Huh? The frontier model companies aren’t operating at a profit but all the major enterprise tech companies (Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, Amazon, etc) are using huge amounts of AI in the SDLC and beyond and certainly are operating at a profit…
Training these models still requires massive data centers, and using any of them that at all compare to frontier models for inference requires large numbers of GPUs
Fair enough. There’s also a nice history of cyber culture stuff in the 90s (FringeWare Review for example, though interesting to note Paco Nathan has long since relocated to Northern California). And obviously UT is a good school, I saw a great Ween show at Stubbs once, etc.
I was just in Austin last week and every time I go there and then come home to Berkeley I’m reminded how much I love where I live. And esp with teenage daughters how I’d never live somewhere that doesn’t respect their fundamental rights.
All of Austin is like this. It’s really incredibly boring, very little to do (esp if you like natural beauty and the outdoors), and all has a mid tier feel. San Antonio at least has some neat architecture but Austin feels like one giant strip mall. I don’t think I’d ever leave coastal northern California (even with absurd taxes that aren’t actually used in a society improving way) but if I really wanted to avoid taxes at least parts of Nevada are close to the Sierras, or close to Zion.
Microsoft and Salesforce both have very positive free cash flow… but in any case that isn’t profit. All 4 of the companies I listed are still very profitable (Alphabet/google being the one “exception” where they are still wildly profitable but down from q3 2024 vs q3 2026). But even in the Alphabet and Amazon cases, they have negative free cash flow because they are investing like crazy in AI. This doesnt mean they aren’t profitable it means they are using their historic performance to make a big bet on the future. This is fundamentally very different from the frontier lab companies who have never been profitable and are staying afloat mostly from cash injection from big tech (Anthropic is an interesting one that may have just turned the corner).
It’s fine to have moral, labor, or environmental objections to “AI” (which is a very stupid name for some specific applications of machine learning) but I would expect Lemmy to have a higher level of discourse around this stuff that is actually rooted in reality.