Submitted 3 months ago by cyrano@piefed.social to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.ft.com/content/23e54a28-6f63-4533-ab96-3756d9c88bad
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The government will bail them out. They want the AI surveillance power but don’t realize how flawed it is. MK Ultra went on for 20 years before they realized they can’t use LSD to mind control people…
This is what the upcoming IMO is for. I wish I was joking
These headlines look like something out of the twilight zone.
If someone made a movie with Donald Trump as president and the whole AI slop in 2010, people would not like it because how unrealistic it is.
Corpo’s saying that it’s not a bubble in the face of this reminds me of “don’t look up” except more malicious.
Lol bubble
I’m guessing by fiat you mean government issued currency that is not backed by precious metals but by faith and credit of the issuing government.
They call it fiat because a government just declares how much of it there is.
Blockchain tokens are also fiat in this sense, it’s just that the protocol makes the declaration instead of a government.
The other notable difference is that I can buy things with USD or other government currencies. I can’t with blockchain tokens. I mean technically I can but they have to be converted first and the popular ones are mostly depictionary so you’re deeply disincentivized from using them as currency.
The value of USD comes from people taking it in exchange for goods and services, and the US government taking it as payment for taxes. The value of a Bitcoin comes from people giving you USD for it under the assumption that they can sell it for more USD later. Like a stock, but without the incidental fractional ownership of a corporation with actual capital.
It’s a cool concept though, and peer-to-peer digital payment is a good thing, but it cannot function as a store of value without a connection to the material world.
Yeah, im talking about the 207 BILLION US dollars they need to raise.
Bitcoin is a pyramid scheme. I mined bitcoin in the early days when you could literally make 1 whole bitcoin in two weeks. The next two weeks I mined 0.3 bitcoins. That’s when I realized that it was a scam.
It’s not about facilitating peer-to-peer transactions like its proponents claimed. It’s about creating a huge money store. The more we use it the more inefficient it gets.
Well that’s not true, is it. The values are insane, but sometimes insane situations occur, for a while, until the bubble bursts. Until it does, money is money, and people will spend it on things.
Someone needs to shut that shit down- ASAP.
Leave it on long enough to fully kill FB, Insta, X, etc. THEN shut it down. We’re like 1/2 way there already
AI companies make up 1/3 of the current stock market value in the US. Nvidia alone is 7% of the stock market. 92% of 2025 GDP growth in the US has been from AI. They will get bailed out.
I wanna say you’re wrong, because AI is absolutely not an essential service - like say a water or power company failing would be (or arguably banks). But knowing how deeply the AI tech bros have sucked up to and supported Trump I have to sigh and agree with you that they will probably be rescued from their own stupidity by the taxpayer.
I am at a loss to what that would even look like. The bubble popping would mean the admission of AI (LLMs) not having a viable path to usefulness or return, so then what would a bail out even be? Money? To what end, the bubble would have burst and the idea of AI (LLMs) being anything but a money pit would be what makes the bubble burst in the first place. Unless they can show a path to profit (they can’t) then the bubble will burst in time or continue in an endless zombie state where they just pretend that somehow AI (LLMs) are the future while burning capital. If it does go into a zombie state (as so many other things in the us market are becoming) then the whole market will just slowly fail as the “hype” turns into disappointment. The only reason that the zombie state would be preferable is that entities need to invest their money somewhere and maybe some other thing in the market can take AI (LLMs) place, but even then why bother bailing out anyone?
Investors could be bailed out. As in you invested 10e11$, so now the government gives you that money back.
they’ll try to get bailed out but you would have to bail out so many companies it’s not feasible. you cant just bail out one of these companies. they all propped their stock value up on each other, so unless you bail out every company in the tech sector, there will still be trillions of market cap wiped out.
this is a good thing though. it will mostly only affect those who are overly invested in ultimately unprofitable tech, and the rest of us will be able to buy cheap stock for companies affected like Google and Amazon that will be hit massively but obviously are not just gonna go out of business. it’s similar to the covid drop. sucked for rich people but for the average person it wasn’t a massive issue and even had money making opportunities attached to it as these big companies scrambled.
