e/acc - "effective accelerationism"

Gorbachev's Perestroika was at one point called Uskorenie or acceleration—polishing your marketing pitch is so very important—and involved a big cash infusion into heavy industry to try to right a burning ship. This is perhaps similar to dumping a big cash infusion into AI, or what passes for it today, to try to right a burning ship. On the other hand a state now known to be about to fail may differ from yet another boom and bust cycle in nations that have seen many such cycles.

Over half a trillion dollars has gone into an entire industry without a single profitable company developing models or products built on top of models. By my estimates, there is around $44 billion of revenue in generative AI this year (when you add in Anthropic and OpenAI’s revenues to the pot, along with the other stragglers) and most of that number has been gathered through reporting from outlets like The Information, because none of these companies share their revenues, all of them lose shit tons of money, and their actual revenues are really, really small.