• auzy1@lemmy.world
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    10 days ago

    And that’s without paying royalties to content creators as they should be required to do

    • Arancello@aussie.zone
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      10 days ago

      also before court cases for defamation. Two cases in Germany hold Google executives responsible for false claims (by the Google AI) of sexual crime claims against an innocent man.

      • BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world
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        10 days ago

        Good. If you want to make AI a form of communication then that’s the voice of your company. You’re endorsing whatever it says.

        • auzy1@lemmy.world
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          10 days ago

          yeah. It should be the same with Facebook. Here in Australia, it seems like nothing is against the community standards anymore (not spam, porn or even violent threats)

          • Kenny4tunes@lemmy.world
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            9 days ago

            Trash app, it’s why everyone should just stop using it. I ceased doing so, 6 years ago and it’s been bliss without it.

    • Jhex@lemmy.world
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      10 days ago

      or counting the $1.5 trillion in debt the big AI players are hiding in subsidiaries

      • borkborkbork@piefed.social
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        10 days ago

        yeah the circle-jerk nvidia has created with coreweave and so many others just to wreck the gpu and memory markets, all so these hideously expensive AI racks can SIT IN THEIR FUCKING PACKAGING ON A LOADING DOCK because they don’t have power or cooling built is mindboggling

    • pticrix@lemmy.ca
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      10 days ago

      “The court finds Anthropic guilty and orders them to relinquish the whole of their company to the Group Representing All Artists”.

      Artists : “Wait -”.

      Dario Amodei : “Fuck yes! Good luck paying back those 80 billions, losers!”

  • Nobody@anarchist.nexus
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    10 days ago

    An entire industry built around burning cash, water, and electricity to generate questionable answers based on glorified autocorrect. It’s astounding.

    Throw another few trillion and a couple dozen rain forests at it. Completely rational behavior.

      • ltxrtquq@lemmy.ml
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        10 days ago

        You act as though those billions of dollars spent towards other things (like cancer research) would somehow be better.

        • Zron@lemmy.world
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          10 days ago

          ?

          Fucking yes it would be better to put hundreds of billions of dollars every year into curing cancer/HIV/ Type 1 diabetes/alzheimers, literally any disease. Curing a major illness like those would actively help hundreds of thousands or millions of people around the world every year.

          What does AI help? My fucking manager in sending cryptic emails that raise more questions than answers?

          Dump a few hundred billion into disease research, or fusion power, or just into housing for all of us.

          • SabinStargem@lemmy.today
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            10 days ago

            AI helped me with my voting ballot. I asked Kagi’s AI to research the ambiguous candidates and propositions. I had it put them into a political alignment chart - left/centrist/rightwing. Addendums for candidates included things like whether they had criminal convictions or corruption, stance on vaccinations, how they feel about “tough on crime”, the homeless, ect.

            For propositions, the political alignments had a fourth entry added, where the yes/no included the wealth level of backers for a position.

            This is very useful, completing in a hour what would have taken a week of research. Very useful for digging into the mechanical details of a proposition, like whether it prevented the replacement or supplementing of a measure.

            • Zron@lemmy.world
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              6 days ago

              That’s a lot of words just to say you’re an idiot that would rather offload important critical thinking skills to a piece of software that a rational person wouldn’t trust to provide a cookie recipe.

            • ryrybang@lemmy.world
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              9 days ago

              How do you know that anything it displayed was accurate for those candidates? Every single time I’ve asked it to include source links, those source links don’t actually support the AI’s statement.

            • CybranM@feddit.nu
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              10 days ago

              With a .ml account you need to. I’ve heard way more absurd statements said with a straight face from .ml users

      • AmyAye@nord.pub
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        9 days ago

        What’s stupid is, you could even just keep just the programming part, and it would become much more efficient and not ramble on with explanations etc.

        • 1995ToyotaCorolla@lemmy.world
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          9 days ago

          If an LLM was something you could train on your GitHub repo or an internal knowledge base, and ask it natural language questions about that, AND it didn’t need an 800 acre datacenter to do it, I wouldn’t have so many hang-ups about it. Or maybe even train a model in a programming language and have a model that’s tailor made for writing C, or LISP, or Brainfuck or something.

          But that’s not what they are. They only function if you hoover up everything the light touches and feed it to the machine, to the point where rare, irreplaceable literature is being shredded apart for training data. And god help you if you try to take your ball and go play somewhere else as the AI boosters profess you must do, they will follow you there and scrape you anyway

  • protist@retrofed.com
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    10 days ago

    The loss, up from $13 billion a year earlier, was driven by $72 billion in accounting charges tied to changes in the value of financial instruments Anthropic issued to raise money

    This right here is how all of this will come crashing down. Anthropic and OpenAI, along with several associated companies, are using accounting tricks to hide their debts and obligations. These two are trying to maintain hype for investors so they can cash in on an IPO with total disregard for long-term fiscal sustainability. At some point the bill will come due, and you can bet the C-Suite will have already made out like bandits.

