Image is from the Wikipedia article on the Sudanese Civil War.
Al-Fashir, the capital of North Darfur (a little east of that deep red zone in the west of the megathread map), is the last major holdout of the Sudanese government in that state, and is currently under siege by the RSF. Losing it would be a significant blow to the SAF, though given how the conflict lines are shaping up, it seems increasingly plausible that there will be a de facto - if not de jure - partition of Sudan, unless the military situation substantially changes. This is because the RSF have been pushed out of central Sudan, while the SAF are being pushed out of Western Sudan - although, the situation is pretty complex and has been known to change rapidly before.
As has been a constant feature of the Sudan Civil War - perhaps the single worst humanitarian crisis on the planet right now when measured by numbers - the civilian situation pales in comparison to the military situation, with hundreds of thousands of children dead from famine, and tens of millions of people experiencing extreme food insecurity.
Al-Fashir has been the destination of many thousands of refugees fleeing genocide, and food and aid supplies into the town are being explicitly blocked by the RSF, resulting in scenes similar to what is happening in Gaza right now. The big difference is that fleeing from major battle zones is at least somewhat of an option, though people are often caught and robbed or enslaved or trafficked while moving to neighbouring towns and cities - and these cities are often experiencing similar conditions to places that refugees are leaving.
Last week’s thread is here.
The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
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The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.
Israel's Genocide of Palestine
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against the temporary Zionist entity. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA reports on Israel’s destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia’s youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don’t want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it’s just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists’ side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR’s former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR’s forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster’s telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a ‘propaganda tax’, if you don’t believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
An American citizen who served in the IOF had his vehicle set on fire and “Death to the IDF” spray painted next to it in St. Louis, Missouri yesterday
Based as hell.
South African Buffalo Kills American Trophy Hunting Millionaire in Self Defense
Of course The Guardian tries to frame it as an “unprovoked attack” on the defenseless trophy hunters
the newspaper for nazis
opinion
in my opinion whoever wrote that should be shot
too nice a death
too many genocide enthusiasts around to take your time with them all
that’s why they invented the
I have no words.
John Oliver went into the starvation in Gaza yesterday. This feels like a precursor of the intelligentsia being “always against this” or “not realizing” that Israel was “going too far”.
Has he not even addressed israel-palestine once these past 2 years?
EDIT: I just remembered he (his writers) mocked bernie for not calling for a ceasefire
He did a sequence on the West Bank and a sequence on the “Israel-Hamas War” previously
Not surprised considering he’s just controlled opposition/pressure release valve
The Pro-Palestine Movement is just as susceptible of being integrated into the empire’s cultural hegemony as BLM, Occupy, Land Back, 90s environmentalism, civil rights and abolitionism are/were.
Hilarious fearmongering from the economist: “Iran is flooding the Gulf with foodstuffs. Nine out of ten aubergines, tomatoes and watermelons imported by the UAE are of Persian origin. Oman and Qatar are also being targeted. This is the most spectacular invasion you have never heard of”
my god, someone PLEASE step up to save the Qataris from Persian tomatoes!!
Imagine: There is a huge flood and you are about to die. But just in time, a rescue helicopter comes and you start climbing on the ladder. Before you are allowed into the helicopter, a FEMA lawyer presents a contract to you that requires you to invest $50k in Israeli companies. You refuse. The rescuers kick you off the helicopter and into the raging waters, where you die.
U.S. states and cities that boycott Israeli companies will be denied federal aid for natural disaster preparedness, the Trump administration has announced, tying routine federal funding to its political stance.
This definition covers refusing to do business with any company that: • Is Israeli • Does business with Israel (sells to or buys from Israel or Israeli companies) • Is authorized, licensed, or organized under Israeli law (even if operating outside Israel)
The US is such a fucked up place it’s mind blowing lmao
Well if the federal government denies aid in natural disasters, then I am sure it would only be fair if those taxes remain at home.
This is the question that normie-liberals need to face: “If Trump is dismantling the US government, what’s the point of even participating in all this shit anyway?”. It may be the first time they’re actually thinking “outside the box” ever, since there isn’t any canned reply that they’ve been fed by the media or other sources (yet).
