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that came after Uber told employees to use AI as much as possible and Uber’s CTO said the company had blown its entire AI budget in four months
Further evidence that most CEO’s and SLT’s are just confident, lucky, and born wealthy; not competent, smarter, or much better than average.
Also they are addicted to sycophancy. Now that they have a convincing yes man in their pockets they are uniquely vulnerable to AI psychosis.
AI is about to join the list of “stupid technologies that people should really wait and see before investing on”, which includes
- 3D TVs - complete dud
- Blockchain - useless for real world problems already solved by typical computing
- Metaverse - still one of the best jokes around
- Folding screen phones - overpriced junk
- Fully autonomous self driving cars - “Just around the corner” for the past 10 years
Don’t forget NFTs… though I guess that can fall under blockchain.
yeah but NFTs were so stupid that they deserve their own dishonorable mention here.
NFTs are so fucking stupid the satirical yearly award for this shit should probably be the NonFungible Trophy cus it’s a literal fucking physical trophy.
It’s just the same as crypto
Literally, even. NFTs exist on crypto blockchains themselves.
I know. I’m a BCH developer.
Cool, welcome to lemmy, where it’s assumed that you aren’t the only person reading your replies and that every answer may be tailored to a broader audience. I hope you someday find as much experience with it as you have BCH.
I’m also the developer of Mbin (Lemmy alternative) btw.
Thanks for the warning.
Folding Phones Sales Continue To Increase since 2019, showing people seem to like them
Two time buyer, can confirm. They’re legitimately useful and durable enough for me.
I don’t think they are for me but I honestly would not include them in that list above. First of all, there is no investment bubble around them and secondly some people seem to like them and are ready to pay for them. They also do have legitimate benefits (but also downsides)
Yeah I didn’t dislike the 3d monitors/tvs they just had too many caveats at the time and VR kind of ate its lunch.
3D stuff has the fundamental issue that VR and 3D views are just incredibly straining on the human user. Folding phones have no such issue and their durability is also good enough to be competitive (yet clearly worse than regular smart phones). They are really not comparable to 3D monitors and VR.
I think the strain is really dependent on the person as it never really bothered me, it definitely is a problem for some people though. Either way I don’t think it belongs in the same category as blockchain bullshit
It is straining for everyone but yes, some can handle the strain better than others. It just takes so much more mental energy to handle. Most can’t handle it well though, which is why those technologies never manage to break out of their niche.
I do agree however that it is quite different from NFT and other scams. It is a really fascinating technology with real use cases but just some foundational issues that prevent it from leaving their niche.
Two time buyer as in you liked it so much and bought another, or two time buyer as in the first is already inoperative and got another?
My fold4 lasted 3 years, and still works. I’ll concede it was only able to unfold to about 85% open at the end when I decided to upgrade. I was happy to upgrade to the fold 7 which has a redesigned hinge and better dust protection. I acknowledged the risk of mechanical failure as a possibility compared to a slab phone and after using it for years I decided I was still very impressed with the flexibility of having a tablet in my pocket. The fact that my 7th generation is significantly thinner and has a 200MP camera compared to the 4th is what sealed the deal.
It’s not perfect for everyone, but I wouldn’t go back to using a slab, there’s too much functionality I’d be pissed giving up.
Granted, I tend to upgrade my phone every 2 years or so anyway.
I find only 3 years of durability to be absurd 0_0
I find keeping a phone longer than three years absurd, guess we like different things!
Not the same guy. But I’ve been using foldables since 2019 as my primary phone. Samsung fold 1 -> 3 -> 5. No case, no protectors, keys with phone in same pocket. Never had an issue.
If it lasts 5 years, maybe its durable enough.
…7
I like the one that folds like a GBA SP.
Not that I’m gonna buy one based on that.
But if I’m choosing between two identical models but one folds (and I guess it isn’t that much more expensive), I’d go for the folding one.