I think you’re part right. I think they’ll attempt a bailout, but I don’t believe Trump’s appointments and the administration they’re creating have the skill to plan or execute a bailout (or admit to failure enough to identify that they need one in a timely manner)
They’re more likely to ram the economy full speed into rock bottom, then blame an outgroup (“the Democrats did this”) and pretend nothing could have been done.
I think they’re too big to bail out at this point
Also, no one wants US bonds right now, so we couldn’t borrow our way out of it even if we wanted to. We’d just have to print like a trillion or more dollars all at once
The only possible customer for committed datacenter projects is the US government. the bailout is just buying all the datacenter time… because if not, China wins. Amazon, despite no congressional appropriations yet, has announced $50B datacenter to supply government customers.
With the financial genius in the white house, I wouldn’t rule that out.
Fuck that. #ad
This is peak bubble type news. AI is becoming rapidly more energy efficient. These events will be looked back on like pets.com reaching hundreds of millions and then dying.
okay lmao
Is it becoming useful yet?
I am a developer. While AI is being marketed as snake oil, the things they can do is astonishing. One example is it reviews code a lot better than human beings. It’s not just finding obvious errors but it catches logical error that no human would have caught.
I see people are just forming two groups. Those who thinks AI will solve everything and those who thinks AI is useless. Neither of them are right.
Yes, as far as scalability, cheaper more efficient models can be used in applications which require thousands of uses a day.
Sometimes. As a tool, not an outsourced human, oracle, or some transcendent companion con artists like Altman are trying to sell.
See how grounded this interview is, from a company with a model trained on peanuts compared to ChatGPT, and that takes even less to run:
…In 2025, with the launch of Manus and Claude Code, we realized that coding and agentic functions are more useful. They contribute more economically and significantly improve people’s efficiency. We are no longer putting simple chat at the top of our priorities. Instead, we are exploring more on the coding side and the agent side. We observe the trend and do many experiments on it.
www.chinatalk.media/p/the-zai-playbook
They even touch on how their own models are just starting to show practical, albeit not miraculous utility in their internal workflows.
How. How does this work? They lose astronomical amounts of money. Without a prospect to ever make enough to be in plus, not even talking about paying off all the investments. How does this system work? I never understand. Same with US economy.
Well, the stock market on the whole is about gambling. Legalized gambling that fucks over small-time investors. So … why should long-term viability matter? The gamblers want their cash, that’s what they’re there for, and they don’t care about bankruptcy or mass economic collapse.
Yes, but the scale of this… We’re talking billions being poured into things that are not sustainable in any possible way and every investment into it will end up down the drain.
Because companies don’t do R&D anymore, they fund startups and aquire them when they’re ripe
Being able to replace workers with AI is a holy Grail for capitalism, and so a ton of companies have poured their saved up “R&D funds” in order to get in early
He who controls the spice, controls the universe.
AI companies will try to worm their way inside governments around the world, to “enhance” it. Then they’ll become “essential” cost of running said governments, being “impossible” to remove without serious disruption.
sooner than later, “agentic AI” will replace the “employee cost burden”. I presume they’ll charge per AI agent and produce revenue at scale.
everything you see in politics nowadays is a race against the clock to create infrastructure to “deal with” the unwashed, unemployed, hungry masses. UBI is not going to win out over soylent green.
Here’s the first admission I’ve found of what’s on the way: fortune.com/…/gen-z-college-grad-unemployment-cou…
UBI is not going to win out over soylent green.
Establishment prefers solylent green solution to unneeded slavery for sure. UBI is an obvious winning political platform, even though it does not provide the proponents with maximum political power, the way that bandaids on oligarchist supremacism still allows for supremacism and soylent green to rise as the solution.
Simply, the answer, is to reject establishment politics, including Bernie as controlled opposition proposing nonsense that gets shot down for its stupidity, instead of UBI.
Also, an MIT study released today, said 135m US jobs could be replaced with AI agents.
This all presumes that OpenAI can get there and further is exclusively in a position to get there.
Most experts I’ve seen don’t see a logical connection between LLM and AGI. OpenAI has all their eggs in that basket.
To the extent LLM are useful, OpenAI arguably isn’t even the best at it. Anthropic tends to make it more useful than OpenAI and now Google’s is outperforming it on relatively pointless benchmarks that were the bragging point of OpenAI. They aren’t the best, most useful, or cheapest. The were first, but that first mover advantage hardly matters when you get passed.
