• JeeBaiChow@lemmy.world
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    17 days ago

    Capitalism doesn’t sell performance. It sell ‘potential’ and ‘perceived gains’.

    • einlander@lemmy.world
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      17 days ago

      I sell my dates on my potential wealth and potential penis size. People need to get on the capitalism grindset.

      • seven_phone@lemmy.world
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        17 days ago

        And women sell dates on their potential to do that thing that was discussed but then try to backtrack by pretending they thought it was a joke and didn’t even bring a banana.

      • TachyonTele@lemm.ee
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        17 days ago

        “I have a great venture Idea for you Susan. What if, and hear me out, what if my penis was at least average size! I already have an investor lined up in the bedroom, you’d be crazy to pass on this opportunity”

      • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.zip
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        16 days ago

        “Both my cock and my investment portfolio are well positioned to overperform both ongoing quarterly and year over year growth as compared to standard cocks and investment portfolios, should volatility continue to remain close to historical averages.”

        Breakdown of how this doesn't actually mean anything, because I'm autistic:

        This doesn’t actually mean anything.

        “Well positioned to do X” just means ‘could happen’.

        It doesn’t actually promise any outsized gains at all, it ascribes no likelihood to this scenario, it does not quantify anything, at all, and it even conditions the potential hypothetical gains on a the vaguely defined condition of volatility remaining ‘close’ to ‘historical averages’, again totally unquantified.

        This would be dubious to expect to continue in perpetuity and without deviation, because both for the market and for people’s interpersonal lives, the extremely normal pattern is that volatilty remains within ‘normal’ bounds for a while, but will also predictably have short but highly intense bursts from time to time.

        So these entirely predictable volatility bursts break the condition.

        … But to someone with less knowledge of or experience with both markets and relationships, it seems good that something is well positioned to exceed standard growth, it seems reasonable that things will stay close to historical averages, so the ‘vibe’ takeaway is positive, and the mentioned (potential but utterly without basis) outsized growth was both in the short term and enduring year over year!

        Even though the actual content of what was said is literally nothing beyond jargon laden flim flam that has no ultimate literal meaning, nor legal liability.

        • skulblaka@sh.itjust.works
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          16 days ago

          Hey, give credit where it’s due.

          Some people work quite hard to make sure their jargon laden flim flam has no ultimate literal meaning nor legal liability.

  • Artyom@lemm.ee
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    17 days ago

    Finance bros who run wall street are all idiots, so they designed a system where no matter how stupid they are, they’re always right. If you get a bunch of finance bros in a room and give a really good sales pitch, your valuation can triple despite nothing real actually happening.

    In the case of AI, even the foremost experts are uncertain about how useful AI is. Qualified people disagree and no AI based tool has really proved itself to be robust, but it is amazing at fooling people who are either dumb or willfully ignorant, so it’s like crack cocaine to anyone who works on Wall Street.

    • Squizzy@lemmy.world
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      16 days ago

      There are multiple multiple useful implementations. They might not be ethical and cost people jobs but there are loads of smaller projects in use. We use it to analyse pictures of completed work to ensure it is to standard, has been working great and passed all audits.

      • frayedpickles@lemmy.cafe
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        16 days ago

        Are you talking about machine inspection? Cause that’s been around for decades. Why is that impacted by AI? You usually want the opposite of ai, a traceable way of verifying a part was made right every time.

        • Squizzy@lemmy.world
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          16 days ago

          Possibly? Its how things are installed in the field, if it as spec or not. We trained it on thousands of examples of right and wrong and now its reliable

  • T156@lemmy.world
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    17 days ago

    It shouldn’t be, but it is. 20 years ago, in the far-off year of 2005, a lot of tech companies more or less followed the same path, where it took decades for them to actually be profitable, if they were at all.

    YouTube ran at a deficit for something close to 15 years. AI companies are likely following this trend, and running mostly on investment money, rather than being self-sufficient.

    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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      17 days ago

      I don’t know about now, but Amazon ran a deficit for pretty much its entire existence. Amazon is a bit different though since it was part of an R&D strategy and they could’ve stepped off the gas at almost any point and been profitable.

