[Plura-list] The AI that we'll have after AI

Thu Oct 16 13:09:37 EDT 2025

Read today's issue online at: https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/16/post-ai-ai/

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I'm on a tour with my new book *Enshittification*!

Catch me next in Los Angeles, Calgary and San Francisco!

Full schedule with dates and links at:

https://pluralistic.net/tour

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Today's links

* The AI that we'll have after AI: Cheap GPUs, unemployed engineers, and open source models.

* Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.

* Object permanence: FBI confuses KISS and Dr Who; How the NSA breaks crypto: Bricked Ferrari; Taxing billionaires.

* Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.

* Recent appearances: Where I've been.

* Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.

* Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.

* Colophon: All the rest.

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🍪 The AI that we'll have after AI

When the AI bubble pops, what will remain? Cheap GPUs at firesale prices, skilled applied statisticians looking for work, and open source models that already do impressive things, but will grow far more impressive after being optimized:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/27/econopocalypse/#subprime-intelligence

The AI bubble companies are scams. They've spend most of a trillion dollars in capital expenditures, and by their own (very cooked and dishonest) numbers, they are *grossing* a total of $45b/year, industry-wide:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-ai-bubbles-impossible-promises/

At $45b/year (an inflated number, remember!) it's going to take them a *long* time to recoup the hundreds of billions of dollars they've spent so far. But they don't have a long time: the massive GPUs that power AI's "foundation models" and cost six- or seven-figures *each* burn out remarkably quickly. The companies that buy these GPUs claim they'll last five years (and depreciate them over that schedule); however, this is accounting fraud, because in reality, these GPUs have a duty-cycle that's more like *two to three years*:

https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2025/10/15/lifespan-of-ai-chips-the-300-billion-question/

And when the companies run their GPUs *really* hard, they burn out in just *54 days*:

https://techblog.comsoc.org/2024/11/25/superclusters-of-nvidia-gpu-ai-chips-combined-with-end-to-end-network-platforms-to-create-next-generation-data-centers/

To recoup their existing and announced investments, AI companies will have to bring in *$2 trillion*, more than the combined revenue of Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Nvidia and Meta:

https://www.bain.com/about/media-center/press-releases/20252/$2-trillion-in-new-revenue-needed-to-fund-ais-scaling-trend---bain--companys-6th-annual-global-technology-report/

And they have to bring in that $2 trillion before all those GPUs burn out...which is, again, about 2-3 years.

Or sometimes just 54 days.

AI companies' purchases and R&D expenditures aren't guided by the need to make products that will bring in $2 trillion dollars. AI companies spend money in order to put on a show for investors, to demonstrate that they are *very serious about AI*. Think of all those GPU-stuffed data-centers as akin to a peacock's tailfeathers: an expensive way to attract mates (or, in this case, investors), by emitting costly signals that demonstrate your power:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory

Of course, it's far cheaper to *pretend* to be spending a lot of money than it is to actually spend it, and they're doing plenty of that, too. Meta has promised to spend $72b next year on data-centers. However, Meta's annual free cash flow is $52.1b. OpenAI says it will spend $60b/year on data-centers, which is five times its annual revenue of $12.7b (and the company is losing $9b/year). As *The American Prospect*'s Brian McMahon writes, "How can OpenAI plan to spend *five times* what it brought in?"

https://prospect.org/power/2025-10-15-nvidia-openai-ai-oracle-chips/

I don't know how many of these giant "foundation models" will still be online after the crash, but I would not be surprised if that number is zero.

So the big question is, what comes next? What will the AI bubble leave behind?

Some bubbles leave nothing or next-to-nothing behind. Enron left nothing behind but the cooling corpse of a CEO who popped his clogs before he could be sentenced to life in prison. Worldcom left behind a CEO who survived long enough to die behind bars...and a ton of fiber in the ground that people are *still* getting use out of (I'm sending these keystrokes to the internet on old Worldcom fiber that AT&T bought and lit up).

Crypto's not going to leave much behind: a few Rust programmers who've really taken security by design to heart, sure, but mostly it'll be shitty Austrian economics and even shittier JPEGs.

So what kind of bubble is AI? That's the $2 trillion question:

https://locusmag.com/feature/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

Before I get to that, let me be clear here: bubbles are always bad. As much as I like my 2gb symmetrical fiber, the fact that it exists because a crook stole billions of dollars from everyday people who were only hoping to live a dignified retirement of material sufficiency is *terrible*. Worldcom CEO Bernie Ebbers deserved what he got, and worse.

The AI bubble is on its way to sucking up a trillion dollars and not all of that money is coming from Saudi royals, hedge fund bastards and Elon Musk's credulous creditors. Plenty of it will come out of the savings of working people who've forced to play the suckers at the table thanks to the replacement of guaranteed pensions with "market-based pensions" that only pay out if you guess right about which stocks to buy:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/25/derechos-humanos/#are-there-no-poorhouses

Those people are going to get *wrecked*. And so are the rest of us. You don't need to be an AI investor to get wiped out by the AI investment bubble, either. With 30+% of the S&P 500 tied up in seven AI companies' stock, the coming crash will *definitely* escape containment and crash the whole damned economy.

