"AI" is great.
Generative AI is a scam.
The best thing I can say about Generative AI is that eventually the bubble will collapse.
this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2026
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How do you differentiate AI and Generative AI?
Do you mean Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT) as in what we see with large language models?
The investment bubble may collapse on them, but the usage isn't going anywhere but up. I don't know why you think it's some sort of scam. If it was such a scam, companies that have been using it for two years already would be throwing it in the trash and instead they're buying up more capacity.
I have legitimate business use cases for it today, and my company can't get hands on hardware or even available compute from the big players because it's in such high demand.
It used to be that most of the compute was going to training models, but that hasn't been the case for a year now. The majority (and it's increasing fast) is inference at this point and while it doesn't live up to the "It will do your entire job and get you fired" it's definitely useful in many situations.
Historically, AI is an umbrella term for anything and everything around using machines to make decisions. Spam detection, video game adversaries, explosive detection, and the old Xbox Kinect are all different things that have used artificial intelligence for 10+ years before GenAI became practical.
If you're interested in learning more, all this stuff falls under the umbrella of "machine learning".
If AI was able to run easily on a local computer and still have all that power, then I think the AI world would be a lot more interesting. But now it’s just used to kill jobs while also being more expensive and not really much better.
It possibly could but the people running it are doing so for profit.
Okay, say an AI cures cancer. That’s not just going to be free. They’re only going to sell it to people who can afford it, and price it out of reach of working folks.
Stuff like that.
It can be used to solve problems, but it’s not going to share the solutions. The person running the AI will get to choose to share it or not.
If you put aside the ethics of how AI got to this level and the environmental costs for mainly doing things humans could have done, the next problem is who is in charge of how it's used. So now that we're here, the potentials could be good in a few aspects, but power-hungry humans are at the controls, so that's a big part of the doom and gloom of it being used for worse things, or just misused in general which is what we mostly see.
AI overall (the large grouping that includes but isn't just LLMs) is a tool, and tools used for good purposes can make big differences. LLMs even have their specific uses that make sense, but that's been totally overblown and stuffed into every conceivable place, often breaking because it's the wrong tool for the job and was sold to gullible idiots.
"the environmental costs for mainly doing things humans could have done"
/me checks how much the environmental costs of humans doing those tasks would be....
shocked Pikachu
AI causes a tiny fraction of the environmental impact that a human causes, Humans emit more pollution commuting to offices than the entire datacenter industry will use in the next few years, and transportation is only the third largest way that a human pollutes (on average) with the other two larger cases being home heating/cooling and food consumption.
I'm not saying humans are bad, but you cannot be going around making that comparison that AI is worse for the environment than humans.
The whole who controls it thing is a massive problem, no argument there.
I get your point, but it rests on me having said the data centers will replace all humans, so it's either/or. It's going to be both, even with reduction in human work force replaced by AI, there will still be people doing people things as well as AI running. And the energy costs! So if AI doesn't consume that much energy comparably, why are some of them trying to get dedicated nuclear plants?
I’ll say that you need to read Reverse Centaure.