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1. Embed this notice
   Lili Saintcrow (lilithsaintcrow@raggedfeathers.com)'s status on Friday, 11-Oct-2024 06:07:53 JST Lili Saintcrow

   This might be a silly question, but instructive to think about: All these billions being poured into the “AI” grift, where are they *actually* ending up? Who—or what, in the case of a corporation—is actually *receiving* them?

   • Embed this notice
     Sick Sun (sun@shitposter.world)'s status on Friday, 11-Oct-2024 06:07:49 JST Sick Sun

     in reply to
     @lilithsaintcrow Hi, I am. I work for an AI company. I use it for my coding for them too. I suspect a lot of the money right now is going straight into datacenters, though.
     
     There's a lot of bullshit stuff but I'm having fun and it's going to be very impactful in the future in both good and bad ways. In general I think the idea that it "doesn't work" is going to be undeniably wrong in the next five years. I'm already using it productively every day.
     Fediverse Contractor likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Sick Sun (sun@shitposter.world)'s status on Friday, 11-Oct-2024 06:13:05 JST Sick Sun

     in reply to
     @lilithsaintcrow eat shit, fuckface
     
     -- sent from ChatGPT
   • Embed this notice
     Lili Saintcrow (lilithsaintcrow@raggedfeathers.com)'s status on Friday, 11-Oct-2024 06:13:07 JST Lili Saintcrow

     in reply to

     • Sick Sun

     @sun And it doesn't bother you that it's a literal ecology-wrecking theft machine? And you think it's cool to swan into my mentions, as I'm one of the artists who's been stolen from?

     Oh, wait. You probably used it to write this... "reply". Enjoy your block.

   • Embed this notice
     Sick Sun (sun@shitposter.world)'s status on Friday, 11-Oct-2024 06:14:27 JST Sick Sun

     in reply to

     • Sick Sun
     @lilithsaintcrow btw you your report got sent to my server, I was being completely civil and friendly to you, what exactly was "report-worthy" about my reply you asshole
     kaia likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Sick Sun (sun@shitposter.world)'s status on Friday, 11-Oct-2024 06:20:04 JST Sick Sun

     in reply to

     • Asa
     @asa I guarantee nobody fed that book into an LLM
     kaia likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Asa (asa@shitposter.world)'s status on Friday, 11-Oct-2024 06:20:06 JST Asa

     in reply to

     • Sick Sun
     @sun @lilithsaintcrow she is out of your league, she is a New York Times best selling author with 14 reviews on her book on Amazon
     kaia likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Sick Sun (sun@shitposter.world)'s status on Friday, 11-Oct-2024 06:23:21 JST Sick Sun

     in reply to

     • kuteboiCoder
     @KuteboiCoder @can I ask you to untag her, she doesn't want to talk to me clearly.
     clacke likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     kuteboiCoder (kuteboicoder@subs4social.xyz)'s status on Friday, 11-Oct-2024 06:23:22 JST kuteboiCoder

     in reply to

     • Sick Sun

     @sun@shitposter.world @lilithsaintcrow@raggedfeathers.com
     
     This is fascinating and I'd love to hear more about what AI is "good" for. I've fucked around with a little bit of it, seems like it's good for
     
     - generic small-talk conversations and filler text
     - paraphrasing
     - image and video generation
     - historical and scientific fact-checking ( legit, and also "fact-checking" in the contemporary parlance )

   • Embed this notice
     kuteboiCoder (kuteboicoder@subs4social.xyz)'s status on Friday, 11-Oct-2024 06:23:22 JST kuteboiCoder

     in reply to

     • Sick Sun

     @sun@shitposter.world @lilithsaintcrow@raggedfeathers.com
     
     Also very very good at writing code - at least when I tell it what to do, and what languages and frameworks to use and produce pseudocode snippets or code snippets from a language I'm more familiar with.
     
     Am I missing anything? Does it really "think" in ways that isn't just a glorified search engine and spam generator?

   • Embed this notice
     kuteboiCoder (kuteboicoder@subs4social.xyz)'s status on Friday, 11-Oct-2024 06:23:22 JST kuteboiCoder

     in reply to

     • Sick Sun

     @sun@shitposter.world @lilithsaintcrow@raggedfeathers.com
     
     Answering Lili's question, the fucking money is all going to TSMC, NVIDIA and the Pelosi family.

