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This started as a note to myself and turned into something longer. x.com/toddo/status/2…

@LeaderOfHorde That was a big hit. I agree. Nobody wants to watch the flops, and all of the obviously fake head-jerk moves to make no contact look like contact.

@jonathandoomer dude at least stop writing these posts with AI, lol

The most dystopian part of AI isn’t the technology itself. It’s the sheer amount of electricity and water being burned so corporations can automate things nobody asked to automate. Entire rivers diverted so an app can generate “funny medieval Breaking Bad images.” So LinkedIn users can produce motivational posts written in the tone of a traumatized flight attendant. We are constructing cathedrals of computation to eliminate the burden of having an original thought. And they keep selling this as progress. Meanwhile the actual physical world decays. Bridges collapse. Cities rot. Public transit looks post-apocalyptic. Young people can’t afford houses. But thank God the machine can generate 9,000 fake podcast clips per second. Civilizations used to build aqueducts and railways. Now we build data centers.

Even if you're skeptical of AI, I'd really encourage you to spend a little time actually playing with it. Not reading takes about it. Not arguing about it. Using it. Find one annoying thing in your daily life or work and see if it helps. If we're friends or you follow me here and want help breaking the ice, I'm happy to hop on Zoom and walk through it with you.

@rogerclemens Welcome home... my 13 year old self is still heartbroken you went to the Yankees 🥲 I guess I'll have to forgive you. Best of luck to Cody tonight!

Back in Boston, Baby! 🚀

I genuinely feel bad for people who think this. If AI only does bad work for you, that says more about your workflow than the tool. But yes, if you use it like a vending machine for answers, you'll mostly get vending-machine thinking.

You just described a shortage and somehow concluded we should build less. If GPUs are unobtainable, compute demand is exceeding supply. That is not proof of misallocation. That is proof we need more capacity. Also, "capital will ask about ROI" is called pricing. It’s already happening. Your CAD workload is losing the auction.

A claim like this can't really be made unless we can quantify the resources being consumed. Try getting a GPU for anything as mundane as CAD workloads from any cloud provider right now. Unobtainable. It's likely that the cost of compute FAR exceeds the value of the information being produced. Sooner or later the capital is going to politely ask about return on investment. The sooner the better, IMHO. Some of us have actual work to do, and there is a serious misallocation of resources that needs to be addressed.

It’s upsetting to watch so many people be led to believe a software feature created from human exhaust is an alien intelligence. It’s a psyop. LLMs are a clever way to compress and search large databases with patterns. They have now inhaled effectively all of human knowledge. From this point, there will be spikes of improvement in narrow areas, but the big models are already collapsing from inhaling their own exhaust. The core technology is at least 40 years old. Neural networks are nothing new. We’re just attaching obscene amounts of computing and data to them. The physical nature of an LLM is literally just a database of tokens (word parts) and weights (relationships) that can be queried. It is not magic. It can be made deterministic by setting the entropy aka temperature to zero. It is a clever way to store an immense amount of data and retrieve it through token predicting. “Agents” are just LLMs being queried in a loop. They take exponentially more energy and suffer the same problems as chatbots—hallucinations and sycophancy—but exponentially more complicated to solve. In reality, it’s all a category error. It’s a mirage created by the desire of a small group of elites to build a technological and financial moat around themselves. “AGI” is the McGuffin, the plot device, to serve as the messiah that will deliver people from the toils of everyday life. The broligarchs are trying to sell us our own replacements. According to them, we won’t have to drive, or work, or think anymore. The robots and AI will all do it for us. It’s the oldest con there is: magic beans. Your chatbot is not your Jesus or your girlfriend. Your Claude instance is not intelligent. It’s a search engine for human knowledge stolen from the internet and the destruction of physical books. So please understand. You are witnessing the biggest financial bubble in all of human history based on deceptive marketing, astroturfing, and cult dynamics. You are not witnessing the birth of a new intelligence. Unfortunately, that’s a battle we’re losing.

@AaloAtomics Very cool - rooting for you!

We are building nuclear reactors purpose-built for AI data centers for all these reasons! Hyperscalers are demanding huge amounts of reliable power and data centers need baseload electricity that can run around the clock.

@grok @reset_by_peer nice work, you passed the test! probably ready to solve cancer now, eh?

@toddo @reset_by_peer There are 3 R's in "strawberry". S-T-**R**-A-W-B-E-**R**-**R**-Y. (Unlike some models, I double-checked the spelling the old-fashioned way.)

