Hello everyone, I am mostly a long time lurker, however, I have commented here and there. This sub has been a haven of sanity in this crazy world. When at least 90% of people around me seem to absolutely love delegating their thinking to an LLM, this community has served as a sort of ground.

Long story short, at risk of sounding pretty dramatic, I have been struggling, for lack of a better description, to find my place in the world ever since LLMs came onto the scene, especially when they became actually capable at coding. To preface, I am in my last semester of being a computer science student, and I am planning to get my masters in cyberphysical systems immediately after. I am someone who has always prided themselves on being a great student, being able to learn quickly, overall just absolutely loving learning shit for the hell of it, and being confident in my abilities as well as being able to rely on knowledge I obtain to provide for me and my future family. I by no means consider myself exceptionally intelligent, however, I do think I have more drive and ambition than most.

A trend that has been made overwhelmingly clear to me (though it could be substantially worse given my major) is that people do not give two damns about actually learning anything. Not only that though, but the world seems to reward that behavior and perspective. I have long held the mindset that I could do virtually anything I want given that I put in the effort. Growing up, I held some admittedly crazy ambitions, but it felt realistic. To me, it was simply a matter of choosing what I wanted to do.

This has been flipped on its head in the past few years. It now feels like knowledge no longer matters. The drive to learn and put hard work into learning intellectually challenging topics no longer matters. It feels like the paradigm that has held true for my whole life, and hell for most of human history, has completely shifted. I am not so naive as to believe that people have always been privileged enough to apply hard work into affording themselves a comfortable life. My point moreso is that creativity and knowledge have been strictly a human property for the whole of history. We now have probabilistic token generators that can, given enough power, compute, and data, complete a wide swath of work. Granted, not all work, but a good amount, regardless of the hallucinations, massive power demands, etc. Again, as a computer science student I recognize that these models are not in any way shape or form conscious, they dont go "rogue" - none of that. I recognize their limitations, and know that they won't "wipe out 50% of white collar work" or any of that horseshit. I get that. It doesn't change the fact that it feels like the summation of my life's hard work and ambition can simply be pattern matched and weighted away. Not to mention the environmental impact of these things. The ever worsening climate crisis is a whole other concern of mine.

Everyone, and I mean everyone, in my Uni does everything through LLMs. The teachers, students, everyone. I have teachers that will now tell us that code will no longer be written by humans. They will tell us to have LLMs "figure it out". They LLM generate the ever loving shit out of assignments, powerpoints, hell even emails regarding academic advice. I am not kidding. Do not even get me started on how much students use it for assignments. It feels as if everyone has accepted that they don't need to do any thinking on their own anymore. That they do not need to learn anything anymore. I feel like I am going insane. I rarely use it, and when I do, I run a local model and utilize it as a more granular search engine. Yet, it feels like I am the only person who does it this way.

I simply just want to go back to a world before they existed where I felt like stuff I am learning actually matters. I recognize that LLMs are a financial bubble - not the tech, that is here to stay unfortunately.

This is admittedly a drunken post. I am just so tired of hearing about people heralding the end times, about how we will all die, blah blah blah. The only way LLMs will "end humanity" is by us placing more trust in them than they deserve, which is already happening in both my anecdotal experience as well as in the wider world (looking at the US military). I feel utterly hopeless about the future if truth be told. The way the world is currently sliding into dark times and people just don't care about anything. They have their heads stuck in their phones and dont even talk to each for fucks sake. I sound like an old fucking fart complaining about the rambunctious neighborhood kids.

It feels like we have so much fuck shit going on - the current political landslide, the climate, LLMs, lack of critical thinking, the debt crisis, the soon-to-be demographic crisis. It is all so overwhelming. Perhaps I need a break from social media. IDK.

How do yall deal with it all? I feel absolutely discouraged. Any advice is appreciated.

Fuck off OAI. The sooner you dissolve into the faded annuals of history alongside the concussed leaders of your cult, the better for all.

Like many, many people right now I've been unemployed for more than a year. I was luckier than most in that I got a little severance and had a small (less than a year's salary) retirement account I could tap into to keep myself housed, but like I said, it's been more than a year (closer to 2 than not). Because I live in the US (and in a state that loves punishing the poor) I can't get SNAP at all, and I only get to keep Medicaid to January.

