As long as oligarchs get their unrestricted factories, that's all that matters. If drinking water is poisoned, that is a price they are willing you to pay.
I've got a 100$ openAI sub through work and I never even get close to reaching the limit. I really wonder what the hell is everyone else doing that they could even get close to spending 4 figures a month in tokens.
>voting for policy positions that obviously work against those voters' own interests
Delusions of grandeur / superiority complex much? Have you considered a posibility, that these voters just dont agree with your idea of what their best interests are?
>fictional terrorist organization called "antifa."
An organization so fictional, that just a few months back multiple members were convicted in a terrorist attack
“Organization” is a stretch. Criminals? Sure. Violent thugs? Maybe.
The “terrorist” word, however, has been stretched and distorted for political ends. It seems like any crime motivated by political or religious ideology is now “terrorism”, and thus subject to much harsher punishment than those same crimes would normally receive.
By this definition, the Jan 6 rioters were terrorists - yet they received pardons.
The UK's position on Palestine Action is the poster child for this. Completely harmless old people holding placards have been prosecuted under terrorism legislation passed after 9/11. "Terrorist" has become a label applied to anyone opposing any government policy.
We need to roll back all those counter-terrorist laws in every Anglosphere country.
If people could imagine it being used against them, maybe they might understand. Like labeling the Republican party a terrorist organization because they sponsored Jan 6 insurrectionists.
> Antifa defenders just hide behind the fact that the movement is decentralized and leaderless by design
Calling a movement an organization is a fiction, unless you live in an alternate reality. Should i consider you part of an organization because you tweeted a certain hashtag once? Are you the member of a band because you whistled a song on the subway? Are you in the military because you watched a Rambo movie when you were a teen?
For a group who's so bloody-minded about "words have meanings" about certain things, this whole "movement and affiliation and organization are all obviously exactly the same thing" claim is blatantly ridiculous.
When Republicans in the US communicate and sometimes coordinate with totalitarian international leaders, does it mean we get to label the whole thing as a single "international totalitarian organization"?
> Have you considered a posibility, that these voters just dont agree with your idea of what their best interests are?
I mean, there's not really room for debate on it. Voting to take your money away from you and give it to people who already have more money than they could spend in a lifetime is obviously against your interests. But that's what Republican policy does. That's why they have to make increasingly outlandish fictions and fund whole media empires to sell those fictions: to convince people to keep voting against themselves. Between either a billionaire, or the guy down the street making burritos for $8 an hour, it's obvious which one took all of your money. It's the guy with the money. The increasingly elaborate alternate reality exists to hide this from their voters, so they can keep raiding us.
All of those can be addressed by proper regulation. Banning them outright is the equivalent of banning all immigration just because there's some particular subgroup that people hate.
It’s all just feelings, based on observations affected by hundreds of variables entirely unrelated to one particular type of industrial construction.
Start paying closer attention to the news and make note of when facts are cherry picked to suit sentiment… and then ask yourself where the origin of the sentiment is.
I oppose AI data centers the way they are being rolled out (which is not the same as I'm against data centers as a concept). Just like I'm anti "AI as it is being pushed", not against AI as a technology.
I'm not a moron. I do know what I'm talking about most of the time.
99% is an interesting figure because that's roughly how much my energy bill has increased despite no significant change in my usage due to data center demand on the grid
Buddy I work in world class premier data centers and I don’t want more of ‘em either. I appreciate that you think I’m a moron though for wanting to protect my community from douchebags like yourself. But respectfully I reject your bullshit.
They can't engage with your ideas, so they try to label you as the kind of person whose ideas aren't worth engaging with. It doesn't matter to them what you said, it must be wrong because you said it. Unless, of course, you agree with them, in which case you suddenly become worth taking seriously again.
- "artificial intelligence has three quarters to prove itself before the apocalypse comes" — Mar 2024
- "If OpenAI doesn’t either reduce their $8.5bn operating costs to $1bn or less and raise at least $5bn in the next year, they will die." — Jul 2024 2025 costs: $34B
- Generative AI “isn’t getting much more efficient” (Jul 2024 ). OpenAI’s frontier-model API price fell from $30/$60 per million input/output tokens for GPT-4 to $4/$20 for GPT-5.6 Sol, alongside major capability gains.
- “I would be shocked if [Musk’s] wealth doesn’t return to something more like he had in 2019 or 2020” (Dec 2022 ). Musk is now worth approximately $873 billion , several times his wealth when Zitron wrote this.
The actual quote and topic is far different than you’ve portrayed it. Here’s the actual quote: “ yet the company says that it expects to make $11.6 billion in 2025 and *$100 billion by 2029*, a statement so egregious that I am surprised it's not some kind of financial crime to say it out loud.” from https://www.wheresyoured.at/oai-business/
He goes on to specifically discuss how unrealistic $100B by 2029 is given that OAI is structurally unprofitable.
The fact that you’re skewing your misinterpretation of what he said so much shows your own bias I’m afraid.
This is another case of missing the forest for the trees. In the scope of what Zitron is talking about, the difference of >$2 billion of revenue doesn't make a difference of his overall point of it not being close to enough to cover their spending.
I follow Zitron but the way he talks has been grating and it is even more obvious how biased he is when he has guests on. As if he's trying to lead them into agreeing with his more extreme claims.
