The insane AI push is purely driven by fear of being left behind.

No one is actually stopping to ask whether it is all worth it.

  • redlemace@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    It’s the like a high IBM manager once said during a presentation : “We are gonna outsource to india. The competition is doing it too, so it’s a good decission!”

  • Canaconda@lemmy.ca
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    5 days ago

    No one is actually stopping to ask whether it is all worth it

    Everyone here is too poor to understand that the AI bubble bursting will benefit the rich at our expense.

    1. The bubble bursting will be triggered by the rich cashing out of their stock positions and leaving everyone who isn’t an insider holding the bag.

    2. Assets like land for data centers may lose liquid value in the short term, but in the long term they will remain assets of the rich.

    3. Data centers themselves require inputs that the rich can afford to procure. The rich will collude to supply data centers while leaving everyone else fighting for energy and water.

    The people standing to benefit from the AI bubble are insulated by several layers of corporations, trusts, and insurance. They’re pushing us over the cliff so that they can buy the dip. Dump and pump baby.

    • [deleted]@piefed.world
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      5 days ago

      Since that is going to happen anyway the earlier it bursts the sooner the industries they are bleeding dry, like computer component manufacturing, and the negative impacts of a huge chunk of the ‘economy’ collapsing can get sorted out.

      • Canaconda@lemmy.ca
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        5 days ago

        No offense but that’s exactly what I mean when I say people are too poor to understand what the rich are attempting here.

        The bubble won’t burst until they decide to stop injecting cash. They’ll keep injecting cash so long as there is blood left to squeeze. Once they get their capital gains and appreciable assets the stocks just get sold (triggering the bubble burst) and reinvested during the dip.

        For all the Dot Com references, people seem to be forgetting that Amazon lost 90% of it’s stock value during that March 2000 crash.

      • tino_408@lemmy.world
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        4 days ago

        To be fair just like the dot com bubble it will effect everyone. The rich just can afford a hit that big. Yet some people not matter the class will get rich from the bubble popping that’s just the market

        • IronBird@lemmy.world
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          4 days ago

          arguably, a crash represents the poor/middle classes best chance at obtaining true financial independence. oligarchs don’t call working the labor trap for nothing, wages are capped by design (especially in amerikka)

          fundamentally what a crash represents is overleveraged gamblers getting forced to sell, debt-laden businesses (likely also over-leveraged) getting foreclosed on etc.

          for cash-poor people who understand basic market mechanics, a crash is like shooting fish in a barrel. only people really hurt by it are “new money” who can’t do basic math, people that panic sell seeing their retirement lose half it’s value overnight, people who don’t realize the whole (US) market is a casino designed to take your $ etc.

          • hitmyspot@aussie.zone
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            4 days ago

            It’s not just that people panic, it’s that it takes time to recover. If you’ve got generational wealth, you let it recover. If you need to pay for housing or food, you sell assets, at a reduced rate and take the loss.

            People panicking is only half of it.

        • Canaconda@lemmy.ca
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          4 days ago

          Fully agree!

          Companies will go bankrupt, millions of peoples retirement savings will disappear, and many will suffer /die from the economic aftershock…

          BUT

          The rich will have already realized their dividends / capital gains

          The rich will have already purchased the land / property

          The rich will already have the data centers / ram / AI

          They rich will have their assets and eat ours to

          The whole system is a kleptocracy and the AI bubble bursting will make late stage capitalism worse not better.

  • Riskable@programming.dev
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    5 days ago

    The real problem isn’t investments in AI. It’s that they don’t know WTF they’re doing!

    Huge companies are spending millions of dollars on AI services they don’t know how to use and aren’t even aware of cheaper and superior alternatives.

    Just buy some AI hardware your damned self already!

    GLM-5 was just released and is at something like 95% parity with the latest models from Big AI. That means for merely a few thousand dollars you can get the same damned service for a fraction of the cost. A single Nvidia DGX spark can handle the AI requests for hundreds of employees simultaneously and there’s free, open source tools that automatically distribute requests across a cluster of the things.

    Yet here we are: Businesses are so used to the Chicago School of Economics methods that they’d rather spend a million dollars a month on a service than a one-time, mere thousands of dollars cost on hardware they have to run and maintain themselves because “it’s not a core business function.”

  • frustrated_phagocytosis@fedia.io
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    5 days ago

    What would happen to me if I told my boss, hey, this project is an expensive morass with no perceived benefit, but it’s already eaten a lot of money and time so we might as well keep going? I don’t think I will get a golden parachute on my way out.