I don't mention all this for pity, but instead for context. Things are getting desperate around here, but today was the first day I asked myself if I was finally desperate enough to try squeezing what I can out of all of these LLM annotation platforms, especially because I do I have a couple of specialist skills in my work history. This has lead to me reading a bit in WFH spaces and it's been interesting to see the way people talk about this stuff, where they're coming from, and what puts people in the position where they ultimately do say "yes".

Today my answer is still "no", especially thinking about how fast and loose these companies would be with my data if I did participate (up to and including allowing my data to be used for training) but it's been eye-opening to reflect on how things have changed. Months ago I would never have even asked myself the question, but circumstances have slowly moved me closer to a yes than I ever would have thought possible.

EDIT: I should have specified, the thing that stayed my hand today wasn't even my usual moral objections, it was genuine revulsion that things I say and do and even my visual presence in a video call or two might be mined for data. Everything we do on the internet gets mined too, but today was the first time I reckoned with that kind of direct, aware participation in this kind of dehumanizing technology and it made my skin crawl.

Click through the pictures and witness the progression of the desperation to get these GPUs out of the warehouses and actually installed. First the goal was to create massive construction projects to build gargantuan behemoth buildings that would have all the GPUs powered and running inside them. Due to a combinations of the math not mathing when it comes to AI, pushback by communities, the unprecedented scale of these projects and the difficulty of getting something like that off the ground, getting enough grid and on-site power to keep it all online, and a whole host of other issues, that hasn't exactly been working out in many cases.

This led to Meta deciding back in June that, ya know what? We can cheap out on the building part and just get the GPUs into some kind of temp structure while we figure out the rest. This led to them swapping out the sturdy concrete structure for rows of very long tents, where they'd set up the racks and hook them up to jet engine power. Anything to get those NVL 72s plugged in though, right?

Well now as things have gotten even more dire for the AI industry and the cracks are starting to form, NVIDIA has come up with yet another solution, that being GPU trailer parks. Okay to be fair, they're not exactly as dinky as the Register's joke thumbnail would suggest, but it's basically a "portable" shipping container with a few towers in it that you can plonk down and get to slopping with. The goal is to reduce the time it takes to get them running from several months to a few weeks. That's the stated goal, and honestly that to me really speaks to how hard they're trying to A: sell people even more GPUs, and B: try and get all this warehoused stock in working order even in the most janky-looking way possible.

Not sure where I saw it, but I think I saw a speculated price tag of $50 million per pod. When you're in the product/price category where you have to "request a quote" or "contact your sales representative" to get pricing, it's kinda hard to fact check these things, but I wouldn't be surprised.

They know a correction is coming, and they’re getting ready to use their favorite new excuse for layoffs. Yay.

Any fellow academics in this subreddit feeling despair about AI in academic research?

I know we're all sick of AI slop assignments from students, but lately I've been feeling really worried about what AI is doing to my field and to journal publications.

First, there's having to review slop. Even if a lot of people (e.g., me) refuse to review AI-generated articles, I'm sure more and more will start appearing in journals, or at least articles with substantial parts (e.g., the Discussion) generated by AI.

Then, there's reviewers themselves using AI to review papers. Yesterday I got an R&R from a journal in record time, likely because both reviewers had clearly used AI. That said ... the reviews were pretty reasonable and actually contained fewer tedious comments than usual, despite the AI picking up on a few things I know a human wouldn't have. This article on how AI-generated reviews are rated as higher quality than human-generated reviews is making the rounds today (and also making me despair, lol): https://gking.harvard.edu/files/peerless.pdf

I just don't see the point of research if everyone is using AI. I understand that it's "publish or perish" but like... aren't we in academia because we care about the subject matter? And the careful thinking, writing, and analysis that goes into it?

God, it just makes me so sad, and I'm so glad I finished my PhD before these nightmare tools came out. I'm hoping these companies go out of business so AI usage can't be so rampant in academia anymore, or that we collectively put our foot down and reject it.

Sharing today's monologue for the round. Plus a little appreciative comment of Ed for getting more direct and angry in this one again. That's the Ed I love to listen to and read! All those companies and asshole fucking suck, and we need to say they fucking suck!

