#aibubble

David Swan has written an article about the people behind Firmus, an Australian bitcoin mining turned AI data centre start-up that withdrew its $43.7 billion sharemarket float this week. It's really quite something: "Oliver Curtis, Firmus’ 40-year-old co-chief executive and the husband of public relations entrepreneur Roxy Jacenko, is a former investment banker who served a year in jail for insider trading a decade ago. He has since called his actions “incredibly, gravely stupid”. "He co-founded Firmus in 2019 as a bitcoin mining business with his cousin Tim Rosenfield, who ran a luxury lingerie brand, and Jonathan Levee, who handles the engineering. Neither co-chief executive came from the technology industry. "They signed up big names all the same. Nvidia, the world’s most valuable chipmaker, is a shareholder and James Packer and former treasurer Joe Hockey hold stakes. “As a father, I’m incredibly proud of what Oli’s done,” Curtis’ father Nick, a mining entrepreneur and major shareholder, told The Australian last week. "Firmus earned about $US50 million ($73 million) in revenue last financial year. It asked to be valued at about 600 times that. ... "The price had climbed quickly. Firmus sought a $1.2 billion valuation in late 2024 and raised money at $15 billion in August. Then it asked public investors for almost three times that. "The road to Friday was rocky, to put it lightly. This week Firmus confirmed that a $73 billion partnership with CDC, an established Australian data centre operator, was over. The Financial Review reported that a test of Firmus’ prized cooling system had flooded part of CDC’s Melbourne data centre earlier this year. ... "The banks running the float, JPMorgan, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley and Morgans, told investors on Monday that demand at $11 a share was “well in excess” of what was on offer. One Morgans adviser emailed clients that demand had been “enormous”. "By Wednesday, the banks were discussing cutting the price to about $9. On Thursday morning, they told fund managers that bids made that morning were “not held”, then went quiet. “Bankers gone to ground,” read one message doing the rounds of brokers and investors. By midday the offer documents had been pulled from view." https://www.smh.com.au/technology/two-tech-outsiders-tried-to-sell-a-44bn-tech-company-it-didn-t-work-20261009-p6145h.html #business #AI #LLM #DataCenter #DataCentre #Firmus #capitalism #AIBubble

As a response to your prompt, the LLM gives you the words that are statistically most likely in the order that is statistically most likely, given its training texts. That's all it does. It's artificial but not intelligent. You're reading a mind into the LLM output just the same way as you think about your robot vacuum cleaner as a house pet. #llm #ai #aibubble

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@YvanDaSilva/115563876034073326 Anyone still arguing that the bursting of the "AI" bubble will leave us with useful computing infrastructure, now disused, needs to read and think about this. #AI #AIBubble #EWaste

Nine tech giants carry $3 trillion in off-balance-sheet AI obligations, a figure triple their reported debt and nearly double a July estimate of $1.65 trillion. https://247wallst.com/investing/2026/08/22/alphabet-meta-and-microsoft-are-hiding-3-trillion-in-debt-on-the-ai-booms-hidden-ledger/ #ai #aibubble ##aihype #aiscam

@NyxKai@ieji.de The #ai companies are (or will soon be) also competing on the stock market, and they are desperate to keep their shares prices up. None of these #ai products make a profit, they all make huge losses, they are not viable business models, so they rely on hype and bluff to keep their share prices from collapsing. that is why they are trying to 'outbadass' each other. #ScamAltman #aihype #aibubble

@karimh89@mastodon.social So the #ai companies are now competing with each other to show who has the most dangerous, invasive and criminal product. Just to prop up their share prices. And that's what is saving the US economy. What could possibly go wrong? #ScamAltman#aihype #aiscam #aibubble #aibullshit #openai #huggingface #anthropic #gemini #hyperfailures

This interview is great bc Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr ) is discussing/debating "AI" with someone who disagrees with him but can be persuaded by logic and evidence. Doctorow is countering common beliefs about "AI" using evidence straight from his books. #AI #computers #LLM #hype #AIBubblehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTqCVJFr7XM&list=WL&index=2

@pluralistic@mamot.fr The new insight here, to me, is that the math problems that LLMs are solving are a) actually real, and b) of a specific kind that that technology can solve--ie, the ones that can be "brute forced"--because LLMs are suited to brute force attacks. #AI #LLM #hype #AIBubble

HT @berzhu@mastodon.social#AISucks #NoNukesForAI #AI #Enshittification #Environment #ClimateChange #AIBubble #Capitalism #Datacenters #Crapitalism

