Waiter, please bring me 1,000 of your finest shares of WinRAR! I'm going to be rich, I tell you! Quite!
this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2026
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I like LLMs and also the research but I think we're at a point where one could make a pause, turn the models into silicone and sell them as hardware for people who are actually interested.
That would solve all privacy problems, eliminate many data centers, subscription fees, internet dependencies and allow for slower and more thoughtful upgrades (hardware isn't updated as often as software). That would be a pretty sovereign solution.
However, from a company perspective they can't force it on everyone anymore, don't get all the juicy data from all the users and can't sell subscriptions any more and change everything on their side.
That would be lovely
Capitalists: Noo its bad, see, it doesn't make profit
Communists: Free AI for everyone
looking forward to looting RAM and GPUs for our community library organized communist LLM
They'll reclassify it as a necessary utility like water or power and tax more subsidies for paying billionaires even more from public coffers before admitting it's mostly just search engines & corporate social media eating their own tail.
“I remember once my father and I were walking down Fifth Avenue and there was a homeless person sitting right outside of Trump Tower and I remember my father pointing to him and saying, ‘You know, that guy has $8 billion more than me,’ because he was in such extreme debt at that point, you know?”
~ Ivanka Trump
I refuse to believe that Trump is capable of such introspection.
Believe it or not, Trump's become dumber with age.
That is so true, bringing $40 Billion a year with about $80 Billion as expenses makes OpenAI indeed in a red zone. They should consider shutting down so that we can have some level of relief from AI slop.
Your local grocery store is more profitable than OpenAI. In fact you are more profitable than OpenAI.
OpenAI owes hundreds of billions of dollars, with a revenue a fraction of that. They will never become profitable.
They will never become profitable.
If you look at OpenAI as a single, independent, private company then they appear unprofitable. But when you look at them as a means of laundering Pentagon money and other federal contracts into straw purchases for NVIDIA and Oracle, they are immensely profitable.
AI is a Loss Leader. It props up the production and sale of hardware, which has been fruitful for its partners, its investors, and the economy as a whole. It is a digital form of induced demand in so far as new construction creates a "virtuous" cycle of increasing consumption, as more and more of the business and public sector is dragged into its orbit.
The end-game for OpenAI is to have a captured market of businesses and government institutions. Whole sectors of the economy devoid of human knowledge workers who are hopelessly addicted to AI Agent processes, because nobody managing the companies actually know what these agents are doing anymore. At this point, Altman and Amodei can charge whatever they damned well please for token traffic, because there's no bureaucracy capable of competing with them.
Most of the money getting funneled to Nvidia came from them in the first place. That's why they're one of the chatbot's biggest cheerleaders.
Most of the money getting funneled to Nvidia came from them in the first place.
NVIDIA's not getting most of its money from OpenAI. OpenAI doesn't really buy anything from NVIDIA. They buy rack space from Oracle, which then builds out new datacenters with NVIDIA chipsets. And Oracle's primary revenue stream is from its business Cloud Services, of which OpenAI is a small fraction.
This would make sense if they were the only game in town , but they very much…aren’t.
Keeping foreign technology out of the reach of US consumers has been a big part of Trump/Biden/Trump-Era tech policy.
And as hardware prices skyrocket, access to compute approaches a monopoly position.
The Weimar Republic was more profitable... well no, maybe not. But you get the sentiment.
I mean, you joke. But Germany pivoted out of the Great Depression far faster than its European peers precisely because they weren't afraid to print a bunch of money and pay people to do things.
The Fascists inherited one of the only recovering economies in Europe by the time they took power in 1932. And when they assumed office, they brought investment from the Americans overseas (who were having their own fascist turn), because they were willing to purge or enslave local populations, tear down neighborhoods, and build up whatever capital Standard Oil, IBM, and Ford Motor Company asked of them.
On the opposite side of the Atlantic and on the other side of the Urals, progressive liberals and Soviet communists were trying out a leftist mirror of this strategy. They were using the levers of the state to mobilize the masses of unemployed labor into productive capital improvements for the benefit of the public at-large. So the US, Germany, Japan, and the USSR all rapidly emerged out of the '29 crash into a booming 1930s economy. Meanwhile, England and France and much of Latin America and North Africa languished under artificial constraints of state-capitalism.
Why does that feel forebodingly familiar
I mean, we'll jump to 1930s on reflex. But this is a pattern that's repeated itself internationally, from Apartheid South Africa to the juntas in the Pacific Rim to Fascists in Argentina and Chile.
Economy shits itself. Social Democrats come in to deliver milquetoast reforms. The economy recovers somewhat, but never enough to actually relieve the social pressures of the moment. And then the democratic system starts vomiting up radical candidates of all stripes, while bourgeois capital attempts to ride the tiger into the next full recovery and/or national emergency.
The wheel of fortune doesn't always land on Fascism. But it's definitely a possibility.
They made trillions of marks, so yes they were extremely profitable.
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I like that they never lost their gusto with the designs of the bills lol
Like they had to know that their currency was basically dead, yet they still made sure that those 100 billion Mark notes looked classy as fuck.
If/when the modern US makes it to this point, I can't imagine them putting all that much effort into making our $100 billion dollar bills look cool.
They'll probably have fucking Steve Bannon's face on them.
The person designing them had to make them pretty because they knew they were going to be paid in them
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I wonder what will happen in 2027 when those repayments come due.
Squeeze the working class.
That won't pay off the several hundred billion they owe.
That's for governments to figure out.
They'll pay off the old loans with new loans disguised as investments between all the major AI players.
They will get an extension based on lies about ai genocide or something.
From who? Not really an option. If OpenAI can't pay it's bills in 2027-28, it will end Oracle & Softbank.
Softbank is so over-leveraged, it should be illegal.
The government will buy a stake to both pay billionaires more from collected taxes and control what information can be generated and making the spy apparatus backdoors tracking every question or command part of the official platforms.
I'll bet you $$$ right now that won't happen. First of all, they still won't be profitable. Second of all it's easy to just completely avoid interacting with LLMs.
So you're saying we should be pumping all our savings and pension money in WinRar?
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If AI could really make your business so much more efficient that it makes up for the cost of paying for AI... Why doesn't Google just run your business themselves? They could make even more money than you do.
Theyd probably try to use gemini, and it would either spin in circles or delete their production databases
I was finally starting to save up money in a 401k for retirement. Then I got fired. Now the AI bubble is going to burst and nuke what little money is in my 401k. FML.
I’m trying to stick with it, and not pull a bunch of money out. If this is all just insider trading back and forth, my hope is it will recover over time and level out. (As that will be in the interest of the manipulators too.)
If it’s just a big crash, like 1929 style, then I figure we’re all fucked whether you have stocks or dollar bills or CDs or doubloons.
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You should roll over your 401K to investments you believe in.
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