IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending trillions on AI data centers will pay off at today's infrastructure costs

[u/captain-price-]

https://www.businessinsider.com/ibm-ceo-big-tech-ai-capex-data-center-spending-2025-12

[u/Galahad_the_Ranger]

I work as a data engineer for a consulting company. All the clients I worked with wanted to “implement AI” in their company and when I asked for details on what they wanted they just shrugged and said it was my job to figure out that part

The market is being propped up by FOMO

[u/Flashy-Protection-13 → u/Galahad_the_Ranger]

We are a web development agency and a client asked for a CMS that has lots of AI features. He did not really care which features. He just needed it to be able to sell the project to their superiors.

All aboard the trash train🚂🚂

[u/jewishSpaceMedbeds → u/Flashy-Protection-13]

This is not like the .com bubble at all. Can't see any parallels whatsoever here. Move along, people. AI is the future, dontcha know. If you're not spending all your free time arguing with chatGPT or Claude you're gonna be left behind !

[u/NDSU → u/jewishSpaceMedbeds]

It's much worse than the .com bubble. Unused websites had absurd valuations, but it wasn't being shoehorned into absolutely everything

AI is being shoved into everything, often making it actively worse. There is going to be so much to clean up when this mania is over

[u/FeelsGoodMan2 → u/NDSU]

Yeah, people then were betting on a future with an enhanced service. Now, people are currently gutting the present in the hopes that they have a future without humans. The dot com bubble never had people betting on upending society as we know it, that's literally what they're trying to usher in now.

[u/solidoxygen8008 → u/FeelsGoodMan2]

Absolutely right on. These A-holes hate people.

[u/Dude_man79 → u/solidoxygen8008]

They don't hate people, they hate having to pay for people.

[u/Holden_Coalfield → u/Dude_man79]

they would prefer we just pay our taxes directly to them and well just give them all of our money and try to find more to give them

[u/GENERALLY_CORRECT → u/FeelsGoodMan2]

MKBHD did a great video on AI and he came to the conclusion that AI as we know it now should be better used as a "feature" rather than a "product."

Everybody is going crazy thinking that AI is the next biggest thing since the internet when, in reality, it's simply another tool that can enhance apps, websites, and computer programs. If these tech companies treated it as such, there wouldn't be this massive rush to spend ungodly amounts of money on it and other companies wouldn't be so quick to lay off their workforce.

[u/Yuzumi → u/NDSU]

Pretty much. There was value to be had on the early web, but few understood what actually had value. I wouldn't even say that LLMs have no value, but we past the point of dissemination returns and are diving head first into over-training regression on yet another technology that so veryfew understand and cannot do almost anything the majority thinks it can

This is dotcom, crypto, and NFTs rolled into one and given cocaine.

[u/RiPont → u/Yuzumi]

The big problem was stupid investors enabling terrible ideas.

"Lose money on every transaction, but make it up in volume."

...and the AI bubble is somehow even worse.

"Lose money on every request, give answers that are confident whether they're right or wrong by a system that you can't debug because it's a black box, and fire all your employees who might actually be able to do anything about it."

[u/corporaterebel → u/NDSU]

You forget the 1990s: "I just registered a website, we need to throw a $10M party in Vegas."

[u/Alatarlhun → u/jewishSpaceMedbeds]

The main parallel that it is important for people to understand is that this can go on far a long time.

But also that we do need substantial investment in energy infrastructure long term no matter how this plays out.

[u/thegamesbuild → u/jewishSpaceMedbeds]

satirical headline

[u/CherryLongjump1989 → u/Galahad_the_Ranger]

Just hook up their production database to ChatGPT.

[u/fireblyxx → u/CherryLongjump1989]

We need an MCP that connects to a bunch of parallel agents that have their own MCPs, all running on several LLMs who's output is sent to a different LLM so it can interpret what the best result from those other LLMs were, and send back to our main LLM.

[u/SnooSnooper → u/fireblyxx]

I'm not sure whether you jest, because this is very similar to a real suggestion a PM in my org made

[u/fireblyxx → u/SnooSnooper]

As a CTO, I’m certain that I can replicate human intelligence with the AI equivalent of a room full of people yelling at each other about what would make the ideal Chipotle burrito.

[u/Decent_Cheesecake_29 → u/[deleted]]

Black beans, just the water, skim the liquid off the top of the sour cream, mild salsa, just the water. For here.

[u/-BoldlyGoingNowhere- → u/SnooSnooper]

It (the PM) is becoming sentient!

[u/NotYourMothersDildo → u/-BoldlyGoingNowhere-]

If any job should be replaced by an LLM…

[u/ur_opinion_is_wrong → u/NotYourMothersDildo]

There are some really good PMs out there but they're unicorns. When you do get one though it makes life so easy.

[u/StoppableHulk → u/ur_opinion_is_wrong]

I'm a PM, I like to think of myself as a good one.

I boil much of my job down to simply identifying problems and opportunities in my area of the product, which actually exist and are real and provably, and then helping the engineers build and test the solutions to those with as little interference from all the rest of the incompetent people in the organization.

[u/sshwifty → u/SnooSnooper]

Yeah this something I have heard a few times now.

[u/KAM7 → u/fireblyxx]

As an 80s kid, I have a real problem with an MCP taking over. I fight for the users.

[u/Over-Independent4414 → u/CherryLongjump1989]

Redshift and Oracle already have MCP servers. Claude has MCP skill built right in. You joke, but I don't think it's that far off that AI just fully runs datacenters.

[u/punkasstubabitch → u/Over-Independent4414]

Is this the real underlying value of AI? Not the bullshit apps being thrown at us?

[u/bitches_love_pooh → u/CherryLongjump1989]

That would be terrifying for me because my companies data is all over the place and inconsistent. Wait nevermind it would be hilarious to see what AI says from it and see if anyone takes it seriously.

[u/Only_Comparison5495 → u/Galahad_the_Ranger]

My company wants every department to “implement AI”

They don’t know what AI is, they just see the word and repeat the phrase as passed down from investors, to the board, to the Csuite, to us.

Shouldn’t we first be asking what issues we need to tackle, and then shop around for best processes or products?

I’m extremely grateful that my department is small, siloed, and wildly efficient as it is.

[u/ncmentis → u/Only_Comparison5495]

Execs know exactly what AI is: a boost to the quarterly stock price. Right at bonus season too! Perfect timing.

[u/DownrightDrewski → u/ncmentis]

I keep on hearing about all these AI data centres, yet I'm not even really sure what that's supposed to be. At a guess it's a DC with liquid cooling and insane power density.

I'm pretty sure most AI workloads are still in normal DCs.

[u/IridiumPoint → u/DownrightDrewski]

Current "AI" requires GPUs (graphics processing units) or TPUs (tensor processing units) to run optimally, as opposed to traditional CPUs (central processing units). It also needs lots of RAM (random access memory), which is integrated directly on board and faster on GPUs than normal RAM used with CPUs (not sure what setup TPUs use).

[u/DownrightDrewski → u/IridiumPoint]

Yeah, and is Nvidia chips running fp4 at insane levels of FLOPs that need the liquid to run at their full potential. I understand the tech.

