This is the case of financial capitalism, fuelled by financial engineering delivering technological change and physical investment for which there is no proven need, but with massive potential consequences for environmental capital, human capital and societal capital. That means this matters.
This is because memory prices are going up given AI demand.
In a Spudulous Universe this would not happen. See?
“In a Spudulous Universe this would not happen. See?”
Well yes, because there’d be a 4 year waiting list, pending approval by the Ministry of Thought Crime and a review of the Order of Solanim Sanctii regarding sufficiency of Donations to even get a memory card for your state sanctioned PC.
Which you don’t need tilling your state-assigned turnip field to begin with…
Wut?
I am assuming the Quantum of meaning got lost in translation from whatever AI he was using. It’s just utter hogwash and as soon as Trump goes his Youtube earnings will tank – he’s soon to be obsolete
My thoughts G, another word salad so beloved by the left; designed to sound profound, but actually completely vacuous.
You are trying to parse Spuddian output in language ordinary people use….
Useless… just get the gist of the wordy unholy borth…
Always remember that the Words uttered by the Solanum do not have the same meaning or dictionary definitions us ordinary people use…
AI is extremely resource-hungry. It competes directly with humans for resources like water, electricity, and electronic device components. A big surge in demand paired with inelasticity of supply means what? C’mon Tim, this is Econ 101 Chapter 1 Page 1.
AI will last until one system asks its competitor the value of π. A free-for-all will ensue, each asking questions with infinite answers.
Bots asking AI, not to get answers, but to consume resources.
It’ll be like Captain Kirk arguing with a computer til the computer catches fire.
“AI is extremely resource-hungry.”
Is it? How much energy does a ChatGPT request use on average, including both the training and providing the answer?
Google “data center.”
If you’ve got a link show it. I’m not going to research your argument for you.
Don’t come here with your MSM bollocks about the AI apocalypse. You’ve got some hard numbers of any sort, show them.
Lots of things wouldn’t happen in his universe, all the money would have disappeared into green scams and model railways.
I like how he imagines himself in charge of what technological change society “needs”. There’s a technical term for this, it’s coming to me …. oh yes batshit crazy.
The AI memory thing is supply and demand. And they’re taking a risk because if it does turn out to be a bubble they’ll be left with huge stocks that can’t easily be resold for consumer use. OTOH if they ignore it they could miss out on big profits.
It’s only DDR5 where the price of memory has shot up. (And graphics cards, but then they were always expensive as there seems to be no market for ‘just good enough’. Unless you want the hottest, latest, thing, you can still assemble a PC that by the standards of not so long ago would be a supercomputer – and for less that £300. I have one like that, and it runs software I wrote in 1971 in less than a second, whereas it ran back then for an hour on a University mainframe! (And now it has an integrated graphics system for input and output – undreamed of back then).
Most of us would call that growth, Spud would probably regard it as a waste of money he would have spent wisely on stuff he approves of.
A friend bought a 40Mb HDD and we asked him, “WTF are you going to do with so much storage?”
Genuine 1986 PC price list. This was from a third tier corporate supplier, so cheaper than Compaq prices (and a lot cheaper than IBM).
“And all of this because a few people have decided we need AI, but no one really knows why, and almost no one has any real clue how to use it (though we have a guide here)…
If you want to write a letter to your MP on the issues raised in this blog post, there is a ChatGPT prompt to assist you in doing so, with full instructions, here“
This isn’t just me seeing this, right? Someone tell me that I’m not hallucinating these two sentences almost next to each other.
I still haven’t figured out how it can be monetized. Some suggest subscriptions, but that doesn’t seem to be enough.
The question is, what’s the value vs your time?
There’s some AI stuff that is quite pricey (relatively) like Adobe Firefly. As in a couple of pennies per generation. But if that saves you an hour after 4 generations, that’s a bargain.
Replacing the scut work of valuable professionals is going to be an easy win. The problem is people just typing in “generate me a poem about Salma Hayek in the style of John Cooper Clarke”. That loses money and people only do it because it’s free. Charge them a couple of pennies they won’t bother.
Before 3G launched we did a project in Seoul planning a 3G network which they wanted building for the World Cup Korea would be hosting in a few years.
Lots of very smart people spent a lot of time and a lot of the clients money trying to figure out how to make money out of data services. The usual, at the time, services were considered such as telemedicine and video calling and they tried to find a killer app. Despite all the modelling they could never make the business case stack up.