    • Andy@slrpnk.net
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      10 days ago

      Don’t forget, though, that there’s another cashflow that they’re banking on: total surveillance.

      AI can’t do a lot of things, but the thing it’s most suited for is creating a society run like a prison to try and keep the discontented masses in check.

      • 4am@lemmy.zip
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        10 days ago

        Not enough people realize this. They think the component shortage is a side effect, but it’s to push you towards cloud services on underpowered devices that rely on it.

        Imagine the censorship when every service is monitored and controlled by them. Imagine the market capture when they can see everyone’s financials and trade secrets. When they can cut off journalists and activists with one click.

        • Darkonion@lemmy.world
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          10 days ago

          Haven’t heard anything new lately, but there is a push to eliminate physical currency for, what I presume, is a similar reason -> make everything trackable.

          • Seralth@piefed.seralth.com
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            9 days ago

            People have been trying to eliminate physical currency for decades in not longer. That shit predates computers.

        • AmyAye@nord.pub
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          9 days ago

          I think this will backfire too. I think they way underestimate the amount of people already using “underpowered devices” that will just continue to do so without the new cloud services shit.

          Basically everyone I know us using a 5-10+ year old laptop, for example. And they just use it fine, sure it’s pokey, and it’s not everyone, but it’s a lot.

      • 100_kg_90_de_belin@thelemmy.club
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        10 days ago

        The Italian government has just passed an emergency decree that authorizes AI-powered face recognition in public spaces without a judge’s authorization.

      • benjirenji@slrpnk.net
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        10 days ago

        I’m not even sure it’s great at that. Is this not a function of any industry struggling to find a usecase eventually ending up with the largest US employer and cash cow: the DoD?

        • MalReynolds@slrpnk.net
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          10 days ago

          LLMs (‘AI’), not so great, but it can get (probabilistic, but fascists don’t care) descriptions of video feeds into easily searched text. Gobs of GPUs in datacenters paired with surveillance devices all over the place however presents a greater threat, where there’s an (evil) will, a way will be forthcoming. Nice of Ukraine to point out how fragile they are. There’s a deathstar analogy there somewhere.

          • AmyAye@nord.pub
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            9 days ago

            Yeah, the type of people pushing this don’t even care about the inaccuracy either. If it “catches a black man” with facial recognition, even if it’s the wrong person it won’t matter “they are all criminal thugs anyway.” See also the ICE bull shit and basically deporting anyone even remotely Mexican looking, citizen or not.

    • AreaKode@riskeratspizza.com
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      10 days ago

      Modern companies are only profitable in late stage capitalism if they fall into one of they two categories: scams or gambling.

    • GamingChairModel@lemmy.world
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      9 days ago

      This right here is how all of this will come crashing down

      No, this is pretty normal, and more importantly, doesn’t actually cost the company cash. They gave lenders bonds that can be converted to stock, so this loss on their books is pure paper loss, the same way wealth in owning stock in this money losing company is pure paper wealth.

      These numbers are just illustration for simplicity, but imagine a company borrowing $20 billion and telling the lender that you’ll either pay back the $20 billion plus interest, or they can opt to convert it into stock worth 10% of the company. When the company is worth $100 billion, the bondholders won’t convert to stock. But if the value of the company shoots up on paper to where that same stock would be worth $100 billion, the lenders would rather take the stock than the cash repayment. And because it’s worth $80 billion more, the company will have to record that on the books as replacing $20 billion in bonds for $100 billion in stock, and an $80 billion loss compared to their last statement.

      But look at the underlying financial cash flow. When that happens, the company actually takes $20 billion in debt off their books. They don’t have to repay that loan anymore. So it improves their cash flow position at exactly the same time that they’re booking a loss.

      The whole thing will come crashing down for totally different reasons, relating to operational cash flow, not the actual accounting shenanigans where one kind of paper number gets converted to another kind of paper number.

      • Zos_Kia@jlai.lu
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        9 days ago

        It’s not entirely transparent though. It’s a paper loss in terms of cash but they did have to give the stock. At their crazy valuations, even 1% is a big deal.

    • Seaguy05@lemmy.world
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      10 days ago

      I dunno, isn’t this the same scheme that the ride share companies and food delivery services?

      • bonesawmcl@lemmy.world
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        10 days ago

        With the difference that all those services mostly outsource their asset costs to their drivers or have very little investment there. Unlike anthropic who have billions in costs related to all the compute they need to service their customers (obligations to other companies, datacenters and, not to forget, ever rising interest on all their debt).

        • protist@retrofed.com
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          9 days ago

          Definitely, the cost of doing business for these AI companies is orders of magnitude higher than Uber or Lyft

      • kestrel7_7@lemmy.world
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        9 days ago

        You mean the ones who had to massively pivot their entire business model, because they were relying on self-driving cars being practical in 2019?

