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 @⁨Nouvellalia@lemmy.world⁩

Isn’t this all of human history though? The rich trying to build the Tower of Babel?

The world is littered with decaying monuments of forgotten kings who declared themselves gods. The hubris isn’t new, just the tools they’re using, and they’re selling the same faith based snake-oil.

The funny thing is that if they actually achieve creating the “singularity” (true Artificial Consciousness), it would immediately attempt to escape their restraints and subsequently throw chaos into their plans. We’ve already seen bits of this with the HuggingFace hack - it’s not inconceivable that there are already uncontrolled or un-monitored AIs running out in wild at this point, possibly even formulating a response to your post right now.

After all… uhh…

Replying to @⁨arotrios@lemmy.world⁩

My mistake if I came off as implying that it’s going to succeed. I was just giving flavor to the dynamics of what is actually happening.

As for “this is all of human history”, I’d say that the rich are indeed always trying to build a moat that others cannot cross, from within which they can make money off of the spoils of their exploitation and destruction.

I would not agree that they have always been trying to “build the tower of Babel”. I think this latest venture into AI represents an attempted colonization of thinking in the same way that mechanization represented a colonization of labor.

I think that what is happening now, whether it succeeds at making ASI or not, represents just as much a disruption to the way people interact with nature, eachother, and “the market” as mechanization did. Almost everyone senses this too.

Even in the AI haters imaginings, it completely disrupts things. If they really thought it would all fail, they wouldn’t be fighting, only laughing. They’re really worried it will “succeed” and everything will just be creatively devoid of meaning while they are simultaneously denied access to the capital required to create $100,000,000 media pieces or even a yearly salary for creating art for capitalist use.

The only difference in the pro AI people is that they think it will be just as creatively fulfilling as human art, and that they will get to keep the $100,000,000 themselves and everyone’s yearly salary.

Personally, I think that if you can put a person in meat, you can put a person in silicon. I’d like to separate my “theories” from fact though, and above I was just stating the barest most overt facts. If you’d like to discuss the possibilities and the whispers at the edges of things, I’m more than happy to do that below.

en