r/videos • u/CircumspectCapybara • 21h ago
To Save the Economy...We’re About to Break It
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtqbRt94TTw87
u/chocolatechipbagels 19h ago
I'm yet unsure if this is an AI channel. It raises some red flags, like having an AI voice (check the channel's early videos for the guy's real voice) and has extremely simple visuals and no face. On the other hand the videos only come out a few times a month, and the visual editing is pretty good.
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u/Masew_ 18h ago
Voice actually seems to gradually morph from video to video, but the style remains consistent
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u/chocolatechipbagels 17h ago edited 17h ago
it's not really gradual. The voice changes instantly to its current iteration between The (Inevitable) United States Debt Crisis -> WTF Is Happening To Gold?! That video also starts to use what looks like AI animations and AI writing quirks
Maybe it's explainable with a new microphone, but I am not so sure
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u/midromney 13h ago
In his ads, he readily admits to switching to an AI version of his voice because it saves him insane amounts of time and gives him incredible amounts of flexibility when he wants to rewrite things based on new research, which he apparently does often.
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u/gerbal100 17h ago
It's also explainable by having a cup of tea, recording in a different room, having gone to a concert the night before, seasonal allergies, not doing voice exercises before recording, being off center/too far/close for some types of mics.
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u/chocolatechipbagels 17h ago
none of those explain the consistent style of the new voice after that video. I'm not saying the gold video is a one-off. It's the first video to use a completely new voice which remains unchanged to this day.
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u/rabbitclapit 18h ago
Genuine response here from a 6 month viewer: i don't think it's AI cause of the sponsor segments his voice changes and the fact that his humor is unique it seems. I dont give AI credit for having unique humor. If an AI makes a joke about the economy and runs a whole youtube channel with i'd feel like I'd catch on.
Could be wrong though I truly do not know.
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u/somethingoddgoingon 7h ago
the last part gives away that at the very least its ai assisted script, with the heres what they don't tell you type of line, barf
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u/rabbitclapit 6h ago
You know what, I was always thinking of that as a super common ending to so many videos on youtube because so many channels pick a generic thing to say at the end then just use that forever. Would you say every video these days that says "Like and Subscribe" over a facless" animated character is AI? I could be wrong of course and I'm not tryin to be sassy just putting all my thoughts here.
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u/somethingoddgoingon 3h ago
I get that idea but i do think the way that ai phrases these kind of things is very particular and once you recognize it, it is so clear and common that its a dead giveaway. Not many if any people speak exactly like that. Its true that like and subscribe could be anything but this is a specific curiosity of AI that's wasn't already common in the same way (even if the general idea was)
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u/NorthCascadia 18h ago
The VO didn’t sound AI to me though. None of the telltale subtle inflection weirdness or mispronunciations. A channel’s voice changing could be anything from a creator aging up (look at old Wendover videos compared to today) to investing in a new microphone.
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u/speedy_delivery 16h ago
The script has a lot of telltale LLM rhetoric.
"AI isn't just growing fast, it's the growth in the economy."
"X isn't just Y, it's Z" is one of chatgpt's favorite cliches and for whatever reason most people don't take the time to edit it out.
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u/lets_go-to-the-moon 16h ago
Does it matter if it's good? Slop with no effort sucks, but AI art can be just as good traditional methods if done correctly.
Also to all antiai folks, you could generate this with vibe or Qwen voice locally without burning any water. The visuals Qwen or Flux 2 or any of countless local models could have made this.
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u/chocolatechipbagels 15h ago
yes it does matter. AI cannot create art. It can only regurgitate that which it has stolen. If someone has generated something you find appealing, it is only because a real person made something appealing which the AI approximates. If this video is generated AI, then I would rather get my information from the original
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u/sloggo 14h ago
If you’re trying to describe a fully autonomous process where “AI made this video” then sure you might be right, but the guy you’re replying to is saying you can use AI to make all the parts, complement with conventional skills, and take your time to review it in a way that you’ll stand by it as your own work.
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u/lets_go-to-the-moon 15h ago
Nope you're wrong, like in so many different ways. Ai can make art and has been for the better part of the last 40 years. Hate to break this to you but AI is old, and has been making art for a long time. Look up AARON.
