I’m really disappointed in this thread.
There are a number of people who are recommending buying their cheapest plan under the premise that it will put them under since it is a loss leader. Despite the popular fantasy, the rich and powerful are not stupid. You don’t know more about a company or market from passively consuming headlines than the leadership of that company. So, I’ll state the obvious: If you don’t like a company or industry, the last thing you should do is give them your money.
I’m sure a bunch of people with excel sheets to monitor their credit card points will show up in the replies to argue about how it’s theoretically possible, but I will reiterate: The leaders of the companies are not stupid. If they started seeing a net loss from their sales strategy, they’d change strategies.
While I agree with not buying being better that giving them money. I can’t agree with leadership being smart.
This thing was never going to be profitable. So they either:
a) they’re actively malicious — they were never planning on profiting which means this is basically a pump and dump scheme capable of triggering some form of recession;
b) they’re fucking morons for believing their own fantasies, which judging by their public appearances would track.Former seems just as plausible, but my bet is on the latter. These AI bro CEOs seem to be woefully average at best.
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” - Hanlon’s Razor
I assume you’re operating off this principle, and I understand the point, but it’s ill conceived for our purposes. Where malice and stupidity are functionally identical, preparing for malice is equivalent to preparing for stupidity. Where malice and stupidity differ, malice is more dangerous and requires greater preparation. Hanlon’s Razor is a good perspective to prevent escalation in cycles of revenge, but it’s bad perspective for strategy.
It’s safe to assume some portion of highly educated and entrenched powers are willing to undermine the public good for their own gain. We shouldn’t allow our selves or our peers to dismiss potential adversaries as stupid. Even if the leadership was composed entirely of nepo-nitwits, there are competent people working for them, advising them, and benefiting from their success.
I what this response to be higher. This is an excellent take.
I’ve worked too many places where “b” is absolutely the answer. Even small companies that you’ve probably never heard of where management is drinking the koolaid. They usually don’t like being asked why someone would actually pay for whatever bullshit they’re selling. The answer, almost without exception, is because one of their CEO buddies told them it was a good idea.
The bet was that bigger compute gave more parameters which gave exponentially better intelligence.
Unfortunately the increase in intelligence is logarithmic under current methods, so the business model is unsustainable.
Counterpoint:
They already are losing money. They themselves do not project that they will be profitable until 2030. The idea that “smart people with spreadsheets won’t let them lose money” is obviously wrong because they have done nothing except lose money, ever.
They get thier operating capital from funding, not sales.
Now, I agree that the gambit is wrong. So you’re right. You’re just right for the wrong reason.
Funding is just the cash value of market optimism for the future of your product. High usage props up optimism. Social media IPOs were valued very much based on active users, the idea being that more users meant more opportunity for profit.
The more people actively using these tools, even if they’re just maliciously burning tokens, just add to the “active users” metric. Which makes funding easier. And funding is the ACTUAL way these companies “make thier money”.
Sure, they’re in the business of selling shares not AI-tokens. Standard bubble stuff. Doesn’t change the overall point.
Yeah, I conceded that your call to action was correct.
Just wanted to add colour so people understand the mechanics at play. When you understand them, it lets people evaluate other things, without needing you to tell them what to do.
For example, if your comprehension of these companies is that the companies are acting with the goal of profitability l, they would see something like a fast-track onto an index post IPO as a bid for legitimacy, some kind of ego play.
If you comprehend it as a beast that can only subsist on funding with no viable product, it entirely changes how you comprehend the post IPO index listing desire.
Despite the popular fantasy, the rich and powerful are not stupid.
Uh… famously untrue. Mental illness has plagued monarchs, pharaohs, and caesers for millennia. That’s long before you get to all the quirked up white boys and trad rad girl bosses currently running things.
You don’t know more about a company or market from passively consuming headlines than the leadership of that company.
Okay, but you can review their balance sheets and their primary lines of credit. Case in point, Sam Altman is heavily reliant on three big financial partners - Softbank, Oracle, and NVIDIA. Two of these are - themselves - hemorrhaging money thanks to large capital outlays that have failed to produce substantive returns.
There are finance journalists who get out ahead of this and report their own analysis. And you can find that in a thousand different private journals, substacks, and podcasts. But you can also go do the grunt work yourself if you’re ambitious.
OpenAI’s financials have been disclosed already (although the official SEC filing is still upcoming). So… just read them if you doubt what you’re reading in the news. But it’s not some kind of secret that the business is operating at a loss, with a fixation on debt-fueled growth. The argument is over future projected revenue, which isn’t something business leadership can be any more certain of than a passive media consumer.
