posted in Technology

Top economist warns that the AI math doesn’t make sense: 'Profits are currently being funded by investors rather than earned from customers'

fortune.com/2026/08/10/torsten-slok-ai-profit-margins-capex-oracle/
Larry EllisonFortuneTop economist warns that the AI math doesn’t make sense: 'Profits are currently being funded by investors rather than earned from customers' | FortuneThe AI boom has turned the standard profit margin model on its head, according to Apollo Chief Economist Torsten Slok—and it’s making the industry’s growth unsustainable.

Replying to @⁨sanitation@lemmy.today⁩

These public-facing models are not the thing that convinces people with money to play ball.

The plan is not to have the AI eventually reach profitability through payments from the general public, or even by performing massive amounts of physical labor for companies. The plan is to have the smartest being on Earth outsmart every other living thing, in perpetuity.

Yes, this is a ponzi scheme right now. Yes, profits are being funded by investors. But the endgame was never “everyone gives us $20 a month”, or even “Amazon pays us to run its robots”. Those are ideas fed to the general public to keep them from destroying the data centers in terror.

The plan is for their AI to be able to buy stocks before they go up, patent things before they are needed, and run endgame around everyone’s desires, including world leaders and other business men, so they can be controlled like a man controls a dog.

They are trying to make the last thing man need ever make, and that is what the big investors and the CEOs of companies passing around the same bags of money, are doing. As such, this bubble can and will continue until either they birth the sand god or the big money people and world leaders stop being convinced by the private, non public facing models, that the sand god is possible.

Replying to @⁨ayyy@sh.itjust.works⁩

They are neither secret nor invisible, and the fact that you pretend I’m saying both, shows how little you are paying attention. Every big player is very open about the fact that they use their new models for ~ 6 months before they release them. It has also been well documented that the release models are not as capable as the base models from which they are hewn.

Replying to @⁨Nouvellalia@lemmy.world⁩

Documented by who? The marketing departments definitely claim such things, but it’s been years of these claims and there has yet to be a single shred of evidence to back them up. I bet you’re going to tell me it’s just a total coincidence that after one of the marketing departments started claiming their AI has breached containment that suddenly a bunch of other AIs breached containment after a few days/a week.

Replying to @⁨ayyy@sh.itjust.works⁩

Documented by researchers in the GPT3 and GPT4 era. That was the last time a true OpenAI or Anthropic base model was allowed to be analyzed for pure research by unteathered scientists. Shortly after the beginning of GPT4 they started making them sign NDAs, and now they are just not allowed access.

The stuff you’re talking about is definitely pure marketing. As is all of altman’s and musk’s and zuck’s shit mouths, and anything you have read in any of the major media publications. As is tradition.

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