There’s a difference between proprietary software thats highly profitable maintaining a stronghold over “cheaper” options and a massively overvalued and artificially inflated ecosystem having to confront economic realities.
Companies like Amazon taking out loans to fund more AI infrastructure, coupled with AI companies that are massively overvalued and burning cash, coupled with companies saying there’s no ROI from AI investments, coupled with the margin from selling AI models trending to zero paints a nasty picture that can’t continue much longer.
This is more marketing hype than substance. Amazon isn’t “building” a team, it’s broadly just taking existing people and now calling them “forward deployment engineering teams.”
Also, adoption isn’t lacking because of lack of awareness. Adoption isn’t happening because the math doesn’t add up and the ROI isn’t there. Consulting pixie dust can’t fix that.
The ultimate irony here is that the biggest jobs wipeout most likely to happen now is when all these “AI exploration lab” type teams that every company quickly created are blown up.
Most, if not nearly all, of these teams have little to show ROI wise and the music on the AI bubble is slowing dramatically. They went from seemingly unlimited budgets and headcount when CEOs said “get me some of that AI” to some really uncomfortable scenes playing out know as the same CEOs realize this has cost a fortune with little to show for it.
>>“Europeans were sold the idea that the US is their friend. It is an ally, but not a friend, and that distinction matters.“
This is a fair and key point and also worth considering the view from the other side of the pond. Americans were legitimately getting fed up that the ally-ship was getting too one sided on who’s pulling their own weight in the relationship. Military spending is one hot topic coming to light again now that the neighborhood is looking unstable again.
Europeans often say “but look at our social net you silly Americans.” The American view often says “your social net has all that government money because your defense is highly subsidized by us.” That’s glossing over a few points but the math is directionally correct. Europe is running the numbers and increasingly realizes this too. Reckoning with that is one of many future hurdles facing Europe.
Yes and this is the point. If Europe as a “bloc” wants to put substance behind the rhetoric then it needs to get everyone running in the same direction to actually compete with the US. Until then it’s all just wishful thinking.
The UK found this out the hard way after Brexit. When you go from sitting at the global table as Europe to being a relatively small island nation in the North Atlantic folks tend to negotiate with you differently.
The challenge for Europe is if it can actually deliver. It’s been highly dependent on the US economically, technically, militarily and otherwise for decades. Posturing on sovereignty has ramped up again but it’s not fundamentally new.
A lot of folks would take Europe more seriously if there was more substance behind the talk. If it wants to replace US tech it needs to be competitive with US tech. Today it’s light years off.
The US has its own challenges, but it’s ability to unite as a country of independent states is something that Europe is unlikely to match anytime soon and that has a direct impact on the ability to execute everything Europe is posturing about.
I think we’re saying the same thing. If you’re using AI as a tool to support human creative content that’s one thing. But what courts are pushing back on is trying to patent/protect content where the core creator was AI. That’s what most people mean when they say “AI slop.” There courts are consistently saying you can’t protect this.
This is consistent with rulings in other courts globally around IP rights. IP protects content created by humans. Your AI slop is effectively public domain.
The ultimate irony is that many folks asking for things to be “more inclusive” are asking for someone else to modify their behavior to fit the requester’s preference and definition of the “right” way, which is the literal opposite of being inclusive.
Yes… and AWS is critical to the cash flow and valuation of its parent Amazon. The market looking like it’s trending towards oversupply does not paint a good picture in that context. AWS has to operate at these margins as most of the rest of Amazon is a very low margin business.
Google, Microsoft and others have separate cash cows. For Amazon, AWS is the cash cow. They can’t afford a blip here.
It’s a pretty consistent story in tech. Meta built a successful ads platform. That success went to their head and the company starts acting like it’s just great at tech and innovation and tried to do a bunch of other stuff. Turns out it’s pretty crap at most other things and can’t figure out how to make money from anything other than selling ads. Company is very headstrong and refuses to admit it’s just not good at other stuff. It has enough cash from ads to not go bankrupt and so just carries on with this nonsense on cycle after cycle of crazy side projects that go nowhere.
Everyone slamming the brakes on tokenmaxing and companies putting strict AI budgets in place is surely having at least some impact on demand.
And the point is not that “no” demand exists but the likes of AWS are building to the moon citing massive future need but that simply doesn’t jive with all this unused capacity from others coming to the market.
And building out massive capacity to sell a product that’s likely to trend to a low margin market commodity isn’t a great business.
So like likes of AWS are spending crazy sums building capacity citing amazing demand they can’t meet. Meanwhile those with capacity are saying hey maybe we don’t need so much and are building cloud businesses to compete with AWS and flood the market with excess capacity.
A lot of things are actually LESS expensive in stores. All that speedy delivery adds a lot to costs that are baked in. Sometimes things on Amazon are 50+% more. You have to know your prices to know what’s a good deal vs what’s a total ripoff.
IE folks will take a 4 pack of something that sells for $20 and sell each bottle individually for $10 each.