&d costs and figure out what the actual cost to the customer has to be. And then the customer rethinks how useful the AI is or isn’t.
People will pay $10 a month for chat GPT to write their emails. Will they pay $100 a month?
What about the company that replaced all their software developers with AI. Suddenly the AI cost as much or more as the software developers. Only now the developers who understood the code base work for other companies.
There will be a fun correction when this happens.
Once you get into things with useful generation and large context windows, or things like video generation, suddenly you need one or more $10,000+ pieces of hardware to run it.
A Blackwell server with 72 GPUs costs about $3 million, plus requires 130 kW of power (about 3 residential homes’ max rated power through a residential 200A circuit box, for about $600-$1000/day in electricity cost).
You’re gonna need to sell a lot of $20/month subscriptions to get that paid for, assuming that the server is good for 5 years. If it’s only good for 3 years, the economics are basically impossible.
… assuming that the server is good for 5 years. If it’s only good for 3 years, the economics are basically impossible.
And surely the big AI companies wouldn’t decide that hardware rated for ~3 years should be amortized over 5-6 years in order to massively inflate their value on paper.
I’m sure Bernie Madoff’s fund had an ‘accounting puzzle’ too.
I love how the publications call it a ‘puzzle’ rather than what it so obviously is- a bunch of people throwing $billions at tech they don’t understand which has no serious road to profitability anytime soon.
If it’s only good for 3 years, the economics are basically impossible.
Also consider that as models improve, the newer frontier models that are doing actual useful work require significantly more compute and RAM than basic chat bots…
I am no AI fan, but I do not see this going away. I think if you can get enough people addicted, they will pay costs if the costs seem nominal at first.
If someone can’t write well and has an upcoming deadline for an essay or needs to write an important document, they might use a one-time fee. If someone uses it for day-to-day decision making, they will certainly do a subscription if it seems cheap at first. And once you have those people expecting to pay, the price keeps increasing every couple of years.
Example a - Facebook. Rolled out as an entirely free service and enrolled billions of members. Now enough people pay for extras in things as stupid as Candy Crush that they can tack millions onto their revenue for nearly no benefit provider. If enough people pay $1 for something stupid, it pays off
Example b - Prime streaming services. It was a free tack-on to people with Prime memberships. So people bought Fire sticks and use it as a home base. And now they are so cemented into the system and don’t know how to use an alternative so they will pay for 1) extra apps that will show the program they want, which will pay Amazon a fee and 2) pay extra for no ads now that they are addicted
I also have no doubt that advertising can be baked into AI. Just wait until it writes a pathology report and recommends a certain brand name medication, or gives someone a to-do list for hosting a Christmas party with specific brands and desired trends listed.
As for video generation, I think you have a small enough pool that does this anyway, and this will increasingly be consolidated by price towards a handful of powerful individuals who want to sway public influence.
You and I may not pay for it, but have no doubt you can get similar adoption to streaming services and you can get people to pay for anything if it feels cheap enough to be nothing money. I’ve become a cynical old fart and I’ve watched this song and dance too many times.
I think the price point is where your theory falls apart. The AI companies are spending far more than Netflix and they will need to charge more than the average family can afford in order to turn a profit. (Especially in the US where people are struggling to pay for gas and groceries right now.)
Take a look at the new token-based business services. People are blowing through their monthly allotment in a couple of days doing the same things they had been doing previously. Businesses won’t be able to afford increasing their AI spending by 10x to keep up.
I think it will have to consolidate down to a few players - I certainly don’t expect that there is a market for 100 different systems. And I think the personal market is a supplement to the executive suite market, so getting a few people addicted for cheap both brings in a small revenue stream and dumbs a population down enough that they have no choice but to function without it (imagine telling someone in 2001 that they would one day pay $1700 for a cell phone - now it’s just considered the cost of living)
The businesses who overdid it on tokens have a choice to make: hire back workers or switch to a different AI company. Maybe one day they will look at humans (although salary may have to increase due to negative reputation), but I think there are a good number that will just shop around to another AI company for a better deal.
There’s just no way to pay for the cost of these services, though.
When someone constructs a 100 MW data center (now considered a smaller one for new construction), that’s about $2 billion in total costs to outfit the whole operation. And then once it’s on, we’re talking something like $10-20 million/month in electricity alone, and a few million in other costs. How many $20 subscriptions do you need to sell just to break even with your operating expenses? How many $100/month subscriptions do you need to sell to make a dent on your interest payments on the construction? Will there be a market for $1000/month subscriptions from millions of customers? If not, how’s this all going to be paid for?
