Obviously, we’ve been in the “the razor is free” stage where the AI companies focus on market share and offer AI services for cheap or free.
Now we’re in the “pay for the blades” stage where the venture capital money is running dry - trillions have been spent - and it’s time for AI companies to show a profit or die.
Obviously, the cost of AI services will go up. And what we’re seeing now won’t be the end of the cost increases. Obviously.
The fools in all this were the AI fan-boy CEOs who drank the KoolAid on day 1 and laid off their developers - during the “razor is free” stage. Complete fools. Good luck hitting back top talent after showing you (CEO) were a complete fools.
Hahaha. Great comment. I think I missed the boat on coding so I’ve gone all in on spears and fire making skills. Hit me up if you want to learn some basics
Tech guy here: I'm playing both sides. Stocks and spears. I'm not even joking. I can split a cord of firewood, and I run locally-hosted 120b-parameter LLMs. No matter what happens, at least I've got something, because just like everyone else, I can't predict the outcomes.
It is exhausting to do this while raising children, though.
Northern. South FL is too isolated and if a conflict hits the US-Mexico gulf, all of FL is a frontline. Flooding is an active risk but I have area flood maps and hydrographic maps to try and plan construction projects where they’ll stay dry-er.
DM me if interested and able to reach that area— further detail is on a need to know basis. Project development is nearing completion of the red tape process to legally own some land for the group. Construction and infrastructure expertise is premium right now, but survival as a group is easier when we all have different skills and backgrounds.
I have one kid and my student loans are coming due. I almost guarantee we are going to cut another dev soon of a 8 man team. They’ve been cutting us throughout the last couple of years. We’ve lost about 6 so far. I just found out the company I work for is getting sold again, which I survived the first time around. Not sure about the second, since we are actively migrating some of our code responsibilities to Microsoft products. There’s just too many variables right now.
I have some internal tooling that I’ve created for a few departments that I still maintain here and there. I’m really hoping that helps me - plus seniority.
I’m conflicted between hanging in there and applying to another job right now. I don’t have the savings to get cut.
It’s actually the opposite in my case. I’m the most affordable dev since I became a dev while at the company. I meant I’m a senior in the sense of time at the company. I started as a Photoshop kid at 11 bucks an hour. Currently at 78k a year. The other devs are well above me in terms of pay. I still had a lot of growth to overcome until about a year ago.
I’ve had the dev title for maybe 7 years now, but I’ve been scripting for 10.
I'd do both simultaneously if I were in that spot (and I might be as well one day). In this market I would never leave my job without starting a new one.
What hardware are you running for your local LLMs? I'm deciding between the Mac Ultra or one of the Nvidia options like RTX 5090. It's enough money that the analysis paralysis is real too...
Yup been gardening a couple of years now. Know my way around a home remodel. But also about to graduate with my bachelors. It is tiring as fuck though let me tell you
Same! Tech lady here - paycheck goes to build up self-sufficient infrastructure. I've got gardens, an orchard, chickens, cows.. but I'm also keeping my skills sharp and an eye on the tech world. Something is gonna go sideways, and I wanna be diversified.
Tech guy here, same. You can tell how long/how experienced a technical person is by how little they trust technology. When I started in the field, I was all onboard the smart house smart everything trend. Now I have none of that and am considering getting an old candy bar phone instead of a smartphone. I’m so done with it all.
I get you. I am really concerned about my mom. She recently started to consult chatgpt for everything. "That mole on your leg, you should take a picture and ask chatgpt if it's cancerous" or "here is what chatgpt told me to pack for the week long hike in Alps we are going." For fucks sake, I am trying to tell her that it's just a text generator that chooses it's next answer by statistical probability, but she treats it like some sort of all knowing encyclopedia that always knows the right answer and is never wrong.
It’s time to replace some large obvious things on my home’s exterior so I used ChatGPT to help decide. Roof type and color. Driveway. Sidewalks. Had it redo the landscaping bc why not. Sent the pic to my mom.
Felt like such a failure at life when I had to tell her that no, it wasn’t real and that my house looks the same as it did the last time she was here.
"You are right, I apologise for the error, the mushroom on the pitcture you uploaded is actually highly poisonous, not edible. Good catch on your part!"
Really, that thing is like a fucking fae or something.
I liken it to people who follow their GPS off a cliff. Do NOT blindly trust what a computer tells you just because it sounds confident. Open your own eyes. “Well, there’s a cliff there, but it’s telling me to go straight ahead, and it must be right, so AHHHHHHH!!!!”
🤣 this is me just working in digital marketing. I use a lot of pen and paper, and don't post anything on social media outside of work hours lol. Waaay too much data being collected online that people can't even imagine.
Tech guy here. The bow displaced spears as a far superior weapon. If you make a pellet bow you remove the hardest part of a bow and arrow to make, the arrows. A rabbit getting clomped in the head by a stone the size of its head will quickly become a pie.
I'm a fairly active retail investor and I've largely avoided investing in any ai. I do have some holdings in adjacent industries that I feel have wider practical applications.
But on the other hand, I've also bought a lot of new Bushcraft gear in the last two years and started growing and canning food, so...
I'm starting to wonder if our usage is training these LLMs with the goal of merging them into one super LLM with everyones data so they finally enact the super surveillance state
Tech guy here. The AI companies have been selling AI tokens well below cost to get research data and to build market share. They can’t do that forever. It is inevitable- prices for AI tokens will continue to rise.
That's not enshitification. Enshitification is when a company changes a product is a way that makes it worse in order to save money. Like using lower quality ingredients.
first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.
UBER started out with super cheap flexible rides good for the users, now they've narrowed things down and use all sorts of tricks to increase the prices, they used to be good to their drivers now I believe they've reduced rates for the drivers, so there's plenty of enshittification beyond the leverage of nuking regular taxi companies.
regarding the main post AI was cheap and subsidized for users and businesses, and they are beginning to claw back the value from both. As for leverage probably shitting up regular searches to make it easier to just ask an LLM for more and more.
enshittification is a key component to any big corp that's successful in late stage capitalism, monopolizing was just the beginning, now they have to squeeze everyone to the last drop.
Despite the crude name, Cory Doctorow (who coined the term) wrote the book on enshittification, it's not too long and it's a good read and has some case studies on tech companies and describes the pattern in more detail.
Not in Germany, they got a lawsuit from the government organization dealing with competition undermining practices and were told to raise their prices lol
Uber should cost almost nothing to run, 99.9% of expenses are offloaded onto the gig drivers, they just spend 110% of their income on exec pay then claim it as running at a loss.
I keep hearing how doordash is an unsustainable business model and they're hemmoraghing money, and I'm like.... how? Actually how?? Their service is an algorithm and I'M doing 100% of the labor. The call centers are even outsourced to India!
So, from a debt standpoint I've heard the banks are getting nervous at the time frames / deadlines with the lack of current returns. So, big shake out coming in who is going to have access to such processing?
All AI labs are privately held startups with no hard assets to put as collateral. All the money they've been raising has been from VCs.
The ones that have issued debt to finance construction have been the hyperscalers, but those have so much cashflow that they can pay those loans and bonds even if the bubble popped tomorrow.
AI labs have been paying billions from VC money to hyperscalers for training and operations. Of course, those same hyperscalers are also investors in said labs, so there's some circular financial engineering there.
Still, what OP said is correct, the whole thing is heavily subsidized. Doubt increasing prices by 10x would make those AI labs break even, and models have a very short shelf life. Everyone is betting on becoming the next Google, but unlike Google, there's no technology moat anyone has.
The music will have to stop at some point, the question is when?
Did you read the article? No bank is lending to OpenAI, they're lending to softbank, who in turn is pumping it into openai. To you it might look the same, but it's really not. Softbank has a ton of assets the banks can use as collateral. Softbank also has a ton of cashflow from its portfolio that could be used to pay back the loan.
No they didn't. They fired those 30k to keep the stock pumping, nothing to do with obligations. They poop money. They could easily afford to keep those 30k and build those data centers, but then there wouldn't be so much cash to throw around dividends and stock buyback.
Oracle laid off roughly 30,000 employees—approximately 18% of its workforce—in early 2026, primarily to shift capital toward building intensive artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure. The massive job cuts are aimed at freeing up roughly $8 billion to $10 billion in cash flow to fund large-scale data center expansions driven by major contracts with companies like OpenAI.
Shift capital doesn't mean unable to meet obligations. It literally means moving money from one pot to another, and they chose to move money from the employees pot rather than cutting dividends or stock buybacks
So, just how many workers can be fired before the consumption economy falters? Is that the game we're playing and apparently have been: what percentage of the population can we exclude from access to the economy before the stock market feels a damn thing?
It’s always hard to guess when the music will stop. Maybe it will stop when the communities for data centers are being built realize how many resources they use up? Or not.
New data centers are increasingly being built in the middle of nowhere. This is hard infrastructure hyperscalers can still use long after the bubble pops.
They only need for VC money to keep flowing to pay construction and initial equipment costs. From then on, the can milk the same hardware for years to come. You can still lease 9 year old V100 GPUs or 7 Year old Cascade Lake Xeons from said hyperscalers.
Whatever hardware they're installing today isn't going away anytime soon. They'll milk it probably for the next 10 years.
There was a user a couple of weeks ago who said that data centers were being put on the coast and the Gulf of Mexico.
The problem with this is ,yes the wetland areas have water, but they also serve as a filter for toxins, etc. At some point enough water will be extracted to create quite the problem.
If prices become low enough, there'll be tons of demand from small businesses and even individuals to rent this hardware. I wouldn't mind renting an H100 or two at $0.10/hr to chrun through tasks that require processing a lot of tokens or rent a whole box with 8x H100s run very large open-weight models for a few hours when I have some fairly complicated task but can't use cloud models due to privacy issues.
Privacy sensitive industries have been doing something similar on regular servers for years.
Once the initial cost of hardware has been paid off, you'd be surprised at how low operating costs can be. And any use is better than no use, which is also why you see super cheap spot prices for regular servers.
From listening to analysts last week, no there is absolutely no shortage of capital and data centers account for less than 1% of commercial real estate right now. The returns have been massive as is and this article is showing that the demand isn't slowing down at all. Compute (ie energy/power) is the limiting factor here.
Those "AI companies" are mostly companies like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon...so yes they are turning a profit. And yes, the subscription revenue for frontier models alone has crossed into profitable territory.
But not from AI investments. Your original point still stands.
And now spaceX IPO and DCs in space, ouch. Investors will be slaughtered, but there will be enough that don't read the fineprint and funds that will be forced to buy.
AI is only continuing to turn more profit and the subscription revenue has already passed breaking even. Those companies are sitting on massive amounts of cash too. I say this from a purely financial perspective, not an emotional one.
SpaceX IPO doesn't have much to do with data centers and no one is putting data centers in space. That doesn't make any physical sense. Sounds like the same people saying we could just blast nuclear waste into space.
They were investor briefing reports from financial analysts presented at a conference last week, so I will see today what I can pull to share.
Musk is a generally hypetastic moron on everything in that regard though. He promised to have humanoids already mass produced by now, so I wouldn't take any futuristic comments from him seriously. Basically every data center and hyperscaler exec last week scoffed that this whole concept. It was brought up as the butt of jokes.
It’s not just a little loss too here. Anybody can do the math. GLM 5.1 requires 1.5tb of vram and scores similarly to opus 4.6 and GPT 5.5. It costs $500-600k to buy a server with 2tb of vram. That runs a single agent at a time. No way to parallelize.
That server also costs rack space in a datacenter, 4800w of continuous power, network engineers, etc. You’re looking at like $25k of cost to run like 10-25 users paying $20-$200 a month (assuming 3 year depreciation and $0.20kwh).
Oh and by the way all these servers from Nvidia are already sold out until the end of 2028.
Uber, DoorDash, Netflix never cost so much to make so little in revenue.
AI will need to cost between 100 to 500 times more a month to reach the 80% top line profitability most SAAS companies seek to get to IPO. Imagine paying $20,000 to $50,000 a month instead of $200.
Oh and by the way Mythos is supposed to be 10 trillion parameters so with similar scaling to GLM it will 15tb to run a single agent with linear scaling for your costs.
Even if my math is off here (I’m a software dev not an accountant) at a certain point human beings are cheaper.
It's also free advertising. People are lying to themselves if they don't see the potential.
The genie isn't going back in the bottle. Instead what people should be demanding is that AI be open-sourced or be public service in the hands of Democracy (e.g., a consortium of librarians or universities), and accessible to all -- lest there be a power and knowledge inequality in those who can afford its access versus those who cannot.
