This piece is allegedly 18,500 words, so I would have said that Ed Zitron needs an editor, but apparently he has one—who’s also very wordy, so I suspect he’s no use. If you’ve read his pieces before, the first 25% is a recap. And then a lot of the remaining 75% is restating what’s in the recap just to drive the point across. Truly, this piece should have been 3,000 words at most, but I’m still glad he’s doing all this, because someone needs to.
I’m going to try to sum it all up—without using a slop machine:
- Nvidia is selling expensive GPUs to everyone
- Nvidia also lends money to everyone to buy more GPUs
- Everyone is building data centers like crazy, because the demand is supposedly high
- Nobody is turning a profit and they’re barely bringing in revenue because
- The technology doesn’t do what everyone claims it can do, so users are just stuck in a loop of trial and error to make it do what they want
- Nobody has figured out how to prevent users from using more than their fair share, so they keep consuming more than they’re paying for
- Consequently, we’re in a giant bubble, and when it bursts it’s going to be like the Great Molasses Flood, except it’s going to be shit instead of molasses. There’s a good infographic in there if you scroll down about 43% of the way (according to my reader app)
- The media is taking everyone’s words at face value without a shred of research or critical thinking
Am I forgetting anything? Probably.
If you give up before getting to the end, here’s a good quote (I had 20 more, but I just can’t):
Every single “vibe coding is the future,” “the power of AI,” and “AI job loss” story written perpetuates a myth that will only lead to more regular people getting hurt when the bubble bursts. Every article written about OpenAI or NVIDIA or Oracle that doesn’t explicitly state that the money doesn’t exist, that the revenues are impossible, that one of the companies involved burns billions of dollars and has no path to profitability, is an act of irresponsible make believe and mythos.