They certainly cant make their money back writing personal emails and doing kids homework, but I dont think thats where they are aiming in the long run. We may end up with big business and military paying big money for the real frontier models and everyone else using lightweight local models on their own hardware, cheap models integrated into existing applications, and watered down frontier models on subscription.
You may be right (I hope you are). Do you think government funding would offset this?
I don’t think government funding can actually offset the crash in consumer and business demand being insufficient to cover the cost of the most expensive models on the most expensive GPUs. But if you look through my comment history I’ve made the comparison to supersonic flight, because I genuinely believe there’s a possibility that governments fund the expensive branch of this technology for their own military or surveillance or law enforcement purposes without the benefits necessarily actually spilling out into normal commercial applications.
We’ve hit the point where training a model (both pre training and post training) isn’t the expensive part, and the expensive part is actual inference, which makes it hard to scale the most expensive models to where it’s useful for a lot of people. So it might be that the companies and governments that can afford to operate an expensive model might be the only ones to do it. And they’ll be able to, without necessarily the public being able to have access to the same tech.
They would raid pensions before asking congress
What happens when its chatgpt, Claude and Gemini $$$$ vs Deepseek $. The Chinese will absolutely flood the market with free AI so long as it burns the American companies.
With more headlines like this in the news …
Anthropic/OpenAI may be spending more than $1000 for every $100 you pay them
… it really seems like even if the market is winnowed down to the major players, there’s still not enough consumer demand at the prices they need to be profitable.
Also, if my cellular plan cost me $1700, I’d be shopping for a better deal.
Advertising is already baked into AI. There just need to switch it in fully. That’s coming.
People will pay $10 a month for chat GPT to write their emails.
They won’t even pay that in many cases but instead rely on the free offerings. Expect those to go away altogether, to be heavily hamstring, or to become absolutely riddled with advertisements.
If run locally you get none of those problems.
Right, but then we are back to the question of how these companies are supposed to make money. I suppose hardware manufacturers will be okay with this outcome but I’m not sure how these heavily inflated software companies will profit under a local first world. So we are back to the bubble deflating or bursting.
I agree with your conclusion. I can’t see where the income is coming from to fund all the datacenters being built.
The bubble is based on creating AGI, but people already don’t want to pay for sub AGI intelligence that is already beyond most people’s needs.
On the code development front it’s even worse as now you have an unpredictable cost based on token consumption rather than the predictable cost of a salary and have no leverage to negotiate the cost.
Quite true. Switching providers is an apples to oranges comparison, so it’s not like you can just switch from Claude to Gemini and expect everything to work perfectly.
I want to see everyone hop on the IPOs and ride them all the way down to the floor!
Fuck AI
If I wasn’t convinced the entire financial system was fraudulent I would be shorting the fuck out of all of them
“The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent”
We’ll burn more and more coal to power air conditioners to deal with unbearable global warming until that’s no longer possible.
The financial markets are the same. No reasonable person believes any of this is sane or sustainable. But what happens when the music stops? Very few chairs.
Especially since Nvidia has reached the “too big to fail” level; guess who’s gonna pay again for the upcoming crisis?
Source? Not doubting you, just would like to know the criteria.
There isn’t a completely objective criteria, from Wikipedia:
Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke also defined the term in 2010: “A too-big-to-fail firm is one whose size, complexity, interconnectedness, and critical functions are such that, should the firm go unexpectedly into liquidation, the rest of the financial system and the economy would face severe adverse consequences.”
NVIDIA currently makes up nearly 7.5% of the S&P 500 (not to mention that they have invested a lot in the other companies and those companies have invested in NVIDIA). If they were to suddenly be liquidated I’d say that would cause ‘severe adverse consequences’ to the economy.
And it would likely cause a ripple to other tech companies, which which make up roughly 1/3 of the entire US stock market.
Thank you indeed. On my side I only remembered the news back in November that nvidia weighted 16% of the US GDP. Now of course comparing valuation and GDP is not really meaningful but the idea stuck.
Thanks, especially for the figures, that helped a lot.
I think investments, 401Ks and retirement funds will hop on SpaceX and AI and the mass will complain for a bit until the next news cycle.
Really? Has anyone mentioned that to Tesla? Or to whoever is in the government that keeps giving him billion dollar contracts?
Oh you mean the Tesla with a PE Ratio of 382 (20 times the industry average), a PEG of 16, P/B to 18, massive insider stock dumps, and is still down YTD? Tesla still has power because of their stranglehold on charging. AI companies have insane costs and people souring on them as they either lose their jobs or see their companies’ costs go up as a result, all without solid ROIs and strong buyers remorse.