    • jj4211@lemmy.world
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      17 days ago

      Tech companies were in that boat in the late 90s as well.

      The dot com bust deflated it somewhat, but somehow the industry got right back to it within a couple of years.

    • I Cast Fist@programming.dev
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      16 days ago

      Pretty sure youtube still runs on deficit. Storage costs alone would probably bankrupt some small countries.

  • john89@lemmy.ca
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    17 days ago

    Gotta keep in mind, profit can always be distorted based on how much employees are getting paid.

    Someone is making money. In fact, a lot of people are.

  • harsh3466@lemmy.ml
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    17 days ago

    Totally normal. Just keep throwing stupid amounts of money at it so it can find a way to undercut some existing business structure by operating at a loss until that business is dead and then enshittify. Profit! /s

  • vane@lemmy.world
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    17 days ago

    That’s how every single company targeting consumer market in the web started. No profit for many years. Majority because of scale of the market. Facebook started making profit after 2012 so for 8 years they were burning money figuring out where to sell their soul to. Now the scale and risk for OpenAI is way bigger, because they have not sold their users fully or we don’t know if they sold it and for exchange for what. It would be funny if they at some point alter their privacy policy and turn out to sell people’s chats to advertising agencies. They might also go bankrupt or turned out to be a scam that hires thousands of people to answer questions.

  • andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.works
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    17 days ago

    As a major investor into Open AI future, I’d gladly exchange all my non-existing stakes for a blowjob by fugly Sam Altman. It wouldn’t turn into any profits, but for some time, he’d have something in his mouth that isn’t a lie or a sketchy promo. I believe, some on Open AI board would even pay me to keep him silent.

  • seven_phone@lemmy.world
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    17 days ago

    So now we are actually to the point where we can ask if a corporation or more widely anything at all has any value if it makes no profit.

    There are people in the world who by luck of birth or circumstance have amassed obscene wealth and they after the fact are trying to convince everyone that profit is the only thing of value. These are the real public enemies.

    • TachyonTele@lemm.ee
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      17 days ago

      Altman has since said the company is losing money on its $200-per-month Pro subscriptions, which offer limitless access to its most recent model, OpenAI o1, and to its video generator, Sora AI. “People use it much more than we expected,” he wrote in a post on X.

      It’s ridiculous. More people use the product, so they’re losing money? What. That’s the complete opposite of what a business is.

      Not to mention the environmental damage they’ve been doing for close to no positive results.

      • nolefan33@sh.itjust.works
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        17 days ago

        It’s not more people using the product, it’s the limited population who are paying $200/month use it way more than they thought they would. So the costs per person paying that are going way over $200/month. Basically, they made the mistake of setting a fuck off price that was too low and a bunch of people did the math and took them up on the offer.

        • dragonfly4933@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          17 days ago

          If the product costs that much to run, and most users aren’t abusing their access, it’s possible the product isn’t profitable at any price that enough users are willing to pay.

          • masterspace@lemmy.ca
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            17 days ago

            This is dumb. Moore’s law may be mostly dead, but chips are still progressing at an absurd pace. In 6 years you’ll be able to run the o1 model on a raspberry Pi with no internet access.

            • dragonfly4933@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              17 days ago

              Maybe, but i never mentioned years into the future. Of course technology will improve. The hardware will get better and more effcient, and the algorithms and techniques will improve.

              But as it stands now, i still think what i said is true. We obviously don’t have exact numbers, so i can only speculate.

              Having lots of memory is a big part of inference, so I was going to reply to you that prices of memory stopped going down at a similar historical rate, but i found this, which is interesting

              https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/historical-cost-of-computer-memory-and-storage?time=2020..latest

              The cost when down by about 0.1x from 2000 to 2010. 2010-2020 it was only about 0.23x. 2020-2023 shows roughly another halving of the price, which is still a pretty good rate.

              The available memory is still only one part. The speed of the memory and the compute connected to it also plays a big part in how these current systems work.

