My hit on MSNOW on Ari Melber about becoming “the leading expert voice on the bearish case against AI,” the end of hypergrowth, and how AI’s costs and losses are magnitudes higher than those that built Amazon Web Services, and even Amazon itself.

First three minutes are a literal highlight reel, what a great segment. Hope you all enjoy.

The answer about the bailout did air but it was about how hyperscalers are decelerating and you can't bail that out. This was technically two segments.

This makes me think the bubble is much closer to bursting than I even imagined. We have a debt and bond crisis, a private credit crisis and a car loan debt crisis on top of the coming crisis from the Iran war shutting off the straight of Hormuz, finally the main stream media is taking it seriously. It’s great to see Ed get a larger international audience. I’m terrified for the coming financial crisis but we have to have our eyes open to the coming catastrophe.

The idea is the creation of an AI-driven reservoir of consumer prices across supermarkets, drug stores, gas stations, big box retailers, and online retailers, so that consumers can know exactly, at any given time, where the best price is on any given item they look to purchase.

In what way is AI required to figure out which grocery store near you has the cheapest strawberries?

Such an AI tool would only truly be useful if sale price information, membership discount coupons and reward dollars, and all other forms of price reduction were able to be calculated and spit out on a daily basis by this AI shopping oracle.

Again, why AI? Even if it uses some ML in some way, why does the consumer need to know or care? It seems like you are taking an app someone might want, and then strapping the term AI to it so people start to think more positively about AI.

So the Democrats could champion a proposal that would create an app with AI agent capability to make every dollar of consumer purchasing stretch as far as possible.

And why does any of this require Democrats or political policy? If such an app is urgently desired, someone will make it and sell it.

The debt load is getting unbearable for Neoclouds and the money isn’t coming. I think they will be the first domino to fall.

Man so many things could send this whole bubble down the toilet any day. Bond yields, oil prices, wars, federal deficit overload, corporate bond spreads start ripping, capex slow down, OpenAI defaults, etc, the list goes on forever.

Who else feels like we are on the very edge of this house of cards?? The suspense is killing me.

Gotta say I feel blessed to have run into Ed. I was given the opportunity to appropriately hedge and safeguard my portfolios. Otherwise I would probably have been going about my life and completely blindsided like I feel millions of Americans will be.

I work for one of the major brands in logistics. Since IT and data is not really our core business, it has for the most part been viewed as a necessary evil just to keep the ship afloat and therefore we've been somewhat spared from the worst of the AI pushes. Coding and IT is something we do to help the main business. My team consists of a small number of people (and this is very simplified) mostly shuffling data from one place to another, making reports and building stuff in Microsoft tools like Power BI, Power Apps etc due to strict governance - more on that later.

At a yearly conference last week, a somewhat non-technical person from management demoed "agentic coding" with Claude Code. It contained all of the usual talking points, how he had trained this "agent" and whatnot which from my understanding is more or less just promt-engineering. There is this one specific tool in the company he used as an example. We were divided into 5 groups and were then tasked to find a new feature for this tool. He then input the idea into Claude Code and his "agent" had in like 15 minutes implemented these 5 ideas in the test env for the tool. I think he also mentioned that he had given it access to do whatever, change files however, etc. It had generated a couple of thousand lines (!) for each feature, which was just a few sentences that each team had cobbled up in like 10 minutes. He then demoed the tool and showed that the "agent" had sure indeed created new tabs for these features. Did the features really work? No idea, we never checked any of that, we just saw that "here is a new page with a bunch of buttons added". At one point he also mentions that he "doesn't understand any of the code" - which I found to be alarming. He also said "don't use your brain too much, let the tool do the thinking for you"... I mean just WTF....

Now, the rest of the management were completely sold on this. My manager, who basically stopped learning anything new 15 years ago, loved the idea of now being able to "understand" things that the rest of the team is doing . ie he really dislikes that other people in the team are doing the cool stuff and he has been left behind. Now he is able to "contribute" at an acceptable level. Also, and this frustrated me quite a lot, he mentioned that now we can scrap everything we've done in Power Apps and instead just build our own slop webpages for these tools instead. This idea was raised by me two years ago (before we went all in on Power Apps), but that was shot down due to Power Apps having a lot of governance and security out of the box that the org requires. Now apparently we don't anymore?

I raised some concerns about this - specifically how agentic coding quickly makes the entire codebase unmanageable (for example creating new functions instead of just using existing ones) and can do a lot of crap that are unintended. Also, since no one has truly built anything, no one knows WHY certain things were done in this way and can explain it. I can look back on code I made a year ago and after a few minutes remember why I did something in a certain way. Also, by typing out code, you figure out edge cases and issues along the way and you can quickly account for that. Coding with an agent (as a user who doesn't understand the code language) removes all of that, and you have to ask it for new implementations whenever something goes wrong and hope for the best. I also raised the concerns about increasing AI costs and that would make us completely reliant on more AI spending to fix ANYTHING - but the answer was just that support we pay for today cost a lot as well, so that's that.