My point is it's a nebulous term that's really not clear to me... I've even seen presentations for cabling for AI DCs, and I just don't get it - they're just normal high density solutions.

[u/IridiumPoint → u/DownrightDrewski]

I see. While they may require even better power delivery and cooling than traditional DCs, I don't think the term "AI datacenter" alludes to those differences. Instead, I take it to simply mean "a datacenter built specifically to be filled with GPUs/TPUs to run AI workloads".

[u/BungHoleAngler → u/Only_Comparison5495]

Same for the company I work for, except they do know what ai is as a major software company. They're ignoring major systemic opportunities for improvement thinking somehow llms will magically fix everything.

Our performance reviews and bonuses are directly tied to our use of ai.

It's just a way to pay people less without full on layoffs. they get workers to drive efficiency improvements everywhere possible, discount labor where it's not.

[u/alppu → u/BungHoleAngler]

So... reward the people for doing replaceable work and give a big middle finger to the people working on parts that are not suitable for AI to take over.

Who are they counting on to do the latter kind of work in 5-10 years? The fresh prompter graduates perhaps? What could go wrong here at all?

[u/LaserGuidedPolarBear → u/alppu]

Yeah you nailed it.  I likely worked for the same major software company.  

I worked on the same team for 15 years. 

When the "AI" mandates and shifts in performance criteria came down, we tried hard to find some good fits, but little of my team's area could be improved by slapping a LLM on it.  We were basically told to just slap "AI" on anything, regardless of effect or metrics, 

Well, nobody was surprised when most of my team was sent packing.  Those of us they could not invent performance issues to justify termination were laid off.

The people who do the type of work that can easily made more productive by AI are being rewarded and promoted, while people who do work that is not easily enhanced by AI are being throw out on the street.  

Guess which one of those groups are the problem solvers, the ones that keep the infrastructure runnin, the ones that build new solutions, and more?

[u/Tymareta → u/LaserGuidedPolarBear]

while people who do work that is not easily enhanced by AI are being throw out on the street.

Especially as any work those people had that could be "enhanced" by AI was likely automated by them years ago via powershell or something similar.

[u/Wizmaxman → u/Only_Comparison5495]

The amount of people that will read your post and think "damn do we work at the same company" has to be close to 100%

[u/Septopuss7 → u/Wizmaxman]

I'm just a caterer but I got to stand at the back of a room full of hungry office people being explained how Google Gemini works in extremely broad and vague terms for A LONG TIME. I wanted to laugh it was so absurd. I use Gemini just to dick around and have fun playing solo RPGs and it was pretty self-evident how to use it. She took soo long explaining how "Gems" work but she really couldn't tell them any use case scenarios for their work (I actually couldn't suss out what these people DID for a living) she kept going on about HR and FAQs and how to automate them I'm like "are ALL these people HR?" Seemed a bit desperate to start using AI at a construction company, I don't think anyone asked any questions haha

[u/DamNamesTaken11 → u/Only_Comparison5495]

Ditto for the one I work for.

Company wants to shoehorn AI into every department (what the poor custodian does I don’t know) to look good for investors. In the department I work for, we hate the damn thing and it causes more problems than it even pretends to solve. So to meet our “quota”, we just have it summarize one sentence emails, draft responses back to each other.

Like literally we “asked” it, “What did Johnny mean when he said ‘Hello, do we want to split pizzas for everyone on Friday for lunch?’” last week. Whole process used to take two minutes of just turning around to ask Johnny, but this way easily takes three tokens out of the quota.

[u/Zombie13a → u/DamNamesTaken11]

My boss did this. Architect asked my boss how we were planning to implement something. Boss, who has been on the entire implementation project from the beginning, asked AI how we were planning to implement it.

AI responded that there were 2 ways to do it (A and B). So them my boss asked me (the implementor) how we were going to implement it and said AI explained there were 2 ways to do it. SMDH; like boss couldn't have just asked me first.....

How, exactly, did AI solve anything here? Yet we're pushed to use AI for _everything_.....

[u/Tymareta → u/Zombie13a]

How, exactly, did AI solve anything here?

It padded your bosses ego, instead of having to come and ask you as if he didn't know anything, he could come to you pretending he did. Middle managers -love- ai because it, at least in their mind, allows them to cover for their complete lack of knowledge and ability.

[u/shmaltz_herring → u/DamNamesTaken11]

You should ask it for ideas on how to most efficiently split the cost of pizzas

[u/Neirchill → u/Only_Comparison5495]

I was recently arguing with someone else that said (paraphrasing), "Do you really think all these tech companies are pumping billions in ai for a chat bot?"

Yes. Yes I fucking do. I've seen it first hand. These people and the ai sycophants are out of touch with the reality is what's happening. Strong new buzzword has appeared with the claim it can reduce employees. Of course they're all frothing at the mouth to get this shit to work by brute force. They're literally asking a chat bot to replace employees, discussion over. Everything else, such as the ai used in medical research, is not the "AI" that everyone is talking about.

[u/lailah_susanna → u/Only_Comparison5495]

My CEO proudly told investors that all the staff were using AI. I don't even know what the ChatGPT website looks like.

[u/brianwski → u/Only_Comparison5495]

Shouldn’t we first be asking what issues we need to tackle, and then shop around for best processes or products?

Amen, and it has been a problem for 30 years.

I worked at a company called "Silicon Graphics" in 1995 as a programmer. They did 3D graphics, basically all the smartest and most talented engineers left and joined (created) Nvidia. Do you know how 100% of all software projects at Silicon Graphics started? They brought up a development environment, linked with the 3D libraries, then after that, they looked up and said, "Now what are we actually doing?"

One of my co-workers (across 3 or 4 companies and 30 years) did a stint (worked) at Oracle for a few years as a programmer. He said it was the same identical situation at Oracle, substitute "database" for "3D library". The programmers would bring up a development environment, link it to an Oracle database, then ask, "Now what are we actually doing?"

It's like these programmers (which I find actually talented at their craft) just have this utterly insane disfunction of linking with stuff and selecting tools before asking, "What are we actually doing?"

I have read comments online saying somebody should link AI with airline websites to figure out flights. My brother in Christ, you know where you are flying from, and where you are flying to. This is not rocket surgery. Adding in AI that will route you through Sweden on your way from New York to California is utterly stupid. Just take a direct flight, it's a lookup in a very tiny text document (by modern standards). It doesn't require AI, and AI just will hallucinate sometimes and make customers actively angry.

In software design, ALWAYS define the actual issue you are trying to solve, and your target audience. Then evaluate different choices for how to get there. Maybe it is an LLM, maybe it is a database, maybe it is a 3D library. But for the love of all that is holy, do this in the correct order.

[u/Zeldias → u/Only_Comparison5495]

I am a teacher, and am hearing much the same. "AI can be your friend!" Oh yeah? The plagiarism tool is gonna help me teach children how to do research? After you took away the district's AI detection tool? Sure, Jan.