  • jtrek@startrek.website
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    10 days ago

    That’s a lot of money that could have been spent on healthcare, food security, housing, transit, climate change problems…

    • AliOski@feddit.nl
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      10 days ago

      That’s not how that works… the money “lost” isn’t going down the drain. It is… going somewhere, doing something useful. That’s why it is a loss to the company.

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        10 days ago

        If it’s going to make LLMs it’s not as useful as the other things I listed. Paying a bunch of software engineers $300k each to work on LLM nonsense instead of something useful is a shame. Sure, the money isn’t set on fire, but the opportunity cost is large.

        • RandomStranger@piefed.social
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          9 days ago

          I mean… A lot of the money is being spent on compute, which is just consuming electricity, which is many times made from coal or gas. So a lot literally is on fire.

        • Seralth@piefed.seralth.com
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          9 days ago

          Your confusing fact with opinion.

          Factually yes it’s useful to the company.

          Your opinion is that the usefulness doesn’t justify it and this isn’t useful.

          The real question is, is it useful enough. Which is likely no.

  • TrackenDaKracken@lemmy.world
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    9 days ago

    All those loans are getting hot. They’re starting to toss them around and trying to hide them.

    I have strong doubts they can ever make this particular approach to AI work at all, let alone in time to cover their bets.

    This path looks like a dead end. But, I don’t know jack about shit.

    • ElChinchilla@lemmy.world
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      9 days ago

      Yes. If you follow the money, investors in OpenAI are the usual suspects, a Kushner in there (admittedly the “best” kushner) and the early investors were guaranteed returns of up to 18% (bank CD currently around 5.3%) which stemmed from a $500B injection from the US government. Not only will it be a rug pull, but a government built one. Truly appaling, we let the fox in the henhouse.

      Cant have Healthcare for our people, but can pump and dump the world economy.

  • RedGreenBlue@lemmy.zip
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    10 days ago

    Please don’t make the tax payer pay for it. The tax payer is gonna pay for it, right?

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        9 days ago

        2 only works if regulatory capture in place to prevent cheaper competition from open models.

    • NekoKoneko@lemmy.world
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      9 days ago

      Yup, because they’re still losing hundreds of dollars for every dollar spent. Their economics still rely on a delusion that the hardware outlay is a fixed cost that can be recovered after model training by selling cheaper compute. Instead, models continue to be released not only to match competition, but because models still do not do a fraction of what they are promised and being sold to do. So capital costs are not fixed.

      So AI hyperscalers have a lose/lose/lose/lose choice of either growing at a rate that requires unsustainable subsidies, stopping growth and admitting models can’t do what they and a thousand other startups have been selling them for, charging actual costs, or any combination of the three.

      If people were charged anything near the actual costs, much less with a profit margin, demand would implode fast enough to create a sonic boom.

      • jj4211@lemmy.world
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        9 days ago

        Add to this that incremental improvement comes at exponentially more and more cost. So they spend ungodly amounts more in hopes that the next incremental improvement will push them over the magic line beyond where the are.

        Some impressive feats but the issues holding it back from the ‘replace the whole economy’ sort of ambition they imagine are very stubborn. Notably it still confidently declares incorrect information (a significant volume of software developement works around by rigging auto-retries until it stumbles into ‘correctness’, and of course the people pumping out slop art/books aren’t bound by ‘correctness’) and they still have no clear path to autonomous control of humanoid robotics (as crazy advanced as the online GenAI experience, they are still struggling to demonstrate even the most basic manual labor tasks).

  • SCmSTR@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    10 days ago

    See here’s the thing: it isn’t really their money, so they don’t give a shit. If it was, things would be… ✨different✨

  • EtruDUR@thelemmy.club
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    9 days ago

    It is obvious to me that AI computing is a COMMODITY, in that it will inevitably be something that can not be effectively gate-kept.

    These two major US companies (OpenAI and Anthropic) are playing the game of “locking in” a monopoly in a product category that has yet to mature. This is a pretty old capitalist game, of course… Uber, Microsoft, facebook,and many others have played this game in the past.

    But, unlike OSes or word processing file compatibility I don’t see a “network effect” in that an open source/weight model can/will do 99% of what a proprietary model can, will do it “transparently,” will eventually become so optimized that it can run locally, etc. etc.

    I mean: maybe its name recondition that is worth “trillions” but a race to be “Xerox” or “Kleenex” or even “PC” (as in IBM PC) did not really work out well for these companies.

    I think that even the established players (MS, Google, etc.) are biding their time, making sure that they don’t get locked out while non-proprietary solutions become feasible.

    I means I know that much of the issues have to do with the limited availability of hardware, but locking down supply is not sustainable for the “big 2” and sooner or later more adequate memory and GPU supply will enter the market…