And Trump/Hegseth keep giving them contracts because they’re idiots
still down YTD
TSLA was at $297 this time last year and it’s trading at $403 today. I’ll spot you that it’s off the $485 peak. But it’s been on an absolute tear for the last six years.
And Trump/Hegseth keep giving them contracts because they’re idiots
Government contracts are the lifeblood of every big corporation. Half the reason why business execs at Fortune 100 firms are so slavishly loyal to whomever happens to be running the country at any given moment.
I don’t think Trump/Hegseth are morons for giving Musk access to the unlimited money pump, given how much of Musk’s money keeps overflowing into their own pockets. I think Biden and Obama were rubs for pumping up Silicon Valley stock over the last 18 years, fully ignoring how often they were getting in bed with outspoken fascists.
More broadly speaking, I think Hegseth has set the Pentagon up for failure over the next decade in the same way Rumsfeld did under Bush. But I also don’t consider that a bad thing, broadly speaking. Just a shame that we’re going to piss away trillions in blood, sweat, and tears at home so the US can finally get its nose busted properly in the Middle East.
And Trump/Hegseth keep giving them contracts because they’re idiots
Ironically, Trump said the same thing about Biden.
Agree with the sentiment. It’s not like we are not in a bubble, but the old fashioned business and growth of the 20th century is gone. With technology things scale incredibly so winning the market share can put you on top for decades, and not just with finances. At this point the power and control of information means everything
Ah yes, the stable and sane business environment of the 20th century, which brought us totally sane and obviously correct investments like Xerox.
Xerox was a household name !
The only thing more guaranteed than a Tech Sector crash is the multi-trillion dollar government bailout.
Might as well walk in the door with a $1.5T valuation, because that’s what the Feds are going to use to justify cutting you a check in another five years.
Based on what? Spotify took what, 16 years to turn a profit?
Money stopped working like you expect it to a long time ago.
The arc of technology progress since the crash in the early 2000s has been pump and dump scams perpetrated on the entire market.
They ARE going to make money. They own all the stocks now. An inflated IPO means they cash out. It’s not about long-term strategy
‘At some point you’ve got to make money’
Hey hey hey, now, that’s loser talk. Here, c’mon, let’s snort a ton of coke.
That sounds like something The Wolf of Wall Street would say
A lot of people working in finance were not alive when that movie was taking place and like the movie Wall Street the ones who watched it learned all the wrong lessons.
Don’t you worry about Wall Street, let ME worry about blank!
Blank? BLANK??! You’re not looking at the big picture!
ERROR: Capitalism has no idea how to deal with this situation.
I’m actually kinda fascinated with how this will shake out. This isn’t like one or two companies making a bet. The entire S&P500 is pushing Ai.
Well, here’s hoping a few investors do a flip before they hit the pavement.
This is capitalism working exactly as intended. People with capital are using it to guide businesses to make them more money.
The mistake is thinking that capitalism is motivated by a healthy economy, when the theory is that if everyone is aggressively selfish then the economy will naturally become healthy and efficient.
The people making money are counting on making their money as investors keep pumping more in. The investors are all aiming to be the last one to sell before the crash. Russian roulette venture capitalism. (In some cases they think the economy will tolerate 1-2 companies and they’re aiming to buy a controlling interest in a company worth 2% current value after the correction, and in others they just have so much money that a few billion is a minor bet - BlackRock comes to mind, with more than $10 trillion to invest)
If you look at 2008, we had a similar-ish situation with a major portion of the economy being invested in mortgage based investments.
People only saw the percentage returns and not the human cost. We haven’t learned our lessons and are doomed to repeat the same scenarios.
ERROR: Capitalism has no idea how to deal with this situation.
Au contraire, it actually does! The same way the last four or five economic crises were handled - massive government bailouts for the affected sector.
It’ll soften the blow for the common people’s 401ks so they don’t completely revolt, but the c-suite execs will get their big payoff and the asset buyup (datacenters, hardware, etc) in the aftermath will transfer an unimaginable amount of wealth into the hands of yet fewer people and dramatically increase inequality.
It’s a shitty solution, and one that is not viable long term, but since it has worked so many times in the past, I doubt the government is going to change up their winning strategy. Especially not with the current clown cadre at the helm.
ERROR: Capitalism has no idea how to deal with this situation.
Actually it does. Bad decisions can be made only until money runs out
That’s not nice. Think of the people who clean that pavement.
Wat? Capitalism knows exactly how to deal with this situation. People who still have faith in the companies will keep loaning them money or buying their stock or investing in them in other ways, and people who don’t have that faith will stop doing those things. Eventually each company will either succeed or run out of believers and die. It’s a very common scenario.
edit: answering the people who mentioned bailouts and government loans, as if to invalidate what I’m saying here.