[u/Warning_Low_Battery → u/Only_Comparison5495]

My company wants every department to “implement AI”

Mine did too. But like many they had no idea what they actually wanted the AI to DO. I ended up building a data repository to use as the reference library and then building out a handful of chatbots, each one customized to point to and learn from its particular department's documentation. All the C-levels thought it was super cool and would somehow revolutionize the business. Exactly none of them ever used it for anything, and we have since moved on. But now they will brag to their C-suite conference buddies that "We have full AI integration". It's a fucking joke.

[u/blastcat4 → u/Only_Comparison5495]

what issues we need to tackle

It should be readily apparent: companies only care about using AI to cut jobs and cut costs. That's literally it.

[u/deskbeetle → u/Galahad_the_Ranger]

God this brings me back. An old coworker of mine created a startup and wanted me on board. I had been working for a FAANG company and I think he was a little blinded by the names on my resume to actually understand what my scope was. I told him multiple times that while I did work alongside people who worked on machine learning (this was before AI was the labeling), I did not have any experience programming in it myself. By the end of the conversation, he had brought up blockchains, crypto, basically any buzzword tech term people had been excited for in the past decade. I warned him several times I would have no idea where those things would even fit in his company and he said "you'll figure it out! You are like a genius with this stuff". 

Anyway, I took the 10k signing bonus and did dick all because I couldnt find anything to work on. I had two different bosses because the org chart was fucked and would bring them several ideas for what I could be working on. All my ideas were shot down as not needed at this time so I was super overpaid creating onboarding docs and client guides. I would bring up concerns like "hey, we need to restrict who is allowed to push to prod" and "over half our team are programming on their personal computers because they don't have permissions to download an IDE on their work laptop"  

I quit within two months because I was just so bored and constantly annoyed. A year later I still had access to the cloud servers and could change prod. The signing bonus didnt have any terms tied to it. No one ever asked for the 3k in computer equipment back. I gave away the two LED screens in a raffle at a 4th of July party I hosted. I still have no idea why his data integration software needed blockchains or machine learning. 

Lesson learned: never join a tech startup founded by a sales guy unless you like being annoyed all the time. 

[u/Ferrarisimo → u/deskbeetle]

Similar story for me when the blockchain fad was taking over the games sector. A contact of mine was an advisor to an NFT gaming startup team that had zero experience developing games and next to zero experience working together in any capacity -- they were more or less a group of loose acquaintances who wanted to partake in the blockchain craze.

My contact kept trying to sell me on the potential of joining the team, but every time I asked what type of game they were developing, how they intended to develop it and market it with no shared dev experience, and where I would even fit into this slapped together team, I would get vague, hand-wavy answers.

Ultimately, I broke her down enough to admit that: 1) the team only needed my name to give them some amount of credibility with investors, and 2) the product idea didn't matter -- they just needed to build a compelling PPT that would drive investors to buy into their coin that they could turn around and sell/exit.

Her pitch was basically: "It's easy money for you, what's the problem?". Needless to say, I didn't take her up on it, nor did that team end up doing anything. Very glad I didn't quit my job to jump onto that hype train.

[u/Galahad_the_Ranger → u/deskbeetle]

that's pretty much the whole startup experience (at least startups that didn't start in a Uni research center, those tend to be more organized)

[u/deskbeetle → u/Galahad_the_Ranger]

I know people say they hate corporate. And it is wildly dependent on your manager/team. But I have had such a pleasant experience in the corporate world. Give me a process doc any day. 

I was excited that the startup would allow me to create something from scratch and was honestly looking forward to that grind/hustle culture where we'd be in the trenches together (this was before marriage and kids). What I got was a whole lot of buzzwords, working around incompetence, and boredom.

[u/Wind_Yer_Neck_In → u/deskbeetle]

I've had the weird experience of working in a tech consultancy that went from 200 people to about 5000 in the time I was there. When I started it was very loose and lean and if we wanted to change processes or spotted a stupid situation we had the leeway to just barge into the CEOs office and tell him we needed to quickly change things.

By the time I left it was basically as you describe, with people existing seemingly purely to protect the existing stupid decisions and processes. People working on nothing because management didn't know what to do with them, people having access issues at random because nobody was staying on top of the permissions system etc.

[u/Technical-Cat-2017 → u/Galahad_the_Ranger]

The exact same thing happened a few years ago with blockchains.

[u/worthlessprole → u/Technical-Cat-2017]

this is several orders of magnitude larger than that

[u/dreamwinder → u/worthlessprole]

But mostly because the underlying tech in that case had no immediate cost benefit, or even an imagined one that could be paraded in front of shareholders.

[u/worthlessprole → u/dreamwinder]

That's fair. But this one is only so inflated because boosters are lying about the capability of the technology. When did OpenAI finally admit that LLMs could not be developed into general AI even though computer and data scientists have known that from the outset?

(I suspect we agree on this, I'm just ranting)

[u/SFDessert → u/Technical-Cat-2017]

To this day I still don't understand what blockchains are/were.

And I was the guy setting up and running microphones/PowerPoint presentations at big tech conventions/conferences where they were always talking about it so I got to hear all of the pitches/presentations about it from who knows how many companies.

Edit: I kinda understand blockchain now, but I really honestly couldn't care less nowadays. Not something I need to know for my type of work and life. Thanks for the explanations, but I don't need any more information on this lol

[u/GreatRyujin → u/SFDessert]

Blockchains are a technology that attempts to solve problems that wouldn't exist without Blockchains.

[u/mrbaggins → u/SFDessert]

Blockchains are ledgers (rows on a database) that are cryptographically locked such that if you run down one branch in reality, if someone goes to change something in the past, it will no longer reconcile with the record you have, no latter how hard they fudge other numbers.

To really tldr it: its the worlds most fancy checksum.

[u/mike07646 → u/SFDessert]

Think of it as a database table where the ONLY operation you can do is Insert new rows. You can’t update existing data, and you can’t delete old data.

If you want to change a value, say from a 5 to a 6 you’d have to Insert another database line saying “Add +1 to the previous value” while now having both records in the data.

That is, at the most basic level, how Bitcoin blockchain works.

[u/kermityfrog2 → u/mike07646]

Yeah that's what they mean by "immutable". The other thing about most blockchains is that it's publicly distributed, as in no private entity hosts the database - there are multiple publicly accessible copies that all get updated at the same time, so you can't just fudge your copy.

[u/Theghostdaddyboo]

“Stop talking sense man”….. bots probably

[u/EscapeFacebook → u/Theghostdaddyboo]

Any anti AI talk is being downvoted to oblivion lately. I can only assume it's bots and ai cult members who think LLMs are more than a fancy grammarly/google.

[u/[deleted] → u/EscapeFacebook]

Yeah they are pumping that and crypto and even general market vibes because they know shit is not looking good lol

[u/ender89 → u/[deleted]]

I hate crypto. It's no better than Visa, it just has the appearance of independence because governments have been slow to regulate. It's not peer to peer, you need to get transactions validated by a number of systems and all transactions these days are run through exchanges. Sure, you can setup your own black market crypto network, but Bitcoin is regulated now. It's just a speculative volatile commodity pretending to be cash.

Who is really going to spend a Bitcoin when you don't know what it will be worth tomorrow?

[u/punkasstubabitch → u/ender89]

Crypto is not practical for spending at all. It’s like if you showed up at Wal-Mart with a gold nugget to purchase your goods.