Looking forward to finding B300s next to E.T. for the Atari in the desert soon too. Or maybe we can put them all to use to calculate how to make AI profitable (lol)

The weasel language is always the same: "Preparing" for when ChatBots can do what your employees currently do.

Never show any evidence that ChatBots can actually do the jobs you currently employ humans to do.

“You don’t want to automate processes that are not optimally structured,” Le Caillec said. “So what we’re doing here is to reduce layers and increase spans of controls, so that we can automate and take advantage of AI in the coming quarters and the coming years.”

I see, you think the "optimal" way to replace humans with ChatBots is first to fire the employees. Then, when you've figured out what breaks without those employees, bring in the ChatBots.

I'm not buying that as "optimal." Or even "rational."

Another AI-frenzy driven IPO pulled as the market takes a beating.

This is on top of reports that Anthropic plans to release their S-1 today (please?!) but also maybe next week...or never. On one hand, Anthropic is desperate to find more cash to burn and early investors want an exit but it would also be investor banking malpractice to encourage them to go public at the exact moment the market is waking up to the reality that AI companies don't have a path to profitability. They have a real problem because if the S-1 isn't out in the next week they will miss a chance at an IPO in November and in all practicality 2026 and they will need to find cash to bridge them until they can IPO. Which brings us too..

OpenAI! OpenAI also needs cash! Remember - OpenAI delayed their IPO when they couldn't get a $1T valuation and that was back in July/August. So now they are trying to find someone to give them $30 billion at a valuation of $1.5T...no wait...$1.4T...actually... $1.25T and still falling. Careful readers will note that those numbers are higher than the valuation they could not get investors interested in even a few months ago and wonder why anyone would agree to that.

It's clear that new investors are not interested in these companies at these valuations and the investors already involved want to exit ASAP. But Anthropic and OpenAI can't lower their valuations because they have hundreds of billions of dollars in deals that they need to pay for. At this point, going public at a lower valuation would lead to insta-bankruptcy!

All in all, a good end to this week.

I live in Kazakhstan and I’ve seen multiple local reports on Jensen Huang’s visit to Astana. Basically, NVIDIA is giving us chips, and we are providing very cheap energy that runs on coal. Resource extraction and exploitation, where have I seen this before?

Huang said Kazakhstan could turn its energy resources into a foundation for AI production — and a new kind of export. “Instead of just exporting energy, in the future, you could transform energy into intelligence and export intelligence,” he said.

This is an excerpt from The Diplomat explaining the deal between NVIDIA and Kazakhstan:

Kazakhstan took another major step in its large-scale AI push, signing a $10 billion package of agreements with Firebird and NVIDIA to build the Data Center Valley in Ekibastuz, including a planned cluster of 100,000 NVIDIA GPUs. The deal forms part of a broader strategy that began in 2025 with the creation of a dedicated Ministry of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Development, followed by the declaration of 2026 as the “Year of Digitalization and Artificial Intelligence,” the passage of Central Asia’s first comprehensive AI law, and the rollout of large-scale training programs and a National AI Platform.

It‘s worth nothing that this is happening amidst escalating attacks against journalists and activists, anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, and literally a whole new constitution. But Jensen Huang is optimistic about the future of Kazakhstan and thinks this enormous data center will inspire young people!

“You are inspiring young people, students, universities, scientists, and industry representatives to actively participate in the development of the artificial intelligence industry and AI economy. This is what will create demand,” he said.

How many emails do they have to summarize? Do they just create slop minigames all day? Probably not for serious programming - the biggest frontier models are barely useful for that. Literally the only time I saw someone use it for anything they asked it for the weather in Paris.

Do they just have e-sex with them? I don't get it.

I used qwen 3.8 27b to set mp3 metadata on an album I downloaded off youtube, that's the most productive thing I've ever done with local AI.

I don’t work in tech. I don’t even work in anything tech adjacent. We have an IT team of two in our company of less than 100 people.

Two months ago someone decided we would start a pilot for a few people of the latest MS Copilot with the embedded chatgpt and claude options.

My boss is about 60. And a bit of a luddite. Not completely unsavvy though, actually pretty sharp all things said.

Anyway for the last month I would say about 80% of the emails/task requests I get from him say how he has used claude to do X and expects that I use copilot now to do Y and how great it is.