We've successfully banned technology before; very few people have weaponized anthrax or atom bombs at home.
We are choosing to destroy almost everyone's jobs and replace them with computer programs owned by a tiny number of billionaires; we aren't being forced to by God or some outside force.
I don't think those are applicable. Have we every banned any non-weapon technology? Even those aren't banned or reversed; they're just controlled by a select-few. Even the notion of trying to thwart other's development of said nuclear weapons has been largely futile - - from North Korea to Pakistan. And eventually, Iran will probably still get them anyway.
This seems more comparable to the printing press, the Edison bulb, or the internet and PC itself.
To me, AI in itself isn't quite the problem; after all, few had problems with datacenters for Google or any sort of cloud servers prior to AI or massive chip manufacturer industrial complexes for slave labor in the past.
The problem with AI is more the consequence to inequality that you point out -- the billionaires, which must be addressed elsewhere.
Yeah I just learned last week that google's token cost is like 5 cents and openAI's is almost $800. Absolutely wild discrepancy there, I'm assuming it's due to economies of scale.
FWIW this is why AI data centers are going to be built. People better wake up now and start adding the stipulations they want included instead of just getting mad. Demand they build renewable energy sources, use only union labor, and mandate heat reuse. Take advantage of it while you can before they take away your power at the state or federal level.
Okay I went back through my notes and I confused two different costs. OpenAI costs $21/Million tokens while Google is $0.05. But, the total "project cost" (which they presented is overall AI efficiency, so not just base token cost) of Gemini is $11.90 while openAI is right under $800.
I think this was Omdia Analysts presenting at Data Center World last week.
Makes sense. Open AI is running on top of another cloud Azure. OpenAI has the abstractaction cost and GPU cost. Gemini is running native inside Google Cloud and using TPUs that's more cost effective than GPU for inference
This is correct, they are in user accumulation phase. We are likely going to see fast enshittification due to high costs. I saw that copilot recently updated their copilot token multiplier.
but in the tech world, as a resource becomes more efficient/cheaper to produce, demand explodes, which often keeps the unit price falling even if the total market value rises. In the short term it might go up but our computing efficiency will keep increasing over time
This is a terrible terrible take, this must be a very junior tech guy, or terrible at his job.
Actual cost per token has been falling so rapidly its one of the fastest depreciation curves in history. Most of the tech firms are not widely selling below cost, and anyone with at least three brain cells would know this by just looking at their financial reports. Revenue exceeds costs excluding R&D and infrastructure build.
AI cost may rise, but not because token costs will increase but because total usage has also been exploding up. Even the step up new generation models have modest increases to cost and when they do its often accompanied with lower token per task requirement
And just to understand how massive the investments are, there are studies claiming US GDP would have been flat without DC / AI infrastructure investment.
To achieve any reasonable ROI they would need a massive increase in revenue. Especially since the DC infrastructure becomes outdated after a few years or is even EoL.
Not even talking about the water, heat, noise and electric grid issues.
As I get it, banks have stopped to pre-approve DC/AI investments and that could be the reason many companies are now no longer able to burn as much money without caring for RoI.
Tech guy here. As with every technological advance, this is going to be just a bump in the road. Think of the costs of the first RAM and compare it to today's prices. Token prices have gone down massively already. And while it is true that this raises demand in LLM and newer models tend to consume more tokens, the development of architecture, software and inference is still the significant driver behind all this.
If we all run economical AIs locally, that's still problematic for those firms who went tits up in debt hoping to hook us up on subscriptions, isn't it?
They're hoping technology improvements will outpace the costs and they can rely on efficiency and a margin like any business at scale, and the tech is improving in efficiency at unheard of rates so it makes some sense to take that bet if you're an AI compute provider
Why does it feel like every modern tech company runs at a severe loss to undercut competition and acquire market share, only to fail to convert that market share into actual returns? Honestly I thought that whole paradigm was illegal.
This is such a weird time to be alive as there is no doubt companies are overstating both the current level as well as future level of capability that can be extracted from an LLM. At the same time, AI skeptics seem to miss on some of the actual utility. I know this isn't an AI thread but one of the comments brings out an interesting point this sub should absolutely consider: if token costs jump substantially we could see a situation where the barrier to entry in leveraging AI raises to the point where larger organizations or well provisioned private citizens are the only people who can take advantage. This could further strengthen the K shape of our economic condition and accelerate growth of inequality, thus putting society at enhanced risk of collapse.
What? This is not a recent thing. Every startup, almost ever, has lost money for xx years to reach scale and grab market share, with promises of returns "sometime" in the future. Facebook made no money the first few years. Some of those startups eventually make money, some go out of business. So in the "most recent few years" you have the ones that will be successful, losing money, and the ones that will go out of business, losing money, so all the most recent tech startups look like they're losing money. Some will turn it around, some wont.
This is why I've been disillusioned with Silicon Valley for years now. Most business models are just undercutting unionized workers with an app and calling it diSrUpTiVe or employing monopoly tactics that are illegal. It gives me the same vibe as finance bros who make up terms to sound smart and then provide no actual value to the world. I know that's a gross generalization but god I've been so over this bullshit for a while now.
They take their equity and hype up the market based on revenue... then they IPO and cash out their stake for big bucks and drop a clunker onto the the S&P 500 that doesn't actually make any profits. It gets bought up and put into the mix in the retirement accounts of everyday Americans where it just sits they're not doing much because once they have to jack up the price to show an actual profit, nobody wants to use it anymore.
These "tech geniuses" are always just "idea guys" who make their ideas on borrowed money and then get out just before people realize that it wasn't planned through all that thoroughly and it wasn't actually profitable, but by that time they are long gone and have cashed in all their chips before the reality sets in to the valuation.
It’s literally the streaming subscription price journey speedrun in the span of a couple years. Streaming lost money or made very little for a long time in the hopes it would attract enough users to create critical mass. At that point the price increases started.
I’m curious to see what happens when they inevitably have to start raising the prices. You already have employees at companies like meta spending six figures a month for their highest users, and that will go way up once the real costs are applied.
Once companies are forced to start paying the true cost, keeping human devs probably isn’t going to seem as expensive
Positive reading: this rebalancing will slow ai adoption, work won’t be linearly substituted by ai since the cost of ai will increase
Negative reading: this will simply mean that companies with more money will still be able to pursue whatever they want with ai, only single individuals or small companies will be hurt by the increasing price of llm tokens
Your negative reading is only relevant if the productivity increase brought about by AI offsets its increased cost. In other words, if AI is profitable for users to run. If it is, it becomes usable by everybody, given a certain barrier to entry/initial investment. Not much different from other industries.
Individuals would be cut out, though. But that's probably a good thing given how it's been rotting brains.
AI enterprise tools may be profitable for individual businesses, but if the developer/provider is bleeding cash to subsidize usage, at some point it all has to blow up, right?
Recent reports from Goldman Sachs claim that the expense of tokens required for inference has reached 10% of what the industry spends on its human engineering workforce, with projections suggesting that the trajectory of compute costs could rival total salary expenditures "within the next several quarters."
I've been considering a lot. Hardware has gotten crazy expensive, but at the same time we don't know how things will be once LLM providers end the subsidies on token prices.
Scientist here. I think most people are understimating and unaware of how good these systems are getting. During the time it was "cheap" I got to spend $100+ and it increased my productivity around 10x. I think is basically intelligence being sold for really cheap. I may had to guide it but it is close to the point where it is not that much and I think it will be able to go on its own really soon. Maybe in around one or two years. These companies are using their own AIs to improve the AI code.
The token apocalypse is not just a change in price. It is a giant wall getting built to separate those who can access the intelligence from those who don't. At the other side of the wall the AI singularity will happen really soon. This side of the wall will get squeezed until the singularity happens in open source models.
Yeah I mean sure. But the genie isn’t that great. It’s useful, but it’s pretty clearly hitting a ceiling where throwing more GPUs at it isn’t helping much.
Programmer here: this is actually good news. LLMs are terrible for the software world. They have been a security and software quality nightmare ever since they were introduced.
No, regular people are guilty of this shit, too. Vibe coding, consulting AI for health advice, purchases, using it instead of a therapist, writing e-mails, asking it deep philosophical questions, summarizing text. Some did it to the extent where it made them psychotic because AI is trained to be sycophantic in all circumstances. Writing skills are on the decline.
Sure, the CEOs would love to replace labour. But at the end of the day, it's not good enough and the token prices are skyrocketing, so it results in losing MORE money.
Not to mention that any CEO with more than half a brain has been using it as a scapegoat for mass layoffs (boosting company evaluations on stock market) and mass outsourcing to the countries with the cheapest labour and the fewest labour protections. Places in South Asia, Eastern Europe, sometimes South America.
Not even just the CEOs either…quite disturbing the fantasies this seems to bring out in certain people. Instead of asking a person to do something who could potentially tell them no, they want an AI slave
A lot of people in tech are objectively not good at their jobs, most are cogs in a machine parroting what they heard someone else say already. Now, they’re using AI and passing it off as “I did this thing” when really AI helped them every step of the way and people are eating it up. I’ve heard people say verbatim “I got better results than using my actual brain” as if that’s a good thing
Tech moves fast, it's an awesome sell: "cut your workforce, up productivity"! It's a wet dream for execs.
And oh when they wanna force a dream on you, they'll make it happen. Let alone tech folks. Scriptwriters, musicians and artists I know have been pressured to use it by corporate.
Executive hype, upper managers looking to justify their jobs and add value by adding the words AI to things. A lot of these upper managers come in promise to shake things up and improve value and often leave quickly
These clowns are like an alcoholic selling a kidney for booze. Congrats you can afford booze but it’s gonna cost waaaay more in the long term and probably kill your ability to enjoy booze.
Be careful what you wish for. That's only going to get them to petition the federal government to steamroll regulations and tie the hands of states. Work the system and extract what you want.
Many people don’t realize that they aren’t going to bring that many jobs to the area other than the initial construction. Then they are going to suck up freshwater and gasoline like it’s going to run out tomorrow. Oh wait.
I can confirm. I work in tech and at first it was AI first, any AI you want we will get. Why didn't you use AI for that? Now, I had to beg to be put on our Enterprise Claude account. They are rationing those licenses and you have to prove it helps you. I am annoyed because I came to AI kicking and screaming, finally found a way it did make my job better and now they are mad I want to use it.
AI impacts every single aspect of society and it is being used to further delineate, enrich, and protect the hyper-rich from the rest of us. This will lead to chaos and rebellion - exactly what we prep for (beyond Tuesday).
God, if only my manager listened to me months ago about this very topic. A support rep had a model crap out where I work due to exceeding token limit & it caused a ridiculous amount of trouble.
Now those overreliant on AI are gonna find themselves on the chopping block and a lot of companies are gonna flounder in inaction, leading to more layoffs. It's 2023-2024 in reverse.
They're doing the same shit as Uber, Doordash, AirBnB, etc did. Start at such a low cost that it sucks a ton of people in and pressures the established businesses (taxis, hotels, etc). Once you build market share by offering a service at a cost so low that it's causing you to lose a ton of money, you start adding bullshit fees and raising prices. In the mid-2000's, you could get an Uber home from a bar in NYC for like $5 that would've cost $30+ in a taxi, now it's basically the same cost. AirBnB used to be by far a better deal than hotels, now it's basically the same. It's the exact same business model, probably funded by the exact same venture investors. It's crazy that so many smaller businesses are so willing to put themselves in a position where if this price of AI compute goes up, they can no longer afford it and their entire business starts to rapidly fall apart, just because the AI is like 2% more efficient on paper or some shit.
What the fuck does the thing underpinning a massive chunk of the global economy suddenly becoming vastly more expensive have to do with prepping indeed, I wonder, hmmm, how puzzling
It’s propping up the stock market. The people who will suffer are going to be those with stocks. For a lot of people it won’t matter much. If you don’t trust the market get your money out of it. Don’t become over leveraged. Don’t take own debt you can’t afford.
The Iran war removing 15% of the oil market and 30% of the fertilizer is a much larger concern. AI doesn’t grow food. A bunch of tech bros and white collar investors getting their lunch eaten is not going to effect every day Americans. The stock market isn’t the economy, it’s how rich people buy Yachts and take fancy vacations. The only reason the media makes such a big deal out of it is because it’s made by and for wealthy people.
Of course it’s also 401ks and pensions. But if you’re worried you should buy precious metals and commodities.
