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Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster. A shockingly inefficient trillion-dollar project.
(www.theatlantic.com)
Efficiency deserves more attention than hype.
this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2026
677 points (97.3% liked)
Technology
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He's sadly right.. My wife is Chinese, she watches AI Chinese dramas and she has told me that most of China watch AI dramas. And Gen Z watch AI, Everyone younger than 30 relies on AI.
Now before you downvote me, I'm 37 and I've worked in IT since I was 19.. AI gives me nothing I can't find for myself. The only time I've used AI was when chat GPT was fresh and new and I told it to be more sarcastic and snarky in it's answers and I argued with it for 2-3 mins before I got bored.
Humans are much better at arguing with me and being sarcastic to me.
I don't care for AI, Turn off all the air conditioners and AI burns out.
What are AI Chinese dramas? How much is AI? Just the script, or is the entire thing AI animated? Where do you see these programs?
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Are you responding to something specific from this article? I feel like we might have read completely different articles.
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Yeah no shit Sherlock. AI chat bots are just a way to market and sell a dystopian surveillance apparatus to the masses wrapped in the guise of it will right your bullshit corporate emails and messages for you all the while the government and the corporations are fucking you in the ass.
It was a barely functional technology that provides convenience and laziness well hiding it’s true purpose, Machine learning algorithms for facial recognition license prints tracking making it efficient and relatively economical to spy on and control an entire population.
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AI is the idea of putting a million monkeys in a room with a typewriter and waiting for Shakespeare.
The smart people already knew the monkeys would just starve to death. The business majors are just now figuring that out.
To be or not to be, that is...
It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times.
The ten thousandth monkey typed out the word "the" , fund them everything they'll type out Shakespeare!
Dude, the math says it would be cheaper to fund research into necromancy to revive the actual Shakespeare than this.
If only the mainstream media would have said this since 2023. We maybe even have dodged the bullet called the Trump second term, but now we're heading towards a global financial collapse.
Look, if you know a way to convert a PDF to text with less than 500GB of VRAM and 2000W of power used for twenty seconds, I'm all ears.
Runs on anything that runs Linux:
NAME
pdftotext - Portable Document Format (PDF) to text converter (version 3.03)
SYNOPSIS
pdftotext [options] PDF-file [text-file]
DESCRIPTION
Pdftotext converts Portable Document Format (PDF) files to plain text.
Pdftotext reads the PDF file, PDF-file, and writes a text file, text-file. If text-file is not speci‐
fied, pdftotext converts file.pdf to file.txt. If text-file is ´-', the text is sent to stdout. If
PDF-file is ´-', it reads the PDF file from stdin.
Foes it works on scanned image PDF?
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We are repeating an old pattern in computing: throw more hardware at the problem until efficiency becomes impossible to ignore. Bigger models have delivered remarkable gains, but they’re increasingly expensive. The next breakthroughs may come less from adding parameters and more from smarter architectures, better algorithms and more efficient inference.
That's literally exactly what Chinese researchers are doing at DeepSeek and they've built frontier models with that philosophy
Except there likely won't be a lot of further breakthroughs if we burn down our planet faster than we already do.
This is all an expenditure of vast amounts of energy for literally no gain for anybody except a handful of billionaires and their corporations.
DeepSeek has really led the way here, especially as they are a bit more hardware constrained. Plus they openly publish their findings and release open source models, so high hopes there.
It's probably China's play to pop the AI bubble, but I'm all for it (:
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But it’s so good at programming if you already know how to program! Surely that’s worth burning the planet and crashing the world economy??
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It isn't about content generation at all. It's about pattern recognition and prediction, which, in the hands of those with the most power to change the world, offers insights into our collective behavior that rulers from every age would have committed genocide to get. AI will tell them how to better build the prison the poor are being impoverished into.
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