« The AI sector is utterly dependent on criti-hype. They are burning tens of billions of dollars on engineering salaries, custom chip fabs, human data annotation, data-center rents, racks and racks of GPUs and ASICs, whole gridsworth of electricity and entire aquifers’ worth of fresh water for cooling.
They are hemorrhaging a river of cash, but that river’s source is an ocean-sized reservoir of even more cash.
To keep that reservoir full, the AI industry needs to convince fresh rounds of “investors” to give them hundreds of billions of dollars on the promise of a multi-trillion-dollar payoff.
That’s where the “AI Safety” story comes in. You know, the tech bros who run around with flashlights under their chins, intoning “ayyyyyy eyeeeee,” and warning us that their plausible sentence generators are only days away from becoming conscious and converting us all into paperclips. »
@axbom
Sounds a repeat of the Dutch #Tulipmania of the 1600's.
I' really buy a bottle of champagne 🍾, if you were right.
Alas, my assessment is they are burning enough cash an #embodiment will do the trick. Once #PeterThiel gets his way with the #AI geneneral and robots like the ones from #BostonDynamics are hooked up to it...No the would be the next step.
IMO, the singularity/AGI will happen before that: once trillions of sensors and actors from automation are fed...
Do you remember the good ol' days of the Dot-Com Bubble? And the Dot-Com-Crash that followed?
Back then, Sun Microsystems was one of the darlings of Silicon Valley. The company is credited with inventing Java, and many of the Internet's servers at the time ran on Sun hardware. Investors jumped in the bandwagon, which pumped the share price. People were buying the shares because they expected the share price to keep going up. This can look good — for a while.
A problem with speculative stocks is that the price ceases to bear a healthy relation to the company's potential future earnings. There's no way for the company to deliver enough profit to make the price you paid worth it. The fundamentals don't stack-up, and a crash is inevitable. With the benefit of hindsight, Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems, was critical of speculative trading when the company’s stock price reached a whopping 10 times revenues.
You may think that was all just "tulip mania".
You may think sharemarket investors have learned from the dot-com bubble era.
You may think governments and banks would have changed the rules to prevent things getting so out-of-whack again.
You may think the "snake-oil salesman" tactics by Silicon Valley Tech-Bros couldn't create a disaster like that again these days...
Tesla's share price is being pumped by a fast-talking madman. Tesla's Price-to-Sales Ratio is currently about 9, and looks to be heading up to over 10 again, where it was from mid June to mid-July.
Nvidia's share price is being pumped by AI hype. Nvidia's Price-to-Sales Ratio is currently about 35, and looks to be heading up to over 40 again, where it was from mid June to mid-July.
I know this will likely get lost in the feed, but after planting hundreds of tulips the past couple of weeks, sometimes when I'm alone I go out to my garden and cover myself with dirt and leaves and pretend I'm a tulip. #tulipmania#gardening#GardeningMastodon#tulips#gardendesigner#bulbseason