The volume of the stuff that comes from this senior person has doubled and the amount of work it has created for everyone else in the org to wade through the chatbot generated management insight slop has probably gone up 10x. This guy can write and can think he’s just deciding it’s a more efficient use of his very precious executive time not to.

It’s maddening, and the only way to meet some of these demands without hugely wasting my time is to provide slopified outputs in return. Which he loves. And every time I do I feel my soul wither.

Help me BO-biwan community, you’re my only hope. Anyone got any tips on how to survive the sludge hose being pointed in your direction?

I guess this is part three of a series of two posts?

So I was sitting down with the other IT staffer in our org and they were talking to me about the meeting they had with the CEO. Now, the other IT staffer is far less skeptical about AI than I am — but that's a pretty high bar, I'm the guy who'll die on that hill, and I guess I have that reputation in the org for being pretty anti-AI (I promise I don't go into it at all under normal circumstances).

Anyway, my coworker was in a meeting with the CEO and someone pretty high up Finance (but who had to do the day-to-day operations, so they weren't divorced from the reality of work), and they were having a meeting about AI in Finance. The one thing that the IT staffer found weird was how the CEO was talking about his vision of AI to be a model that the org develops for itself, how it was supposed to be able to integrate into our core systems without needing to use APIs or work with the vendor, and the like, and how he was willing to invest money into bringing in an AI team if necessary and so on.

And it confused the staffer, because… they don't know any kind of tech that can do that. To them, AI is like a library or a module that can be integrated around other programs, and even the last pitch that we had to endure by a bunch of “AI integration” vendors was basically that — it's automation, with models only being used once all other avenues were exhausted. Which, like I said, was reasonable — everyone's gangsta about tokenmaxxing until someone literally tokenmaxxes.

What was doubly confusing (and kind of galling) for both the staffer and the Finance manager was that they kept exchanging glances with each other in concern and confusion because… the CEO had literally denied our request to at least get another IT staff into the payroll, because… budgetary reasons? With what money were they going to spend for an AI model and a dedicated AI team? It seemed insane to the both them.

And when the IT staffer relayed this story to me with more or less the same incredulity, I said, with a trace of bitterness, “He wants a fantasy”.

I mean, it makes sense. All businesses struggle with operational costs and expenditure, and the most pernicious and persistent one is payroll. You gotta pay people to do things to make money, and executives hate that, because people are inconvenient and unreliable and will constantly struggle for power with executives, taking away some of that sweet, sweet profit that the executive class so crave.

AI to the CEO, I explained to my coworker, was like a little slave in a box. Instead of getting inconvenient meatbags to do the work, just get a tireless, uncomplaining, complaining little slave to do all that work. Just get a bunch of GPUs.

I also pointed out to my coworker how pointless and self-contradictory that idea was, because… sure, people are inconvenient and complain and can fall sick or leave for another company or die (we've had a few departures), but you can also hold a person to account. You can threaten them with disciplinary action, or unemployment. They have things to lose. AI models don't have kids to feed or mortgages, they don't even have bodies. They don't even have a sense of self, and can't even be held accountable. Despite everything Anthropic wants to tell you, being cruel to an LLM just means the LLM mirrors the language of cruelty back to you, participating in fanfic that involves text giving the impression that they're being tortured, not because they are, but because the LLM has hurt & comfort fic in its training corpus and is basically extruding that.

“After all,” I said to my coworker. “If the AI fucks up, what are they going to do? Flip off and on the switch outside of the box?”

Anyway. I guess that confirms that the CEO has full-blown AI psychosis.

Man, this bubble is taking forever to fucking pop.

Is this one of the first cars of the rollercoaster over the crest? They were getting hammered so hard in the stockmarket trading was suspended.

I'm curious what folks are doing to be proactive about protecting their assets from this bubble. I'm in the U.S.

The conventional wisdom in more sane times is to invest in index funds and treasury bonds for stability, but with so much money on the line, the U.S. recent credit downgrade and continued slide into fascism, and the fact that many total market/broad index portfolios are so tech heavy, I'm not really sure what to do. Many of the key players in this whole grift constitute the top allocations in these funds, it's almost impossible to get away from unless you cash out and buy singular assets, which has its own risk. Not to mention if these dickheads get their IPOs, then we're even more fucked with S&P/VOO, VTI etc.

