writes this while sitting in a meeting where the boss is excited about all the fancy AI tool that are being sold to him [send help]
this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2025
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I used to like Sabine but she's a hack.
Can you elaborate?
Fuck Sabrine Hoffsteader. She's an idiot and you should get your news from someone else. Stupid grifter
Was really disappointed when she came out to be transphobic.
Do you have some Information about this?
She is a transphobe and peter thiel fangirl. She is against renewables and thinks that 'mainstream science' is just a money making scam. All around dumb bitch who chugged the kool aid.
I used to watch her when, as far as I knew, all she talked about was science (mainly physics) news. You know, talking about the thing she actually studied in.
Then one day she did a "capitalism is actually great" video, and spouted a bunch of erroneous neo-lib bullshit. Thankfully most of the comments tore into her, pointing out the logical falacies and out right lies she was parroting.
I only watched a few more vids after that as she seemed to get more and more out of her area of knowledge and saying dumb shit.
I had no idea about the anti trans stuff though. I'd just stopped watching and written her off as the Nth person to be smart in one area and try and apply that to other areas where they have no expertise but think they know more about it than anyone else.
So yeah, fuck her
The facts are:
She has a PhD in theoretical physics. She could not find meaningful employment in particle physics. Unless somebody can correct me, she's produced little if anything substantive to the field.
In the last several years she has engaged in attacks against the public trust for science. She engages the conspiratorial-minded viewers who're looking for any reason to disavow scientific knowledge.
One example was putting on scripted theatrics while reading a self-penned letter fraudulently claimed was from a prominent scientist, who's identity and details of course must be kept totally secret. Reading out this "bombshell letter" was a transparent children's play, where the held-anonymous writer magically agreed with every one of her endless, bleating refrains, that most scientific research is "bullshit".
Then her support for Eric Weinstein who is a complete grifting con-man with an "entertainment" publishing that he fraudulently describes as both a "paper" and a credible physical theory. It was literally released on April 1 and directly in it, it tells you it is a work of fiction meant for entertainment, and like all good science (/s) may not be used, incorporated into other works, or improved upon. It's a complete piece of hogwash, and every credible physicist from here to Mars has described as not fit to wipe fecal matter; not a theory, not even science.
Then there's all the Theil money.
Check out Professor Dave on YT, he just fucking obliterates her.
Edit
First https://youtu.be/70vYj1KPyT4
Second and better https://youtu.be/nJjPH3TQif0
Third and best, 3.5 hours of clobbering with qualified physicists https://youtu.be/oipI5TQ54tA
Thanks for explaining!
Just from the thumbnail alone I was hesitant to check out the video. I'm glad I found this comment.
Number 1 reason is the people selling it are far more excited by it than the people having to use it.
six rounds of funding without making any money should be proof enough, an industry can't be entirely made of unicorns.
NVIDIA is already paying podcasters and YT channels to cover Isaac and Jetson, so I guess the shovel seller is already seeing itself out.
I enjoyed Sabine’s analysis in another video that continuing to make increasingly larger models with more compute is about as effective as continuing to make larger and larger particle accelerators. Come on, bro, this million km Gigantic Hadron Collider will finally get us to the TOE. Just one more trillion, bro.
Hasn't Sabine been getting in some hot water about promoting academic skepticism and making authoritative claims on fields well outside of her expertise?
Personal experience as some of her views have come across my viewing habits is she is as full of shit at the next one. She passes off conjecture as fact.
She has also peddled transphobic talking points
Every particle accelerator that has been built has paid for itself in research value. There's basically nothing that comes out of AI research except the need for a bigger model.
The comparison is poor. Particle accelerators are science, LLMs do not produce science.
That's not to say that we couldn't build LLMS that would be useful for scientific purposes but we're not. That is not the function or the goal of the people building these things.
Not really my area of expertise, but this article lays out her perspective on this for anyone who isn’t aware: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-world-doesnt-need-a-new-gigantic-particle-collider/
TL;DR - Many times the cost of the LHC and unlike the LHC, the gains are likely to be incremental instead of revolutionary. The same funding could do much more good elsewhere.
To your point, agreed that even small, incremental gains for science are more valuable than what we are likely to get from AI.
Sure, but the waste of AI is so much worse while providing close to no benefits at all (or probably even damage society as a whole).
