Tootfinder

Wait I thought it’s the future of humanity and close to AGI https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/759965/sam-altman-openai-ai-bubble-interview

Sam Altman says OpenAI "totally screwed up some things" on the GPT-5 rollout, confirms plans to fund a brain-computer interface startup to rival Neuralink (Alex Heath/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/command-line-news

I talked to Sam Altman about the GPT-5 launch fiasco
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman addressed criticism of GPT-5’s rollout, the AI bubble, launching a social network and brain-computer interface, buying Google Chrome, and more.

Time for another round of critical AI weekend reading:
Crashing hard: why talking about bubbles obscures the real social cost of overinvesting into “Artificial Intelligence”
Aline Blankertz (@…)

Crashing hard: why talking about bubbles obscures the real social cost of overinvesting into “Artificial Intelligence”
More and more commentators talk about and warn of an “AI bubble”, and everybody seems to congratulate each other on being such a smart financial analyst. BUT: A bubble pops and you are left with air and maybe a splash of soap somewhere on the floor. A fairly clean affair. This kind of investor speak

"The real threat posed by generative AI is not that it will eliminate work on a mass scale, rendering human labour obsolete. It is that, left unchecked, it will continue to transform work in ways that deepen precarity, intensify surveillance, and widen existing inequalities."
"The current trajectory of generative AI reflects the priorities of firms seeking to lower costs, discipline workers, and consolidate profits — not any drive to enhance human flourishing. If we allo…

Is the AI Bubble About to Burst?
In the years since Automation and the Future of Work first appeared, a new wave of technological enthusiasm has swept across the popular imagination. The catalyst this time has been the rapid advances in generative artificial intelligence, spearheaded by companies like OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Meta. Once again, a c

"As we approach the coming jobs cliff, we're entering a period where a college isn't going to be worth it for the majority of people, since AI will take over most white-collar jobs. Combined with the demographic cliff, the entire higher education system will crumble."
This is the kind of statement you don't hear that much from sub-CEO-level #AI boosters, because it's awkward for them to admit that the tech they think is improving their life is going to be disastrous for society. Or if they do admit this, they spin it like it's a good thing (don't get me wrong, tuition is ludicrously high and higher education absolutely could be improved by a wholesale reinvention, but the potential AI-fueled collapse won't be an improvement).
I'm in the "anti-AI" crowd myself, and I think the current tech is in a hype bubble that will collapse before we see wholesale replacement of white-collar jobs, with a re-hiring to come that will somewhat make up for the current decimation. There will still be a lot of fallout for higher ed (and hopefully some productive transformation), but it might not be apocalyptic.
Fun question to ask the next person who extols the virtues of using generative AI for their job: "So how long until your boss can fire you and use the AI themselves?"
The following ideas are contradictory:
1. "AI is good enough to automate a lot of mundane tasks."
2. "AI is improving a lot so those pesky issues will be fixed soon."
3. "AI still needs supervision so I'm still needed to do the full job."

It's worth bearing in mind that all AI companies are in that phase where they burn money to attract the most customers and hope that the competition blinks first. That means all AI is pretty badly underpriced.
For coding, that's a problem. It's just on the edge of being arguably positive for some. If the price goes up by an order of ten, the bubble is going to burst. And it may take the other AI use cases with it. After all, coding was kind of a killer app.

Anthropic Is Bleeding Out
Hello premium customers! Feel free to get in touch at ez@betteroffline.com if you're ever feeling chatty. And if you're not one yet, please subscribe and support my independent brain madness. Also, thank you to Kasey Kagawa for helping with the maths on this. Soundtrack: Killer Be Killed -

I keep posting about how the AI hype bubble makes it almost impossible to have a reasonable conversation about LLMs, and it’s only when the bubble bursts that we can start thinking realistically about what if anything LLMs are actually good for in writing code.
That seems to be what Fred is getting at here: the massive gap between the hype and the reality means that the affordances of these tools fit neither the task at hand nor the tool’s own capabilities.
6/

Another week in which my filter bubble is both “I don’t like tech companies cramming AI into everything” and “Apple has fallen concerningly behind in the race to cram AI into everything”.

[OT] Wall Street's #AI bubble is worse than the 1999 dot-com bubble, warns a top economist https://gizmodo.com/wall-streets-ai-bubble-is-worse-t…

Wall Street’s AI Bubble Is Worse Than the 1999 Dot-com Bubble, Warns a Top Economist
A chief economist at investment giant Apollo says the top ten AI stocks are more detached from reality than the tech titans of the 1990s were. His chart is a stark warning that history is about to repeat itself.