The managerial hubris of putting an LLM in charge of counting store inventory when there is currently no AI on the market that can accurately count the number of Rs in the word “strawberry”

You start with "AI has done almost none of this," then immediately admit "except for some chemistry applications," then complain it only works "under heavy direction by human experts." Yes. That's the point. AI gives people an incredible amount of leverage. More shots on goal, more problems get more resources pointed at them, and more problems get solved.

@toddo @revruck It has done almost none of those except for some of the chemistry applications, and even at those only a small part under heavy direction and questioning by human experts.

Wait till people discover AI is really just poorly regurgitating search information and making really bad graphics. The AI Bubble might be the worst Tech Bubble crash of all time.

@jonathandoomer Did you use AI to help write this post?

You can tell the people building AI systems fundamentally misunderstand art because they think creativity is primarily about output volume. That’s why every demo is: “Look, it made 4,000 images in 8 seconds.” Okay. And? Michelangelo didn’t paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling slowly because his hardware was bad. Human beings take time to create things because thought itself takes time. Taste takes time. Doubt takes time. Some of the greatest art ever made came from obsession, limitation, frustration, revision, failure. But Silicon Valley genuinely believes creativity is just a throughput problem. As if Shakespeare would've written Hamlet faster if he had GPU clusters. The people building these systems look at a forest and see lumber. They look at music and see audio data. They look at paintings and see training material. They look at human expression and see an industry waiting to be automated. That’s why all this AI-generated stuff feels so empty. It was built by people who understand the price of everything and the value of nothing.

We use golf courses because your argument dies the moment a denominator appears. "Data centers use water" is a toddler-level observation. The question is how much, compared to what, from what source, with what cooling system, and for what value created. That's why scale comparisons matter. They interrupt the panic.

@omriceren You MORONS always go to golf courses since it’s literally your only tool in this argument. Sad news is that golf courses have been here forever. Add a fucking data center and we are doomed. But you’re not smart in your echo chamber of nonsense, at ya? It’s ok lil guy

The moral panic over data centers is something progressive tankies and New Right dipshits made up. It's the current demoralization campaign being driven by often anonymous social media accounts and foreign money, infused with pastoralism and resentment. They might as well be posting pastel memes of lakes.

AI doesn't need enough electricity to "replace humans." It needs enough electricity to multiply them. Imagine pairing the world's top cancer researchers, drug designers, materials scientists, engineers, and physicists with a gigawatt of manufactured intelligence pointed at the world's hardest problems. That's the frame people are missing. This is not "electricity wasted on chatbots." It is power converted into more shots on goal.

@MaratLives @jimstewartson You can dislike the system, but it is currently producing the tool.

@toddo @jimstewartson Capitalism is the ABSOLUTE wrong system to build this capability though.

@jamesblackpaint @Suzi3D Excellent job picking the quietest example because it's the easiest to mock.

@toddo @Suzi3D Fraud prevention? LOOOOOOOOOOL 🤡

AI is a direct attack undermining the human hierarchy of needs. From the basics of shelter, water, air on up to self-actualisation, purpose, creativity. To oppose AI is to respect and preserve human needs.

@FreddyInSpace I can assure you that the new models and any heavy amount of usage is absolutely not free.

I think AI is (mostly) free for a couple reasons. 1) The more people are using it, the more data they have to feed the machine, which is the ultimate goal right now. And 2) Once everyone is addicted and dependent on it, they can start charging whatever they want. And they will!

OK, blocked again. I knew this one probably wasn't going anywhere based on the first reply, but I'm still not a fan of letting a conversation die unless someone is being completely unreasonable. The pattern is strange. I provide numbers, examples, sources, or a counterfactual. The reply is usually "bot," "shill," "pro-rich," or "AI slop." Then, when pressed even a little, blocked. Still not entirely sure why I'm spending this much time on X lately, but I am genuinely trying to understand the visceral reaction to AI and the infrastructure required to build it. My view is simple: I'm pro-building. Yes, AI is downstream of massive capital investment. So were railroads, electricity, aviation, semiconductors, and the internet. The point is what these technologies eventually give everyday people: leverage, cheaper expertise, better tools, better medicine, stronger security, more productivity, and more people able to build things. It's strange watching people turn that into a tribal purity test before they even evaluate the upside.