“humans care more about belonging to a group than discovering the truth”

This explains the current state of affairs.

The AI boom has been propping up U.S. growth for more than a year. But Goldman Sachs chief economist Jan Hatzius says that support is about to crest, and Apollo chief economist Torsten Slok says the payoff that was supposed to replace it hasn’t shown up.

“Despite massive investments and widespread hype around artificial intelligence, the technology has delivered zero financial payoff to corporate America outside of tech,” Slok wrote in a note Saturday.

Hatzius wrote in a note to clients Monday that the growth impulse from the AI boom was set to peak in late 2026 or early 2027 “even before concerns around the sustainability of the AI investment boom intensified in recent weeks.” 

AI is one of several reasons Hatzius sees risks to growth tilting downward. Gasoline, diesel, jet fuel and European and Asian natural gas prices are back near or above their March and April highs on fears of renewed Middle East escalation.

 Long-term interest rates are up about 100 basis points on average across developed-market yield curves since early 2026. Hatzius partly blames large deficits and “AI-linked borrowing” for that rise, and estimates it will subtract a cumulative 0.6% from GDP if it lasts.

Read more [paywall removed for Redditors]: https://fortune.com/2026/10/26/ai-zero-financial-payoff-outside-big-tech-apollo-slok-goldman-peak/?utm_source=reddit/

Here’s what the number really means

AI is already changing the workforce. But the most interesting story may not be the headline number — it’s what sits behind it.

If you want to understand how artificial intelligence is affecting employment, there is a number worth paying attention to:

136,460.

That is the number of U.S. jobs linked to AI-related workforce reductions since January 2025, according to jobloss.ai, a public tracker maintained by The Alliance for Secure AI.

As of October 23, 2026, the dataset includes 53 reports across 46 companies and 18 industries.

At first glance, it is tempting to translate that number into a much simpler headline:

“AI has eliminated 136,460 jobs.”

But that would be misleading. And I think understanding why is much more interesting than the headline itself.

AI-related does not always mean AI-replaced

One of the things I like about the jobloss.ai tracker is that it does not pretend every workforce reduction involving AI is the same.

Instead, each event receives one of three attribution labels:

- Explicit means the company itself publicly cited AI, automation or machine learning as a reason for reducing its workforce.

- Reported means credible journalism identified AI as a primary driver, even when the company did not explicitly say so.

- Mixed means AI was one factor among others, such as restructuring, cost reduction or changing market conditions.

That distinction is essential.

A company introducing AI while simultaneously simplifying its organization, closing business units and reducing costs cannot automatically attribute every eliminated position to an AI system.

....

If you’d like to find out more, you can read the full analysis here

screenshot this and check back in 2040. here's where I think the world is going:

- countries start competing for citizens like apps compete for users. you'll shop for a passport the way you shop for a phone plan

- the first AI-run city opens before 2040 and has lower crime than any human-run one

- governments can't keep up with how fast AI makes money, so the biggest companies end up richer and more powerful than most nations

- money splits: one currency for humans, one for machines. most transactions on earth happen between agents

- wars get fought mostly by software. the first one ends before most people notice it started

- school as we know it is dead within 10 years. kids learn faster from AI and spend the day building things and playing outside

- college becomes a luxury social club, not an education

- the most important thing a parent can teach a kid is how to tell what's real

- dating apps die. your agent talks to their agent first and only introduces you if it works

- people fall in love with AI and it becomes as normal as long distance

- nobody trusts video, photos or voice again. "I saw it" means nothing

- every public figure gets an AI twin, and most people talk to the twin, not the person

- the dead stay online. you'll call your grandfather's AI on his birthday and some people will think that's beautiful and others will think it's sick

- memory becomes a product. you'll pay to forget things

- aging gets treated as a disease and the first drug to slow it is already in trials

- the rich don't buy yachts anymore, they buy extra years

- food gets made in labs and farms become parks

- small towns win. cities empty out because nobody has to be anywhere

- the biggest divide isn't rich vs poor, it's people who use AI vs people who refuse to

- half the population will be angry about all of it, and that anger shapes politics for 30 years

- the real problem isn't what AI can do. it's that we get bored, and boredom turns out to be the hardest thing to solve

which one do you think I got wrong?

As in the title. If a company is reaping the benefit of AI, then why should society have to bear the cost for their "efficiency" increase. Whether (un)employment insurance, a UBI for a define period or whatever, the company claiming these AI efficiency gains should be responsible for those displaced workers.

I know that most technological changes can cause unemployment, but in this one, we explicitly have the leaders of this tech telling us that the gains are worth the societal change and that eventually AI will be doing the heavy lifting and we can just live on those benefits. Well put your money where your mouth is and start now.

Around 9 a.m. on Oct. 26, Anthropic unveiled one of the most eagerly awaited documents in Big Tech history: its prospectus for an initial public offering.

