The Guardian – Cory Doctorow: “When the AI-investment mania halts, most of those models are going to disappear, because it just won’t be economical to keep the datacenters running. As Stein’s law has it: “Anything that can’t go on forever eventually stops.” 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 $100bn IOU. AI is the asbestos in the walls of our technological society, stuffed there with wild abandon by a finance sector and tech monopolists run amok. We will be excavating it for a generation or more. To pop the bubble, we have to hammer on the forces that created the bubble: the myth that AI can do your job, especially if you get high wages that your boss can claw back; the understanding that growth companies need a succession of ever more outlandish bubbles to stay alive; the fact that workers and the public they serve are on one side of this fight, and bosses and their investors are on the other side. Because the AI bubble really is very bad news, it’s worth fighting seriously, and a serious fight against AI strikes at its roots: the material factors fueling the hundreds of billions in wasted capital that are being spent to put us all on the breadline and fill all our walls with hi-tech asbestos…”

See also Financial Expert Says OpenAI Is on the Verge of Running Out of Money. “The AI industry continues to pour tens of billions of dollars into resource-intensive models and the infrastructure to run them. In the face of it all, their promises of kickstarting a technological revolution that could one day be immensely profitable remain convincing enough for investors to prop up sky-high valuations — at least for now. But actually turning a profit is likely many years away for the vast majority of AI companies, and that’s if it ever comes. Who will stand to benefit from the rampant expenditures also remains a subject of heated debate, as corporations like Google, Meta, and OpenAI continue to race each other for dominance in the space. Google and Meta already have successful businesses doing other things, but OpenAI doesn’t. That hasn’t stopped it from committing to spend well over $1 trillion before the end of the decade, an astronomical and extremely risky bet on scale even as its revenue lags. Users have shown a low willingness to pay for ChatGPT subscriptions, and the company has only begun exploring other revenue-generating avenues. It all adds up to an enormous unanswered question: how long can OpenAI keep burning cash? n a new essay for the New York Times, Sebastian Mallaby, senior fellow at the nonpartisan think tank Council on Foreign Relations, predicts that the Sam Altman-led company could run out of money “over the next 18 months.”