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Bailouts are infrequent special cases where governments intercede when there’s fear that corporate failures might cause widespread unemployment or other economic consequences. The entire AI industry isn’t even in that leage - it currently employs around 25-30,000 people. The largest one (OpenAI) only has about 8000. The largest of them could fail without disrupting their industry. This is nothing like a situation that would spur an industry-wide bailout.
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Same goes for large government loans or loan guarantees. These aren’t handed out like candy whenever anyone asks. The scale of the consequences from company failures simply wouldn’t justify it.
The overwhelmingly likely scenario if AI companies fail is mergers and acquisitions. There’s even a class of investors known as “corporate raiders” who specialize in buying desperate companies and selling off the assets. None of this is new, it’s normal business activity that happens all the time, just part of the ecosystem. Believing AI companies are bulletproof because the government will simply hand them money simply isn’t supported by history. For a counterexample read up on the dotcom bubble of the late 90s, when tens of thousands of web startups went under without getting bailed out.
Are you seriously suggesting companies live and die by the free market?? Those poor failing companies need taxpayer bailouts.
One problem with capitalism is that everything is for sale, including the government. The AI industry is intentionally positioning themselves as “too big to fail” so that they can guarantee a government bailout. As for the dotcom bubble, sure the smaller players were allowed to fail, but that just meant more room for the larger players like google and amazon to take over and now they’re definitely too big to fail. With AI, we already have a small handful of huge players and they’ve convinced the government that this is a matter of national security.
On top of that, people’s retirements are more tied to the stupid stock market than ever before, so the government will use that as an excuse to bail out these companies, hence the rush to IPO and enter indexes.
Ok, point by point: First, government corruption isn’t a function of capitalism. Officials in every system find ways to sell favors. I personally knew Russians who bribed their way out of the USSR, which was almost laughably corrupt. Secondly, the AI industry can’t “position” its own value - it is what it is, and as an industry it simply isn’t “too big to fail.” Thirdly, Google (founded in 1998) was still a startup during the dotcom bubble, not a “large player”. We have no “huge players” in AI yet - as I mentioned, the biggest AI company only has 8000 employees.
Based on all this I assume the prediction that the government will use retirement account stock market exposure as an excuse to bail out AI companies is something you heard or read - if you gave a link to that I’d be happy to look at the reasoning.
Yeah, that would be true if there never was a public bailout, or a cheap government loan.
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Is the real hope that AI will be a subscription service? Those subscription billionaires ain’t got a clue. Let’s change “At some point you’ve got to make money” to “At some point you’ve got to add value”.
Probably the least controversial take on the threadiverse but i stumpled upon Ed Zitrons Blog like maybe two years ago. I’ve read a few posts of him since then and i just watch the shitshow unfold tbh. Its not that i 100% believe in his predictions. But he has made his point. I’m just an average fuck. I dont know shit. But it was so far the most believable and backed up assessment of the current AI situation.
I make barely enough money to afford my rent in bumfuck europe. How the fuck am i more informed about AI then some CEO? WTF.
- replacing human workers is their fondest dream so they want to believe so hard
- they have FOMO “everyone else is doing it and I don’t want to lose out”
- everyone else is doing it and if they didn’t do it and were wrong, it would be worse for their reputation than following the pack and being wrong
- c suite types talk to each other and they’ve formed an echo chamber
In summary, CEOs (of large public companies anyway - your mom and pop plumber could also be a CEO) are not smarter than the average person. Just more amoral and having the connections to be CEOs
The last 2 bullets are so damn true. And trying to argue that is just pointless. So I’ve shifted to the money part of it and have asked “how are you preparing for the bubble to burst?” and back it up with that data.
It’s not that you’re more informed. It’s simply that you have to worry about consequences of mismanaging money where a CEO… well, hasn’t.
I’m not much of an AI skeptic compared to most on Lemmy. I think the technology is incredibly useful and probably beneficial to society if we can remove the control of the ruling class.
That said I truly don’t understand how the AI business model is supposed to work. I’m sure there is some market for businesses, governments, etc., basically people who have too much money who may want to pay for the latest and greatest models.
But I don’t really see the average consumer doing this when slightly less good versions will almost certainly be available for free. And the above customers will not be able to support the level of investment that’s going on right now.
technology is incredibly useful and probably beneficial to society
For what? It’s not reliable enough to actually automate anything and people that use it regularly inevitably stop checking the output and start falling victim to hallucinations. It’s pretty good at rifling through social media posts which I don’t think is good for society and it’s OK as a frontline support system but even that they normally go too far and just make it infuriating
I automate plenty with it, no you cant be an idiot about it but i can do what used to take me weeks in hours with it.
