I am not a big government fan, so anything to throw shade on their actions is welcome to me.
I would not say I am the most informed person, but a quick Google search and asking ChatGPT failed to support the "Free Government Money" claim.

I cannot defend the logic that lower taxes as "free government money".
I would much rather Billionaires spend their money than the government.

I assume you are talking about research funding or grants or something?
OpenAI did just get that Department of Defense contract that Anthropic lost, but I would not call it free money; I would assume they are providing AI services in response.
The CHIPS Act perhaps indirectly is free money to AI? Because the money will hopefully build fabs that will build chips that will run AI?
Bottom line: modern AI companies are primarily funded by private capital today, not government direct funding or grants.

Major U.S. deficit drivers are: Social Security, Medicare, defense, and interest on debt.
I agree we should reduce the deficit by getting rid of Social Security and Medicare and paying down the national debt by reducing the budget.
Government AI research funding is pretty tiny portion of government spending and AI funding so we can cut there too.

The rates have not dropped to Greenspan levels, yet; so no support for the "Free Government Money".
Even if we got 1% rates, I cannot defend your "Free Government Money" claim here without being a bit disingenuous and try to fudge that 1% is pretty much free.

Interest rates raised to cool things off into the dot com bubble bursting.
No bail outs or free government money given out to rescue the private investors from the dot come bubble.
However, interest rates were lowered to stimulate the economy after the dot com burst.

Low interest rates encouraged cheap mortgages with an exploding time bomb ballon rates that were handed out to people who could not really afford them and housing prices were artificially inflated.
The bad loans got wrapped up and combined with other debt to not look so bad.
In addition insurance on top of insurance is taken out on the lipstick covered loan packages.
People defaulted on their loans, bank collapses, insurance is overwhelmed, the banking system starts to crumble, and the Credit market freezes.
The Government buys up parts of the banks to save them. Free Government Money?
Not quite, the banks buy back the shares and the government profits.
Housing assistance programs were free money to home owners, free government money went to people who should never have gotten loans.
The investment in GM and Chrysler was a loss as well for the government.

So no the AI companies have not gotten "free government money", because the interest rates have not been lower yet, and the AI companies have not defaulted, and the government has not bailed the AI companies out.

Please now tell me about the free government money.

I want to start by asking again for the "free government money" explanation you have stated twice; sorry I buried that request at the end of my last post and I am really most curious about that.

Agreed, that is why the jobs cuts in 2023 were not that scary; they were a good correction for a previous mistake; not the explanation for the 2026 layoffs.
Also why I am not worried that layoffs today are a concern; from what I have heard out of Facebook, there is a lot of fat to cut.

Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads are not going anywhere; they are continuing to grow.
Even Meta VR is growing.
Meta is not betting the farm, AI is already useful, even without AGI; the data centers will get used.
However, I would agree that Meta is still the weaker of the three legs after Microsoft and Google for AI.

I am not a Zuck fan, try to avoid his "products", but betting against him in business? I guess time will tell.
But one thing Zuck seems to be good at is acquiring companies and continuing to grow their technology.
So again I will go on Polymarket and put my money on "Meta acquires Anthropic".
The business concern I have for Meta is reducing any effort into VR/AR/XR where they have the clear lead and still appears to be a sleeping giant of a market.

I will prop up advertising as the untapped income source for the other side: citation Google and Facebook primary income today.
AI brings the eyeballs, and Google and Facebook are pretty good at selling the eyeballs.

It is an Apple product, so the correct answer is: whatever is prettier.

Massive layoffs are unsettling, but they now seem like lopsided news with some missing half of the story.
I guess Meta lays off 22.16% of its employees in 2023 is much catcher headline than Meta increased its employees by 20% in 2022, and 10% in 2024.
Meta had nice looking growth rates for years: https://www.macrotrends.net/st...
I suspect they may be maturing a bit, Covid saw everyone over hiring, and the VR push did not quite pay off; although the Meta glasses seem to be a success in spite of privacy concerns.

At the same time we are seeing these layoff headlines from Meta, they also bought Moltbook; a seemingly worthless piece of AI slop that cannot even be advertised to? I am beginning to think that massive layoffs are not necessarily a warning indicator, and are just another accounting trick. But I am sure there can be pretty much a 99% correlation with massive layoffs before a company went under. A quick Google search shows Google and Microsoft reporting larger absolute numbers of layoffs than Meta even in the last few months or coming months.

Except unlike social media and internet search (Meta and Google), these people, including my mother, are paying for AI access today, and tomorrow the free loaders will pay for it with advertisement. YouTube ran at a loss for years and is now more profitable than Disney, NBC, Paramount, Warner Bros. Discovery (combined).