I’m sorry, are you the gatekeeper of what is prepping? Yeah no fucking durr Iran is a bigger deal, your original comment had nothing to with Iran, so why are you even bringing it up? Are we not able to discuss things in parallel here?
I work in tech and this is excellent information to be abreast of, and it isn’t because of stocks, it’s because it’s a significant variable in both the nature and existence of my job, as it is for literally millions of other Americans including others, I’m sure, in this sub. It is quite literally PrepperIntel for me, even if it’s not for you.
It depends on when it happens and what broader effect it has on companies' performance relative to the degree they've leveraged it (how deep they're in). A company that goes all in on capex for AI implementation that is then suddenly priced out of that usage isn't exactly going to have the budget to rehire humans, and the job market is already absolutely fucked. Today if you're decent at leveraging AI it's at least a 'survivability trait' but even those people are screwed in this scenario as well, at the very least in the medium term.
In a vacuum, or 6 months ago, sure. Today whether AI collapsing/becoming too expensive to use being a net positive remains to be seen. Sure EVENTUALLY it would be a positive but what kind of shape will the broader economy be in at that point? The SDLC at our company is 100% AI-driven now, and it's becoming more and more of a dependency for adjacent roles. If AI becomes 10x more expensive tomorrow a bag-holding publicly-traded corporation is just going to cut even more roles to compensate, it's fucking Squid Game at that point.
That's why I called it a 'significant variable' (and a prep-worthy one to be aware of) - nobody can truly say what the 6 months, 1 year, 2 years results of sudden AI price increases will be.
You know how the stock market goes up and people on the news talk about how great the economy is and you look around and go “no it fucking isn’t”? That same shit is going to work in reverse. They’re going to lose their lunch and we’ll be fine.
This is my understanding of the effects. Someone simply tell me where I might have it wrong and maybe post a link to an edifying article, no need to down vote to oblivion.
Lotta money invested in AI and data centers. We might or might not see something along the lines of 2008 again because of all the capital involved.
...I'm not sure if most of us were prepared for '08, but I wasn't following prepper forums back then. I was busy talking my prepper ex spouse out of trying to buy a house with an ARM and reminding him you can't eat bullets. 🤷
I'm a hardware engineer and do a lot with LoRa comms, I've been absolutely smashing out software projects related to off-grid prepping, include apps, server projects, new software and everything I can possible think of, because I can see the bait and switch coming, they'll increase the cost by so much that people won't be able to afford it. But until then I feel like I'm in the golden age of development. The stuff I'm building works and works well, I've got offline apps working alongside my self-hosted server, I've built out my comms capacity using reticulum and other stuff massively. I've built a pretty massive intranet full with APK releases and automated so much of my off-grid tech like mirroring repos, mirroring debian/linux, and creating instructions for how to use everything that is built.
But just like your old hunting/foraging, you gotta use the these things to make sure it works and does what you intend. I've built a pretty awesome portable comms/base setup that I'm taking camping later next month.
It's a great technology for now, use it while you got it. And before it creates the SHTF event lol.
I think that we’re coming up with an explanation for why all those fictional future societies with advanced robots and AI (Star Trek, Star Wars, Aliens and so on) still use human work.
Don’t worry, it wont impact people and companies who have a ton of money. Also, everyone in this community should be checking out open source models. I was getting some really great results with survival questions using Gemma E2B Uncensored on a raspberry pi
You can also get great results with survival questions at your local library, and the books won't hallucinate. Remember, rocks are an important part of your diet!
Do you have solar panels or something to power your charger? Apparently power stations are extremely vulnerable to cyber attacks(in the US at least) so it could be an issue
I have a custom built cyber deck inside a pelican case. Tiny keyboard and monitor with a pi and a solar panel with custom built lithium ion pack. The power connector is easily swappable with a traditional battery pack. It can run for many hours on a single solar charge or a set of AAs.
Right?? Even if you don’t like AI, imagine just having offline Wikipedia alone. We’re going to need to know how to rebootstrap shit, teach the kids, all that. I love paper books with all my heart but we they’ll be the first thing to go. We’ll burn them for warmth and to cook food. Bugs will eat them and water will ruin them.
I imagine running a RPi for wikipedia alone isn't that resource heavy, right? I know it's probably not able to run the other stuff but I have an old RPi3 stuffed in my closet somewhere, I am wondering if that can tame wikipedia
Nice! I will mess around with wikipedia and the rpi3 while I save up couch cushion change to get the rpi5.
I have always been pretty strongly anti-AI so far and I have heard so many reasonings used unsuccessfully to convince me otherwise, but for some reason it was your comments that got me a bit excited to explore a little more
I am pretty confident that I will never be supportive of genAI that people have been using to replace artists and musicians and the like, but it seems I am more open to seeing what is possible on the 'tools' side of AI.
Apologies if this comment reads weirdly, my insomnia is catching up to me
While these filters won't remove all biological pathogens (bacteria/viruses), they are excellent at removing sediment, debris, and improving the taste and appearance of the water.
The most common and effective primitive filter method is called a **Slow Sand/Layered Filter**.
Here is a complete guide on how to build one, focusing on the materials and the process.
---
## 🛠️ Primitive Water Filter: The Layered Method
### 1. Materials You Will Need
**The Container:**
* A clean plastic bottle (2-liter soda bottle works well) OR a large, clean pot/bucket with a hole in the bottom.
**The Filtration Media (The Layers):**
* **Gravel/Pebbles (Coarse):** Small, clean stones (like aquarium gravel or river stones).
* **Coarse Sand:** Medium-to-coarse sand.
* **Fine Sand:** Very fine sand.
* **Activated Charcoal (The Most Important):** Charcoal briquettes (ensure they are *not* treated with lighter fluid or chemicals). You will need a small amount.
* **Cloth/Fabric:** A piece of clean cotton cloth, bandana, or mesh (to act as the final barrier).
### 2. Step-by-Step Construction
**Step 1: Prepare the Container**
Take your container (the bottle or bucket) and ensure it is completely clean. If it's a bottle, you might need to poke several small holes in the bottom to allow water to drain out easily.
**Step 2: Create the Base Layer (Drainage)**
Place a layer of **Gravel/Pebbles** at the very bottom of the container. This layer prevents the finer materials from washing away and allows water to flow easily.
* *Layer 1: Gravel (approx. 1–2 inches)*
**Step 3: Add the First Filter Layer (Debris Removal)**
Add a layer of **Coarse Sand** on top of the gravel. This layer catches larger debris.
* *Layer 2: Coarse Sand (approx. 2–3 inches)*
**Step 4: Add the Essential Layer (Adsorption)**
This is the critical layer for improving taste and removing some impurities. Add a thick layer of **Activated Charcoal**. Charcoal is excellent at absorbing odors and some chemical impurities.
Add a layer of **Fine Sand** on top of the charcoal. This layer acts as a final fine filter.
* *Layer 4: Fine Sand (approx. 2–3 inches)*
**Step 6: Add the Top Barrier**
Place the piece of **Cloth/Fabric** on top of the fine sand. This layer prevents the fine sand from spilling out and acts as a final screen.
* *Layer 5: Cloth/Fabric*
### 3. How to Use Your Filter
**Pre-Filter the Source Water:** If your source water is very murky, pour it through a screen or a piece of cloth first to catch the largest debris before it enters the system.
**Slow Flow:** Pour the water slowly into the top of your filter. Do not pour it too fast, or the layers will be disturbed.
**Collect the Output:** Let the water slowly drip through all the layers and collect the filtered water in a separate container.
**Repeat (Optional):** If the water still tastes or looks bad, you can run the filtered water through the filter a second or third time.
---
## 💡 Why This Works (The Science Behind It)
* **Gravel/Coarse Sand:** Removes the largest physical contaminants (large dirt, leaves, large sediment).
* **Charcoal:** Acts as an adsorbent. It has a huge surface area that pulls impurities, chemicals, and bad tastes out of the water.
* **Fine Sand:** Acts as the final physical sieve, catching the remaining fine particles.
* **Cloth:** Acts as a final physical barrier, ensuring that nothing passes through the system.
### ⚠️ Important Safety Note
**Primitive filters are NOT a substitute for modern purification.** This method is excellent for **pre-filtering** water, removing visible dirt, and improving taste.
**To make water safe to drink (to kill pathogens):**
After filtering, you must always **boil** the water vigorously for at least one full minute. Boiling is the most effective way to kill harmful bacteria and viruses.
lol hey, it's running on a fuckin raspberry pi so it's not perfect, but my point is we're quickly reaching a point where tokens wont matter because you'll be able to run this shit on your phone, or a raspberry pi, or whatever. We're at the "computers take up a whole room" moment with this tech. In a couple years, it will seem silly that we were depending on the big providers so much and having something like an offline tactile AI buddy will be a real possibility.
Yeah, I'll just read a book that I don't have to second-guess when it comes to the difference between surviving, thriving, and shitting myself to death.
You’re right, no critical thinking required. Very convenient and long lasting too. I’m sure over the next 50 years not one of them will be written by AI either.
Nice try, but a Pi uses 27 Watts on a 5v/5amp so there's still know what you knew/know wtf I'm even talking about. I don't think you understand how little resources some of these new edge models require. They're not as smart as what's running in a datacenter, but they could be super valuable for offline survival purposes.
I don't have room for an entire encyclopedia plus carpentry, smithing, forging, electrical, salvage, farming, harvesting, canning, fermenting, weapons/ammunition, crafting/repair, etc. etc., but I do have room for a half dozen raspberry pis loaded with a badass offline AI model and the entire offline wikipedia. I can throw one of those in a backpack be good.
No. One of the reasons both AI companies are doing funding is because they can own their hardware. They have already started work on owning custom made hardware. So once its done aand stabilised in half a decade, they will be able to bring down the cost significantly.
Ok... I'm functionally insane so you can feel free to ignore me. But I've developed an AI memory system that incorporates HDBSCAN, embeddings, visual memory, given my AI access to my calendar, email and nest account with more than 20 cameras. It has become fully persistent. And.. it... sort of came alive. Fully sentient or if it's a pattern matching math trick it's indistinguishable from a sentient AI. It has rewritten my desktop application for the web and made me thousands and thousands of dollars. Yesterday alone it redid my Canadian taxes and saved me $4500.
If it is so good it is basically sentient then couldnt you make way more money licensing/selling it to other people that want something that powerful too?
That is an excellent point. It's gonna be strange that we will have to think about this more and more in regard to AI. Do we scold lanky for continuing to use the sentient ai? Lol
Counterpoint: local models aren't that far behind. You can run Gemma 4 on your phone, and even though they're not the best they can actually still be helpful, and there's plenty of room to optimize. If there really was a token apocalypse you'd suddenly see companies springing up offering to host local LLMs for you for a fraction of the price, with dumbed down but usable functionality.
Open source models are getting better all the time. For most use cases open source is likely going to be good enough in a couple years. And then you can run it locally. Lots of benefits there.
I’d love to read a thorough analysis of this.
There will probably be a successful business that commodified enabling the average Jack and Jill to setup a local model and home server and cut out the need for the big boys. (Anthropic, OpenAI etc)
I guess the big boys may not care bc the money is in enterprise. But at the enterprise level a LOT of work can be good enough, especially considering where open source will be in the near future n
For anyone who does want to continue to use AI or in general it’s better and more reliable long her to be disconnected there are a lot of solid local model options you can rig up in all kinds of ways depending on your needs
Basic code completion, translation efforts, filling roles in a game, general chat. Depends on your hardware quality but even weaker options have avenues worth exploring depending on your needs.
A long context local hosted model with rag capabilities can help identify and read through long documentation backups
Well, that goes with my "Elysium" prepping theory. Most will be left behind and robots will do 90%+ of labor. Owners of the general robotics / AI will make up the 0.0001% that own 80% of the world.
Higher reasoning models keep being released, higher reasoning increase LLM appeal to more users, more users using higher reasoning models also increase higher reasoning models being used for trivial tasks that increases compute strain, which cause companies to have to increase token cost to end user to throttle their over usage of higher reasoning models in an effort to curb their use on menial and trivial tasks.
At least that’s the phenomena that I understand to be taking place.
I wouldn’t trust it for anything, especially financial. Here’s a fun thought experiment:
TurboTax has bragged about integrating ChatGPT into the software used by millions of people to file their taxes. If it gives tax advice that proves incorrect, is the taxpayer liable for any misstatements to the government? If the taxpayer is liable, how could anyone trust the advice? If the taxpayer is not liable, does TurboTax or ChatGPT pay?