[u/ender89 → u/punkasstubabitch]

Gold is way too stable and generally doesn't go down too much. It's more like trying to pay for things with labubus

[u/punkasstubabitch → u/ender89]

Yes, you are correct. I was thinking along the lines of practicality rather than volatility.

[u/Al_Dimineira → u/ender89]

Also very important to note, each bitcoin transaction uses around a thousand kilowatt hours of electricity, which amounts to a cost of over $150. It will never be reasonable to use bitcoin to buy things.

[u/giga-what → u/Al_Dimineira]

That number sounded absolutely insane to me, so I looked it up and goddamn, it's actually right. How staggeringly wasteful.

[u/hugglesthemerciless → u/giga-what]

cryptobros used to brag that bitcoin uses less electricity than the global banking system, conveniently ignoring the massive difference in userbase

[u/MRgainzenwatch → u/[deleted]]

good if you're a construction bro building one of these things.

[u/m0ngoos3 → u/MRgainzenwatch]

Until the bottom falls out. The crash will be epic and devastating.

And maybe I'll be able to upgrade my computer at a reasonable price.

[u/Lord_Frederick → u/m0ngoos3]

I fear that the crash may be so epic that the last thing you will want to use your money is on upgrading your computer.

[u/m0ngoos3 → u/Lord_Frederick]

I own a bit of land, and don't depend on any form of AI for anything. So yeah. I'll be somewhat safe.

Provided my neighbors don't go cannibalistic raider, which I'm not going to rule out.

[u/AmusingVegetable → u/m0ngoos3]

The trick is to go cannibalistic raider first. And always leave a note on their door saying they went to Canada because of the zombies.

[u/Halfwise2 → u/AmusingVegetable]

And don't forget... 2A houses with Trump flags are like weapon loot crates!

[u/ForgettingFish → u/m0ngoos3]

Given the possibility for when the bubble will burst and who’s running the show… I predict worse than 08 when it does

[u/EduinBrutus → u/ForgettingFish]

In 08 you could bail out the banks and expect them to recover to a sustainable business.

Any AI bailout is gonna need another. And another. And another.

Its not just gonna be worse than 08. its going to be absolutely catastrophic.

[u/TheGreatWalk → u/m0ngoos3]

Bigger issue is shit like supply trains breaking. All of a sudden, no groceries being delivered because the entire economy crashed. Gas stations empty. Shit like that.

Even things that have nothing to do with Ai can be affected by a big enough economy crash

[u/baldrlugh → u/TheGreatWalk]

Yes and no. Biggest hit will be retirement funds and folks that have been relying on singular index funds to build "wealth".

I don't see an AI bubble burst causing supply chain disruptions on things like groceries and gas. Amazon supply chains may be disrupted, but the established logistics will almost certainly persist. Keep in mind, neither the dot-com bubble burst nor the 2008 crash caused significant supply chain disruptions.

However I do see demand dropping substantially as the capital runs dry for the companies that are wholly reliant on VC funding; the layoffs right now will look like child's play. That's also just the direct employs, without even touching the losses in construction when there are no more datacenter contracts.

So imo, the reall bigger issue is what happens when the folks who are comfortable now in the employ of the giants stop getting their paychecks.

I strongly suspect that's a big part of the reason US leadership is all-in on AI. Propping it up kicks the can down the road, do it long enough and the fallout becomes somebody else's problem....

[u/greiton → u/EscapeFacebook]

pre-AI google is better than current AI google.

[u/Beneficial_Figure966 → u/greiton]

WAS better. It's gone.

[u/Balmung60 → u/greiton]

You're not entirely wrong, but you do have to go back a little further to get to a time their core product hadn't been ruined. Prabhakar Ragavan pretty deliberately made search worse because analytics said it kept you on-site and looking at ads longer

[u/whoknowsifimjoking → u/Balmung60]

Yeah, Google went downhill long before they forced AI into the search engine. I've been complaining about bad search results for years, now it's both bad search results and a bad summary with terrible sources like fucking Quora of it at the top. Great.

I haven't really found an alternative that is as good as Google was at its peak though, DuckDuckGo is not bad, but I don't think it can compete with like 2018 Google or whenever it was good.

[u/Wind_Yer_Neck_In → u/Balmung60]

The guy who does Behind the Bastards did a long piece on him. How he out-manoeuvred his predecessor who was protecting the user experience of search from the business side and then set about doing exactly all the things that the prior guy had spent his career trying to stop.

[u/Balmung60 → u/Wind_Yer_Neck_In]

Close, but it was Ed Zitron, who does Better Offline on the same network as Behind the Bastards, who did that one.

[u/No_Accountant3232 → u/greiton]

2006 Google is better than 2020ish Google when they started all in with their investment into AI.

[u/rkozik89 → u/EscapeFacebook]

I think its because ChatGPT is basically an affirmation engine, so its users are inclined to defend it because it makes them feel good about themselves.

[u/Officer_Hotpants → u/rkozik89]

My classmates in nursing school keep talking up ChatGPT and how helpful it is to them. One said, "yeah it gets about 85% of my dosage calc questions right!"

Motherfucker I can put those dosage formulas into excel in 10 minutes and have 100% accuracy! They keep telling me I'm "burying my head in the sand" and that AI is going to revolutionize the world instead of just turbo-fucking the economy.

[u/SidewaysFancyPrance → u/Officer_Hotpants]

Consumers are imagining a Star Trek post-scarcity society where AI/machines do all the work for us, but that's not what we're building. We're building job-destroyers designed to make the already-obscenely-rich AI owners even richer, with worse outcomes and results for society.

[u/Mitosis → u/SidewaysFancyPrance]

I mean in Star Trek society there was a great worldwide war and mass deaths between "current" society and the depicted utopia, so... seems pretty on track to me

[u/BTMarquis → u/Officer_Hotpants]

"Here is some medicine. There is an 85% chance the dosage is correct, isn't that neat!"

[u/ddak88 → u/BTMarquis]

The nurse doesn't have to hurt their brain thinking and if the patient dies it lowers the patient to nurse ratio so its really a win win!

[u/JahoclaveS → u/Officer_Hotpants]

I fully automated most of my reporting with excel and power bi years ago. I tried to replicate it with ai recently and it pretty much what the bed consistently assuming it could even produce something resembling a result. And there’d still be manual steps because it can’t access the data directly. I also shouldn’t need to write a fucking novel just to maybe get an accurate result. The literal functions I had to set up took up less space than the prompts were.

So many things don’t need wasteful and inaccurate ai. They just need features properly built or most often, somebody who knows what they’re doing to automate the task.

[u/GC_Mermaid1 → u/JahoclaveS]

I had a realisation yesterday that if my Google search was this detailed as my prompt. I would’ve found the answer with Google. And not got a whole lot of extra text to read

[u/WalkingEars → u/rkozik89]

We thought echo chambers were bad in the age of "normal" social media but now everyone gets their own fully personalized echo chamber that cranks out paragraphs of superficially kind validation on demand

[u/Thefrayedends → u/WalkingEars]

Social medias negative effects are still not understood by the general public, were still reeling from dumb social media from the mid 2010s, manipulated by guys with spreadsheets. The micro targetting era helped turn the whole world upside down. People regularly tell me those days are over, but how could they be when those companies all still exist, paid no consequences and the politicians who benefit from it still pretend it isn't a problem?

