When some huge and stupid public chatbot disaster hits the news, the AI pumpers will Kramer into the mentions to say stuff like “you have to admit, AI is here to stay.”

Well, no, I don’t. Not unless you say what you actually mean. What’s the claim you’re making? Herpes is here to stay too, but you probably wouldn’t brag about it.

What they’re really saying is “give in and do what I tell you.” They’re saying AI like it is in the bubble is a permanent force that will reshape society in Sam Altman’s image. It’s a new paradigm! So you have to give in to it. And give me everything I’m demanding.

Here’s an egregious example from the Washington State school system. It starts with the sentence “AI is here to stay,” then there’s a list of AI stuff to force on the kids, on the assumption that all of this will work forever just like the biggest hype in the bubble. And that’s not true! [OSPI]

If you ask these guys why AI is here to stay, they’ll just recite promotional talking points. So ask them some really pointy questions about the details.

Remember that a lot of these people were super convinced by just one really impressive demo that blew their minds. We have computers you can just talk to naturally now and have a conversation! That’s legit amazing, actually! The whole field of natural language processing is 80% solved!

The other 20% is where the computer is a lying idiot — and it probably can’t be fixed. That’s a bit of a problem in practice. Generative AI is all like that — it’s genuinely impressive demos with unfixable problems.

Sometimes they’ll claim chatbots are forever because machine learning works for X-ray scans. If they say that, they don’t know enough about the details to make a coherent claim, and you’d have to teach them the difference between medical machine learning systems and chatbots before they could.

Grifters will try to use gotchas. Photoshop has AI in it, so you should let me post image slop to your forum! Office 365 has AI in it, so if you use Word then you’re using AI! Spell check’s a kind of AI! These are all real examples. These guys are lying weasels and the correct answer is “go away”. Or maybe something stronger.

Are they saying the technology will surely get better because all technology just improves? Will the hallucinating stop? Then they need evidence of that, because it sure looks like the tech of generative AI is stuck at the top of its S-curve at 80% useful and has not made any major breakthroughs in a couple of years or more.

The guy’s probably seen an impressive demo, but he’s going to have to bring proper evidence that chatbots are going to make it to being any sort of reliable product. And we have no reason to think they will.

Are they saying that OpenAI and its friends, all setting money on fire, will be around forever? Ha, no. That is not economically possible. OpenAI alone needs tens of billions of fresh dollars every year. Look through Ed Zitron’s numbers if you think numbers will do any good to reply to this one. [Ed Zitron]

The big venture-funded AI companies are machines for taking money from venture capitalists and setting it on fire. The chatbots are just the excuse for them to do that. The companies are simply not sustainable standalone businesses.

Maybe after the collapse, there’ll be a company that buys the name “OpenAI” and dances around wearing its skin. The name “Fyre Festival” just went on sale. [eBay]

Are they saying there’s a market for generative AI, so it’ll surely keep going when the bubble pops? There may well be some market — the vibe coders are addicts. But the prices will be at least five or ten times what they are now if the chatbot has to pay its way as a standalone business.

But chatbots are useful to me personally! Sure, they do some useful things. Large language models are based on transformers, so anything a transformer does well, a chatbot will do okay if it’s trained. Translation, transcription, grammar checking, a chatbot can at least muddle through. And right now, the chatbot is convenient. Will you pay ten times the price for that? I’m not so sure.

Are they saying you can always run a local model at home? Sure you can, and about 0.0% of chatbot users do that. In 2025, the home models are painfully slow toys for nerd enthusiasts, even on a high-end box. No normal people are going to do this to get what they get from a casual chatbot now.

I’ve seen the people saying “AI is here to stay” get called on it and back down to, well, the technology will still exist. Sure, mathematics is here to stay. The transformer architecture is actually useful for stuff. But just existing isn’t much of a claim either. Technologies have their heyday then the last dregs of them linger forever.

Crypto is still around, serving the important “crime is legal” market, but nothing else is happening, and it’s radioactive for normal people. If you search for “AI is here to stay” on Twitter, you’ll see the guys who still have Bored Ape NFT icons.

Generative AI has a good chance of becoming as radioactive to the general public as crypto is. They’ll have to start calling the stuff that works “machine learning” again.

