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 @⁨Abyssian@lemmy.world⁩

We can’t believe what it does not, or six agos what it does then. The shit is moving faster then literally anyone really seems to understand.

The avg person that makes fun of ai, seems to still think they have the same problems they had 2-3 years. Because the cheap free models they have access to are extremely out of date, or very limited.

The actual real deal big boy models are so far beyond what your avg even extremely technical user understands. Unless you are actively watching following and using the models you just flat out have no clue just how fast this shit is sprinting.

It’s got plenty of problems and the growth is not across every aspect of it equally. So it’s really easy to point and laugh at a particular point it’s struggling with while it skips ahead in other regards.

It’s wild. The progress is just as unsustainable as the profits are bad. As long as that progress keeps sprinting the bad profits flat out don’t matter.

IT WILL hit critical mass to replace your avg idiot long before the profit problem really hits at this rate.

The bigger problem is that even if it replaces people that profit problem doesn’t go away. So it will just hit AFTER people are replaced. And that’s a even worse outcome then replacing people.

We NEED the bubble to pop before that point and the industry recalibrates to a sustainable model.

Else we will have mass job loss promptly followed by a massive bubble popping and economy collapse AND companies flopping and job opportunity losses as places closing shop so there won’t even be jobs to back to.

It could get REALLY fucking bad.

Replying to @⁨Holytimes@sh.itjust.works⁩

Disagree.

It is true there were massive strides in the last 8 years. But fundamentally, the tech is still the same large language model it was before, just bigger and better optimized.

It’s like going from an ancient, slow, Ford Model T that topped out at 45mph to a Bugatti that can do 260mph in 8 short years. It’s impressive, it boosts productivity, it is a marvel of modern technology, but that’s not my point of contention.

The issue is that AI companies have been funded on the promise that with enough advancements and upgrades this tech will achieve AGI. Which is an absurd statement to anyone in the field actually developing these things. That is the equivalent of promising that this 260mph Bugatti, with a few years of upgrades and advancements, will become a Harrier Jump Jet!

It’s just not happening, a fundamental shift in model architecture or technology used is needed. And from what we’ve seen so far, no one has discovered any.

Replying to @⁨Shayeta@feddit.org⁩

Exactly this, especially the last sentence.

I only have pretty basic machine learning knowledge, based on a few Master’s classes at college while I was doing gamedev, and even with that I can tell that the way they are expecting to get AGI by just feeding more data into a language model is simply not happening.

I remember a comparison from one of the AI-pilled tech-bros when AI was starting to get attention, and his metaphor about AGI was something along the lines of “Imagine a difference between a medieval commoner and Albert Einstein, that’s the difference in inteligence AI will soon have to the smartest people we know now”.

But that doesn’t make sense with the current approach. Imagine Einstein writing his cutting-edge theories, and the commoner is watching him behind his shoulder and vetting anything he does. Scratching his ideas, forcing him to redo it, if he doesn’t like it, pointing to a reddit thread about why. There’s no way he would ever finish anything new.

Unless they figure out a completely new way how to do AI reasoning, there is no way we’re getting anywhere near AGI. And that is also becoming more unlikely the longer we go with this approach, because every AI-pilled company is heavily outsourcing all of development to the current models, reducing their employee (and the whole worlds) innovation potential and skill. This is probably the last generation that can do serious academia, unless there are drastic measures done to limit access to AI in education. It’s fucked.

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