Well, the unthinkable has happened, taking us totally unawares. Who could have seen it coming?
After years of round robins, and where we saw the majors borrowing from Peter to pay Paul which, for the record, AI itself said of this, “This practice is generally considered a temporary or futile solution that results in no net gain and often shifts the problem rather than solving it.” It’s also called the ‘Drunkard’s Path’ and a good name for it. We all watched it happen, in real time, but paid no attention to the man behind the curtain.
In case you missed it, Tech stocks wipe out $1 trillion in value as concerns deepen about the AI boom, NBC reported. Alphabet “shed about $500 billion in market value — its worst day ever and the second-worst wipeout of value in market history. On Friday, the stock dropped another 1.4%.

“In response, some investors are now looking at Big Tech’s massive AI spending through a more skeptical lens.”

Ya think?

Despite the likes of Anthropic and OpenAI raising piles of cash and founder raising $50 million seed rounds – yes, seed rounds, with barely a proof of concept, but details… That’s last century thinking, although when we predicted, above the fold in the market section of the Wall Street Journal some six months before it happened that the center would not hold. We were clueless, we were told. We just didn’t understand the ‘new economy.’ We were right, almost to the day

In case you haven’t been paying attention, “Companies rushed in on AI. Now some are pulling back,” reported The Guardian, saying that “Rapid AI adoption left workers cleaning up a flood of errors and low-quality work.”

So much for that ‘ask forgiveness’ thing. When in their race to dominance and building bigger, fast, better – well, not so much – they release products not yet ready for prime time. And left companies open to well-documented vulnerabilities.

“Employers around the globe are grappling with the fallout from rushing to adopt fast-changing artificial intelligence tools.

“Meta has scaled back plans to axe staff and use more AI agents after the company found employees were spending more and more time cleaning up technical and security errors, Reuters reported. And after thinning its workforce, especially middle managers, in a 2023 efficiency push, the company is expanding its managerial ranks again, LinkedIn posts from workers show.

“At Microsoft, which rolled out AI widely internally, executive vice-president Ryan Roslansky recently publicly lamented the prevalence of AI slop in his day-to-day work,” The Guardian continued
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“Employers are navigating a flood of errors and low-quality work that are sapping employee time, raising privacy and security risks and pushing up costs. Now, some businesses that started off fast and furious on AI are pumping the brakes, implementing restrictions where experimentation was once encouraged, bringing back experienced workers and upping training efforts.

“C-suite leaders say when it comes to AI, there’s a sense that “we’re driving the truck and building it at the same time, and that’s a problem,” said Johnny C. Taylor Jr, president and CEO of the Society for Human Resource Management. “If we could all rewind … we would have introduced [this] in a more thoughtful, slow way.”

Is the party over? Not by a long shot. The tech companies are still all in on AI. Why? As Edward Snowden said in his latest podcast, “if individuals can’t live, work, or engage in society without being intermediated by someone else’s technology, then the entire allocation of power in society becomes dangerous. When a handful of private companies control the digital infrastructure of our lives, they become gatekeepers to our reality. That’s not just a tech issue; it’s a crisis of democracy and freedom.

Which has always been our point and our concern and let’s face it: you simply have the wrong priorities.

“Snowden isn’t saying AI is evil,” said Tee Ashby in his Substack. “He’s saying the people building and deploying it are dodging responsibility, and the legal frameworks we have are hopelessly unprepared. He even went so far as to say that OpenAI’s Sam Altman should be in jail if his models cause harm….not as a legal accusation, but to make a point. Someone needs to be held personally accountable. And right now, nobody is.”

But we were led to believe that the idea is to move fast and break things. Well, in that case, AI, mission accomplished. Onward and forward.