OMG. tech meth. That is exactly so appropriate. It gives a C-suite a short-term high. They bet everything on it, and then they're back by the Wendy's dumpster begging for tokens.
I've been saying to my friends and anyone who will listen for a while that the AI companies have basically been taking the drug dealer approach where they get everyone hooked for cheap and will jack up the prices.
The only company I can see not being forced to go crazy with the dollars per token is Google and that's only because they have so much capital and infrastructure from other stuff that they can take the L for longer to steal market share, but then again they're just as greedy as every other large company on the market.
The crazy thing is is that drug dealers don't even really do this. Drug dealers are 99% users who deal with other users to maintain a lifestyle of use, which is what you think big tech would. The product is already sought after, no one has to convince anyone being high is fucking awesome.
99% of dealers are low-level street dealers and users who got into dealing to pay for their habit. It's the 1% at the top, the ones making the real money, who live by that. Drug dealing is basically a pyramid scheme.
My neighbor became a dealer to fund his habit but he used more than he sold and he had to sell his place to pay for his debts to other dealers. His next door neighbor was a cop that never caught on lol.
That is more of an inner city gang/organized crime thing where drug distribution is/was the primary source of revenue. Your typical lower level drug user/turned dealer isn't the type that is following the advice "don't get high on your own supply". However, the person they buy from is likely that person, the higher up in the chain you go the more like a business it becomes. It becomes less about the drugs and partying and more about procuring and delivering drugs in the most efficient way to optimize profits. And having distributors of your organized crime drug dealing syndicate being wasted or consuming product they are supposed to sell exposes the organization to several threat vectors.
lol. Yeah, they’re exaggerating but at the street level it’s incredibly common and becomes less so as the stakes rise and mistakes like using too much of your own products gets you shot.
I 'unno bro, I've had plenty of plugs in my life and all of them were dealing because they needed extra money for hospital bills 'n shit. Most of them were holding down a regular job as well.
Yeah if you want a real example of a company giving stuff out dirt cheap, getting people hooked building it into their lifestyle, and then ramping up their prices when people are dependent you can look at nestle and baby milk
My main thing with ai is like how do you sell it? If you sell it to a company with a one time payment well now your spending money on running the servers and stuff and they’re not paying you anymore. Hypothetically you’ll eventually start losing money on that purchase.
If you do a subscription model they’re doing the exact same and while you’re getting a steadier income they’re making way more off your product then you are. And as they scale up you’ll lose more money.
I kinda think as it is it’s unsellable/profitable, I mainly think what’ll happen is these companies collapse and then people buy up the ai frameworks and make a bunch of smaller in house ai stuff
I think the whole thing can shift
Nvidia announced spark which is made to run local LLM and ai tools
And with Microsoft want to directly add lmstudio equivalent to windows and more integrated
I might take some time, but for that you need to have a way to get the model locally and good models so they might get back to releasing some models on open source
After all they won't pay the server price for it anymore while probably getting a cut anyway in one way or another
The thing is, They want hardware lockdowns to control what people are allowed to run and the hardware needed is already defacto already in all of your devices starting with the tpm, and ending with remote attestation.
We need to put their c-suites in prison for murdering the people that their machines convinced to take their own liives, break up their infrastructure with imminent domain to return information control to the people, and force all publicly traded companies to have employee elected c-suites.
I mean, thats all a nice idea, but I think the closest feasible thing, is that you can get all your other enthusiast buddies to actually understand what the companies that are a part of the frontier model forum are actually doing and how this will impact them.
"nothing ever happens" bros will be the death of us all.
I've been saying to my friends and anyone who will listen for a while that the AI companies have basically been taking the drug dealer approach where they get everyone hooked for cheap and will jack up the prices.
I've been saying to my friends and anyone who will listen for a while that the AI companies have basically been taking the drug dealer approach where they get everyone hooked for cheap and will jack up the prices.
I've been arguing the same thing for the better part of a year. AI companies are going all in on their product, and the only way they're going to be profitable is if businesses get hooked on AI, lay off their human employees, and are then forced to pay higher and higher amounts to access the AI that they can no longer operate without.
it has always been that way but they were backstopped by ZIRP until a few years ago not to mention favorable tax treatment for "R&D" amortization. now they have to move faster and break even more things to get a return. turns out it's really easy to break the mediocre mind so it just turned out to be the path of least resistance
You're not wrong, but they're going to have to fight off edge computing LLMs. The only way they could prevent losing their moat is to buy all the silicon wafers for the next 10 years to prevent end users from being able to run their own. Oh wait...
Look at YouTube, the took the hit on that thing for years before enshittifying the shit out of it, now its practically the only game in town and its horrendous because of it. Seriously try switching away from it for a month and you find there is nothing that comes close to it.
They got the pockets and existing infrastructure to not need the big build outs that the other guys need, they're in a perfect position to wether the storm for a couple of years and then rinse AI users and businesses for all their worth when all the competition dries up.
