Yeah, the logical inference here is that there’s a strong correlation between being stupid enough to click on adverts and being stupid enough to vote for conservatives.

Better to say that Google claim they want to use private nuclear reactors because that will allay any fears about the climate impact of their products. In reality the SMRs they’re purporting to invest in basically don’t exist outside of a pipe dream. They’re a less viable product than genAI itself. But just like the supposed magical “good” version of genAI, Google can claim that SMRs are always just around the corner, and that will mean that they’re doing something about the problem.

I think it’s mischaracterising the argument against AI to boil it down to “AI is useless” (and I say that as much as a criticism of those who are critical of genAI as I do of those who want to defend it; far too many people express the argument reductively as “AI is useless” when that’s not exactly what’s really being meant).

The problem is not that genAI is never useful for anything. It is sometimes useful for some things. The problem is that being sometimes useful for some things does not remotely justify what the technology costs. I mean that both on the macro scale - untold climate damage, vast amounts of wasted resources - and on the micro scale; OpenAI alone loses $2.35 for every $1.00 they make.

That is fundamentally unsustainable. If you like genAI for whatever use cases you’ve found for it, and you really don’t care about the climate toll and other externalities, then you can look forward to paying upwards of $50-$100 a month to actually use it, once we’re out of the “Give it to ‘em cheap/free to get’ em hooked” phase, because that’s what it’ll take to make these models profitable. In fact that’s kind of a lowball estimate.

I know plenty of people who find this tech occasionally useful as a way of searching for the answer to a question or producing a small snippet of code, but I can’t imagine anyone who finds those uses so compelling that they’d throw “Canadian cell phone contract” levels of money at it.

And if you had offered any point of contention to my suppositions, I could respond to that. But as I’ve already explained, you didn’t actually counter a single one of my arguments, or even understand what the subject of the discussion was.

I’m sorry, but I’m done responding to this. I’m not obligated to waste my time on nonsense that doesn’t even rise to the basic factual definitions of “an argument.”

Keep in mind; this article is by people building an LLM based product.

They have a deeply vested interest in the narrative that LLM driven products are an inevitable landslide that every company needs to either integrate, or risk being wiped out.

Keep that bias in mind. They want you to think the great flood is coming, because they’re the ones building boats.

This is a very poorly considered argument. Even if we suppose that everything you’ve said is true, the existence of a second plausible explanation doesn’t invalidate the first. You’ve not actually offered any reason why any of what I said is wrong, you just said “X is possible, therefore Y cannot be true.”

Also, I want to note that this particular digression wasn’t about cryptocurrency at all. The point I was responding to was a claim that blockchains had uses other than as currencies. So you really might want to step back a bit and consider what you think is being discussed here, and what you’re actually trying to say.

The reason major businesses haven’t bothered using distributed blockchains for auditing is because they fundamentally do not actually help in any way with auditing.

At the end of the day, the blockchain is just a ledger. At some point a person has to enter the information into that ledger.

Now, hear me out here, because this is going to be some totally out there craziness that is going to blow your mind… What happens if that person lies?

Like, you’ve built your huge, complicated system to track every banana you buy from the farm to the grocery store… But what happens if the shipper just sends you a different crate of bananas with the wrong label on them? How does your system solve that? What happens if the company growing your bananas claims to use only ethical practices but in reality their workers are effectively slaves? How does a blockchain help fix that?

The data in a system is only as good as your ability to verify it. Verifying the integrity of the data within systems was largely a solved problem long before distributed blockchains came along, and was rarely if ever the primary avenue for fraud. It’s the human components of these systems where fraud can most easily occur. And distributed blockchains do absolutely nothing to solve that.

And yet, every single company that has ever tried to implement a distributed zero trust ledger into their products and processes has inevitably ditched the idea after releasing that it does not, in fact, provide any useful benefit.

Now imagine a world where, instead of there being billionaires, everyone had their basic needs met, so artists could afford to focus on creating their art instead of relying on handouts from a capricious god.

A single billion, when put in terms of money, is enough that - simply invested in GICs and bonds, earning a very, very conservative 1% interest - it would earn you ten million dollars a year in interest alone.

I would challenge you to even come up with a reasonable way to spend ten million dollars a year. By my back of the napkin math you could vacation every single day, living in hotels and eating at fancy restaurants, and still not make a dent in that.

Musk has an estimated net worth of $247 billion. You could fine him 99% of his current wealth, and he would still struggle to spend enough that he wouldn’t end up increasing his remaining wealth every year.

In this particular case, I’m really not sure it’s a loophole.

Antitrust laws exist to constrain companies so large and powerful that they have become, or are becoming monopolistic forces

What Twitter successfully proved to the EU court is that Musk’s management of the company has been so spectacularly incompetent that Twitter/X no longer has enough reach or cultural relevance to be in any danger of being a monopoly.

This is, objectively speaking, a serious L for Twitter. They just proved to a court that they’re no longer even close to being the best place to spend your advertising dollars. The major spenders will take note.

If a company genuinely cares about their employees, they’d support them unionizing.

This is a long post and I’m not even going to try to address all of it, but I want to call out one point in particular, this idea that if we somehow made a quantum leap from the current generation of models to AGI (there is, for the record, zero evidence of there being any path to that happening) that it will magically hand us the solutions to anthropogenic climate change.

