@jwz @rstevens I’m starting to harbor a borderline conspiracy theory that all the ex cryptocurrency grifters who are now AI (cocaine) grifters have worked out they don’t need AI to _work_, because what the whole industry/bubble is actually designed and being used for, is to create artificial scarcity in real world resources instead of magic internet beans.

If you have a conspiracy/consortium that can create artificial scarcity for things people and companies need by controlling global ram and hard disk supply, you can price gouge everybody and make usurious profits.

If you own contracts for all the electricity and water in places you claim to be building data centers you can profit from that.

If you can price ownership of the means of computation out of reach of anyone not part of your consortium everyone else will be forced into renting compute from data centers, many of which your consortium controls.

If you prop this up with circular paper value only contracts and agreements between you global consortium members there is no legal jurisdiction that can easily hold you to account for racketeering or conspiracy.

Perhaps the reason AI doesn’t work is because it only needs to work in the context of investor demos and to get techbros hooked thinking they’re gonna be part of the “getting rich” phase when AI shows its real potential <Elon voice> “within 6 to 12 months”.