Investors may also be growing jittery about the “circular funding” at the heart of the AI industry, through which artificial intelligence firms finance one another.
On Monday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Nvidia was in discussions with OpenAI about providing $250bn (£188bn) for a massive datacentre project in Ohio. Backing from Nvidia, which has an investment grade credit rating, could make it less expensive to raise funding for the project.
Literally the only thing they have is circular funding...
The only people that can afford to build data centers, are the people selling chips to data centers...
That should set off alarm bells in any rational mind, because even after built, no one has a plan to monetize it.
There's no path to long-term profits here, everyone not in the circle is just assuming they'll be the first ones to decide to pull out.
If enough gets pulled, it makes the rest panic and there will be a crash.
It's gonna happen, because there's too much money at stake for investors to risk it. One day we'll just hear that it's over and have to deal with the mess.
The only thing separating this from being a Ponzi scheme is that there is a product, and it does have value. It's overblown for sure, but it's not a pure Ponzi scheme.
LLMs will bounce back to local GPUs when they find out its really hard to keep this circular grift going just for surveillance. Turns out you actually need to extract money from the workers to pay for this, so those workers need money and can't just be replaced with AI.
i used googles LLM to help me code a python script to completely replace my fake cloud ai twitch streaming companion with one that runs entirely on my own machine no internet required so now i don't need googles LLM
Literally the entire point of the comment you replied to, like making exactly that point.
Like; it’s not saying it’s a Ponzi scheme, it’s saying that this does everything a Ponzi scheme does, but with an extremely overvalued product, instead of no product at all.
so we don’t have a name for this type of fraud specifically, and we’re not calling it a Ponzi scheme because that, as we established, means something else. But it works very similarly, in the logistical sense. So much so that we can succinctly describe it - not by enumerating all the things it is - but instead juxtaposing it against a Ponzi scheme and establishing that it’s the same except if you change this one thing.
Perhaps we should name it instead? Like a Fauxnzi scheme? Like pronounce it like Fonzie so it’ll catch on with boomers? I mean maybe Henry Winkler doesn’t deserve all that but it’s descriptive no?
I'm sure he'll try. He knows that the only thing between him and a gallows is the stock market. If the ultra wealthy can't or won't protect him while they're busy dealing with other problems, he's going to have a bad time.
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