If only there was a name for that kind of money making scheme…
Top economist warns that the AI math doesn’t make sense: 'Profits are currently being funded by investors rather than earned from customers'
Submitted 3 days ago by remington@beehaw.org to technology@beehaw.org
https://fortune.com/2026/08/10/torsten-slok-ai-profit-margins-capex-oracle/
Comments
Angryhumanoid@fedinsfw.app 3 days ago
eurodyne@piefed.world 3 days ago
Is it… Reaganomics?
4am@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
It’s exactly a Ponzi scheme, with the bone difference being that there is no product with a true Ponzi scheme, but this one has a product. It’s just a worthless mechanical Turk designed to hornswaggle the rubes.
It’s an Altman scheme.
pgo_lemmy@feddit.it 3 days ago
Reaganomics recalled something from some forgotten box.
Elon-gate?
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
This has been fucking obvious for at least 2 years, more like 4, really.
What this has been the whole time is naked power grab to establish a technate, a techno-oligarchy.
When, not if, this fully fucking detonates the West’s finances and economies, most of these people will still be very wealthy, most of our 401k/pensions/net worth will mostly no longer exist, and we will end up with all but formal aristocracy.
That is their plan. They have been open about that for 20-30 years; they despise democracy, they think the world should be hard deliniated into haves and have-nots.
It doesn’t matter if the tech works or is profitable.
What matters who will be on top when the dust settles.
somegeek@programming.dev 3 days ago
Wait till they ruin the internet, make users unable of any meaningful general purpose computation on their own hardware, then everybody has to beg them for computing and knowledge.
this is bigger than a few AI companies. This is the scheme of global governments moving towards full totalitarianism and control.
Call me paranoid but I highly believe this is the route we’re at.
Sims@lemmy.ml 3 days ago
Wait till they ruin the internet
I think we are long past that by now. “Enshitification” and “Capitalist Slop”, was already a huge thing before these ‘new’ ***holes came about. Capitalist slop is the pre-cursor for “AI-slop”, and is basically to throw literal shit on the market(wall) and see if it sticks. My personal view is that 99.99% of all internet content is Cap-Slop that shouldn’t/wouldn’t be there in a natural society.
full totalitarianism and control.
That was always the end-state of Capitalism, “Fascism” is basically when govs are taken over by private Capitalist sh*tters. US have been an Oligarchy for longer than anyone alive today, and ‘Democracy’ were never there.
Everything is going as the anti-capitalists predicted and expected…
terranoid@lemmy.cafe 3 days ago
Nah, I don’t think it’ll “ruin” the internet in the disaster sense. It’s already done enough that it ruined reddit, quora, other social media, but those weren’t really information sources as much as companies selling addictive brain rot to steal your data. They are not on the same level as wikipedia, or even representative or what the internet is. Even if you got useful stuff off reddit once upon a time, it was always about tracking you and capturing your data and making you addicted to wasting your time watching bullshit.
What we’re seeing and this “top economist” is saying is just “this is a bubble” in other words without saying the B word. People tune out the B word because they believe in the technology. A bubble has nothing to do with whether AI works, and all to do with the behavior of investors and unsustainable investments. So many people these days have to dance around the bubble word because people think it means you are anti-AI.
We will likely see things remain more or less the same except one day investors freak out and stop investing in AI, and then tech will go through a ton of shitty layoffs and people will struggle and some rich day trader type fucks will lose their livelihoods, just like the dotcom era. But after that, we will still have generative AI tools here and there, maybe more restricted to better use cases and not shoved in your face everywhere, but LLM will still be a thing.
Yeah, it means you’ll likely have fucked social media forever, bots, propaganda, fake news, fake AI videos of bullshit, but social media always was about controlling your thought patterns. It already fucking sucked. That part of the internet was always shit. But interconnected devices sending data to each other and allowing researchers in Oslo Norway to talk to researchers in Omaha Nebraska, that will still very much be alive and work well.
somegeek@programming.dev 3 days ago
You say i vestors will back away and the bubble will burst, but I say the investors are governments themselves, therefore, they have all the money and power there is. The bubble will burst in some sense, but this is larger than simple consumer product markets.
This is a weapon. One of the greatest tools for governments and those on power to dictate and control.
PRIMEcavitationfetishist@quokk.au 2 days ago
Money is fake. Its their invention. They will not let it be used against them.