Among comrades I think it provokes an interesting and nuanced discussion about what the consequences of that sort of move would be and what form it should or could take. For the normie-liberals (not or lightly online, no formal power) it’s just going to have to be beaten over their heads until they start to get that the existence of the US is holding them back from everything they want and more.
As for “what is to be done?” couldn’t say cause all paths toward actual secession lead to civil war, and the left loses that 100/100 times without decades of preparation. However, any amount of internal disunity toward the US stretches the empire thinner and gives more room for the global south to make some moves.
This is the question that normie-liberals need to face: “If Trump is dismantling the US government, what’s the point of even participating in all this shit anyway?”. It may be the first time they’re actually thinking “outside the box” ever, since there isn’t any canned reply that they’ve been fed by the media or other sources (yet).
depending on how narrow you want to be about “all this shit”, the federal government falling apart doesn’t mean everything goes away immediately. Your state and local governments will continue to function in some capacity. people will still buy groceries with dollars (for a while anyway). People are used to these structures and will for the most part maintain them out of habit. It doesn’t really get interesting until the food or utilities stop, people don’t get paid, or banking collapses.
Agree, although in the “among comrades” discussion we should understand that the free trade that comes from open internal borders is what keeps most state and local economies functioning. Disrupting this could cause issues, but that’s not to say that it shouldn’t happen and can’t be managed if it did happen.
yeah if the ports shut down and racist militias occupy border checkpoints it would hasten everything else. Have to look at other countries that have collapsed and figure out what makes logistics people keep working or not if somebody wanted to go through the whole rat maze.
As a Democratic socialist account my hope is that the US can transition to democratic socialism (or more likely, social democracy) in a managedd way. There will be no revolution here, and socialism will arrive last at the imposition of a socialist global order.
I understand that this is off topic but I cannot help but point out that “cascadia” and that flag are deeply deeply rooted in white supremacy and have origins with the Pacific Northwest imperative that was a movement to create a new white ethnostate in the pacific northwest. Not only is it a dumb cracker fantasy even without those origins it is extremely offensive to indigenous people specifically especially those that are working to assert their sovereignty in those regions.
This is the original flag of the “Northwest Imperative” it’s just been slightly rebranded to appeal to a broader segment of white libertarian weirdos and obscure it’s neo-Nazi roots:
The Doug Flag as it is known is a misguided attempt by some white lib with a fundamental misunderstanding of anti-racism and very suspiciously chose the exact colors of the explicitly white supremacist flag that preceded it.
As other indigenous comrades put it, the movement is at best tone def and has done very little to seek indigenous input and seems to be more a reorganization of colonial power than a rejection of it, and at worst it is used by cryptofascists to try to reignite the white separatist movement. If such a breakaway state were created today it would have one of the whitest demographics in all of North America.
Not exactly off topic comrade, and important to discuss. I’ve noted most of my thoughts here, maybe start with the last couple sections, as they relate to your post: https://hexbear.net/comment/5576727
My use of “Cascadia” imagery has a lot more to do with appropriating this:
The Doug Flag as it is known is a misguided attempt by some white lib with a fundamental misunderstanding of anti-racism and very suspiciously chose the exact colors of the explicitly white supremacist flag that preceded it.
Than the white nationalism part ofc.
As other indigenous comrades put it, the movement is at best tone def and has done very little to seek indigenous input and seems to be more a reorganization of colonial power than a rejection of it, and at worst it is used by cryptofascists to try to reignite the white separatist movement. If
Agree, all valid. I personally have strong anti-colonial convictions and a strong inclination toward indigenous liberation. I spend more time talking about these topics than I do talking about “Cascadia” itself. To me, I am using it as an offramp from Americanism and an onramp to democratic socialism (something, something. Allende), anti- colonialism (the US can’t help themselves but exploit, this makes it both dangerous and unethical to take part in the imperial system), and indigenous rights (“a key part of a ‘Cascadia culture’, were it to exist, would be respect for indigenous people and stewardship of the environment, wouldn’t it?”).
