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AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

chrbutler.com

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Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#41

Post by corry »

"The best case scenario is that AI is just not as valuable as those who invest in it, make it, and sell it believe."

This is the crux of the OP's argument, adding in that (in the meantime) the incumbents and/or bad actors will use it as a path to intensify their political and economic power.

But to me the article fails to:

(1) actually make the case that AI's not going to be 'valuable enough' which is a sweeping and bold claim (especially in light of its speed), and;

(2) quantify AI's true value versus the crazy overhyped valuation, which is admittedly hard to do - but matters if we're talking 10% of 100x overvalued.

If all of my direct evidence (from my own work and life) is that AI is absolutely transformative and multiplies my output substantially, AND I see that that trend seems to be continuing - then it's going to be a hard argument for me to agree with #1 just because image generation isn't great (and OP really cares about that).

Higher Ed is in crisis; VC has bet their entire asset class on AI; non-trivial amounts of code are being written by AI at every startup; tech co's are paying crazy amounts for top AI talents... in other words, just because it can't one-shot some complex visual design workflow does not mean (a) it's limited in its potential, or (b) that we fully understand how valuable it will become given the rate of change.

As for #2 - well, that's the whole rub isn't it? Knowing how much something is overvalued or undervalued is the whole game. If you believe it's waaaay overvalued with only a limited time before the music stop, then go make your fortune! "The Big Short 2: The AI Boogaloo".

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#42

Post by verdverm »

gizajob wrote: post #31
carlosjobim wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Machine translation was horrible and completely unreliable before LLMs. And human translators are very expensive and slow in comparison. LLM is for translation as computers were for calculating. Sure, you could do without them before. They used to have entire buildings with office workers whose job it was to compute.

Google translate worked great long before LLMs.

LLMs are not they only "AI"

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#43

Post by xeckr »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #27
hagbarth wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you read a little further in the article, the main point is _not_ that AI is useless. But rather than AGI god building, a regular technology. A valuable one, but not infinite growth.

> But rather than AGI god building, a regular technology. A valuable one, but not infinite growth. AGI is a lot of things, a lot of ever moving targets, but it's never (under any sane definition) "infinite growth". That's already ASI territory / singularity and all that stuff. I see more and more people mixing the two, and arguing against ASI being a thing, when talking about AGI. "Human level competences" is AGI. Su…

Once you have AGI, you can presumably automate AI R&D, and it seems to me that the recursive self-improvement that begets ASI isn't that far away from that point.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#44

Post by dvcoolarun »

I believe it’s a bubble. Every app interface is becoming similar to ChatGPT, claiming they’ll “help you automate,” while drifting away from the app’s original purpose.

Most of this feels like people trying to get rich off VC money — and VCs trying to get rich off someone else’s money.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#45

Post by carlosjobim »

gizajob wrote: post #31
carlosjobim wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Machine translation was horrible and completely unreliable before LLMs. And human translators are very expensive and slow in comparison. LLM is for translation as computers were for calculating. Sure, you could do without them before. They used to have entire buildings with office workers whose job it was to compute.

Google translate worked great long before LLMs.

It really didn't. There were many languages which it couldn't handle at all, just making completely garbled output. It wasn't possible to use Google Translate professionally.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#46

Post by exceptione »

philipkglass wrote: post #3

I think that what is really behind the AI bubble is the same thing behind most money, power, and influence: land and resources. The AI future that is promised, whether to you and me or to the billionaires, requires the same thing: lots of energy, lots of land, and lots of water. If you just wanted land, water, and electricity, you could buy them directly instead of buying $100 million of computer hardware bundled wit…

Valid question. What the OP talks about though is that these things were not for sale normally. My takeaway from his essay is that a few oligarchs get a pass to take over all energy, by means of a manufactured crisis.

  When a private company can construct what is essentially a new energy city with no people and no elected representation, and do this dozens of times a year across a nation to the point that half a century of national energy policy suddenly gets turned on its head and nuclear reactors are back in style, you have a sudden imbalance of power that looks like a cancer spreading within a national body.
He could have explained that better. Try to not look at the media drama the political actors give you each day, but look at the agenda the real powers laid bare

- Trump is threatening an oil rich neighbor with war. A complete expensive as hell army blowing up 'drug boats' (claim) to make help the press sell it as a war on drugs. Yeah right.