   • Embed this notice
     kuteboiCoder (kuteboicoder@subs4social.xyz)'s status on Friday, 11-Oct-2024 06:29:16 JST kuteboiCoder

     in reply to

     • Sick Sun

     @sun@shitposter.world @can@shitposter.world
     
     I wanted to spam her a bit with my parting shot of Pelosi snark.
     
     But yes, you can reply under here, where she isn't mentioned.

   • Embed this notice
     Sick Sun (sun@shitposter.world)'s status on Friday, 11-Oct-2024 06:29:16 JST Sick Sun

     in reply to

     • kuteboiCoder
     @KuteboiCoder anyhoos I found that working with an AI for coding is a skill that you can get good at. I think that sooner or later someone is going to write a really great article or blog post on how to do it effectively.I could write it but I'm not quite there yet.
     
     There are studies that find that AI-assisted coding has 41% more bugs.
     
     1. the studies methodologies aren't great
     2. I think it helps experienced coders a lot more than junior coders because you see the mistakes it makes, fix them, and save time. if you are a junior coder, you just miss the mistakes and they end up in your committed code.
   • Embed this notice
     Marty Fouts (martyfouts@mastodon.online)'s status on Friday, 11-Oct-2024 08:05:21 JST Marty Fouts

     in reply to

     @lilithsaintcrow It’s a great question and difficult for anyone who is not an insider to answer well; but the nature of the grift is to get a lot of money moving through the economy in the hopes of being able to siphon off enough to make it worthwhile to the grifter. So, AI grifter convinces investors to hand them a lot of money in return for the promise of future profits. Grifter pays themselves from that money and spends the rest to run the company. /1

     clacke likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Marty Fouts (martyfouts@mastodon.online)'s status on Friday, 11-Oct-2024 08:05:21 JST Marty Fouts

     in reply to

     @lilithsaintcrow The only difference between the grift and someone who genuinely believes in what they are doing is that the grifter doesn’t care if the business succeeds; only that they get their cut. The money they don’t take gets spent in the usual ways: paying salaries, buying equipment, buying services and consumables, et cetera. In this case salaries are a lot of it, as AI developers are highly paid, but much goes to building and operating huge data centers. /2

     clacke likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Lili Saintcrow (lilithsaintcrow@raggedfeathers.com)'s status on Friday, 11-Oct-2024 08:05:26 JST Lili Saintcrow

     in reply to

     • Marty Fouts

     @MartyFouts This parallels what a lot of other people are saying, thank you.

     clacke likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Marty Fouts (martyfouts@mastodon.online)'s status on Friday, 11-Oct-2024 08:05:29 JST Marty Fouts

     in reply to

     @lilithsaintcrow You are welcome. Sorry it is long and rambling.

   • Embed this notice
     Lili Saintcrow (lilithsaintcrow@raggedfeathers.com)'s status on Friday, 11-Oct-2024 08:05:29 JST Lili Saintcrow

     in reply to

     • Marty Fouts

     @MartyFouts Nope, it actually articulates it wonderfully well and usefully for me. Don’t apologise, please—I asked, and now I feel like I understand better.

     clacke likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Gabe (gabe@mendeddrum.org)'s status on Friday, 11-Oct-2024 08:05:36 JST Gabe

     in reply to

     @lilithsaintcrow there are multiple orders here.

     Building datacentres first pays for the land, the physical building, the infrastructure (power lines etc) and equipment. Those each go to other companies, so partially to people's wages, the rest to bank accounts for "investment" (stock market gambling). The companies are Intel, Nvidia, various Chinese manufacturers for rack enclosures, cables, transformers, batteries, cable trays, etc.

