The Generative AI Con
www.wheresyoured.at
It's been just over two years and two months since ChatGPT launched, and in that time we've seen Large Language Models (LLMs) blossom from a novel concept into one of the most craven cons of the 21st century — a cynical bubble inflated by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman built to sell

cross-posted from: https://ponder.cat/post/1675150

I refuse to sit here and pretend that any of this matters. OpenAI and Anthropic are not innovators, and are antithetical to the spirit of Silicon Valley. They are management consultants dressed as founders, cynical con artists raising money for products that will never exist while peddling software that destroys our planet and diverts attention and capital away from things that might solve real problems.

I’m tired of the delusion. I’m tired of being forced to take these men seriously. I’m tired of being told by the media and investors that these men are building the future when the only things they build are mediocre and expensive. There is no joy here, no mystery, no magic, no problems solved, no lives saved, and very few lives changed other than new people added to Forbes’ Midas list.

None of this is powerful, or impressive, other than in how big a con it’s become. Look at the products and the actual outputs and tell me — does any of this actually feel like the future? Isn’t it kind of weird that the big, scary threats they’ve made about how AI will take our jobs never seem to translate to an actual product? Isn’t it strange that despite all of their money and power they’re yet to make anything truly useful?

My heart darkens, albeit briefly, when I think of how cynical all of this is. Corporations building products that don’t really do much that are being sold on the idea that one day they might, peddled by reporters that want to believe their narratives — and in some cases actively champion them. The damage will be tens of thousands of people fired, long-term environmental and infrastructural chaos, and a profound depression in Silicon Valley that I believe will dwarf the dot-com bust.

And when this all falls apart — and I believe it will — there will be a very public reckoning for the tech industry.

  • mindbleach
    3·
    5 days ago

    I get that there are people that use LLM-powered software, and I must be clear that anecdotal examples of some people using some software that they kind-of like is not evidence that generative AI is a sustainable or real industry at the trillion-dollar scale that many claim it is.

    Then the headline should be “bubble,” not “con.”

    NFTs were a con. NFTs had literally nothing going for them. What little application crypto might’ve had, NFTs threw out.

    But this? This whole new kind of software, that does spooky shit from plain-English instructions? Even if that’s a solution in search of a problem, it works. It will become local models you can lean on instead of googling ‘who was that guy in that movie,’ or photoshopping an image mashup, or cranking out lo-fi background music. It’s stuff you can do, on a computer… that the computer… can now do by itself.

    No shit it’s not a trillion-dollar industry, because that’s a cocaine fantasy number. And we’ll struggle to quantify how this software is driven by decentralized weirdos giving things away for free. Like, how big is the Linux industry, in US dollars? I neither know nor care. I just want them to keep dissolving Windows at its foundations. That same process is already visible thanks to DeepSeek, which undercut OpenAI by at least an order of magnitude, no matter how hard they fudged their numbers. We can and will go lower. The ultranerds of this field will only get better at planning and training models, until you really can do it for a couple hundred bucks.

    Look at the products and the actual outputs and tell me — does any of this actually feel like the future?

    Yes.

    We have a whole new kind of software, driven mostly by example, and it does a bunch of stuff we insisted would require human intelligence. Ed pounding the table about how old and tired this all is, after two years, is absurd. We will see LLMs get massively better at the things they actually do - even if that’s plainly not the AGI tasks these rich assholes insist they already can. We will see image and video AI advance to the point they become force multipliers for serious artists - even if only to tween and style-transfer over human art. We will see new networks that can find existing answers, from the perspective that respectable science is right and crank blogs are wrong - even if they could trivially do the opposite, having no awareness of or opinion on the real world.

    These companies will implode and the tech will still be there.