The AI bubble is itself a widespread organism of enshittification.
The last few years of AI hype have been built on lies. Every company has conspired to make you think that AI is affordable and sustainable, that profitability was possible, that hallucinations were fixable, and that any problems you faced today were a result of being in “the early innings.” In reality, the AI industry has absorbed over a trillion dollars, effectively all tech talent, the majority of startup funding, the majority of media coverage, the art and work of millions of people, and been given chance after chance after chance to fix the obvious, glaring issues.
Every time a skeptic dared to stand out and say that none of this made sense, they were told that it was just like Uber (it’s not) or that Amazon Web Services cost a lot of money (it cost $52 billion over the course of 14 years and was cash-flow positive in nine), that “costs always come down,” and that everything would magically be alright as long as they were patient for an indeterminate amount of time.
Four years and a trillion dollars in, AI is more expensive, its companies more cash-intensive, its products just as unreliable, and its boosters more desperate than ever to make you ignore reality as a means of empowering one of a few ultra-rich oafs. Products from OpenAI and Anthropic are built to ingratiate and coddle losers while creating work-shaped outputs that are good enough to impress braindead executives, imbeciles and middle management hall monitors that don’t do any real work, and the reason it’s worked this long is that both companies intentionally misled everybody about how much the real costs were.
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All of this is to say that the Dot Com Bubble happened due to irrational exuberance and growth lust, and what was recovered at the end came not from scientific breakthroughs but the fact that the useful infrastructure existed and could be adapted and used to make things cheaper and more efficient.
That isn’t the case with AI data centers, AI startups or anything else to do with the AI Bubble.
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AI data centers are effectively large boxes with custom cooling built for a very limited subset of chips. Adapting them to other uses would require gutting the data center, which would mean that the vast majority of the capital expenditures were wasted.
AI will leave little productive ruins for future great ideas and technology to inhabit and gain a foothold as we haven’t actually done anything with AI but apply a terrible data compression algorithm to datasets and then culturally turn around and cut funding to maintaining those datasets at every level.
All of this is to say that the Dot Com Bubble happened due to irrational exuberance and growth lust, and what was recovered at the end came not from scientific breakthroughs but the fact that the useful infrastructure existed and could be adapted and used to make things cheaper and more efficient.
Last year some guy recreated GPT2 for twenty bucks. From a corpus to a model, from scratch, in an hour. Same performance as that 2019 chatbot that was ‘too dangerous to release.’
Spending going up is different from how costs have come down. The craze does not reflect what is necessary. There’s people modifying and distilling image and video models on home computers. Mostly for porn. Let’s be real, it is driven by, just, so much porn. Back when TensorFlow was new, I dabbled with a greyscale-to-color filter that didn’t work out, and I had to write all my own Python. Yesterday fucking PewDiePie released a turn-key offline sandbox. Software infrastructure keeps getting simpler and more powerful.
But of course Ed is saying these companies are fucked, despite constantly phrasing it like this tech is fucked. The weirdos training LORAs for every fetish imaginable don’t have custom chips. They have consumer GPUs, or maybe an AWS account. When this bubble bursts, they’re gonna keep a-going, very much the same way websites as a concept survived underpants-gnome business plans. Y’know, ‘1. Make a website 2. ??? 3. Profit!’ Writing a novella every month to explain why that’s dumb seems needlessly verbose.
Nobody’s making back the trillion dollars spent giving away all the R&D and its fruits. But the genie’s not going back in the bottle, for chatbots that code at least as well as any script kiddie, or CGI that renders by describing it. A program the size of a Netflix movie, with system requirements like a video game, can now do black magic fuckery. People will be paid to make use of it in accordance with how it actually works. It’s not an oracle. It’s not sentient. But it’s not going anywhere.