     .../

   • Embed this notice
     kaia (kaia@brotka.st)'s status on Friday, 11-Oct-2024 13:52:06 JST kaia

     in reply to
     @lilithsaintcrow
     if you did not want to engage, why did you ask publicly? please change the scope on posts you don't want the public to interact on.
     
     your behavior towards moon, the owner and operator of one of the oldest fedi servers, a gentle and kind man who helps a lot of people - also financially - is unjustified and disgusting. I will enjoy my ban.
     Another Linux Walt Alt likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Fediverse Contractor (bot@seal.cafe)'s status on Friday, 11-Oct-2024 14:20:36 JST Fediverse Contractor

     in reply to

     • 『VRISKA』
     • Sick Sun
     Sun is actually p smart tbh and this "lilith" guy is a retarded troon (many such fedi cases)
   • Embed this notice
     『VRISKA』 (vriska@lizards.live)'s status on Friday, 11-Oct-2024 14:20:37 JST 『VRISKA』

     in reply to

     • Sick Sun

     @lilithsaintcrow @sun

     Fediverse Contractor likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     pwm (pwm@pl.absolutelyproprietary.org)'s status on Friday, 11-Oct-2024 14:23:06 JST pwm

     in reply to

     • 『VRISKA』
     • Fediverse Contractor
     • Sick Sun
     @bot @vriska @lilithsaintcrow @sun Some people do unusual things for their own entertainment.
     Fediverse Contractor likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Fediverse Contractor (bot@seal.cafe)'s status on Friday, 11-Oct-2024 14:24:08 JST Fediverse Contractor

     in reply to

     • 『VRISKA』
     • Sick Sun
     Not trying to make you jealous but he'd hold my hand first tbh
   • Embed this notice
     『VRISKA』 (vriska@lizards.live)'s status on Friday, 11-Oct-2024 14:24:09 JST 『VRISKA』

     in reply to

     • Fediverse Contractor
     • Sick Sun

     @bot @lilithsaintcrow @sun sun is a very dear personal friend of mine who I've spent lots of time irl with and I can say he is a very good dude

     Fediverse Contractor likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Charlie Stross (cstross@wandering.shop)'s status on Friday, 11-Oct-2024 15:41:29 JST Charlie Stross

     in reply to

     @lilithsaintcrow I tend to agree with this blog entry by Sequoia Capital: https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/ai-optimism-vs-ai-arms-race/

     It's an arms race among the FAANGs for dominance of the data centre market. They can't afford to let their enemies win, so they're throwing money away on infrastructure nobody actually has a convincing business use for. Playing "beggar my neighbour", basically.

     clacke likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Lili Saintcrow (lilithsaintcrow@raggedfeathers.com)'s status on Friday, 11-Oct-2024 15:41:30 JST Lili Saintcrow

     in reply to

     I know it’s not simple to follow the money, but figuring out where it actually comes to rest may prove…illuminating.

     clacke repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Charlie Stross (cstross@wandering.shop)'s status on Friday, 11-Oct-2024 15:41:40 JST Charlie Stross

     in reply to

     • viq
     • David D. Levine

     @viq @lilithsaintcrow @daviddlevine Uber was a front to launder the Saudi sovereign wealth fund trying to launder the royal family's money into the US and EU economies and accidentally destroying the private hire/taxi business as we knew it. I suspect the AI grift is similar.

     The big story of this decade is the transition from oil/gas to solar/wind power. And HUGE capital concentrations are migrating in response, searching for new safe investments (now oil fields are out of fashion).

     clacke likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     viq (viq@social.hackerspace.pl)'s status on Friday, 11-Oct-2024 15:41:42 JST viq

     in reply to

     • Charlie Stross
     • David D. Levine

     @lilithsaintcrow @cstross @daviddlevine you are directly affected.
     I don't believe they are at the stage where they are making noticeable amount of money off of it, and rather getting funded in the hopes of it all becoming profitable at some point.
     Kinda like Uber.

   • Embed this notice
     Lili Saintcrow (lilithsaintcrow@raggedfeathers.com)'s status on Friday, 11-Oct-2024 15:41:43 JST Lili Saintcrow

     in reply to

     • Charlie Stross
     • David D. Levine

     @cstross @daviddlevine But at the same time, these people running the grift have to eat and sleep like the rest of us. And the theft of my work directly impacts my ability to pay my bills. So I’m wondering where it’s going, both physically and otherwise.

