Now you can keep track of how many billions the AI companies are losing on AI.
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Now you can keep track of how many billions the AI companies are losing on AI. (Red is spending, green is revenue.) https://isaiprofitable.com/
@MikeElgan So everyone is trying to figure out the scheme Nvidia has. Got it.
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@MikeElgan And exactly how many trillion valuation did they add to the their Big Tech sugar daddies?
Let's be honest, last time I checked that was some time ago, alone the difference in MSFT valuation between "growth" and "mature" company P/E was over 2 trillion USD.
That makes the burnt capex look like good PR costs, wouldn't you agree?
@MikeElgan Or to put it differently, the graph is nice. Beside the aspect that the "spent capex" in most rows is "estimated," the primary issue is that it's a way to narrow perspective.
Let's skip the aspect that there are really useful uses for AI, but let's ignore them.
The whole AI hype (epicenter USA) is primarily a market manipulation. Market as in securities, but secondarily they are manipulating anything that is convenient.
E.g. the OpenAI LoI con job was not only a brilliant securities -
@MikeElgan Or to put it differently, the graph is nice. Beside the aspect that the "spent capex" in most rows is "estimated," the primary issue is that it's a way to narrow perspective.
Let's skip the aspect that there are really useful uses for AI, but let's ignore them.
The whole AI hype (epicenter USA) is primarily a market manipulation. Market as in securities, but secondarily they are manipulating anything that is convenient.
E.g. the OpenAI LoI con job was not only a brilliant securitiesmanipulation for the involved companies (OpenAI, Samsung, Hynix if memory serves), it also led to an artificial shortage and allowed Samsung & Hynix to raise their memory prices over 100% in a concerted action.
(And no, OpenAI if they wanted to reserve an allocation "RAM for AI", the natural way would have been to sign purchase order with NVidia, not a non-binding LoI with the RAM makes for unfinished wafers in unspecified amounts at unspecified times …) -
manipulation for the involved companies (OpenAI, Samsung, Hynix if memory serves), it also led to an artificial shortage and allowed Samsung & Hynix to raise their memory prices over 100% in a concerted action.
(And no, OpenAI if they wanted to reserve an allocation "RAM for AI", the natural way would have been to sign purchase order with NVidia, not a non-binding LoI with the RAM makes for unfinished wafers in unspecified amounts at unspecified times …)It raises the market valuation for all the sugar daddies, and that is literally like printing money for these companies. Companies with such high, unnatural P/E ratios tend to use their stock to pay for anything they buy, be it companies they acquire, highly sought-after employees, …
Mature companies cannot compete; they have to pay cash.
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Now you can keep track of how many billions the AI companies are losing on AI. (Red is spending, green is revenue.) https://isaiprofitable.com/
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@MikeElgan So everyone is trying to figure out the scheme Nvidia has. Got it.
@mrgrumpymonkey @MikeElgan
Nvidia got lucky (most business succeeds by luck not judgement IMO!), as did their investor Softbank who cashed out when the price plateaued in Nov '25.This is interesting on where they invested next (TL;DR - they are attempting to own the whole supply chain, based on much cheaper silicon tech):
https://dataconomy.com/2025/11/11/the-why-behind-softbank-nvidia-stake-sale/Once the first grifters leave, the bubble's days are numbered I rekon (I hope!).
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@KennedyRichard @sebastian @julesbl @PaulaToThePeople @MikeElgan I have a web site. I don't pay for it, it's not on my personal domain but it's my site, easy to port elsewhere if needed. Jekyll generated static html based on markdown source. Link in my mastodon profile.
There's plenty of personal web sites out there with excellent content. I have read lots of it. Most of what is worth a read is similar generated static html with minimal design.
There are striking, simple, elegant designs.
@cohentheblue @sebastian @julesbl @PaulaToThePeople @MikeElgan That is great. I'll bookmark your site when I'm on my PC (I'm on phone right now).
Funny that a lot of people are using static website generators these days. I myself use one as well. Didn't actually find one to my liking but managed to make a simple one w/ Python and the Python Markdown lib.
It seems everyone reaches that moment in life where they just want noise-free work, no distractions, no bs. Just write, generate, publish.
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@MikeElgan I like how literally everyone's broke except NVidia
This is so stark lmao
@MikeElgan@mastodon.social @zkat@fedi.zkat.tech selling shovels in a gold rush
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@cohentheblue @sebastian @julesbl @PaulaToThePeople @MikeElgan That is great. I'll bookmark your site when I'm on my PC (I'm on phone right now).
Funny that a lot of people are using static website generators these days. I myself use one as well. Didn't actually find one to my liking but managed to make a simple one w/ Python and the Python Markdown lib.
It seems everyone reaches that moment in life where they just want noise-free work, no distractions, no bs. Just write, generate, publish.
@cohentheblue @sebastian @julesbl @PaulaToThePeople @MikeElgan mines are kennedyrichard.com (general stuff that interests me as a dev), indiesmiths.com (my FOSS projects and related content) and nodezator.com (a generalist Python node editor, also FOSS). All of them have some sort of post/article/essay, but not much yet.
However, I already have a list of articles to write, including outlines that I'm putting on paper before starting to write the actual content on my PC.
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@vicash @KennedyRichard @julesbl @PaulaToThePeople @MikeElgan
i am not saying that we should stop writing and creating, preferably on self-hosted or otherwise independent sites, off the corporate platforms.
been doing that for 25+ yrsbut we have to be aware that
1/ this does not address monetization - how does a creator survive?