I actually think that all these topics are super important to our region, I’m tired of it always being “Trump’s bullshit of the day” and :vote:ing. In a way I’m happy that there is some entanglement with the white nationalist history because it offers an opportunity to discuss!
You may disagree with the approach, but I hope you at least see where I’m coming from. Also I’d love to toss out the flag and the name and start over with the “People’s Federated Socialist Republic of the Salish lands”, but people see the Doug flag at soccer games and whatever so it’s an easier starting point.
Doesn’t it feel similar to appropriating the confederate flag?
It simply doesn’t, that’s not what pretty much anyone would understand it to be.
My perception of it is that both refer to a white separatist movement.
Also I’d love to toss out the flag
Then why not start by just not using it?
It’s like trying to reclaim the swastika or confederate flag.
“People’s Federated Socialist Republic of the Salish lands”
Have you actually consulted with indigenous people on this matter? Cuz I feel like if you had you just wouldn’t be trying to do this.
Then why not start by just not using it?
I’m curious if you live in the region yourself. It would make more sense if you do.
It’s like trying to reclaim the swastika or confederate flag.
Not correct at all, it’s much more similar to reclaiming the US flag. I know that’s not popular with this community either, and it’s something that I think is extremely cringe as well (seeing liberals carry it around and such), but it also isn’t the same as a swastika. Nobody perceives it that way besides a dozen kkk boomers out in baker city. Local urbanites don’t have a single clue about it (which is not a good thing).
Furthermore, the flag has never represented an actual movement or country in the way of Nazi Germany or the CSA. It’s known as a “flag people fly at soccer games” unless you dig through Wikipedia or you live in “greater Idaho”. It actually is eligible to be reappropriated, in this case.
Have you actually consulted with indigenous people on this matter?
No because this isn’t a movement, it’s a rhetorical tool as far as I’m concerned. If someone were to approach me and try and make it real, I’d immediately adopt your perspective and continue the discussion form there.
If tomorrow I were made the chair of the Cascadia Workers’ Party in some alternate universe, it would of course be my responsibility to approach indigenous leadership, develop relationships, and offer them representation.
A rhetorical tool to do what?
The native cultures of that region have probably some of the coolest looking art I’ve seen, tons of stuff that would look great on a flag, and could show their long history in that land, and they go for this? “Ocean on one side, trees on the other, whites in the middle”
that was a movement to create a new white ethnostate in the pacific northwest.
As if Oregon wasnt explicitly founded as a white-only utopia enough.
Also these flags are far more prettier than the cascadia one. I know the reddit-style minimalist flags are currently all the rage (look at the ugly minnesota flag)
Or this one based on salish woven baskets.
Those are absolutely way cooler and more meaningful, if I had an actual platform it would be the first order of business to pick one of these.
Actually, it would be the second order of business after establishing relationships with indigenous leadership. Demographics mean that a socialist PNW movement will be very white, and we can’t just appropriate shit and move on without the underlying relationship.
Might change my avatar to something like this, but at the same time I like stirring the controversy (gently) and getting the whole discussion out there. This isn’t the first time someone has brought up the region’s white nationalist background (I brought it up myself in the first post on this account!), and every discussion is an educational opportunity for the observer.
Maybe I’ll make another account with a cool fish flag avi that always calls out this account from the left as a bit.
This is the question that normie-liberals need to face: “If Trump is dismantling the US government, what’s the point of even participating in all this shit anyway?”
The answers they’ll probably come to are “maintaining the dollar hegemony” and “nuclear weapons.”
True, and I would agree the nuclear weapons aspect should be considered carefully (among comrades in a hypothetical situation where something is actually happening). I don’t think “dollar hegemony” is going to come up for a normie-lib, but if it does, it at least advances the conversation outside of electoralism and “trump bad” and gives you something to work with.
If they bring up nuclear weapons control, ask them if they know the name and location of the single site where American nukes are built and maintained.