Except, of course, for the fact that the next phone I buy will be Commodore’s Callback.I had the Fold 2 and Fold 4, both broke so I just went back to a Pixel 🤷
This could also be explained by the entire rest of the market being different flavors of the exact same thing. A little over a decade ago, we actually had choices in what type of phone we wanted. Now, if you want anything other than an identical slab, foldables are your only choice.
Disco Stu says disco record sales have trended upwards for the entire decade of 1970’s. If this trend continues… eyyyyyyyyy!
Cold fusion. Green hydrogen. Hyper loop. Just off the top of my head.
Hyper Loop was an insane idea (in a bad way).
Motherfucker wanted to invent subway, but for cars, making cities even more dependent of cars.
hyperloop was very low air pressure subway tubes for high speed trains. Works for research tesring tracks impractical to infeasible for real world applications. But it apparently what killed high speed rail in california (because wait this will be better)
The cars in tubes thing was a seperate stupid idea.
I don’t know that he really wanted to fully execute on Hyperloop so much as build hype (and Tesla stock price) around the idea while sabotaging funding for California’s high speed rail project. But yes, end goal to keep people buying his cars.
Average massively shitty car CEO idea
Actually not entirely true.
He was proposing transportation method similar to how the communication tubes are. Where vacuum would be used to transport capsules with people.
He knew it was bunk, so initially just published that idea and let anyone do it. His actual goal was to kill California’s high speed rail, which he did.
Eventually he purchased Boring company and started building tunnel in Las Vegas and called that (as you called it, subway for cars) a hyper loop and pretend that it was the original idea.
Cold fusion is a scam, not a bad idea. There is no scientific basis for that. Is as bad as “infinite energy engine”.
All of the things I mentioned are scams lol
Green hydrogen is water electrolysis with solar power, not scam, it works, it is just a question of making it economically viable. Hyperloop is just stupid, but within the realm of possible. Cold fusion is the only scam here.
The scam isn’t always “fake tech” so much as “distracting from better alternatives for monetary reasons”. Even if hyperloop worked perfectly, they’re not going to build it, because not building high speed rail was always the point.
Your definition of “scam” is not what other human being use. Causes unnecessary back and forth.
Oh, put a sock on it.
Metaverse - still one of the best jokes around
This one I slightly disagree with. I got my headset on a black friday and it was super cheap, but VR documentaries are friggin’ amazing and I hope museums will invest heavily in it in the coming years.
Fully autonomous self driving cars - “Just around the corner” for the past 10 years
Definitely. Makes me feel good for people who make their living driving trucks.
The metaverse isn’t VR in general, it was meant to be a virtual space in VR where users could be advertised to and buy/rent things and space like in a physical city.
It failed because those were the intended starting points, and it didn’t solve any problem other than a shitty attempt at a “I want to live in a ready player one world” and didn’t have any compelling reasons to actually use it, let alone use it and pay ridiculous amounts to do interesting things there. They always just wanted to be the middlemen, offering space for others to pay for and do something interesting in. The most interesting thing they came up with is having a meeting with avatars instead of faces on a screen (and most people don’t even want to turn on their video and just do a voice conversation instead).
Plus Second Life already tried the same idea and failed, and did so without requiring several hundred dollars of specialized equipment per user like the Metaverse did.
Though they did have the advantage of their name not being poison. When fb bought oculus, I stopped considering them an option for VR setups.
Until someone come up with things like sword art online, they gonna flop lmao
Yeah, what we call VR is just a pale imitation of the VR that made things like SAO and The Matrix so cool.
Some of these turned out to be useless, some just haven’t been adequately delivered yet.
In 2040 folding phones and autonomous cars might be great, but blockchain will still be a solution in search of a problem.
3D TVs - complete dud
The real issue with 3D TVs had nothing to do with the tech, but 100% to do with lazy implementation on the media side. Everyone was always trying to make things pop out of the screen, which was the complete wrong approach. Nevermind the fact that companies got so lazy to the point of just filming in 2D and then “adding” 3D in post.
