Log in | Sign up

How else are they going to begin to recap their billions and billions of debt? Someone has to pay for all those data centres, all that hardware, all that power, etc etc etc. It will be the companies that have come to rely on AI.

Sure, for now, AI is a lot cheaper than an intern, but it doesn’t become an expert like a human does. And Amazon used to be cheaper than other retailers right up until they had achieved vast market share.

This cannot be the last 10x price multiplier they pull. Not even close. Firstly they’re way, way, way off from recouping their costs, and secondly, they’re still way, way off market value for an incompetent human intern who isn’t learning much.

Uber didn’t enter the market to open up taxis to new drivers and bring down prices, that was marketing. They entered the market to take a cut out of ever taxi fare in the world, and drive up prices at peak times to many times the agreed fares, especially in regulated areas.

Similarly, AI didn’t enter the coding market to drive down prices and enable greater access for folk to generate code. They entered the coding market to receive the wages of programmers and drive up prices in in-demand fields. They are not unaware of how much companies pay devs. Why else would they have spent all those billions in advance? Where is the payback coming from?

Your brain.

I assume those costs are closer to the real cost to provide the service, ouch!

Not even close. Most AI companies are making something like 95% loss according to an article here a bit ago. So if you’re an AI provider, you need to multiply prices by 25 before you even begin to eat into your insane levels of debt.

AI has the same relationship to truth and trust that former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has: truth is absolutely not part of the equation whatsoever, except in as much as it may be necessary to say some true things in order to establish trust.

Giving such an entity executive power is to ignore a vast and ever growing body of information that you ought not to trust, yet here you are, hanging over the keys to the plausible-sounding nonsense monger.

What about Nigel Farage? Well of course, he’s an absolute liar, a man who chose the dark side decades ago, who knows he’s in the wrong but strangely thinks it’s somehow bad to try to do good.

Boris isn’t a liar or evil in the conventional sense, it’s just that he absolutely wouldn’t dream of letting whether something is true or good be part of decision-making any more than he would lock himself in a cage in public for the week, consult with ants about his route to work or hop on one leg all the time.

So it is with AI.

I enjoyed these two sentences so much.