Oh, folks in my area are totally on the vaporization shortlist if for some reason the US ever gets nuked. I’d assume it’s fairly common knowledge but I could be wrong.
this is a racket, zionist firms will be able to bully clients for inferior product and prices even when non-zionist contracts have nothing to do with BDS
the entity fears BDS
even if you sign it, it’s meaningless because it’s coercion, but all law is fake so
everyone who is too much of a coward to stop trading with israel or give them a little extra gift Delibird style should at least do a really shitty job. even during iran’s beautiful fireworks display I could see aliexpress reviews like “fast shipping to israel, good quality, but it didn’t shoot rainbows for no reason and when i complained the seller wouldn’t condemn khamas so 1 star” and I’m like damn why are these not at least the QC rejects
In 5 years you will be arrested if you leave the supermarket without purchasing at least two “israeli” products
I always feel weird when I bring this up, but I feel I need to given that I think there are misconceptions about “boycott bans” that a lot of us run with. And it’s important we all understand it lest some libs dunk on us for getting something wrong.
At least as things are now, YOU can boycott Israel as an individual citizen. You can organize a boycott to get a group of people to boycott Israel. The furthest any law could TRY to go would be to outlaw organizing a boycott publicly, but even with our dogshit SCOTUS that would get shot down.
What the state and local anti-BDS laws are designed to do are prevent government entities from formally boycotting Israel. They also sometimes ban the government from banning contractors following BDS but good luck finding some petite boug construction businesses who are also following BDS. Functionally this only ever happens with universities and small municipalities. There might be some laws somewhere that disallow government employees from organizing BDS, but I can’t recall if I’m just imaging that or if it really happened somewhere.
At least as things are now, YOU can boycott Israel as an individual citizen. You can organize a boycott to get a group of people to boycott Israel. The furthest any law could TRY to go
Just not true. In Texas government employees. All government employees have to sign a pledge in their employment contract that says they won’t boycott the zionist entity. I seem to vaguely recall a teacher or someone getting fired for it but I’m not positive it happened, just that it absolutely could today right now and all it would take is a photo of you present at a BDS, pro-Palestine rally or a post on social media saying people should boycott the entity. This is 100% legal and fine by the SCOTUS because you can just like choose not to be employed, choose to not use your teaching credential, choose to get another job because as we know good paying jobs are everywhere these days.
Death death to the IDF
I have a family member who is a school teacher who was forced to sign a document stating they wouldn’t engage in BDS activities against Israel.
tbh, there are ways to boycott without exclusive boycott as legal entities, their administrators just don’t want to. Say buying bonds with aa rating or etf which explicitly don’t invest in weapons (as a whole).
The URL redirects to:
US reverses pledge to link disaster funds to Israel boycott stance
By Courtney Rozen
August 4, 202510:54 PM GMT Updated 1 hour ago
edit: wayback didn’t even catch it
Largest civilian flotilla to set sail to Gaza
Boats will leave Spain on 31 august, and Tunisia on the 4th
not sure if the aerial footage of gaza that has been filmed over the last couple days has been shared here yet. what i have seen of it is harrowing and this clip from itv sums up the grim scenes:
“Gaza is being erased … Israel tried to restrict images from above being filmed or shown … This landscape of destruction looks otherworldy, but it’s not, it’s this world - What is happening may come to define one of its darkest eras, one that casts a stain on humanity, which will endure for generations”
words are inadequate to describe the horror of this genocide, the worst crime of the 21st century and certainly among the worst of the last 100 years
It certainly is one that most people are confronted with. No other genocide was as globally visible and reachable to a common audience.
It also broke the delulu libs who thought that they would have acted morally righteous if they lived in 1930s europe.
Great clip. Wish I didn’t scroll down, though. There’s always people with terrible takes in the replies of X, the everything Nazi app.
I recently read this article posted on lemmy on how big the AI bubble is regarding the US empire economy and …its huge.