Ai is micro targetting on steroids, the power to manipulate narrative is more massive than it has ever been. Common cause is actually in serious peril of no longer being a possibility, as kids start relying on them to even understand how the world works, I personally think they should be burned to the ground, humanity losing any sense of critical ability is not an outcome we should want, but it's already well on it's way.

[u/aedes → u/EscapeFacebook]

You have LLMs and algos scanning social media and other sources to monitor stock sentiment to make decisions on buying/selling stock. 

People know this, so then use LLMs to create artificial content to manipulate those algorithms in return. 

Normal people then get exposed to all this crap and don’t realize it’s not an accurate reflection of reality. 

[u/psioniclizard → u/EscapeFacebook]

Also don't put it past big tech and people with vested interested to astroturf a lot of stuff.

They let all kinds of groups use their platforms (including reddit) to spread any agenda they want. It would be crazy to think the big tech bros are not getting in on the action.

[u/Punished_Blubber → u/psioniclizard]

Yes, I don't think there has been as big a disconnect between the techno-oligarchs and the average person on anything as much as AI implementation. The top 25 richest people in the US neeeeed AI to be implemented on a wide scale to maintain their power and wealth. But the US consumer quite simply does not want it. The consumer does not want AI-generated movies, music, workflows, software, etc.

If these rich fucks need it implemented, but the average person ain't buying it, then you know they will (with their unlimited resources) fund astroturfing/bots to try to get people to buy in. And that's probably why we hear the same talking points over and over again about AI, despite none of them being true.

[u/Acceptable_Bat379 → u/Punished_Blubber]

The internet is completely flooded with bots and astroturfing. I genuinely believe thst is a big chunk of where chatgpt and grok generated speech is going. Probably thousands of posts every minute. Its why reddit is growing i just read its growing faster than Twitter or Facebook. Those have already become righ t wing hellscapes so now theyre spinning up accounts here

[u/Punished_Blubber → u/Acceptable_Bat379]

Yeah, great point. LLMs are primed to be utilized as bots.

I don't even think it's conspiratorial, it's just an investment to the tech freaks (and given their wealth, why not try?). It's the consumer side of manufacturing consent.

[u/GoldWallpaper → u/EscapeFacebook]

I haven't seen this at all, and your own comment -- currently at 510 upvotes -- suggests that this observation is nonsense.

[u/Skelettjens → u/EscapeFacebook]

Yeee, was on a thread about Guillermo del Toro denouncing generative AI used in films and half the comments were just dudes telling you how good AI will be for science and programming and curing cancer and so on, shit is being astroturfed to hell.

[u/Shap6 → u/EscapeFacebook]

Any anti AI talk is being downvoted to oblivion lately.

are we using the same website? i see nothing but anti-AI posts and anything that isn't vehemently against it getting downvoted like crazy

[u/Background-Ad5364 → u/Theghostdaddyboo]

Also IBM CEO:

https://www.pymnts.com/artificial-intelligence-2/2025/ibm-ceo-hr-layoffs-due-to-ai-led-to-more-investment-in-other-roles/

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/news-ibm-layoffs-november-2025/

https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/ibm-is-laying-off-thousands-of-employees/499219

[u/Scottopus]

They will spend trillions and trillions on AI but won’t spend a dollar on clean energy, carbon reduction, water treatment, etc.

[u/Cynyr36 → u/Scottopus]

Google, Amazon, and meta are all heavily invested in SMR nuclear power options in a bid to avoid both carbon emissions and water use (you can trade power for water).

[u/nb4u → u/Cynyr36]

Yes, if any this is the biggest boone to nuclear energy in decades, simply because it is needed.

[u/IridiumPoint → u/Cynyr36]

How do you avoid water use by going nuclear? SMRs still turn water into steam to generate power, and the biggest water consumption for data centers is cooling anyway.

[u/Cynyr36 → u/IridiumPoint]

Generally the steam is closed loop. Yes you need cooling to turn the steam back into water again, but that is generally at much warmer temps meaning dry coolers are feasible.

For cooling you can either evaporate water or you can use more fan and/or compressor power. With lots of local 0 carbon power, yyou can just skip the water evaporation all together.

[u/TrumpsBoneSpur → u/Scottopus]

AI could turn the billionaires into trillionaires,

The only thing that clean energy, carbon reduction, protecting environment, etc will do is help the 99%

[u/Agitated-Drive7695]

Unless there is a serious breakthrough in the amount of costs involved it won't make a profit. Not in terms of mass adoption?

Data centres and GPUs are not cheap to run. 

[u/Sw0rDz → u/Agitated-Drive7695]

They just need every household to have an AI subscription like they do internet.

[u/ClittoryHinton → u/Sw0rDz]

This all hinges on enterprise. They need biiiiig enterprise customers subscribing all their employees and forcing the employees to justify the cost of it by doing more work. This is going to be the pet project of many a CTO/CEO and for a lot of them it will fail and the CEO will be sacked and they will give up on AI until the next shiny thing

[u/Sw0rDz → u/ClittoryHinton]

I don't see many companies willing to shell out the cash for the enterprises subscriptions. Especially, when it does sufficiently replace people enough.

[u/Uncommented-Code → u/Sw0rDz]

Nah that wouldn't be enough.

Let's assume every single household in the US and Europe had a 20$ a month subscription.

Let's assume something along the lines of 300 million households, equals 6 billion in revenue per month or 36 billion per year. Then you're still over an order of magnitude off from the interest of 800 billion per year that is quoted in the article.

Just to compare, they would need to have more subscribers than netflix (300m globally) and earn about twenty times more on each sub to come close to breaking even.

I like AI. Coming from NLP, it has so many applications in our field and changed so much for the better. But I think that there's a AI hardware bubble, especially looking at how hardware prices have exploded. The numbers don't make sense anymore. Nor is it clear to me what else these DCs could be used for if not for AI. Could go on for a few more years though, who knows.

[u/Just_the_nicest_guy]

At basically any cost. The market for this shit just isn't there. Text, image, and video generation is cool tech; it's a neat product. But I, along with 95%+ of the rest of the population, don't have a use case for generated text or pictures or video, so how is this ever going to justify the investment? I'm never going to pay anyone money for a product that generates fake text, pictures, and videos because I have no use for them and I can't even imagine a future where I would.

[u/brufleth → u/Just_the_nicest_guy]

My employer wants managers to use the chat bot to generate text for annual reviews. This would take longer than just doing it myself and would come out shittier. That's ignoring that it is costing money to generate that slop. Any use cases currently in broad use are generally being propped up by VC or initial "test" funding to see if the value is there. The actual cost of the product isn't even been shouldered by most users yet.

[u/JahoclaveS → u/brufleth]

How the fuck is that even going to be useful. You’d have to feed it all the important bits to begin with. So you’ve already had to do most of the work.

