This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
And it's not even working. Not one of the AI companies is profitable. So they're putting the hope for profits some time in the future over sanity and safety.
Steve Burke (of GN) described the absurdity pretty well, within the context of the currently uncertain Nvidia and OpenAI deal:
Nvidia offered OpenAI $100B in investment, money that it didn't have, as long as OpenAI gave that money back to Nvidia to lease GPUs that haven't been made, to then put in data centres that haven't been constructed, which will be powered by electricity that hasn't come online, to then rent to users who haven't subscribed, to provide them features that haven't come to fruition.
And hope you’ve propped up the economy enough by the end of it that the government has to ~~bail you out~~…sorry i meant provide a “backstop”.
I don't think they even care about profits anymore.
Billionaires live in the balance sheet, not the P/L statements.
AI businesses are putting profits over sanity and safety.
All businesses are. That's what a business is. A legal entity that seeks to extract as much wealth from people as possible. They put profits before people as a matter of policy.
Limited liability corporations should be outlawed.
That's not what business is inherently; that's what capitalism is.
It's not even strictly what capitalism is about. It's some stupid bullshit interpretation that came out of the University of Chicago economics department.
Seriously, go look at Adam Smiths wealth of nations. The only mention of the "invisible hand" is so different from what is taught in economics now
… by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.
It's not that we need no regulation. It's just trying to say that if we set things up correctly, we don't need to worry about people pursuing SOLELY their own personal gain. Because the market seeks out the "greatest value", which is not just about money. It's also the value to society as a whole.
Instead, we got the fucking bullshit from Chicago saying that the only / best way of measuring value is by profit.
If anybody leaves an AI company with a fat paycheck, promises to "be honest about the real problems," and then proceeds to regurgitate things the AI company CEOs say: be suspicious.
Exhibit A is Anthropic millionaire Mrinank Sharma, who only mentioned (future) peril from AI and AI-made bioweapons, two fictional scenarios on the short list that Anthropic officially endorses. It's a list of things that please Anthropic investors.
Real-world stuff like AI psychosis, poisoning people's air, or generating CSAM doesn't get a mention from him. There's no profit in acknowledging those things, so he won't.
What profits?
Now what does that tell us about the sanity and safety?
"AI businesses are putting profits over sanity and safety".
Remove "AI" from that sentence and you'll see that's just more normal business practices that have been going on for decades.
The real question is: what profit? It's a sink hole in a hope to maximize reach
This is a ball and cup game designed to create cashflow where there is none. The 'profit' is the assets, dividends and capital gains the shareholder class will syphon out before the bubble bursts.
This is many companies right now.
Mine is run from the top down (all executives) by people who use LLM's for fucking everything.
Everyone fucking hates them at this point. We all think they are fucking trash.
Maybe it's time to grab some fellow employees and make an employee owned business.
The MBA class has long been this way.
That’s just every company isn’t it?
Not in my experience. Once their clients budgets get cut by funding cuts due to reality and they notice it doesn't do anything of benefit (on the clients side), they will be all "client first".
Just vibe code the AI. I'm sure it'll work perfectly.
Just another day in corporate America. Putting fake profits over employees’s well-beings, and customer safety and privacy.
The thing that gets me is they just want to get in on this $2Billion investment that keeps changing hands without changing hands. They really are just taking IOUs from… elsewhere? Because apparently, according to Jensen, that money hasn’t actually exchanged hands. Investors are just buying into the new Ponzi Scheme.
The alternative prediction is that this is in fact sustainable and AI companies will in fact have revenue to keep the bubble inflated for a lot longer, just in the worst way - by extracting the value of human-created reliability and trust from the market:
CEOs have also bought into AI almost to a person, and are using it to replace workers, results be damned. AI can't do the things they believe it can, but to them, if they can fake satisfying a need with AI for $5, that is preferable to actually satisfying a need with a real employee for $10.
The CEO is happy because his company saved $5 and he's met his stock option incentive target, the AI companies are happy to pocket that $5 instead of the employee getting $10. Maybe they even raise the customer's price to $12 as AI rent-seeking starts rising, and both companies get $6 each. Win-win, life will go on, just worse for everyone else.
CEOs have also bought into AI almost to a person, and are using it to replace workers, results be damned. AI can’t do the things they believe it can, but to them, if they can fake satisfying a need with AI for $5, that is preferable to actually satisfying a need with a real employee for $10.
Yep that's exactly how me and my entire team were laid off. "Automatization".
There's a huge list of eye rolls here but also...what profits?
"They are putting profits over sanity and safety"
Soooooooo, just like every other business in the history of capitolism?
🌎 👨🚀 🔫 👨🚀
Every company does that. The difference is the AI companies will be broke soon and laying off all their staff so people are getting out before the collapse.
Exactly. And some of them are rats fleeing a sinking ship. Just look at Mrinank Sharma, who got paid a million bucks or so for a year at Anthropic, then ditched.
I sure hope they secretly sabotage on their way out to protect society
Talents leave
Tell me a "journalist" has no concept of mass nouns without using those words.
Publicly traded companies are legally required to put profits over sanity, safety, and everything else. It's a truly insane system we've put together for ourselves.
