If all of that were the case... why aren't they ALREADY profitable? There are only 2 companies in the actual LLM/AI space, OpenAI and Anthropic, and OpenAI is already so dominant that Anthropic is a noncontender. Since that is the case, why aren't either of them profitable? If they were, they'd be screaming about it constantly; Altman would be on stage every single goddamn day boasting about it; OpenAI would be posting monthly, if not WEEKLY profit reports, just to show how much money they were making as """The Future™️"""; public investors would be POURING IN like nothing else mattered!!!
So where is it? Where's the profit? Where are the reports and press conferences, the investor statements and the IPO's? Where's the goddamn money, Lebowski???
And don't say they're in the "growth stage" or whatever. 4 years in and a TRILLION DOLLARS LATER, there's no profit to be seen, no remarkable products to use, nothing of substance except billions burned building bespoke data centers and polluting the planet. The whole AI """industry""" is a lie.
He can do what he wants because he is, at least on paper, obscenely wealthy, and that provides the best protection from consequences in the world. Pair that with largely compliant judiciary and legislature branches, and suddenly his random rich person bullshit becomes codified as the King's Law. It's all fucked, dude.
The main difference between Science and fucking around is that Science has you write things down. So long as you record everything you did, even if it ended up with wildly unexpected results, it's valid.
That's the truly hilarious part - NOBODY is okay with this! EVERYONE knows it sucks! The ONLY reason it's still relevant is because Business Idiots are so goddamn pervasive and stupid. Any rational society would've taken GenAI out back and shot it years ago, that's how bad it is. If you want to get into the real nitty-gritty of JUST HOW TRASH things are, I recommend more of Zitron's work; it's a common topic for him to rip apart in a well-researched rage.
Do non-programmers just enter Claude and write "make program!!!" and then expect it to work?
Unironically, yes. The main proponents of this tech absolutely DO just do that, because they're Business Idiots who are fully happy and content with code that looks """good enough""", even if it does nothing useful. You can see this in all the credulous articles detailing tech CEOs who decree "All workers shall now use AI!!!" while vibecoding a bunch of slopware. They have no idea what the fuck they're actually doing, and they don't care. All the other Business Idiots have decided that this is the new hotness, so they either fall in line and "do AI", even at massive financial loss to their company and themselves, or they stop being part of the "In" crowd.
And to the Business Idiot, there is no fate worse than being irrelevant.
It's all the middle managers and Business Idiots who think they're so goddamn smart and effective at their jobs, wasting everyone's time because they're actually incompetent.
The absolutely critical difference between the work you, your buddies, and basically everyone else wants to do, versus corporate """work""", is that you want to do it because it'd make you happier and your community healthier, as opposed to making a line go up for some shareholders who honestly wouldn't care if you died tomorrow so long as it made the line go up a little further. Neoliberal Capitalism is Hell, man.
Come on now, people can't actually be humoring this fever dream, can they? It's just so fucking stupid...