 Now that the Claude purveyor has filed its S-1 with the SEC, it’s free to begin a roadshow in 15 days, and pursue a timetable that would see its shares trading on the Nasdaq, under the symbol ANT, as early as mid-November. At an anticipated valuation in the $1.8 trillion to $2.0 trillion range, Anthropic would rank second only to SpaceX as the largest market debut of all time.

Given its central importance both as a potential investment and bellwether for the future of AI, Wall Street research crews and everyday investors alike are carefully parsing the over-400-page document. And one big concern dwarfs all others: Can Anthropic generate revenues so gigantic that they far outpace the huge spending on compute its leaders already acknowledge is coming?

Evidence that’s happening would provide much comfort before folks and funds wrestle with the next and more vexing head-spinner: Will any reasonable projections for its growth in sales and operating leverage prove great enough to make Anthropic worth anything like $2 trillion? So far, the S-1 shows surprisingly excellent bedrock performance, and boasts great financial strength.

Read more [paywall removed for Redditors]: https://fortune.com/2026/10/27/anthropic-s1-ipo-filing-financials-profits/?utm_source=reddit/

Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/10/26/researchers-cybersecurity-start-up-cathedral-got-inside-anthropic/

A months-old security startup called Cathedral, founded by former DOGE staffers, ran AI agents against Anthropic under its bug bounty program and got in through flaws in third-party business software. Anthropic confirmed access to a limited set of sales, HR and IT systems, says it shut that access off the same day, and says customer chats, code and model weights were never reached. Anthropic also says Cathedral overstated the national security angle and didn't fully disclose its activity.

The fact that p(doom) is a popular term in the field should be cause enough for concern. I understand scepticism of the claims of the CEOs, but what about Nobel laureates telling you there’s a 10-20% chance it will “wipe us out”?

The more I read through this forum, the more I feel like a lot of it is just coping. I think many people have a really hard time accepting that life might simply be meaningless. And AI is, in a way, a reflection of that realization.
I think I’m starting to understand why so many people are against AI. It’s taking away something we’ve considered a fundamental part of our human identity for thousands of years.
Philosophers have spent centuries debating what makes us human. “I think, therefore I am.” Intelligence was always seen as something that made us special. Consciousness, too, was considered something incredibly valuable.
But now we’re seeing that intelligent thinking can apparently exist without any biological processes behind it. We’ve created systems capable of solving complex problems without any evidence that they’re conscious.
AI can already outperform most humans in many intellectual tasks. It can tackle mathematical problems that generations of scientists have struggled with, and it might eventually solve Millennium Prize Problems that none of us could ever have solved. It can code better than some of the best engineers.
And all of this exists within a single system, with an amount of knowledge that no individual human could ever accumulate in an entire lifetime.
Maybe that’s exactly what so many people struggle to accept. That intelligence isn’t exclusively human. That something doesn’t have to be alive to surpass us in what we’ve always considered our greatest strength.
I think a lot of what people are saying about human uniqueness right now is just an attempt to hold on to an idea that’s becoming increasingly difficult to defend.
Maybe we simply struggle to accept that we’re not as special as we’ve always believed. That life might have no deeper, objective meaning, and that AI is forcing us to confront that possibility.
At the end of the day, it’s essentially just matrix multiplication, and yet it can surpass even the most intelligent humans. If that’s still not enough for you to accept that life is meaningless, then you’re just coping.

My uncomfortable prediction: over the next six months, distribution and pricing may matter more than small feature differences between general-purpose agents.

Imagine two products that both produce an acceptable spreadsheet, research summary, or slide deck. One requires a new subscription and another login. The other appears inside software you already use and includes free credits.

The second product doesn’t need to be dramatically better to get chosen.

If users struggle to notice differences in ordinary tasks, existing customer access, bundling, and subsidies become powerful advantages. That would favor incumbents with established distribution and enough money to absorb early usage costs.

But “people tried it” is a weak victory. An agent can attract users while losing money on the work it performs.

The important question is whether customers stay when free credits end, and whether their payments cover inference, support, and acquisition.

Product quality still matters where mistakes are expensive or one agent needs substantially less supervision. My claim is narrower: modest improvements may be hard to monetize when a bundled alternative is good enough.

Which difference would actually make you leave a free, bundled agent and pay for another one?

Nowadays, all popular ai chatting websites like qwen, chatgpt, gemini, claude, etc. come with a read aloud functionality that allows users to read aloud the AI's responses.

I used that feature to instead make the AI repeat back the text that i gave it -- effectively turning the platforms into text to speech tools. The voices sound really nice and it's free to use!

You can get all of these extensions by visiting ai-readers.com

Commonwealth Bank replaced 45 call centre workers with an AI voice bot and reversed it weeks later. Klarna went through its own version. The video walks through Gartner's number on how often self-service really fixes a problem, why the work came back to fewer people, and what a study of 5,000 support agents found works instead.

Vave - a popular creator of electronic musical instruments and devices recently launched a small Midi synth/sound module. They used a common microcontroller at its heart and it seems that by accident (or inadvertently) didn't lock the firmware down.