Post-Keynesian economist Steve Keen shows how the #AIBubble is related to all the previous overinvestment bubbles. He’s got the models and the math to prove it, and it’s easy to follow. But most importantly, he then goes and models also the hypothetical post-AGI market with huge job losses. Keen shows, that if the tech bros keep insisting on current #Neoliberal models without #UBI funded by a government deficit, we might end up in a Hunger Games world. https://youtube.com/watch?v=TD3FB9NkwSQ #economics

Wow, hard disk prices are complete nonsense now. When I last upgraded my NAS' storage, I bought three 4 TB disks. That was just over 11 years ago. The exact same model is still for sale and costs about twice as much. #AIBubble

Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) "Quantity has a quality all its own. These businesses aren't just wasting billions – they're replacing skilled workers with defective chatbots. As I've written before, AI is the asbestos we're shovelling into the walls of our technological society. Our descendants will spend generations digging it out again, and the longer the bubble goes on without popping, the longer it will take to repair the damage." https://www.thenerve.news/p/cory-doctorow-ai-business-incentive-to-lie-useless-chatbots-report-nikhil-suresh #AI #llm #aibubble

💵🤖🫧🪦 Listening to Better Offline (Monologue: The Pale Horsemen Arrive): https://omny.fm/shows/better-offline/monologue-the-pale-horsemen-arrive In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron runs through how 70% of Microsoft, Google and Amazon’s AI revenues are from Anthropic and OpenAI, with 7% of Microsoft’s FY26 revenue coming from OpenAI alone, and how this is cast-iron proof that demand for AI doesn’t exist at a scale that warrants any of the trillion dollars in capex they’ve spent. #AIBubble

« "Ces investissements ne sont rentables que si les gens se mettent à utiliser massivement l’IA. Rien n’est acquis de ce point de vue là", explique Gilles Moëc, chef économiste du groupe Axa. Selon une étude publiée le 22 juillet par l’université du Texas à Austin, environ 33 % des salariés utilisent l’IA au travail. Ils étaient 46 % il y a un an. Le prix des puces mémoires, essentielles pour gérer les tâches d’IA, ajoute à l’inquiétude. Il a sextuplé en 2025 ». #AIbubble https://www.lemonde.fr/economie/article/2026/08/05/les-investissements-record-de-la-tech-americaine-ne-font-plus-rever-les-marches_6739441_3234.html

A lot of people seem to believe that if you ask an LLM to look through a database and calculate something, or extract data according to some criteria, then it will do exactly what you ask for. It won't. It will calculate an output that looks normal. And you won't discover this unless you do the same operation manually and compare. #llm #ai #aibubble

When even #Texas conservatives are against #AI data centers, we surely must be close to the end of the #AIBubble. https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/data-centers/texas-slams-on-the-breaks-for-1-800-data-centers-power-grid-requirements-are-five-times-higher-than-peak-record-demand-474-gigawatts-of-power-requests-are-now-subject-to-new-moratorium

It's artificial, all right. But it's not intelligence. #ai #llm #aibubble

Ray Dalio on the AI bubble nearing 1929, 2000 levels and the lesson people always forget: ‘Wealth is not the same as money’ https://fortune.com/2026/08/04/ray-dalio-ai-bubble-1929-2000-ipos-wealth-is-not-money/ #aibubble

"Last week’s tech earnings saw outlet after outlet claim that Amazon, Google, and Microsoft’s AI bets were “paying off” as their respective cloud segments reported record revenue growth, casually ignoring that none of them have broken out their AI revenues (...) To be clear, all three of these companies’ cloud platforms have many other customers paying for many other things other than generative AI services or AI GPUs, and they’ve all engaged in a combination of multiple outright price increases and changing their core subscriptions to force AI features on them as a means of boosting revenues and conning the street into believing that “AI is paying off” every time they non-consensually thrust it on their customers, framing higher prices as “better value” in a way that fucks the user to appease Wall Street. Yet the biggest con of all is that a vast majority of this revenue growth comes from the compute spend of Anthropic and OpenAI, both of whom account for the vast majority of AI revenues and overall cloud growth we’ve seen in the last few years. Every publication you read right now will tell you that AWS and Azure and Google Cloud are growing like wildfire as a result of the hundreds of billions of dollars they’ve invested in AI GPUs and data centers, when the truth is far simpler: their revenues are being buoyed by two unprofitable, unsustainable AI labs that cannot exist without being funneled tens of billions of dollars each year. And a decent chunk of that money is coming from the hyperscalers themselves. In the last seven months alone, Google has sunk $10 billion (and up to $30 billion more) into Anthropic, with Amazon funnelling $5 billion to Anthropic within a week of that investment and a total of $50 billion into OpenAI." https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-ai-demand-bubble/ #AI #GenerativeAI #AIBubble #AIHype #BigTech #OpenAI #Anthropic