You mentioned this free government money in your last post as well.
I have failed to figure out exactly what you are referring to as free government money.
I would love for you to clarify this.

I hear you, the assertion is that today the $20/month or so ChatGPT subscription is not covering the true cost.
As a result either ChatGPT eventually has to raise the cost of the subscription or find another revenue source to keep the lights on in the data centers.

Google and Meta have already solved this problem.
The obvious established revenue source is advertisement and selling "user" data.

Google and Meta do not have my mom's credit card on file, yet she "consumes" electricity at the Google data center when she fires up Gmail and Google search everyday, and the same at the Meta data center when she goes on Facebook. In spite of my mother seemingly being a power draining parasite to these companies are quite profitable.

On the other hand, xAI, is the first online monthly service after Amazon Prime to convince my mother to turn over her credit card info in the 30 years she has been on the internet. So they will continue to take her $30/month and probably spit some advertisements at her on top of that later. Fortunately, Elon is going to put all the data centers in outer space and use free sun power so no worries on electricity there.

This technology is unlike anything I have seen as far as adoption rate.
However, my view is limited and could be quite skewed, but when my mother is using and paying for the technology there is something there to me.

I see about 50% of people in my life have adopted ChatGPT or the like, from my boss to my mother, and they are not giving it up; it would be easier to take away them all the social media, streaming services, ecommerce, and gig work services than ChatGPT.
This 50% will easily give up Tiktok to Facebook to Twitter/X, Netflix to Spotify, Amazon to eBay, Uber to DoorDash, before they let go of their ChatGPT or the like account.
The demand is insane, more than social media, more than smartphones, more than internet retail, more than internet search, more than I saw with the internet, more than with cell phones. I could have yanked any of those techs away five years after they were mainstream and most people in my life would have gone on without much complaint; no way with ChatGPT and the like.

The other 50% in my life have not gotten "addicted" yet. Some do however say: "hey can you have the AI do this for me?"
Now I am in an educated affluent first world area that is poised to be the first adopters and benefactors of this tech.
That means today ChatGPT and the like have only started to scratch the surface of available market.

I can understand the view point that AI stuff is a cute trick that is not really useful.
That is where I was in 2023, and I think I was right for the most part; but I missed the potential and regret taking so long to try it again later after it improved.

Google, Microsoft, and Meta can easily absorb the cost of all the fancy accounting.
The giant ChatGPT merger into Microsoft will be like Time Warner AOL, a nice headline that moves the market for a day or two.
Even less so when Dario has to go work for Zuck.
Unfortunately we will mostly be left with those big three serving up and leading this AI tech push, no different than the personal computing, internet, social media pushes of the last three decades that created those companies.
They have proven they have sound business models that are not going anywhere.

Yeah I believe you are right. Even if the industry wanted to ramp up my understanding is that it is about a 3 year process.

Now I was referring to the supply of AI compute, not the supply of hardware; although it seems hard to decouple those.
But the naysayers who are predicting, seemingly cheering for, a fall, believe that the data center (chips and all) build out is an over supply that AI demand will not pay for.
If however the chip shortage instead is a thing, then all the compute that say OpenAI secured will become even more valuable, and would be an argument for an increase in AI prices; one the summary and article did not appear to mention.

My understanding, and I am failing to find a great source for this, is that we enjoyed an oversupply of RAM and SSD chips from 2023 into 2025.
As a result RAM and SSD prices were at a low (abnormally is perhaps a bad choice of words since it is not the first boom bust in this industry).
The increase in demand from AI flipped the supply and quickly took us from an oversupply situation to an under supply raising prices.

My primary point is that we most likely will not see a return to the low prices in early 2025 because they were an exception; just like the prices today are an exception in the other direction.
Unfortunately we got spoiled with prices for the last 2 to 3 years and it is making this price surge feel even worse through that lens.
The current RAM prices are not really a 4 or 5x over the trend line, they are more like a 2x, where we were at 0.5x of where the market average should have been from 2023 to 2025.
So when the market corrects back down we will probably go to 50% of the prices today, or 2x the prices yesterday (2023 to 2025) and we should not feel too bad about that.

The demand for modern AI is real and growing.
The hardware they are buying up is not being stored in a warehouse to starve the competition; it is being used.

I could maybe convinced that OpenAI and Anthropic are just ponzi schemes of a sort, racing for an IPO before the investment money runs out.
But Microsoft, Google, and Meta are not in this for a quick buck.