            • wewbull@feddit.uk
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              17 days ago

              Nvidias latest gen looks to be 30% faster after 2 years of development with about the same power usage increase. So no reduction in Joules per GOP, just a speed increase.

              In 6 years they might go 2x the speed of today but need double the watts (to deliver the same energy in half the time).

      • seven_phone@lemmy.world
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        17 days ago

        Because the people that innovate do not care for business and are not good at it, but everything in this world we created has to be sold so there is always this initial mismatch before the business graduate vultures, who innovate nothing descend on it, beg control and then go way too far in the opposite direction. At that late point the only innovation will be a slightly more rounded set of icons on the website.

      • Cruxifux@feddit.nl
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        17 days ago

        I almost shat myself in half when I saw how much water is needed for cooling for every prompt

    • john89@lemmy.ca
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      17 days ago

      This is the post-scarcity shift. This is how it happens.

      We need to take, by force, those who have too much and give it to those who have too little.

      They will be kicking and screaming. That means we’re doing something right, because they are not our allies.

    • wewbull@feddit.uk
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      17 days ago

      A company can have value without making profit. It can own assets. It has value in its staff.

      Now should it have a valuation like OpenAI? Fuck no!

    • john89@lemmy.ca
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      17 days ago

      People want to jump on the bandwagon and assume they know everything about new technology.

      It’s really easy to take advantage of these laymen with things like traveling to mars or… building underground highways of tubes so people can use transportation like those bank chutes.

      I hope one day, we as a species can recognize these patterns so that we may take steps to break them.

      We don’t need some “big new tech” to solve the world’s problems. We need to turn around and help out our fellow man who has less than us. We have the tools, just not the desire.

      It’s a cultural problem.

    • jeffw@lemmy.worldOP
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      17 days ago

      It’s typical for tech companies to organize as nonprofits and then restructure because they are losing cash?

      Not sure if I’m misunderstanding you or what part you think is typical

  • ᕙ(⇀‸↼‶)ᕗ@lemm.ee
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    17 days ago

    absolutely should. america lives in an idiocracy. a trump meme coin could be valued at 100trillion $ and thats fine. if you want feudalism with extra steps, this is exactly that. go buy some golden sneakers and maybe they’ll be worth a million some time or not.

  • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
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    16 days ago

    Same goes for Tesla, it’s severely over bloated even if it’s bubble has shrunk a bit.

    These sort of bubbles should be stopped by the government but why stop that if the politicians themselves are the ones having pumped millions into these bubbles?

    First you gotta make a law prohibiting politicians from having stocks, then watch how fast this problem gets resolved

    • AA5B@lemmy.world
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      16 days ago

      Why should they be stopped by the government? That assumes the stock market should be logical and predictable but why should that be true? It’s all speculation, just a step above gambling, and people should be allowed to.

      Tesla is a great example. Its stock has never been at an expected level for their revenue or profit. It’s all speculation about their potential to disrupt the car market (which they have), and predictions like 50% growth per year. Even now, self-driving and artificial intelligence seem a bit far fetched to most of us, but if they happen will be very disruptive.

      But yes , politicians should have required ethics standards, including banning insider training. The rest of us have to: how does it make sense for our leaders to have lower ethical standards than everyone else?

      • SoftTeeth@lemmy.world
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        16 days ago

        It should be forced to be logical and predictable because Capitalists have made it so the stock market is the only way to really save for retirement.

        Our society and economy shouldn’t be a fun game for the whales to win at the expense of the rest of us.

  • frayedpickles@lemmy.cafe
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    16 days ago

    You know when you’re playing a game and you think this is kinda dumb sure my gun now does 100 more damage but the baddies have 100 more health so really nothing has changed? But it still makes you feel better because well, it’s 100 more.

    I think that’s how these valuations work.

  • LovableSidekick@lemmy.world
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    17 days ago

    The history of the Internet and computers in general is full of investors willing to take seemingly insane chances on overvalued speculative ventures.

    • aesthelete@lemmy.world
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      17 days ago

      Private equity is so pumped full of cash that they basically have nothing better to do with it.