"There are some code generation tools which are, at times, helpful, but, unless subsidized, very expensive. There is ChatGTP and other squawk boxes which in the end are just new forms of inherently unreliable web search tools."
From what I have seen much AI is just enhanced Wikipedia slop--in other words, the CIA version of every controversial story. Who needs it?
Well, some are continuing the “borrowing spree” to fund “the CIA version of every controversial story!”
“The hope is that at some point, all this massive investment will lead to a surge in EBITDA. The only problem is what happens if nearly-free Chinese open-weight models end up dominating the market while US hyperscalers duke it out in the biggest spending spree since the Nuclear arms race. And, as we reported overnight, that's precisely what is happening.”
One Nation Under Blackmail author, Whitney Webb is Dr Chris Hedge's guest, to talk about how the potential of AI is being rolled out, he argues, not for the public good:
Under the radar, the billionaire class is building the infrastructure and models necessary to create a dystopian future in which cities become billionaire fiefdoms - completely privatized, governed by dictatorial CEOs and financed by subservient taxpayers. The buildout of data centers is one essential part of the effort to construct a totalitarian capitalist society, which is already advancing.
East Sphere…West Sphere…they are quite different and will never meld. Different ground.
They look at humans/souls and the universe differently.
Different view of alchemy and what to do with the humans.
This is most obvious in the differences between Eastern and Western medicine. Eastern is about the entire human, physical, mind and spirit: a kind of purification leading to wisdom and a kind of immortality. See Daoism (Xi, his wife and the leading cohort around him are Daoists). Daoism, as opposed to Buddhism/Legalism and Confucianism, has always viewed Technology as a way to hasten this. Very cosmological. It’s not about changing the humans soul as such. Life force: Qi. Qigong.
Digital technology has become, officially, absolutely ubiquitous in China. From birth to death. It is everywhere. China has adopted an “open” system. What this means is that anyone can use and modify. This contributes to low cost and rapid advancement and deployment.
Virtually every device we will use will have Chinese AI/Digital technology running it. Just the reality. This will, btw, have a great impact on the notion of re-industrializing the US.
In the West, following PRINT and Protestantism, we still view humans mostly materially. Sinners that have never been reformed and are the fundamental problem for humanity and the planet. So alchemy in the West is about changing the humans, or bypassing most in favor of a few. Our adoption of tech reflects this: closed. Secrets. Eliminating humans wherever possible. From the US to Russia, this is part of the mindset and approach.
For the Modern West this has been about manipulating/engineering humans. Interesting to compare Roger Bacon 13th century and Francis Bacon 17th century on this and how alchemy in the West changed.
The China/East the idea of purification, immortality, divination of the physical, mind and spirit is quite different from the West’s adoption of salvation/redemption. If you are secular in the West, it is not God that will bring salvation, but human adoption of technology that changes the humans. Thus AGI: Musk claiming AI will surpass Humans in every way…except AI cannot be better at being human…;)
In the West we still focused on improving the technology. In the East they are focused on applying the tech to elevating the humans. Whether this works as they want it to remains to be seen. What everyone misses is how DIGITAL is a new psycho environment that is forming humans differently than anything we have ever experienced.
The data centers will be used to track and control the population. The malinvestment will be bailed out by the buyer of last resort and put to use doing what that buyer does best - repression at scale.
As always, it's never simple. Warning, long rant incoming.
AI in the US is as much a financial engineering play as it is a tech, and to a lesser degree, a religion item.
The big tech companies, which had been carrying the previous NASDAQ bull market, were sitting on insane cash positions, some of which would be used to buy back shares to boost valuations, which were both part of C-suite bonuses and KPIs. But still, cash piled up.
Along came LLMs and the associated hype, setting the perfect opportunity for grabbing generational wealth. The cash would be deployed into compute infrastructure, and startups that simulated demand, which would in turn drive valuations of said startups, which could then be booked as revenue despite being unrealised "gains" of non-publicly traded stocks.
Right now, Amazon is booking about half of their revenue from those imaginary "gains" of "investments" into AI companies. Same everywhere. Look for "other income" in the quarterly statements.
This, in turn, then pushes the "hyperscaler" stock, because record earnings, right? Nvidia, previously known mostly for designing overpriced gaming GPUs and lying about their performance (note that they don't actually make chips physically) suddenly found itself at the receiving end of the cash firehose.
With profit margins from lalaland, they began "investing" into their customers to buy their product, which they could then book as earnings again.