Maybe if they were demonstrating advanced robotics control, but other companies are mostly showing that whole OpenAI remains “just a chatbot”, with more useful usage of their services going through third parties that tend to be LLM agnostic, and increasingly I see people select non OpenAI models as their preference.
Simple, you invest in the company, wait for the stock price to grow and sell before it collapses. Everyone knows it will collapse eventually but for now there’s still money to be made.
I think you just explained it to me so I finally understood. Thanks!
What if it’s not a publicly traded company like OpenAI?
And their products are so fucking shit. Today I wanted to shit post in a Discord server I’m a part of. I felt like if I put effort into it, it wouldn’t really be a shit post any more. The idea was minimum effort for a few laughs and we move on. So I loaded up ChatGPT and asked it to generate the meme image. I thought even if it messed up the text, I would just generate it without the text and put the text in with gimp or something.
I put in the prompt, it spewed a lot of nonsense about what I meant and how it was going to generate the image. If I would just say “Generate it”, it would generate the image. So I did, it then said I needed to be signed in for image generation. OK fine, I signed in with a Gmail account I only ever use for spam, just for occasions such as this. It was happy to start generating.
It hung on generating for a while, until it said done in the status thing top right, but nothing in the chat. I refreshed the page, which gave me the option to prompt again. I asked where is the generated image? It said here it is and presented a gray box. It said if you see a gray box you uploaded it wrong? Wtf are you talking about? I didn’t upload anything. It said it could try generating again. Same exact result, crashing on generation, refresh yielding a new different gray box.
Like for fucks sake, the one thing I thought it would be good at, low effort shitposting, it failed at. Why the fuck does this company have such a large market cap?
I can’t wait for this whole AI debacle to be over and done with. Nobody is ever going to pay for your buggy ass bullshit generator.
Our company rolled out a new and innovative internal LLM. It’s intended to help with coding tasks and find internal documentation.
(Which really is just a wrapper over copilot).
When looking form-documentation, it fails harder than pasting the same text into the sesrch bar.
I don’t find LLMs helpful for coding since they’re wrong so often. But after encouragement I decided to try my hand at using it to help me debug a small 12 line bash script.
Whenever I posted examples it would fail silently. I assumed it wasnt sanitizing inputs so I tried a few other methods of wrapping the text. It would still faik silently.
Eventually, a half hour later I decided to just Google it. After I resolved my own problem it messaged me, 45+ minutes later to say “an error occurred trying to handle your request”.
These things suck so bad they can’t even error out effectively.
45+ minutes later and as many kWh…
Sure, but it’s all about 12 digit figures, not about making sense.
Skynet hungers
OpenAI is a money pit with a website on top. That much we know already, but since OpenAI is a private company, there’s a lot of guesswork required when estimating the depth of the pit.
HSBC’s US software and services team has today updated its OpenAI model to include the company’s $250bn rental of cloud compute from Microsoft, announced late in October, and its $38bn rental of cloud compute from Amazon announced less than a week later. The latest two deals add an extra four gigawatts of compute power to OpenAI’s requirements, bringing the contracted amount to 36 gigawatts.
Based on a total cumulative deal value of up to $1.8tn, OpenAI is heading for a data centre rental bill of about $620bn a year — though only a third of the contracted power is expected to be online by the end of this decade.
To check OpenAI ability to pay, HSBC’s team first had to build a model to forecast revenues.
Its starting point is to put user numbers on an S-curve that by 2030 reaches 3bn, “equivalent to 44 per cent of the world’s adult population” ex China. That’s versus an estimated total user base last month of approximately 800mn:
Advertising, agentic AI and possibly even Jony Ive’s thing can contribute to revenue by the end of the decade, For now, the business is mostly cajoling this user base to sign up for subscriptions.
LLM subscriptions will become “as ubiquitous and useful as Microsoft 365”, HSBC says. It models that by 2030, 10 per cent of OpenAI users will be paying customers, versus an estimated 5 per cent currently.
The team also assumes LLM companies will capture 2 per cent of the digital advertising market in revenue, from slightly more than zero currently.
