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Talents leave AI companies: "They are putting profits over sanity and safety"
(www.computerworld.com)
this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2026
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And it's not even working. Not one of the AI companies is profitable. So they're putting the hope for profits some time in the future over sanity and safety.
I don't think they even care about profits anymore.
Billionaires live in the balance sheet, not the P/L statements.
Midjourney is profitable
Source?
Midjourney are the worse of the worse when it comes specifically training on stolen work from artists who dedicated their lives to it. They opened the floodgates to what we see now with mass theft of content by not getting sued into oblivion. Fuck them and their creepy little fuck face of a CEO.
They're also not providing a large language model, so they actually did have a path to profitability. It's keeping LLMs updated and running that costs so much money that companies trying to do so are losing billions, and Midjourney doesn't have that problem.
It's just that their path to profitability was built on plagiarism on an astonishing scale. You're spot on, they should have been utterly destroyed right at the start.
Couldn't agree more. They did really help greenlight "stealing everything is fair game" mentality. They came out before chatGPT gpt3 at the time LLMs were not hoovering everything including copyrighted content.
Steve Burke (of GN) described the absurdity pretty well, within the context of the currently uncertain Nvidia and OpenAI deal:
And hope you’ve propped up the economy enough by the end of it that the government has to ~~bail you out~~…sorry i meant provide a “backstop”.
What about all the user data they sell to third parties? I'd be interested in knowing how that contributes to this
So what's the problem? This looks self-correcting to me, if none of the AI companies are profitable then they're going to go away. Short their stock and make a fortune.
Shorting isn't just a bet that a stock will fail but also when
Then invest in competitors, they've got a more flexible timeframe.
Imagine your entire life is viewed through the lens of actions you can take in the stock market. What a sad life.
The original comment that this subthread descends from was about the profitability of AI companies.
Profitability has pretty much nothing to do with stock prices these days.
The problem is the cost of that correction is going to fall on us. Or did we forget that the flavor of capitalism we live under is the "Privatize the profits, socialize the losses" kind. We're not the ones in the casino, but we're the ones who will lose our shirts when they lose.
"What's the problem" with the entire American economy being moored to a bunch of companies all acting as flaky as Enron and friends during the dot-com crash?
Edit: just realized FaceDeer is obsessed with AI stuff, so he's probably here just to troll with questions he already knows the answers to.
It's only self correcting if the powers that be are losing money, which they aren't because they are either liquidating important assets to pad their pockets or just using economic magic to make trillions appear out of no where. They'll only feel it when their company or the economy collapses, and at that point they make off with their ill gotten gains
Where's this infinite well of investment money coming from? "Economic magic" is pretty vague.
I wrote it intentionally vague because the reality is that we don't know exactly how they are doing it, but we don't need to to be able to see that there is a positive feedback loop between ai companies, cloud service providers and compute hardware manufacturers. Likely what they are doing is simply lying about their books and since the regulators have been bought already, or are simply incompotent, there is no one to say otherwise.
Have you not heard of inflation? It is literally the creation of new monies that the government gives to banks to give loans.
that’s… not at all what inflation means… it is 1 of many causes of inflation
and the government doesn’t “give” it to banks
the reality is far more complex in both cases, even if sometimes the simplified version of things looks like that
I'm talking monetary inflation, not price inflation.
In the mean time they're soaking up all the RAM, SSD and silicon processing which makes basically everything with any of those cost a lot more (like the RAM I bought for $99, 4 yrs ago thats now $560). Not to mention the power requirements and costs being passed on to the consumers that don't want it anyway.
They're also screwing up the environment in ways it won't recover from.
Which is pouring money into the manufacturers of those things. If you're convinced the AI companies are going to collapse then just wait a little and you'll get all those things way cheaper than they were before.
At the moment, most of that "money" is just stock in the other company. And the type of RAM and "GPU"'s being manufactured are not ones that normal consumers will use. They're very specialized for AI en masse.
Another thing around that is that the major manufacturers being leveraged for that gear have stated that they are not increasing production in the near future because of this. It seems they're mostly in a "wait and see, it might just be a bubble" mode as scale up takes a lot of time and only pays off with continued demand over a long period of time.
I'd love if it was going to be flooding the market with cheaper tech, but thats not been shown to be the case. And it's really not worth the environmental impact in either case.
They're using the same foundries that would make those things. I'm not saying that there'll be a flood of "used" equipment (though there would indeed be some of that too, other companies could set up data centers much more cheaply), I'm saying that the foundries will switch back to consumer products.
The stock is worth a lot because it can be sold for a lot. If the manufacturers don't think the AI companies will stick around they should be selling the stock they're receiving from them. It's money either way. What do you think they're doing with that money?
They'll just declare bankruptcy and get away scott-free
That's not how bankruptcy works. The investors don't get their money back.
thanks for pointing that out.
I'm not sure how this benefits the big corporations then. Surely they don't have a deathwish? And aren't stupid/incompetent enough to not see that? Else they'd not have gotten this big, right?