No one wanted to put in the effort to do it right (aside from James Cameron). So no wonder no one liked it.
I watch a lot of YouTube about everything nerdy and celebratory to every detail and facet about the global apocalypse. Yesterday for the first time in months, a novel idea got through to me… dude was talking about the overblown reactionary movement to which I initially ate my own vomit… yes, I consume this drug, but yes, I am cognisant it’s really bad, so don’t tell me it’s all okay… Something along lines of “everyone thinks it’s like the industrial revolution. It’s not. It’s like the Internet or mobile devices. We just forget how big a change those were now that they’re normative, so it sounds psychotic to compare AI to such “small” shifts in society like the Internet or mobile”… and I felt a fuck ton better. Copium or not, it’s nice to hear a grounded take (he backed it up), and neither a sycophant or chicken little diatribe that feel respectively like sociopaths with heads in the ground or click bait unsubstantiated drama.
Not undermining what AI is doing to people, society, and the ecology. But now that I type that, thinking what to follow, anyone remember Mary Poppins? How normal it was for little kids covered in soot missing fingers at the dawn of the industrial revolution. We just need regulation which is the actual fundamental shift problem, as demand for political action is no longer democratized now that the Citizens have United.
Am I a douche? Lying to myself?
All of these have one thing in common. They are viable technologies for certain use cases but not widespread technologies for everyone and everything.
Fully autonomous self driving cars - “Just around the corner” for the past 10 years
It exists, but they realized that why should they do that, when they can make money by creating taxis without drivers.
There is no benefit for us, ordinary people.
They aren’t making any profit with self driving taxis, though.
Are you sure? I see Waymo driving around picking and dropping people off. I would imagine that charging more for the novelty and not having to pay the driver would actually generate a lot of profit.
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This is 100% the thesis I’ve been shopping personally… Many Boomers and Xers in executive positions had a “magical millennial” that they quietly kept as a secret “AI” to split/edit PDFs, set up an Airtable base, add columns to a google doc, etc. There was a tacit, silent agreement in this symbiotic relationship for the bulk of the last 20 years - you’ll make sure I don’t look completely incompetent in tech matters and I’ll backchannel on your behalf to senior leaders and people who “matter” to help you advance.
Gen AI essentially allows the laziest input, gives a half competent output that “feels” fine and has the bonus of telling the boomer/Xer that they are actually amazingly capable, and could have done this themselves all along even, but they rightly delegated the task to their magical millennial, and now to the AI of choice.
So they fired all the magical millennials, because they knew too much about the before times. Now that they are fucked without a life raft, costs soar and they will cling for dear life because they will be exposed otherwise.
Edit: through a twist of fate, the iPad kids grew up technically incapable and relied on the magical millenials as well. They could only offer praise and loyalty really, or a boomer, Xer recruited them in and talked the MM up as a “wiz” to seek out. Anyway, now that the MM are gone, the Zoomers and gen Alpha kids only have one strength remaining, the old people have no idea what they are doing or how to quantify their success, outside of “use more AI”. So the fragile balance remains for now, with a vulnerable, hollow center where the magical millennials used to live.
I’m surrounded by this shit, and it seems to come from all generations. My boss, who is my age, called me because her computer was frozen and she wanted me to fix it. “I was like, turn it off and on again, this is the first, most basic rule of troubleshooting.” Meanwhile the boomer next to me is having me do shit like attach files to a fucking email.
I’m a Millennial and work in IT. We aren’t magical. There’s competent and incompetent people in all age groups. I wouldn’t even say we had better starting conditions overall because being good with tech was seen as cringe nerd stuff when I grew up.