In context of this article about some of the novel ways that the child-killing zionists are integrating AI technologies into their weapons systems and military; basically using Gaza as a testing ground for these capabilities. Of course the demons are bragging about it. One of the described methods discusses using bombings and sonic booms to triangulate locations of intercepted communications transmissions:
spoiler
.In late 2023, the Zionist regime was attempting to assassinate Ibrahim Biari, the commander of Hamas’s Jabalia Central Battalion, who was allegedly involved in planning the October 7 attack. The regime’s military intelligence intercepted Biari’s communications with other Hamas members but was unable to pinpoint his exact location. Therefore, they turned to an AI-powered audio tool—one that analyzed various sounds such as sonic booms and airstrikes.
After the approximate location of Ibrahim Biari’s communications was identified, Zionist military officials were warned that the area—which included several apartment complexes—was highly populated. They stated that to ensure Biari’s death, multiple buildings needed to be targeted in the airstrike.
The operation was approved and carried out.Since then, the regime’s military intelligence has also used this audio tool—alongside maps and images of Gaza’s complex underground tunnels—to search for hostages. According to two Israeli officers, the tool has improved over time to identify individuals with greater accuracy.
…
The audio tool is just one example that demonstrates how the regime has used the Gaza war to test and rapidly deploy AI-supported military technologies on an unprecedented scale.
Many of these efforts resulted from collaboration between active-duty soldiers in Unit 8200 and reservists working at tech companies such as Google, Microsoft, and Meta. According to these individuals, Unit 8200 has established a central hub called the “Studio,” which serves as an innovation center and a place to connect experts with AI projects. Reservists from the aforementioned major companies are involved in this unit. The Studio’s primary mission is to rapidly adapt artificial intelligence technologies to meet military needs.
While the regime rapidly continued to develop its artificial intelligence arsenal, the deployment of these technologies has led to mistaken identifications, wrongful arrests, and civilian deaths. According to European and American defense officials, no other power has been as active as the occupying regime in testing AI tools in real battles. This situation provides an initial glimpse into how such technologies might be used in future wars, as well as a warning of how these technologies could malfunction or be misused, resulting in the killing of civilians.
Meta and Microsoft declined to comment on the killings carried out in the Gaza war using artificial intelligence, but Google, in an effort to clear itself of accusations, stated: “We have employees who serve as reservists in various countries around the world. The work these employees do as reservists is not related to Google.”
Avi Hasson, CEO of the nonprofit organization Startup Nation Central, which connects investors to companies in the occupied territories, said, “Reservists from Meta, Google, and Microsoft have played a vital role in advancing innovation in drones and data integration.” He added, “Reservists brought specialized knowledge and access to key technologies that were not available in the military.”
Its noteworthy that Microsoft, Amazon, and Google stocks are all up ~50-60% since Oct 7 2023. Nvidia of course is up ~ 300%. Palantir has gone up 1000% but most of that is since trump was “elected”.
I previously pointed out that the “tel aviv” stock exchange has doubled since Oct 7 and goes up when fighting gets more intense while declining during ceasefires. A depressing stock chart for Elbit the ‘israeli’ weapons company being targetted by Palestine Action and makes murder drones among other things.
It’s hard not to perceive this as an AI-driven genocide bubble.
Guess we gotta’ switch to text-only encrypted messages now if they’re able to analyze them like this.
or you could do fake noises to make them bomb something else.
And it can’t be an app connected in any way to any legal entity under a NATO country’s jurisdiction. Signal’s vaunted security won’t mean shit when American federal gestapo threaten developers with star-chamber trials.
While the regime rapidly continued to develop its artificial intelligence arsenal, the deployment of these technologies has led to mistaken identifications, wrongful arrests, and civilian deaths. […] This situation provides an initial glimpse into how such technologies might be used in future wars, as well as a warning of how these technologies could malfunction or be misused, resulting in the killing of civilians.
The technology is shit, but its a useful tool for pretending to care about “humane” slaughter, sorry, “precise” bombing and “target” spying.
I guess there’s a silver lining of the amount of waste in making NATO’s wunderwaffen; if nothing else does it, they will, inevitably, make it crumble.
Is there a way to speed up a bubble bursting?
Some quotes I’ve pulled out from that first article you sent, as well as another article cited that goes into some details on the AI bubble.
Google, Amazon, and Meta are soaring past $2 trillion, and now Apple is well past $3 trillion. Much of this expansion of value has occurred in just the last two years, on the back of the AI boom.
