It's so blatantly tied to who's likely to lose the most money. The unreal part to me is that the major news outlets are so much more obvious in their framing now.
AI has a lot of rich people riding on its success, and this time's different for, IMO, two major reasons...
- First, the companies most invested in AI are perfusing it everywhere. Many parts of these big businesses, if not the business as a whole, is invested heavily in the success of LLM-based products. Microsoft is probably the poster child for this, where you can't use practically any of their modern products without copilot or some such being shoved in your face. OpenAI and Anthropic are both companies whose existence is predicated only by a viable LLM-based product. Nvidia and (as of their last-week's announcement) Micron are both now also heavily invested in the success of this technology, though they're also surely not the only companies in the hardware sector to be following this path to some degree.
- Second, the actual individuals behind these companies are the world's richest people, and much of their fortune comes from stock in these companies, and loans taken out against that stock.
They stand to *personally* lose a significant-even-to-them sum of money if the bottom falls out of this thing. If this weren't the case, I'm absolutely certain we wouldn't be seeing as much reporting about how an AI crash would hurt the average household. When smaller crashes happen (even those that affect more average households), it's inevitable, or it's good for the economy in the long-term (it's a correction, after all -- how could that possibly be bad?), or it's the consequence of people's personal choice to invest one way or another, but because the uber-rich were spared, it's *not really that bad.*
This is a disgusting turn in the state of journalism. I don't pretend know what comes next, or how this can be remedied. Crowdsourced news is as prone to manipulation as "traditional" centralized news, so that's not it, and I don't think people have the depth of knowledge to use something purely fact-based (like bellingcat) for every domain of day-to-day life (which is less an effect of the US education system being in continuous decline over decades, and more an effect of the cognitive load it takes to be familiar enough with everything to be able to draw reasonable conclusions about it.
AI has a lot of rich people riding on its success, and this time's different for, IMO, two major reasons...
- First, the companies most invested in AI are perfusing it everywhere. Many parts of these big businesses, if not the business as a whole, is invested heavily in the success of LLM-based products. Microsoft is probably the poster child for this, where you can't use practically any of their modern products without copilot or some such being shoved in your face. OpenAI and Anthropic are both companies whose existence is predicated only by a viable LLM-based product. Nvidia and (as of their last-week's announcement) Micron are both now also heavily invested in the success of this technology, though they're also surely not the only companies in the hardware sector to be following this path to some degree.
- Second, the actual individuals behind these companies are the world's richest people, and much of their fortune comes from stock in these companies, and loans taken out against that stock.
This is a disgusting turn in the state of journalism. I don't pretend know what comes next, or how this can be remedied. Crowdsourced news is as prone to manipulation as "traditional" centralized news, so that's not it, and I don't think people have the depth of knowledge to use something purely fact-based (like bellingcat) for every domain of day-to-day life (which is less an effect of the US education system being in continuous decline over decades, and more an effect of the cognitive load it takes to be familiar enough with everything to be able to draw reasonable conclusions about it.