So. If someone says “AI is here to stay,” nail them down on what the precise claim is they’re making. Details. Numbers. What do you mean by being here? What would failure mean? Get them to make their claim properly.

I mean, they won’t answer. They never answer. They never had a claim in mind. They were just making promotional mouth noises.

I’ll make a prediction for you, to give an example:

The AI bubble will last at least two, maybe three more years, because the venture capitalists really need it to. When, not if, the VCs and their money pipeline go home and the chatbot prices multiply by ten or more, the market for generative AI will collapse.

There will be some small providers left. Gen-AI will technically be not dead yet! But the bubble will be extremely over. The number of people running an LLM at home will still be negligible.

It’s possible there will be something left after the bubble pops. AI boosters like saying it’s just like the dot-com bubble!! But i‘ve never really been convinced by the argument “Amazon lost money for years, so if OpenAI just sets enough money on fire then it must be Amazon.” It’s not a good argument.

Will inference costs — the real cost of each query, which are 80%-90% of compute load — come down? Sure, they’ll come down at some point. Will it be soon enough? Well, Nvidia’s Blackwell hasn’t been a good chip generation, so Nvidia is putting out more of their old generation chips while they try to get Blackwell production volumes up. So more efficient chips won’t fill out the market very soon.

So there you go. I might be wrong about any of that — but at least I’ve given reasons for what I’m saying.

If you want to say “but AI is here to stay!” then tell us what you mean in detail. Stick your neck out. Give your reasons. You might be wrong about parts of it, but at least you’ll have made a checkable claim.

• Video version

by Abrahm Lustgarten

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

On July 4, the broken remnants of a powerful tropical storm spun off the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico so heavy with moisture that it seemed to stagger under its load. Then, colliding with another soggy system sliding north off the Pacific, the storm wobbled and its clouds tipped, waterboarding south central Texas with an extraordinary 20 inches of rain. In the predawn blackness, the Guadalupe River, which drains from the Hill Country, rose by more than 26 vertical feet in just 45 minutes, jumping its banks and hurtling downstream, killing 109 people, including at least 27 children at a summer camp located inside a federally designated floodway.

Over the days and weeks to come there will be tireless — and warranted — analysis of who is to blame for this heart-wrenching loss. Should Kerr County, where most of the deaths occurred, have installed warning sirens along that stretch of the waterway, and why were children allowed to sleep in an area prone to high-velocity flash flooding? Why were urgent updates apparently only conveyed by cellphone and online in a rural area with limited connectivity? Did the National Weather Service, enduring steep budget cuts under the current administration, adequately forecast this storm?

Those questions are critical. But so is a far larger concern: The rapid onset of disruptive climate change — driven by the burning of oil, gasoline and coal — is making disasters like this one more common, more deadly and far more costly to Americans, even as the federal government is running away from the policies and research that might begin to address it.

President Lyndon B. Johnson was briefed in 1965 that a climate crisis was being caused by burning fossil fuels and was warned that it would create the conditions for intensifying storms and extreme events, and this country — including 10 more presidents — has debated how to respond to that warning ever since. Still, it took decades for the slow-motion change to grow large enough to affect people’s everyday lives and safety and for the world to reach the stage it is in now: an age of climate-driven chaos, where the past is no longer prologue and the specific challenges of the future might be foreseeable but are less predictable.

Climate change doesn’t chart a linear path where each day is warmer than the last. Rather, science suggests that we’re now in an age of discontinuity, with heat one day and hail the next and with more dramatic extremes. Across the planet, dry places are getting drier while wet places are getting wetter. The jet stream — the band of air that circulates through the Northern Hemisphere — is slowing to a near stall at times, weaving off its tracks, causing unprecedented events like polar vortexes drawing arctic air far south. Meanwhile the heat is sucking moisture from the drought-plagued plains of Kansas only to dump it over Spain, contributing to last year’s cataclysmic floods.

We saw something similar when Hurricane Harvey dumped as much as 60 inches of rain on parts of Texas in 2017 and when Hurricane Helene devastated North Carolina last year — and countless times in between. We witnessed it again in Texas this past weekend. Warmer oceans evaporate faster, and warmer air holds more water, transporting it in the form of humidity across the atmosphere, until it can’t hold it any longer and it falls. Meteorologists estimate that the atmosphere had reached its capacity for moisture before the storm struck.