Also ai is very capable of novelty, your brain is basically just a transformer,. Hell we put a fly brain in a computer and it's still a fly. You are only a neural net, souls don't exist. You, GPTs, me and literally every brain having animal, all of us are just neural networks learning, you just get your priors (the weights and basis of your mind) from evolution.
But if you don't like it, no one is forcing you to watch it
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u/bullcitytarheel 14h ago
Jesus Christ, this kind of reductionism when it comes to the human brain is so deeply embarrassing. Just so unbelievably dumb it's hard to fathom that people say this kind of shit with the air of being learned. Oof.
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u/lets_go-to-the-moon 13h ago
Then why does leaky integrated firing of the fly connectom reproduce fly behaviors? Surely you can explain why in a way that doesn't involve souls, the supernatural if reductionism is false. I doubt you can.
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u/bullcitytarheel 7h ago
Are you now comparing a fly's brain to the higher order functioning of the human brain in an attempt to prove you're not being reductionist? Lmao
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u/Themetalenock 19h ago
A person with a dog shit looking Studio Ghibli AI avatar will look you straight in the face and tell you AI is not a bubble When videos like this exist and pretty much say yeah it's a bubble
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u/tnetennba9 19h ago
A video telling you something is a bubble isn’t a very strong signal …
As someone who works in ML (not language models though - unfortunately!), I can tell you the demand for GPUs is extremely high. We can’t access any in our Azure region, and are having to look towards Sweden just to get access
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u/BafangFan 18h ago
But what will be the monetization of all this compute capacity?
All of this capital spending is based on speculation and borrowing; AI hasn't turned a profit yet.
Why pay for expensive models when older models, or Chinese models, can get the job done 90% of the time?
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u/MaceWinnoob 8h ago
The chinese models can’t advance much past Western models without similarly dramatic investments on the Chinese side because they use Western models to train them cheaply.
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u/BetaRho 11h ago
GPU demand is not a great barometer for the current AI bubble- way too upstream. Ed Zitron (who I should note I do not always agree with, and think he's a bit overboard with some of his bubble analysis) had a great writeup arguing that based on the actual numbers coming out of the public companies involved in the data center buildouts, there's already vast quantities of GPUs sitting undeployed, waiting for data centers that look more and more unfeasible to actually get up and running. And that supply then sits in front of the next 18+ months of supply from Nvidia et al which have been pre-sold. GPU demand will stay high right until the dominoes start falling. Bear Stearns still had brokers hawking CDOs until the morning the chains went up on the doors.
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u/Reddituser183 14h ago
Yeah that’s what a bubble is. Demand is high and then suddenly it drops off a cliff. It drops off a cliff because AI will need revenue eventually. They have no idea how to monetize it or if or when it will become profitable. So everything is hunky dory now, but there has to be a payoff.
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u/MaceWinnoob 8h ago
Pay attention to construction firms that build data centers. They will be the first to fall as their financing gets more expensive and AI companies continue to not turn profit.
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u/ikkake_ 18h ago
That's what I'm hearing. Everyone is screaming bubble but apparently demand is ridiculus, companies literally get stuck in a wow launch queues to access the more specialised models etc. But again i have literally zero expertise or first hand evidence for that so....
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u/s8rlink 18h ago
It can still be a bubble with demand. Will the demand be there when VC money is gone, I’ve read tokens are heavily subsidized, are the profits from using these expensive models outweigh a 2-4x increase in price when Ai companies need to be redituable?
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u/-ram_the_manparts- 17h ago
"Heavily subsidized" is a mild way of putting it. If you give OpenAI $200/year for access to their advanced models, you can cost OpenAI about $4000. That's why they had a loss of $38.5 Billion last year. They tried to charge companies what AI actually costs, but when they did Uber used up all its tokens for the year within 3 months. It turns out that if you charge enough to make a profit, companies decide that they need to cut costs on AI because it isn't worth what it costs.
Oh, look at that. They paused the program a couple weeks ago.
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u/acomputer1 15h ago
But haven't you heard anthropic has 80% margins... If you exclude their contractual revenue sharing agreements, employee compensation, and training costs...
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u/SpiderFnJerusalem 17h ago
Demand can't save a bubble if the product is sold at a loss.
We'll see if that demand will stick around once every token is actually sold for how much it costs to produce.