I definitely get the knee-jerk impulse to announce “business professionals know more about business than internet idiots”. Because, sure. True. But the idea that business professionals don’t routinely make bad decisions has some pretty historic well-established counterpoints.
“The business people know more” line is akin to saying “This used car dealer must know more about the vehicles on his lot than I do, so I can trust him”.
Sure, professionals make bad decisions. Usually they’re more complex than they seem on the surface, but there are exceptions. Sure, you can put the work in to out-knowledge them. Doubt anyone here is interested enough to do that, but the internet is a big place.
Regardless, it should be fairly obvious that giving a company you hate money will not cause them to fail faster. We can quibble over the exact mechanism, but the overall point stands.
Regardless, it should be fairly obvious that giving a company you hate money will not cause them to fail faster.
I’ll concede that trying to soak Altman for $14k/mo when he’s already hemorrhaging billions is a bit like pissing in the river.
I might ask what you plan to do with the $14k in tokens you’re burning. If you’ve got a material use case for them, and Altman wants to sell you $20 for a nickel, go wild.
But half the joke of AI is that you’re burning tokens to do nothing. That’s why businesses recoil as soon as they’re asked to justify at-cost AI spend.
“every little bit helps” said the old woman as she pissed in the sea . . .
I think companies these days are more about valuation (how much people think they are worth) vs profit (what they actually earn). AI companies are loss leaders, yet vcs still fund them anyways. Paying them more money will just add to hype and valuation (eg “our XX service grew YY% which projects to ZZ potential profit”)
The only way to stop them is give them more money.
Despite the popular fantasy, the rich and powerful are not stupid.
Hubris is what the rich and powerful suffer from, not stupidity. And hubris makes the same blind decisions as stupidity.
Right on point
Bailout in 3…2…1…
I sincerely hope not. Yet… quite a few things that can’t happen have been happening.
I see a lot of people in this thread stating and insisting that people should give them more money, which fells so surreal. I guess people’s mind have been shaped into consumerism to such a degree that they can’t think about a solution to things that doesn’t involve buying something anymore. It’s so hard to believe
The leaders of the companies are not stupid. If they started seeing a net loss from their sales strategy, they’d change strategies.
Unless money is not the goal. Not the sole goal at least. As you said, they’re not stupid. It’s entirely within reason to assume they may be aiming for more than just money.
Who knows what they’re planning. Nothing good for us - that’s for sure.
I agree with you that nobody here should purchase a subscription with any of these companies, but I will watch happily from the sidelines while AI fanatics engage in this exact behavior, jumping from loss leader to loss leader.
Lemmy, this is the fourth year in a row that “OpenAI bankrupts soon” articles are being posted:
Year Article Explicit bankruptcy claim 2023 Business Today — “OpenAI might go bankrupt by end of 2024”, August 12, 2023 OpenAI could go bankrupt by the end of 2024 because of ChatGPT’s high operating costs, mounting losses and dependence on continued Microsoft funding. 2024 ITPro — “OpenAI could go bankrupt in 12 months if it doesn’t raise some serious cash”, August 7, 2024 OpenAI could go bankrupt within twelve months unless it secured substantial additional financing. 2025 Braden Kelley — “Is OpenAI About to Go Bankrupt?”, December 4, 2025 The article explicitly asks whether OpenAI is “on the brink of bankruptcy” and argues that its spending and business model may be financially unsustainable. 2026 Windows Central — “OpenAI might torch $14 billion in 2026, hitting bankruptcy by next year”, January 20, 2026 OpenAI could burn through approximately $14 billion during 2026 and face bankruptcy by mid-2027. OpenAI isn’t going anywhere.
Because they really should be failing. These companies are leveraging against themselves and getting propped up by the government.
They will get bailed out just like 2008 to avoid a cataclysmic global financial meltdown. I won’t be surprised if other countries chip in to bail them out.
This is the year of the OpenAI bankruptcy.
And it’s the year of the Linux Desktop! What a coincidence!
To be fair, the Linux Desktop use to have virtual no market share. Now it is close to 5%. Linux used to be absolutely painful to run as a desktop environment. Now, there are some rough edges, but it works pretty well.
Faster please. I want to buy computer parts again
I will happy when this bubble bursts. OpenAI, Grok and several other companies offer nothing substantive and if they’re burning cash and disrupting economies then just die already.
offer nothing substantive
Like industrial farming, there is nothing new, but now everybody can create memes and create software. Society will change.
nothing substantive
You were saying? 🤨
At least you’re honest about about what most are using it for. But have you ever tried to talk to a real one?