Kill them, or let it happen.
SocialistVibes01@lemmy.ml 2 days ago
Some other news in the past week was about scrappers making like 90% of internet traffic.
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 2 days ago
scrappers an bots.
PRIMEcavitationfetishist@quokk.au 2 days ago
I feel like an idiot not catching it the first time I heard about the GPU crunch, but yes.
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 2 days ago
dont need top economist to tell us that, its been well known since '23
wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 2 days ago
It took them this long to figure that out?
BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca 3 days ago
The underlying technology isn’t unprofitable, inference alone isn’t unprofitable. It’s the research and development of better models that’s unprofitable and unsustainable.
That’s pretty much how almost every new development happens. EVs were the same, primarily funded by subsidies and now they’re cost competitive or better in many situations even without them. Cellphone networks… also heavily funded by investors and some took hits from how it all played out. The dotcom bubble. Even as far back as the Railroad boom in the UK.
PRIMEcavitationfetishist@quokk.au 2 days ago
isn’t unprofitable
Yes it is. The only things its useful and efficient for are all laid out in either ‘1984’ or the Geneva conventions.
BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca 2 days ago
Your emotions don’t override reality.
LLMs are excellent at translation as one significant beneficial use case.
IchNichtenLichten@lemmy.wtf 3 days ago
I wouldn’t put a fancy and stupidly resource-intensive word guessing game on the same level as those other things.
BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca 2 days ago
Maybe you wouldn’t, but I would. You clearly don’t remember how bad the internet was when it first became available to the public.
helix@feddit.org 3 days ago
Every gold rush only makes the people rich who are selling the shovels, never the investors, never the workers.
tangeli@piefed.social 3 days ago
Maybe shares should be ‘sold’ on subscription, like so many other things these days. You ‘buy’ them but you don’t ’own’ them - you just get the benefits of having them temporarily. That should reduce the incentive to ’own’ shares in companies that are not profitable.
deadbeef79000@lemmy.nz 3 days ago
Back in the before times we called that a ‘dividend’ and the company would pay you one of they did business well and made profit.
Then the dark times came and the ‘speculators’ arrived, caring not for the dividend but for the price itself. Expecting it to go ever on up. The dividend was forgotten.
Business didn’t have to be good and profitable it just had to have ‘promise’ and ‘venture’. They propped each other up, made their prices up. Each leaning on each other with no foundation each nor to share. They cared not, for they had a ‘system’ and means already their own to sustain themselves.
The people looked on in horror, knowing the ‘bubble’ must burst in the air and not settle gently to the ground and rest easy. Power they had not, only the ‘sight’ of their incoming doom.
smiletolerantly@awful.systems 3 days ago
Quick! Get this person a series A, B and C funding!
some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org 2 days ago
Yeah, we’re all about to be fucked because so many major players are tied up in this scheme. The bottom is going to fall out and the entire world economy might be affected (USA for sure, cause WE’RE NUMBER ONE).
Set aside additional savings (if you can) to be prepared for a bad time ahead.
eurodyne@piefed.world 3 days ago
Oh! Welcome to the 1980s
kayzeekayzee@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 days ago
Isn’t that true of all tech companies nowadays?
DGen@piefed.zip 2 days ago
Of course it is not sustainable. The level of data centers they build tells the story.
kittenroar@beehaw.org 3 days ago
Sam Altman and others have publicly stated (something to the effect that) the end goal is for AI to replace workers. There is no amount of money too big for a capitalist to bet on that outcome, especially if they deem it plausible.
AMoralNihilist@feddit.uk 2 days ago
And then who buys the products 🫠
HK65@sopuli.xyz 2 days ago
They buy products from each other, and shut out more and more people if society.
You see the homeless drug addict on the street? They want more of that.
partofthevoice@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
Exchange still occurs globally and amongst the upper class.
PRIMEcavitationfetishist@quokk.au 2 days ago
When we only have white cishet billionaires, we can abolish money.
chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
Just imagine a world in which the only products manufactured are exclusively chasing the dollars of wealthy investors. So like yachts, custom giant statues, kill drone perimeters, etc.
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 2 days ago
what he isnt saying, is AI needs to be profitable for it to happen, it hasnt.
TQuid@beehaw.org 3 days ago
That’s an excellent way to think about it. I mean, horrifying, but incisive.