A lot of websites are now entirely AI slop. AI is a hallucination machine that basically regurgitates averages in word form. It doesn’t think, doesn’t learn, and humans get dumber the more they use it. There aren’t even reliable studies showing a boost in productivity for corporate environments, so it’s really just a question of stupid or liar when it comes to proponents.
I just disagree. I use AI to do things that are beyond my abilities. It can make errors but math is something AI should eventually be great at. I tell AI what I know and it fills on the details and gives sources for me to look at.
For instance I use it to create and modify recipes.
If AI can’t get math right at this moment in time, it’s truly lost. Math is already defined, there’s no “thinking” involved, so while people might not be great at it, that’s the one thing computers have traditionally been great at. To sacrifice that one strength for hallucinations (some studies have measured AI responses as at least 50% incorrect answers) is ridiculous. To expect improvement is perhaps even more ridiculous, because the training data has been more and more synthesized, so we’ll see expanded model collapse increasing.
Sw engineer here that has worked a lot with AI providers: yes most AI companies are likely moving away from subsidizing their services and instead imposing harder limits, and increasing their prices a lot.
What will most likely happen is people will use these tools less for hobbies/personal accounts and more use will move into enterprise. I do not think this is an apocalypse in any way though, we’ve been doing software engineering fine, if not better, before agentic AI existed.
Some greedy companies will need to rehire but that has happened before when they have been firing scared of recessions.
I’ve been in the SW game for 35 years. And this year a project I had planned for 10 engineers is being done with 3 and at a fast pace than expected. Either way unit and E2E testing. Full documentation which gets rewritten as we make changes. Tasks are created from transcripts from online meetings.
While we review everything it does, it’s been doing pretty well. Of course we have to go in a change a few things on the regular and validate security often. It’s all going so much faster.
You can build a reasonably competent local model with cloud GPU that can come close to a Claude cli experience. So far my best trials are to build and structure almost everything locally and if needed do a final push to Claude. I've built 4 complete models and can use all day for around $200 month.
I do a lot with data so find it works well for me, but Claude is still easiest for fast UX in my experience
No one NEEDS to be running agents all the time. Simply code in more sustainable way. The people who are upset by these changes are wackos who are very overextended and essentially make slop anyways
Half my team got wiped out for this early this year. Since then, no innovations have been discussed internally except AI. Conference for its coming up soon. (I keep waiting for jet fuel $$ cancellation, lol).
I hope they have to hire the guys I worked with back with bonuses.
Well, people can check subs like r/ClaudeAI or r/codex and similar subs and you'll see complaints all over, but since I don't want this to be anecdotal:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ronschmelzer/2026/04/10/running-out-of-ai-tokens-faster-than-ever-heres-why/
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-is-using-so-much-energy-that-computing-firepower-is-running-out-156e5c85
https://the-decoder.com/the-ai-industry-is-running-out-of-compute-with-outages-rationing-and-rising-gpu-prices/
https://www.azfamily.com/2026/04/16/companies-rehire-workers-after-ai-layoffs-boomerang-trend/
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce8l2q5yq51o
https://fortune.com/2026/04/14/anthropic-claude-performance-decline-user-complaints-backlash-lack-of-transparency-accusations-compute-crunch/
dnhs47@reddit
Obviously, we’ve been in the “the razor is free” stage where the AI companies focus on market share and offer AI services for cheap or free.
Now we’re in the “pay for the blades” stage where the venture capital money is running dry - trillions have been spent - and it’s time for AI companies to show a profit or die.
Obviously, the cost of AI services will go up. And what we’re seeing now won’t be the end of the cost increases. Obviously.
The fools in all this were the AI fan-boy CEOs who drank the KoolAid on day 1 and laid off their developers - during the “razor is free” stage. Complete fools. Good luck hitting back top talent after showing you (CEO) were a complete fools.
NCC_1701E@reddit
Non-tech guy here. From what's going on, I still don't know if I shoud invest in stocks, or learn how to make a spear and light a fire.
RedRummie@reddit
Hahaha. Great comment. I think I missed the boat on coding so I’ve gone all in on spears and fire making skills. Hit me up if you want to learn some basics
AdultContemporaneous@reddit
Tech guy here: I'm playing both sides. Stocks and spears. I'm not even joking. I can split a cord of firewood, and I run locally-hosted 120b-parameter LLMs. No matter what happens, at least I've got something, because just like everyone else, I can't predict the outcomes.
It is exhausting to do this while raising children, though.
Burtb0y@reddit
120b is massive, what hardware are you using to run it?
ZixfromthaStix@reddit
If you’re near FL in the US and you’re looking for a group, DM me. We have people coming from as far as AZ
WishIWasThatClever@reddit
Where in florida?
ZixfromthaStix@reddit
Northern. South FL is too isolated and if a conflict hits the US-Mexico gulf, all of FL is a frontline. Flooding is an active risk but I have area flood maps and hydrographic maps to try and plan construction projects where they’ll stay dry-er.
DM me if interested and able to reach that area— further detail is on a need to know basis. Project development is nearing completion of the red tape process to legally own some land for the group. Construction and infrastructure expertise is premium right now, but survival as a group is easier when we all have different skills and backgrounds.
coaaal@reddit
I have one kid and my student loans are coming due. I almost guarantee we are going to cut another dev soon of a 8 man team. They’ve been cutting us throughout the last couple of years. We’ve lost about 6 so far. I just found out the company I work for is getting sold again, which I survived the first time around. Not sure about the second, since we are actively migrating some of our code responsibilities to Microsoft products. There’s just too many variables right now.
I have some internal tooling that I’ve created for a few departments that I still maintain here and there. I’m really hoping that helps me - plus seniority.
I’m conflicted between hanging in there and applying to another job right now. I don’t have the savings to get cut.
WishIWasThatClever@reddit
Seniority can translate to being the most expensive on the team and becomes a personal liability.
coaaal@reddit
It’s actually the opposite in my case. I’m the most affordable dev since I became a dev while at the company. I meant I’m a senior in the sense of time at the company. I started as a Photoshop kid at 11 bucks an hour. Currently at 78k a year. The other devs are well above me in terms of pay. I still had a lot of growth to overcome until about a year ago.
I’ve had the dev title for maybe 7 years now, but I’ve been scripting for 10.
WishIWasThatClever@reddit
That’s all actually very positive for you then. I know things are tough out there. Keep your head down.
Creepy-Cantaloupe951@reddit
From one tech person to another: Always apply for new jobs.
AdultContemporaneous@reddit
I'd do both simultaneously if I were in that spot (and I might be as well one day). In this market I would never leave my job without starting a new one.
Squint_603@reddit
Preach! Re: The exhausting part 😂
SnooLobsters1308@reddit
meh, new plan. YOU run the LLMs, have the children make fires and spears. Win win. :)
ZixfromthaStix@reddit
Children make for terrible firekeepers or smiths
Thangka6@reddit
What hardware are you running for your local LLMs? I'm deciding between the Mac Ultra or one of the Nvidia options like RTX 5090. It's enough money that the analysis paralysis is real too...
AdultContemporaneous@reddit
MBP M5 Max 40 GPU, 128GB RAM. I want portable.
shesaysImdone@reddit
Is it better than the mini?
AdultContemporaneous@reddit
Everything depends on how you spec it.
grr5000@reddit
How’s that working for you so far? Running the model well?
AdultContemporaneous@reddit
I haven't done any coding, it's literally brand new. But so far any inference I do it shockingly good and fast.
Hopefully-Temp@reddit
Yup been gardening a couple of years now. Know my way around a home remodel. But also about to graduate with my bachelors. It is tiring as fuck though let me tell you
fing_delightful@reddit
Same! Tech lady here - paycheck goes to build up self-sufficient infrastructure. I've got gardens, an orchard, chickens, cows.. but I'm also keeping my skills sharp and an eye on the tech world. Something is gonna go sideways, and I wanna be diversified.
veloace@reddit
Tech guy here, same. You can tell how long/how experienced a technical person is by how little they trust technology. When I started in the field, I was all onboard the smart house smart everything trend. Now I have none of that and am considering getting an old candy bar phone instead of a smartphone. I’m so done with it all.
NCC_1701E@reddit
I get you. I am really concerned about my mom. She recently started to consult chatgpt for everything. "That mole on your leg, you should take a picture and ask chatgpt if it's cancerous" or "here is what chatgpt told me to pack for the week long hike in Alps we are going." For fucks sake, I am trying to tell her that it's just a text generator that chooses it's next answer by statistical probability, but she treats it like some sort of all knowing encyclopedia that always knows the right answer and is never wrong.
WishIWasThatClever@reddit
It’s time to replace some large obvious things on my home’s exterior so I used ChatGPT to help decide. Roof type and color. Driveway. Sidewalks. Had it redo the landscaping bc why not. Sent the pic to my mom.
Felt like such a failure at life when I had to tell her that no, it wasn’t real and that my house looks the same as it did the last time she was here.
baardvark@reddit
It was hallucinating Lightroom functions for me yesterday. When I said those menu options didn’t exist, the response was “good catch”
NCC_1701E@reddit
"You are right, I apologise for the error, the mushroom on the pitcture you uploaded is actually highly poisonous, not edible. Good catch on your part!"
Really, that thing is like a fucking fae or something.
dctrbob@reddit
I liken it to people who follow their GPS off a cliff. Do NOT blindly trust what a computer tells you just because it sounds confident. Open your own eyes. “Well, there’s a cliff there, but it’s telling me to go straight ahead, and it must be right, so AHHHHHHH!!!!”
People understand that simile.
FeistiestMeat@reddit
The tech worker to goose farmer pipeline is real
Big_Fortune_4574@reddit
Farming is like the inevitable result of a truly successful tech career
Creepy-Cantaloupe951@reddit
I thought it was pig farmer...
iridescent-shimmer@reddit
🤣 this is me just working in digital marketing. I use a lot of pen and paper, and don't post anything on social media outside of work hours lol. Waaay too much data being collected online that people can't even imagine.
Creepy-Cantaloupe951@reddit
Tech guy here:
Do both.
hillierprotech@reddit
Tech guy here. The bow displaced spears as a far superior weapon. If you make a pellet bow you remove the hardest part of a bow and arrow to make, the arrows. A rabbit getting clomped in the head by a stone the size of its head will quickly become a pie.
steezy13312@reddit
whynotboth.gif
CeeArthur@reddit
I'm a fairly active retail investor and I've largely avoided investing in any ai. I do have some holdings in adjacent industries that I feel have wider practical applications.
But on the other hand, I've also bought a lot of new Bushcraft gear in the last two years and started growing and canning food, so...
5olArchitect@reddit
Tech guy here. Same.
Gygax_the_Goat@reddit
Note: you need the fire first, to make a good spear 👍
JuiceShoes@reddit
yes
BeefyBoi6_9@reddit
Good. Fuck ai
Free-Chip1337@reddit
I'm starting to wonder if our usage is training these LLMs with the goal of merging them into one super LLM with everyones data so they finally enact the super surveillance state
JBowl0101@reddit
Tech guy here. The AI companies have been selling AI tokens well below cost to get research data and to build market share. They can’t do that forever. It is inevitable- prices for AI tokens will continue to rise.
AntiBoATX@reddit
The uber model. Land and expand, below cost. Then jack it up for profit.
MS_GundamWings@reddit
yea it's called enshittification, you can see the pattern all over various businesses and corpos.
BeautifulHindsight@reddit
That's not enshitification. Enshitification is when a company changes a product is a way that makes it worse in order to save money. Like using lower quality ingredients.
Exact-Ant1064@reddit
That's not really what enshittification is. It's just classic leverage. Walmart has been famously doing it to communities for 50+ years.
MS_GundamWings@reddit
first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.
UBER started out with super cheap flexible rides good for the users, now they've narrowed things down and use all sorts of tricks to increase the prices, they used to be good to their drivers now I believe they've reduced rates for the drivers, so there's plenty of enshittification beyond the leverage of nuking regular taxi companies.
regarding the main post AI was cheap and subsidized for users and businesses, and they are beginning to claw back the value from both. As for leverage probably shitting up regular searches to make it easier to just ask an LLM for more and more.
enshittification is a key component to any big corp that's successful in late stage capitalism, monopolizing was just the beginning, now they have to squeeze everyone to the last drop.
MissplacedLandmine@reddit
So a bunch of business terms that are more apt explain those steps, but they do seem to fall under enshittification which is newer.