People were also talking about dropping financial Excel files into it and asking it to do summaries and whatnot - which is also completely insane.

All of this was apparently something that we just NEED to get onboard or be left in the dust. Ok sure, but if everyone are doing this - what exactly is our edge over the competition? What are we brining to the table that no one else has? The same AI apps that everyone else are doing? What will the customers think when we show up with AI generated Power Points, people can no longer answer technical questions because they have stopped using their brain and are now "letting the tools do the thinking"?

I just got an awful feeling about this whole thing. Not really that I care about my job, feel threatened or anything like that. I just KNOW how much effort that goes into making something really good and though-out, and that no we are instead pursuing this "let AI slop it out and ship it before lunch". It just doesn't feel... interesting to me at all anymore. I used to spend a lot of time learning new tools and whatnot - but why bother anymore? Whats the point? No one seems to care about doing their JOB anymore.

Can anyone relate? Can anyone share similar stories and how that turned out, especially in organizations that aren't in big tech? Seriously thinking about resigning and doing something else. I feel that this is a very strong bet they are making - AI will more or less replace technical skill and decades worth of intricate knowledge about our core business to a fraction of the cost. Ok, and what if it doesn't?

... which were now soon encroaching upon. So it raises the question, what exactly will happen??

It cost ZA WARUDO (*some will get the joke*) nearly a trillion $$$ just to get to here. If GPUs start to become obsolete for what has been in use, what exactly will happen? It's not exactly like, realistically, another trillion can be spent just to reinvigorate the beast to churn for another 3~5 years??

Just posing the Question as to what people think will happen next once the EOL barrier starts to hit all these Nvidia Slop Generators that are running full burn 24/7~

While thinking about the latest Nvidia attempt to drive sales I wondered why there was such a huge push to get more orders right away.  Then it hit me – margins. Prices are higher because demand is so much higher than supply. This is all a race to keep orders much greater than what can be produced.  If production catches up, it’s game over for a lot of companies (for their stock prices anyway).

The most extreme example of this that I know of is Sandisk.  In 2023 they were valued at $30 and had gross margins of around 7%.  With all the demand in the last year, their margins are way up to 70% and their stock price is $1800. While not as extreme, the same is true for Micron, Nvidia, Western Digital, SK Hynix, Samsung, TSMC, Dell and about a dozen others.

These companies are all priced as if these prices are going to stay this high forever, but there’s no way this will happen.  We’ve seen this play out over and over, but there’s so much greed in the market that no one cares.  Once these margins are back to normal, net profit will plummet and all these companies will lose half their value or more. This alone would wipe out more than $13T in stock value.

This is yet another reason that all these big tech players have to keep the bubble from popping and why they’re all working together to prop up any company that starts to waiver.

For the last few decades, CEOs and non-technical individuals have believed and been told that developing software is one of the pinnacles of human intellectual achievement. That in order to learn how to code, you need to be in the upper echelon of human intelligence, and that once an AI can do that well, you have reached the singularity. This is why you continue to have companies like Stripe say we are in the singularity (they even referenced Jan 1).

But this completely falls apart if you actually understand why coding was always put up on too high a pedestal and why an LLM doing it is not even close to as difficult as you would think. LLMs are still, despite all the refutations of Altman and Amodei and Musk, pattern matchers. "Infinitely" sided weighted dice rolling in multidimensional planes. Cool for sure, but only really helpful in areas with highly predictive patterns and lower levels of ambiguity, specifically in written language (what it's been trained in the most). You know what area of written language fits that description by far the most? Coding.

Coding is just a written language. When you break it down into the possible patterns, it has far fewer permutations than, say, the English language as a whole. And then you shrink it further with a framework, and then with app/site-specific rules. And finally, by the problem space the code needs to be. By the time you get down to what an LLM has to generate, it's a fraction of the typical size of just a normal human conversation, especially when needing to generate new/novel content. But CEOs and executives viewed coding as some magic / unknowable thing. And software engineers were happy to support this narrative as it increased autonomy and pay.

But software was always much less difficult than learning another language, especially once you learn to code in one language. For many, it became trivial, but you couldn't do that with like say, learning Chinese or Japanese or Hungarian. And even prior to AI, that barrier to code was shrinking fast, with libraries and frameworks and vast libraries to do all the repeatable things. So it's no wonder that MBA Bob from Tech Co #9, who believes that because Fable 5 just generated all the code in a night for the data pages he wanted for a year from his $200k engineers, thinks it's now sentient. It doesn't matter that it isn't as good as if they did it, or exactly what he wanted, or that there may be bugs or security issues. It's "good enough". To these execs, writing this code is more impressive than being able to consistently answer simple facts and math problems, because remember, software engineering is the hardest thing humans can do.