The disaster comes during a week in which extreme heat and extreme weather have battered the planet. Parts of northern Spain and southern France are burning out of control, as are parts of California. In the past 72 hours, storms have torn the roofs off of five-story apartment buildings in Slovakia, while intense rainfall has turned streets into rivers in southern Italy. Same story in Lombok, Indonesia, where cars floated like buoys, and in eastern China, where an inland typhoon-like storm sent furniture blowing down the streets like so many sheafs of paper. Léon, Mexico, was battered by hail so thick on Monday it covered the city in white. And North Carolina is, again, enduring 10 inches of rainfall.

There is no longer much debate that climate change is making many of these events demonstrably worse. Scientists conducting a rapid analysis of last week’s extreme heat wave that spread across Europe have concluded that human-caused warming killed roughly 1,500 more people than might have otherwise perished. Early reports suggest that the flooding in Texas, too, was substantially influenced by climate change. According to a preliminary analysis by ClimaMeter, a joint project of the European Union and the French National Centre for Scientific Research, the weather in Texas was 7% wetter on July 4 than it was before climate change warmed that part of the state, and natural variability alone cannot explain “this very exceptional meteorological condition.”

That the United States once again is reeling from familiar but alarming headlines and body counts should not be a surprise by now. According to the World Meteorological Organization, the number of extreme weather disasters has jumped fivefold worldwide over the past 50 years, and the number of deaths has nearly tripled. In the United States, which prefers to measure its losses in dollars, the damage from major storms was more than $180 billion last year, nearly 10 times the average annual toll during the 1980s, after accounting for inflation. These storms have now cost Americans nearly $3 trillion. Meanwhile, the number of annual major disasters has grown sevenfold. Fatalities in billion-dollar storms last year alone were nearly equal to the number of such deaths counted by the federal government in the 20 years between 1980 and 2000.

The most worrisome fact, though, may be that the warming of the planet has scarcely begun. Just as each step up on the Richter scale represents a massive increase in the force of an earthquake, the damage caused by the next 1 or 2 degrees Celsius of warming stands to be far greater than that caused by the 1.5 degrees we have so far endured. The world’s leading scientists, the United Nations panel on climate change and even many global energy experts warn that we face something akin to our last chance before it is too late to curtail a runaway crisis. It’s one reason our predictions and modeling capabilities are becoming an essential, lifesaving mechanism of national defense.

What is extraordinary is that at such a volatile moment, President Donald Trump’s administration would choose not just to minimize the climate danger — and thus the suffering of the people affected by it — but to revoke funding for the very data collection and research that would help the country better understand and prepare for this moment.

Over the past couple of months, the administration has defunded much of the operations of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the nation’s chief climate and scientific agency responsible for weather forecasting, as well as the cutting-edge earth systems research at places like Princeton University, which is essential to modeling an aberrant future. It has canceled the nation’s seminal scientific assessment of climate change and risk. The administration has defunded the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s core program paying for infrastructure projects meant to prevent major disasters from causing harm, and it has threatened to eliminate FEMA itself, the main federal agency charged with helping Americans after a climate emergency like the Texas floods. It has — as of last week — signed legislation that unravels the federal programs meant to slow warming by helping the country’s industries transition to cleaner energy. And it has even stopped the reporting of the cost of disasters, stating that doing so is “in alignment with evolving priorities” of the administration. It is as if the administration hopes that making the price tag for the Kerr County flooding invisible would make the events unfolding there seem less devastating.

Given the abandonment of policy that might forestall more severe events like the Texas floods by reducing the emissions that cause them, Americans are left to the daunting task of adapting. In Texas, it is critical to ask whether the protocols in place at the time of the storm were good enough. This week is not the first time that children have died in a flash flood along the Guadalupe River, and reports suggest county officials struggled to raise money and then declined to install a warning system in 2018 in order to save approximately $1 million. But the country faces a larger and more daunting challenge, because this disaster — like the firestorms in Los Angeles and the hurricanes repeatedly pummeling Florida and the southeast — once again raises the question of where people can continue to safely live. It might be that in an era of what researchers are calling “mega rain” events, a flood plain should now be off-limits.

In the HBO drama “The Leftovers,” two percent of the world’s population suddenly disappears. This is cast as a fantastical and mysterious occurrence, setting the stage for a surreal tale of science fiction. You should never underestimate American ingenuity, though. We are on the verge of our own age of mass disappearance. It will be all too real. And it will not be fun.

