Any company in 2025 whose technology depends on the kind of ravenous and relentless consumption of our natural resources the way OpenAI depends on our fresh water is not by definition committed to progress, or anything approaching it. OpenAI and companies like it are only committed to profit and destruction on levels we can't even comprehend or anticipate.
Also, why did AI create an image of John Hughes wearing a plastic helmet in response to the request for Sam Altman as Darth Vader? It's pathetic: we are handing over our survival to people running a technology whose work is mostly ugly nonsense.
OpenAI cannot make a return on investment for its VC investors on a pure subscription model as per the current ChatGPT subscription. It's already sunk way too much money to make a 10x Unicorn return off of a subscription fee, at least at a fee level that anyone is going to want to pay.
So, how will they ever make money?
As I see it, there is only one way - they have to be an intermediary (in some service or function ) and get a piece of the action out of every transaction.
Think of Apple Store fees, Mastercard / Visa transaction fees, SWIFT banking fees, stock exchange transaction fees, you get the idea.
The questions then become:
1. "what service(s) will they insert themselves into?“
2. “what value (if any) can they add to the service(s) to justify their piece of the action?"
3. "will they actually make it better, or just enshittify it in the long run?"
4. "Will they get there via fair(ish) competition in an open market, or will they force their way in via political or other means?"
My gut feeling is that it would only work on a high volume / low margin type service, where the "AI cut" ("AI tax?") just becomes one of those many "deaths by a thousand cuts" fees and charges we largely just glaze over and ignore these days, like the ones listed earlier.
But those fees and charges already exist, in long-established services / markets, with dominant, politically well-connected, players who aren't going to roll over and give up a piece of the action to some Silicon Valley upstarts.
If there was only some new, parallel, system being touted, maybe a new financial exchange system perhaps, one that they could infest and build out a dominant position at the heart of, perhaps by waving some "AI smart contract" fairy dust over it, or "AI verification" for every transaction as a security measure or insurance policy, and thus be in a position to charge a service fee / settlement fee / processing fee / whatever, and thus skim their percentage off the top?
But I guess that's just a fairy tale, right? Cough, ₿, cough...
Yup, sounds about right (the middle-man cut). But that is not needed for the AI companies signing contracts with U.S. and U.K. governments. The Trump administration is all-in on AI (and crypto for that fairy dust), and has recently granted $200m contracts to each of the major AI companies (Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and xAI ) for DoD. There is a 2025 budget request of 32 billion for non-defense related AI R&D work (https://www.nitrd.gov/ai-rd-investments/). The government is already actively working on integrating GenAI into all areas of government projects and services.
As for your questions, my $0.25
1. "what service(s) will they insert themselves into?“ -- Everything they can. It will take over as the new ad-tech (on steroids), since it can collect even more personalized data. It is being forced into every OS, app, and service interface, and getting harder to opt-out.
2. “what value (if any) can they add to the service(s) to justify their piece of the action?" -- see (1) above, plus they can sell all that data to the big Insurance, Financial and policing companies.
3. "will they actually make it better, or just enshittify it in the long run?" -- GenAI-based will mostly enshittify, given my experience with any Chat-based service agents. There is some AI (more traditional Machine Learning/NeuralNetwork w/domain-specific curated data sets, that can, and have, helped advance science and medical fields (e.g. AlphaFold) .
4. "Will they get there via fair(ish) competition in an open market, or will they force their way in via political or other means?" -- there is no open market in AI, you've got your few very big players that will continue to dominate given the start-up costs. There will likely be be several smaller players creating custom apps that use the one of the big 3 underneath.
The big money is in the chips and and cloud service providers. The storage and compute
demands of GenAI LLMs can generate a lot of revenue, which is then passed on to every company using GenAI, which is then passed on to consumers. As for paying for all the Energy and Water consumed by those massive data centers -- again, that cost will be passed on to us plebes (this is already happening, just check your latest utility company requests for increases in rates).
If interested in more info on the negative impact of the push to GenAI, I highly recommend following Brian Merchant's substack: https://www.bloodinthemachine.com.
