We need to start with voting in such overwhelming numbers this November that Democrats get the House and Senate - ideally with a huge proportion of actual progressive leftists. It needs to be a large enough majority to completely stop any further actions on Trump's part.
Next, there needs to be congressional hearings that expose everything - fucking everything - the orange sack of shit has done to corrupt the government. Make it stay in the news 24 hours a day. Put federal officials under constant congressional subpoena. Make it impossible for the remaining Republicans in the House and Senate to avoid hearing about it.
Finally, when those Republicans have finally had enough, move to impeach and remove both Trump and Vance. Get both those motherfuckers out of there. Let the new Speaker of the House become acting president, and start cleaning up the mess.
At that point, start packing the court. Boost the number of justices to 15. Implement term limits for SCOTUS as well, and make them retroactive. Alito, Thomas, and Roberts: Gone.
If this happens, maybe in 2028 we can start really repairing the damage.
nvidia, microsoft, google, oracle, etc are all profitable
NVIDIA is a hugely profitable hardware company. Not an AI model provider. They're selling the shovels for the gold rush. And their profits will tank as soon as one of the model providers fold, though pivoting back to consumer hardware is definitely an option for them.
Microsoft is a hugely profitable business and consumer software company. Again, not an AI model provider. They have trained a couple models, but have made no profit on serving them. Their add-on "Copilot" services aren't profitable (hence the recent enormous price hikes for GitHub Copilot, which has resulted in a bunch of companies scaling back their AI usage). All of Microsoft's profit comes from software sales.
Google is a hugely profitable software company as well - but again, not with AI. Their model, Gemini, isn't remotely profitable, and has similar costs to maintain as Anthropic and OpenAI see for their models. Heck, they just did a fundraising round for the first time in years to support it, which is NOT a sign of a healthy AI business.
Oracle is also profitable in software, but they've staked their company on hardware roll-outs supporting data centers for OpenAI. They've booked future profit from OpenAI owing them almost a trillion dollars. If OpenAI can't pay that bill when the time comes, Oracle is completely fucked.
inference is profitable, training is not
When I don't include the costs of doing business, my business is profitable! That's silly. Inference might be very slightly in the green now when viewed by itself (although that's deeply questionable; no actual GAAP accounting has shown it to be so). But since training is an ongoing expense that frontier model providers have to constantly engage in, their companies are - and will remain - very deeply in the red.
And without seeing GAAP accounting showing where all the money goes in support of inference, I am highly doubtful that it's profitable.
training is what the majority of data centre spend is going towards
if they want to be profitable pull back the training but right now they are competing for market share
They can't. Ever. Pulling back on training means allowing model drift. You need to understand that models are obsolete the moment they're released. Their training data is set in stone. New version of Typescript ships? Some celebrity dies? Big election happens? The model not only doesn't know about any of it, it can't be updated. The best you can manage is throwing MCP and RAG at it in the hopes that the model will pay attention to it, but the point of diminishing returns on that arrives almost instantaneously. You have to train. Constantly.
feel free to look back at all the times lemmy predicted the end of spotify because it wasn’t profitable, now they turn around and cry it’s making money
Bad comparison. Spotify has already been a profitable, publicly-traded company for years.
And - this part's important - I'm not Lemmy. The platform we're having this conversation on has nothing to do with whether or not the AI model providers are profitable.
At work nobody is talking like this, everyone is talking about claude and it makes sense, it’s the best thing since vscode
Anecdotes aren't data. But as long as we're swapping anecdotes, here's mine: I work with actual machine-learning engineers. They're the ones who bag on Anthropic and OpenAI the most. And they use Qwen, Gemma, and a few other small, open-source, open-weight models. Have you looked at Hugging Face? Its community is huge, and growing daily. No one wants to be locked in to Claude Code or any other proprietary development tool when the service has been unstable and the pricing has becoming ridiculous in their desperate attempts to become profitable.
The cost for using Qwen tokens is $0, no matter how many tokens they use.
You say no one talks like this... Are you sure you're listening?
Anthropic is already profitable if you take out the enormous spend they have on training, which if the bubble bursts would leave them as the number 1 ai provider, it’s also insanely in demand and has trouble keeping up with its current product, they also have several products mythos etc lined up
First off... Why in the world would you take out the enormous spend they have on training? Training is an ongoing expense, not a startup expense. If your expenses exceed your income, then you're not making a profit.
Secondly, they had one quarter in which they reported (using non-GAAP accounting) a very slight amount of profit. That same quarter, SpaceX gave them a massive - and temporary - discount on rented compute.
We don't have any reason to think they're actually profitable.