Microsoft and Nvidia are benefitting from bona fide historic levels of investment… Paul Kedrosky in his most recent column in the Wall Street Journal:
spending on AI infrastructure has already exceeded spending on telecom and internet infrastructure from the dot-com boom—and it’s still growing… one explanation for the U.S. economy’s ongoing strength, despite tariffs, is that spending on IT infrastructure is so big that it’s acting as a sort of private-sector stimulus program
Capex spending for AI contributed more to growth in the U.S. economy in the past two quarters than all of consumer spending, …
Over the last six months, capital expenditures on AI—counting just information processing equipment and software, by the way—added more to the growth of the US economy than all consumer spending combined.
There’s also a longer article mentioned, and here are some quotes pulled from it, but I didn’t get a chance to read through it all. From The Hater’s Guide To The AI Bubble
The Magnificent 7 stocks — NVIDIA, Microsoft, Alphabet (Google), Apple, Meta, Tesla and Amazon — make up around 35% of the value of the US stock market, and of that, NVIDIA’s market value makes up about 19% of the Magnificent 7.
Microsoft (18.9%), Amazon (7.5%), Meta (9.3%), Alphabet (5.6%), and Tesla (0.9%) alone make up 42.4% of NVIDIA’s revenue. The breakdown makes things worse. Meta spends 25% — and Microsoft an alarming 47% — of its capital expenditures on NVIDIA chips
In simpler terms, 35% of the US stock market is held up by five or six companies buying GPUs.
… by the end of 2025, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Tesla will have spent over $560 billion in capital expenditures on AI in the last two years, all to make around $35 billion.
The Information reports that Microsoft made $4.7 billion in “AI revenue” in 2024, of which OpenAI accounted for $2 billion, meaning that for the $135.7 billion that Microsoft has spent in the last two years on AI infrastructure, it has made $17.7 billion, of which OpenAI accounted for $12.7 billion.
Things do not improve elsewhere. … Amazon, which plans to spend $105 billion in capital expenditures this year, will make $5 billion on AI in 2025, rising, and I quote, “as much as 80%,” suggesting that Amazon may have made a measly $2.77 billion in 2024 on AI in a year when it spent $83 billion in capital expenditures.
Some people compare Large Language Models and their associated services to Amazon Web Services, or services like Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud, and they are wrong to do so
These services are… selling infrastructure. You aren’t just paying for the compute, but the ability to access storage and deliver services with low latency
…ultimately cloud services are about Amazon, Microsoft and Google running your infrastructure for you. Large Language Models and their associated services are completely different, despite these companies attempting to prove otherwise, and it starts with a very simple problem: why did any of these companies build these giant data centers and fill them full of GPUs?
Amazon Web Services was created out of necessity — Amazon’s infrastructure needs were so great that it effectively had to build both the software and hardware necessary to deliver a store that sold theoretically everything to theoretically anywhere, handling both the traffic from customers, delivering the software that runs Amazon.com quickly and reliably, and, well, making sure things ran in a stable way. It didn’t need to come up with a reason for people to run web application.
Yet after that, generative AI feels more like a feature of cloud infrastructure rather than infrastructure itself. AWS and similar megaclouds are versatile, flexible and multifaceted. Generative AI does what generative AI does, and that’s about it. You can run lots of different things on AWS. What are the different things you can run using Large Language Models? What are the different use cases, and, indeed, user requirements that make this the supposed “next big thing”?
We’re three years in, and generative AI’s highest-grossing companies — outside OpenAI ($10 billion annualized as of early June) and Anthropic ($4 billion annualized as of July), and both lose billions a year after revenue — have three major problems:
- Businesses powered by generative AI do not seem to be popular.
- Those businesses that are remotely popular are deeply unprofitable…
- …and even the less-popular generative AI-powered businesses are deeply unprofitable.
Cursor’s $500 Million “Annualized Revenue” Was Earned With A Product It No Longer Offers…
Cursor raised $900 million and very likely had to hand large amounts of that money over to OpenAI and Anthropic to keep doing business with them, and then immediately changed its terms of service to make them worse.