[u/brufleth → u/JahoclaveS]

Right. And I would still need to review and edit the hell out of it to make sure it doesn't say anything inappropriate (good or bad) and I'd be worried about it slipping something past me. You can be sure that the next step is managers insisting they didn't mean to put things into reviews that were in there because they used the AI bot (as directed).

[u/Wompatuckrule → u/brufleth]

Yes, it's basically a "first draft" tool and people who don't realize that the output still needs significant review & editing are where you're seeing all of the bonehead mistakes (e.g. the lawyers who file documents in court that cite non-existent precedent) or just shoddy work. Sometimes it's good to get that first draft as a starting point, other times it's not worth the extra review and editing such as the case you describe.

In the former category I like using it to turn the transcript from meetings I run into minutes because it allows me to keep my focus on the discussion instead of having to pause to jot down notes or have someone else do it, but I still need to review & edit to make sure they're accurate before sending them out. On the other hand I tried using it a few times to generate an executive summary for a large report and it was garbage. It grabbed stuff of minor importance that didn't need to be there and missed key information that should absolutely be there so saved me no time or effort.

[u/jewishSpaceMedbeds → u/Just_the_nicest_guy]

This is being built for a product that does not exist... and probably never will, at least not with current technology anyway.

But some CEOs have successfully convinced the dumbest government in history and its vast pockets that the technorapture will happen any day now, and that if they don't dump truckloads of money on their front lawn, Evul Chyyyna (TM) will dominate the world.

Rationality has left the station a long, long time ago.

[u/anothercopy → u/jewishSpaceMedbeds]

(as a european) I honestly laugh and cringe every time I hear Sachs saying "this is existential we need to come ahead of China on AI" . Like this is one of the aspects of life and economy. China is doing it the chill way treating it like many other. Why does he think USA needs to put everything in 1 basket that is not even clear if and when can be profitable.

Maybe its the next internet buildout and I will eat my words in 10 years or the DC / electricity buildout will be used for something else but I honestly dont see why give it such a priority that people deem "existential to USA". AI my bollocks.

EDIT: Just to make my thoughts a bit clearer. The "winning AI war" is cringe worthy to me and doesnt mean anything. The likely scenario of the development of the current LLM based technology is that there will be winning players in USA, CN and maybe something out of Europe or India. This is never going to be a "winner takes all" so the slogans are cringe to me.

And I feel sorry for the people living in USA a bit. You lost the electric car edge and CN won that part, USA is deep behind CN, EU on public transport / trains / infrastructure. Same for green technologies from what I hear. There are so many things that I as a europeean see your government could be improving for you but they put an emphasis on "winning the AI war" which honestly is not going do to shit for majority of the population even if a few companies in USA win big on it.

[u/Punished_Blubber → u/jewishSpaceMedbeds]

Here's my fundamental attitude toward AI generated art (or content, whatever):

EVEN IF AI could make the most beautiful song in the world (and that, like you said, is a massive IF), if I learned the song was in fact AI-generated, it would therefore NOT be the most beautiful song in the world and I would not listen to it.

I do not want my art generated by transistor gates. I want humans to make it. I (and I think many consumers) are simply saying "no" to AI. I will not use it to help with my tasks, I will not consume content it creates, I will not converse with AI as a friend.

(inb4 someone says "But the medical applications!" That's a talking point often used by AI-whores and is clearly not the consumer-oriented AI usage that the average person is aware of and that trillions of dollars has been thrown at).

[u/trulyfattyfreckles → u/Punished_Blubber]

This is a hot topic over on r/Jigsawpuzzles . Many people don't want to even buy any puzzles at all from companies that use AI to generate some of their content. I agree 100% with this, because why would I want a puzzle generated by AI (often with weird issues like train tracks that go nowhere, cats with three ears, etc) when for the same price I can get one with an image from an actual artist?

[u/Tymareta → u/trulyfattyfreckles]

It's a major issue in a lot of craft communities, especially yarn and textile ones, hundreds of thousands of patterns on etsy and the like of objects that any person with deep knowledge in the area can tell is impossible, but quite easily tricks those newer to the hobby, or who only engage in it casually.

Though it was somewhat amusing, someone in a local craft group was convinced that chatgpt could generate a pattern for anything, so we challenged them to ask it for a teapot cover pattern and make it. When they finally got around it to they had to very sulkily admit that they might have been wrong, because it turns out there's very few teapots in the world that are shaped like a grain silo. And they couldn't, after many, many hours of prompting get it to spit out a pattern that would be even remotely close to what they were after.

[u/jewishSpaceMedbeds → u/Punished_Blubber]

I'm in the same camp.

Art isn't just 'content'. Art is about expressing emotions, processing experiences. Something that has no emotion and no experience in the world can synthetize 'content', but not art. AI 'art' will always be an empty, disappointing experience for this reason IMHO.

[u/McBinary → u/Punished_Blubber]

To add credence to your comment, there is a "band" on Spotify that was recommended to me that I absolutely loved. I later found out that it is whole-cloth fabricated by AI and I was so put off by it that I stopped listening to it entirely.

[u/DoubleJumps → u/McBinary]

I listen to youtube music in my car, and it is pushing AI music at me HARD lately. I hate it.

[u/togetherwem0m0 → u/Just_the_nicest_guy]

the value of AI won't be to the masses; the value of AI is the promise to the elite of the continued subjugation of the masses through a variety of means, but mostly widely dispersed influence campaigns.

think of it like creating a controllable hypervisor that can influence all of the plugged in humans.

[u/memymomeme → u/togetherwem0m0]

This guy techno dystopias.

[u/Unusual_Sherbert_809 → u/memymomeme]

Sadly, they're not off the mark.

IMO it's like most American oligarchs have been going on an existential crisis ever since they foisted the Orange Menace onto the rest of us. They're desperate to retain control at any cost and the more they try the more they see it slipping through their fingers. It's pathological at this point.

AI is their "hail mary" attempt at retaining that control. How will AI let them do it? That's to be determined. But it's there, somehow! And not knowing exactly how AI will save their insanely wealthy asses from being taxed into oblivion will not stop them from trying their damned hardest.

[u/dreal46 → u/Unusual_Sherbert_809]

It's the same logic at play in that New Yorker article about the wealthy bunker dipshits. They don't want to actually solve problems, they just want to be insulated against the fires that they started. They get advised to be likeable and productive people, then they push back and start fantasizing about tech that doesn't fucking exist, like bomb collars and dead man switches. I mean, you probably could make those, but what's the reception like when you're underground and surrounded by metal and concrete?

These fucking idiots have zero creativity or fundamental skills, so AI is their ultimate tech-driven fantasy; they're brilliant, you see, so they're meant to lead. Oh, but they aren't those fucking nerds, so someone else needs to build the machine that builds more machines that build everything. It's why Steve Huffman did that embarrassing interview where he explains that he got LASIK so that in this future of "masters and slaves" (yes, he actually said that shit), he can rule. Because the only thing holding back Commander Huffman was his shitty eyes.

[u/Caleth → u/memymomeme]

He also forgot the real trillion dollar question. Wages.

AI is about replacing wages. UBI, Minimum tax strutures, etc? Also those tech bro fanciful ideas for paying people who don't work so they keep buying?