If OpenAI cannot pay the bills I will bet on Microsoft to absorb what they do not already own of them just for their data centers.
And Meta needs to buy Anthropic so it can catch up.
A little dip in the market on both events, and then back to the moon they go, just like after the dot com bubble, but not even that bad.

People can run a spreadsheet app or word processor on their local hardware and store their files on their own servers; but most do not.
Instead people pay Microsoft and Google for online services for things that everyone easily did at home 20 years ago.
This is not because Microsoft and Google bought up all the CPUs and RAM so you only had a thin client; it is convenience.

Most people do not run Chinese models today because it is a pain in the ass. The majority of people who could pull it off do not bother because the Chinese models are behind the proprietary models, and it is more important to get things done than it is to be "free".

Then there are a few who do it for real productivity and demand the liberty. Thankfully this will get easier and better; but just like computing the percentage of people on devices without keyboards and with walled garden app stores will continue to grow faster than those booting Linux Desktop (not Android) and using a mouse. I mean look at Chromebook sales.

AI will just be part of Google Workspace and Microsoft Teams like word processing, spreadsheets, and presentation apps are today.
You and I will still try to run it locally, and it will be great.

Manufacturing will catch up to demand, but we probably will not see the abnormally low prices again that we were enjoying for RAM and hard drives again.

Cheap AI is not only here to stay, it is going to get cheaper.

Google, Microsoft, and Meta offer competing AI products that are good enough, while having other income sources to maintain low prices.
OpenAI and Anthropic will not compete if they raise prices.

The only reason prices would go up is if the supply cannot keep up with the demand.

Charles Baudelaire

Grandfather:

You:

If the fear is that the AI will end all human labor, then it must be very useful at accomplishing the labor humans are currently being paid to perform.
Since people are willing to pay for the labor, well then they are asking for this; something that can make the labor cheaper.

So you support the grandfather post and offer no other explanation for the very strong opposition to AI asserting it is just useless "slop".
Therefore those asserting the statement the grandfather says is ignorant must have an ulterior motive is my assertion, because it is impossible to be so ignorant at this point in the face of so much evidence.

You on the other hand would be on the opposite spectrum it seems: this AI stuff is so freaking good I am afraid no one will have any work.
So if you believe that AI is so good, then why would people be so vocally obviously lying about AI and downplaying AI?
Please share your wonderfully clear broad perspective on the matter, I truly am curious to hear an alternative explanation.

Serious? What is the fun in that?

Okay, harm is vague, but I have heard maybe three or four specific horror scenarios of AI harm.

It is a foregone conclusion that AI is useful for accomplishing tasks and will continue to improve and become more useful. That is said to eliminate the stupid AI harm resulting from the AI bubble collapse, allowing everyone to buy cheap RAM again.

#1 The Evil Super AI
This is where the AI becomes so smart,and then it is either directed to or decides to do great harm like maybe bio weapons or something.

So Russia and China want to get to Super AI first. Ideally they scare us into limiting AI development out of fear. But if Super AI is possible, someone will create it. The more the better. Ideally, instead of putting on the brakes, we should accelerate toward Good Super AI and have much more of it to fight Evil Super AI.

It is just like nukes, if everyone had them war would end. If Ukraine had not given up its nukes it could simply wave at Putin. If Iran had gotten the bomb they would just stick their tongue out at Israel. Being scared of nukes and giving them up is what gets you harmed. See North Korea undertands.Note when Trump takes over North Korea in May I will totally have egg on my face, but Cuba is screwed in April, no nukes.

#2 The Global Warming AI
Giant data centers use significant electricity, contributing to Global Warming, which is extremely harmful.

The data centers will be placed in space and block the sun which will cool the Earth. No worries here, Elon has this under control. But if we stop making AI, there will be no data centers in space and global warming will continue without the sun being blocked.

#3 AI Takes All The Jobs
The AI is cheaper, eventually better, and finally more efficient at doing all human tasks. No more jobs?

Things will just get cheaper and cheaper because labor is cheaper and more efficient.Basic economics 101 here. Eventually world hunger will be solved, all disease will be cured, and we will all become artists hold hands and sing.

#4 People Opt To Meet Their AI Girlfriend
Crazy people talk to AI and it causes them to self-terminate. Well this is sad, but they probably did not procreate and these crazy genes will work themselves out of the population. Tragically I think these people were doomed with or without AI. Maybe with AI, we will have a chance to get them help.

Okay your turn Chinese troll, scare me!

Those against AI must be Russian or Chinese trolls trying to slow down western progress is the only thing that makes sense.