Yeah I think Lenny’s generic take is heavily colored by the absolute morons using it moronically. That’s a large number of people because lots of people are…well, morons. But you can definitely use it in productive ways. Keeping a human in the loop right now I think is very prudent, for cost and reliability reasons, but man does it decrease drudgery in capable hands.
People are scared because they think they could lose their jobs. Even if they say out loud they don’t think it will happen and that they think AI is useless. They need AI to fail for peace of mind.
If anything they’re most at risk for losing their job due to a stubborn refusal to adopt technology. What people don’t realize is that we don’t live in an ideal world where the optimal solution is the only way. Even if LLMs are less than perfect, there’s a scenario where it remains commonplace because it’s what’s in style. The stubborn abstainers will find themselves left behind when everyone else is leveraging it to complete mundane tasks much faster and checking the work.
We already live in a world full of cumbersome enshittified technology. There’s nothing we can do but make do with what we have. At this point people are dreaming if they think the AI bubble will pop and the technology will be shelved. It’s not going away. It’s already demonstrated usefulness. That it’s not turning a profit is a different story.
Maybe some others are simply scared that they don’t have the expertise to check the work of LLMs in the first place.
It doesn’t need to fully automate anything to make people more productive. And I think there’s ample evidence it can greatly increase productivity in some fields. We’re in the bumpy phase of finding out how much human supervision is needed in each field so you’re bound to hear about ways it has been misused but everyone I’ve talked to who uses it professionally thinks it helps them get a lot more done than without it.
I don’t believe that for a second. Everyone I know that talks about being more productive is just pushing extra work onto more responsible people by making output that looks like work but isn’t sufficient.
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It’s not reliable enough to actually automate anything
This is half true. It’s not reliable enough to automate an entire job but it is reliable enough to automate tasks that would otherwise take a lot of time, usually related to sifting or searching data.
If I need to look through a massive set of data like Google for something thst I can only describe with an explanation, the LLM will do a much faster job actually finding what you need rather thsn spending an hour manually sorting through SEO slop.
You don’t even need the cloud models for this, you can slap SearXNG onto a local model at home.
It’s basically just an autocomplete search on steroids which is its biggest advantage. Any documentation you need is immediately accessible, which is especially useful if you have zero experience with something niche or new.
Now actually getting the LLM to consistently generate output is a completely different story lol.
We call that vibe coding.
If I need to look through a massive set of data like Google for something thst I can only describe with an explanation, the LLM will do a much faster job actually finding what you need rather thsn spending an hour manually sorting through SEO slop.
You could also use any other search engine since Google intentionally wrecked their search, and use the adblock list that filters out the seo slop. Just as efficient and less glacier melting
, usually related to sifting or searching data
No matter the harness, no matter the spell, no matter the model, it is failing me daily in that regard, in my field of expertise. And the failures are random between inconsequential to grandiose.
Heck, the thing it should be doing best - summaries - are constantly either missing the point or focusing on wrong take.
This isn’t directed at you specifically, but just the broad sentiment that people are coming now OK with AI even though people kinda I guess forgot that like AI stole and ripped all of our information books. Music works of art all of it’s stolen ya know. But I’ll digress it doesn’t matter anymore.
I think it matters. I do think the technology is interesting and useful, but if you create something using AI models based on license violations then what stops someone from taking it? What standing would you have in court to say that it’s yours? Why is the AI model “fair use” but a thing made with it is proprietary? These are things yet to be fully determined, but given that training and running AI is not cheap these companies are building on sand IMO.
I personally don’t think the concept of stolen IP is ethically coherent. Ownership of ideas is a ridiculous concept. So I don’t find this to be a very compelling argument for why AI is bad per se.
However, I do think it strengthens the argument that it should not be the intellectual property of tech oligarchs who did not create the vast breadth of knowledge that the algorithm is sorting through and accessing.
But I’ll digress it doesn’t matter anymore.
Exactly. There is no ethical consumption.
The Internet that you’re posting on was built on top of a military network intended to provide redundant communication in the event of a global thermonuclear war. The satellites that provide you with GPS were created in order to more accurately drop bombs and guide armies. The rockets that put them in space exist because of research into methods of delivering nuclear weapons.
Your smartphone likely contains components built by slave labor, you almost certainly consume food products resulting from child labor. Your clothing as well.
The world is built on all manner of immoral things. ‘Stealing’ information (which presupposes the idea that a person can own knowledge, which I disagree with) is incredibly mild.
On top of that, the advances in AI are happening independent of LLMs. The advances in machine learning that made LLMs possible apply to all kinds of different areas that have nothing to do with language, music, or art.