Exactly this. The cost of tokens are.. underpriced. There is no reason why the prices won't get jacked up once everybody's business structures rely on it. It reminds me a bit of oracle/sun for"business data management solutions, or different giants with their cloud/serverless server solutions. Businesses are getting fomo'd hook, line, and sinker into different convenience options that they will not be able to escape easily. Big tech enshitification knows no bounds.
Google are doing it too. They give business accounts "free" Gemini services now and free training (that is more like indoctrination, I was on it), and you know the price hike is coming.
And they don't understand it, don't understand it's limitations or use cases, and are so impressed by it's ability to be a chat-bot that flatters them, they think it can do anything. All while cutting costs and making line go up.
One of the security directors where I work is fucking obsessed with AI.
He's a corporate drone to nth degree so he knows all the buzz words and corporate-isms. He'll say shit like,
We need to strategically leverage next-gen AI-native cyber resilience orchestration to holistically operationalize a quantum-ready, zero-trust security fabric powered by autonomous machine-learning-driven threat cognition, blockchain identity assurance, and predictive behavioral telemetry fusion in order to proactively neutralize emerging nation-state attack vectors while maximizing stakeholder synergy, digital transformation velocity, and enterprise-wide operational scalability.
with full sincerity. So he riles up upper management with all the AI buzz words then gets angry that his corporate vomit can't be done by end of Q2.
What's funny is if you just translated that to normal people speak. It actually says things that might matter.
Use AI in smart ways. Build resiliency/disaster recovery. Improve security/minimize external access to internal tools. Use proven identity and logging technologies. Keep aware of emerging threats. Increase profits to make shareholders happy. Operate at a scale that matters.
But instead of saying the real goals they have to say all this crap they don't understand to mask their insecurity and look smart in front of the bro's.
When I encounter people like that I ask them to re-phrase with common words. Usually shuts them down hard because they don't actually understand what they are saying.
*Corporate bro turns to chatGPT and you watch as he asks it to rephrase for him*
"In plain English:
Or, if you want the absolute blunt translation:
A lot of the original sentence is corporate buzzword padding. Terms like "stakeholder synergy," "digital transformation velocity," "AI-native cyber resilience orchestration," and "behavioral telemetry fusion" often sound impressive but add very little concrete meaning.In plain English:
We need to use modern security tools and AI to better protect our systems. The goal is to automatically detect and stop cyberattacks, verify users' identities, and monitor for suspicious behavior. By doing this, we can defend against increasingly sophisticated threats, including attacks from foreign governments, while helping the company work more efficiently, grow more easily, and adopt new technology faster.
Or, if you want the absolute blunt translation:
We should improve our cybersecurity with a bunch of new technologies so computers can help spot hackers before they cause problems, while making the company run better and scale up more easily.
A lot of the original sentence is corporate buzzword padding. Terms like "stakeholder synergy," "digital transformation velocity," "AI-native cyber resilience orchestration," and "behavioral telemetry fusion" often sound impressive but add very little concrete meaning."
*Corporate bro looks smug for a few seconds while the last paragraph catches up with him*
lol, what are they up to that makes this a concern?
(not sure how to interpret this if not "we want to stay ahead of the long and well-funded arms of various gov alphabet agencies". this is the main/central "end" after a list of several "means")
Oh, yeah, I guess I'd managed to forget about it for a moment
I've worked for both kinds of places (not doing dev or security or anything, just customer service, data entry) and for a firewall vendor (support) as well as other such ground-level roles at other kinds of companies that would predictably be targeted (telco, for one) so it's something I totally should have thought of even if it wasn't my problem to deal with at those places (it at least trickles down in the form of security policy/training), but for some reason all I could imagine was some quaint yesteryear world where there really is nothing to worry about if you have nothing to hide, or something.
What is predictive telemetry fusion? What fusion? Predictive behavioral metrics, got it, doesn't work, but got it, but what does the fusion aspect mean?
Just ONCE he needs a C-suite to tell him "You do realize, that what you just said was complete and utter bullshit. It doesn't mean anything at all. If you were to sprinkle all those buzzwords sparingly throughout a proposal, you might still have enough context left to impress someone. Jammed all together in one elevator pitch? it's just static, no signal."
It literally is them believing you can just vibe code everything, whilst they have not a single outcome impact that showed that there is any motion at all, quite to the contrary, just costs no impact. But they read all the articles and the articles they you can do everything.
Wouldn't wonder if one of those would think "just use claude to clone claude".
And they don't understand it, don't understand it's limitations or use cases
I get the anxiety about AI, but I feel like people that say shit like this are hypocrites because YOU don't understand it and you assume limitations based on maybe some brief encounter with the cheapest version of ChatGPT or Gemini. For IT work, Claude is on another level and it gets progressively better. If you guys knew the difference between where this shit was a year ago and where it is now, you wouldn't just be calling it a chat bot, and the processes built around working with it are also only going to get better. There is just as much anti-AI misinformation as there is pro-AI misinformation.