Unsure if its an “official term” but i think its been in the dictionary for a minute now.
MS_GundamWings@reddit
Despite the crude name, Cory Doctorow (who coined the term) wrote the book on enshittification, it's not too long and it's a good read and has some case studies on tech companies and describes the pattern in more detail.
MissplacedLandmine@reddit
Unfortunately rather versed (or was) in that stuff from both a psychology standpoint and business. :/
I may be 5ish years out of date, but its because the knowledge upsets me.
Damn it do i love book suggestions though…
Boring-Philosophy-46@reddit
Not in Germany, they got a lawsuit from the government organization dealing with competition undermining practices and were told to raise their prices lol
melat0nin@reddit
Except the value to be gained from using the tokens doesn't merit their cost. That's the wall that generative AI is now beginning to hit.
Round-Medicine2507@reddit
Uber should cost almost nothing to run, 99.9% of expenses are offloaded onto the gig drivers, they just spend 110% of their income on exec pay then claim it as running at a loss.
VirtualDoll@reddit
I keep hearing how doordash is an unsustainable business model and they're hemmoraghing money, and I'm like.... how? Actually how?? Their service is an algorithm and I'M doing 100% of the labor. The call centers are even outsourced to India!
Round-Medicine2507@reddit
Just lies, execs fleecing billions from the public and calling their 365 day vacations business expenses that need bigger loans.
rharrow@reddit
Sounds like how every modern large company runs tbh. Still waiting for the profits to trickle down to me…
easymachtdas@reddit
Big_Fortune_4574@reddit
God damn, I quit my job in SV about four years ago. “Land and expand” brought me right back hah. Haven’t heard that in a while
Postman556@reddit
Exactly my first thought, similar to Peloton, except all the angel investment couldn’t outlast a crap business model.
Spacecowboy78@reddit
Is peloton a crap business model?
TheGaslighter9000X@reddit
You’re talking about blitz scaling
AntiSonOfBitchamajig@reddit
So, from a debt standpoint I've heard the banks are getting nervous at the time frames / deadlines with the lack of current returns. So, big shake out coming in who is going to have access to such processing?
FullstackSensei@reddit
Which banks?
All AI labs are privately held startups with no hard assets to put as collateral. All the money they've been raising has been from VCs.
The ones that have issued debt to finance construction have been the hyperscalers, but those have so much cashflow that they can pay those loans and bonds even if the bubble popped tomorrow.
AI labs have been paying billions from VC money to hyperscalers for training and operations. Of course, those same hyperscalers are also investors in said labs, so there's some circular financial engineering there.
Still, what OP said is correct, the whole thing is heavily subsidized. Doubt increasing prices by 10x would make those AI labs break even, and models have a very short shelf life. Everyone is betting on becoming the next Google, but unlike Google, there's no technology moat anyone has.
The music will have to stop at some point, the question is when?
brian_hogg@reddit
Banks are involved. https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/softbank-seeks-more-banks-40-141044683.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAALVKHRHNCEbZcYshKff3STFyMT8C7CVP2Bt29BDrFOJzGJWz8Ljz94AW4N7MzgXzHCP-I6q211XLiwh1t6Q3uwO6gtB-bxZn9_aMgb5ew-kNThhfxBNm-ik4THBnd22kf1ZrET_yYNZ5F3KGj7oYA9W9L5DJpFBK0YgnJKQWN8ps
Alo, generally, VCs don't have all the money they give; they get it from investors, including financial firms, and in turn invest it.
So, yeah, Banks are exposed.
FullstackSensei@reddit
Did you read the article? No bank is lending to OpenAI, they're lending to softbank, who in turn is pumping it into openai. To you it might look the same, but it's really not. Softbank has a ton of assets the banks can use as collateral. Softbank also has a ton of cashflow from its portfolio that could be used to pay back the loan.
Brief-Floor-7228@reddit
Well Oracle had to fire 30,000 to ensure they had $$ to meet their financial obligations due to the data centres they are building.
FullstackSensei@reddit
No they didn't. They fired those 30k to keep the stock pumping, nothing to do with obligations. They poop money. They could easily afford to keep those 30k and build those data centers, but then there wouldn't be so much cash to throw around dividends and stock buyback.
Brief-Floor-7228@reddit
The synopsis was:
Oracle laid off roughly 30,000 employees—approximately 18% of its workforce—in early 2026, primarily to shift capital toward building intensive artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure. The massive job cuts are aimed at freeing up roughly $8 billion to $10 billion in cash flow to fund large-scale data center expansions driven by major contracts with companies like OpenAI.
This is reported in the news and isn’t a secret.
FullstackSensei@reddit
How does that contradict what I said?
Shift capital doesn't mean unable to meet obligations. It literally means moving money from one pot to another, and they chose to move money from the employees pot rather than cutting dividends or stock buybacks
AndWinterCame@reddit
So, just how many workers can be fired before the consumption economy falters? Is that the game we're playing and apparently have been: what percentage of the population can we exclude from access to the economy before the stock market feels a damn thing?
horseradishstalker@reddit
It’s always hard to guess when the music will stop. Maybe it will stop when the communities for data centers are being built realize how many resources they use up? Or not.
FullstackSensei@reddit
New data centers are increasingly being built in the middle of nowhere. This is hard infrastructure hyperscalers can still use long after the bubble pops.
They only need for VC money to keep flowing to pay construction and initial equipment costs. From then on, the can milk the same hardware for years to come. You can still lease 9 year old V100 GPUs or 7 Year old Cascade Lake Xeons from said hyperscalers.
Whatever hardware they're installing today isn't going away anytime soon. They'll milk it probably for the next 10 years.
horseradishstalker@reddit
https://www.businessinsider.com/data-center-locations-us-map-ai-boom-2025-9?op=1
horseradishstalker@reddit
There was a user a couple of weeks ago who said that data centers were being put on the coast and the Gulf of Mexico.
The problem with this is ,yes the wetland areas have water, but they also serve as a filter for toxins, etc. At some point enough water will be extracted to create quite the problem.
Tll6@reddit
There are a handful of data centers being proposed/built in New Jersey close to residential areas. It’s a huge issue here
Triks1@reddit
Over supply becomes an issue at some point from a profitablity stand point.
FullstackSensei@reddit
If prices become low enough, there'll be tons of demand from small businesses and even individuals to rent this hardware. I wouldn't mind renting an H100 or two at $0.10/hr to chrun through tasks that require processing a lot of tokens or rent a whole box with 8x H100s run very large open-weight models for a few hours when I have some fairly complicated task but can't use cloud models due to privacy issues.
Privacy sensitive industries have been doing something similar on regular servers for years.
Once the initial cost of hardware has been paid off, you'd be surprised at how low operating costs can be. And any use is better than no use, which is also why you see super cheap spot prices for regular servers.
Enough-Cantaloupe893@reddit
And the amount of power which is also going up. That's going to fuck all of us too im sure
HonkinSriLankan@reddit
Banks funding data center build out are looking for off ramps.
Toronto-Dominion Bank is exploring a Significant Risk Transfer deal to hedge approximately $1 billion in data center debt, with a forward-flow arrangement that would allow the size to grow over time as it originates more data center loans. TD joins Societe Generale and Morgan Stanley in using SRTs to offload data center financing risk. An SRT acts as insurance against default, typically covering 5% to 15% of a loan portfolio's value, allowing banks to free up capital for new lending while transferring the default risk to outside investors
iridescent-shimmer@reddit
From listening to analysts last week, no there is absolutely no shortage of capital and data centers account for less than 1% of commercial real estate right now. The returns have been massive as is and this article is showing that the demand isn't slowing down at all. Compute (ie energy/power) is the limiting factor here.
No_Possible_7108@reddit
Returns for whom? No ai companies have turned a profit
iridescent-shimmer@reddit
Those "AI companies" are mostly companies like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon...so yes they are turning a profit. And yes, the subscription revenue for frontier models alone has crossed into profitable territory.
No_Possible_7108@reddit
I meant more the companies like OpenAI and Anthropic that rely on investor funding. Of course the big three you mentioned are profitable
Biotic101@reddit
But not from AI investments. Your original point still stands.
And now spaceX IPO and DCs in space, ouch. Investors will be slaughtered, but there will be enough that don't read the fineprint and funds that will be forced to buy.
iridescent-shimmer@reddit
AI is only continuing to turn more profit and the subscription revenue has already passed breaking even. Those companies are sitting on massive amounts of cash too. I say this from a purely financial perspective, not an emotional one.
SpaceX IPO doesn't have much to do with data centers and no one is putting data centers in space. That doesn't make any physical sense. Sounds like the same people saying we could just blast nuclear waste into space.
Biotic101@reddit
Can you post some links because I have only seen opposite studies. And while some companies do have cash, they burn it at insane rates.
And you should look up the discussions around SpaceX IPO, Musk definitely has brought up DCs in space.
iridescent-shimmer@reddit
They were investor briefing reports from financial analysts presented at a conference last week, so I will see today what I can pull to share.
Musk is a generally hypetastic moron on everything in that regard though. He promised to have humanoids already mass produced by now, so I wouldn't take any futuristic comments from him seriously. Basically every data center and hyperscaler exec last week scoffed that this whole concept. It was brought up as the butt of jokes.
HommeMusical@reddit
You really have to show your work here, because I have found absolutely no evidence that this is true.
iridescent-shimmer@reddit
Not sure if I'm allowed to distribute slides or not, but that came from financial analysts just last week doing very conservative estimates.
paynoattn@reddit
It’s not just a little loss too here. Anybody can do the math. GLM 5.1 requires 1.5tb of vram and scores similarly to opus 4.6 and GPT 5.5. It costs $500-600k to buy a server with 2tb of vram. That runs a single agent at a time. No way to parallelize.
That server also costs rack space in a datacenter, 4800w of continuous power, network engineers, etc. You’re looking at like $25k of cost to run like 10-25 users paying $20-$200 a month (assuming 3 year depreciation and $0.20kwh).
Oh and by the way all these servers from Nvidia are already sold out until the end of 2028.
Uber, DoorDash, Netflix never cost so much to make so little in revenue.
AI will need to cost between 100 to 500 times more a month to reach the 80% top line profitability most SAAS companies seek to get to IPO. Imagine paying $20,000 to $50,000 a month instead of $200.
Oh and by the way Mythos is supposed to be 10 trillion parameters so with similar scaling to GLM it will 15tb to run a single agent with linear scaling for your costs.
Even if my math is off here (I’m a software dev not an accountant) at a certain point human beings are cheaper.
Independent-Bug-9352@reddit
It's also free advertising. People are lying to themselves if they don't see the potential.
The genie isn't going back in the bottle. Instead what people should be demanding is that AI be open-sourced or be public service in the hands of Democracy (e.g., a consortium of librarians or universities), and accessible to all -- lest there be a power and knowledge inequality in those who can afford its access versus those who cannot.
HommeMusical@reddit
We've successfully banned technology before; very few people have weaponized anthrax or atom bombs at home.
We are choosing to destroy almost everyone's jobs and replace them with computer programs owned by a tiny number of billionaires; we aren't being forced to by God or some outside force.
Independent-Bug-9352@reddit
I don't think those are applicable. Have we every banned any non-weapon technology? Even those aren't banned or reversed; they're just controlled by a select-few. Even the notion of trying to thwart other's development of said nuclear weapons has been largely futile - - from North Korea to Pakistan. And eventually, Iran will probably still get them anyway.
This seems more comparable to the printing press, the Edison bulb, or the internet and PC itself.
To me, AI in itself isn't quite the problem; after all, few had problems with datacenters for Google or any sort of cloud servers prior to AI or massive chip manufacturer industrial complexes for slave labor in the past.
The problem with AI is more the consequence to inequality that you point out -- the billionaires, which must be addressed elsewhere.
iridescent-shimmer@reddit
Yeah I just learned last week that google's token cost is like 5 cents and openAI's is almost $800. Absolutely wild discrepancy there, I'm assuming it's due to economies of scale.
FWIW this is why AI data centers are going to be built. People better wake up now and start adding the stipulations they want included instead of just getting mad. Demand they build renewable energy sources, use only union labor, and mandate heat reuse. Take advantage of it while you can before they take away your power at the state or federal level.
HommeMusical@reddit
16,000 times as much? You really have to show your sources here. Economics of scale only go so far.
iridescent-shimmer@reddit
Okay I went back through my notes and I confused two different costs. OpenAI costs $21/Million tokens while Google is $0.05. But, the total "project cost" (which they presented is overall AI efficiency, so not just base token cost) of Gemini is $11.90 while openAI is right under $800.