Cursor is the largest and most-successful generative AI company, and these aggressive and desperate changes to its product suggest
- A) that its product is deeply unprofitable and
- B) that its current growth was a result of offering a product that was not the one it would sell in the long term
Outside of OpenAI, Anthropic and Anysphere (which makes AI coding app Cursor), there are no Large Language Model companies that make more than $500 million in annualized revenue… [and] there are only twelve generative AI-powered companies making $100 million annualized.
Generative AI Has No Business Model If It Can’t Do Software As A Service
… in the world of Software-as-Service or enterprise software, [the revenues of AI companies are] chump change. Hubspot had revenues of $2.63 billion in its 2024 financial year.
Netflix makes about $39 billion a year in subscription revenue, and Spotify about $18 billion.
Compare to OpenAI’s $10 billion annualized.
… OpenAI’s 15.5 million subscribers suggest that it can’t rely on them for the kind of growth that would actually make the company worth $300 billion (or more).
Really, Where Are The Consumer AI Startups I’m serious. Perplexity? Perplexity only has $150 million in annualized revenue! It spent 167% of its revenue in 2024 ($57m, its revenue was $34m) on compute services from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Amazon! It lost $68 million!
And worse still, it has no path to profitability, and it’s not even anything new! It’s a search engine!
And don’t talk to me about “AI browsers,” I’m sorry, it’s not a business model. How are people going to make revenue on this, hm? What do these products actually do?
… it doesn’t seem like you can really build a consumer AI startup that makes anything approaching a real company. Other than ChatGPT, I guess?
The Generative AI Software As A Service Market Is Small, With Little Room For Growth And No Profits To Be Seen
But the worst sign is that nobody is saying the monthly figures, mostly because the monthly figures kinda suck! $100 million of annualized revenue is $8.33 million a month. To give you some scale, Amazon Web Services hit $189 million ($15.75 million a month) in revenue in 2008, two years after founding, and while it took until 2015 to hit profitability, it actually hit break-even in 2009, though it invested cash in growth for a few years after.
Right now, not a single generative AI software company is profitable, and none of them are showing the signs of the kind of hypergrowth that previous “big” software companies had.
If you look at what generative AI companies do…, it’s probably doing one of the following things:
- A chatbot, either one you ask questions or “talk to”
- This includes customer service bots-
- Searching, summarizing or comparing documents, with increasing amounts of complexity of documents or quantity of documents to be compared
- This includes being able to “ask questions” of documents
- Web Search
- “Deep Research” — meaning long-form web search that generates a document
- Generating text, images, voice, or in some rare cases video
- Using generative AI to to write, edit or “maintain” code
- Transcription
- Translation
- Photo and video editing
Every single generative AI company that isn’t OpenAI or Anthropic does one or a few of these things, and I mean every one of them, and it’s because every single generative AI company uses Large Language Models, which have inherent limits on what they can do. LLMs can generate, they can search, they can edit (kind of!), they can transcribe (sometimes accurately!) and they can translate (often less accurately).
As a result, it’s very, very difficult for a company to build something unique
… when your services are dependent on a Large Language Model, are dependent on the model developer, who, in the case of OpenAI and Anthropic, could simply clone your startup, because the only valuable intellectual property is theirs.
Generative AI Is Simply Too Expensive To Build A Sustainable Business On Top Of It
Damn, if only there was some sort of philosopher or political economist who had written about something like this. Oh well.
This is more, but this is already getting a bit long.
Apparently the Armenians have fully cucked and accepted the Zangezur corridor, which will be named “Trump corridor 🤮”. This is a sextuple whammy against BRICS in which:
- Iran is now locked from Russia by land from Armenia.
- The Caspian sea can now house NATO assests
- Turkey now has a link to mainland Azerbaiyan, increasing its influence in the region dramatically.
- Azerbaiyan can now sign the Abraham accords, and it’s likely to sign into NATO.
- China can get locked out of the BRI through the corridor.
- The CSTO has been highly neutered.
Bad news all around, on that front.