By now, the cash is gone at the big tech boys, and they've become net sellers of shares (no more buybacks) and, in Q1 '26, have matched the US government in the amount of debt they're taking on, crowding out the bond market.
At the same time, a group of religious, trans-humanist nutjobs have both created the hype of all hypes (margin debt to GDP is at historic high) and convinced the tech-illiterate government that a) their software is 99% towards sentience, keeps hacking companies, can autodetect brown-skinned people to murder and b) it's a new cold war with China, because if the evil commies "win" and get their god-AI first, it's the end of the free world and apple pie, so could you please shut up the rabble that keeps complaining about the noise, water and electricity prices?
Meanwhile, are LLMs useful? Yes. They can speed up human workflows if used for boilerplate tasks by qualified people. They've allowed African scammers to double their revenue year-on-year by producing targeted phishing scams. They allow autonomous drones to find stuff to blow up. With all their flaws and hallucinations, they're a skill multiplier.
So what's the TAM (total addressable market)? We know that users are willing to pay maybe 20 bucks a month for a subscription, but not a grand to produce questionable code that takes a human twice as long to fix, and we know that there's no moat - they all do the same stuff.
Currently, ALL AI companies are priced as if they're the only one who's going to cover the market, and even then, it's going to be a footnote in revenue for a good while.
Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon? They're going to survive the inevitable collapse of the shell game. They'll hurt for a while, but they have real business to fall back on. Semiconductors are going into their usual downcycle. OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX are going to disappear or shrink to a fraction.
The players will walk away with billions in their pockets and can get back to building doomsday bunkers in New Zealand.
So why can the Chinese build cheaper-running models? Better engineers, cheap energy, sure, but also incentive. They don't have the same financial scams running the show. They had to make do with "not unlimited hardware", and in all honesty, there was never an incentive for US AI companies to build efficient models.
None of this is hidden btw. Prof. Boyle had an excellent video on the accounting of it, and it's all there in the open, investors are just too stupid and lazy to read.
In the end, retirements will be pillaged, government money will be funneled into a few pockets, regular people who have been driven by greed to take on debt to buy worthless paper will be left holding the bag. Kospi is a good indicator of what's to come.
AI will end up changing the world, and will be commoditised, and be part of our jobs and everyday lives. Open source models from China will be forbidden for NatSec reasons, but good luck stopping that. Governments will be given new and fancy tools to both control the uppity peasantry through the upcoming depression, and deliver warheads on foreheads on the cheap.
- Data centers in the middle east are being attacked by Iran.
- AI is often interchangeable. Basically you can use any ai model to power your application. Some many users are migrating to Chinese open source models that are 60-90% cheaper.
- US takes forever to build power plants. Last nuke plant was 15 years and first new one in 30 years. None currently under construction in the U.S. China has 37 under construction. Trump is trying to kickstart the U.S. nuke industry. U.S. power system is a mess.
I saw somewhere that there's been newly proposed connection requests to the Texas grid operator, for believe it or not, almost 5x the highest demand that has ever been. The generation doesn't exist and will never exist to support this insanity, especially since it's just another tulip mania.
Gee, sounds a lot like our defense system equipment; costly to develop, very, very expensive to build; very costly to operate and maintain, performance is usually a lot less than promised and the taxpayer gets left holding the bag. But hey, what do I know, we could easily get over on some country using cheap drones with our bazillion dollar weapon systems…oh, wait……
“Families in Ohio are paying $200 more per year in electricity bills to subsidize data centers locked into 19-year leases for GPUs that become obsoleted in over a year, serving customers on five-year contracts, in an industry where the CEOs building it admit it’s a bubble, financed through circular money arrangements that remind people of Enron, requiring more electricity than the grid can provide, generating returns that 95% of enterprises report as zero.
"There are some code generation tools which are, at times, helpful, but, unless subsidized, very expensive. There is ChatGTP and other squawk boxes which in the end are just new forms of inherently unreliable web search tools."
From what I have seen much AI is just enhanced Wikipedia slop--in other words, the CIA version of every controversial story. Who needs it?
Well, some are continuing the “borrowing spree” to fund “the CIA version of every controversial story!”
“The hope is that at some point, all this massive investment will lead to a surge in EBITDA. The only problem is what happens if nearly-free Chinese open-weight models end up dominating the market while US hyperscalers duke it out in the biggest spending spree since the Nuclear arms race. And, as we reported overnight, that's precisely what is happening.”