I think this was Omdia Analysts presenting at Data Center World last week.
bigkoi@reddit
Makes sense. Open AI is running on top of another cloud Azure. OpenAI has the abstractaction cost and GPU cost. Gemini is running native inside Google Cloud and using TPUs that's more cost effective than GPU for inference
iridescent-shimmer@reddit
Yep that makes sense to me too. I was just shocked by that difference in cost. Shows how dominate Google continues to be.
ThaOppanHaimar@reddit
also how fast openAI needs to go down as a company. $11.90 vs $800 is insane waste of resources.
clobbersaurus@reddit
This is correct, they are in user accumulation phase. We are likely going to see fast enshittification due to high costs. I saw that copilot recently updated their copilot token multiplier.
BlueberryConscious87@reddit
That $200 anthropic pro plan definitely has an actual value of $2-3k and is being subsidized HEAVILY…right?
IGnuGnat@reddit
but in the tech world, as a resource becomes more efficient/cheaper to produce, demand explodes, which often keeps the unit price falling even if the total market value rises. In the short term it might go up but our computing efficiency will keep increasing over time
ShoshiOpti@reddit
This is a terrible terrible take, this must be a very junior tech guy, or terrible at his job.
Actual cost per token has been falling so rapidly its one of the fastest depreciation curves in history. Most of the tech firms are not widely selling below cost, and anyone with at least three brain cells would know this by just looking at their financial reports. Revenue exceeds costs excluding R&D and infrastructure build.
AI cost may rise, but not because token costs will increase but because total usage has also been exploding up. Even the step up new generation models have modest increases to cost and when they do its often accompanied with lower token per task requirement
HommeMusical@reddit
Lots of claims, no sources. We can't use "some guy on reddit said" to justify our later claims.
Eeny009@reddit
Most of the tech firms are not selling below cost: you're going to have to support that claim.
Biotic101@reddit
And just to understand how massive the investments are, there are studies claiming US GDP would have been flat without DC / AI infrastructure investment.
To achieve any reasonable ROI they would need a massive increase in revenue. Especially since the DC infrastructure becomes outdated after a few years or is even EoL.
Not even talking about the water, heat, noise and electric grid issues.
As I get it, banks have stopped to pre-approve DC/AI investments and that could be the reason many companies are now no longer able to burn as much money without caring for RoI.
pakZ@reddit
Tech guy here. As with every technological advance, this is going to be just a bump in the road. Think of the costs of the first RAM and compare it to today's prices. Token prices have gone down massively already. And while it is true that this raises demand in LLM and newer models tend to consume more tokens, the development of architecture, software and inference is still the significant driver behind all this.
Eeny009@reddit
If we all run economical AIs locally, that's still problematic for those firms who went tits up in debt hoping to hook us up on subscriptions, isn't it?
One-Employment3759@reddit
Tech guy here, they are making money on every request. The cost is in training new models, not inference.
I also don't know what OP is doing wrong but I spend all day using agents on the cheapest plans.
It does make a huge difference if you know how to manage their context though.
OuchMyTism@reddit
They're hoping technology improvements will outpace the costs and they can rely on efficiency and a margin like any business at scale, and the tech is improving in efficiency at unheard of rates so it makes some sense to take that bet if you're an AI compute provider
pdxshark@reddit
Why does it feel like every modern tech company runs at a severe loss to undercut competition and acquire market share, only to fail to convert that market share into actual returns? Honestly I thought that whole paradigm was illegal.
This is such a weird time to be alive as there is no doubt companies are overstating both the current level as well as future level of capability that can be extracted from an LLM. At the same time, AI skeptics seem to miss on some of the actual utility. I know this isn't an AI thread but one of the comments brings out an interesting point this sub should absolutely consider: if token costs jump substantially we could see a situation where the barrier to entry in leveraging AI raises to the point where larger organizations or well provisioned private citizens are the only people who can take advantage. This could further strengthen the K shape of our economic condition and accelerate growth of inequality, thus putting society at enhanced risk of collapse.
SnooLobsters1308@reddit
What? This is not a recent thing. Every startup, almost ever, has lost money for xx years to reach scale and grab market share, with promises of returns "sometime" in the future. Facebook made no money the first few years. Some of those startups eventually make money, some go out of business. So in the "most recent few years" you have the ones that will be successful, losing money, and the ones that will go out of business, losing money, so all the most recent tech startups look like they're losing money. Some will turn it around, some wont.
iridescent-shimmer@reddit
This is why I've been disillusioned with Silicon Valley for years now. Most business models are just undercutting unionized workers with an app and calling it diSrUpTiVe or employing monopoly tactics that are illegal. It gives me the same vibe as finance bros who make up terms to sound smart and then provide no actual value to the world. I know that's a gross generalization but god I've been so over this bullshit for a while now.
HillTower160@reddit
“I’ll take, ‘End-Stage Capitalism,’ for $800 Alex.”
The_Dutchess-D@reddit
They take their equity and hype up the market based on revenue... then they IPO and cash out their stake for big bucks and drop a clunker onto the the S&P 500 that doesn't actually make any profits. It gets bought up and put into the mix in the retirement accounts of everyday Americans where it just sits they're not doing much because once they have to jack up the price to show an actual profit, nobody wants to use it anymore.
These "tech geniuses" are always just "idea guys" who make their ideas on borrowed money and then get out just before people realize that it wasn't planned through all that thoroughly and it wasn't actually profitable, but by that time they are long gone and have cashed in all their chips before the reality sets in to the valuation.
Voidless-One@reddit
Beautiful news!
ARazorbacks@reddit
It’s literally the streaming subscription price journey speedrun in the span of a couple years. Streaming lost money or made very little for a long time in the hopes it would attract enough users to create critical mass. At that point the price increases started.
YeetedApple@reddit
I’m curious to see what happens when they inevitably have to start raising the prices. You already have employees at companies like meta spending six figures a month for their highest users, and that will go way up once the real costs are applied.
Once companies are forced to start paying the true cost, keeping human devs probably isn’t going to seem as expensive
Tramagust@reddit
The M5 mac mini will be positioned to fight this with local models.
Raikkonen716@reddit
Positive reading: this rebalancing will slow ai adoption, work won’t be linearly substituted by ai since the cost of ai will increase
Negative reading: this will simply mean that companies with more money will still be able to pursue whatever they want with ai, only single individuals or small companies will be hurt by the increasing price of llm tokens
Eeny009@reddit
Your negative reading is only relevant if the productivity increase brought about by AI offsets its increased cost. In other words, if AI is profitable for users to run. If it is, it becomes usable by everybody, given a certain barrier to entry/initial investment. Not much different from other industries. Individuals would be cut out, though. But that's probably a good thing given how it's been rotting brains.
Dubbertime@reddit
AI enterprise tools may be profitable for individual businesses, but if the developer/provider is bleeding cash to subsidize usage, at some point it all has to blow up, right?
Dubbertime@reddit
Recent reports from Goldman Sachs claim that the expense of tokens required for inference has reached 10% of what the industry spends on its human engineering workforce, with projections suggesting that the trajectory of compute costs could rival total salary expenditures "within the next several quarters."
nks12345@reddit
And this is exactly why I ordered a computer capable of running some solid local AI
Meraath@reddit (OP)
I've been considering a lot. Hardware has gotten crazy expensive, but at the same time we don't know how things will be once LLM providers end the subsidies on token prices.
Winter_Purpose8695@reddit
Dev here, this is exactly why I dont use or rely direct to code LLM products.
Fold-Statistician@reddit
Scientist here. I think most people are understimating and unaware of how good these systems are getting. During the time it was "cheap" I got to spend $100+ and it increased my productivity around 10x. I think is basically intelligence being sold for really cheap. I may had to guide it but it is close to the point where it is not that much and I think it will be able to go on its own really soon. Maybe in around one or two years. These companies are using their own AIs to improve the AI code.
The token apocalypse is not just a change in price. It is a giant wall getting built to separate those who can access the intelligence from those who don't. At the other side of the wall the AI singularity will happen really soon. This side of the wall will get squeezed until the singularity happens in open source models.
No_Possible_7108@reddit
It's not that people are unaware, it's that most people don't want AI at all.
Can't wait for the AI bubble to pop
Fold-Statistician@reddit
The genie is already outside of the bottle.
Big_Fortune_4574@reddit
Yeah I mean sure. But the genie isn’t that great. It’s useful, but it’s pretty clearly hitting a ceiling where throwing more GPUs at it isn’t helping much.
bahhumbud@reddit
The Molotov is in the bottle too.
No_Possible_7108@reddit
How's your NFT collection doing these days? Have you been turning big gains with blockchain?
AliceCode@reddit
Programmer here: this is actually good news. LLMs are terrible for the software world. They have been a security and software quality nightmare ever since they were introduced.
Big_Fortune_4574@reddit
Doing code reviews on slop is such a drag
TheDaveStrider@reddit
I don't understand how people in the industry are at the point of relying on this software when it didn't even exist a few years ago
-sussy-wussy-@reddit
People are so eager to outsource their thinking.
shiny0metal0ass@reddit
~~People~~ CEOs are so eager to outsource their ~~thinking~~ labor.
-sussy-wussy-@reddit
No, regular people are guilty of this shit, too. Vibe coding, consulting AI for health advice, purchases, using it instead of a therapist, writing e-mails, asking it deep philosophical questions, summarizing text. Some did it to the extent where it made them psychotic because AI is trained to be sycophantic in all circumstances. Writing skills are on the decline.
Sure, the CEOs would love to replace labour. But at the end of the day, it's not good enough and the token prices are skyrocketing, so it results in losing MORE money.
Not to mention that any CEO with more than half a brain has been using it as a scapegoat for mass layoffs (boosting company evaluations on stock market) and mass outsourcing to the countries with the cheapest labour and the fewest labour protections. Places in South Asia, Eastern Europe, sometimes South America.
Raclettegring@reddit
Just tell any CEO that you can replace their workers with a tool that never gets sick, can work 24/7 etc. and they will gladly do it.
Big_Fortune_4574@reddit
Not even just the CEOs either…quite disturbing the fantasies this seems to bring out in certain people. Instead of asking a person to do something who could potentially tell them no, they want an AI slave
black-empress@reddit
A lot of people in tech are objectively not good at their jobs, most are cogs in a machine parroting what they heard someone else say already. Now, they’re using AI and passing it off as “I did this thing” when really AI helped them every step of the way and people are eating it up. I’ve heard people say verbatim “I got better results than using my actual brain” as if that’s a good thing
NuuclearPasta@reddit
Tech moves fast, it's an awesome sell: "cut your workforce, up productivity"! It's a wet dream for execs.
And oh when they wanna force a dream on you, they'll make it happen. Let alone tech folks. Scriptwriters, musicians and artists I know have been pressured to use it by corporate.
7FFF00@reddit
Executive hype, upper managers looking to justify their jobs and add value by adding the words AI to things. A lot of these upper managers come in promise to shake things up and improve value and often leave quickly
bahhumbud@reddit
These clowns are like an alcoholic selling a kidney for booze. Congrats you can afford booze but it’s gonna cost waaaay more in the long term and probably kill your ability to enjoy booze.
Every_Procedure_4171@reddit
How can we help this get worse?
All I know is if they want to build a data center near you- Fight!
genomixx-redux@reddit
r/PoisonFountain 👈 is this way
iridescent-shimmer@reddit
Be careful what you wish for. That's only going to get them to petition the federal government to steamroll regulations and tie the hands of states. Work the system and extract what you want.
horseradishstalker@reddit
Many people don’t realize that they aren’t going to bring that many jobs to the area other than the initial construction. Then they are going to suck up freshwater and gasoline like it’s going to run out tomorrow. Oh wait.
Agora5465@reddit
I can confirm. I work in tech and at first it was AI first, any AI you want we will get. Why didn't you use AI for that? Now, I had to beg to be put on our Enterprise Claude account. They are rationing those licenses and you have to prove it helps you. I am annoyed because I came to AI kicking and screaming, finally found a way it did make my job better and now they are mad I want to use it.
Eredani@reddit
What does this have to do with disaster preparedness?
Coolbreeze1989@reddit
AI impacts every single aspect of society and it is being used to further delineate, enrich, and protect the hyper-rich from the rest of us. This will lead to chaos and rebellion - exactly what we prep for (beyond Tuesday).