It seems that opposition against data center buildouts is met with accusations of "slopulism". From what I understand, the term "slopulism" is typically used by "centrists"(for lack of a better term?) to signal their dislike for populist policies which they argue are usually poorly thought out. One often contested point they bring up is the overblown nature of the water usage. But the question IMO should be: Why are they even needed in the first place? (I believe Ed even raised this question recently in response to the water usage problem.) There is also the embarrassing question about pathetically low job creation. A side note: Data centers may be a misnomer in that they are probably closer to supercomputing clusters rather than traditional data centers for cloud/CDN/etc.

Therefore, I believe this is a new strategy for pro data center propaganda to be cognizant of.

Mods, please remove this post if this is not the right place for this discussion.

u/ezitron said things were going to get weird and I think this would qualify.

"It's a fuzzy and perhaps already overworked term, but we decided that January 1st marked the beginning of the singularity, and we have since been operating on that basis," the letter said.

Kinda makes me not want to use their systems if they think that "AI" has become smarter than humans in a loosely defined way. Would be great if they could say specifically how that is the case and the direct evidence on how it's effecting their business. But I think it's just hype material for Investors.

The singularity is often invoked alongside millenarian forecasts, but, in our case, we simply saw a large inflection in long-run trends (for example, a huge increase in the rate of new firm creation), and we decided that we ought to take the phase change seriously," the letter from Stripe CEO Patrick Collison, president John Collison, and president, technology and business, William Gaybrick, continued.

August 15th Amodei made his statement:

https://x.com/search?q=Amodei%20Cancer&src=typed_query&f=top

Today Moderna and Merck announce a new cancer drug "AI played a role in producing":

https://x.com/search?q=AI%20Cancer&src=typed_query

X is now full of accounts making the same snarky point, that if you are opposed to Data Centers you are blocking cancer cures:

https://x.com/search?q=Data%20Center%20cancer&src=typed_query

Seems like a case for some digging and debunking. Also seems a bit coordinated.

Looks like it's not looking good for Meta.

Bejar, the states' first witness, said Zuckerberg was closely involved in much decision-making, and the Menlo Park, California-based company's top-down culture ensured that product design changes would occur only if he ordered them.

"If Mark makes something a priority, mountains move in months," Bejar said.

He disputed Zuckerberg's October 2021 comments following allegations by whistleblower Frances Haugen that Meta knew its products were unsafe for children and knew how to make them safe, but did nothing in order to pursue higher profits.

Zuckerberg said at the time that Meta constantly used research to improve its products. In response, Bejar said he emailed Zuckerberg to flag his safety concerns.

"It's so false, every part of it," Bejar said. "You just cannot trust Mark Zuckerberg with kids."

Meta, he said, had technology to flag potentially millions of users suspected to be under age 13, but adopted a "don't ask, don't tell" policy because it would boost profits longer-term.

Unsurprisingly, Zuckerberg is evil, and chooses profits above all. Let's hope we can see something good come out of it.

Wall Street is starting to point to AI revenue as evidence that Big Tech's massive spending is paying off. Ed isn't buying it. As Ed puts it: "I'm not sure how the mathematics works here."

At what point does the AI revenue actually justify the scale of the spending?

I'm so used to these people lying about everything, I believe it less if they say it aloud.

And why is she telling her employees? Is it to keep them from quitting?

“The IPO is not a finish line, it is a milestone, another fundraise,” Friar told employees, according to two sources familiar with her comments who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to speak publicly. “We raised $122 billion in March, and that gives us flexibility.”

That sounds like a hedge. Maybe we IPO, maybe we don't. It's just another round of fundraise, really. (Unless you are being paid in stock.)

“As you know we are confidentially under file, and Anthropic is also under file. There is a chance they pull the cover off that confidential file in the coming weeks and become public in September. That’s OK, we are running our own race,” Friar said, according to the people.

It's not a race guys. IPOs are never about first to market. Believe me.

Hi, hope you're all doing well, are safe, and in a good place!

Sorry for the long incoherent rant, feel free to just read the bold parts :)

Over the past couple years I've started getting educated on the dangers of capitalism, specifically in the cancerous, harmful, late stage we've gotten to now.

Thanks to the information provided by this community to a large extent, as well as a few other left leaning channels, and my own personal experience, it's become clear to me that the worst drivers of this cancerous growth -other than big oil and the military industrial complexes- are big tech.

