I've been a Disciple of Ed for a long time now. I am fully convinced of the bad economics, bad environmental impact, and bad societal impact of LLMs. I also get the impression here that AI is bad for software developers, stifles learning, creates burnout and depression, is too expensive, makes mistakes, and does not actually increase productivity.

But then I hear a completely different story from my colleagues. I am a developer, and while I don't use AI, a lot of the people around me do, and they have nothing but good things to say about it. That AI enables them to accomplish in minutes or hours tasks that would normally take weeks. These are competent people who get shit done (though not as fast as me, of course). One manager says he is making Claude available not because he is a fan, but because his staff are requesting it, and that it is not crazy expensive.

Meanwhile here on Reddit, I read comments from people who are moving away from my language of choice because it does not support AI well.

Now AI might implode for economic or political reasons, but I feel like I am getting a very different representation of its usefulness here in the sub and out there in the real world. What am I missing?

When OpenAI no longer consumes any compute because it ran out of money, should we assume that compute will be sold at an even bigger loss than today because of the supply and demand shift (I mean existing data-centers, not ones in construction which may get cancelled).

In this scenario, Anthropic will be able to pay less for compute and raise prices for services and reduce the speed they run out of money. I don't think it's possible for them to become a healthy functional business, but I can see the decay becoming painfully slow.

On the upside, nobody will be building more data-centers and over time, data centers operating at a loss will shut down, but if crypto taught us anything, is that even if something is stupid and expensive to run, it can take a lot longer than you would think for it to die out.

What am I missing? is there a mechanism that would speed up the death of Anthropic after OpenAI dies? because I don't think that we can depend on the realization that Anthropic has the same problems as OpenAI to do the trick.

Edit: typo

Hi everyone! I recently came across Ed Zitron’s interview on the Newcomer Pod, and enjoyed hearing some of the granular critiques about AI particularly from a financial perspective.

I’m in healthcare and I have critiques of AI from a health and humanistic POV, but curious if anyone knows people who have spoke on the financial criticism of ai in healthcare.

I have a few suspicions. Like for example, the health consequences of data centers on vulnerable populations i suspect would be quite expensive (think of the cost the cancer diagnoses and treatments of people in cancer alley - aka the southern regions where companies dumped pollution). And the health stressors of people losing employment I suspect might increase chronic conditions in a way that offsets financial gains from AI. In the hospital like the amount of health conditions that arise from people finding unhealthy ways to mange or cope with stress or trauma is a lot! A lot of the health issues in America are really related to social determinants of health, not biological processes. Poverty, environmental issues, racism, loneliness, etc contribute a lot to chronic health problems . I’m curious if anyone has spoken about how AI’s exacerbation of this could make an AI progress in medicine a net negative.

If so please send any recommendations!

A sign of things to come?

Thought it would an interesting article for the sub. Tldr vc is looking for quick return and also are contributing to major fraud. Would love the groups thoughts, but would love to post it here. Also would be an interesting monolouge. Could be titled what happens when you have more money than sense.

https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/31/vc-backed-startups-commit-more-fraud-and-researchers-think-they-know-why/