yeah, i mean it’s all bit abstract, but that’s essentially what it is.

a concrete example would be Nvidia. they’re wildly profitable, and they don’t care how overleveraged you are as long as their barrels full of cash keep coming in.

i agree with you that there is a concerning amount of debt and leverage going on, but it’s undeniable there’s money changing hands.

but also, speaking of abstract, all this shit is made up and most of the money “moving” is just flipping some bits in a database somewhere. i also agree with you that it’s all a bit of a facade for people with power to play with power while the true “value” of society such as cost of living and quality of life take a low priority cuz “AI has a $T valuation”. but if you live in this system, this is what it is.

yeah, i know the argument you’re trying to make, but that doesn’t change the actual capital and labor being used to create these things. whether it’s profitable once the investors run out of money is another story.

i mean, people are making money. sure there are debts owed, but Mark isn’t going home to a 1br rental even after being so “humiliated”. the bag holders are the investors.

i kinda feel sorry for Yann LeCun and his team at FAI. he’s been saying from the beginning that LLMs are not the way forward for AI research as a field, and that has kept Meta from competing in this gold rush effectively. world models, multi-modality, etc are fine and good research but aren’t here to compete with Claude Code or even as effective at being good enough for stuff like search.

not to be too reductionist, but it’s a tough spot when your head of AI is insisting that this tech has no future when there is a literal $T market for it.

the irony is that these “frontier labs” like OpenAI and Anthropic have basically dropped every greenfield research project that doesn’t directly support their “agentic AI” infrastructure (ie endless Markdown prompts + a while loop) while the labs working on the true frontier are seen as failures because they can’t make a bazillion bucks burning megawatts of energy to replace their front end devs.

this has been “the plan” since 2005. when i was in high school trying to figure out what the heck “cloud computing” was, this is what they were talking about: anything requiring more compute than secure authentication and pixel drawing would be rendered in the cloud and delivered to dumb terminals. this is what netbooks, Chromebooks, and smartphones have been a step towards if not an implementation of.