Now you can keep track of how many billions the AI companies are losing on AI.

[earthshine@masto.hackers.town]

@MikeElgan there are a few other winners like TSMC and Micron etc. In fact when you add all the economy propped up *by* this ai foolishness you get a huge bubble that's the primary thing keeping the markets afloat. Once AI companies finally fold under the pressure, I strongly suspect the rest of our economy to go down like a sinking ship, especially in the west.

[emmecola@fediscience.org]

@MikeElgan Some of these companies rely only on AI, while others have a diversified business. I think this will make a big difference in the long run

[okuna@social.tchncs.de]

@MikeElgan Amazon, Tesla and many others weren't profitable for decades.
Now they are run the world.
They just try to achieve the same thing.

[gepasi@fediscience.org]

@happyborg @MikeElgan construction industry (data centers), no one else

[mensrea@freeradical.zone]

@MikeElgan in a gold rush, sell shovels

[max@gruene.social]

@n_dimension @MikeElgan In case someone honestly believes this (and this isn't read as the obvious joke about AI-bros saying similar things):

The internet basically was never losing money, it enabled researchers to communicate and compute things way faster than before when they needed to send out mail and tapes manually. The amount of value their faster research created is basically immeasurable.

Also of course the internet wasn't burning our planet alive to work.

[hannorein@mastodon.social]

@MikeElgan Shouldn't it use profit rather than revenue to answer the question of whether it is profitable? You can have all the revenue in the world and still make a loss.

[bob_zim@infosec.exchange]

@julesbl @sebastian @PaulaToThePeople @MikeElgan A future? That sounds like a problem for whoever is in charge later! The people in charge now will have already made their money and power wrecking everything by then.

[sfpodge@famichiki.jp]

@MikeElgan @savvykenya let’s see SpaceX now

[julesbl@mastodon.me.uk]

@bob_zim @sebastian @PaulaToThePeople @MikeElgan
I'm not sure about that, the shear vast amounts of debt are big even for these big companies, but time will tell

[noplasticshower@infosec.exchange]

@MikeElgan loss leaders

[jay_peper@chaos.social]

@n_dimension in case this wasn't sarcasm, No, "the internet" never lost money. And outside of government projects (think moon landing, wars), I've never seen unbalanced investment like this ever before.

[cohentheblue@ohai.social]

@KennedyRichard @sebastian @julesbl @PaulaToThePeople @MikeElgan How would you find my home page for example? For a while now, the only way to search for general knowledge is a site:*subdomain.com search. I see a lot of that independent content around, most people aren't aware of it because there's no true useful search unless you already know where to search. There's no lack of content but there is an incentive to lock it away by initially the corporate search engine owners, now AI owners.

[sebastian@norrebro.space]

@cohentheblue @KennedyRichard @julesbl @PaulaToThePeople @MikeElgan

You can certainly search not knowing *where* you are searching, but there is always a mediator inbetween - that most people might not be so aware of.
And if and when that mediator not only takes the role of filtering, deciding, but also presenting the results from their engines - no traffic will ever hit the original content.

[jmcrookston@mastodon.social]

@MikeElgan

Nvidia selling shovels to the gold rush prospectors

[kennedyrichard@fosstodon.org]

@cohentheblue @sebastian @julesbl @PaulaToThePeople @MikeElgan

Fair enough. I myself often think some of my stuff didn't appeal to anyone and then after some time access to them spikes randomly when someone shares and suddenly a lot of people are reading/talking about it.

But at least this means we have a discoverability problem, not necessarily a content problem. I know it sucks and I don't have a solution, but while we figure out a solution, we must keep encouraging people to write/create.

[sebastian@norrebro.space]

@KennedyRichard @cohentheblue @julesbl @PaulaToThePeople @MikeElgan

These content creators might not even see the spikes anymore, though, let alone be rewarded for them.
Everything they d see is crawlers.
Their content would be presented, and capitalized on, by those who run the centralized gateways.

[kennedyrichard@fosstodon.org]

@sebastian @cohentheblue @julesbl @PaulaToThePeople @MikeElgan

True. Like I said in reply to the post you just commented on, I don't have a solution to this, but at least it means the problem isn't a lack of quality content, just the discoverability/delivery. Until we find a problem to this, we must take care not to discourage people from writing/creating. We know meaningful content has value, so we must keep creating it while we find a way for it to get delivered to people that cares for it.

[bob_zim@infosec.exchange]

@julesbl @sebastian @PaulaToThePeople @MikeElgan I’m mostly joking about how stock-market-focused capitalism heavily incentivizes looking good for the current quarter, then bailing out before people outside realize you did it by selling off all the buildings and signing extortionate leases for those same buildings. Or by laying off all the people who actually make the product the company sells. Etc.

When the lack of good training data becomes a problem, the current heads will bail out before it becomes public knowledge how bad the situation is. Or they’ll be “fired” with hundreds of millions of dollars in severance. They’re incentivized to not care.

[bronsen@chaos.social]

@MikeElgan what even is money?