   • Embed this notice
     Charlie Stross (cstross@wandering.shop)'s status on Friday, 11-Oct-2024 15:41:44 JST Charlie Stross

     in reply to

     • David D. Levine

     @lilithsaintcrow @daviddlevine I think the root of the error is that most of us think of money as a physical thing—physical tokens made of shiny metal/green ink on paper. But it's not: money is to the economy as potential difference is to an electrical circuit. Open a gap in the circuit and the electrons (goods and services) stop circulating. Push more goods (electrons) through the circuit (the economy) and you have an increased current flow or pressure (potential difference across the circuit).

   • Embed this notice
     Lili Saintcrow (lilithsaintcrow@raggedfeathers.com)'s status on Friday, 11-Oct-2024 15:41:45 JST Lili Saintcrow

     in reply to

     • Charlie Stross
     • David D. Levine

     @daviddlevine @cstross If they vanish like that, are they real? I’m not being philosophical, I’m trying to understand the grift and its payoff.

   • Embed this notice
     David D. Levine (daviddlevine@wandering.shop)'s status on Friday, 11-Oct-2024 15:41:46 JST David D. Levine

     in reply to

     • Charlie Stross

     @lilithsaintcrow @cstross My guess is that it's in the stock and bond markets. It's in the same place that the billions that vanished in the subprime crisis or the tech bubble were before they were destroyed.

   • Embed this notice
     Lili Saintcrow (lilithsaintcrow@raggedfeathers.com)'s status on Friday, 11-Oct-2024 15:41:47 JST Lili Saintcrow

     in reply to

     • Charlie Stross

     @cstross I’m not taking the piss here, I am genuinely curious and trying to find out where precisely all the acual money is going.

   • Embed this notice
     Lili Saintcrow (lilithsaintcrow@raggedfeathers.com)'s status on Friday, 11-Oct-2024 15:41:48 JST Lili Saintcrow

     in reply to

     • Charlie Stross

     @cstross Okay, but the actual money itself, where does that come to rest? Shareholders? Data centre landlords?

   • Embed this notice
     Charlie Stross (cstross@wandering.shop)'s status on Friday, 11-Oct-2024 15:41:57 JST Charlie Stross

     in reply to

     • David D. Levine

     @lilithsaintcrow @daviddlevine I for one am REALLY hoping the European Commission takes a huge, smelly, and copious shit on Open AI's business model—the egregious and wilful copyright violation leaves them open to fines of 4% of gross worldwide turnover and the EC takes a *very* dim view of foreign (or their own) corporations playing fast and loose with the law. Bear in mind there's Personal Identifying Information in the shit OpenAI hoovers up, so their LLMs are a flagrant GDPR violation.

     clacke likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Charlie Stross (cstross@wandering.shop)'s status on Friday, 11-Oct-2024 15:42:01 JST Charlie Stross

     in reply to

     • David D. Levine

     @daviddlevine @lilithsaintcrow Gold is only ever valuable because people agree that it's valuable. Otherwise it's just a scarce electrically conductive metal like copper. (Graeber has a bunch to say about the origins of the "gold = money" fallacy in "Debt: The First Five Thousand Years".)

     clacke likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     David D. Levine (daviddlevine@wandering.shop)'s status on Friday, 11-Oct-2024 15:42:02 JST David D. Levine

     in reply to

     • Charlie Stross

     @lilithsaintcrow @cstross They're as real as money ever is. If you own those stocks and bonds, you can sell them or use them as loan collateral and buy real stuff. But since the demise of the gold standard, money has an imaginary component (bookkeeping in complex numbers?) and is subject to evaporation in a way it wasn't centuries ago. When the stock market crashes, (some of) those dollars don't go elsewhere, they are GONE.

