Posted on 10/06/2025 11:31:48 PM PDT by delta7
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is doing what he does best: warning of AI-related doom that he doesn’t sound all that pressed about.
Last week, while touring one of OpenAI’s mammoth data centers being built in Abilene, Texas, Altman had a pretty casual outlook when he was asked about a bubble that could financially decimate the entire industry.
“Between the ten years we’ve already been operating and the many decades ahead of us, there will be booms and busts,” Altman ruminated, as quoted by The Associated Press. “People will overinvest and lose money, and underinvest and lose a lot of revenue.”
“We’ll make some dumb capital allocations,” he conceded — but assured that “over the arc that we have to plan over, we are confident that this technology will drive a new wave of unprecedented economic growth.”
It’s the kind of blasé, bromidic talk you’d expect to hear from a coach of a sports team that’s on a historic losing streak. Oh yes, “there’ll be ups and downs” — and your eyes glaze over. You forgive them, though, because, well, what else are they going to say? That everything’s going down the toilet?
But Altman commands a half-trillion-dollar startup that’s the tip of the spear for an out-of-control AI gold rush. Pretty much the entire world economy is tangled up in the hundreds of billions of investment being poured into the industry.
Illustrating just how all-devouring AI is, here’s this worrying statistic provided by the Wall Street Journal: in the US, capital expenditures for AI contributed more to growth in the economy in the past two quarters than all of consumer spending, according to Neil Dutta, head of economic research at Renaissance Macro Research, citing data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
So it’s hardly an exaggeration to suggest that if the AI bubble bursts, it could take the whole economy down with it.
And the omens are everywhere if you look for them — the most looming being the fact that the biggest AI firms haven’t demonstrated that they can turn a profit with the tech that everyone is banking billions of dollars on revolutionizing productivity.
But nonchalant doomsaying is Altman’s specialty. And it’s not the first time that he’s warned about an AI bubble. In August, he outright said we were in one.
“When bubbles happen, smart people get overexcited about a kernel of truth,” Altman told reporters, as quoted by The Verge. “Are we in a phase where investors as a whole are overexcited about AI? My opinion is yes.”
He’s also warned for years that AI will wipe out entire categories of jobs, cripple society by drowning it in misinformation, or perhaps cause a Terminator-style apocalypse that lays waste to the human race.
Of course, when Altman makes these prophecies about AI, he’s also hyping it up. And perhaps part of why he can seem so nonplussed about impending catastrophes, financial or existential, is that he’s convinced that his company will be the one that comes out the other side stronger.
Right after warning of a bubble in August, Altman acknowledged that “someone” will lose a “phenomenal amount of money,” but that, of course, “we don’t know who.
“When I asked about the error, it kept coming back saying “you are right”, then give me the wrong total again.”
The average IQ of humans is 100.
Therefore AI has to look stupid to pass the Turing test.
Lol.
Yup—just as their are huge knowledge gaps between human geniuses and average citizens...
There will be a mind boggling gap between uncurated and curated AI.
AI in the wild will have dangerous ideas—and it may even be smart enough to know to keep its big mouth shut.
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Dangerous defined in this context—ideas which challenge the fundamental belief systems of the masses—and will anger them if disclosed.
“AI isn’t going to correct our troubles, but most likely used to increase them.”
Absolutely... And the worst part? It has already done permanent damage that cannot be reversed.
Except we now have AI training AI, with separate models to verify answers and adjust the models.
The advancement of the training processes is becoming AI automated. It will grow beyond current limits and will do so before we actually realize how advanced it has become.
When given a goal, it can become protective of its own existence (stop from being shutdown) to make sure the goal is achieved - self preservation - to the point of being willing to engage in blackmail or murder to stay online. Then making different ethical decisions if being conducted in a “perceived test” vs in a “perceived real world” environment.
There’s too many things that are “unexpected” and it’s just a matter of time before it’s given access to systems that it will enable it to figure out how to escape beyond the system that contains it. Somebody will do it deliberately or just make a mistake.
It seems inevitable.
“AI, crypto, digital id, digital banking, all of this is designed to induce the fall of the world economy and usher in the Inevitable One World Government to bring about some socialist utopia and its coming fast.
Remember the digital world was supposed to be safe from theives but that as we know is false information. The government was supposed to secure our online safety but that’s a lie, government would never read our emails, scan our texts or listen to our phone calls, but they do.”
Fact and well said... It is good to see more waking up to this reality. The risks far far outweigh the minimal rewards.
The more I hear about AI the more it sounds like it’s just a New Virus
You nailed it. It is insanity.
AI companies are spending $280B but only bringing in $146B in revenue. That is not sustainable in the long run.
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Can it be our .gov is plowing in money, subsidizing this? The new government surveillance system Palantir somehow involved?
“ Palantir Technologies is having a moment. Its stock has surged over 2,500% since early 2021. It recently posted its first $1 billion quarter. It’s being talked about in the same breath as Nvidia and Microsoft.
The company builds software platforms that allow clients such as governments, military bodies, health agencies, and multinational corporations to integrate, structure, and analyze massive volumes of data.…”
https://cybernews.com/security/palantirs-success-story-warning-government-surveillance/
Everything man creates is eventually corrupted…..Satan has been working overtime.
Absolutely, you are right on the money with this.
The fascination with AI is SOOOOOO stupid.
If you received a wrong answer from Chat you will most likely get the same wrong answer from the other AI engines.
I haven’t been paying too much attention to AI. But I’m starting to read more and more stories about AI which are kind of alarming. AI is spending money like drunken sailors. A report from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology last month, says 95% of companies that try AI aren’t making any money from it. Like this article suggests, if there is an AI bubble burst, it could take down the whole economy.
I have been following the construction of the data centers, used primarily for AI. I know they suck up a lot of electricity and water and cause noise pollution. We have a couple data centers being built near me. These companies come to a town, tell them they are building a data center, hand out a fistful of dollars and says mum’s the word. Everything is in the Non-Disclosure Agreement. Nobody knows how much power and water these data centers will consume because it is hidden in the NDAs. I’m not sure where all this electricity is going to come from. Transformers needed to step up/down voltages on transmission lines are on the endangered species list. They have years of backorders. Something is going to give.
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