I’m under the impression that Google deliberately hinders their YouTube platform just because you have ad-blockers. With videos taking time to buffer, seems to signal this, because it almost makes up nearly the amount of time for when ads take if you had to watch them. So since you’re ad-blocking and they don’t like that, they’ll make your experience miserable until you want to pay their service or not use ad-block.
I suspect that OpenAI is on a path to spend as much money on data centers and hardware as possible so they can go bankrupt and sell those assets to Microsoft for pennies on the dollar.
It’s a scheme to filter billions and billions of dollars around the “AI everything” hype train directly into Microsoft’s coffers.
My assumption is that the goal of most modern tech giants is to become “too big to fail” and be bailed out like many banks were post 2008.
Bailouts only happen to companies with loads of employees. An AI company with loads of employees is an oxymoron!
Bailouts happen when the overall economic effect of letting a company fail would be more painful than using tax dollars to save it.
The number of employees at the institution in trouble is a factor, as it was with some of the banks in 2008, but think of all the wild deals AI companies are making for memory, hard drives, and data center construction. Each of those adds to the bottom line of other companies and their suppliers and subcontractors. If those contracts aren’t honored, many of those smaller companies lower down on the food chain are going to suffer, possibly go out of business, putting their employees out of work. And that’s not even considering the effect it’ll have on hedge funds and other financial institutions that hold stock in AI.
If it seems insane for AI companies to commit to huge purchases and massive projects before they have a clear revenue stream, it’s probably because it is, but if they can inflate the bubble enough they effectively hold both the US and global economy hostage. Since the US government clearly favors business over people, and so many tech companies have swung right to appease the orange lump currently in office, they stand a pretty good chance of getting bailed out and later subsidized in the event of a crash.
Oh no, it’s actually much worse.
These LLM datacenters are basically useless for anything but running LLMs. You can’t use them for any other cloud software, because all the electronics were specifically made for running LLMs. Really, the only thing that will still be useful is the concrete building and the power and data lines coming in.
No, the actual reason why hundreds of billions of dollars are being spent is because of three things.
AI boosters (Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, etc) are excellent liars and great storytellers, and rich people eat that shit up.
rich people invest money by the bucket load, and everyone else notices. Stocks go up and everyone notices that LLM stocks go up, making people buy them making stocks go up because surely, something popular must also be good and useful.
The people investing money into these lies want to see it happen, so they tell their pet CEOs to implement LLMs and reward them for implementing LLMs. Not for getting a use out of it, but for applying it.
So we get a bunch of people benefitting in the form of massive bonusses for implementing LLMs and pushing the use of LLMs, despite it actually not doing anything useful and being actively detrimental in most cases. All to make the stock line go up, unlocking more bonusses for the ultra rich.
But the LLM itself is pointless. It doesn’t even matter if it does anything. It’s just a vehicle to inflate fake numbers.
Oh shit, yeah I also was thinking about how the people paying for these huge investments might not be the ones to profit from the venture finally, if it ever pays for itself.
The other factor to consider is the US government is going to bail them out, that is just absolutely going to happen, but I think you are on to something, idk whom is going to be the beneficiary exactly though.
Embrace, extend and extinguish.
An interesting theory, but I think the key question that needs to be answered is: why would OpenAI stakeholders be prepared to tank the company for Microsoft?
I’m not saying it’s impossible. There could be some sort of tie between Altman and Microsoft, or the high level executives or shareholders of OpenAI.
And who would be left holding the bag? NVIDIA? Is this a scheme to get them to make a ton of AI-centered GPU’s, so that when OpenAI goes down Microsoft would be able to buy that hardware super cheap? Maybe, but then again someone else could too, which would be easier if OpenAI’s assets were on the open market.
I’m not buying this theory yet, but it’s kntriguing enough to keep an eye on at least.
I guess in this situation the upper mgmt are in on the deal and under MSFT’s thumb and get to earn top dollar and be a special boy CEO for a few years.