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 @⁨badgermurphy@lemmy.world⁩

Powerful people are willing to pay a large price to manipulate the masses.

As7de from that, the plan is to lose money for years gobbling up all the data before there’s laws that actually get enforced to protect against it, and to get an entire generation of college kids and workers dependant on using AI, with companies relying heavily on its usage. This is happening to a huge degree right now with data entry, “vibe coders”, Law firms, and healthcare.

Those people won’t really be able to transition back or away from AI. They’ll be dependent on it. And AI will start charging them way more than they are now. And they’ll eat the costs and pay it.

So it’s stealing data while it’s free or nearly free, power to manipulate all the sheeple, create dependency.

Replying to @⁨ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de⁩

The chatbot labs (and Oracle) quite literally don’t have years.

www.wheresyoured.at/brokenomics/

Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed AtAI's BrokenomicsIf you liked this piece, you should subscribe to my premium newsletter. It’s $70 a year, or $7 a month, and in return you get a weekly newsletter that’s usually anywhere from 5,000 to 18,000 words, including vast, detailed analyses of NVIDIA, Anthropic and OpenAI’s

Replying to @⁨ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de⁩

I seriously doubt you read that article if that was your only takeaway from it.

Nobody is winning the LLM lab race, all of their unit economics are garbage and every new subscriber actually makes that situation worse instead of better. Furthermore, I’m running a open 30 billion parameter LLM on my laptop via Ollama right now, so what the fuck do I need lyin’ Sam Altman for?

At this point I’m just here to watch Oracle crash and burn.