TL;DR
When AI companies warn that superintelligence will end the world, what they actually want is government blessing to stop competing with each other — and to ban cheap Chinese open-weight models.
When an AI company tells a horror story, it is not always because it is afraid of the monster. Sometimes it wants you to lock the door for it.
Bleeding money and wanting out
The outfits running the 'hyperscale' AI playbook have, on the author's account, never made money: the more customers they get, the more they lose, and each new model generation loses more still.
Their line is that they are nearly there. But the author says their claims of profitability rest on a private definition of the word, at odds with ordinary accounting rules. The last company to try that trick was WeWork.
Switching costs you a mouse click
Suppose they did fix the economics. The trouble gets worse. The moment Anthropic shipped a big Claude update, OpenAI's best customers walked almost overnight.
Swapping chatbots is close to free — one click. At CES the author asked every AI gadget maker what they would do if their chatbot supplier raised prices. All of them said the same thing: they had built the product so they could switch models at the press of a button.
So nobody gets to finish the railroad and sit back collecting fares. The instant your track is laid, a rival announces a faster one, and everyone has to start digging again. It is an arms race no one can win.
The only exit is for the big players to quietly agree to stop fighting each other. Under antitrust law, that is a serious crime.
The lifeline is the apocalypse
Unless the government decides 'superintelligence' is an existential threat, and grants them permission to slow down together — while also banning the Chinese open models that run on ordinary computers.
The author notes the industry has form: Google pays Apple more than twenty billion dollars a year not to enter search, and the biggest tech firms once had a secret pact not to poach each other's engineers.
So when an AI boss warns that humanity is doomed without regulation, ask who is paying for the warning.
In one line: when a business that has lost more money than any venture in history asks the government to kill its competition, what it fears is probably not the robot. It is you switching apps.
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