Just to put this in perspective: OpenAI alone had a $40 Billion funding round in March this year. That is enough to build that huge particle accelerator and run it for 20 years. OpenAI burned that money in 6 months (they needed another $40 Billion in funding in August) and all they have to show for it is GPT 5 which is just more of the same.
Sure other Science Projects could probably do a lot more with the 40 Billion, but the complete waste of resources in the persuit of AI isn't comparable to ground breaking Physics experiments which actually helps further our understanding of the universe and the very fabric of reality.
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Every step towards the next generation of colliders needs to be deeply justified about the falsifiables it will check and their interest to the current knowledge before being able to see a cent for it, and the expected energies of the TOE are well known to not be reachable with current means and technology, that's not what they are promising ever, but what they do they fulfill, often, beyond predictions, to not mention the huge return basic research has always had in the long term to humanity... nope, I am afraid that I do not find it a good analogy at all. EDIT: but, yes, such strategy of making it bigger does not work anymore, so collider proposals go usually in other directions...
Except that’s not at all what they’re doing. Most of the impact studies are already outdated, and the models are shrinking and becoming more efficient.
Used to love Sabine, but the channel’s been taken over by sloppy clickbait.
If the last 5 years has taught me anything, it is that stock prices are completely divorced from the realities of the fundamentals of business. It is a clown economy and more like a casino then an honest measure of what a stock is worth. Especially with tech.
AI is way overhyped, to a level we perhaps have never seen before, but I would not expect the stock prices too reflect that.
Look at Tesla. The intrinsic value was no more than 10 billion before he started sieg heiling on national TV and alienated half of the western world.
What will continue to drive the stock prices is the support or acquiescence of governments to it. Do you the United States and the rest that follow.
It's gambling on who might stumble on AGI, not building anything.
but I would not expect the stock prices too reflect that.
Agreed. One rule of the stock market is that while it might theoretically rely on sound fundamentals, it can stay irrational longer than you (or anyone) can stay solvent. It will inevitably fall screaming towards reality eventually, but there's no guarantee it will happen within any reasonable timeframe and expecting it to is dangerous. It's a rigged casino, the house always wins, and when they don't their goons will grab you when you try to leave. At this point the billionaires own pretty much the entire house, and their goons are running the world's largest military and police state. "Invest" at your own risk.
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And then AI will just go away and everything will go back to normal again, yes? It'll suddenly stop working and so people will stop using it for all the things they're currently using it for.
Naw, it'll just be "software" and not "magic thinking machine". Chatbots and "virtual assistants" existed before, just no one was using them because they're a) cringe, b) faster and more efficient to do it yourself.
I mean, even NFTs are still technically around, the tech didn't go away, it just stayed as it's own niche since grifters stopped trying to push it to normal people. I think the same will happen to AI since even if everyone that used chat gpt paid it's monthly fee, they would still lose money.
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consider the Dot Com Bubble: the internet obviously didn't disappear but that doesn't mean there weren't serious economic consequences.
ELI5. Because I was actually 5 when that happened.
The dot-com bubble? A whole bunch of investment money was poured into businesses operating over the Internet from around the time dial-up became widely available. A few years later, investors realized that "on the Internet" wasn't necessarily the key to making a crapton of money and the stock market crashed. A bunch of companies (many of which never made it to profitability) went under, and a fair number of people lost their jobs. Pets.com was one of the more notable victims.
This doesn't, however, mean that no business is done over the Internet today.
Absolutely not. AI tech will continue to be pushed by C-suites convinced they can surplus a fraction of their workforce eventually. The change will be that most of the investments in AI companies will disappear overnight and most will go belly-up. It will erase a significant fraction of everyone's pension funds, and federal governments around the world will pour public funds into propping up the larger companies so that they don't go under too. Heads they win, tails you lose.
people will stop using it for all the things they're currently using it for
They will when AI companies can no longer afford to eat their own costs and start charging users a non-subsidized price. How many people would keep using AI if it cost $1 per query? $5? $20?
OpenAI lost $5 billion last year. Billion, with a B. Even their premium customers lose them money on every query, and eventually the faucet of VC cash propping this whole thing up is gonna run dry when investors inevitably realize that there's no profitable business model to justify this technology. At that point, AI firms will have no choice but to pass their costs on to the customer, and there's no way the customer is going to stick around when they realize how expensive this technology actually is in practice.
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