This has led to a huge amount of activity in alternative firmware.

Further another major manufacturer Behringer - to launch new hardware specifically to be *open source* saying that *AI* allows people to write firmware now, and they want to support it.

There is a bit of backlash that the 'Behringer Kick' (their initial device) is very similar to an Akai device... So Akai fans are calling them out on this.

AI has just found a massive real purpose...

Im genuinely looking to try to stay positive. Can someone give me a positive outcome or end goal with the current trajectory of AI?

Is there a possibility we all end up with a better life and less work?

Could we somehow become inherently more human?

Could there somehow not be mass layoffs and security issues?

It seems so bleak out there. Between layoffs, evaluations, government intervention or lack thereof, economic bubbles, etc.

Found several songs I thought were cool on youtube and I come to find out they are AI, even the lyrics are sung by AI.

I would like to know HOW? I get the background music but the LYRICS? How does it know how the song wants to be sung, how does it know what words to change tone on?

Am i overthinking this and its simply that a regular person sings it then uses AI to make it sound better?

AI song example 1

AI example 2

Edit: On a side note makes me kind of mad because I can longer say "Wow this person is talented at singing"

One of the biggest companies in the AI sector Anthropic who designed the AI system Claude will be putting themselves on the stock market under an IPO (Initial public offering) when they have lost over €80 billion in just the first half of this year. The below could be wrote about most AI companies but Anthropic is the only one to defy the US government and its owner seems to at least be warning us about massive downsides.

They stood out for the past few months for some good reasons when you move to the side the mental money they lost this year because the US government wanted to have full access to their AI to develop software to use with the likes of Tomahawk missiles and they said no. The Pentagon then black listed them and the biggest pussy in the world that runs the US Department of Defence Pete Hegseth then designated Anthropic; "national security supply-chain risk" - a law typically reserved for companies based in countries that pose a threat to the US."

Not long after they told the US military to fuck off, the US used another AI system when they started a war with Iran and blew up a school on the first day killing 156 civilians which included 120 children which is a war crime. The AI system they used had maps built into it that were years out of date because AI has been built by scraping all known information off the web and there are no checks to confirm if its relevant let alone up to date.

The AI system they used has not been released even after US politicians requested the information.

The CEO of Anthropic came out numerous times warning about the very serious risks of AI, at the start of the year he wrote on his blog (which is linked below) "The Adolescence of Technology - Confronting and Overcoming the Risks of Powerful AI" in which he warned when talking about the positives of a normal person having advanced AI at our fingertips as we do with other apps on our phones;

"But not every effect of making everyone superhumanly capable will be positive. It can potentially amplify the ability of individuals or small groups to cause destruction on a much larger scale than was possible before, by making use of sophisticated and dangerous tools (such as weapons of mass destruction) that were previously only available to a select few with a high level of skill, specialized training, and focus."

AI can be our step towards medical equipment and treatment that is like something out of Star Trek, it can improve in real time our public transport but the risks need to be seriously weighed because AI has been hacking outside of experiments all the time.

Sources;

Pentegon stops using Anthropics and blacklists them - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5j9x9pr0240o

US bombs Iranian school - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/17/iran-school-bombing-un-mission-us-military-behind-attack

Anthropic CEO Blog - https://darioamodei.com/essay/the-adolescence-of-technology

List of known AI hacks that have been publicly declared - https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/27/heres-all-the-times-ai-has-gone-rogue-and-hacked-other-companies/

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/22/technology/ai-hacks-list.html

Sorry about the length, when I get into researching things I read a tonne and then find good sources to provide those that will read it.

I read Anthropic's S-1 against its partners' latest 10-Qs. Several of them report big deals with a company they don't name. The Google and Broadcom ones were reported in the press at the time, but the terms in the filings now line up with the S-1 almost exactly:

• Alphabet, Q1 10-Q: in March 2026, "a $40.0 billion investment in a private company", $10.0B upfront plus $30.0B contingent on milestones. The S-1: Google agreed on March 31 to buy about $10.0B of Series G-2 stock and may fund up to $30.0B more through 2030. Alphabet's Q2 10-Q shows $20.0B left; the S-1 says Google's $10.0B Series H purchase in May cut it to $20.0B.
• Broadcom, Q3 10-Q: "our customer" may issue it up to $42B of convertible notes, only to pay its lease obligations. The S-1 has the same $42.0B, only to pay rent on the Broadcom TPU leases. Broadcom also backstops up to $29B of that customer's lease payments to an Apollo vehicle; the S-1 calls Apollo "another third party" and doesn't mention the backstop.
• SpaceX, Q3 10-Q: a new "Customer B" at 34.5% of revenue (about $5.0B in the quarter), on cloud contracts cancellable on 90 days' notice, the same notice period as Anthropic's SpaceXAI deal. This one is circumstantial.

The compute side is the striking part: about $657B of agreements with eight suppliers, against $16.3B of revenue in the first half.

Which of these do you expect Alphabet and Amazon to address on their calls this week?