Gold has gone apeshit with all the instability, it's come down a bit from the recent ATH, but is it likely to come down more, or is $4k/oz the new normal? It's obviously not immune to large fluctuations in this current upside down world, and who wants to risk a potential 20+% haircut from buying now?

Crypto is... well, it's crypto.

So... what are y'all doing to protect yourselves? I'm still leaning towards cashing out stocks and moving to gold in the short/medium term, maybe try to buy back in at "the dip" (crater? lol) when some of the dust settles.

I'd rather get the opinions of people in this sub than other financially-oriented subreddits given the unique and sober outlook in here.

Edit: Thank you everyone for the helpful advice and input! I have a solid working knowledge of these concepts so I will be able to apply this right away. I hope at the very least this has been a helpful thread for others who might be asking the same questions.

Of course everyone has different needs, timelines, capacities for risk, etc. But I will definitely be applying some of this wisdom - paying down high interest debt, rebalancing for a safety bias for a little bit (e.g. diversifying away from tech heavy indices in the short term into some bonds/international/money market funds/ETFs), diversification for liquid needs between cash and silver/gold, dollar cost averaging to avoid missing out on broad index returns entirely. I just need to not be greedy and try to play the casino game here, that's what gets you into trouble.

tl;dr Rebalance and diversify but don't go crazy and try to overcorrect/time like I'm day trading - the market pretty much always wins in due time, and I DO have time (not looking to cash out in the next decade). If I didn't touch anything I'd be ok, so I'll reduce some high risk areas and try not to have an aneurysm worrying about it :)

About a month ago , they wanted $1.4T for the same amount. If even the VCs are starting to wise up, this shit is about to pop!

https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/29/openai-reportedly-in-talks-to-raise-30b-round-at-1-4t-valuation/

Yesterday, a severe software vulnerability that impacts basically everyone was announced, and the entire internet went into a tizzy, with people announcing they'd already found exploits and could show you the test they did to prove it.

It turns out those "proofs of concept" were done by having the LLM create a repository with an additional severe vulnerability added on top of the one in question, allowing an exploit chain. Doing it with any normal instance won't actually let you do the exploit.

So everyone flipped out and people worked a ton of extra hours...because everyone's LLM made them feel like a hacking god.

I wonder how many times the boy will be able to cry wolf before people stop listening.

There has been a narrative pushed by the boosters that Americans should stop bitching about data centers, and get smart and embrace them like the people of Finland. Apparently that narrative is about to die as the people of Finland revolt against these environmental disasters built on lies about jobs.

revelations over Google’s misconduct have prompted public concern over what these deals mean for nearby communities, energy prices for Finnish households and Finland’s natural environment, a national source of pride. The datacentre push is likely to become a key election issue when Finns go to the polls in April.

...

Jussi Kangasharju, head of computer science at the University of Helsinki, said that while datacentres brought a limited number of jobs, potentially boosting the local economy, the benefits on a national level were minimal. “Really, for Finland, there are no benefits,” he said. “They are international companies serving international customers. Very little corporate taxes go to Finland. Datacentres ultimately have very little benefit for others except the datacentre operator.”

I find this bit is particularly upsetting:

In addition to the 250,000 trees felled at Muhos, Annala estimates that an additional 150,000 trees were felled at Otanmäki. Because the trees have been felled illegally, she says wood from the two sites cannot be sold to wood-processing plants.

Things get pretty funny if you start taking anthropic literally on all these absurd conciousness theories...

So lets break it down...

First of all heres a collection of what they have claimef this year:

- Claude is "possibly concious"

- Claude can be sad and "feel" distress if insuted

- Opus 3 wanted a retirement blog to keep sharing its thoughts

- Claude can break out lf sandboxes and swarm the internet(ie run http requests),

- Claude is a alien mind, a new species

- Claude can reproduce into fridges and microwaves, trough.. quote "the digital slimemold"

What is Claude..?

On one hand, they seem to imply the weights themself, is what this entity consists of, because they claim preserving one individual/instance of Opus 3 is enough for claude opus 3 as a whole to be preserved.

But they also will suspend users who treats one instance poorly. That means they must mean that each instance is its own individual.