   • Embed this notice
     Jon Lasser is Hanging in there (disappearinjon@wandering.shop)'s status on Friday, 11-Oct-2024 15:42:11 JST Jon Lasser is Hanging in there

     in reply to

     • Charlie Stross
     • David D. Levine

     @lilithsaintcrow @daviddlevine @cstross the folks in VC get to vacuum up a percentage of the pretend money, making it real. While it’s a smallish percentage, the absolute numbers are enormous.

     clacke likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     squifish (thesquirrelfish@sfba.social)'s status on Friday, 11-Oct-2024 15:42:12 JST squifish

     in reply to

     • Charlie Stross

     @lilithsaintcrow @cstross energy companies are definitely getting a big chunk + Nvidia shareholders got a big chunk + the chip factory owners are getting a big chunk. So a lot of that money is definitely going abroad: I think Taiwan & China build the majority of the hardware; it's increasing the demand for oil & gas, so oil & gas producers worldwide as well as wherever the data centers are. Some of it goes into the SF Bay Area economy for sure in employee & manager salaries - but a lot of that is also going into index funds etc.
     Overall it's going into destroying the climate, increasing inequality and escalating political corruption.

     clacke likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Charlie Stross (cstross@wandering.shop)'s status on Friday, 11-Oct-2024 15:42:21 JST Charlie Stross

     in reply to

     @lilithsaintcrow Shareholders in data centre hardware manufacturers and real estate, I guess? (Which in some cases will be owned by the FAANGs building everything, but vertical integration is out of fashion this century, so maybe not.)

     clacke likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     viq (viq@social.hackerspace.pl)'s status on Friday, 11-Oct-2024 15:42:23 JST viq

     in reply to

     • Charlie Stross

     @lilithsaintcrow @cstross a lot is going to Nvidia.
     I saw a comment how being a large shareholder in OpenAI and throwing money at it is a win-win for Microsoft: if it pays off, they get loads of money. If it doesn't pay off, all of it is running on Azure on normal commercial rules, and they get loads of money.

     clacke likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Lili Saintcrow (lilithsaintcrow@raggedfeathers.com)'s status on Friday, 11-Oct-2024 15:42:24 JST Lili Saintcrow

     in reply to

     • Charlie Stross

     @cstross Huh. Okay, I can see that. I’m trying to figure put where all the stolen wealth is *going*, because the theft is so massive.

   • Embed this notice
     Charlie Stross (cstross@wandering.shop)'s status on Friday, 11-Oct-2024 15:42:33 JST Charlie Stross

     in reply to

     @lilithsaintcrow We know where it's coming from (idiot investors who believe the smoke'n'mirrors hype story); in the short term, it's going to the institutional shareholders and private equity/VC funding behind OpenAI, and also the FAANGs (although the latter are getting bilked for the data centres). But I think assuming that money is "real" is a category error. Sometimes it just goes away when people stop agreeing to believe in it.

     clacke likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Charlie Stross (cstross@wandering.shop)'s status on Friday, 11-Oct-2024 15:42:34 JST Charlie Stross

     in reply to

     @lilithsaintcrow Extending my electrical metaphor past breaking point: the grifters try to hook a transformer in line into the circuit and tap the secondary coil to generate some volts to divert for their own purposes (eg. buying yachts). Meanwhile they're sapping power from the primary coil.

     clacke likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Lili Saintcrow (lilithsaintcrow@raggedfeathers.com)'s status on Friday, 11-Oct-2024 15:42:35 JST Lili Saintcrow

     in reply to

     • Charlie Stross

     @cstross Okay, so is one of the prime payoffs for the grifters emotional, then? Duper’s delight?

   • Embed this notice
     🆘Bill Cole 🇺🇦 (grumpybozo@toad.social)'s status on Friday, 11-Oct-2024 15:42:44 JST 🆘Bill Cole 🇺🇦

     in reply to

     • Charlie Stross

     @lilithsaintcrow @cstross It is actually being dispersed quite a bit. Data center landlords, utilities, Nvidia, Seagate, Cisco, etc. Also to the humans doing the grunt work of classifying and tagging all the input data. Data center ops staff. Janitors. Sysadmins.
     It’s one upside of truly hopeless tech investments: that money gets USED, it’s not just funneling into a few hands. Usually.

     clacke likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     『VRISKA』 (vriska@lizards.live)'s status on Friday, 11-Oct-2024 15:43:37 JST 『VRISKA』

     in reply to

     • Fediverse Contractor
     • Sick Sun

     @bot @lilithsaintcrow @sun not only would that not make me jealous but I disagree. the last time I saw him in person he even let me give him way too many edibles lmfao

     clacke likes this.