Black Mirror ... for real

@mattxiv via X

Futurism's on a roll. 3 articles showing Black Mirror logic applies ... for real.

San Francisco is plastered with billboards advertising AI tech, all in varying degrees of in-your-face dystopic. Even so, a new crop of them has managed to stand out from the pack by being shockingly upfront about the industry’s attitude toward regular humans.

“Our AI does your daughter’s homework. Reads her bedtime stories. Romances her. Deepfakes her,” reads a billboard asking you to visit a website called Replacement.AI. “Don’t worry, it’s totally legal [winking emoji].”

Visiting the website finds an even more overt message: huge text proclaiming that humans are “no longer necessary.”

“Stupid. Smelly. Squishy. It’s time for a machine solution,” it reads. “At Replacement.AI, we believe that building AI tools to fix the world’s most pressing challenges is an unprofitable waste of time.”

There’s also an actual quote by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman: “AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there’ll be great companies.”

Before you get your pitchforks out: it’s satire. The ad was highlighted in a now-viral tweet by makeup artist and influencer Matt Bernstein, before being reshared across the internet in places like Reddit, where the joke was lost on many users.

& this ...

Getty / Futurism

Pattern recognition anyone?

An AI-powered gun detection system hooked up to a Baltimore County high school’s cameras mistook a bag of Doritos chips as a weapon — and called the cops on a 16-year-old student.

As local news station WBAL-TV 11 News reports, Taki Allen was enjoying the snack while sitting outside of Kenwood High School after football practice.

Twenty minutes later, he was visited by a small army of heavily-armed police officers.

“It was like eight cop cars that came pulling up for us,” he told WBAL-TV 11 News. “At first, I didn’t know where they were going until they started walking toward me with guns, talking about, ‘Get on the ground,’ and I was like, ‘What?'”

“They made me get on my knees, put my hands behind my back, and cuffed me,” Allen added. “Then, they searched me and they figured out I had nothing.”

Lastly ...

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images

But they always need money ...

To whit ...

The company behind ChatGPT, OpenAI, might be the world’s most valuable private company on paper — but in real life, it’s hemorrhaging money faster than it can ever hope to pay back, at least for now.

According to Agence France-Presse, OpenAI is ordering hundreds of billions of dollars worth of AI semiconductor chips at a time when investor confidence is being stretched to its limits. Those chip investments include deals inked with Nvidia, AMD, and Broadcom, units AFP estimates would consume power equivalent to “20 standard nuclear reactors.”

In order to pay off just its recent shopping spree, OpenAI will have to make “hundreds of billions of dollars,” according to Gil Luria, managing director at financial consulting firm DA Davidson. Indeed, another analysis by the Financial Times pegs OpenAI’s total financial commitments at over $1 trillion.

With this much capital involved, the exact number is almost meaningless, because the prospects of OpenAI paying off even a fraction of its debt is looking increasingly dire. Though OpenAI is now valued at $500bn, the company is only pulling in about $13 billion in annual revenue, the vast majority of which comes from ChatGPT subscribers, per TechCrunch.

In short, there’s an astronomical amount of money up in the air — so much so that the rest of the US economy now depends on the AI industry not dropping the ball. Or, as Bernstein Research analyst Stacy Rasgon put it in a note to investors, Sam Altman “has the power to crash the global economy for a decade or take us all to the promised land.”

“Right now, we don’t know which is in the cards,” she added.

Some financial types have posited the possible entire loss of monies if AI totally vapor locks.

The $7 trillion figure likely reflects the total projected investment needed across the entire AI ecosystem to keep it going, including players like OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and potentially Apple. It represents the staggering cost of trying to scale and run AI in hopes of generating real revenue in the months and years ahead. A crap shoot for the ages applies.