The AI dooooooom thread

[PJL]

'I was only following AI' is the new 'I was following orders' excuse.

[Jacob]

'I was only following AI' is the new 'I was following orders' excuse.

Yeah, but the systems are set up such that the humans involved don't have any way of questioning the AI. There's no point in the process where there's a human with information to challenge the output of the software.

[Baron von Schtinkenbutt]

The only thing "new" about this is using the term "AI".  Automatic target recognition failures have been blamed for tens of thousands of civilian deaths over decades.  Like nearly all the problems "AI" is being blamed for creating, it's once again exacerbating an existing problem.

[Jacob]

The only thing "new" about this is using the term "AI".  Automatic target recognition failures have been blamed for tens of thousands of civilian deaths over decades.  Like nearly all the problems "AI" is being blamed for creating, it's once again exacerbating an existing problem.

Yeah, that's the point the article makes.

And my take on it, that AI is another mechanism for further diffusing any responsibility for the outcomes, and that that mechanism is a separate function from the AI decision making process itself.

[crazy canuck]

Aside from the errors AI makes in drafting legal arguments, the main preoccupation of in house lawyers these days is how they are going to manage the tsunami of legal issues and legal risks they see coming because of the pressures coming from the executives to use AI, without anyone understanding how it should be used and how to mitigate all the errors it makes.

The only thing "new" about this is using the term "AI".  Automatic target recognition failures have been blamed for tens of thousands of civilian deaths over decades.  Like nearly all the problems "AI" is being blamed for creating, it's once again exacerbating an existing problem.

Something that might be new is the high trust and low verification occurring with the use AI.  Of necessity for anyone pushing the use of AI - if anyone was to spend the time and resources needed to check the work and fix all the errors found, the use case for AI would be dramatically reduced. 

[Sheilbh]

Yeah, that's the point the article makes.

And my take on it, that AI is another mechanism for further diffusing any responsibility for the outcomes, and that that mechanism is a separate function from the AI decision making process itself.

I've mentioned it before but Dan Davies' The Unaccountability Machine is fantastic on this and the artificial intelligences that are the corporations and government bureaucracies that already run the world.

And why economics needs to be crushed as a discipline.

[Legbiter]

Niftiest use of a trillion-dollar autocomplete script I can personally think of, where it would actually be genuinely useful, is in training it on the entire written corpus of, say, Old Norse and Old English plus Latin. Or medieval Polish and medieval Lithuanian, throw in Latin and thus giving the young scholar a fantastic research tool without having to first learn all these languages plus reading the entire corpus (impossible in one human lifetime) and then being able to ask said Trillion Dollar Clippy some very pointed research questions.    

There's probably an enormous number of similar niches where it's fantastic. Most commonly, it's probably going to be used by male shut-ins to make customized porn clips and virtual boyfriends for their female equivalents.   

[Valmy]

There's probably an enormous number of similar niches where it's fantastic. Most commonly, it's probably going to be used by male shut-ins to make customized porn clips and virtual boyfriends for their female equivalents.   

Oh yeah. This is a multi-trillion dollar porn machine. That is where it is going to make most of its money back.

[Legbiter]

[Legbiter]

Everybody always talks about an out-of-control AGI that will paperclip or Skynet us all. But what if the God-Machine, once birthed by a seriously mentally ill SF "Effective Altruist" type is instead more like a concerned zookeeper observing a degenerate group of pandas failing to breed effectively?

And after going through the data in a microsecond it just goes "it looks like electricity causes some strange distress in Homo Sapiens.  I'm going to take it away for your own good!"

Leaves a few scattered medical stations around and goes on to do it's own thing in space. And we get back to this. 

No more Zoom, no office politics, no traffic.   

[Syt]

https://thenextweb.com/news/oracle-layoffs-march-2026

Oracle is cutting up to 30,000 employees to pay for AI data centres

Employees across the US, India, Canada, and Mexico woke up on 31 March to termination emails from "Oracle Leadership" with no prior warning. TD Cowen estimates the cuts will affect 18% of Oracle's 162,000-person workforce and free up $8-10 billion to fund AI infrastructure. Oracle has not confirmed the total number.