So the bubble is bad. *Really* bad. But even so, there will be things we can salvage from it: open source models, skilled programmers, cheap GPUs bought out of bankruptcy for pennies on the dollar. It would be better if we created that stuff *without* burning the world's economy to the ground and emitting a heptillion tons of CO2, but ignoring the productive residue of the AI crash won't bring the economy back, or suck the carbon out of the atmosphere.

The open source models are a big deal. They're already capable of doing really impressive things, like transcription, image generation, and natural language-based data transformation, running on commodity hardware. I run several models on the laptop I'm typing this on - a computer that doesn't even have a GPU.

What's more, there are a *lot* of ways to improve these models within easy reach. The US AI companies that threw these models over the transom after irrevocably licensing them as free software had very little impetus to improve their efficiency by optimizing them. Remember, they're spending money as a way to "prove" that AI has a future.

Shipping a model that runs badly - that needs more data-centers and energy to run - is a way to convince investors that it's doing something *really* advanced (after all, look how much compute and energy it's consuming!). It's a scaled-up version of a scam that Elon Musk used to pull on investors when he was shopping his startup Zip2 around: he put the regular PC his demo ran on inside a gigantic hollow case that he would wheel in on a dolly, announcing that his code ran on a "supercomputer." Yes, investors really are that dumb.

Even modest efforts at optimization can yield *incredible* performance gains. Deepseek, the legendary Chinese open source AI model, consumes a fraction of the resources gobbled up by the likes of OpenAI. Deepseek's launch was so impressive that it knocked $589b off of Nvidia's stock price the day it shipped:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nvidia-stock-plummets-loses-record-589-billion-as-deepseek-prompts-questions-over-ai-spending-135105824.html

There are a *ton* of these open source Chinese models, and they all perform like crazy. China does a lot of AI optimization because US embargoes prevent Chinese AI companies from accessing the most powerful GPUs, so Chinese coders tighten up their code and outperform US companies even though they're using far less powerful computers.

After the crash, everyone will be in a similar position to those Chinese AI optimizers: Chinese companies can't buy advanced GPUs because of the embargo; and everyone else won't be able to buy advanced GPUs because the AI crash will have cratered the economy for a generation.

But there is *so* much room at the bottom. Optimized models do really impressive things on *really* cheap hardware.

How cheap? Well, here's hardware hacker Pete Warden demoing a chatbot that you talk to and that talks back to you - and it's running on Synaptics System-on-a-Chip (SoC) that costs "low single digit dollars":

https://petewarden.com/2025/10/16/why-does-a-local-ai-voice-agent-running-on-a-super-cheap-soc-matter/

This is basically a little special-purpose Alexa, except it doesn't connect to the internet at all (and therefore doesn't leak any of your data). In Warden's demo, the gadget is a button-sized voice assistant that is meant to be integrated into a dishwasher, which can interpret the dishwasher's manual for you. If your dishes come out dirty or if the drain gets clogged, you press the button, describe your issue in pretty vague terms, and it instantly speaks aloud all the troubleshooting steps to deal with it.

This privacy-preserving, cheap-like-borscht component adds a voice-activated, conversational assistant to a device, sipping power like the clock on your microwave, running on a processor that costs less than a pack of AA batteries. It's *seriously* fucking cool.

There's going to be a lot of this AI, after the AI goes away - just like there was a lot of the web after the dotcom crash, when, overnight, San Francisco had infinity office-space, servers, and techies going begging.

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🍪 Hey look at this

* How I Became a Populist https://newrepublic.com/article/201171/alvaro-bedoya-ftc-became-populist

* Introducing the Bantam Tools EggBot https://www.evilmadscientist.com/2025/bantam-tools-eggbot/

* Framework flame war erupts over support of politically polarizing Linux projects https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/14/framework_linux_controversy/

* AI Won’t Replace Jobs, but Tech Bros Want You to Be Afraid It Will https://gizmodo.com/ai-wont-replace-jobs-tech-bros-want-you-terrified-2000670808

* US Passport Power Falls to Historic Low https://www.henleyglobal.com/newsroom/press-releases/henley-global-mobility-report-oct-2025

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🍪 Object permanence

#20yrsago Logic and math riddles from Slashdot https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=165444&threshold=3&mode=flat&commentsort=5&op=Change

#20yrsago Yiddish postcard gallery https://web.archive.org/web/20051018030610/http://members.screenz.com/bennypostcards/

#20yrsago JibJab’s legal threats over the use of 9 seconds of their video https://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2005/10/do_as_i_say_not.html

#20yrsago Wal-Mart photofinishing narcs out student who made anti-Bush poster https://web.archive.org/web/20051011233852/https://www.alternet.org/walmart/26503/#thumbtack

#20yrsago Buddhist monks deploy saffron flak vests and armored monkmobiles https://eyeteeth.blogspot.com/2005/10/monkmobiles-and-bulletproof-robes.html