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/hyperscaler-bond-spreads-blow-out-after-google-shocks-another-25-billion-bond-offering
One Nation Under Blackmail author, Whitney Webb is Dr Chris Hedge's guest, to talk about how the potential of AI is being rolled out, he argues, not for the public good:
Under the radar, the billionaire class is building the infrastructure and models necessary to create a dystopian future in which cities become billionaire fiefdoms - completely privatized, governed by dictatorial CEOs and financed by subservient taxpayers. The buildout of data centers is one essential part of the effort to construct a totalitarian capitalist society, which is already advancing.
https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/how-the-epstein-network-is-privatizing?
East Sphere…West Sphere…they are quite different and will never meld. Different ground.
They look at humans/souls and the universe differently.
Different view of alchemy and what to do with the humans.
This is most obvious in the differences between Eastern and Western medicine. Eastern is about the entire human, physical, mind and spirit: a kind of purification leading to wisdom and a kind of immortality. See Daoism (Xi, his wife and the leading cohort around him are Daoists). Daoism, as opposed to Buddhism/Legalism and Confucianism, has always viewed Technology as a way to hasten this. Very cosmological. It’s not about changing the humans soul as such. Life force: Qi. Qigong.
Digital technology has become, officially, absolutely ubiquitous in China. From birth to death. It is everywhere. China has adopted an “open” system. What this means is that anyone can use and modify. This contributes to low cost and rapid advancement and deployment.
Virtually every device we will use will have Chinese AI/Digital technology running it. Just the reality. This will, btw, have a great impact on the notion of re-industrializing the US.
In the West, following PRINT and Protestantism, we still view humans mostly materially. Sinners that have never been reformed and are the fundamental problem for humanity and the planet. So alchemy in the West is about changing the humans, or bypassing most in favor of a few. Our adoption of tech reflects this: closed. Secrets. Eliminating humans wherever possible. From the US to Russia, this is part of the mindset and approach.
For the Modern West this has been about manipulating/engineering humans. Interesting to compare Roger Bacon 13th century and Francis Bacon 17th century on this and how alchemy in the West changed.
The China/East the idea of purification, immortality, divination of the physical, mind and spirit is quite different from the West’s adoption of salvation/redemption. If you are secular in the West, it is not God that will bring salvation, but human adoption of technology that changes the humans. Thus AGI: Musk claiming AI will surpass Humans in every way…except AI cannot be better at being human…;)
In the West we still focused on improving the technology. In the East they are focused on applying the tech to elevating the humans. Whether this works as they want it to remains to be seen. What everyone misses is how DIGITAL is a new psycho environment that is forming humans differently than anything we have ever experienced.
It’s really NOT about the math…
The data centers will be used to track and control the population. The malinvestment will be bailed out by the buyer of last resort and put to use doing what that buyer does best - repression at scale.
As always, it's never simple. Warning, long rant incoming.
AI in the US is as much a financial engineering play as it is a tech, and to a lesser degree, a religion item.
The big tech companies, which had been carrying the previous NASDAQ bull market, were sitting on insane cash positions, some of which would be used to buy back shares to boost valuations, which were both part of C-suite bonuses and KPIs. But still, cash piled up.
Along came LLMs and the associated hype, setting the perfect opportunity for grabbing generational wealth. The cash would be deployed into compute infrastructure, and startups that simulated demand, which would in turn drive valuations of said startups, which could then be booked as revenue despite being unrealised "gains" of non-publicly traded stocks.
Right now, Amazon is booking about half of their revenue from those imaginary "gains" of "investments" into AI companies. Same everywhere. Look for "other income" in the quarterly statements.
This, in turn, then pushes the "hyperscaler" stock, because record earnings, right? Nvidia, previously known mostly for designing overpriced gaming GPUs and lying about their performance (note that they don't actually make chips physically) suddenly found itself at the receiving end of the cash firehose.
With profit margins from lalaland, they began "investing" into their customers to buy their product, which they could then book as earnings again.
By now, the cash is gone at the big tech boys, and they've become net sellers of shares (no more buybacks) and, in Q1 '26, have matched the US government in the amount of debt they're taking on, crowding out the bond market.
