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Reality Check


I'm sick and god-damn tired of this! I have written tens of thousands of words about this and still, to this day, people are babbling about the "AI revolution" as the sky rains blood and crevices open in the Earth, dragging houses and cars and domesticated animals into their maws.

While I'd love to add a "because..." here, if not because it’s important to be intellectually honest and represent views that directly contrast my own, even if I do so in a somewhat sardonic fashion, nobody seems to actually have a cogent response to how they right this ship other than Hard Forker Casey Newton throwing a full-scale tantrum on a podcast and saying I'm wrong because "inference costs are coming down." While I hope I'm wrong, the calamity I fear is one where the massive over-investment in data centers is met with a lack of meaningful growth or profit, leading to the markets turning on the major cloud players that staked their future on unproven generative AI. If Amazon is only making $5 billion in revenue from the literal only shiny new thing it has, sold on the world's premier cloud platform, at a time when businesses are hungry and desperate to integrate AI, then there's little chance this suddenly turns into a remarkable revenue-driver.

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