Why AI can't possibly make you more productive; long
#AI and "productivity", some thoughts:
Edit: fixed some typos.
Productivity is a concept that isn't entirely meaningless outside the context of capitalism, but it's a concept that is heavily inflected in a capitalist context. In many uses today it effectively means "how much you can satisfy and/or exceed your boss' expectations." This is not really what it should mean: even in an anarchist utopia, people would care about things like how many shirts they can produce in a week, although in an "I'd like to voluntarily help more people" way rather than an "I need to meet this quota to earn my survival" way. But let's roll with this definition for a second, because it's almost certainly what your boss means when they say "productivity", and understanding that word in a different (even if truer) sense is therefore inherently dangerous.
Accepting "productivity" to mean "satisfying your boss' expectations," I will now claim: the use of generative AI cannot increase your productivity.
Before I dive in, it's imperative to note that the big generative models which most people think of as constituting "AI" today are evil. They are 1: pouring fuel on our burning planet, 2: psychologically strip-mining a class of data laborers who are exploited for their precarity, 3: enclosing, exploiting, and polluting the digital commons, and 4: stealing labor from broad classes of people many of whom are otherwise glad to give that labor away for free provided they get a simple acknowledgement in return. Any of these four "ethical issues" should be enough *alone* to cause everyone to simply not use the technology. These ethical issues are the reason that I do not use generative AI right now, except for in extremely extenuating circumstances. These issues are also convincing for a wide range of people I talk to, from experts to those with no computer science background. So before I launch into a critique of the effectiveness of generative AI, I want to emphasize that such a critique should be entirely unnecessary.
But back to my thesis: generative AI cannot increase your productivity, where "productivity" has been defined as "how much you can satisfy and/or exceed your boss' expectations."
Why? In fact, what the fuck? Every AI booster I've met has claimed the opposite. They've given me personal examples of time saved by using generative AI. Some of them even truly believe this. Sometimes I even believe they saved time without horribly compromising on quality (and often, your boss doesn't care about quality anyways if the lack of quality is hard to measure of doesn't seem likely to impact short-term sales/feedback/revenue). So if generative AI genuinely lets you write more emails in a shorter period of time, or close more tickets, or something else along these lines, how can I say it isn't increasing your ability to meet your boss' expectations?
The problem is simple: your boss' expectations are not a fixed target. Never have been. In virtue of being someone who oversees and pays wages to others under capitalism, your boss' game has always been: pay you less than the worth of your labor, so that they can accumulate profit and thus more capital to remain in charge instead of being forced into working for a wage themselves. Sure, there are layers of management caught in between who aren't fully in this mode, but they are irrelevant to this analysis. It matters not how much you please your manager if your CEO thinks your work is not worth the wages you are being paid. And using AI actively lowers the value of your work relative to your wages.
Why do I say that? It's actually true in several ways. The most obvious: using generative AI lowers the quality of your work, because the work it produces is shot through with errors, and when your job is reduced to proofreading slop, you are bound to tire a bit, relax your diligence, and let some mistakes through. More than you would have if you are actually doing and taking pride in the work. Examples are innumerable and frequent, from journalists to lawyers to programmers, and we laugh at them "haha how stupid to not check whether the books the AI reviewed for you actually existed!" but on a deeper level if we're honest we know we'd eventually make the same mistake ourselves (bonus game: spot the swipe-typing typos I missed in this post; I'm sure there will be some).
But using generative AI also lowers the value of your work in another much more frightening way: in this era of hype, it demonstrates to your boss that you could be replaced by AI. The more you use it, and no matter how much you can see that your human skills are really necessary to correct its mistakes, the more it appears to your boss that they should hire the AI instead of you. Or perhaps retain 10% of the people in roles like yours to manage the AI doing the other 90% of the work. Paradoxically, the *more* you get done in terms of raw output using generative AI, the more it looks to your boss as if there's an opportunity to get enough work done with even fewer expensive humans. Of course, the decision to fire you and lean more heavily into AI isn't really a good one for long-term profits and success, but the modern boss did not get where they are by considering long-term profits. By using AI, you are merely demonstrating your redundancy, and the more you get done with it, the more redundant you seem.
In fact, there's even a third dimension to this: by using generative AI, you're also providing its purveyors with invaluable training data that allows them to make it better at replacing you. It's generally quite shitty right now, but the more use it gets by competent & clever people, the better it can become at the tasks those specific people use it for. Using the currently-popular algorithm family, there are limits to this; I'm not saying it will eventually transcend the mediocrity it's entwined with. But it can absolutely go from underwhelmingly mediocre to almost-reasonably mediocre with the right training data, and data from prompting sessions is both rarer and more useful than the base datasets it's built on.
For all of these reasons, using generative AI in your job is a mistake that will likely lead to your future unemployment. To reiterate, you should already not be using it because it is evil and causes specific and inexcusable harms, but in case like so many you just don't care about those harms, I've just explained to you why for entirely selfish reasons you should not use it.
If you're in a position where your boss is forcing you to use it, my condolences. I suggest leaning into its failures instead of trying to get the most out of it, and as much as possible, showing your boss very clearly how it wastes your time and makes things slower. Also, point out the dangers of legal liability for its mistakes, and make sure your boss is aware of the degree to which any of your AI-eager coworkers are producing low-quality work that harms organizational goals.
Also, if you've read this far and aren't yet of an anarchist mindset, I encourage you to think about the implications of firing 75% of (at least the white-collar) workforce in order to make more profit while fueling the climate crisis and in most cases also propping up dictatorial figureheads in government. When *either* the AI bubble bursts *or* if the techbros get to live out the beginnings of their worker-replacement fantasies, there are going to be an unimaginable number of economically desperate people living in increasingly expensive times. I'm the kind of optimist who thinks that the resulting social crucible, though perhaps through terrible violence, will lead to deep social changes that effectively unseat from power the ultra-rich that continue to drag us all down this destructive path, and I think its worth some thinking now about what you might want the succeeding stable social configuration to look like so you can advocate towards that during points of malleability.
As others have said more eloquently, generative AI *should* be a technology that makes human lives on average easier, and it would be were it developed & controlled by humanists. The only reason that it's not, is that it's developed and controlled by terrible greedy people who use their unfairly hoarded wealth to immiserate the rest of us in order to maintain their dominance. In the long run, for our very survival, we need to depose them, and I look forward to what the term "generative AI" will mean after that finally happens.