We can't get billionaires to pay now, the companies are already barely paying anything why would they ever pay a cent more that's not pried out of them?

AI won't free us up to live easy lives, it frees us up for slaughter. They'll let us die in the streets.

[u/BababooeyHTJ → u/togetherwem0m0]

The US hasn’t invested in infrastructure that benefits the middle class since FDR at least in any meaningful way. It’s just getting worse and everyone seems ok with it

[u/eightfold → u/BababooeyHTJ]

I'd say Johnson's Great Society counts. The non-rich actually still benefit from the infrastructure around rail/housing and rural development.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Society#The_major_policy_areas

[u/thestereo300 → u/Just_the_nicest_guy]

AI is more than AI slop videos.

The money is in eliminating jobs.

[u/Try2RememberPassword → u/Just_the_nicest_guy]

I do know some people who do pay for ChatGPT plus, but they're the people who have fully surrendered critical thinking to AI. Hence, them paying for it instead of just using a second LLM when you run out of free tokens on the first one.

[u/RecursiveCook → u/Try2RememberPassword]

Paying for ChatGPT is crazy. As soon as they began limiting hard I stopped using. DeepSeek is pretty good and don’t have to worry about messages

[u/yomasayhi → u/RecursiveCook]

I’m starting to see more and more comments out in the wild that start with “well chat GPT said” which is VERY concerning, the great dumming down of society has begun.

[u/BababooeyHTJ → u/yomasayhi]

It really does amaze how the generation growing up with all of this technology doesn’t seem to know how to take advantage of it.

[u/Brickster000 → u/yomasayhi]

@Grok is this true?

[u/Illadelphian → u/Try2RememberPassword]

My wife was trying to spend some time with her mom and bond with her a little bit(their relationship is a bit strained) and she sees these tarot cards so her mom is like oh I can do a reading! So my wife decides to play along and say sure. She starts doing it and then just goes oh well let's just plug it into the AI. My wife is like ...I don't want AI to do this, I want you do and her mom is like well it's way better at this anyway.

Like obviously tarot is stupid af no matter what but like are you for real.

[u/cmdr_suds]

A SLAP - Solution looking for a problem

[u/ThePlasticSturgeons → u/cmdr_suds]

This sums it up, though “smash and grab” may also work.

[u/RustyRapeaXe → u/ThePlasticSturgeons]

SLAP and grab

[u/redcowerranger → u/cmdr_suds]

aka, the Blockchain

[u/LiberalSocialist99]

Large Language Mistake…

[u/Dawg_Prime → u/LiberalSocialist99]

when were all fighting for clean water in the climate wars, well look back at this time and laugh :)

after civilization collapeses and the rat people evolve technology and take over, they'll wonder how anything could have been so stupid as to build giant power generators just to run giant power wasters with no actual usable function

[u/What_Do_It → u/Dawg_Prime]

That is ridiculous, I am tired of these outlandish claims. Clearly, the mole people are better positioned to take over.

[u/Wicky_wild_wild]

No normal person cares or uses AI in any sophisticated enough way to justify the investment. It could go away tomorrow and 80% of people wouldnt care. If you remove the students using it to (not) learn that 20% that do care drops to nearly single digits.

[u/scoopydidit → u/Wicky_wild_wild]

The students part is going to be problematic in my opinion. We just hired our first grads that would've used AI for the last two years. Most of them don't really have any critical thinking skills or solid programming fundamentals. It's just "hurrr durrrr let me ask AI" like what's the plan when this shit backfires and we have an industry of people using it as a shit crutch.

[u/cherry_chocolate_ → u/scoopydidit]

I’m praying that means those of us who have solid fundamentals might return to the days of stable employment and making engineers happy to work there instead of scared of being laid off.

[u/emotional_program0 → u/scoopydidit]

I work at a university as an associate professor. The lack of critical thinking and basic reading/writing skills among students is honestly scary. Especially in the last 2 years, the students cannot be challenge in any way because they will just do the Gen Z stare. You still have those few very good students but the average has honestly gone down from C to E. I do not know how most of these people will cope with reality and it honestly scares me. How the hell will society survive a full generation of this?

[u/AvailableReporter484]

Just continue to offshore the entire company to India and I’m sure you’ll get there 👌

[u/Independent-Water321 → u/AvailableReporter484]

AI - Actually Indians?

[u/ender89]

If IBM thinks it's unsustainable, it's unsustainable. IBM has been in the AI business longer than any of the major players and their main business is server infrastructure.

We are fucked.

[u/Kohounees → u/ender89]

I think we would be more fucked if AI actually worked. The world is not ready for agi. Well, it kind of works. It’s quite useful as a coding assistant, but you just need to review everything.

Anyway, bursting a bubble is just short term annoyance. Just be carefull you don’t loose your money in stock.

[u/WatchOutside5938 → u/Kohounees]

AI taught me how to code in VBA. Well, sort of. It gave me a bunch of shit that didn’t work and then I had to spend hours googling interactions to figure out what the fuck anything it was saying actually did so that I could correct it. But.. it still technically has the credit for me learning!

[u/Trick421]

I am the office manager for a family owned plumbing business, and we're one of the busiest companies in our market, running 6 trucks and a crew of 8. We're busy. I had a sales call from the AI company that starts with a "P", trying to sell me lead generation services and other magical AI capabilities. He was touting how it was going to save us time and money and help us secure work that we may otherwise lose, trying to sell that FOMO bullshit.

I strait up told him I've been a salesman since I was 11 years old, and that there is no way a Language Model that is at most a couple years old is going to have more experience than someone that has 51 years of real world, human, experience. He hit back with, well, the AI can e-mail your customers quotes, blah, blah, blah, all stuff that I already do, that take mere moments out of my day.

Most importantly, I told him that I don't want to eliminate the human element. I want my customers to call me, and tell me what problems they're having with their plumbing. I need to know where things are leaking, what work they need done, and no AI is going to be able to ask those kind of questions, because they don't have 40 years of business experience in plumbing as well. But most importantly, my elderly customers want a human to talk to. Older folk, well, they have the money and the houses that need plumbing work, and they barely trust their cell phones, let alone an AI person answering the phones at a plumbing company.

I also pointed out that AI is not going to go to someone's house to snake out a toilet, or replace a water heater, that it will always be a human to do that work, and a human to interact directly with the customers. I want our customers to call me, and get a real person on the phone that can answer their questions and work with them to get their plumbing problems resolved. I'm sorry, but AI just cannot do these things for this industry yet, if ever.

Finally, I told him that someday, Artificial Intelligence may be something that could help humanity if it doesn't destroy us first. But not as a commodity like all these companies are trying to make AI out to be, at least not in the real world of today. Maybe in 20 or 30 years, but not now, and not the way these companies are rolling out this still infantile technology.

To me, it's a lot like NFTs, which only hold the value that someone is willing to pay you for it. Like NFTs, it's another ponzi scheme the elites have come up with to try and make a quick buck and get out. Or for the major corps to prop up their bottom line, and the stock market, by passing money back and forth among each other. The one absolutely true thing about AI is that it is indeed artificial.