I think your theory is mostly right though, just along the lines of competent/incompetent. So many people constantly choose what they believe the path of least resistance with tech, even if it actually isn’t. Don’t spend one or two minutes to learn how to save to PDF in Word, instead google “word to pdf” and upload whatever sensitive data you have in that DOCX to some shady website.
The funny thing is that even with this massive overspending, AI companies aren’t profitable. They need these companies to spend 10x the amount per token, and 10x the number of tokens. Probably 10x the number of customers too.
Burning energy, draining water, spending massive cash so they can lose money on a product that doesn’t even do its job. How the hell has the bubble not popped yet…
The Stock market is literally just vibes. As long as everyone believes, it will somehow be profitable in the future, the line will keep ging up
and building more and more datacenters, replacing AI chips faster and faster, the more people use it, which of course is wasting a ton of money.
The problem seems to be that it takes competent employees to get anything useful out of an LLM in the first place. However, it is these very employees whom the greedy CEOs want to replace. So the result is that an incredible amount of money is being spent on absolutely nothing.
The logical conclusion, then, should be that it would make more sense to replace these useless CEOs with AI. Since they’re just making idiotic decisions for a lot of money anyway, there could be lots of savings.
Unfortunately, however, that will never happen, because contrary to all that talk of KPIs and such, what really matters in the upper echelons of management is never efficiency, but rather ruthlessness and brown-nosing.
I recently learned of a term “reverse centaur” and found the ideas in that article were very entertaining as a way to explain why CEOs are obsessed with LLMs. The author of the book being interviewed has a few hot takes that I think are pretty relevant here too. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/06/how-to-burst-the-ai-bubble-strike-at-its-roots/
Indeed!
“The bubble doesn’t want cheap useful things,” Doctorow said. “It wants expensive ‘disruptive’ things: big foundational models that lose billions of dollars every year. When the AI investment mania halts, most of the models are going to disappear, because it just won’t be economical to keep the data centers running. The collapse of the AI bubble is going to be ugly. Seven AI companies currently account for more than a third of the stock market, and they endlessly pass around the same $100 billion IOU. AI is the asbestos in the walls of our technological society, stuffed with wild abandon by a finance sector and tech monopolists run amok. We will be excavating it for a generation or more.”
I think that pretty much sums it up.
My employer has this figured out the right way: AI tools in the hands of competent employees can get a lot done. The engineers themselves agree and are long past their initial chilly reaction. They now have their workflows figured out and routinely report that they did something in minutes that would have taken them hours to do manually.
And even under this rosier picture, token budgets are an issue. These guys have agents running agents running agents that use a whole ecosystem of internal MCP servers and skill plugins and on and on. They say they never shut their laptops because they have 6 or 7 things running at all times. The LLM usage is ridiculous.
Once the LLMs cost what they actually cost, there will be a big time reckoning. First companies will crack down, then they will futz with on-premise models, then they will drive for SLMs and other slimmed down stuff. And they will pay the big guys 100x what they are now for 1/100th the usage.
But hey I don’t know why I’m posting in substance about the real world when all we are here to do is say AI is bullshit and CEOs are dumb. Carry on I guess.
Did they think everyone was gonna be creating return value based products for the company to make a fortune on?
Instead they making posters and having crazy convos.
It’s like someone has just discovered salt and every restaurant has it. Each thinks they are unique and gonna be the GOAT.
If my boss would mandate the use of LLMs I would definitely abuse it to rack up the bill.
I already am.
I just debugged a report, found the issue almost right away. A missing number in a GROUP BY clause.
Well if you’re measuring what I do through LLM use, the Claude is fixing it instead. Hope that dollar was worth it!
I like to race the ai on most tasks and find myself winning on anything of substance. Sure SOME mundane tasks can be done but does it out weight the energy and infrastructure costs as well as reputation and morale.
Even after all that you STILL need a human double checking and inputting the information.
Leadership are mostly idiots. They don’t know how work gets done. They think like “wow it produced so many lines of code!” and don’t know that’s not a useful metric.