- Green energy projects, even running ones, get cancelled. Energy from oil and nuclear are both capital intensive and at the same time completely out-shined by solar and battery tech. So the energy card is a strong one to direct policy towards your interests.

If you can turn the USA into a resource economy like Russia, than you can rule like a Russian oligarch. That is also why the admin sees no problem in destroying academia or other industries via tariffs; controlling resources is easier and more predictable than having to rely on an educated populace that might start to doubt the promise of the American Dream.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#47

Post by crazygringo »

> There is a vast chasm between what we, the users, and them, the investors, are “sold” in AI. We are told that AI will do our tasks faster and better than we can — that there is no future of work without AI. And that is a huge sell, one I’ve spent the majority of this post deconstructing from my, albeit limited, perspective. But they — the people who commit billions toward AI — are sold something entirely different. They are sold AGI, the idea of a transformative artificial intelligence, an idea so big that it can accommodate any hope or fear a billionaire might have.

> Again, I think that AI is probably just a normal technology, riding a normal hype wave. And here’s where I nurse a particular conspiracy theory: I think the makers of AI know that.

I think those committing billions towards AI know it too. It's not a conspiracy theory. All the talk about AGI is marketing fluff that makes for good quotes. All the investment in data centers and GPU's is for regular AI. It doesn't need AGI to justify it.

I don't know if there's a bubble. Nobody knows. But what if it turns out that normal AI (not AGI) will ultimately provide so much value over the next couple decades that all the data centers being built will be used to max capacity and we need to build even more? A lot of people think the current level of investment is entirely economically rational, without any requirement for AGI at all. Maybe it's overshooting, maybe it's undershooting, but that's just regular resource usage modeling. It's not dependent on "coding consciousness" as the author describes.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#48

Post by hollowturtle »

sockgrant wrote: post #14

“As a designer…” IMHO the bleeding edge of what’s working well with LLMs is within software engineering because we’re building for ourselves, first. Claude code is incredible. Where I work, there are an incredible number of custom agents that integrate with our internal tooling. Many make me very productive and are worthwhile. I find it hard to buy in to opinions of non-SWE on the uselessness of AI solely because I t…

Where are the products? This site and everywhere around the internet, on x, linkedin and so is full of crazy claims and I have yet to see a product that people need and that actually works. What I'm experiencing is a gigantic enshittification everywhere, Windows sucks, web apps are bloated, slow and uninteresting. Infrastructure goes down even with "memory safe rust" burning millions and millions of compute for scaffolding stupid stuff. Such a disappointment

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#49

Post by redorb »

hollowturtle wrote: post #48
sockgrant wrote: post #14

“As a designer…” IMHO the bleeding edge of what’s working well with LLMs is within software engineering because we’re building for ourselves, first. Claude code is incredible. Where I work, there are an incredible number of custom agents that integrate with our internal tooling. Many make me very productive and are worthwhile. I find it hard to buy in to opinions of non-SWE on the uselessness of AI solely because I t…

Where are the products? This site and everywhere around the internet, on x, linkedin and so is full of crazy claims and I have yet to see a product that people need and that actually works. What I'm experiencing is a gigantic enshittification everywhere, Windows sucks, web apps are bloated, slow and uninteresting. Infrastructure goes down even with "memory safe rust" burning millions and millions of compute for scaff…

I think chatGPT itself is an epic product, Cursor has insane growth and usage. I also think they are both over-hyped, have too much a valuation.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#50

Post by Octoth0rpe »

milesskorpen wrote: post #29
Animats wrote: post #23

It's pretty clear that the financialization aspect of AI is a bubble. There's way too much market cap created by trading debt back and forth. How well AI will work remains an open question at this point.

It's a big number - but still less than tech industry profits.

That is true, but not evenly distributed. Oracle for example: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2025/11/oracl...

Also, it may be true that these companies theoretically have the cash flow to cover to spending, but that doesn't mean that they will be comfortable with that risk, especially as that risk becomes more likely in some kind of mass extinction event amongst AI startups. To concretize that a bit, the remote possibility of having to give up all your profits for 2 years to payoff DC investment is fine at 1% chance of happening, but maybe not so ok at a 40% chance.

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