Yeah they’ll just sell more data and get more money from oil barons or something. They’re not going anywhere.
Any chance of a bunch of used gpus getting sold off from this?
Unfortunately they would broadly be systems that need about 15kw, and as part of a board that won’t work as discrete parts.
So you get it, but you’ll need a couple of 60 amp circuits to dedicate to it… Also you have no viable video out
No, they’re going to use the data centers for surveillance
I hope so
Might be like the AMD BC-250 discarded from crypto. Hopefully! https://bc250.info/
Getting those GPUs would be like getting a beat up horse. It’s still a horse, just not much of a use anymore
I still has some use, it’s just that it’s not as good but still useful for people who want to save money on gaming pc builds
OpenAI isn’t running ChatGPT on RTX 5090’s, they use data centre hardware like the nVidia NVL72, which are entirely useless for anyone else. You wouldn’t even be able to boot it as it uses more power while idling than a residential home has access to, and up to 150kW at full load.
up to 150kW at full load.
That’s the last generation. They’re moving from Blackwell to Rubin chips now, and the 72-GPU Rubin servers use up to 230 kW.
The typical residential connection in the U.S. has a 24 to 48 kW electrical connection. A block of houses might not have enough power infrastructure to power just one of these server racks.
Those GPUs will be about as useful as a bitcoin miner for gaming. As in exactly not useful.
They may be really useful for running your own local LLM, as long as you don’t mind the hefty power bill and jet engine noise.
LLM coops might have a big future
A friend of mine was a big crypto miner but he was kinda crazy. He died young and I helped his remote family process his estate. They let me take his computer equipment. I got a dozen tired GPUs but my dad has been running his 4k monitor on one of those old 1080tis for about six years now and it’s still doing its thing. No one has any info on his crypto accounts, all of that is just lost for now.
I was hoping the same, but have since been told by several people that know more about it than I do that they are useless for gaming.
I wouldn’t say entirely useless. They just aren’t plug and play replacements.
I hope you’re right.
Aren’t they using low accuracy FP units that aren’t suited for gaming anyway?
How can I help speed this up?
Use very non-cachable tokens without paying them a penny.
Use something like repomix to do maximum damage.
Tokenmaxxing. They lo
ose more money, especially on the subsidized plans.Nice try OpenAI
More like nice try Nvidia.
Can you tight money?
It certainly appears to be escaping them.
Nice
Rubber band
Come on, burn faster!
“grim”
Every bubble has created something we use every day. AI isn’t going anywhere.
You use tulips every day?
You bundle and sell subprime mortgages every day?
You use the world wide web every day?
dot com bubble was about speculation over domain names. The internet was certainly not created by a bubble.
Mortgages are used everyday.
Railroad are used everyday
The interest is used everyday
Amazon is used everyday
Those are the big bubbles in recent history.
Railroads were not made or built by a bubble.
Amazon did not invent remote shopping by mail. That’s been around since 1800s. They weren’t even the first website to do that.
and loans and interests are abstract concepts that have existed for millennia so I don’t know what you’re talking about there.
Bubbles and speculation don’t create wealth, new tech or products. Like what aspect of bubbles are you trying wash here? They’re bad for everybody except for the few rent seekers at the top.
Yes the railroad was a bubble. A ton of people lost money in that investment.
Amazon was a bubble, it lost 92% value when it popped.
Bubbles don’t create wealth, i agree
The housing bubble lost people a ton of money that that investment, and people also lost their pensions when the Bible popped.
A bubble is when people start heavily investing in a product to the point it’s a losing bet because that sector doesn’t need the money, or can’t produce the returns bubble investors are looking for. So when the AI bubble pops a lot of people will lose money, but the product will be here to stay because of the investment.
My point is that when a bubble pops the product is here forever, where most people think a Bible popping is the product is a failure and will disappear.
Don’t forget the AI bubble is also a ram and SSD bubble.
That is not a bubble, it’s a shortage caused by a bubble.
Fingers crossed! Let it burn.
Doesn’t matter. The regime got what they wanted out of this. The data centers are up, the tech is there, they will just snap it up cheap for use in surveillance and fabricating evidence of dissenters.
The data centres are far from up. Many of them look to have a few steel beams in place and that’s it. Others are sitting empty due to lack of hardware or lack of power.
The datacenters largely aren’t built yet, as someone else pointed out. That doesn’t even matter though, to your point.