LLMs just happen to be the easiest kind of AI to train because humanity has spent millennia storing language in books and the Internet provides a massive amount of data as well.
The Internet that you’re posting on was built on top of a military network intended to provide redundant communication in the event of a global thermonuclear war.
Responding to this part alone: that’s not actually true.
The intent of arpanet, the direct predecessor to the Internet, was to make it easier for universities to use high powered computer resources located at national laboratories, as well as making it easier to distribute software updates. The person who initially pushed for it’s creation wanted “an electronic commons open to all, 'the main and essential medium of informational interaction for governments, institutions, corporations, and individuals '”. They secured funding for the initial computer science labratories, os research that underpin everything, and the foundation for the “INTERgalactic NETwork”.Arpa was, at the time, the advanced research project agency. They were under the DoD, but they filled a role closer to the NSF today.
In designing the system they referenced work done by people who were studying robust communication networks. At the time that meant the phone system and nuclear weapons. The research, however, was applicable to any unstable network, and so had particular interest to them because computers had terrible reliability and they wanted to not have to call people if they discovered they had turned off a computer halfway between New York and LA.
The closest thing it has to a cold war military objective is to help us win the research race and spite the Soviets. It can withstand a nuclear attack, but that’s just because that’s the easiest way to make it survive a farmer with a backhoe accidentally hitting a wire.
They were under the DoD, but they filled a role closer to the NSF today.
DARPA was defense projects funded by the military for the military. NSF predates DARPA by 8 years. DARPA did not fill a role closer to the NSF today.
It was after ARPANET was created for the military that it was expanded into general university use by NSF into NSFNet in 1986.
(I worked for Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf in the early 90’s.)
DARPA was originally ARPA. They were under the department of defense but their project scope wasn’t limited to defense projects. The reorganization that rebranded the agency as DARPA and made it defense focused ostensibly saw the non-defense oriented moonshot project responsibility transfer to the NSF, although the funding shift wasn’t proportional.
The order of creation isn’t exactly relevant to how responsibilities have shifted.It’s kinda like how, for the longest time, presidential security was handled by the Treasury department. It wasn’t because presidential security was considered a financial matter, but because that’s where it fit.
https://www.darpa.mil/news/features/arpanet
Secure communications and information-sharing between geographically dispersed research facilities were among the ARPANET’s original goals.
From your link to the arpanet wiki:
Building on the ideas of J. C. R. Licklider, Bob Taylor initiated the ARPANET project in 1966 to enable resource sharing between remote computers.
Sutherland and Taylor continued their interest in creating the network, in part, to allow ARPA-sponsored researchers at various corporate and academic locales to utilize computers provided by ARPA, and, in part, to quickly distribute new software and other computer science results.
There’s a big difference between ARPA funded labs and general university usage.
I’m not sure why it would matter that you worked for them in the early 90s. That doesn’t exactly give you a privileged insight into the creation of ARPANET.
information-sharing between geographically dispersed research facilities
Research facilities doing DOD research.
I’m not sure why it would matter that you worked for them in the early 90s.
The president of the company got Vint and Bob on board because he was their military liason at Darpa.
The project I worked on was partially funded by Darpa. We reported weekly updates to a Lt Colonel.
The Internet was originally by the military and for the military and only later handed off to universities.
Yes, I will just take your word for it over the word of the original people involved.
You keep talking about DARPA, when they’re not the same organization that backed ARPANET. Arpanet came before laws were passed saying DARPA could only fund projects directly related to defense.
How is the technology useful?
For the love of Asimov, someone please explain.
It is useful for programming, I know a lot of people here don’t want to hear that, but denying it now is being willfully ignorant. No it isn’t good enough that you can tell it “just go do the thing” and then accept what it gives you without checking it, but using it as a tool as a professional can very much improve your work and how quickly you do things.
For me recently I used it to unpick a nasty race condition that was occasionally causing a program I was working on to lock up and couldn’t figure out why. It took some back and forth with it but it did help me figure it out when before I had been stumped.
I do work in software, and my main focus is on code review, as we work with money, and things have happened due to many factors.
I DO NOT want any more work being done. Fuck that. It’s hard reviewing ‘normal’ amount of code, multiplying it will backfire horrendously.
I do not need people not being able to figure out their bugs. It’s the most important part of the job, and not being able to fix it quickly costs us a lot.
If you need to fix something in a library you don’t understand… maybe you should review it before using? There are situations when it’s not possible, usually in low risk fields, frontends and such, but even then, we (IT in general) produce so much shit for no real gain. And we need LESS of it, not more.
