The bottom line regarding the AI market panic

This summarizes, very well, a lot of things.

Now that a company has figured out a way to produce an AI app that’s just as effective at producing satisfactory output as the big American companies, at a sliver of the cost, a $500 billion data center facility in the desert suddenly seems like an offensive boondoggle…

It’s worth underlining a couple things here. First, generative AI long seemed destined to become a commodity; that ChatGPT can be so suddenly supplanted with a big news cycle about a competitor, and one that’s open source no less, suggests that this moment may have arrived faster than some anticipated. OpenAI is currently selling its most advanced model for $200 a month; if DeepSeek’s cost savings carry over on other models, and you can train an equally powerful model at 1/50th of the cost, it’s hard to imagine many folks paying such rates for long, or for this to ever be a significant revenue stream for the major AI companies. Since DeepSeek is open source, it’s only a matter of time before other AI companies release cheap and efficient versions of AI that’s good enough for most consumers, too, theoretically giving rise to a glut of cheap and plentiful AI—and boxing out those who have counted on charging for such services.

Second, this recent semi-hysterical build out of energy infrastructure for AI will also likely soon halt; there will be no need to open any additional Three Mile Island nuclear plants for AI capacity, if good-enough AI can be trained more efficiently. This too, to me, seemed likely to happen as generative AI was commoditized, since it was always somewhat absurd to have five different giant tech companies using insane amounts of resources to train basically the same models to build basically the same products.

What we’re seeing today can also be seen as, maybe, the beginning of the deflating of the AI bubble, which I have long thought to only be a matter of time, given all of the above, and the relative unprofitability of most of the industry. - Blood in the Machine

The corporate "bigs," climate denial, and social media

Many of us didn't need a study to know full well this is happening. But it's good to have it documented and proved.

From 2008 to 2023, nine of the nation’s largest oil, agrichemical, and plastics trade groups and corporations posted thousands of tweets on the social media platform X, and their messaging on environmental issues was strikingly “obstructive” for climate policy and action, a study published (in January) in the journal PLOS Climate concludes.

The study found that all of the organizations, including the American Petroleum Institute (API) and the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF), were mentioned by at least four of the other groups – helping to essentially create an echo chamber for similar messages. The groups also frequently tagged regulators and the media in their posts, with researchers finding the Environmental Protection Agency was tagged 795 times and the Wall Street Journal, the most mentioned media organization, tagged 517 times out of more than 125,000 X posts.

“Our study suggests that climate obstruction in different industries is more coordinated than is generally recognized,” said co-author Jennie Stephens, professor of Sustainability Science and Policy at Northeastern University and of Climate Justice at the National University of Ireland Maynooth.

“Combined with the high engagement of the petrochemical derivative and fuel sectors with government regulatory, policy, and political entities in the energy and environmental in particular, this suggests strategic attempts to undermine and subvert climate policy through social media,” the authors wrote. - DeSmog

Almost 1/3 of US may have contaminated drinking water

And many probably believe that that only happens in "poor" countries.

More than 97 million United States residents have been exposed to contaminants in their drinking water that are unregulated and could affect their health, a new analysis by Silent Spring Institute has found.

Hispanic and Black communities have a higher likelihood of their water being contaminated by unsafe levels of toxic chemicals, a press release from Silent Spring said. They are also more likely to live close to sources of pollution.

The findings add to increasing concern about U.S. water quality and contamination’s disproportionate impact on communities of color. - EcoWatch

New report on Big Pharma price gouging

I've long considered Big Pharma to be one of the three absolutely worst "Bigs" of all, along with Big Ag and Big Weapons.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday published the second part of its investigation into how prescription drug middlemen are marking up the prices of specialty generic drugs dispensed at their affiliated pharmacies by hundreds—and in some cases, thousands—of percent, underscoring what advocates say is the need for urgent action by policymakers.

The FTC's second interim staff report on consolidated pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) found that the three largest of these middlemen—CVS Health's Caremark Rx, Cigna Group's Express Scripts, and UnitedHealth Group's OptumRx—"marked up two specialty generic cancer drugs by thousands of percent and then paid their affiliated pharmacies hundreds of millions of dollars of dispensing revenue in excess of estimated acquisition costs for each drug annually." - Common Dreams

The ultra-privileged have already blown through their carbon budget

Not that the rest of us can do much about it, at this time.

An Oxfam analysis published Friday shows that the richest 1% of the global population has already blown through its global carbon budget for 2025 — just 10 days into the New Year. The figures, which arrive amid catastrophic fires in Los Angeles that may turn out to be the costliest in U.S. history, highlight the disproportionate role of the ultra-wealthy in fueling a climate emergency that is causing devastation around the world.

Oxfam calculates that in order to keep critical climate goals in reach, each person on Earth must have a CO2 footprint of roughly 2.1 tons per year or less. On average, each person in the global 1% is burning through 76 tons of planet-warning carbon dioxide annually — or 0.209 per day — meaning it took them just over a week to reach their CO2 limit for the year

By contrast, the average person in the poorest 50% of humanity has an annual carbon footprint of 0.7 tons per year — well within the 2.1-ton budget compatible with a livable future. - Truthout

Relying on AI in healthcare invites disaster

More totally irresponsible, and dangerous, crap from the tech greedheads.

Every so often these days, a study comes out proclaiming that AI is better at diagnosing health problems than a human doctor. These studies are enticing because the healthcare system in America is woefully broken and everyone is searching for solutions. AI presents a potential opportunity to make doctors more efficient by doing a lot of administrative busywork for them and by doing so, giving them time to see more patients and therefore drive down the ultimate cost of care. There is also the possibility that real-time translation would help non-English speakers gain improved access. For tech companies, the opportunity to serve the healthcare industry could be quite lucrative.

In practice, however, it seems that we are not close to replacing doctors with artificial intelligence, or even really augmenting them. The Washington Post spoke with multiple experts including physicians to see how early tests of AI are going, and the results were not assuring...

The problem with tech optimists pushing AI into fields like healthcare is that it is not the same as making consumer software. We already know that Microsoft’s Copilot 365 assistant has bugs, but a small mistake in your PowerPoint presentation is not a big deal. Making mistakes in healthcare can kill people. Daneshjou told the Post she red-teamed ChatGPT with 80 others, including both computer scientists and physicians posing medical questions to ChatGPT, and found it offered dangerous responses twenty percent of the time. “Twenty percent problematic responses is not, to me, good enough for actual daily use in the health care system,” she said. - Gizmodo