Everyone is using AI for everything now. Including people on here. It's "AI this" and "AI that". Why are people surprised this is what has happened? Has nobody on this forum ever lived in the contrast of a home with minimum appliance, then moved to a place with 4 gamers all over clocking their GPUs for 3 to 4 hours a day, and not observed the delta in utility bills? I'm honestly shocked everyone is surprised at what is happening.
Well, not everyone is using AI, and many of the people using it are using it becuase somebody else (a product vendor or employer) decided to put it in front of them as a tremendously less efficient and much less reliable but very flexible replacement for what they'd already been using.
They're mostly not opting into some change from no appliances to a houseful of hardcore gaming, they're being led from a houseful of servicable traditional appliances to a houseful of elaborate whizzbang futurist appliances that don't actuallg change much about what they get done in a day.
And all the absurdly more costly resource demands of these received whizzbang doohickies are off-site, so yes, people get pretty shocked and confused when confronted with those extreme hidden costs.
A good number of people doing their daily Google searches are now “using AI”.
> many of the people using it are using it becuase somebody else (a product vendor or employer) decided to put it in front of them
This doesn’t change the usage without a pendulum changing direction, and it doesn’t currently seem to be.
I’m still shocked at how nonsensical it all is every time I hear it because there’s people who claim it makes sense. There’s a chart in that article showing that 1/10th the proposed GW is online. And that’s just for Texas. What the hell do we need 10x the capacity we’ve got right now for? The best case is that makes tokens too cheap to meter which would be sweet for everyone but the investors. I don’t see how this ends any way other than a massive burst.
Anytime you hear someone claim that something would bring about the benefit of something being "too cheap to meter", stop believing them right there. These companies are not charities, they are not there to give you something so insignificant in value that they cannot be bothered to measure its worth. That's their entire reason for being: to find new ways to measure value that's otherwise unmeasured and charge for access to that value.
Right obviously. So then what happens with 10x the data centers? How do you saturate that in any reasonable way? The options are 10x usage, 1/10 cost.
Probably 10x usage.
Think about it this way: when OpenAI was founded, it was a public benefit corporation. It had to take into account the "public good" - which is nebulous, but whatever - and capped returns for shareholders at 100x initial investment. It has since been converted into a for-profit corporation and I recall reading that the earnings cap has been done away with, but that should give you at least some idea of the stakes.
According to these guys [0], there has been a total of $180 billion invested in OpenAI since its founding. Assuming there's not been a change in what the shares were sold for to each round - which is a fairly large assumption, I know - for them to reach the 100x threshold that was apparently too low to be followed, the company would have to reach a valuation of $18 trillion dollars.
For what it's worth, the year-on-year GDP of the world's largest economy, the United States, was $32.56 trillion in Q2 2026. [1]
You don't reach a little over half of the economic output of the US in valuation by cutting costs.
[0] https://tracxn.com/d/companies/openai/__kElhSG7uVGeFk1i71Co9...
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDP/
> Everyone is using AI for everything now.
I don't think it's that big of a trend. There are a lot of people around forums like this who use it (I am one) and a lot of business leaders who want it so they can tell people like me that they need to find somewhere else to work. For the average person, it feels like living in Uncanny Valley and puts their livelihood at risk. They don't like it.
The resistance to AI is real. You don't see moratoriums and protests like this come out of nothing. People don't want to subsidize the infrastructure construction costs for an industry known for its insanely wealthy individuals, especially not if doing so could realistically put them out of a job within the next decade.