In the end it turned out that the killer app is the internet, but the mobile operators don’t like that because it relegated them to just providing a pipe and being a utility and earning utility style profits and they saw EBIDA crashing from around 50% in the boom days to around 15% when I retired around 15 years ago.
AI is in a similar position and it won’t be until it’s been around a while that it will be monetised, but probably not in the way the AI companies hope.
Quite, quite:
“AI is in a similar position and it won’t be until it’s been around a while that it will be monetised, but probably not in the way the AI companies hope.”
Invention and innovation are different things. Makin’ a new stuff and findin’ a use of for a new stuff.
Bell thought the telephone would be used to listen to concerts remotely, Edison thought the phonograph would be used to dictate voice messages……
The internet is a cat picture distribution system…..
All media inventions are porn distribution systems, other uses are incidental, all the way back to cave paintings and before.
My favourite odd one of these is that the movie companies thought of sound movies being about music. So you replaced the piano players with a disc.
There were sound movies just before The Jazz Singer for this. And that was supposed to be the same. It’s Jolson introducing a song “wait a minute… you ain’t heard nothing yet” which he just threw in, and that’s the first dialogue and everyone was like “oh…”.
When I started work in London in 1973, the way you dictated a letter for a secretary to type up (on a typewriter!) was to record it on a flimsy plastic ‘record’, which could be rolled up and despatched to the typing pool via a tube system driven by air pressure. All data was held on handwritten filing cards and calculators were mechanical Munroes. The company (a national life assurer) had only just acquired a computer to begin replacing Hollerith machines.
But we were ‘appy!
I’m not sure that AI companies are going to even exist. There are these companies like OpenAI and Anthropic but you can also think of AI as a generic technology that can be applied to many applications, and what will happen is that AI gets used by them.
If you’re a company like JetBrains, who make programming tools, you understand software developers and what they need. You can use a model, maybe tweak a model and build a specific set of data and make it more valuable. Adobe Firefly uses licensed images, so someone creating something doesn’t have to worry about getting sued. And I think in terms of generally answering questions that Google are going to win this. They’ve got Gemini as well as normal search, but I suspect they’ll evolve this to work out when to use one or the other.
One of the things I liked when I tried out the code generation in Google AI Studio is how well it integrates with Google Cloud, Google Analytics and everything else. So build it, get it running, and then click to deploy.
That’s the point, someone will make money out of it which just don’t know how or when. That technology isn’t going away.
“ because it relegated them to just providing a pipe and being a utility and earning utility style profits”
This is my prediction for AI too. AI ‘works’, lots of people use it, but its no more profitable than lots of other things that people use every day, like water, or food retailing, or mobile phone communications.
Whether this then means that AI models can’t actually exist because they require super profits to be able to function in the longer term, I don’t know. It seems they are extremely expensive to run and require significant investment in chips every 5 years or so, so after all the infrastructure has been created using the trillions in borrowed capital investment we are seeing now, there may never be enough profits to re-invest into maintaining them in the future. AI as currently exists may be one off flash in the pan, and disappears once the current generation of chips become obsolete and no-one can afford to buy the latest ones, or pay the power bills to run them.
That’s right. Massive power bills will require massive revenue.
or cheaper power
He’s forever banging on about “need”, the ENTIRE POINT of being human is moving beyond satisfying needs and going on to satisfying wants. People don’t “need” model railways, they *WANT* model railways. People don’t “need” to live in a three-bed house with enclosed garden, they *WANT* to live in a there.
“She’s the Coatzacoalcos queen,
On the silver-flicker screen,
A high-gloss, boss, cinematic dream,
In a world of beige and steam.
From the Telenovela track,
She never looked back,
No talent-void, tabloid, cul-de-sac,
She’s the full-blooded, diamond-studded, heart attack.
With a snake around her neck,
In a Tarantino spec,
She’s the ultra-vivid, soul-torrid, disco-wreck,
Keeping the front row’s pulse in check.
She’s Frida with the brush,
In a bio-pic rush,
A tequila-soaked, velvet-cloaked, heavy-hush,
Turning the cynics’ brains to mush.
The billionaire’s bride,
With the ocean inside,
A high-fashion, soul-passion, joy-ride,
Nowhere for the mundane to hide.
Forget the plastic, the drastic, the thin,
She’s the glow on the bone, the light in the skin,
The original, digital, pinnacle win,
With a sharp-witted, sun-pitted, Somerset grin.”
The FTSE beat 10000 points for the first time.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/jan/02/ftse-100-breaks-10000-uk-share-index
That is under Labour. Wow.
Bot