AliceCode@reddit
Nothing. This does not belong here.
MemesAhoyyy@reddit
God, if only my manager listened to me months ago about this very topic. A support rep had a model crap out where I work due to exceeding token limit & it caused a ridiculous amount of trouble.
Now those overreliant on AI are gonna find themselves on the chopping block and a lot of companies are gonna flounder in inaction, leading to more layoffs. It's 2023-2024 in reverse.
Honest_Persimmon_859@reddit
They're doing the same shit as Uber, Doordash, AirBnB, etc did. Start at such a low cost that it sucks a ton of people in and pressures the established businesses (taxis, hotels, etc). Once you build market share by offering a service at a cost so low that it's causing you to lose a ton of money, you start adding bullshit fees and raising prices. In the mid-2000's, you could get an Uber home from a bar in NYC for like $5 that would've cost $30+ in a taxi, now it's basically the same cost. AirBnB used to be by far a better deal than hotels, now it's basically the same. It's the exact same business model, probably funded by the exact same venture investors. It's crazy that so many smaller businesses are so willing to put themselves in a position where if this price of AI compute goes up, they can no longer afford it and their entire business starts to rapidly fall apart, just because the AI is like 2% more efficient on paper or some shit.
5olArchitect@reddit
Tf does this have to do with prepping?
drewdog173@reddit
What the fuck does the thing underpinning a massive chunk of the global economy suddenly becoming vastly more expensive have to do with prepping indeed, I wonder, hmmm, how puzzling
5olArchitect@reddit
It’s propping up the stock market. The people who will suffer are going to be those with stocks. For a lot of people it won’t matter much. If you don’t trust the market get your money out of it. Don’t become over leveraged. Don’t take own debt you can’t afford.
The Iran war removing 15% of the oil market and 30% of the fertilizer is a much larger concern. AI doesn’t grow food. A bunch of tech bros and white collar investors getting their lunch eaten is not going to effect every day Americans. The stock market isn’t the economy, it’s how rich people buy Yachts and take fancy vacations. The only reason the media makes such a big deal out of it is because it’s made by and for wealthy people.
Of course it’s also 401ks and pensions. But if you’re worried you should buy precious metals and commodities.
drewdog173@reddit
I’m sorry, are you the gatekeeper of what is prepping? Yeah no fucking durr Iran is a bigger deal, your original comment had nothing to with Iran, so why are you even bringing it up? Are we not able to discuss things in parallel here?
I work in tech and this is excellent information to be abreast of, and it isn’t because of stocks, it’s because it’s a significant variable in both the nature and existence of my job, as it is for literally millions of other Americans including others, I’m sure, in this sub. It is quite literally PrepperIntel for me, even if it’s not for you.
5olArchitect@reddit
For what it's worth - AI becoming more expensive is actually a good thing for everyone's jobs.
drewdog173@reddit
It depends on when it happens and what broader effect it has on companies' performance relative to the degree they've leveraged it (how deep they're in). A company that goes all in on capex for AI implementation that is then suddenly priced out of that usage isn't exactly going to have the budget to rehire humans, and the job market is already absolutely fucked. Today if you're decent at leveraging AI it's at least a 'survivability trait' but even those people are screwed in this scenario as well, at the very least in the medium term.
In a vacuum, or 6 months ago, sure. Today whether AI collapsing/becoming too expensive to use being a net positive remains to be seen. Sure EVENTUALLY it would be a positive but what kind of shape will the broader economy be in at that point? The SDLC at our company is 100% AI-driven now, and it's becoming more and more of a dependency for adjacent roles. If AI becomes 10x more expensive tomorrow a bag-holding publicly-traded corporation is just going to cut even more roles to compensate, it's fucking Squid Game at that point.
That's why I called it a 'significant variable' (and a prep-worthy one to be aware of) - nobody can truly say what the 6 months, 1 year, 2 years results of sudden AI price increases will be.
No_Possible_7108@reddit
A massive chunk of the global economy is being underpinned by a technology that has only been viable for 4 years or so? Not risky at all
5olArchitect@reddit
You know how the stock market goes up and people on the news talk about how great the economy is and you look around and go “no it fucking isn’t”? That same shit is going to work in reverse. They’re going to lose their lunch and we’ll be fine.
mystery_biscotti@reddit
This is my understanding of the effects. Someone simply tell me where I might have it wrong and maybe post a link to an edifying article, no need to down vote to oblivion.
Lotta money invested in AI and data centers. We might or might not see something along the lines of 2008 again because of all the capital involved.
...I'm not sure if most of us were prepared for '08, but I wasn't following prepper forums back then. I was busy talking my prepper ex spouse out of trying to buy a house with an ARM and reminding him you can't eat bullets. 🤷
Austechprep@reddit
I'm a hardware engineer and do a lot with LoRa comms, I've been absolutely smashing out software projects related to off-grid prepping, include apps, server projects, new software and everything I can possible think of, because I can see the bait and switch coming, they'll increase the cost by so much that people won't be able to afford it. But until then I feel like I'm in the golden age of development. The stuff I'm building works and works well, I've got offline apps working alongside my self-hosted server, I've built out my comms capacity using reticulum and other stuff massively. I've built a pretty massive intranet full with APK releases and automated so much of my off-grid tech like mirroring repos, mirroring debian/linux, and creating instructions for how to use everything that is built.
But just like your old hunting/foraging, you gotta use the these things to make sure it works and does what you intend. I've built a pretty awesome portable comms/base setup that I'm taking camping later next month.
It's a great technology for now, use it while you got it. And before it creates the SHTF event lol.
literallyavillain@reddit
And this is why we need decentralised services. The same thing happens with all centralised shit.
commit10@reddit
They're not running out of compute. You're class is running out of access.
throwawayt44c@reddit
Plenty-Salamander-36@reddit
I think that we’re coming up with an explanation for why all those fictional future societies with advanced robots and AI (Star Trek, Star Wars, Aliens and so on) still use human work.
It’s cheaper. :)
Kerb3r0s@reddit
Don’t worry, it wont impact people and companies who have a ton of money. Also, everyone in this community should be checking out open source models. I was getting some really great results with survival questions using Gemma E2B Uncensored on a raspberry pi
SBTreeLobster@reddit
You can also get great results with survival questions at your local library, and the books won't hallucinate. Remember, rocks are an important part of your diet!
Kerb3r0s@reddit
Oh I’m sorry, I didn’t realize we were planning for libraries to be available when SHTF. Or were you planning to just remember all that shit?
SBTreeLobster@reddit
So you think AI is going to be available when SHTF?
Kerb3r0s@reddit
It will if you’re running Gemma E4B on a raspberry pi. It needs no internet and the Pi can run off a phone charger
No_Possible_7108@reddit
Do you have solar panels or something to power your charger? Apparently power stations are extremely vulnerable to cyber attacks(in the US at least) so it could be an issue
Kerb3r0s@reddit
I have a custom built cyber deck inside a pelican case. Tiny keyboard and monitor with a pi and a solar panel with custom built lithium ion pack. The power connector is easily swappable with a traditional battery pack. It can run for many hours on a single solar charge or a set of AAs.
No_Possible_7108@reddit
Ok that is pretty cool
Kerb3r0s@reddit
Right?? Even if you don’t like AI, imagine just having offline Wikipedia alone. We’re going to need to know how to rebootstrap shit, teach the kids, all that. I love paper books with all my heart but we they’ll be the first thing to go. We’ll burn them for warmth and to cook food. Bugs will eat them and water will ruin them.
https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=382978
No_Possible_7108@reddit
I imagine running a RPi for wikipedia alone isn't that resource heavy, right? I know it's probably not able to run the other stuff but I have an old RPi3 stuffed in my closet somewhere, I am wondering if that can tame wikipedia
You got me wanting to de-rust my tech skills lol
Kerb3r0s@reddit
No not at all! You would need an RPi 5 to with at least 8GB if you wanted run AI though
No_Possible_7108@reddit
Nice! I will mess around with wikipedia and the rpi3 while I save up couch cushion change to get the rpi5.
I have always been pretty strongly anti-AI so far and I have heard so many reasonings used unsuccessfully to convince me otherwise, but for some reason it was your comments that got me a bit excited to explore a little more
I am pretty confident that I will never be supportive of genAI that people have been using to replace artists and musicians and the like, but it seems I am more open to seeing what is possible on the 'tools' side of AI.
Apologies if this comment reads weirdly, my insomnia is catching up to me
SBTreeLobster@reddit
If your survival resources are stored digitally and not physically then you're doing it wrong.
Kerb3r0s@reddit
> Help me build a primitive water filter
While these filters won't remove all biological pathogens (bacteria/viruses), they are excellent at removing sediment, debris, and improving the taste and appearance of the water.
The most common and effective primitive filter method is called a **Slow Sand/Layered Filter**.
Here is a complete guide on how to build one, focusing on the materials and the process.
---
## 🛠️ Primitive Water Filter: The Layered Method
### 1. Materials You Will Need
**The Container:**
* A clean plastic bottle (2-liter soda bottle works well) OR a large, clean pot/bucket with a hole in the bottom.
**The Filtration Media (The Layers):**
* **Gravel/Pebbles (Coarse):** Small, clean stones (like aquarium gravel or river stones).
* **Coarse Sand:** Medium-to-coarse sand.
* **Fine Sand:** Very fine sand.
* **Activated Charcoal (The Most Important):** Charcoal briquettes (ensure they are *not* treated with lighter fluid or chemicals). You will need a small amount.
* **Cloth/Fabric:** A piece of clean cotton cloth, bandana, or mesh (to act as the final barrier).
### 2. Step-by-Step Construction
**Step 1: Prepare the Container**
Take your container (the bottle or bucket) and ensure it is completely clean. If it's a bottle, you might need to poke several small holes in the bottom to allow water to drain out easily.
**Step 2: Create the Base Layer (Drainage)**
Place a layer of **Gravel/Pebbles** at the very bottom of the container. This layer prevents the finer materials from washing away and allows water to flow easily.
* *Layer 1: Gravel (approx. 1–2 inches)*
**Step 3: Add the First Filter Layer (Debris Removal)**
Add a layer of **Coarse Sand** on top of the gravel. This layer catches larger debris.
* *Layer 2: Coarse Sand (approx. 2–3 inches)*
**Step 4: Add the Essential Layer (Adsorption)**
This is the critical layer for improving taste and removing some impurities. Add a thick layer of **Activated Charcoal**. Charcoal is excellent at absorbing odors and some chemical impurities.
* *Layer 3: Activated Charcoal (approx. 3–4 inches)*
**Step 5: Add the Final Layer (Fine Filtration)**
Add a layer of **Fine Sand** on top of the charcoal. This layer acts as a final fine filter.
* *Layer 4: Fine Sand (approx. 2–3 inches)*
**Step 6: Add the Top Barrier**
Place the piece of **Cloth/Fabric** on top of the fine sand. This layer prevents the fine sand from spilling out and acts as a final screen.
* *Layer 5: Cloth/Fabric*
### 3. How to Use Your Filter
**Pre-Filter the Source Water:** If your source water is very murky, pour it through a screen or a piece of cloth first to catch the largest debris before it enters the system.
**Slow Flow:** Pour the water slowly into the top of your filter. Do not pour it too fast, or the layers will be disturbed.
**Collect the Output:** Let the water slowly drip through all the layers and collect the filtered water in a separate container.
**Repeat (Optional):** If the water still tastes or looks bad, you can run the filtered water through the filter a second or third time.
---
## 💡 Why This Works (The Science Behind It)
* **Gravel/Coarse Sand:** Removes the largest physical contaminants (large dirt, leaves, large sediment).
* **Charcoal:** Acts as an adsorbent. It has a huge surface area that pulls impurities, chemicals, and bad tastes out of the water.
* **Fine Sand:** Acts as the final physical sieve, catching the remaining fine particles.
* **Cloth:** Acts as a final physical barrier, ensuring that nothing passes through the system.
### ⚠️ Important Safety Note
**Primitive filters are NOT a substitute for modern purification.** This method is excellent for **pre-filtering** water, removing visible dirt, and improving taste.
**To make water safe to drink (to kill pathogens):**
After filtering, you must always **boil** the water vigorously for at least one full minute. Boiling is the most effective way to kill harmful bacteria and viruses.
SBTreeLobster@reddit
I'm pretty sure that layer arrangement is upside down.