2/ the vast majority of users will use monopoly search engines to find our content and thus land in the AI fangs of those monopoly players.see "trees in backyards"
@sebastian @vicash @julesbl @PaulaToThePeople @MikeElgan Fair enough. Although I don't worry about monetization, it is a genuine concern and a need that many projects and creators have.
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T tokeriis@helvede.net shared this topic
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@cohentheblue @sebastian @julesbl @PaulaToThePeople @MikeElgan That is great. I'll bookmark your site when I'm on my PC (I'm on phone right now).
Funny that a lot of people are using static website generators these days. I myself use one as well. Didn't actually find one to my liking but managed to make a simple one w/ Python and the Python Markdown lib.
It seems everyone reaches that moment in life where they just want noise-free work, no distractions, no bs. Just write, generate, publish.
@KennedyRichard @sebastian @julesbl @PaulaToThePeople @MikeElgan Markdown is portable and human readable, html is pretty much not. Hence the generator is not optional. Could use pure pandoc to convert all the pages, that doesn't solve tagging and other stuff that jekyll with plugins automates.
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@namedbird @MikeElgan I saw the movie 'The Big Short', so maybe that counts. So, do you think the same insanity logic might be at play here?
Let's face it, the AI, as yet, doesn't seem to be all it's cracked up to be.
Seems like they are all racing to an obvious plateau. I wonder what percentage of those budgets were spent on advertising for AI.
@dckim @MikeElgan We had ChatGPT impressing everyone with conversational capabilities, so it created a lot of hype and hope. But i suspect that this is also what created a too positive view on AI, resulting in misplaced confidence.
The market will eventually adjust to fit the actual worth of this new technology, and if that adjustment is downwards, you'd better not be too exposed to the financial fallout that would take place. (Many large players are way too leveraged into this.)
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Now you can keep track of how many billions the AI companies are losing on AI. (Red is spending, green is revenue.) https://isaiprofitable.com/
Nvidia, meanwhile...
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Now you can keep track of how many billions the AI companies are losing on AI. (Red is spending, green is revenue.) https://isaiprofitable.com/
@MikeElgan Very true. The same will be true of the data centers, because they all are not needed. Most are real estate transactions being negotiated without a shovel in sight. Hopefully the true need will be calcuable soon.
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@MikeElgan I'd love to see stats added on how much profit they create for the fossil industry and how much funding they get from the fossil industry.
Because that's the AI buisness model. Without AI we'd have energy transition.
PS: Also alt text would be nice for inclusivity (not AI written of course).
@PaulaToThePeople I suspect that the energy requirements of AI may end up accellerating the change to green energy because it will faster scale it because its cheaper. When you have to grow your power-net a lot you will scale green energy and faster grow confident in transitioning entirely.
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"Good Lord, where are they getting the money for this?"
And then you scroll up and that one single massive green bar…
🫨
If the difference between red and green bar is the multiplier one can expect for any AI service subscription these companies offer, ouch.
"Venture capital looks at valuations and growth, not necessarily at profit or revenue. So you don’t actually have to invest in technology that works, or that even makes a profit, you simply have to have a narrative that is compelling enough to float those valuations. So you see this repetitive and exhausting hype cycle as a feature in this industry. A couple of years ago, you would have been asking me about the metaverse, then last year, you would have asked me about Web3 and crypto, and for each of these inflection points there’s an Andreessen Horowitz manifesto."
"It’s not simply that one piece of technology is overhyped, it’s that hype is a necessary ingredient of the current business ecosystem of the tech industry. We should examine how often the financial incentive for hype is rewarded without any real social returns, without any meaningful progress in technology, without these tools and services and worlds ever actually manifesting. That’s key to understanding the growing chasm between the narrative of techno-optimists and the reality of our tech-encumbered world."
— Meredith Whittaker, Signal CEO, to Derek Robertson. "5 Questions for Meredith Whittaker". Politico, 2023-12-01.
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Now you can keep track of how many billions the AI companies are losing on AI. (Red is spending, green is revenue.) https://isaiprofitable.com/
@MikeElgan Wait, OpenAI makes money? Also is "spending" just buying cloud services from the others?
"The AI economy is circular: Google funds Anthropic, Anthropic runs on Google Cloud, Amazon funds Anthropic, Microsoft co-invests with OpenAI. This means aggregate industry figures double-count some revenue flows."
Ah, concern addressed.
Where's Palantir?
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Now you can keep track of how many billions the AI companies are losing on AI. (Red is spending, green is revenue.) https://isaiprofitable.com/
@MikeElgan Particularly distressing when paired with this list of the top 10 stocks by market capitalization in the S&P 500:
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@mrgrumpymonkey @MikeElgan
Nvidia got lucky (most business succeeds by luck not judgement IMO!), as did their investor Softbank who cashed out when the price plateaued in Nov '25.This is interesting on where they invested next (TL;DR - they are attempting to own the whole supply chain, based on much cheaper silicon tech):
https://dataconomy.com/2025/11/11/the-why-behind-softbank-nvidia-stake-sale/Once the first grifters leave, the bubble's days are numbered I rekon (I hope!).
@phlash @MikeElgan Just completing the circle to inflate the numbers. We get to live in an AI marketing world, while these companies keep getting rich. The marketing side is only going to get worse it seems. I'm not fully against the products, but I am against how it's being forced onto everyday devices that don't need it. Capitalism at it's finest.
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Now you can keep track of how many billions the AI companies are losing on AI. (Red is spending, green is revenue.) https://isaiprofitable.com/
@MikeElgan nvidia seems to be getting profits on it though (the only one on the list that is)
