When you’re more worried about this sort of stuff vs generating profit then the history books strongly indicate that’s usually not a good omen of what’s coming next.
2. A lot of the purchases from AI companies are being made with investor capital. As this dries up companies with high debt scramble to service the debt and focus on profits to achieve this goal. This means higher prices and less investment into infrastructure.
3. This has large ripple effects across the broader financial markets, which forces federal intervention. Maybe bailouts for the tech sector. Maybe just some quantitative easing.
4. There will be a second wave of AI companies in the wake that focus on delivering value under constrained capital markets. These will be well positioned 10 years later to catch a major updraft in the next finical cycle.
5. Overall western R&D activity in AI decreases under these conditions, lower hardware costs allow foreign labs to operate at much lower hardware costs. This increases the systematic risk that Artificial Super Intelligence is eventually developed in a rival nation state.
The admin is betting the entire future on this technology and there is no turning back.
Federal dollars can cause acceleration without having to worry about profit.
Love to see that opportunity.
I wish we had simulations where people could live out the consequences of their ideas before they happened.
If the risk is serious or not has little impact on how seriously we treat the risk. Just another way that AI is disconnecting us from ground truth.
China is not only, under pressures created by the USA, producing immense efficiencies, i.e., working smarter not harder; but they have the immense excess capacity in addition to the secondary capacity to expand said capacity and they have the capital reserves to do all of that in addition to several other positive feedback loop characteristics.
There is a strong case that the USA has very few relative positive characteristics that give it a competitive edge, let alone can keep up with the mind boggling speed at which China is moving, arguably with "profit" not being the end all be all, having a sense of social and cultural obligation that has kept China a more or less intact civilization for over 5000 years, the oldest and most durable civilization humanity has ever created.
Whereas the US seems to view AI as a Hail-Mary that will provide a new frontier where the US can establish and maintain dominance, because the old ways of maintaining power are slipping away.
The fake USA and by extension the governors of their vassals around the world see AI as a means for not only gaining total domination over the people after all that pesky freedom and liberty talk from the 18th century they've had to endure, but also that they can work on totally replacing those pesky eaters that have all kinds of demands like not suffering and being miserable because the parasitic ruling class is sucking them dry.
The irony is through that these mentalities towards their respective people will surely lead to what I will roughly cal the BRICS (effectively China and Russia) hopefully being the dominant force in the world that can put some major restraints on the maniacal parasitic class of the fake USA and it's minions and vassals. The only alternative I see if the "west" wins this race is something akin to the Borg from Star Trek consuming us all or maybe Elysium, if we are lucky.
Stick to facts and not breathless brown-nosing and you’ll be a lot less off-putting.
But one thing that is a bit more in favor of the "Chinese civilization" is the relative self-preservation of its home grown culture and civilization. What I mean by that is e.g., Christianity effectively was and has perpetrated the single biggest genocide before that concept was even recently created by the eradication of so many cultures, traditions, customs, and people that we don't even have close to a full understanding of its devastation it has caused from when it swept across Europe as a kind of Asian mental virus (a meme) that saw it eradicating cultures all over Roman Europe and more recently now completely all across Europe in its mutated from of pathological and self-destructive altruism, i.e., emulating the myth of Christ sacrificing themself, i.e., sacrilege, rather than just accepting and internalizing what that sacrifice meant.
I can stick to facts all you want all day long until you are dizzy in the head from things that blow your mental framework out of its hinges.
In the end, regardless of the devastation and destruction the other invasive, parasitic, and viral meme, "communism" has caused the Chinese as much has it was used to destroy and devastate Russia; it looks far more like that Chine will actually recover from the parasitic infestation of "communism" that infected it from Russia, which came from the pale of the settlement of Eastern Europe; where as it stands now, short of events that will surely be monumental history, Europe is effectively going to be eradicated and even more of the indigenous Europeans will be ethnically cleansed and erased and their cultures and people destroyed. That is the trajectory we are currently on either way, whether it can be kinked one way or another notwithstanding.
Some people dream of "Superintelligence", smarter than human AI that acts like a slave, instead of just killing the pesky idiots and calling it a day.
Obviously, there is a spectrum of possibilities between "Pen and paper", "Computer", "Coding agent", ... and "God-level AI controlling whatever can be controlled simultaneously". As well as between "Lawnmower robot" and "All-purpose Terminator" and so on.
Filling in those dots and deciding where to stop before it gets stupid, that can't be so hard?
Y'know, the whole "Man in leather jacket talks about selling computers to AI agents" stuff. The "I have a team of agents and just interact with them via a jira board" crowd.
That will all be violently pulled back to the fundamentals baseline
I can of course see it having the capability of getting almost equivalent stuff done, but I do not see it following that workflow, as the cut-off point for the hand-over is simply wrongly placed in such an architecture.
To put it quite colorfully, if I were to do what the managerial class has been doing over the last years and publicly talk about my wet dreams and fantasies _to the extend they did_, I'd be in jail, on no-fly lists, registered offender and all the others lists we put people on that are a threat to society.
The agentic no-code frenzy - while having had historic predecessors - cranked what came before it to 12.
Having the thing do tool calls is neat and cool, but having an agentic mayor managing agentic workers with agentic wives and agentic dogs screams padded walls to me.
Also, even if the 20 dollar subs disappear, that just means regular folks can't afford AI. API pricing is still a great bargain for businesses replacing generic office workers.
1. Datacenter builders are all up to their eyeballs in debt. The companies serving open weight models are getting their GPUs and power from somewhere, and we can infer that some of that is coming from the new build datacenters. But are those financially sustainable?