#15yrsago Mitt Romney got a bestseller by demanding bulk-purchases of his books in exchange for lectures https://www.politico.com/blogs/ben-smith/2010/10/how-romney-made-a-best-seller-029968?showall

#15yrsago Every terrible thing Canada’s Stephen Harper government has done in the past four years https://24percentmajority.blogspot.com/2015/10/2011-2015-harper-government-wrap-up.html

#10yrsago 1980: the Director of the FBI mixes up KISS & The Who, confusing the hell out of FBI agents https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2015/oct/15/fbi-files-kiss/

#10yrsago Sit down already: standing desks aren’t healthier than seated ones https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2015/10/14/sitting-for-long-periods-doesnt-make-death-more-imminent-study-suggests/

#10yrsago It’s not enough that Apple and Google are bringing usable crypto to the world https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Passcode/Passcode-Voices/2015/1014/Opinion-Why-we-all-have-a-stake-in-encryption-policy

#10yrsago The NSA sure breaks a lot of “unbreakable” crypto. This is probably how they do it. https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2015/10/14/how-is-nsa-breaking-so-much-crypto/

#5yrsago Bricked Ferrari https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/15/expect-the-unexpected/#drm

#5yrsago The Passenger Pigeon Manifesto https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/15/expect-the-unexpected/#openglam

#5yrsago Dystopia as clickbait https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/15/expect-the-unexpected/#dystopia-is-over

#1yrago Of course we can tax billionaires https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/15/piketty-pilled/#tax-justice

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🍪 Upcoming appearances

* Chicago: How Platforms Die with Rick Perlstein (University Club), Oct 14
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/how-platforms-die-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1747916117159

* Los Angeles: Enshittification with David Dayen (Diesel), Oct 16
https://dieselbookstore.com/event/2025-10-16/cory-doctorow-enshittification

* San Francisco: Enshittification at Public Works with Jenny Odell (The Booksmith), Oct 20
https://app.gopassage.com/events/doctorow25

* PDX: Enshittification at Powell's, Oct 21
https://www.powells.com/events/cory-doctorow-10-21-25

* Seattle: Enshittification and the Rot Economy, with Ed Zitron (Clarion West), Oct 22
https://www.clarionwest.org/event/2025-deep-dives-cory-doctorow/

* Vancouver: Enshittification with David Moscrop (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 23
https://www.showpass.com/2025-festival-39/

* Montreal: Montreal Attention Forum keynote, Oct 24
https://www.attentionconferences.com/conferences/2025-forum

* Montreal: Enshittification at Librarie Drawn and Quarterly, Oct 24
https://mtl.drawnandquarterly.com/events/3757420251024

* Ottawa: Enshittification (Ottawa Writers Festival), Oct 25
https://writersfestival.org/events/fall-2025/enshittification

* Toronto: Enshittification with Dan Werb (Type Books), Oct 27
https://www.instagram.com/p/DO81_1VDngu/?img_index=1

* Barcelona: Conferencia EUROPEA 4D (Virtual), Oct 28
https://4d.cat/es/conferencia/

* Miami: Enshittification at Books & Books, Nov 5
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1504647263469

* Miami: Cloudfest, Nov 6
https://www.cloudfest.com/usa/

* Burbank: Burbank Book Festival, Nov 8
https://www.burbankbookfestival.com/

* Lisbon: A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet, with Rabble (Web Summit), Nov 12
https://websummit.com/sessions/lis25/92f47bc9-ca60-4997-bef3-006735b1f9c5/a-post-american-enshittification-resistant-internet/

* Cardiff: Hay Festival After Hours, Nov 13
https://www.hayfestival.com/c-203-hay-festival-after-hours.aspx

* Oxford:  Enshittification and Extraction: The Internet Sucks Now with Tim Wu at Rawley House (Oxford Internet Institute), Nov 14
https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/events/enshittification-and-extraction-the-internet-sucks-now/

* London: Enshittification with Sarah Wynn-Williams and Chris Morris, Nov 15
https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2025/event/cory-doctorow-with-sarah-wynn-williams

* Seattle: Neuroscience, AI and Society (University of Washington), Dec 4
https://compneuro.washington.edu/news-and-events/neuroscience-ai-and-society/

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🍪 Recent appearances

* Enshittification (The Gist)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgBiv_KchI0

* Canadian tariffs with Avi Lewis
https://plagal.wordpress.com/2025/10/15/cory-doctorow-talks-to-avi-lewis-about-his-proposal-to-fightback-against-trumps-tariff-attack/

* Enshittification (This Is Hell)
https://thisishell.com/interviews/1864-cory-doctorow

* Enshittification (Computer Says Maybe)
https://csm.transistor.fm/episodes/gotcha-enshittification-w-cory-doctorow

* Enshittification with Lina Khan (Brooklyn Public Library)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCX5Yst64Hw

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🍪 Latest books

* "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025

* "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

* "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

* "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org).

* "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

* "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

* "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

* "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

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🍪 Upcoming books

* "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

* "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

* "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

* "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026

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🍪 Colophon

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

* "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE AND SUBMITTED.

* A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work - excluding any serialized fiction - is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

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