"AI Slowdown" is Code Word for Bubble Imploding (Trying to Make This Slowdown Seem Wilful, an Act of Safety and Responsibility)
Yesterday: unixcop.com is the Latest "Linux" Site to Have Become a Slopfarm After 2 Years of Death (Inactivity)
Some time very soon all people and sites that rely on LLMs will starve to death. All this nonsense about local (they mean locally-hosted) LLMs overlooks the fact that the models are usually generated somewhere else, and it is uneconomic (updating the models to include - by scraping/plagiarising poorly - new information costs a fortune). For slopfarms disguised as news sites, for instance, having up-to-date (newly-scraped) LLMs means relying on third parties which bear the losses.
"Here is a reference for your question from the other day," a friend has told me, in relation to this observation from yesterday: While GAFAM/Microsoft Disguise Financial Crisis as "Investment in AI" the Slop Giants Make Up a Narrative of Wilful Slowdown
Quoting David Gerard: "The AI vendors need to reduce expectations, because they're all feeling the pinch. And they want to hit the stock market."
Gerard also mentioned jail:
Gerard said: "If you were some sort of cynic, you might think the models were running out of steam and the vendors were running out of money."
Gerard explained the accounting lies, or one slop pusher falsely claiming to have reached profitability:
It’s the safety, see, not OpenAI’s account books being a car crash or the company haemorrhaging executives.Anthropic wants to go public a bit sooner, and they’re loudly telling their investors they’ve had a second profitable quarter in a row! Yaaay! [FT, archive]
Of course, that’s “profitable” using adjusted accounting, not any sort of Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. And Anthropic claim annualised revenue on a basis that isn’t clear, but is not one of adding up the actual dollars coming in. If you use made-up accounting, then Anthropic’s going great!
Amodei’s already pitching for a government bailout, by making governments part owners or controllers of Anthropic — so they might prop it up: [...]
Bailout or bailing out a pyramid scheme? In addition to crashing the stock market and wiping away people's pensions? [1, 2]
Regarding the false accounting (see what Ed Zitron said last month), it only makes sense that people who craft and sell "Plagiarism Engines" and lying machines (in violation of laws) will prefer to also lie to shareholders and stakeholders, i.e. people willing to lose a lot of money by lending it to perpetuate more lies. These are rogue actors. They help one another by inflating the bubble and making false excuses when expansion stalls. █
Image source: dry leaves and round seeds on a tree against a blue sky