2. They are relying on subsidized giveaways of the underlying models by Chinese firms. But it's hard to see how that can be sustainable: it's being done for a reason and that reason is probably not commercial. If and when China stops doing this the open weight serving companies will get steadily less competitive with every passing month as the knowledge in the weights becomes obsolete.
Opinions are my own, etc.
Commodified products competing on price does not bode well for valuations.
Also, "circular financing" is a meme. A private company cannot create money, there is no circularity. NVIDIA may buy services from OpenAI and also sell them GPUs. If a lumberjack buys eggs from his neighbor and also sells him wood to improve his chicken coop, that's not circular financing, just business happening in both directions.
The numbers are staggering eg: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/17/nvidia-financing-open-ai-dat...
Tell me you know nothing about economics without telling me you know nothing about it.
There's a lot of free stuff incurring "real costs" in its production, one more or less doesn't make a shred of difference.
> I agree with you that producers of these models should be able to extract value from their models.
Nobody is stopping them from extracting value but they fail despite being placed in a very advantageous position vis-a-vis others, which tells me, they should call it quits or go open like everybody sane.
Open is the way to go, nothing else works in the field of AI, that's the bitter lesson closed labs are yet to learn.
Something very similar happened with the late 90s telecoms bubble, which collapsed a little before the dot com bust. There was a very nice living to be made by many small/mid-sized providers who were able to feed on the remains for about a decade afterwards.
Capitalists want to pay their workers as little as possible or even not have workers and pocket close to 100% of the profits since forever. Whether they'll be able to do it this time is yet to be seen. Putting the tech itself aside, which is far from good enough yet imo, the only way to avoid a massive social backslash would be to use some of the additional profit they're able to keep because of AI for social spending. And I just don't think they realize yet that it's probably in their interest to do so if they want to replace 'human resources' with AI.
Have you tried using "computer use" models? They just started to get good in the last few months. They can comfortably use GUIs, click the right buttons, enter the data faster etc. This is very significant and my programmer friends often don't appreciate the earth shattering consequences. The vast majority of software in such applications is legacy stuff or proprietary and does not and likely will never have a programmatic API. The only way to interact with it is via GUI. And an AI working that GUI can be deployed unilaterally by the customer of the software company who made the GUI program. This makes adoption and automation much easier. My prediction is that within 1 year (maybe 2) GUI-using AI will be much more powerful and it will be everywhere (of course it doesn't need to be displayed on a screen, it will do its virtual clicks based on a virtual screen buffer rendering in an isolated virtual machine, along with countless other agents in parallel).
There will be huge controversy around it, because this will be the first instance that regular people will see AI do work that resembles their day job all over social media. There will be panic. There will be new license terms saying only humans are allowed to operate the GUI, and AI use is either forbidden or costs extra. But this will not be checkable properly. Even when forbidden, some employees will pay from their own pockets to have cheap AI do the job instead of them.
They are clearly smart/dumb enough to think pushing labor replacement to 20%+++ unemployment levels would have no consequences for them personally. Maybe with their private jets, private islands, doomsday shelters, etc they are right.
Seems like a bit of a gamble to me, or probably anyone who has read a bit of history. But I’m not a billionaire.
And users will make do with what their newly bought cheap hardware will run, which I think is going to be more than enough for everyone that doesn't need to solve another millenium problem.
The use cases LLMs are useful for without lots of RF/fine tuning proves more limited than the expansive views currently held.
We get a generalized productivity boost the way the internet gave us, without any one sector or company being a winner take all of that productivity gain.
Some people will figure out how to run these powerful models on consumer hardware. At that point, nobody has a moat.
(For example by rewriting the training data into a more abstract form, using LLMs, so that a trained model takes less space).
What did stop is investment, and they stopped running some lines, and some stuff was nationalized.
I doubt we'll see nationalizations because that's not America's style (thank goodness!) but if the tide goes out on AI funding we should expect to see much longer gaps between model releases, people complaining that model knowledge is getting stale because there wasn't a pretraining run for long enough, price rises, capacity bottlenecks that go unaddressed, few if any new product launches, maybe some mergers and layoffs. Some labs will quit the market. The market might consolidate down to just two models.
Conceivably the industry might try and get a waiver from anti-trust rules so firms can pool resources to train base models, sharing them with each other and differentiating through RL or product level differences.
A lot of this depends on what happens in China. It's easy to think China can just subsidize everything forever but their own economy is showing signs of serious weakness caused by decades of resource misallocation, like the huge real estate bubble, the pullback on the funding of humanoid robots and so on.
Laughing in a TGV
Existing profitable companies like AWS and Google eat up all their hardware at 3% of its original price.
Countries are borrowing money at the same rate that I can borrow unsecured. That’s just not sustainable.
We’ve seen this movie before. It’s possible for new tech to be both amazing and revolutionary and a business disaster both at the same time.
I expect a huge market correction, alot of parades rained on, and then the start of some very pragmatic and practical applications of LLMs
A (probably) significant amount of those were just to get access to training data. I don't remember who it was, but some CEO of one of the AI labs publicly admitted, even boasted about creating nonsense "research projects" to get data.
We can’t blame them when they are looking to squeeze more profits and at the same time blame the ones who try to do things different.
For me LLMs are a step forward from previous ML approaches (some of them were and still are extremely useful anyway) and for sure are very useful to many people. They are very good at generating sensible output based on input created by millions of people, but very poor at creating anything really novel.
Is intelligence purely computational?
Is consciousness purely computational or at least an emergent property of it? If so do natural numbers have consciousness?
Aren't we on our 3rd or 4th iteration of AI at this point?