Over the last 24 hours, President Trump has:
- Doubled tariffs on India to 50%
- Imposed additional 15% tariff on Japan
- Announced 100% tariff on semiconductors
- Said pharmaceutical tariffs of 250% coming soon
Source: The Kobeissi Letter @ Twitter
BOLSONARO UNDER HOUSE ARREST
he’s being denied his favorite pastime, going to the hospital
one million percent tariff!!!
Very funny how Trump admin shifted from voting with Russia at the UN to tariffing countries importing Russian oil. Full Brandonization.
Which is the human? Which is the animal?
Edit: also guy in the middle looks like Lindsey Graham lmao
Lindsey Graham is the dialectic between MAGA and Bidenism
I was thinking Trump as the animal and then Biden as the human one but after some time, I reversed the decision just on the sole sheer ghoulness of Joe Brandon as a whole. I guess it could work either way in this case.
:kim-yo-jong: Joe Biden is a rabid dog who should be beaten to death with a stick
keep hearing that marketing is being completely wiped out as a career due to the rise of AI, and tbh, i don’t give a shit. useless career that doesn’t need to exist anyway.
The problem is not so much that they’re doing bullshit jobs. The problem is that when people don’t have an income, they cut back on spending which makes everyone else having less to earn from, and eventually that’s going to affect your income (from a selfish perspective), and the economy goes into recession and even more people lose their jobs. Remember, in order for you to earn money, somebody else has got to be willing to spend. If everyone wants to save, then you don’t earn anything.
This is why you need a Federal job guarantee program that acts as an automatic stabilizer. When people are laid off, the government automatically enrolls them into new jobs with guaranteed income to offset the reduced spending in the economy when people lose their jobs. In this case, the government acts as a spender to keep the economy going.
If everyone wants to save, then you don’t earn anything.
Unless you’re a payday loan or repo corp.
“ah, bill’s going for the anti-ad dollar. that’s a good dollar.”
incredible bit
Marketing isn’t going to go away it’s going to get infinitely more cloying and invasive
It already is. People are marketing constantly online, and it is becoming ever more subtle. leading to the erosion of trust. The destruction of language is their end goal, as it a factor that could lead one to organize or potentially slip out of cultural hegemony. Every thought and word must serve to reinforce the constant upward trend of numbers without substance.
Marketing includes advertising which will get more invasive for sure, it also includes things like product design, customer research and segmentation, and logistics which all fall under the ‘marketing’ (making and servicing markets) umbrella. I imagine ‘AI’ is chewing up a lot of those back-of-house marketing positions too
I agree in spirit, but I really don’t want to see AI generated images on billboards everywhere.
hopefully that just increases vandalism
Its’s being used to eliminate or consolidate content creation/generation jobs like copywriting, it’s used on some advertising platforms like with Google Ads Performance Max (if you want to put machine learning under “AI”), and it’s being used to some extent in analytics/data analysis to generate insights.
(if you want to put machine learning under “AI”
we shouldn’t. “ai” (latest fad) is a fairly specific few things and its exponents have deliberately degraded the communicative utility of language to steal valor from people doing useful work.
I would distinguish between advertising and marketing. Don Draper shit is advertising. It’s coming up with ways to sell people on what you currently have. I think the corporations who live and die with advertising (like Coca-Cola) won’t give this up to AI but there is a lot more of your basic advertising (like a local realtor designing a highway billboard) that will, sure.
I don’t see marketing being given up to AI though. It can be bullshit but a lot of the time it’s fairly strategic. I would argue even a centrally planned economy needs marketing. It can be useful. Marketing involves thinking along the lines of “cell phones would last twice as long if we let people replace the batteries. The big phone companies do not allow this because of planned obsolescence. We could make a phone with replaceable batteries and position ourselves as the “buy it for life” phone company. That’s the sort of work I don’t see how AI could replace.
Coca Cola is already doing AI-generated ads
Where’d you hear that, on the bad site? I feel like every single field I look into there is apparently rapidly dying
the bad site?
Reddit
ah yeah wasnt sure if u meant that or twitter
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