Not all AI is bad, it has been around for decades. The focus on GenAI is bad (for many reasons including huge, wasteful, resource consumption, and inaccuracies). If interested in technical discussion about the issues with current GenAI approach see: https://substack.com/@garymarcus/posts
And to get an idea of the ethos of the GenAI Broligarchy, read some stories about the tech bros brought into Musk's DOGE team that are working on integrating GenAI into government services. Many are like Musk, Altman, and Zuckerberg, and the VCs behind them (e.g. Andreessen, Thiel).
minor correction: the link at the end of your article (reference to "the Citizens") goes to the guardian article on UK Memorandom, I think you intended to link to the https://the-citizens.com/
One of the “tells” of AI, whether it’s generating text or transcribing from voice recording, is dropping prepositions, conjunctions, or intransitive verbs. Your text does just that. Either you’re a really sloppy writer, or you’re using AI.
Artificial Intelligence is self-limiting. It will “fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time…”
Question: How can we use AI against these wannabe kings? Why can‘t we establish a kind of anti-hatespeech, anti-datagrab, anti-fakenews-AI, anti-bots etc. in our phones? We should be independent of these insane and irresponsible people.
And: Germany‘s Secretary of the Interior wishes to establish „Palantir“ in all of the country. This must be stopped. And Bavaria, Hesse and North Rhine-Westphalia should get rid of their Palantir-Software. Otherwise we‘ll be part of the „Empire“ soon. I don‘t want this to happen.
How great are the mighty fallen. Sad to see the UK tether its future to proprietary money-grubbing foreign technocrats like Google & OpenAI.
Which in turn owe fealty to a government run by a felon who knows no bounds of corruption and extortion. Until of course he moves on, the quaint concept of sovereign countries expires, and the broligarchies assume their rightful, AI-powered position as masters of the universe.
If you think Microsoft denying access by the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court to his email is bad you ain't seen nothing yet! The very fact that their country doesn't support the ICC speaks volumes.
Has the government even considered supporting UK innovation in international collaborative development of open-source AI? AI models that could help all of humanly whilst maintaining sovereign and maybe even personal stewardship of citizen information?
Oh, wait - that's China's play! Better to hand the future over to the broligarchies to line the pockets of billionaires and corrupt politicians.
Now is our moment—take action against this harmful government. Covering up a pedophile ring. Ignoring court orders. Blatant corruption. The poor, the needy, and children are being abused—by our government. In the streets we must protest outright crooks and the pedophiles until after their shooting us starts, until we go down or we oust tyrants. I made 54 protest signs, and will make many more to share. You will see something different in these signs! Help yourself to this second batch, and share them as far as you can.
How relevant are the Freeports & (?) SEZs the Tories set up to this? Do they offer the potential for deregulated access to resources? If not by design, a fortuitous opportunity for the tech industry?
Thank you for hosting these vital interviews and conversations Carol!
Thanks so much for posting it here. I've only managed to join the live video about 1/3 or so in so rewatching it now! Emailed my local bookshop to order the paperback of Karen's book now :-)
A bill, section 453, is about to go thru to give chemical companies immunity from poisoning us with their 57,000 toxic chemicals including glyphosate. (Just like vaccines.) $10 BILLION has been paid out to those who have been harmed already. This tells WE THE PEOPLE what to do….
Please make this public, we need to stop this genocide. RFK, jr isn’t doing anything about it. They have had vaccines without accountability for over 30 years, now they're trying to pass a bill that allows criminal corps spreading thousands of chems agriculturally and thru food processing without accountability, too!!!!
Any company in 2025 whose technology depends on the kind of ravenous and relentless consumption of our natural resources the way OpenAI depends on our fresh water is not by definition committed to progress, or anything approaching it. OpenAI and companies like it are only committed to profit and destruction on levels we can't even comprehend or anticipate.
Also, why did AI create an image of John Hughes wearing a plastic helmet in response to the request for Sam Altman as Darth Vader? It's pathetic: we are handing over our survival to people running a technology whose work is mostly ugly nonsense.
Sam Altman reminds me of the character Sir Peter Isherwell in the film, "Look Up".