The Epstein class has successfully destroyed large portions of the Internet through bot traffic. They’ve scraped virtually all human contributions and stolen it, while ruining traditional vehicles for information gathering. They’ve eviscerated consumer hardware, and thus shifted control of compute away from the masses. They’ve successfully manufactured consent for mass surveillance including harvesting our biometric data.
Once the AI bubble bursts, it will be one of the largest transfers of wealth in history as they force us to bail out this fradulent industry. If it doesn’t throw us into another great depression, the damage it will do will ensure that things never go back to how they were pre-AI. Once that reality becomes apparent to the masses, they’ll be primed and ready for Peter Theil’s vision of “Freedom Cities”
I hope so
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It will be a race which AI company holds out longest. All of them are making losses that no company can survive, and if they rise their prices enough to cover the costs, they will basically lose all their customers. Who will then struggle to hire the people back who still know how to do things without AI.
Then Google wins? Since they have the ad business sonar least they are making some money.
I think they could significantly lower their costs if they turn their focus away from the race to “AGI.” But, their valuations don’t really make sense unless investors believe they will achieve AGI.
I was there when the “Neural Networks” idea started. They thought they could program NNs to achieve AGI. Now they think they can do it with LLMs. But LLMs are just parrots with a large dictionary. They won’t reach that point, either. An LLM is way too much rooted in words to be able to think.
Recent models are quite good. Like gpt 5.6 sol. Even better than mythos 5.
How is this a response to a comment about AGI?
LLMs are not currently, nor ever will be, anything remotely resembling AGI. AGI is still entirely within the realm of science fiction, like teleportation or time travel.
That’s true. I’m just saying the models do get better and are quite impressive now.
But whatever the term means. I know where AGI stands for, but the term “agi” is still very vague. You can’t compare a machine llm model with the human brain.
Hey, we have AGI! We’ve had it for years! It’s called making babies 😎😎😎😎😎
Yet still hallucinates mass bullshit and can’t count, can’t architect, and can’t write a decent test
The “best” one I’ve tried is the latest Opus. I don’t trust any of them to use for real work, so I mostly just play around with a local Qwen 3.6 27B or Deepseek v4 Flash. I have heard OpenAI’s latest models produce less bloat than Anthropic’s.
I should say I do find LLMs useful as a kind of search agent (both web and large unfamiliar code bases). And GhidraMCP is pretty cool (maybe just because I don’t have much experience with reverse engineering).
Q3 2027 is when the house of cards falls. I have been saying this since 2025 and I will continue to make this prediction based off of loan and investment terms.
I’ve been making the comparison to the first synthesizer in 1897. It was so huge, that it took up the basement of an entire city block in NYC. It was enormous, and relatively useless but it worked…technically. But 60 years of development later, and it can be put in a suitcase and carried around.
I see data centers and AI the same way. Sure, we can technically do it, but it’s big, unwieldy, and wasteful. It clearly isn’t ready for prime time.
Go back to the drawing board, address the real problems, including regulations, and get back to us in a decade or two, when they’ve figured out how to do this properly. Because right now it’s a monstrosity that’s more of a curiosity than an useful product.
“Figure out who to do this properly” means a completely different method. What they’ve built is way, way too expensive for too little return. What they want to do may not even be possible, too little is known about the human mind to assume it is. It’s all assumptions and hubris at this point, no proof. Not everything we imagine is possible.
Still going to take massive amounts of data to train an AI.
I agree with this.
That lines up on the technical side, too, with how LLM “intelligence” is plateauing, cost of cheaper models is decreasing, where open weights are going and such. Q3 2027 seems about when an OpenAI coding subscription makes no sense.
That being said, I’d be wary of the “Facebook effect.”
Once a service gains a huge foothold, it can deteriorate for a long time without going away. Especially with regulatory capture. And for many smartphone users, OpenAI is the only AI they know.
The difference here is OpenAI has no revenue, Facebook has plenty of advertising revenue.
That’s where advertising through AI comes in. People relying on AI suffer from cognitive deterioration which is the perfect opportunity to sneak in advertisements disguised as suggestions through AI responses.
It could be an Auryn. It symbolizes the fucked up circular market flow between software and hardware manufacturers and how their greed is a neverending story.
Is this just a sexual Ouroboros?
It’s two of them, after they discovered 69.
These guys should adopt it as their logo. It’s gotta be satire right!? Right?
That long? Sigh…
He’ll probably tell Trump he’ll help win the election and get all sorts of tax payer handouts.