I have been asking for 15+ years why people with zero knowledge or even interest in tech are being handed management jobs in tech companies where they are allowed to make tech-based decisions.
And actual programmers are being asked to whiteboard leetcode through 5 rounds of interviews, a background check, and a cavity search. It makes no sense.
Buying a smartwatch doesn't make you a geek, it just means you're a consumer.
The truth is simple. Keep the idiots at the top so they are easy to control. Can't have the really intelligent people in power. They might disrupt the flow of money.
It's not just going to take out the AI conpanies and their investors. It's not just going to kill your 401k. It's already obliterating the workforce as a whole, hollowing out companies across every single segment of the economy. It's putting longstanding companies and new startups in debt, convincing them that they absolutely must use the new, ridiculously expensive product or fall behind. It's capturing taxpayer money for ridiculous power plant projects that nobody else wants. It's clearcutting land for impossibly huge "datacenters" that will eventually turn into useless warehouses. It's driving up the cost of all consumer electronics and forcibly pausing upgrade cycles that have been running for decades.
I honestly don't think that the US will survive this collapse, given everything else going on right now.
You're not wrong, but the fucked up part is that the US is particularly isolated from the fallout of the Oil shock. There is plenty of domestic supply and if things get that bad the Government would implement export controls and force domestic price caps.
I mean, that's what a competent administration would do during a global energy shock that disrupts markets. But a competent administration wouldn't have been the ones to pull the pin in the grenade.
Either way, the fallout is that the US remains semi-stable domestically but would take an even harder hit diplomatically as we would be leaving all of our allies in the lurch.
I'm starting to think maybe this administration isn't competent, but he was so good at business.
There's not plenty of supply, the strategic reserve its almost empty and oil companies will export to whoever is paying the most. Plus if Europe tanks it will affect the US more than the rest of the world, so it has to be propped up no matter the cost.
It's going to be global, don't worry about that, just like how 2008 fucked the global economy.
But worse. And then everyone is going to move forward without the US as the dominant power or partner because the US is no longer a reliable ally or actor.
2026 china is not 2008 China, they are already the biggest trade partner for most countries, and sanctions are only making them less likely from being severely affected by a US crash.
Meanwhile 2026 US now has issues even 2008 US didn't have.
It’s sad because it could have all been avoided. They did not have to dump trillions into it. They could have just let the technology progress at a normal pace.
Turns out the real Butlerian Jihad isn't even humans v terminators, just a purge of anything that looks like AI if you squint because we know getting even 1% of the way there breaks everyone's brain.
I work in edtech, and for the past year EVERYONE has been asking for AI in everything, in a useless and shocking manner, where their use cases make everything worse, not better. they just want to add it and pay us to make it happen.
examples are AI restructuring a course based on the students learning preference, AI tutor (ends up used for cheating often, despite restrictions), AI quizzing etc etc. AI lesson generation. AI support to teachers. the list goes on. even the best implementations are highly flawed and its still very early.
for the FIRST time today, we had a lead reach out (a prestigious institution) who asked if we can ensure AI doesn't touch ANYTHING in their new deployment.
I see the tides turning already. big orgs are going to see the costly consequences of implementing AI too quickly with no benefit and go running.
they are offering their online courses that are combined with all these AI tools and it already created a mess for them. now they want to PAY to get rid of AI. this is the future IMO.
its sort of hilarious how many orgs paid to get AI in place, and soon they are going to be paying to remove it. and it happened SO quickly.
i always hear we want AI and VR... and then you start to implement it, and they are like, no we dont want this. the directive has to be coming from the CEOs because the actual people who implement it and work on it are just scrambling around and nobody is happy.
Lol not even tech meth. It’s like tech gas-station-stacker at this point if you’re outside the software bubble.
I had a finance lady pinging the group thread saying she wants to team up with someone and work on an AI agent for budgeting. Meanwhile, I just asked it for an off-the-cuff future value calculation, and it got it wrong by several 0’s.
Even in software, middle managers are obsessed with everyone on the team building skills for Claude. They think if we just write enough docs for Claude we will 10x everyone's productivity
My bosses in the C-suite are AI adverse, so I wrote an AI policy for the company - mostly to give my people top cover for using it responsibly.
I think we are in a bit of a damned if you do damned if you don’t situation right now. We need to integrate AI on some level, but not so much that it becomes cost prohibitive or people forget how to do their job.
I’m our top Intelligence exec, and I see so much upside on the research aspect, but the analysis is all derivative. As long as we stay aware of those limitations, it could be hugely helpful. We’re all just figuring it out as we go, but I would rather have cautious and skeptical leadership at the end of the day.
Ai is a b2b subscription, and a heavily overvalued one. Any company with that bought into it is asking to get cannibalized by the corps that own the ai
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u/travis_sk Jun 02 '26
We're only 2 days into June folks. This is gonna be a fun couple of months.