What results is gangbusters revenue growth:
… but with a parallel rise in costs, meaning OpenAI is expected to still be subsidising its users well into next decade:
… meaning each new OpenAI fundraise will be for shovelling cash to data centre owners:
For what it’s worth, we can summarise a few of the assumptions HSBC is making for the estimates above:
Total consumer AI revenue will be $129bn by 2030, of which $87bn comes from search and $24bn comes from advertising. OpenAI’s consumer market share slips to 56 per cent by 2030, from around 71 per cent this year. Anthropic and xAI are both given market shares in the single digits, a mystery “others” is assigned 22 per cent, and Google is excluded entirely. Enterprise AI will be generating $386bn in annual revenue by 2030, though OpenAI’s market share is set at 37 per cent from about 50 per cent currently. Everyone else stays more or less where they are now, market share wise.
The bottom line is that, for OpenAI, it’s nowhere close to enough.
HSBC’s model assumes that OpenAI’s rental costs will be a cumulative $792bn between the current year and 2030, rising to $1.4tn by 2033. The projection matches OpenAI’s eight-year guidance that CEO Sam Altman is exasperated at being asked to discuss.
OpenAI’s cumulative free cash flow to 2030 may be about $282bn, it forecasts, while Nvidia’s promised cash injections and the disposal of AMD shares can bring in another $26bn. The broker also includes OpenAI’s $24bn of undrawn debt and equity facilities and, at the 2025 mid-year point, its $17.5bn of available liquidity.
Squaring the first total off against the second leaves a $207bn funding hole, to which HSBC adds a $10bn cash buffer for safety’s sake.
These estimates might prove overly cautious, though guessing how is a finger-in-the-air exercise.
Each extra 500mn users OpenAI can grab will add about $36bn to cumulative revenue between now and 2030, while converting 20 per cent of the customers to paid subscriptions might bring in an additional $194bn over the same period, HSBC says. Assumptions for LLM spend and computing costs are flexed in similar ways, though the possibility of OpenAI chancing on Artificial General Intelligence is not put through the model.
If revenue growth doesn’t exceed expectations and prospective investors turn cautious, OpenAI would need to make some hard decisions. Oracle has spooked debt markets, Microsoft’s support for OpenAI has been a bit flip-flop lately, and the next-biggest shareholder is SoftBank.
The best worst option might be to call in some favours and walk away from data centre commitments, either before or at the usual contracted period of four to five years. HSBC says:
Given the interlaced relationships between AI LLM, cloud, and chips companies, we see a case for some degree of flexibility at least from the larger players (less so for the neo clouds): less capacity would always be better than a liquidity crisis.
What might not be clear from the above is that the HSBC software team is very, very bullish on AI as a concept. Here’s an entirely representative section of the note:
We expect AI to penetrate every production process and every vertical, with a great potential for productivity gains at a global level. [ . . . ] Some AI assets may be overvalued, some may be undervalued too. But eventually, a few incremental basis points of economic growth (productivity-driven) on a USD110trn+ world GDP could dwarf what is often seen as unreasonable capex spending at present.
And when it’s put like that, is $207bn to tide things over really such a big ask?
as ubiquitous and useful as Microsoft 365
What a line! Directly referenced a hated service that butchers a whole suite of actually ubiquitous products.
I don’t know a single person who pays for M365. Companies pay for it because they’ve been locked in and/or are forced to for government compliance reasons, but no one actually wants that. Fucking ace thing to compare your AI service to, dipshit.
Give us your data or: “$1 for 4 weeks Then $75 per month.”
Just $75 . What. The. Fuck.
Hmm. That matches my recent napkin math guessing where they would land.
It’s a little short of what they probably need, but they can always raise prices in a few months.
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so it isnt free access. you want my email address and personal data in exchange for this “FrEe” article
/> demands access to quality timely journalism and commentary
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Quality? Timely? … I disagree, but to each their own.
temp-mail.org for email, lie for the rest.
royim85224@feralrex.com <- you can even use that account if you like, password is the same as the email.
I like mailsac. Any user handle and no signup.
Nah, fuck them. Ain’t wasting my time and giving these fucks any traffic to their site.
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Yeahhhhhno
The supermarket has free food. Just pay for it before you leave.
StannisDMannis@lemmy.today 3 months ago
Wow, $207bn by 2030? That’s a lot of money to lose! Maybe they should focus on making some actual profit instead.