• @[email protected]
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    256 hours ago

    Maybe because we’re all getting really tired of industry propaganda designed to sell us on the “inevitability” of genAI when anyone who’s paying even a little attention can see that the only thing inevitable about this current genAI fad is it crashing and burning.

    (Even when content like this comes from a place of sincere interest, it becomes functionally indistinguishable from the industry propaganda, because the primary goal of the propagandists is to keep genAI in the public conversation, thus convincing their investors that its still the hottest thing around, and that they should keep shoveling money into it so that they don’t miss the boat).

    OpenAI, the company behind that giant bubble in the middle there, loses two dollars and thirty five cents for every dollar of revenue. Not profit. Revenue. Every interaction with ChatGPT costs them a ridiculous amount of money, and the percentage of users willing to actually pay for those interactions is unbelievably small. Their enterprise sales are even smaller. They are burning money at an absolutely staggering pace, and that’s with the deeply discounted rate they currently get on their compute costs.

    No one has proposed anything that will lower their backend costs to the point where this model is profitable, and even doubling prices (which is their current plan) will not make them profitable either. Literally not one person at OpenAI has put forth a concrete plan for the company to reach profitability. And that’s the biggest player in the game. If the most successful genAI company on the planet can’t figure out a way to actually make profit off this thing, it’s dead. Not just OpenAI; the whole idea.

    The numbers don’t lie; users, at best, find it moderately interesting and fun to play around with for a while. Barely anyone wants this, and absolutely nobody needs it. Not one single genAI product has created a meaningful use-case that would justify the staggering cost of building and running a transformer based model. The entire industry is just a party trick that’s massively overstayed it’s welcome.

    • @[email protected]
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      5 hours ago

      I mean, fuck the profitability. What about its massive toll on our already crumbling climate? What about its hallucinations that were told by the massively powerful companies (currently, anyway) to just not worry about? What about the promise of it “revolutionizing” industries (corporate speak for fucking workers in new and exciting ways), what about the paradigm solidifying nature of this tech that they keep lying to us about being a democratizing super tool?

      Everything about this shit is trouble because of the world it was built into. This type of tech (even though most of its capabilities and uses are lies) in the hands of the people it’s in will only serve the rich and gobble up resources when we need to be scaling back our consumption. Instead, that endless investment is fueling our climate collapse.

      Fuck this LLM bullshit. It’s not for us. It will only hurt us in this timeline.