Yes and it should be worse. OpenAI should be forced to take on the cost of compensating every copyright holder it exploited. If that means OpenAI doesn’t exist I’m absolutely okay with that.
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
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?
Why should they be stopped by the government?
Maybe, but hopefully the existing controls will prevent that from happening again …. Unless overzealous attempts at “reducing regulations” break those. There were quite a few factors around the Great Depression but consider controls like:
- “circuit breakers”, automatically halt trading when a stock or the overall market drops too quickly
- “qualified investors” are criteria you must meet for the riskiest investments, basically that you can handle the loss
- bank requirements for capital, risk, so less likely to collapse
- bank rescues - Lemmy likes to complain about rescuing banks instead of people, but bank collapses during a crisis are what can push the crash off the deep end
Also the overall size and complexity of the modern investment industry should make it much less likely for any one type of investment to drive a general crash.
- “qualified investors” are criteria you must meet for the riskiest investments, basically that you can handle the loss
I’m surprised you’re not calling that a government overreach considering your previous comment.
Do you think the current government controls are working and shouldn’t be changed at all?
We haven’t had a real depression in 100 years, so something is working. Sure, we have recessions periodically and some are worse than others, but as long as it’s relatively limited.
I think that a lot of regulations were put in place for a reason. Whether they work for that reason or not, it would be better to understand the reason before blindly removing regulations
None of them have come close to the severity of the Great Depression. We’ll never control all instabilities, the important part is limiting their severity
Yes, I’ve been affected by several of these. I’ve gotten laid off during downturns. I’ve been affected by high interest rates. I’ve been affected by unattainable housing. But at least it wasn’t worse
people should be allowed to
uh no they shouldn’t
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.
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.
if you’re mad at this, don’t look at how much xai is worth.
ai is basically just a pump and dump for rich people before the bubble bursts
I’m really excited about your explanation how a pump and dump is going to work when openAI is not even publicly traded. So who’s gonna pump and dump what exactly?
How is it pump and dump? These companies aren’t publicly traded.
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.
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.
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.
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
Do you work at Boeing?
Because that would certainly explain some things.
I should fucking hope OpenAI isn’t profitable.
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
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.
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.
Pretty sure youtube still runs on deficit. Storage costs alone would probably bankrupt some small countries.
People don’t realise how much the storage and bandwidth costs are for a site as big as YouTube, and it keeps going up due to the huge number of videos being uploaded. People think that Google are making huge amounts of money from YouTube. In reality, they’re not breaking even and rely on other, profitable business units (like their Workspace and cloud services) to subsidize it.
There’s no way the ads fully cover the cost, and more and more people are blocking ads. Advertisers don’t pay for blocked ads, and YouTubers don’t make any ad money from your views if you use an ad blocker. (this is the main reason YouTubers say they make less money from ads than they used to - ad blockers)
I guess the cost is worth it to Google just to entrench themselves and their products even further into the lives of most people.
Yeah it’s part of their overall strategy to be seen as a core part of the internet / the web. Same as Yahoo in the 90s and early 2000s.
The more people that use their free services, the more appealing they are to advertisers compared to competing ad platforms (broader reach), and the more paid subscribers they get.
Products like Visual Studio, some Jetbrains IDEs, VMware ESXi, and a lot of SaaS products, are (or used to be) free for individuals or for open source usage for a similar reason - people get familiar with them at home, and end up recommending them and buying them at work. A few individuals liking the product can result in large companies signing paid contracts for tens of thousands of users.
And it would give a competitor a foothold to build a competing ad business
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.
That’s a long established myth. Amazon started out in 94, and became profitable in like 10 years. Most of their hardcore R&D is self-financed cause they generate just that much free cash.
Right. They spend their free cash (and sometimes more) on R&D and infrastructure, which by definition means they’re unprofitable. Profit is what’s left after expenses, so if you have nothing left, you’re unprofitable.
Thanks for clarifying that profit is calculated using a subtraction, but you’re missing the core of my comment. Amazon self-finance their R&D and STILL make a fuck load of profit. They made like 30B$ of free cash last year alone. In the last 15 years they’ve made >100B$ in overall profit and only been in the red twice.
They’re not just profitable they’re an insane money printing machine that doesn’t show any sign of slowing down.
They’re a money printing machine, but they’re usually unprofitable because they spend it all.
If you made $1M/year and spent $1M/year, your household would be less profitable than one that made $100k and spent $90k. That’s what profit means, it’s the amount you keep after all expenses are paid (assets - liabilities). It’s obviously more complex since there are other measures (e.g. EBIT), but that’s generally how profitability is calculated.
Their R&D tends to go to things that will make more money, so it’s not wasted, but it’s only profit if they don’t spend it.
Oh thanks for clarifying in even more excruciating details how a subtraction works that is really helpful.
Why would you repeat the lie that they’re “usually unprofitable” when the information is publically available in a million places on the internet ? In 2023 Amazon made :
- 575B$ in sales
- If you remove costs of goods that’s 270B$ in gross profit
- If you remove operating expenses (including R&D) that’s 30B$ in net income
Amazon is factually not “usually unprofitable”, they have in fact made profit (as in money which actually goes into your pocket after discounting all expenses) every year for the last 15 years except in 2022 and some tiny losses in 2014 and 2012.
The company started in 1994, posted it’s first profitable year in 2001, and had little or no profit through 2014. So for the first 20 years or 2/3 of the entire history of the company, they were unprofitable or barely profitable.
That’s my point, Amazon has historically been hugely unprofitable, so looking only at profit doesn’t tell the full story.
OpenAI was founded ~9 years ago, which isn’t all that different from the timeline for Amazon. They are in very different markets (ironically more similar now with AWS getting huge), with Amazon starting as a logistics company and OpenAI being a pure tech company, so the financials of both will look quite different.
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.
Capitalism doesn’t sell performance. It sell ‘potential’ and ‘perceived gains’.
I sell my dates on my potential wealth and potential penis size. People need to get on the capitalism grindset.
“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.
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.
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.
It’s what we in the biz would refer to as a “grower”, which is in contrast to a “shower”.
If you’re gonna sell dates you better be a grower! Dates don’t just grow themselves!
“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”
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.
No.
Aka why not to have headlines in the form of a question.
AKA Betteridge’s law of headlines.
That’s because it’s just gambling.
With extra steps.
The history of the Internet and computers in general is full of investors willing to take seemingly insane chances on overvalued speculative ventures.
Private equity is so pumped full of cash that they basically have nothing better to do with it.
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.
