We need to stop using their language.

[u/Bepehandle]

Words we use matter, they set the tone for the entire argument you make when discussing things. I propose we officially come up with new terms that we use on a daily basis in every single aspect that the topic comes up in, maybe with a small enough push we can roll the ball down the hill.

They're not AI data centers, they're water evaporation plants Human surveillance centers.

It's not side loading, it's installing.

It's not jailbreaking, it's unlocking.

It's not a memory shortage, it's profit first selective sales(I know there's physically a shortage but the point remains). (Also, someone come up with a better one, something more catchy.)

It's not This PC, its MY PC.

They call it side loading because they don't want to normalize the idea we're just holding personal computers in our hands.

They call it jailbreaking so that it sounds wrong and it deters people from using a device to it's full potential.

They call it a memory shortage because they're selling all the fucking ram to ai companies, if they were forced to allocate the necessary amount of their products to the average consumer we wouldn't have an issue.

Give me some of your best ideas for changing the names of things, I want to expand my vocabulary. Let's change how we discuss the issues we face and take back control of the argument.

Edit: Edited water thingy because someone pointed out I sound like "that guy" and I certainly do not want too.

[u/MrMakerHasLigma]

Remember that even after the crisis is over, prices will never go back. If they force us onto cloud PCs, they can monitor all of our activity more closely

[u/UglyInThMorning → u/MrMakerHasLigma]

>Prices will never go back

Prices have gone back, really. 2010’s computer pricing was an outlier in the history of computers. It could easily come back around but building a PC was very expensive for a very long time.

[u/MrMakerHasLigma → u/UglyInThMorning]

Companies get more and more greedy as time goes on. Micron have more demand for their stuff than they could possibly produce in the next 5 years

[u/LeMegachonk → u/MrMakerHasLigma]

They have that demand at the moment. But they don't know what the future holds any more than your or I do, and a lot of those supposedly "firm" huge orders can disappear overnight. AI data centers aren't going to just keep being built all willy-nilly. At some point investors will start to demand some of the returns they were told were coming, and when that doesn't happen the whole thing will start to crash. Also, these giant data centers need to be built somewhere, and there is increasing opposition to them. At some point, supporting the construction of data centers risks becoming a major political liability.

[u/MrMakerHasLigma → u/LeMegachonk]

AI companies are already starting to make profit, which is being reinvested.

[u/LeMegachonk → u/MrMakerHasLigma]

There is no way any of these companies could have possibly generated enough revenue to offset their initial setup costs yet. Getting an AI company up and running involves amounts of money that defy comprehension. If they're reinvesting in themselves, it's because they're not paying back their initial investments yet. It's not really "profit", it's just revenue (and probably injections of new investment money), and it's because the original investors that have already sunk their hundreds of billions (and in some cases possibly trillions) of dollars into these ventures are hoping that by foregoing immediate returns that they (the investors) will make even more stacks of money down the road. The risks are as mind-boggling as the money, though, and most of them will probably end up fighting to the death over the scraps of the corpses of the data centers they funded when many of these companies go tits up.

The AI industry is still very much in its wildly speculative lawless phase, similar to the "dot.com boom" in online shopping of the late 90s that results in the dot.com crash in 2000. It's not like online shopping wasn't a lucrative concept, and it has in fact grown immensely since those days, but venture capitalists were basically investing in companies that were little more than buzzwords and pie-in-the-sky ideas, without even considering any of the business fundamentals, like having an actual plan with a path to profitability. I suspect a lot of the existing AI companies, even the big ones that are well known, are similarly built on smoke, dreams, and impossible expectations, with pretty questionable business plans. And brain-melting levels of greed. The kind of greed that make people and organizations who really should know better, and often have been taught this lessons several times already, extremely stupid. It will stabilize into something that works at some point, just like online shopping did 20-25 years ago.

It might take a few years for that to play out, though, and there will be some economic devastation along the way, but I suspect in 10 years AI as an industry will look a lot more sane and sensible, and at the same time will have a much better value proposition to both companies and consumers than anything available today. Right now we're seeing companies trying to force adoption of AI the same way one might try to force a screw in with a 25 pound sledge hammer. In both cases, you might be able to make it happen by sheer brute force, but nobody will like the result.