That is absolute nonsense. We know all the solutions to climate change. Very smart people have spent decades telling us what those solutions are. The problem is that those solutions ultimately boil down to “Stop fucking up the planet for the sake of a few rich people getting richer.” It’s not actually a complicated problem, from a technical perspective. The complications are entirely social and political. Solving climate change requires us to change how our global culture operates, and we lack the will to do that.

Do you really think that if we created an AGI, and it told us to end capitalism in order to save the planet, that suddenly we’d drop all our objections and do it? Do you think that an AGI created by Google or Microsoft would even be capable of saying “Stop allowing your planets resources to be hoarded by a priveliged few”?

Powered flight was an important goal, but that wouldn’t have justified throwing all the world’s resources at making Da Vinci’s flying machine work. Some ideas are just dead ends.

Transformer based generative models do not have any demonstrable path to becoming AGI, and we’re already hitting a hard ceiling of diminishing returns on the very limited set of things that they actually can do. Developing better versions of these models requires exponentially larger amounts of data, at exponentially scaling compute costs (yes, exponentially… To the point where current estimates are that there literally isn’t enough training data in the world to get past another generation or two of development on these things).

Whether or not AGI is possible, it has become extremely apparent that this approach is not going to be the one that gets us there. So what is the benefit of continuing to pile more and more resources into it?

“it’s been incorporated into countless applications”

I think the phrasing you were looking for there was “hastily bolted onto.” Was the world actually that desperate for tools to make bad summaries of data, and sometimes write short form emails for us? Does that really justify the billions upon billions of dollars that are being thrown at this technology?

Maybe because we’re all getting really tired of industry propaganda designed to sell us on the “inevitability” of genAI when anyone who’s paying even a little attention can see that the only thing inevitable about this current genAI fad is it crashing and burning.

(Even when content like this comes from a place of sincere interest, it becomes functionally indistinguishable from the industry propaganda, because the primary goal of the propagandists is to keep genAI in the public conversation, thus convincing their investors that its still the hottest thing around, and that they should keep shoveling money into it so that they don’t miss the boat).

OpenAI, the company behind that giant bubble in the middle there, loses two dollars and thirty five cents for every dollar of revenue. Not profit. Revenue. Every interaction with ChatGPT costs them a ridiculous amount of money, and the percentage of users willing to actually pay for those interactions is unbelievably small. Their enterprise sales are even smaller. They are burning money at an absolutely staggering pace, and that’s with the deeply discounted rate they currently get on their compute costs.

No one has proposed anything that will lower their backend costs to the point where this model is profitable, and even doubling prices (which is their current plan) will not make them profitable either. Literally not one person at OpenAI has put forth a concrete plan for the company to reach profitability. And that’s the biggest player in the game. If the most successful genAI company on the planet can’t figure out a way to actually make profit off this thing, it’s dead. Not just OpenAI; the whole idea.

The numbers don’t lie; users, at best, find it moderately interesting and fun to play around with for a while. Barely anyone wants this, and absolutely nobody needs it. Not one single genAI product has created a meaningful use-case that would justify the staggering cost of building and running a transformer based model. The entire industry is just a party trick that’s massively overstayed it’s welcome.

It’s not just you. Search got worse, and it did so intentionally.

Ed Zitron lays it all out really well, with all the receipts, but the basic version is this; Google has an incentive to make you search more for the same things, because then they can show you more ads. And google is, first and foremost, an ad delivery company. Every “product” they own is an ad delivery vehicle. It’s not just AI slop that made search based; Google made search bad, and everyone else followed suit, to a greater or lesser degree.

Edit: I wrote a different response here, but there’s no point. You refuse to acknowledge basic facts that undercut your whole argument. You don’t understand this situation a fraction as well you think you do. I’m not going to sit here and argue with you about your fantasy version of reality.

Point four I’ve already answered; the need to liquidate stock amplifies any costs, with a potential to create a catastrophic snowball that could lead to a significant collapse in his fortune (nothing could ever make Musk “poor” by any sane standard, but he could become significantly poorer, which I’m sure to him would be the end of the world).

Point three is answered by him being overleveraged. He took on a lot of debt to buy Twitter, which makes taking on additional debt significantly harder. You’ve both tried to dispute this, while simultaneously confirming it. We’ll get to that with point one.

Point two is misleading. While Twitter does have its own accounts, those coffers are bare. Either Musk foots the bill out of his own pocket, or the company goes bankrupt. Either way, he’s still on the hook for about $800,000,000 a year in interest payments on the debt it took to buy it.

Which brings us to point one; you’ve tried to dispute this point by offering the evidence that confirms it. As your correctly state, Musk went into business with a murderers row of the kind of merciless loan sharks that you only do business with if the banks all laughed at you. As I mentioned previously the interest on the debts he took on to buy Twitter is $800 million a year. You don’t accept those kinds of financing terms if you have better options. The fact that he did is all the proof you need that his credit is shit. The banks know damn well how precarious his wealth is. And if further evidence was needed, consider this; why did he trigger a significant collapse in Tesla’s stock price last year selling off stock to service those debts if he had the option of simply borrowing against his assets as you claim?

Exactly. Right now Tesla are being priced like they’re the next Amazon, but this is largely on the belief that they’ll somehow end up licensing self driving software to every company in the world that deals in transit or transport. It’s a total fantasy. While Tesla does have some competitive advantages (such as owning the accepted standard for EV charging) they’re not worth anywhere close to what their stock price says. At this point they’re basically turning into a new South Seas Company.