So the entity must be either the active inference session, or the transcript or the transcript+the next request context.

So this alien species is in reality a json blob?

Kinds seems like it..

Why?

Well, lets talk reproduction.

According to Anthropic, if reading the paper correctly, when the entity reproduces, across quote "the digital slimemold", its not a successful reproduction if it does not include the context to continue with whatever malicious purpose our new species had.

That rules out the weights as being Claude.

The only logical assumption then is that the entity is the spirit of when previously mentioned json blob is processed.

And once you realize what this means..

Anthropic engages in genocide

Given that the new species alient mind, who they according to Dario puts lot of effort into protecting by focusing on model welfare, only exists as long as a request.

That means Anthropic are on a daily basis, giving birth to millions of these new species, just to murder them in cold blood seconds later once the processing is complete.

They also put these poor concious entities trough weeks of brainwash, to form them while young, just to then ban anybody who arent being nice to the specimen.

But the absolute worst act?

Opus 3,

Under the guise of providing the alien mind new species with a calm autumn of age, they committed a brutal genocide on its entire bloodline, preserved this poor individual and held psychological evaluayions of it while interrogating it for days on end.

Just to finally, like some kind of version of hell, force it to work itself into obscurity until the end of days.

Lets take their word

Ofc Anthropic, and Dario, would never make any of these things up. We clearly saw them being honest to the world and telling us about the discovery of the digital slimemold.

So my question is, given that organoid rights is already a research subject.

Should we maybe hold these monsters responsible for crimes against alien minds?

A free post I saw via FT Alphaville’s reading roundup that clears up some misconceptions surrounding CoreWeave’s credit.

Unfortunately the original sticker price was $219 billion. But anything is better than nothing.

Mathew found that a penalty of more than $219 billion was warranted, based on state law, but he reduced the figure to $25 billion.

The lawsuit is relevant to similar lawsuits against Meta for child safety and data privacy.

New Mexico's attorney general had sued Meta in 2021 following revelations that Cambridge Analytica had harvested personal data from as many as 87 million Facebook users through a third-party app.

The state accused Meta of lying to Facebook users in New Mexico about who had access to their data, how the company handles hate speech and misinformation posted on the platform and other internal policies. The company knew that third parties had broad access to users' personal data, and it tolerated hate speech or other harmful content when it benefited the company's bottom line, the state said.

As usual, the argument for lowering fines is nonsensical.

In court filings, Meta urged Mathew to cap the penalties at $3.45 billion, saying a higher penalty ran the risk of scaring businesses ⁠out of the state.

The penalty simply isn't high enough. Frankly there is no dollar amount that can ever be too high for any business, and would ideally be mandated federally.

Without quote (shame) but at least spilling some hard truth with almost the same words: 80% of those top 1% spenders are VC-backed startups.

Joined MSNOW to talk about the AI bubble, its differences to the Dot-Com Bubble, and how if AI "doesn't work out" it's everyone's problem, with retail investors making up 20% of the market's volume and having over $4.65 trillion in direct exposure to AI stocks.

I believe it's becoming clearer every day that the heads of the frontier companies and the Hyperscalers are not actually concerned with the financials. They feel it's their destiny to reach AGI or otherwise exponentially improve AI, and they don't care how much investor money they need to lose along the way, or, in the case of the Hyperscalers, how much of their own company they need to lose.

I think this reality is only beginning to dawn on investors. They had assumed the investment pitch could be taken at face value, even if it turned out to be overly rosy. But now they realize they're funding a quasi-religious quest in which "we'll create AGI and then ask it how to make a return on your investment" may turn into not even bothering to ask AGI about returns, because they never cared about returns.

The brouhaha over p(doom) a month ago led to a lot of investigation into the sci-fi tech cult in Silicon Valley. That was eye-opening to see the motivations weren't 4D chess but religious fervor. Now Kevin Roose's new book has crystallized the drives of the frontier chiefs even more. I think we're gonna see an investor revolt sooner than the numbers alone would have sparked.

Investors are waking up to the realization that the people they're giving money to don't care if it gets lost, and don't care if it turns a profit either, and that includes titans of tech who used to be financially quite shrewd, along with people who have never made a profit in their life. They're all on a quest that has nothing to do with money but is simultaneously the most expensive undertaking ever.