My job had Microsoft do a four hour copilot demo for the entire team last week. (Surely an immense expense. They won’t pay for most people to be full time with benefits). The guy used copilot to make a regex to parse html. A little surprised zalgo didn’t show up.
I’ll one up you.
Google’s “principal evangelist” for Gemini did a 2hr presentation for almost 1,000 people at my company on Google Meet a few weeks ago.
40 mins late due to nobody knowing how to get more than 500 people in a meet.
He then spent 90 minutes showing everyone how to do shit that literally everyone knows how to do with AI nowadays; touch up old photos of your grandparents, make shitty marketing mascots and logos, etc…
Here’s an image I took during the presentation. For a laugh, look at the background text:
A C-Suite exec got impatient and asked when we were going to cover how to use agentic tools and he said “oh I’ve got a little section at the end for that.” Ffs
Literally nothing useful happened during this meeting and nearly 1,000 employees were idle for no reason. A complete and utter waste of fucking time. Gemini dude didn’t even bother to consider what use cases we might be looking into, he just did a boilerplate ELI5 of AI that would have been outdated in like 2022.
Absolutely insane.
Never work with children or animals (or do a live demo)
ROFL. Thanks for the screencap, that’s priceless.
Lastly, poor Buc-ee the beaver deserves better.
lol why is “animals” in quotes?
CEOs them to make power points using the already pre built company presentation template then talk about how they couldn’t have made it without AI like that’s supposed to show how useful AI is and not how incompetent they are
Yeh but the people trained ‘number’ widget went up on their numbers dashboard. Good reason for another self awarded bonus!
Using an LLM to parse stuff is like using a rocket launcher to kill an ant.
You can accomplish the same thing using a million times fewer resources with a purpose-built program.
“ChatGPT, what time is it?”
Well, if your KPI is how much you use an LLM like in some reports - this is an easy way to get those good indicators. Also, LLMs are super easy to use to parse things, whereas many special programs like IDK grep isn’t exactly user friendly. Not to mention not finding patterns really. Though here I’m thinking things like looking at various logs on computers.
Maybe we could at least nudge the LLMs in the direction of suggesting appropriate tools and giving hints how to actually do that when applicable instead of blindly brute forcing every task. Of course that does not solve the issue of stupid corporate incentives, but I feel like by now most companies have realized that burning as much money as possible is not a good goal.
Will, that’s what happens when employers tell employees that they should “use ai first”, track their token use on a dashboard, and tell them they’ll get fired if they are too low on the monthly ranking.
Yes but you’re in an open office and all you have available in your open office hell are: rocket launcher, your sanity, Debra’s snappy attitude.
Debra’s probably a better performer than you are.
Sounds like somebody’s got a case of the Mondays
Is Debra here a new version of clippy?
Eat shit you greedy corporate assholes, i hope all of your companies are damaged beyond recovery, you useless fucking tools.
These stupid companies are getting everything they deserve and I’m loving it.
Nah. The bailouts will only be two or three tomes what they squander.
Indeed, they won’t pay for these mistakes, we will.
“They’re too big to fail” etc., with another round of bailouts for our poor, beleaguered corporations.
It’s impossible to bail out Anthropic, OpenAI, Nvidia, etc
Too big to save (like a beached whale, they’ll collapse under their own weight and suffocate)
And Accenture itself reportedly started requiring senior staff to start using AI or risk losing out on promotions.
Every time companies urge employees to use AI and then regret the cost. The fuck is wrong with people? Why are they pushing it so hard? Does Sam give them hand jobs if they use the most?
I don’t understand this need to pressure staff into using something and threatening punishment if not. Are they worried that their employees are not efficient enough? Pay them the token prices on top of their salary and see how stuff changes.
This is actually very common across businesses. My company actually has our bonuses tied to AI adoption, so we have dashboards showing people’s AI usage. Other major companies have done the same, which lead to the practice of “token maxxing” where people were using AI to make more AI calls to boost their numbers up.