That being said, why does this blogger get a pass at this criticism of just being blanket "wrong" when the point of the quote is still very much valid in context? It seems to be the same in the next article, quoted from Ed's blog with the same point. Is this more evidence of being "wrong" or did he correct a previously wrong value and came to the same conclusion (which seems reasonable to me in context)?
It seems like this blogger is guilty of the same criticisms he has against Zitron. They seem eager to find where Zitron is wrong, exaggerating the value of when he misses the mark and without looking at big picture. Then they make sensationalist claims based on those findings.
I think it's fair to call his specific predictions "early." I'm saying his timelines are too short. Like almost all bearish market commentators, he doesn't understand the scope of the government stimulus. This is a systemic problem in market commentary. But, don't kid yourself. If the US stops massive deficit spending, a lot of what Zitron's saying moves forward on the timeline.
A prediction definitionally includes an outcome, and it _can_ include a timeline. (if you’re serious about your forecasting, then you generally include a timeline; forecasting is non-actionable if it does not include a timeline).
You might choose a different timeline for Ed’s outcomes. Okay: those are now your predictions, not his.
Zitron has done us the favor of including timelines with his predictions, so that Dan can invalidate almost all of them.
It's not government stimulus driving this. It's that when you start with a "successful" company, the financial consequences of bad decisions or bad leadership can take a long time to have a negative effect, if at all, because financial success has a momentum to it.
I left Microsoft during the windows 8 cycle in large part because I could tell nobody knew what the hell they were doing, which is an objectively true statement about the time and place. My dad happened to buy Microsoft stock at that same time and did very well with it.
That's the paradoxical problem that I think all big tech has. Poor decisions by incompetent people, met with inexplicable financial success.
Look at GDP growth (it's not great). Where are the sales coming from? The modal revenue boost to Mag-7 companies since Covid has been a profitless tech firm wasting venture money whose source was debt enabled by low interest rates.
The US can safely reduce its deficit spending by $1 trillion and absolutely nothing big will happen.
The US typically adds that much annual GDP every 16-24 months at this point. The notion that somehow the gigantic ~$31 trillion economy will fall apart if the outsized deficits don't continue, is very absurd.
The exact same things were said of the Bush deficits. The US economy was supposedly dead in 2009-2010. Here in 2026 the economy is 50% larger inflation adjusted and it has left most of Europe in the dust. The housing bubble contagion was much worse than anything we're sitting on now with AI spend.
Why do I say $1 trillion instead of $2 trillion? There are plausible scenarios where increased taxes bring down the deficits (the Dems will take the House + Senate + Presidency, we'll see how much taxes go up), there's no plausible scenario where the deficits go away completely.
I disagree. The massive divergence between US household income and European household income since 2009 tracks almost perfectly Fed interest-rate policy and government deficit spending.
The federal government has spent the time since 2009 lighting the furniture and the house on fire to support unsustainable increases in domestic standard of living by effectively mortgaging the future. The problem we have dwarfs anything that was happening during the Bush era.
Likely the difference between you and me is this: I'm 50 years old, already wealthy from tech, and planning to leave the US. You're probably still trying to earn your way. Sadly, I'm pretty sure we've pulled the ladder up, and folks like you are going to reap the whirlwind, as they say.
Would you say the 2012 apocalypse doomsayers were correct but just "early"? After all the sun exploding in a billion years will ultimately prove them correct.
> OpenAI’s frontier-model API price fell from $30/$60 per million input/output tokens for GPT-4 to $4/$20 for GPT-5.6 Sol, alongside major capability gains.
on this specific point: tokens aren't fungible between models right? Like the argument Zitron makes is that improvements in output are due to, glibly, using more tokens to get there. We see people turn on new models and instantly use up all their tokens.
Like the actual measure is more something like "for this specific task, did it cost less now to do it than it did 3 years ago with these AI pipelines" right? The token pricing isn't actually relevant in that discussion.
If you're saying that OpenAI forecast something and you're saying it's validation that the numbers match the forecast, I don't think you're really paying attention to the problems (with annualised run rate bullshit when these are proper companies who could be publishing proper numbers), with unclear financials that are designed to look good, etc.
> There will always be someone willing to build that thing
… with sufficient time and money. As opposed to the minimal time and money required if the baddies are just pulling an existing solution off the shelf.
I hope you are joking, or haven't thought this through! If you sincerely believe and act on what you're saying here, you should be shunned from polite society.
Well, there are quite a few frames to think about. What about the unintended consequences of building something for a worldview at the time? Then the next generation of stewards take over, do not have the same understanding of the problem the system solved and different ideas on how to use the system. That's definitely something worth writing about. Stewardship in software is a real and common aspect of the greater system we all live in, and has unknown consequences with each generation that takes over. When you step in as a gen-1 builder, you should probably consider what it is you are about to build.
Just because someone is willing to build it doesn't mean it has to be you.
We may all play some part in societies that have some degree of monstrous outcomes, but I feel like staying on the "tragic civilian casualty" side versus the "legitimate target" side of a freedom fighter's bombing campaign is probably the way to go.
It's not about someone willing or not, it's about you, an ostensibly grown adult who should think in terms of your own responsibilities instead of others'.
Terrible argument. You can say ”why not work as a concentration camp guard? There will always be someone willing to do it so you might as well cash in”
Youre letting youself be exploited by doomerist clickbait.
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