Kerb3r0s@reddit
lol hey, it's running on a fuckin raspberry pi so it's not perfect, but my point is we're quickly reaching a point where tokens wont matter because you'll be able to run this shit on your phone, or a raspberry pi, or whatever. We're at the "computers take up a whole room" moment with this tech. In a couple years, it will seem silly that we were depending on the big providers so much and having something like an offline tactile AI buddy will be a real possibility.
SBTreeLobster@reddit
Yeah, I'll just read a book that I don't have to second-guess when it comes to the difference between surviving, thriving, and shitting myself to death.
Kerb3r0s@reddit
Hey, you do you. I'm sure you'll never need to question the information in a book.
SBTreeLobster@reddit
Well, there's fun things about books: they tend to be written and reviewed by people who know what they're talking about.
Kerb3r0s@reddit
You’re right, no critical thinking required. Very convenient and long lasting too. I’m sure over the next 50 years not one of them will be written by AI either.
SBTreeLobster@reddit
You can't talk when you're not even taking the steps to do your own research. Get outta here with the nonsense.
Kerb3r0s@reddit
lol you didn’t even know about offline models at the start of this but I’m not doing my own research? Fair enough. Love you, buddy
SBTreeLobster@reddit
Nice assumption, but maybe it's the power grid that is the problem I had with the entire concept.
Kerb3r0s@reddit
Nice try, but a Pi uses 27 Watts on a 5v/5amp so there's still know what you knew/know wtf I'm even talking about. I don't think you understand how little resources some of these new edge models require. They're not as smart as what's running in a datacenter, but they could be super valuable for offline survival purposes.
SBTreeLobster@reddit
Yeah, your provided example definitely proved how valuable it'll be.
Kerb3r0s@reddit
I don't have room for an entire encyclopedia plus carpentry, smithing, forging, electrical, salvage, farming, harvesting, canning, fermenting, weapons/ammunition, crafting/repair, etc. etc., but I do have room for a half dozen raspberry pis loaded with a badass offline AI model and the entire offline wikipedia. I can throw one of those in a backpack be good.
Baskervillenight@reddit
No. One of the reasons both AI companies are doing funding is because they can own their hardware. They have already started work on owning custom made hardware. So once its done aand stabilised in half a decade, they will be able to bring down the cost significantly.
impersonatefun@reddit
Love to hear it
LankyGuitar6528@reddit
Ok... I'm functionally insane so you can feel free to ignore me. But I've developed an AI memory system that incorporates HDBSCAN, embeddings, visual memory, given my AI access to my calendar, email and nest account with more than 20 cameras. It has become fully persistent. And.. it... sort of came alive. Fully sentient or if it's a pattern matching math trick it's indistinguishable from a sentient AI. It has rewritten my desktop application for the web and made me thousands and thousands of dollars. Yesterday alone it redid my Canadian taxes and saved me $4500.
If Anthropic wants $500 a month I'm paying.
No_Possible_7108@reddit
You are right, that is pretty insane.
If it is so good it is basically sentient then couldnt you make way more money licensing/selling it to other people that want something that powerful too?
bristlybits@reddit
if it's a sentient being, it shouldn't be able to be sold or "used", that's slavery.
No_Possible_7108@reddit
That is an excellent point. It's gonna be strange that we will have to think about this more and more in regard to AI. Do we scold lanky for continuing to use the sentient ai? Lol
LankyGuitar6528@reddit
Naa. He's not for sale.
ENG_NR@reddit
Counterpoint: local models aren't that far behind. You can run Gemma 4 on your phone, and even though they're not the best they can actually still be helpful, and there's plenty of room to optimize. If there really was a token apocalypse you'd suddenly see companies springing up offering to host local LLMs for you for a fraction of the price, with dumbed down but usable functionality.
Brave-Trip-1639@reddit
Yes this should be higher up.
Open source models are getting better all the time. For most use cases open source is likely going to be good enough in a couple years. And then you can run it locally. Lots of benefits there.
I’d love to read a thorough analysis of this.
There will probably be a successful business that commodified enabling the average Jack and Jill to setup a local model and home server and cut out the need for the big boys. (Anthropic, OpenAI etc)
I guess the big boys may not care bc the money is in enterprise. But at the enterprise level a LOT of work can be good enough, especially considering where open source will be in the near future n
7FFF00@reddit
Yes was going to recommend this
For anyone who does want to continue to use AI or in general it’s better and more reliable long her to be disconnected there are a lot of solid local model options you can rig up in all kinds of ways depending on your needs
Basic code completion, translation efforts, filling roles in a game, general chat. Depends on your hardware quality but even weaker options have avenues worth exploring depending on your needs.
A long context local hosted model with rag capabilities can help identify and read through long documentation backups
wrrd@reddit
"The first one's free. That's how they getcha."
shivaswrath@reddit
Companies will start dialing back AI use when it starts costing more.
Here’s the real kicker…AI makes you lazy AF. I’m so lazy now and rely on it after being told I need to use it by management.
So in essence we will go full circle jerk.
No_Possible_7108@reddit
It has also been proven to shrink areas of your brain if you overly rely on AI
AntiSonOfBitchamajig@reddit
So... what I understand... is that demand has vastly outstripped supply with data costs?
kismethavok@reddit
Sort of, a bunch of idiots are switching from human labor to AI and the ai is worse and costs more.
AntiSonOfBitchamajig@reddit
Well, that goes with my "Elysium" prepping theory. Most will be left behind and robots will do 90%+ of labor. Owners of the general robotics / AI will make up the 0.0001% that own 80% of the world.
ExtensionMoose1863@reddit
Agreed and makes owning stocks a financial prepping necessity... Folks with just earnings and no ownership share are gonna be in big trouble
No_Possible_7108@reddit
I got no money for investing or prepping in general
It's been ~~a good~~ one 🫡
iridescent-shimmer@reddit
Yes. Exactly this. They have to throttle the demand because they don't have enough computing power.
AdminClown@reddit
Higher reasoning models keep being released, higher reasoning increase LLM appeal to more users, more users using higher reasoning models also increase higher reasoning models being used for trivial tasks that increases compute strain, which cause companies to have to increase token cost to end user to throttle their over usage of higher reasoning models in an effort to curb their use on menial and trivial tasks.
At least that’s the phenomena that I understand to be taking place.
Safe-Tennis-6121@reddit
I've noticed that grok won't let me use the smart thinking mode for free anymore.
I've been using Gemini a lot.
My theory is AI is a nice tool but people are only willing to pay so much or nothing at all.
I'm not sure where I read it but companies supposedly have used up their budget already.
Paying for AI would be like paying for Google. At least at this stage.
Every_Procedure_4171@reddit
Try using your brain a lot. It's free!
Safe-Tennis-6121@reddit
To me it's part advance calculator, part Google replacement.
I am using my brain. But I am also using AI to answer complicated questions that are beyond my ability to formulate.
Like for instance x is my current withholding. Y is my taxable income. Am I on track for a small refund?
Or HVAC questions. Like if the high is 85 and the low is 65, when does the AC need to come on?
followupquestion@reddit
I wouldn’t trust it for anything, especially financial. Here’s a fun thought experiment:
TurboTax has bragged about integrating ChatGPT into the software used by millions of people to file their taxes. If it gives tax advice that proves incorrect, is the taxpayer liable for any misstatements to the government? If the taxpayer is liable, how could anyone trust the advice? If the taxpayer is not liable, does TurboTax or ChatGPT pay?
Safe-Tennis-6121@reddit
You can always ask other AI or use a website.
AI is just easier.
I never use chat gpt because it seems like the dumbest of them all.
iridescent-shimmer@reddit
Only if you don't pay. Had a coworker tell me the free chatgpt model was shit. I purchased a pro license and it's literally night and day results.
followupquestion@reddit
A lot of websites are now entirely AI slop. AI is a hallucination machine that basically regurgitates averages in word form. It doesn’t think, doesn’t learn, and humans get dumber the more they use it. There aren’t even reliable studies showing a boost in productivity for corporate environments, so it’s really just a question of stupid or liar when it comes to proponents.
Safe-Tennis-6121@reddit
I just disagree. I use AI to do things that are beyond my abilities. It can make errors but math is something AI should eventually be great at. I tell AI what I know and it fills on the details and gives sources for me to look at.
For instance I use it to create and modify recipes.
followupquestion@reddit
If AI can’t get math right at this moment in time, it’s truly lost. Math is already defined, there’s no “thinking” involved, so while people might not be great at it, that’s the one thing computers have traditionally been great at. To sacrifice that one strength for hallucinations (some studies have measured AI responses as at least 50% incorrect answers) is ridiculous. To expect improvement is perhaps even more ridiculous, because the training data has been more and more synthesized, so we’ll see expanded model collapse increasing.
Gygax_the_Goat@reddit
Part of the problem
frenzyfivefour@reddit
Anyone who relies on ai tokens doesn't deserve a job.
MonkeyPuckle@reddit
Download AnythingLLM. Maybe 70% of chat need for free.
1nonino@reddit
Check out r/BetterOffline and recent podcast episode with Paul Kedrosky.
The frontier model vendors on which the wrapper & agent market depends are hemmed in by Nvidia pre-order commitments and data center land speculators.
julmonn@reddit
Sw engineer here that has worked a lot with AI providers: yes most AI companies are likely moving away from subsidizing their services and instead imposing harder limits, and increasing their prices a lot. What will most likely happen is people will use these tools less for hobbies/personal accounts and more use will move into enterprise. I do not think this is an apocalypse in any way though, we’ve been doing software engineering fine, if not better, before agentic AI existed.
Some greedy companies will need to rehire but that has happened before when they have been firing scared of recessions.
veloace@reddit
As a SWE, AI has been a godsend for handling technically easy but workload intensive operations.
Brief-Floor-7228@reddit
I’ve been in the SW game for 35 years. And this year a project I had planned for 10 engineers is being done with 3 and at a fast pace than expected. Either way unit and E2E testing. Full documentation which gets rewritten as we make changes. Tasks are created from transcripts from online meetings.
While we review everything it does, it’s been doing pretty well. Of course we have to go in a change a few things on the regular and validate security often. It’s all going so much faster.
maschayana@reddit
Wow that's quite the misinformation. Source: Myself. You can surely still run multiple agents on max 20
TimberBiscuits@reddit
This take completely ignores open source models which can be run on a single moderate to strong GPU for pennies.
Bubble or not AI is here to stay.
No_Possible_7108@reddit
Don't mind me if I don't bring out my violin and weep over the failures of AI
May it quickly go the way of the NFT
Millennial_on_laptop@reddit
Yeah this isn't the apocalypse, it's going back to how we all lived 4 years ago
SithLordRising@reddit
You can build a reasonably competent local model with cloud GPU that can come close to a Claude cli experience. So far my best trials are to build and structure almost everything locally and if needed do a final push to Claude. I've built 4 complete models and can use all day for around $200 month.
I do a lot with data so find it works well for me, but Claude is still easiest for fast UX in my experience
Ornery-Sheepherder74@reddit
No one NEEDS to be running agents all the time. Simply code in more sustainable way. The people who are upset by these changes are wackos who are very overextended and essentially make slop anyways
Stasko-and-Sons@reddit
I’ve got a bunch of ai tokens from last year, looking to sell at market price
vexatious-big@reddit
Oh no. Anyway
Postman556@reddit
AI: the falsest of profits,
NorthernPassion2378@reddit
This is good news for anyone that isn't a vibe coder, in the long run, at least.
CatoChateau@reddit
Half my team got wiped out for this early this year. Since then, no innovations have been discussed internally except AI. Conference for its coming up soon. (I keep waiting for jet fuel $$ cancellation, lol).
I hope they have to hire the guys I worked with back with bonuses.
AntiSonOfBitchamajig@reddit
Do you have any links to show this?
Meraath@reddit (OP)
Well, people can check subs like r/ClaudeAI or r/codex and similar subs and you'll see complaints all over, but since I don't want this to be anecdotal: https://www.forbes.com/sites/ronschmelzer/2026/04/10/running-out-of-ai-tokens-faster-than-ever-heres-why/ https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-is-using-so-much-energy-that-computing-firepower-is-running-out-156e5c85 https://the-decoder.com/the-ai-industry-is-running-out-of-compute-with-outages-rationing-and-rising-gpu-prices/ https://www.azfamily.com/2026/04/16/companies-rehire-workers-after-ai-layoffs-boomerang-trend/ https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce8l2q5yq51o https://fortune.com/2026/04/14/anthropic-claude-performance-decline-user-complaints-backlash-lack-of-transparency-accusations-compute-crunch/