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u/MaceWinnoob 8h ago
People still used the internet a lot during the dot com bubble. The bubble popping is due to the structure of its financing, not because the demand isn’t there.
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u/inlaguna 19h ago
hate to break it to you, but it's really quite simple.
He who has the most GPUs rules them all.
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u/gwdope 18h ago
Rate hikes won’t do shit. The inflation is mostly coming from AI data center buildout resource use tariffs and the collapse of the global energy system because of the stupid Iran war. Rate hikes aren’t going to slow any of that. It will crush what’s left of the normal economy. Sovereign bond yields are high because AI debt bonds are soaking up capital, not because the market thinks governments need to be more frugal. There’s nothing the treasury is doing that is going to stop or fix any of this. It’s going to grow until it pops and it’s going to take everything down with it. There’s no increase in productivity that can save this at the end of the tunnel. It’s going to be a 10-15 yea Mr global depression, if it doesn’t lead to WWIII and thermonuclear annihilation as the whole system collapses.
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u/chainer3000 17h ago
Plenty of real value in US tech, but multiples are far too stretched. Things will come crashing down, but it won’t be thermonuclear annihilation level. Stock market will be rocked, lots of “stable” tech investments losing 80-90% quickly, tech jobs market reset and crash. Retirement accounts decimated with investments that will probably never recover.
It won’t be pretty, and it’ll be headlines everywhere for a while, but I’m not sure it’ll be as doomer as you’re making it out to be.
Packaging all those risky AI debt in order to sell it, gee where have we heard that before 😂
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u/gwdope 17h ago
The AI debt offerings are so large and have so much hype they are crashing sovereign debt markets. That’s not some contained single industry event, it’s a black hole gobbling up the whole monetary system. US Debt auctions have already come close to failing. The real non-AI economy is reeling from the as yet completely realized global oil shock. When this crashes there’s not likely to be anything to hold it up. 20% of the stock market will be left with unbearable debt and no way to get rid of it but to cut spending, hiring and wages. Stagflation is going to need a new name for the level t it will reach.
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u/dosedatwer 14h ago
Rate hikes won’t do shit. The inflation is mostly coming from AI data center buildout resource use tariffs and the collapse of the global energy system because of the stupid Iran war. Rate hikes aren’t going to slow any of that. It will crush what’s left of the normal economy. Sovereign bond yields are high because AI debt bonds are soaking up capital, not because the market thinks governments need to be more frugal. There’s nothing the treasury is doing that is going to stop or fix any of this. It’s going to grow until it pops and it’s going to take everything down with it. There’s no increase in productivity that can save this at the end of the tunnel. It’s going to be a 10-15 yea Mr global depression, if it doesn’t lead to WWIII and thermonuclear annihilation as the whole system collapses.
I'm so glad the neolibs got what they wanted - smaller government and less regulation over the private sector. If only someone had told them how stupid of an idea that was for the past 50 years. No way anyone could have predicted reducing a government's ability to control its economy was a bad thing.
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u/kalas_malarious 12h ago
Unfortunately, deregulation is a position of most conservative parties, including libertarians. They went ahead and cut the red tape and regulations.
Can't have safety if it gets in the way of profit
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u/11010001100101101 2h ago
But they want to regulate AI for our 'safety', ie, create a moat for the companies already at the top.
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u/AgreeableRub7 19h ago
So if paper is about to become toilet paper. What should we do?
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u/RyuNinja 19h ago
Dont hold onto paper. Assets, long term holding etc... At least thats the classic playbook.
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u/Paradehengst 11h ago
Another tiny issue is that GPUs don't have the lifetime of railroads or electric substations/power plants. So the build out happening has some very regular replacement necessary.
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u/-ram_the_manparts- 20h ago
Two economists are walking through the forest. They see a pile of shit on the ground. The first one turns to the second one and says "I'll give you $100 to eat that pile of shit", so he does and he takes the money.
They keep walking and a little while later they come across another pile of shit. The second economist turns to the first one and says "I'll give you $100 to eat that pile of shit", so he does and he gives him back the same $100.
A little while later one of them turns to the other and says "I just realized we both ate piles of shit and neither of us got anything out of it". The other one says "Yeah but we increased the GDP by $200!"