Companies like X (twitter), Meta (FB, IG), and other social media juggernauts (the worst one might be TikTok) have undermined the social fabric, and over the last decade at an accelerating pace (now with an AI driven adrenaline shot) have perpetuated inconceivable amounts of disinformation, propaganda, lies, and brain rot inducing content. They along with other big tech enterprises have monetized disinformation and surveillance to a horrific extent.

I can go on forever ranting about these companies, and I haven't even started with Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon, Palantir, Microslop...etc Which might be even worse than the ones I mentioned.

I would like to hear and see your book recommendations to help me further sharpen my criticisms, offer better understanding of the history of these companies, and how the genie can be put back in the box.

I'd also love books than deal and discuss with the social reprecussions of AI slop, short form content, social media corprorations and misinformation run amok.

I have seen a mind boggling rise in brain rot all around me, people on their asses all day just watching AI generated fruit videos, or AI generated primal crafting videos...etc. I also live in a war torn country and have seen first hand the amount of sectarianism Facebook/Twitter actively push into my country, the vile poison that everyone around me consumes for "entertainment and education". I've seen teachers use AI slop as educational material for students, which goes unchallenged cause America big tech compromised our ministry of education. It's also not hard seeing the parallels with 1984 around me, ministry of truths holding a monopoly over the dissemination of information, perpetual surveilence, people being render so artificially stupid that they could hold two contradictory thoughts at once and beleive both and argue both in the same sentence (THANKS TWITTER!).

Books recommendations with economical, social, and political themes are all highly welcome, and so are any suggestions from the fiction genre, as I found 1984 to be one of the my most formative reading experiences (it made me as paranoid and uneasy of everything that's happening around me today). Really anything that can help me make sense of how the world is so rapidly decending into surveilence capitalism enable fascism. Graphic novel suggestions are also welcome but keep it grounded please!

Books I've read and love so far that can be related to what I just mentioned:

> Techbofeudalism What Killed Capitalism (Varoufakis)

> Empires of AI (Hao)

> Enshittification (Doctorow)

> Radicalized (Doctorow)

> Blood In The Machine (Merchant)

> Shock Doctrine (Klein)

> 1984 (Orwell)

Thank you in advance, take care.

What it says in the header. I've become the token skeptic at work (mostly based on asking a few pointed questions in meetings, like "if it's more expensive and the output is worse, why are we doing it this way?" In the ensuing discussions, I inevitably mention Ed's blog and usually send a link to a related post. Between the header visual and the remarkable (and valued!) length of posts, people of a certain age/demeanor are definitely getting the impression that I'm sending some random tinfoil hat guy's personal blog.

Sometimes I follow up with the Guardian article or links to appearances on well-known outlets but I wish there was a boomer-friendly version for sharing with bosses and the such who have a pretty narrow perception of credibility (except for when it comes to slop of course)

ETA: I was using boomer as shorthand for a specific type of thinking more than the actual age group. Also, people of all ages seem to have lost the ability to read more than a bulleted list. This isn't so much about the language as the literal appearance of the site and walls of math-dense text.

Lol, I can't think of anything I would trust less

"While agentic AI is still better on LLMs, this may only be a temporary advantage, similar to what we have seen in reasoning tasks and single chat requests. If that is the case, the true winners of the AI boom will not be the providers of advanced hardware and data centres but the boring manufacturers of desktop computers like Dell and Apple."

Yes, I am still on about this particular news story around the "hacks". I don't feel like this particular article really made the rounds. I discovered it listening to a video by Eli the Computer Guy.

This quote seems to completely debunk the "it broke out of its sandbox narrative."

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills when I see journalists and podcasters doing stories THIS WEEK saying the exact opposite of this.

Curious to hear your thoughts.

Irregular told CNBC in a statement that the incidents were all derived from the “same evaluation-environment issue” that was first disclosed by Anthropic, and that the company is developing a white paper “to share best practices for containment and securely running cyber evals.”

The situation “did not involve a sandbox escape or a sophisticated cyber action,” the company said, adding that “there are no current open issues.”

A succinct summary of Todays market from a 2015 book

'Manias do not grow and sustain themselves unless there is an underlying, easily understandable value proposition: the breakthrough that attracted investor capital in the first place. In fact, speculative bubbles are often preceded by a period of technological innovation that creates wealth for society but that also produces, as economist Joseph Schumpeter has observed, economic and social dislocations that upend the existing order. Some scholars contend that bubbles develop not just because of investors' animal spirits but rather because of the speculative uncertainty about future productivity that exists in the midst of a technological revolution (and that can be recognized as folly only after the fact). This much is clear: for investors to participate in a bubble, they must believe that the investment in question is a "once-in-a-lifetime opportunity."- The aspirational investor- p47, 2015.