Wall Street giants like Blackstone, KKR, and BlackRock are pouring hundreds of billions into AI data centers, creating concerns of "oversupply" and a bubble (Maureen Farrell/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/02/business/ai-da…

Are A.I. Data Centers a Sure Thing or the Next Real Estate Bubble?
Private equity firms like Blackstone are using their clients’ money to buy and build data centers to fuel the artificial intelligence boom.

You're not being forced to use AI because your boss thinks it will make you more productive. You're being forced to use AI because either your boss is invested in the AI hype and wants to drive usage numbers up, or because your boss needs training data from your specific role so they can eventually replace you with an AI, or both.
Either way, it's not in your interests to actually use it, which is convenient, because using it is also harmful in 4-5 different ways (briefly: resource overuse, data laborer abuse, commons abuse, psychological hazard, bubble inflation, etc.)
#AI

In the ZIRP era, #UX was evangelized as a magic wand to 10x value — and after that bubble popped, UX found a niche as a delivery function. Unfortunately, optimizing our process for faster outputs over outcomes meant that #AI came and ate our lunch with instant outputs/no outcomes.
But this was no golden…

Design struggles to be born
The golden age of UX is over. But the momentum that it brought is not yet extinguished, and a new generation of design leaders is seizing it.

Remember the home assistant bubble? Wasn’t there a prediction that significant percentage of searches would be performed that way? Those people weren’t quiet didn’t they.😅
Probably moved onto promoting their perceived values of Gen AI now.

New high-frequency gravitational waves from first-order phase transitions
Wen-Yuan Ai
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.02794 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.02794

New high-frequency gravitational waves from first-order phase transitions
First-order phase transitions in the early Universe are a well-motivated source of gravitational waves (GWs). In this Letter, we identify a previously overlooked GW production mechanism: gravitational transition radiation, arising from graviton emission by particles whose mass changes as they pass through expanding bubble walls. Unlike conventional sources such as bubble collisions or sound waves, this mechanism operates at the microscopic scale set by the Lorentz-contracted wall thickness, lea…

Weekend list of critical reading links about the state[1] of Tech, AI[2] hype/finance/politics, mostly long form:
Ed Zitron's The Hater's Guide To The AI Bubble
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-gui/
How to use computing power faster: on the weird ec…

The Hater's Guide To The AI Bubble
Hey! Before we go any further — if you want to support my work, please sign up for the premium version of Where’s Your Ed At, it’s a $7-a-month (or $70-a-year) paid product where every week you get a premium newsletter, all while supporting my free work too.  Also,

With 35% of the stock market value coming from 7 companies benefiting from AI hype, and us being in a bubble, I felt it was time to diversify my retirement portfolio. I’ve added this asset to my holdings.

