this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2026
163 points (86.9% liked)

Technology

83963 readers
2678 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 33 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

“Our job at OpenAI and in the AI space — and we need to do a much better job — is to explain to people why … this is going to be really good for them, for their families and for society writ large,”

And here is the crux of the problem - they are lying to us. After making it very clear that they wanted us to integrate AI into our jobs, it has also become clear that their ultimate objective is to replace as many jobs as possible with AI, even if the AI's results are substandard, because the AI is so much more profitable.

We KNOW the objective is to fire as many of us as possible, so the general public has become extremely hostile toward AI. Now the AI companies want to re-brand as family friendly assistants to our lives. Too late, assholes, we're already onto you. Tell your lies walking.

It must be awful to have fought to become a billionaire, thinking you could relax on the bodies of your vanquished foes, and enjoy the tranquility that you've earned, only to find out that you have created an endless supply of enemies who want you dead. You have to pay millions for security, only to find that someone can still put a bullet through your front window where you were standing only five minutes before. All that money, and the best it can do is buy you a windowless bunker to cower in.

[–] e461h@sh.itjust.works 17 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Except it’s not profitable at all. It’s a huge bubble waiting to collapse.

[–] sunbeam60@feddit.uk 2 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

They are currently selling it at a huge loss, agreed. They’ve got plenty of runway for specialised hardware prices to come down, for companies to get hooked and plugged into the ecosystem and for real value to be demonstrated.

When this happens they’ll raise prices and companies will gladly pay it.

Profit at this point is not relevant, seen from the perspective of investors.

[–] e461h@sh.itjust.works 1 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

That’s ’embrace, extend, extinguish’ for you. Question is if there is a profitable model to come. The usual economies of scale don’t seem capable of adding up in this case. Even the maniacs on Wall Street are balking.

[–] sunbeam60@feddit.uk 2 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago) (1 children)

That’s not quite my understanding of EEE.

  • Embrace - adopt something that someone else has done
  • Extend - add proprietary extensions on top of the original, quicker than the original owner can
  • Extinguish - Kill the original owner off by moving quicker then either slow down or kill your own support for the product

What the AI model owners are doing seems to me just to be normal loss-leading with a view to gain market share.

[–] e461h@sh.itjust.works 1 points 6 hours ago

That’s fair. I think they are trying to utilize EEE to replace search, content creation, and more - everything AI is being shoveled into. But the main goal is just to force utilization through any means necessary and establish a new market & sales model they are unable to define.

[–] BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 9 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Not yet, but wait until they've reduced their workforce by 75%, and they can save all those associated expenses.

It won't work, of course, but they've deluded themselves into believing it.

[–] e461h@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Certainly part of the sales pitch. But so far it turns out humans are more efficient (cost less). I think the appeal to companies is the control (and the cost while it’s so heavily subsidized by the industry pushing it). The appeal to the major AI investors and execs is to… privatize the profits and socialize the losses. They will golden parachute themselves and leave the people with their mess.

[–] nile_istic@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago

I think the appeal to companies is the control

This part. Rich people never stopped jerking off over the idea of owning slaves.

[–] ripcord@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The vast majority of the costs are HW and infra

I think they're hoping that reaches more of a steady state

[–] Passerby6497@lemmy.world 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I think they're hoping that reaches more of a steady state

With how quickly tech advances and hardware degrades under heavy use, they're going to be pushing that rock up a hill for a good while lol

[–] ripcord@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

Oh, agreed. And other tech companies are 1000% counting on that being true.

[–] eleitl@lemmy.zip 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It is very profitable in certain roles in the enterprise. This is orthogonal to it being a massive bubble, about to blow up.

[–] e461h@sh.itjust.works 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-subprime-ai-crisis-is-here/

It could be, but it doesn’t look promising - and the fact that it’s pretty much impossible to know what the actual costs are is, in itself, very telling.

When you use these services, the company in question then pays for access to the AI models in question, either at a per-million-token rate to an AI lab, or (in the case of Anthropic and OpenAI) whatever cloud provider is renting them the GPUs to run the models. A token is basically ¾ of a word.

As a user, you do not experience token burn, just the process of inputs and outputs. AI labs obfuscate the cost of services by using “tokens” or “messages” or 5-hour-rate limits with percentage gauges, and you, as the user, do not really know how much any of it costs. On the back end, AI startups are annihilating cash, with up until recently Anthropic allowing you to burn upwards of $8 in compute for every dollar of your subscription. OpenAI allows you to do the same, though it’s hard to gauge by how much.

[–] eleitl@lemmy.zip 2 points 11 hours ago

Some enterprises do run their own hardware (these can ROI in 6 months or so), and there the economics is very well known. For the majority of the current use it's a giant bubble, as Ed Zitron's great analyses keep telling us.