Anyone following following AI reporting by Ed Zitron? The industry looks really bad. $65 billion max in total revenue across the entirety of AI when Western tech media really wants you to believe the entire world economy revolves around AI now.
The entire industry — including OpenAI and Anthropic’s theoretical revenues of $13.1 billion and $4.5 billion — hit around $65 billion last year, and that includes the revenues from providing compute generated by neoclouds like CoreWeave and hyperscalers like Microsoft.
For reference Lenovo, the company behind the Thinkpad laptops, has $80 billion in revenue.. Except Lenovo actually makes money.
There’s this image from Western media anywhere where the entire world economy would collapse if the AI bubble bursts, or at minimum would cause a DotCom or 2008 style crash but it wouldn’t be anywhere near that big. Nobody would notice if Lenovo disappeared overnight.
The more I read from Ed Zitron the more that the AI craze looks like the NFT bubble.
Front page of Ed Zitron’s reporting: https://wheresyoured.at/
From an uneducated Marxist perspective it feels like the western bourgeoisie are manifesting their final victory over the proletariat (but in the lib The Secret self-help book way). They’re projecting this hyper-reality where the west is WW2 mobilizing to build AI and AI datacenters but in reality they’re actually building them with the same vigor that they build Amtrak stations and infrastructure. The data centers are not being built and like half of Nvidia’s GPU output is ending up sitting in warehouses.
The skyrocketing token usage and new tricks like Claude code are coming from Anthropic and OpenAI throwing exponentially more compute at their models but that would imply charging their users (or B2B clients) exponentially more money, which is not going to happen.
The way that the AI sphere boosts their numbers 🐡 is very much in line with other Trump-era grifts, like trading money back and forth over and over again and making non-binding commitments to buy 40% of the world’s DRAM and then not doing it.
Edit: There’s also this myth that tech bros like to repeat that there are 900 million AI users but I’m pretty sure that just includes everyone that uses a search engine which all automatically send your prompt to an LLM at least occasionally. The old non-LLM powered search summaries you would get on Duck Duck Go and Google have been replaced by ChatGPT and Google Gemini summaries. They probably also count everyone that watches YouTube and accidentally clicks on an AI video description.