Trump’s big budget bill passed the Senate yesterday. It will now go back the House, and there is more haggling to be done to appease various factions of the Republican Party, but it is a safe bet that it will pass with its biggest priorities intact. That means that an avalanche of new funding for the Department of Homeland Security, ICE, and anti-immigration measures is, in fact, coming. This is going to spill well past the bounds of what any sane person would consider to be “immigration enforcement.” It is going to create a lavishly funded, unaccountable, quasi-secret police force that will transform our nation for the worse. Very soon.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the terrifying scale of this new funding. This bill contains enough money to build a new system of immigration detention centers far bigger than the entire federal prison system. The American Immigration Council says that it will be enough to facilitate the “daily detention of at least 116,000 non-citizens.” It will let ICE hire more field agents than the FBI. Its $170 billion in funding for Stephen Miller’s rabid campaign to purge America of brown people is comparable to the total annual funding for the United States Army.

Donald Trump envisions himself as an all-powerful leader whose will is equal to law. He is bent on revenge against his political enemies. He has installed extreme loyalists in the Justice Department, the FBI, the Defense Department, the Department of Homeland Security, and all other security departments. The courts have declined to meaningfully restrain his abuses of these departments. This budget will give him the final piece of the puzzle that he needs to achieve his fever dream: a nationwide army of masked, unaccountable armed agents empowered to snatch anyone they like off the streets, and the physical infrastructure to imprison or deport those people at will. Thousands of men with guns, unrestrained by judges or local police, who do not answer to Congress, who point guns at the press, who arrest whoever they want, for reasons they do not share, and do whatever they wish with those people. The implications of this are going to make America a much darker place.

One year ago, if a Congressman on the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party had called for the forcible deportation of the man who just won the New York City Democratic mayoral primary, it could have been dismissed as posturing and delusion. Today, after what has happened over the past six months, you would be delusional not to consider this a serious threat. ICE has already arrested a number of Democratic elected officials, including mayors and members of Congress and a judge. In this environment, it is a trivial matter for Trump and his loyalists to concoct reasons to arrest almost anyone. People can be arrested if they are immigrants, if they look like they might be immigrants, if they illegally harbored or assisted immigrants, or if they somehow impeded ICE’s quest to arrest immigrants. The mission can and will be scaled up from “deport immigrants” to “punish those who want to stand in the way of our mission.” This is already happening, and soon will happen much more, in more places, to a greater degree. We must recognize that we are dealing with people for whom the intellectual justifications are unimportant secondary concerns, made up hastily to pave the way for them to do what they want to do.

This week, the White House told the Justice Department to “prioritize and maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings in all cases permitted by law and supported by evidence.” Thus we will begin to see some of the 25 million naturalized US citizens who the White House considers to be its enemies have their citizenship revoked. They will be exiled. What sort of criteria might be used to choose these targets? According to the memo, among those prioritized for denaturalization will be “Cases against individuals who pose a potential danger to national security, including those with a nexus to terrorism.” Because “national security” and “terrorism” both mean nothing and everything, this category alone is large enough to cover just about anyone that the administration wants to get rid of. Been to a protest? Written a left-wing op-ed? Shared a meme of JD Vance? You can and will be ejected from America.

Yesterday, JD Vance wrote that everything in Trump’s budget bill “is immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions.” This statement is false, particularly for the millions of people who will soon be losing their health insurance, but it does illustrate the extent to which Republicans are willing to whip up hatred of immigrants and use it as a smokescreen for their grand class war. It also reminds me that it is impossible for me to put into words my contempt for JD Vance. Men like Stephen Miller are, at least, genuine Nazis to the core, driven by a deep reservoir of hate. Vance, on the other hand, is a lotion-drenched, amoral careerist, a professional ass kisser of monsters, sitting in air conditioned rooms with his fellow Yale graduates dreaming up justifications for racist policies as a way to amuse himself, as a beloved PTA mom who has spent 47 years in America is snatched out of her Louisiana home and separated from her family. If Trump and Miller are the arsonists of American democracy, Vance is the accomplice pointing the firefighters in the wrong direction, to ensure that things burn as completely as his boss wishes.

Yesterday, Trump proudly attended the opening of a concentration camp. There will be many more to come.