Everyone I work with that uses it is worse at their job than before they started using it, and I’ve lost the ability to teach them how to actually do good work because telling the c-suite they’re 10x now (even though they’re producing only slightly more code and more issues) makes the c-suite happy. I could believe that some people have made small improvements to their workflows but its obvious to anyone competent that it’s not as big as an improvement as they’d have you believe and the vast majority is just people getting addicted to the slot machine, deskilling, and creating inferior output.
it’s not useful for programming and it makes code more verbose, poorly structured, and requires too many attempts to get a mildly useful block.
poorly structured,
yes, that’s bad
requires too many attempts to get a mildly useful block.
yes, that’s bad
more verbose,
How is that bad? I can’t count how many times I’ve revisited my work a year or more later, and wondered what I was thinking, having taken 2 minutes to parse something dense that I wrote, and then thought “why didn’t I make this a little clearer at the time?”
More verbose does not imply that is is more clear, it is often rambling and not even accurate.
correct. it’s long winded code that could be written a lot more succinctly.
rambling and not even accurate
Ah yes, that makes sense; thank you.
but using it as a tool as a professional can very much improve your work and how quickly you do things.
Maybe it’s just my 20 yoe, but that has so far not been my experience with it. It is improving, but definitely not there yet. Even standard boiler plate I can typically bang out faster than asking the AI to do it and then needing to double check it’s work because it somehow still manages to screw that up occasionally. Sometimes it does manage to be better than one of the juniors, but using it that way also cuts the legs out from under the career development pipeline which will result in an intermediate and senior dev drought down the road.
Even standard boiler plate I can typically bang out faster than asking the AI to do it
The people that claim it helps with boilerplate clearly never took the time to learn how to sed/awk, mustache templates, write a perl/python/etc script, use the regex find/replace in their editor, use the keyboard macro in their editor, use snippets in their editor and I’m sure other ways that aren’t immediately coming to mind that have existed forever and won’t hallucinate. They’re the ones that were not highly skilled in the first place and they’re vexingly successful at convincing newbies and laymen to listen to them about LLMs instead of the actual skilled people that actually know what they’re talking about.
Right? Drives me crazy.
Which model are you using? My experience is that it can definitely do “standard boilerplate”. What programming language are you using?
It’s clearly a controversial thing to say on the fediverse, but everyone must realize that AI is another tool - a sometimes faulty, sometimes great tool. A professional can use it well, a careless person can use it carelessly. But it is a tool that can help in certain cases. It’s a nuanced thing, which many people unfortunately have trouble accepting. It has flaws, yes. It also has benefits. This shouldn’t be controversial to say.
That of course doesn’t guarantee that providing that tool must be profitable. It may well be that providing AI models is just too expensive to actually make sense, at least as it is right now.
Sigh
In 2025, Ford sold 25,211 units of the Ranger, which is a 55.11% increase compared to 2024. In 2024, the total sales reached 45,749 units. For more detailed sales figures and trends, you can refer to the sources provided.
– Summary by CoPilot.
How many Ranger did Ford sell in 2025? Ford sold 70,960 Ranger in 2025. In 2024, Ford sold 45,749 Ranger. They sold 25,211 more units in 2025 compared to 2024 with a percent gain of 55.11% YoY.
– the original article in CarFigures.
“Mum, it’s not getting any better…”
deleted by creator
If you don’t understand why AI is going to be akin to a failed industrial revolution, maybe give this scenario a read. Here a think tank has written a forcast on how AI will potentially unfold and influence the global future.
They predict “reliable agent” by 2026. I think they’ve already failed. AI is still unreliable tool. It’s a very useful tool but there is no signs of any change to being reliable. Particularly odd is their claim that a new and better AI will come out from the work of the old unreliable AI. This is unlikely given that it has already been shown that AI trained on other AI degrades, not improves.
Is that a forecast or fanfic?
Fanfic.
They worked on it in stages—starting with early ideas up to mid-2025, then continuing to build from there. But instead of sticking with that first draft, they threw it out and started over from scratch.
They also didn’t settle on just one ending. After finishing their first version (the one marked in red), they created a second, more hopeful outcome starting from roughly the same point. That version also went through several rounds of revisions.
And this wasn’t made up out of nowhere—it was based on about 25 tabletop exercises and feedback from over 100 people, including dozens of experts who work directly in AI governance and AI technical fields.
including dozens of experts who work directly in AI governance and AI technical fields.
All of those people are fucking clowns and you know it. They’re these morons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalist_community
I didn’t know it and although the read was interesting to me I didn’t immediately make the connection, no divisiveness intended on my behalf. Disregard the post if you like, we are all free to listen to eachother’s point of views, then arrive at our own conclusions .
we are all free to listen to eachother’s point of views, then arrive at our own conclusions .