The utter belief that only I have the vision of where our species must go. And that whatever it costs in terms of humanity is of no concern.
OpenAI cannot make a return on investment for its VC investors on a pure subscription model as per the current ChatGPT subscription. It's already sunk way too much money to make a 10x Unicorn return off of a subscription fee, at least at a fee level that anyone is going to want to pay.
So, how will they ever make money?
As I see it, there is only one way - they have to be an intermediary (in some service or function ) and get a piece of the action out of every transaction.
Think of Apple Store fees, Mastercard / Visa transaction fees, SWIFT banking fees, stock exchange transaction fees, you get the idea.
The questions then become:
1. "what service(s) will they insert themselves into?“
2. “what value (if any) can they add to the service(s) to justify their piece of the action?"
3. "will they actually make it better, or just enshittify it in the long run?"
4. "Will they get there via fair(ish) competition in an open market, or will they force their way in via political or other means?"
My gut feeling is that it would only work on a high volume / low margin type service, where the "AI cut" ("AI tax?") just becomes one of those many "deaths by a thousand cuts" fees and charges we largely just glaze over and ignore these days, like the ones listed earlier.
But those fees and charges already exist, in long-established services / markets, with dominant, politically well-connected, players who aren't going to roll over and give up a piece of the action to some Silicon Valley upstarts.
If there was only some new, parallel, system being touted, maybe a new financial exchange system perhaps, one that they could infest and build out a dominant position at the heart of, perhaps by waving some "AI smart contract" fairy dust over it, or "AI verification" for every transaction as a security measure or insurance policy, and thus be in a position to charge a service fee / settlement fee / processing fee / whatever, and thus skim their percentage off the top?
But I guess that's just a fairy tale, right? Cough, ₿, cough...
Yup, sounds about right (the middle-man cut). But that is not needed for the AI companies signing contracts with U.S. and U.K. governments. The Trump administration is all-in on AI (and crypto for that fairy dust), and has recently granted $200m contracts to each of the major AI companies (Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and xAI ) for DoD. There is a 2025 budget request of 32 billion for non-defense related AI R&D work (https://www.nitrd.gov/ai-rd-investments/). The government is already actively working on integrating GenAI into all areas of government projects and services.
As for your questions, my $0.25
1. "what service(s) will they insert themselves into?“ -- Everything they can. It will take over as the new ad-tech (on steroids), since it can collect even more personalized data. It is being forced into every OS, app, and service interface, and getting harder to opt-out.
2. “what value (if any) can they add to the service(s) to justify their piece of the action?" -- see (1) above, plus they can sell all that data to the big Insurance, Financial and policing companies.
3. "will they actually make it better, or just enshittify it in the long run?" -- GenAI-based will mostly enshittify, given my experience with any Chat-based service agents. There is some AI (more traditional Machine Learning/NeuralNetwork w/domain-specific curated data sets, that can, and have, helped advance science and medical fields (e.g. AlphaFold) .
4. "Will they get there via fair(ish) competition in an open market, or will they force their way in via political or other means?" -- there is no open market in AI, you've got your few very big players that will continue to dominate given the start-up costs. There will likely be be several smaller players creating custom apps that use the one of the big 3 underneath.
The big money is in the chips and and cloud service providers. The storage and compute
demands of GenAI LLMs can generate a lot of revenue, which is then passed on to every company using GenAI, which is then passed on to consumers. As for paying for all the Energy and Water consumed by those massive data centers -- again, that cost will be passed on to us plebes (this is already happening, just check your latest utility company requests for increases in rates).
If interested in more info on the negative impact of the push to GenAI, I highly recommend following Brian Merchant's substack: https://www.bloodinthemachine.com.
Not all AI is bad, it has been around for decades. The focus on GenAI is bad (for many reasons including huge, wasteful, resource consumption, and inaccuracies). If interested in technical discussion about the issues with current GenAI approach see: https://substack.com/@garymarcus/posts
And to get an idea of the ethos of the GenAI Broligarchy, read some stories about the tech bros brought into Musk's DOGE team that are working on integrating GenAI into government services. Many are like Musk, Altman, and Zuckerberg, and the VCs behind them (e.g. Andreessen, Thiel).