I doubt it, I think it’d be closer to liberation day tariff’s or the oil crisis, it’ll go down for a bit, many articles will be written about how this is the worst thing ever then 6 months later it’ll be back up again
You're way more optimistic than I am. If OpenAI and Anthropic crash, there are a huge number of businesses that have built themselves around their products, and those will crash, too. And I think you're downplaying the damage the tariffs have already done.
As said all the major players in this game are super profitable major companies, that won’t change
Again, not true. OpenAI is not profitable. Anthropic is almost certainly not profitable. Grok from SpaceX is not profitable. Google is profitable, but not from Gemini. Microsoft is profitable, but not from Copilot.
No business that is built entirely on AI is profitable. Not one.
Look... No one's arguing that the coding tools built around AI are entirely useless. They're not (although their capabilities are way, waaaaay over-hyped). The problem is an economic one: Serving up AI models cannot be profitable. There's just no way, especially now that we have small AI models that can be run on local workstations, and offer similar performance to the frontier models.
Qwen, running in a well-designed harness such as OpenCode, with a carefully written AGENTS.md file, is of comparable performance to at least Claude Sonnet, and possibly Claude Opus. All without the massive, ludicrous infrastructure requirements.
How is Anthropic supposed to compete with that? Sure, you can probably get something useful out of Opus faster, but at the cost of thousands of dollars. Using Qwen and similar local models is free.
No one thinks companies like Google or Microsoft are going away.
What's going to happen is that OpenAI and Anthropic will ultimately fold because they can't be profitable, Google and Microsoft will scale back their supremely unprofitable LLM operations, Micron and NVIDIA will plunge in value because all of a sudden their bloated prices aren't being paid by anyone, Oracle will suffer because OpenAI can't pay its enormous bills with them, massive data center projects will end before completion, and a whole lot of smaller businesses that embraced all this madness will collapse.
That will have devastating ripple effects throughout the economy. It's going to be a lot larger than the dotcom bubble bursting.
Would have been? EVs are exactly that. They're great. Ones with range can easily replace cars with internal combustion engines for most use-cases. Usually costs me about $5 a month to keep mine charged.
Fully agree on LLMs being expensive messes that aren't very useful, though.
I mean, it seems pretty obvious at this point. The data centers aren't getting built in time for all the hardware they're buying up to get used, so it's just sitting in warehouses and will be obsolete by the time any of these new data centers are built (if they ever actually are). And Jensen Huang has been waxing poetic about a future in which people don't own computers anymore, they rent them to run AI agents on.
I'm not saying this is a sane and rational thing they're pursuing, and it's certainly doomed to failure because no one wants to rent computer time to run AI agents. But trying to prop up the AI bubble certainly seems to be the primary goal of all this ridiculous hardware purchasing.
Clever! And when sanity starts reasserting itself at your company, you can claim you're focusing on saving the company money by reducing your token usage and just... make fewer animal slop websites.
Mo Bitar had a bit of advice that I think is applicable here: Lie. Claim to be an extreme 10x vibe whatever. Put "AI enablement" (whatever the fuck that means) in your LinkedIn profile. And wherever you get hired, commit to using enormous amounts of tokens as they require.
Then just... write code. Oh, definitely use the LLMs, too, but not for anything important. Set them to work writing BASH scripts or something. Get them burning through tokens to summarize all the corporate documentation you can find. Have agents creating agents to test the output of other agents and report to more agents on what the agents are doing. Meanwhile, do real work. Make sure that for every PR, you have the AI do one thing on it, to give it that code-slop shine.
Sucks that this is where we're at, but it is what it is.
I'm sorry that happened to you. I've also seen it happen to a lot of very good engineers I've known over the years. It's truly insane. I know some people who've had to dip into their 401k accounts early just to keep their heads above water, and it's going to be an economy-wide disaster soon.
Software engineer, here. Yep, the burnout is real. I consider myself fortunate, however; with the skyrocketing cost of AI, my employer has been urging us to do as much as possible by hand lately to cut back on token usage.
I think that's pretty much where the entire industry will go soon.
It's related to the AI bubble. The AI companies are trying to make it as difficult as possible to get a good PC, because they know they're cooked if the general public has access to systems that can run AI models locally, so they're buying everything up as fast as they can in the name of data centers that will never be built.
As soon as the first one fails, it's all over. Prices will tumble and memory makers will come crawling back to Valve (and other hardware makers) begging them to buy.
It's definitely a step in the right direction. These fascist bastards have deported people on their way to taking the citizenship oath. Now they can't do shit like that.
If you're referring to the Chinese Room, I don't personally find it to be a compelling argument against the hypothetical possibility of AGI. The proposed room has no way to store information, no way to incorporate that information into its system, and no way to initiate activity without external input.
Heck, now that I think about it, it's actually a pretty good description of the way LLMs actually work. But not the way an autonomous thinking agent works.
Yeah, that's the one that stands out the most to me. I had no idea Origa had died. :'(