Oracle began executing what analysts believe could be the largest layoff in the company's history on Tuesday, 31 March 2026.

Employees across the United States, India, Canada, Mexico, and other countries received termination emails from "Oracle Leadership" at approximately 6 a.m. local time, with no prior warning from HR or their direct managers.

The emails informed employees that their roles had been eliminated as part of a broader organisational change, and that the day of the email was their final working day. Access to company systems was cut immediately.

Oracle has not confirmed the total number of people affected, but investment bank TD Cowen has estimated the cuts will hit between 20,000 and 30,000 employees, roughly 18% of Oracle's global workforce of approximately 162,000 people.

The layoffs were first reported by Bloomberg on 5 March 2026, citing unnamed sources who said cuts in the "thousands" were being planned across multiple divisions, with some specifically targeting roles the company expects AI to make redundant. What was reported in early March as a plan is now being executed.

Employee posts on Reddit's r/employeesOfOracle and the professional forum Blind began confirming cuts in real time from early morning, with reports of entire teams at units including Revenue and Health Sciences (RHS) and SaaS and Virtual Operations Services (SVOS) seeing reductions of at least 30%. Canada, Mexico, and Uruguay were affected before the US wave hit.

The financial logic behind the cuts is not hard to follow. Oracle has committed to an aggressive AI infrastructure buildout that requires an estimated $156 billion in capital spending, according to TD Cowen.

To fund it, the company raised $45-50 billion in debt and equity financing in 2026 alone for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

Multiple US banks have reportedly raised lending costs or stepped back from financing certain Oracle data centre projects.

TD Cowen estimates the workforce reductions will free up $8-10 billion in cash flow. Oracle disclosed a $2.1 billion restructuring plan in its March 2026 10-Q SEC filing, with $982 million already recorded in the first nine months of fiscal 2026.

The company is expected to have roughly $1.1 billion remaining in that budget, primarily for severance payments.

The contradiction at the heart of the Oracle story is stark. The company posted a 95% jump in net income last quarter, reaching $6.13 billion, and its remaining performance obligations, a measure of contracted future revenue, stood at $523 billion, up 433% year over year.

This is not a company in revenue distress. It is a company making a capital-intensive bet on AI infrastructure that its current balance sheet cannot comfortably sustain, and eliminating tens of thousands of employees to close the gap.

Oracle did not confirm or deny the layoffs on its Q3 fiscal 2026 earnings call. The company has not yet responded publicly to the events of 31 March.

[HVC]

https://thenextweb.com/news/oracle-layoffs-march-2026

Oracle is cutting up to 30,000 employees to pay for AI data centres


To fund it, the company raised $45-50 billion in debt and equity financing in 2026 alone for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

That's a lot of tulip bulbs.

[Syt]

I guess we can be glad it's Larry Ellison. If it was Peter Thiel he would literally have cut them to harvest their blood.

[garbon]

And then they are like you should be loyal to your company...

[The Minsky Moment]

From Bloomberg

OpenAI shares have fallen out of favor on the secondary market — in some cases becoming almost impossible to unload — as investors pivot quickly to Anthropic, its biggest competitor.

Even as OpenAI raced in recent months to raise tens of billions of dollars, Next Round Capital founder Ken Smythe said his secondary marketplace was seeing a drop in demand for shares of the artificial-intelligence giant. About a half-dozen institutional investors — including hedge funds and venture capital firms that hold large stakes — approached his company in recent weeks looking to sell about $600 million of OpenAI shares.

Last year, they would have been snatched up within days. But now, no one's biting.

Some caution on this.  These secondary markets in restricted private stock are very grey.  To say liquidity conditions are erratic would be an understatement.  OpenAI itself obviously doesn't rely on these markets for any purpose - it raises all of its money in primary deals.

That said, it's an interesting data point on vibes and sentiment.