I don’t have time to get into the nitty-gritty with this, but there’s a lot more going on behind-the-scenes than just running simple queries. I could see a future in which individuals and businesses are running open LLMs on their own hardware at cost for very specific purposes, with the understanding that relying on LLMs for everything will knee-cap them in the long-term. I’m not entirely against the technology itself, as long as people use it responsibly. However, that’s not what’s happening.

What is happening is a handful of AI companies, backed by tech giants and VC funding, are committing gross amounts of copyright infringement and intellectual property theft in an effort to monopolize all human knowledge and sell it back to us at a subscription. In order to do this, they are spending billions of dollars on influence and marketing to the public, government, and businesses. On the public side, they are trying to get everyone addicted to using their LLM chatbots and replace everything from search engines to genuine human interaction with LLMs. On the government side, they are trying to get the military to use LLMs in their war machine and domestic surveillance to identify and target anyone against the regime, while simultaneously cozying up to political leaders to convince them not to regulate them for fear of losing some kind of imaginary AI race with China. On the business side, they are trying to convince every executive and manager that AI is the future and can replace most if not all of their workers, even if it requires the current workers to train their model-powered replacements prior to being laid-off.

As a side note, the inability for regular users to purchase computing hardware at reasonable prices (RAM, GPUs, etc), thus being unable to run open models on their own hardware, is considered a benefit by these AI companies. Similarly, it benefits the AI companies for users to switch from simple queries to agents for basic tasks, because agents consume far more tokens.

The monopolization of this technology by a handful of tech companies, along with the build-out of data centers, hoarding compute hardware, and marketing of it to the public, government, and businesses, is unprofitable at the current prices. The market projections to achieve profitability are somewhere between laughable and insane. Almost all users of the technology, including individuals, government agencies, and businesses, are being heavily subsidized by a combination of dwindling VC funding and increasingly convoluted financing deals. Eventually, the free money is going to run out for the AI companies and their companions (data center builders, AI startups, etc), and they will be forced to raise prices, assuming they don’t immediately go under when the bubble bursts, which is looking increasingly likely. Businesses will be forced to have a serious discussion on ROI for LLM subscriptions, as well as the long-term effects of over-dependency on LLMs for core tasks, such as unmaintainable infrastructure, knowledge loss due to layoffs, and cult-like mindsets driving poor business decisions.

I really hope I’m not right about this, because when the bubble pops, it’s going to be bad, and the repercussions are going to be felt everywhere. I’m reminded of the scene from the Big Short:

You just bet against the American economy. If we’re right it means people lose homes, jobs, retirement savings, pensions. These aren’t just numbers. For every point unemployment goes up, 40 thousand people die. Did you know that?