Tales as old as KPI.
Amazon did this and regretted it, canning their leaderboards.
It’s crazy to me that this is considered normal. Please use this product that will eventually replace you, kill the planet, and make some douchebag rich.
Edit: mobile typos
The fuck is wrong with people?
That’s the corporate hive mind, all afraid of missing out of a great productivity tool. And they think that because media these days just copies what the richest people say and hype it up because the rich these days only speak to yes-men.
and then regret the cost
Reality doesn’t need to obey yes-men.
Fuck Accenture, they just abuse low level analysts to make profit.
When you tell the people to mash the easy button and then they do exactly what you wanted. They created the monster.
If you just throw every task at it, I can completely imagine that it’ll cost you more than any gain in efficiency. To some degree I think this is true of some coding tasks (not all, most are pretty efficient pattern matches, and that’s what it does well).
But using LLMs to build tools and pipelines that stand alone (no AU built into it) and enable human productivity seems like a far higher leverage use.
The programming version is building the libraries and abstractions that are robust and well tested, so that regular developers can quickly build and refine the features.
Or building the reporting dashboard. Or whatever.
The cost is only going to go up, and the companies that lock in some non-AI process improvements before the hike will likely be smiling
Especially because a statistical model of language has very limited valid usecases. Many tasks that people use LLM for do not make any sense and cannot be accomplished by a statistical model of language. It can only output a statistical approximate of what a solution to the task might look like, not an actual solution.
It constructed an entire feature-full library for a UV sensor that just came on the market, by me just throwing the PDF datasheet at it and saying “make library pls”.
It’s the actual solution. Maybe the statistical approximate just coincidentally lined up with the actual solution? Either way, works for me. Second time it did that, too. Worked for a LiDAR sensor earlier.
Maybe the statistical approximate just coincidentally lined up with the actual solution?
Yes, right, and this can happen. I didn’t say they are a bad approximation. LLMs may be the most advanced and sophisticated statistical models ever created (if there are other examples of statistical models that are more sophisticated, I would love to learn about them). But given what an LLM actually objectively is, a statistical model of the next token to follow from a sample of language, what other explanation could there be?
We need to keep in mind what the tools that we are working with actually are.
As a code generator, they can produce great results, especially simple stuff like generating a script or some function implementation. Once you get to software engineering tasks like designing system architecture and designing maintainable code, it starts to fall apart really fast. You end up doing all of the work for it in natural language and just using the LLM for a usecase that it is actually great for: translation, from detailed spec to code.
This is almost the perfect task for them. I think if them as pattern matches. They have patterns for libraries in their training, and you gave it a technical spec, and it pattern matched it across to a library.
On top of that, you can verify it and reuse it. But regenerating it every time wouldn’t be a good use both for the cost, and the risk of subtle issues that don’t get noticed. Same argument as for any library.
Probably because I’ve been doing this so long, I often find it easier and more precise to describe things in code or pseudo code than common English, which often aides my use of LLMs.
On another note, I’m curious what you’re making. My “when I get time” project is to use an old STM32 drone flight controller to do some basic robotics, which will only be possible because I think the LLM will pattern match me out of trouble getting an embedded C program compiling after 20 years out of that game.
This is the most profitable consultant in the world, can’t they just afford to run a local llm?
I heard about a company that was looking at purchasing machines to run local llms for their developers to use.
If more companies do this, rather than using the massive ai data centers being built…. the RAMpocolypse will get way worse.
That is the part that pains me to admit - running local LLMs is not a solution to the RAMpocalypse. In that case we’d just have more GPUs and RAM idling for ~90% of the time in someones basement, without being shared. As bad as it sounds, having data centers for AI stuff is actually the more ecological solution. I can’t believe I said that. Excuse me, I have to take a shower now *shudder*
So you say I have to destroy the AI thing?