At the same time, a group of religious, trans-humanist nutjobs have both created the hype of all hypes (margin debt to GDP is at historic high) and convinced the tech-illiterate government that a) their software is 99% towards sentience, keeps hacking companies, can autodetect brown-skinned people to murder and b) it's a new cold war with China, because if the evil commies "win" and get their god-AI first, it's the end of the free world and apple pie, so could you please shut up the rabble that keeps complaining about the noise, water and electricity prices?
Meanwhile, are LLMs useful? Yes. They can speed up human workflows if used for boilerplate tasks by qualified people. They've allowed African scammers to double their revenue year-on-year by producing targeted phishing scams. They allow autonomous drones to find stuff to blow up. With all their flaws and hallucinations, they're a skill multiplier.
So what's the TAM (total addressable market)? We know that users are willing to pay maybe 20 bucks a month for a subscription, but not a grand to produce questionable code that takes a human twice as long to fix, and we know that there's no moat - they all do the same stuff.
Currently, ALL AI companies are priced as if they're the only one who's going to cover the market, and even then, it's going to be a footnote in revenue for a good while.
Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon? They're going to survive the inevitable collapse of the shell game. They'll hurt for a while, but they have real business to fall back on. Semiconductors are going into their usual downcycle. OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX are going to disappear or shrink to a fraction.
The players will walk away with billions in their pockets and can get back to building doomsday bunkers in New Zealand.
So why can the Chinese build cheaper-running models? Better engineers, cheap energy, sure, but also incentive. They don't have the same financial scams running the show. They had to make do with "not unlimited hardware", and in all honesty, there was never an incentive for US AI companies to build efficient models.
None of this is hidden btw. Prof. Boyle had an excellent video on the accounting of it, and it's all there in the open, investors are just too stupid and lazy to read.
https://youtu.be/NufJ7g63KSY
In the end, retirements will be pillaged, government money will be funneled into a few pockets, regular people who have been driven by greed to take on debt to buy worthless paper will be left holding the bag. Kospi is a good indicator of what's to come.
AI will end up changing the world, and will be commoditised, and be part of our jobs and everyday lives. Open source models from China will be forbidden for NatSec reasons, but good luck stopping that. Governments will be given new and fancy tools to both control the uppity peasantry through the upcoming depression, and deliver warheads on foreheads on the cheap.
AI Stuff:
- Chinas energy cost is 1/6th the U.S.
- Data centers in the middle east are being attacked by Iran.
- AI is often interchangeable. Basically you can use any ai model to power your application. Some many users are migrating to Chinese open source models that are 60-90% cheaper.
https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/chinese-ai-models-now-capture-020440715.html?
- US takes forever to build power plants. Last nuke plant was 15 years and first new one in 30 years. None currently under construction in the U.S. China has 37 under construction. Trump is trying to kickstart the U.S. nuke industry. U.S. power system is a mess.
I saw somewhere that there's been newly proposed connection requests to the Texas grid operator, for believe it or not, almost 5x the highest demand that has ever been. The generation doesn't exist and will never exist to support this insanity, especially since it's just another tulip mania.
Gee, sounds a lot like our defense system equipment; costly to develop, very, very expensive to build; very costly to operate and maintain, performance is usually a lot less than promised and the taxpayer gets left holding the bag. But hey, what do I know, we could easily get over on some country using cheap drones with our bazillion dollar weapon systems…oh, wait……
This is a bit dated, but the point is there. It adds an addition layer to what you are discussing:
https://no01.substack.com/p/the-trillion-dollar-oops?r=8x5hj&utm_medium=ios
There does not seem to be a path to profitability for the U.S. AI.
*Let’s hope the gov does not take a stake in any of the companies and stick taxpayers with the debt.
What if the end goal isn't actually profit? What if it was actually all about control?
That is what Technocracy is all about.
The Data Centers are about control. They are for Mass surveillance of the citizens.
If we look to Gaza and see what was done there, it’s clear what is coming here.
DOGE was the conduit. It got all of our information from the various gov orgs.
A hum-dinger of an article…tx for posting!
“Families in Ohio are paying $200 more per year in electricity bills to subsidize data centers locked into 19-year leases for GPUs that become obsoleted in over a year, serving customers on five-year contracts, in an industry where the CEOs building it admit it’s a bubble, financed through circular money arrangements that remind people of Enron, requiring more electricity than the grid can provide, generating returns that 95% of enterprises report as zero.
Someone is going to pay for this.”
I suspect the gov will take a position in the firms. That will allow them to hold us responsible for the debt etc.
It’s all still true, unfortunately.