Sure, but I’m not going to pretend for a second that the pseudointellectual masturbation of “rationalists” is worth a damn just because their narratives were useful to capalist oligarchs so some people call them “experts” now. What a farce
The business model should be that with economies of scale they could provide compute much cheaper than average consumer can buy to run locally. So yeah, that means they gotta be able to support these $20/mo plans indefinitely.
If they jack up the prices i can just buy a 128gb ryzen ai machine for the price of $200/mo claude for a year. I supposed there’s some room there --they could charge $50/mo and it still makes sense.
but even at $100/mo i can buy a machine to run it at home do a 24 month payment plan and come out ahead.
The business model should be that with economies of scale they could provide compute much cheaper than average consumer can buy to run locally.
That business model assumes that the huge cloud models will always maintain a gap worth paying for, compared to the local models. I’m just not convinced that the average consumer will need cloud models for summarizing their emails or the news of the day.
And for actual costs of their data centers, there literally aren’t enough humans in the world where $20/month AI spending per person will help them break even. They’ll need to sell big accounts (many businesses spending billions per year) in order to break even.
Local is potentially even cheaper than that. This guy talks about how to get 17 t/s with a GTX 1060 that has 6GB of VRAM on the Qwen 3.6 35B MoE model: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8F_5pdcD3HY. He’s using a fork of llama.cpp with TurboQuant and his newest video made after this one is using an even more optimized 28B version of the model. I have cmake building the llama.cpp fork in a Dockerfile at the moment and we’ll see how this performs on my $800 laptop with a RTX 4060.
I’m also impressed how good OpenCode is compared to Claude Code. Qwen 3.6 is not quite as good as Claude and the MoE version that doesn’t need 24GB+ of VRAM isn’t quite as good as the dense version, but it also doesn’t cost $200 a month with usage limitations and a company training their models on your data. If it’s anywhere near “good enough”, I can see this being a daily driver.
I’m not an expert but my understanding is most of the computation is in the training. The actual queries are not too difficult to manage. So I think that’s what makes it more difficult to monetize because you’re trying to position yourself as a digital gatekeeper for work that has already been done. Yes, some industries have survived in this position but it limits the amount of profit you can make because there are always ways to copy someone else’s homework. So if prices are too high people will opt out because they have other options even if they’re slightly less quality or convenience.
Come on now, Nvidia is making money. Nvidia then just gives it back to them to make more money is all.
Yeah, Nvidia invests in Open AI, Open AI uses that money to buy Nvidia chips. More people invest in Nvidia because it’s revenue keeps growing.
Charles Ponzi would be proud.
Alan and Beth, two economists are walking through some woods. They come across s pile of shit and Alan says to Beth “if you eat that shot I’ll give you a tenner”
“Okay,” says Beth. She eats the shit and Alan hands her a £10 note
They walk on for a bit and find another pile of shit. Beth says to Alan “now I’ll give you a tenner of you eat that pile of shit”
“Okay,” says Alan. He eats the shit and Beth hands the £10 note back to him
They walk on a bit further and Beth says “you know, it seems to me like we both just ate a pile of shit and nobody gained anything”
“Ah, that’s where you’re wrong,” says Alan “we’ve increased the GDP by £20”
Isn’t this just the broken window fallacy but with a poop fetish?
Not quite. The point of the broken window fallacy is that had the money not been spent on the window, it would have been spent on something else. So breaking a window does generate revenue, but not necessarily more than not breaking a window
Whatever happens, the shopkeeper is in a worse position than he otherwise was
Here the point is that they’re passing the money back and forth. That’s like the AI companies right now - passing money round in a circle and that being presented as if it were the same thing as the industry as a whole making money
NVidia gives money to OpenAI, who give it to another company to build datacentres, who give it back to NVidia and NVidia’s Number Goes Up
But wouldn’t that be velocity of money, not GDP? GDP is a measure of final goods and services, not money. Unless you have a poop fetish and consider the eating of poop to be a final service, then this wouldn’t impact GDP.
Here the point is that they’re passing the money back and forth. That’s like the AI companies right now - passing money round in a circle and that being presented as if it were the same thing as the industry as a whole making money
The stock market value isn’t the same thing as GDP though. The GDP measurement is never really a great measurement of economic well being because of inequality, but even then, we really don’t know what it is in the US because Trump fires anyone that gives out a bad report.
The people handing money back and forth quickly was actually what happened when the pandemic ended, the increase in the velocity of money resulted in inflation but people blamed it on Biden. Now Trump is President, the economists have been fired and fraud has been decriminalized.
Wasn’t his full name Charles Ponzi-Scheme?
