Geoffrey Hinton’s latest warning about AI making “a few people much richer and most people poorer” has been bouncing around in my head for days now. The man who helped birth modern AI is essentially telling us we’ve created a monster that’s going to eat our economic lunch. And honestly? Looking at the conversations swirling around this topic, I’m starting to think he might be understating the problem.

What strikes me most about the online discussions is how many people see this coming and feel utterly powerless to stop it. Someone pointed out that Hinton has upgraded from “AI will kill us all” to “AI will make us all destitute” – which, let’s be honest, isn’t exactly cause for celebration. Poverty kills people too, just more slowly and with less dramatic headlines.

Stumbled across a fascinating discussion the other day about Nvidia’s latest quarterly results, and one statistic just floored me: 85% of their $46.7 billion revenue came from just six companies. Six. That’s not a typo - we’re talking about nearly half a hundred billion dollars flowing from less than a handful of corporate giants into Nvidia’s coffers.

Now, I’ve been watching the AI boom with a mixture of excitement and concern for a while now. The DevOps side of me appreciates the technical marvels we’re witnessing, but there’s something deeply unsettling about this level of market concentration. When you dig into the comments and discussions around this topic, you start to see just how warped the entire ecosystem has become.

Bloody hell, what a mess Intel has become. Reading about their CEO basically throwing in the towel and admitting they’re “too late” to catch up with AI competition while laying off thousands of workers has got me properly wound up this morning. It’s like watching a slow-motion car crash, except this particular wreck has been decades in the making.

The whole thing reads like a textbook case of what happens when you prioritise quarterly profits over long-term vision. Someone in the discussion thread hit the nail on the head – all those billions spent on stock buybacks could have been invested in R&D to keep them competitive. Instead, they chose to juice their share price while TSMC, NVIDIA, and AMD ate their lunch.