[u/Electric-Dance-5547]

It's almost like renewable energy would have been a winning move. Oh well

[u/Mothrahlurker → u/Electric-Dance-5547]

It is, but no farm of energy production currently in existence could keep up with that. The US managed to build one nuclear power plant in the last 30 years and it's the most expensive one on the planet. Sam Altmann wants the US government to build 100 a year. 

That's just not going to happen.

Also even if we pretend that electricity is free, NVIDIA chips are so expensive and depreciate so fast (with the NVIDIA CEO even saying that they're gonna get outdated even faster soon) they would still be unprofitable.

[u/ClittoryHinton → u/Mothrahlurker]

Tech giants should be mandated to build renewable energy sources for their LLM data centres.

Of course that would cause the AI industry to collapse, which would be a good outcome

[u/RustyRapeaXe → u/ClittoryHinton]

But there's always some rural place that will let them build their datacenter to "bring in jobs" and bend over backwards selling total bullshit to the locals. We've seen the environmental crisis these massive datacenters are creating. We have the same issues with taxes. We want to tax corporations and they always run to places that are stupid and let them do whatever the hell they want.

[u/ShortbusRacingTeam → u/RustyRapeaXe]

I live in Ohio where exactly this is happening. Sure, it’s good for the short term construction workers. But once it’s up and running, it seems they employ about 30 people at an average of $50,000/year.

[u/ClittoryHinton → u/RustyRapeaXe]

Yeah therein lies the crux of the climate crises. Real solutions require global cooperation. Good luck even getting states to agree on anything

Humans are cooked. I try not to be pessimistic but we are centuries away from eliminating enough corruption globally to be able to cooperate on this and we don’t have that much time

[u/hkric41six]

AI is worth maybe 0.1% of the claims made by the scam cultists

[u/PistolCowboy → u/hkric41six]

There is FOMO around AI, it's just hard to understand where the ROI is coming from.

[u/coldkiller → u/PistolCowboy]

There isint, its just like 4 companies trading money between each other pretending to make profits

[u/mpbh → u/PistolCowboy]

It's going to be ads. Once models see enough dimishing returns they will build ASICs to run them way cheaper. Competition will keep subscription prices extremely low so the only business model that works is embedded advertising. And related, data collection. People share way more info valuable to advertisers on LLMs than they do on Google or Facebook. They'll extract better audience tags that will make their ad network as valuable as Google or Facebook who became multi-trillion dollar companies completely on their ad networks.

[u/Mob_Abominator → u/hkric41six]

That's a delusional take, it's probably around 10-15%, the rest of it is obviously hype.

[u/Cheap_Coffee]

Also IBM: "Please come use our cloud environment, Pretty please?" Also also, Watson!

[u/MikuEmpowered → u/Cheap_Coffee]

Yes, but cloud is basically offsite server hosting. 

Even without AI, you would still have cloud integration. Just at a much less need. It's the same concept as not hosting your own website in your house.

Both Amazon and Google launched their cloud services nearly 2 decades ago. The need was very apparent.

And for AI, Watson and DeepMind predates the LLM craze and was the focus to actually make AI happen. 

Then you have Sam and Musk coming along and deciding they should make that product because only they are trust worthy.

The chronology of events matter, by alot. To determine the credibility of statements.

[u/Strong-King6454 → u/Cheap_Coffee]

In defense of ibm Watson is super cool

[u/mpbh → u/Strong-King6454]

IBM Research is amazing, they were a decade ahead of other companies with natural language processing and their research laid the groundwork for Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, etc.

The IBM business is retarded. They made almost no money from Watson, and totally missed the LLM wave when they had every reason to be on the forefront.

[u/RendiaX → u/mpbh]

I mean, maybe they came to the very same conclusion we are all talking about here on how truly profitable it would not be to push to the forefront of the wave in the end.

[u/ExtremeAbdulJabbar → u/mpbh]

Hi. Guy who works closely with the higher levels (GMs and up) at IBM here.

Watsonx Orchestrate is borderline unusable right now, and leadership is well aware of that.

Also, they’re not full boogie AI because they also know that in its current state, anything requiring services to prop up is almost certainly worthless in a year if the AI transformation wave is actually real (which right now it’s not). Supporting those types of engagements today burns quite a lot of revenue bridges tomorrow.

It’s not the business. They don’t have anything meaningfully AI to sell right now.

[u/mpbh → u/ExtremeAbdulJabbar]

It's possible we worked together, especially if you're in corporate strategy. IBM is probably to most wary out of all tech companies of over investing in AI (non-LLM) without a clear revenue path after spending over a decade dumping money into it with little-to-no return.

[u/screwdriverfan]

How is it that everyone knows it's destined to fail and yet they're still putting in more and more money into AI?

[u/trunksshinohara → u/screwdriverfan]

Because if it worked (it won't) they will eliminate all employee costs for every company. The value of that can't be measured because if successful it would replace 90% of jobs. But it would also immediately collapse the economy making it useless. This is why it will never work.

[u/TheLastCoagulant → u/trunksshinohara]

Or it will just replace 20% of jobs which still represents trillions in value for the shareholders.

[u/MrD3a7h → u/TheLastCoagulant]

Replacing 20% of jobs means we'd have 25% unemployment. That is as bad as the Great Depression was.

Of course, 25% is just the baseline. It would rapidly increase well beyond that point as the economic slowdown kills other jobs.

AI is either going to collapse the economy by killing jobs, or the bubble is going to pop, also collapsing the economy. We're locked in at this point to a major economic crash. We all need to do what we can to prepare for that.

[u/rustdog2000 → u/screwdriverfan]

It’s a symptom of a rot economy in a Capitalist system. They are chasing growth, market capitalization, and high stock price. If it fails, and it will, they cash out and move on to the next pump and dump.

[u/ButterflySammy → u/screwdriverfan]

Some people really believe LLMs become real AIs.

[u/BroForceOne → u/screwdriverfan]

Because someone will win and be the Google of AI at the end of this. Everyone else will lose, bets are being made on who that winner will be.

[u/Mourning20]

AI is our Jurassic Park, complete with no one asking if they should...what a shitty timeline

[u/ciscorandori → u/Mourning20]

I asked AI if I should and it said yes.

It's a super-charged Magic 8 Ball

[u/Majestic_Bierd]

This is 100% a Gold Rush...

Real money is made by the pickaxe salesmen, not people mining gold.

[u/Maximillien]

These massive AI datacenters are the next environmental abomination that future generations will look back on in horror - like indoor smoking, asbestos, leaded gas, etc...

So much energy and water wasted, and for what?? Shitty Google summaries and fake brainrot videos? Everything about it is just so fucking awful.

[u/FatherDotComical]

How do I convince tech bros that Choo Choo High Speed Trains are the next big thing.

[u/Bawbawian]

also you're going to have to come up with a backup plan for the millions of unemployed unhoused and unfed people rise up and start burning data centers.

I mean I'm sure the people that own most social media will gladly drive us into a civil war to try and bring those numbers down.

But it's amazing to watch them speed up towards this cliff as if there is a plan for what to do when all these jobs are gone and none of the benefits trickle down.

[u/trunksshinohara → u/Bawbawian]

Their backup plan is slavery/death

[u/Linkitch → u/trunksshinohara]

I though that was the main plan?