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AI's profits are 'being funded by investors rather than earned from customers

fortune.com

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Re: AI's profits are 'being funded by investors rather than earned from customers

#11
post #10
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol, I appreciate your cynicism here, but I think it could realistically go worse than that: - OpenAI and Anthropic convince the US gov to ban open weight models, through bribes or fear respectively. Model weights become contraband, comparable to CSAM, because someone will show you can use uncensored (abliterated) open models to do bad things. - Duopoly firmly in place, the prices are raised until they become painful…

Interesting forecast, but it unrealistically assumes America still has soft power. The US international soft power wings have been clipped by an administration that has shown the world that since everything is permitted to the USA, its various coercive threats are vacuous; there is no one home, no moral metabolism. What is true now will not be true in six months. There is no diachronically stable counterparty. Instea…

> it unrealistically assumes America still has soft power

I did caveat by saying, "where it can".

I'm very unhappy with what we've been doing here, but until you Canadians bail out of Five Eyes, I think you're still in bed with us. Nothing is simple.

Re: AI's profits are 'being funded by investors rather than earned from customers

#12
post #11
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting forecast, but it unrealistically assumes America still has soft power. The US international soft power wings have been clipped by an administration that has shown the world that since everything is permitted to the USA, its various coercive threats are vacuous; there is no one home, no moral metabolism. What is true now will not be true in six months. There is no diachronically stable counterparty. Instea…

> it unrealistically assumes America still has soft power I did caveat by saying, "where it can". I'm very unhappy with what we've been doing here, but until you Canadians bail out of Five Eyes, I think you're still in bed with us. Nothing is simple.

Well, sometimes it is. This happened:

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-military-mo...

Trust me. We might not have yet signed the paperwork, but the divorce proceeds apace.

Re: AI's profits are 'being funded by investors rather than earned from customers

#14
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft will acquire OpenAI for $15B and Google will acquire Anthropic for $10B; the smaller ones will get acquired by Meta, Oracle etc. Their debts will be passed on to USA/EU population. Employees will not get to exercise their stock options, but will have some great stories to tell. Somehow RAM will not get cheaper. Then a new hype wave starts all over.

Lol, I appreciate your cynicism here, but I think it could realistically go worse than that: - OpenAI and Anthropic convince the US gov to ban open weight models, through bribes or fear respectively. Model weights become contraband, comparable to CSAM, because someone will show you can use uncensored (abliterated) open models to do bad things. - Duopoly firmly in place, the prices are raised until they become painful…

>> US hardware will detect when you're doing what looks like too many matrix multiplies or dot products. Similar to "Trusted Computing", HDMI cables, and other DRM.

You mean like NVIDIA is doing to their GPUs for Crypto?

Re: AI's profits are 'being funded by investors rather than earned from customers

#15
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol, I appreciate your cynicism here, but I think it could realistically go worse than that: - OpenAI and Anthropic convince the US gov to ban open weight models, through bribes or fear respectively. Model weights become contraband, comparable to CSAM, because someone will show you can use uncensored (abliterated) open models to do bad things. - Duopoly firmly in place, the prices are raised until they become painful…

>> US hardware will detect when you're doing what looks like too many matrix multiplies or dot products. Similar to "Trusted Computing", HDMI cables, and other DRM. You mean like NVIDIA is doing to their GPUs for Crypto?

That's a great example, and proof of how easy it is for them to do.
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