Just one example: https://donmoynihan.substack.com/p/doges-willing-executioners
minor correction: the link at the end of your article (reference to "the Citizens") goes to the guardian article on UK Memorandom, I think you intended to link to the https://the-citizens.com/
One of the “tells” of AI, whether it’s generating text or transcribing from voice recording, is dropping prepositions, conjunctions, or intransitive verbs. Your text does just that. Either you’re a really sloppy writer, or you’re using AI.
Artificial Intelligence is self-limiting. It will “fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time…”
Question: How can we use AI against these wannabe kings? Why can‘t we establish a kind of anti-hatespeech, anti-datagrab, anti-fakenews-AI, anti-bots etc. in our phones? We should be independent of these insane and irresponsible people.
And: Germany‘s Secretary of the Interior wishes to establish „Palantir“ in all of the country. This must be stopped. And Bavaria, Hesse and North Rhine-Westphalia should get rid of their Palantir-Software. Otherwise we‘ll be part of the „Empire“ soon. I don‘t want this to happen.
How great are the mighty fallen. Sad to see the UK tether its future to proprietary money-grubbing foreign technocrats like Google & OpenAI.
Which in turn owe fealty to a government run by a felon who knows no bounds of corruption and extortion. Until of course he moves on, the quaint concept of sovereign countries expires, and the broligarchies assume their rightful, AI-powered position as masters of the universe.
If you think Microsoft denying access by the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court to his email is bad you ain't seen nothing yet! The very fact that their country doesn't support the ICC speaks volumes.
Has the government even considered supporting UK innovation in international collaborative development of open-source AI? AI models that could help all of humanly whilst maintaining sovereign and maybe even personal stewardship of citizen information?
Oh, wait - that's China's play! Better to hand the future over to the broligarchies to line the pockets of billionaires and corrupt politicians.
As a journalist whose company is excitedly asking them to use the new AI tools they've partnered with, thank you.
Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!
Such great an important work you do ... for all of us!
Now is our moment—take action against this harmful government. Covering up a pedophile ring. Ignoring court orders. Blatant corruption. The poor, the needy, and children are being abused—by our government. In the streets we must protest outright crooks and the pedophiles until after their shooting us starts, until we go down or we oust tyrants. I made 54 protest signs, and will make many more to share. You will see something different in these signs! Help yourself to this second batch, and share them as far as you can.
https://hotbuttons.substack.com/p/more-free-protest-signs?r=3m1bs
Gosh and eek.
Peter Kyle does appear to have intravenously consumed the techbro koolaid, encouraged sycophantically by his new ministerial aid Chat GPT no doubt.
The land and resource grab :
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/13/labour-ai-datacentre-growth-zone-water-shortages-abingdon-reservoir?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
How relevant are the Freeports & (?) SEZs the Tories set up to this? Do they offer the potential for deregulated access to resources? If not by design, a fortuitous opportunity for the tech industry?
Thank you for hosting these vital interviews and conversations Carol!
T
Great piece Carole I have paid homage to your outstanding work with this short film I made
https://youtu.be/8tDRc37bCT8?si=EIxinrTEP9V-zoVp
Great interview. Well worth the time.
Thanks so much for posting it here. I've only managed to join the live video about 1/3 or so in so rewatching it now! Emailed my local bookshop to order the paperback of Karen's book now :-)
Carole,
**** They’re Poisoning Us...Legally - Dr Eric Berg
<<<https://youtu.be/UmAJrhsLub8?si=P2U-28hU7wFey4hc>>>
A bill, section 453, is about to go thru to give chemical companies immunity from poisoning us with their 57,000 toxic chemicals including glyphosate. (Just like vaccines.) $10 BILLION has been paid out to those who have been harmed already. This tells WE THE PEOPLE what to do….
Please make this public, we need to stop this genocide. RFK, jr isn’t doing anything about it. They have had vaccines without accountability for over 30 years, now they're trying to pass a bill that allows criminal corps spreading thousands of chems agriculturally and thru food processing without accountability, too!!!!
Get the word out there please!!!!