They said AI would conquer the market.
AI would “free the hands” of employers and achieve such automation that workers would no longer be needed, resulting in unbelievable profit margins.
That’s what they were saying when OpenAI released the first global version of ChatGPT three years ago.
The dream for all this still exists — and of course, when we say “employers,” we’re not talking about small or medium-sized companies.
We’re talking about the elite of the Western economy: the banking system, the automotive industry, services, education, and other sectors like defense.
Since then, a lot of water has passed under the bridge, but there hasn’t been any significant technological progress — apart from each language model writing a bit better and with fewer mistakes.
There is no AI application today that delivers the profits it promised, nor have any jobs been lost (yet).
Programmers might disagree, but they’re missing the point. While their positions were supposedly at risk of being replaced by AI and lots of lay-offs took place in the tech-sector, in reality, if one looks at the applications for sponsored visas in the U.S., they’ll see that the tech companies with the biggest lay-off numbers are the same ones requesting the most visas, in order to bring in cheap foreign workers.
The goal of AI was — and remains — one: to take all the knowledge of workers and replace them with computers, without giving anything back.
And yet something paradoxical happened:
The Western elites have spent enormous amounts of money trying to replace workers with AI — but all they’ve actually achieved is for AI to help the average worker with basic tasks, to help small and medium-sized businesses become a bit more productive. And all of this is being provided for free by the elites, who get nothing in return!
In fact, they’re on the verge of losing enormous sums (trillions), not only because of the investments in technology but also because of the stock market casino — where, even as Western economies keep deteriorating, tech stocks keep breaking one record after another.
Of course, the average citizen shouldn’t think that if this bubble bursts, they’ll be spared.
Surely, they’ll find a way to transfer the losses to taxpayers — just like they did with the banking system in 2008.
In any case, even if the West decides to restrict ordinary citizens’ access to AI models and their free (or low-cost) use, China will always be there to offer them (almost) for free.
The truth is that today’s language models aren’t built to reach true Generative AI — they’re built simply to produce grammatically correct text.
In other words, the entire bet has been placed on the wrong horse — and we’re talking about trillions of dollars.
There’s perhaps one last idea OpenAI has come up with to make its models profitable — and that’s porn.
But if the entire Western economy is now placing its hopes for survival on pornography, that says far more about the economy, production, and society than it does about AI.
(ChatGPT helped me translate the original text I have written in Greek, into English! 🙂 Thank you AI!)