As for “but it's great for coding!“…
…world-wide there's about 3.6 billion jobs or so, of which ~25 million are in software development; this means maybe about 0.7% of all jobs world-wide can use "great for coding".
Writing actual code amounts to maybe, if you're lucky, 10% of the work a software developer does.
The rest is meetings, high-level specifications, email and chat, more meetings, learning new things, updating stuff, lots of testing and debugging, etc.
The gist is, the supposed gains from "AI" are completely irrelevant (and indeed there's signs and studies that show it doesn't do anything for programmer productivity either).
tl;dr: This is the worst economic bubble in history, pushing a dream of a magical technology that unfortunately doesn't work, by appealing to investor greed.

In the #ISE2025 lecture today we were introducing our students to the concept of distributional semantics as the foundation of modern large language models. Historically, Wittgenstein was one of the important figures in the Philosophy of Language stating thet "The meaning of a word is its use in the language."

Re this from @…, of the biggest tells about the current AI hype bubble:
Instead of replacing the work humans don’t want to do, it’s purporting to replace the work executives hate paying for.
Instead of an end to drudgery, they’re pushing an end to purpose and meaning.
And yeah, we’re going to end up cleaning up the AI’s messes. And doing its laundry.
https://mastodon.social/@PavelASamsonov/114598616057210141

I wonder how this can be leveraged in our #VFX industry.
Can you position a company as the guys who’ll fix stuff that another team messed up because they thought they can do an effects shot with Midjourney but then ended up with nothing to show once the director wanted a simple revision like turning that object a tiny bit more or making the cool explosion more „swooosh“ instead of „wooosh“?

The deeper we get into this AI Hype Cycle, the more it feels like the DotCom Hype Cycle of 1999-2000, to me.
When I was away last week, I saw a billboard with a suited white guy’s face (it looked like a realtor sign) and the headline “AI-ify your business”.
People are afraid of missing out on… whatever this is. Just like they were worried about missing the onramp to the Information Superhighway, 25 years ago.
This bubble *will* burst, and it’s going to hurt at least as muc…

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-gui/

The Hater's Guide To The AI Bubble
Hey! Before we go any further — if you want to support my work, please sign up for the premium version of Where’s Your Ed At, it’s a $7-a-month (or $70-a-year) paid product where every week you get a premium newsletter, all while supporting my free work too.  Also,

Re this from @…, of the biggest tells about the current AI hype bubble:
Instead of replacing the work humans don’t want to do, it’s purporting to replace the work executives hate paying for.
Instead of an end to drudgery, they’re pushing an end to purpose and meaning.
And yeah, we’re going to end up cleaning up the AI’s messes. And doing its laundry.
https://mastodon.social/@PavelASamsonov/114598616057210141

When is the AI bubble going to pop?
Why do we put up with fascist gaslighting when we should be screaming the truth at them?
Why is mainstream media and mainstream centre politics so accommodating of the far-right?
When does Israel's over-extended military collapse?

Whatever LLMs and gen AI may or may not •actually• be good for, whatever jobs they may or may not actually reshape or displace, right now we’re in the middle of a bubble. The sheer amount of money involved makes it almost impossible to think clearly about this, much less have a useful public discussion. Even well-founded hopes and fears for the tech fuel a fire that I very much do not want to fuel.
8/

Whatever LLMs and gen AI may or may not •actually• be good for, whatever jobs they may or may not actually reshape or displace, right now we’re in the middle of a bubble. The sheer amount of money involved makes it almost impossible to think clearly about this, much less have a useful public discussion. Even well-founded hopes and fears for the tech fuel a fire that I very much do not want to fuel.
8/

I see @… has a similar reaction about a study that says something we want to hear.
Re that second remark, “The *point* of AI is to make cognitive abilities irrelevant,” well, that’s the thing that’s up for debate right now. Making cognitive abilities (and thus labor, and people) irrelevant is very much the marketing pitch of the hype bubble. That pitch is about cost cutting, and about fear and intimidation — an intoxicating, investor-frothing mixture of fantasy and terror.
It’s not the only vision of AI, however.
https://hachyderm.io/@datarama/114693869134389025