mathbabe

I recently traveled to Oakland California to see my buddy Becky Jaffe, who just opened a photographic exhibit at Preston Castle in Ione, CA, at a former reformatory for boys. It’s called Reformation: Transforming the Reformatory and you should check it out if you can.

Anyhoo, I got an early flight home, which meant I was in an Uber at around 5:15am on the Bay Bridge on my way to SFO.

And do you know what I saw? Approximately 35 lit billboards, and every single one of them was advertising some narrowly defined, or ludicrously broadly defined, or sometimes downright undefined AI.

I then noticed that every single ad *AT* the airport was also advertising AI. And then I noticed the same thing at Boston Logan Airport when I arrived home.

It’s almost like VC money has been poured into all of these startups with the single directive, to go build some AI and then figure out if they can sell it, and now there’s a shitton of useless (or, as Tressie McMillam Cottom describes it, deeply “mid”) AI products that were incredibly expensive to build and nobody fucking cares about it at all.

Then again, maybe I’m wrong!? Maybe this stuff works great and I’m just missing something?

Take a look at these numbers from the American Prospect (hat tip Sherry Wong)

• In 2023, 71 percent of the total gains in the S&P 500 were attributable to the “Magnificent Seven”—Apple, Nvidia, Tesla, Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft.
• Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta—combined for $246 billion of capital expenditure in 2024 to support the AI build-out.
• Goldman Sachs expects Big Tech to spend over $1 trillion on chips and data centers to power AI over the next five years.
• OpenAI, the current market leader, expects to lose $5 billion this year, and its annual losses to swell to $11 billion by 2026. 
• OpenAI loses $2 for every $1 it makes.

So, um, I think this is going to be bad. And it might be blamed on Trump’s tariffs! Ironic.