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It is astonishing how many times we are forced to relearn the Martin Niemoller poem. But here we are! Every few generations, those who lived through the last round of this stuff die off, and a new generation must repeat the same atrocities, and suffer the same indignities, before at least redrawing the same conclusions. America is about to fund and build a huge secret police force that will, I promise you, be used to attack and imprison and exile the president’s enemies, of all sorts. Better to look this fact square in the face than to continue to kid ourselves as long as possible as we march down the road to the gulags.

This state of affairs is the fault of those who are now carrying it out—the White House, the Trump loyalists, the Republican cowards in Congress, the political supporters of fascism. But, if we want to be completely honest, there is a certain level of responsibility that a much broader slice of America must bear. The things that most Americans long countenanced for others are now being turned on us. The surveillance systems, the heavily armed police, the “anti-terrorism” measures, the vast intelligence apparatus—all these things, we imagined, would be used only for “criminals” of the sort that were not us. Now we are surprised to find that we have been defined as the criminals. Turns out we should not have built the systems of injustice in the first place. This is one of morality’s oldest lessons. We relearn, and relearn, and relearn, the hard way.

Getting through the period of American history that is now descending upon us will require all of us to practice radical empathy. A strange quality of even the worst totalitarian fascist states is that very bad things might happen to the person next to you, and your life can still continue as normal. More and more Americans are going to find that their neighbor or their friend or their employee or their colleague was just snatched up by armed men and taken somewhere. And meanwhile, all of us who were not snatched up can still go to McDonald’s and go to the beach and watch TV. The urge to retreat into the comforting security of the idea “it’s not me” will be strong. Yet navigating our way out of this means having a collective heart. You do not know whether they will come for you, or your neighbor, or your friend, or your colleague, and if they come for any one of us, they come for all of us. We must nurture the outrage that fuels the resistance to what is going to happen. We must hit the streets for our neighbors in the same way that our neighbors would hit the streets for us. It is an illusion to think that you are exempt from the gaze of the secret police. That’s not how it works. Believe that they can come for any one of us, and it will give you the conviction that this cannot be allowed to persist. Some bad things are coming. Luckily, we have something that Trump and Vance and Miller and all of the ICE agents never will. All the money and guns and masks and prisons in the world can’t make up for a coward’s weak heart.

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• Related reading: Retire the Word “Terrorism”; Anti-Immigration Democrats Fuck Off; Building the American Brownshirts; You’re a Bunch of Cowards!

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Via Aaron Rupar. My transcription:

“Mr. President, is there an expected time frame that detainees will spend here — days, weeks, months? And does that have anything to do with the immigration judges you just spoke about being trained and staffed here?”

“When you say, eh, what was the first part of your question?”

“Is there a specific time frame you expect the detainees to spend here — days, weeks, months?”

“In Florida?”

“Yes, here in Alligator Alcatraz.”

“I’m going to spend a lot — look, this is my home state. I love it, I love your government, I love all the people around. These are all friends of mine, they know ’em very well. I mean, I’m not surprised that they do so well. They’re great people. Ron has been a friend of mine for a long time. I feel very comfortable in the state. I’ll spend a lot of time here. Eh, I want, eh, you know, for four years, I’ve got to be in Washington and I’m okay with it because I love the White House. I even fixed up the little Oval Office. I make it, it’s like a diamond, it’s beautiful, it’s so beautiful. It wasn’t maintained properly, I will tell you that, but even when it wasn’t, it was still the Oval Office, so it meant a lot. But I’ll spend as much time as I can here. You know, my vacation is generally here ’cause it’s convenient, I live in Palm Beach, it’s my home. And I have a very nice little place, nice little cottage to stay at, right? But we have a lot of fun, and I’m a big contributor to Florida, you know, pay a lot of tax, and a lot of people move from New York, and I don’t know what New York is going to do. A lot of people moved to Florida from New York, and it was for a lot of reasons, but one of them was taxes. The taxes are so high in New York, they’re leaving. I don’t know what New York is gonna to do about that because some of the biggest, wealthiest people and some of the people that pay the most taxes of any people anywhere in the world for that matter, they’re moving to Florida, and other places. So we’re going to have to help some of these states out, I think. But thank you very much. I’ll be here as much as I can. Very nice question.”

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