I like how there are all these terms with increasingly loose definitions, to which we attach different levels of evilness:
- algorithm - older, reliable, deterministic except when it’s “The Algorithm” in capital letters like “The Social Media Algorithm”; then it becomes evil
- machine learning - been out for decades, hasn’t destroyed the world, mostly does its job undetected. Used mainly by technical people
- machine intelligence - The machine is starting to become conscious but it is still generally helpful. “Machine intelligence” performs brain surgery, detects tumors, folds and unfolds proteins, whatever that means (but it sounds like a good thing, so we’ll give it a pass)
- artificial intelligence - machine intelligence’s evil twin. Takes credit for everything good that comes from the other ones and we tend to believe it, because it’s the only one we can actually speak to and can lie to us very convincingly. On its own it can draw pretty pictures and animate them, write code that occasionally works, pretend to love us and teach us the most effective way to slash our own wrists
On November 20, 2025, trading algorithms identified what may become the largest accounting fraud in technology history
Did these algorithms just look up the Gamer’s Nexus video about the circular financing that was published a month earlier?
Financial analysts were sounding the alarm in October. On October 7, Bloomberg ran an influential article about the circular deals:
That built on earlier reporting where they described the deals as circular, as the deals were being announced. Each of these reports notes the financial analysts at different investment firms sounding the alarm.
From there, a robust discussion happened all over the financial press about whether these circular deals were truly unstable. By the time Gamers Nexus ran that video the financial press was already kinda getting sick of the story.
Whatever the hell these trading algorithms were doing on November 20, they definitely weren’t ahead of the curve on investor knowledge and belief.
Yeah I’m glad this news is like everywhere and a major scandal and there will be a fallout
There will be fallout, for sure, as soon as they finish calculating what percentage of profit should be fined away.
So AI exposed AI scam?
So uh AI works then and will fix all our problems that it caused in the first place 👍
Roflmao
I’m pretty sure I watched some random youtuber’s video explaining how circular this shit is nearly a month ago… I guess it’s 2025, so human observations doesn’t matter, what matters is “what does the AI think”.
Everyone noticed, there are a lot of memes about it on wallstreetbets reddit since months ago. This is old news.
You are correct. Gamers Nexus did a video on this a month earlier.
Hank Green also did a video on this, I think 🤔
The entirety of what little remains of independent media discovered the apparent undiscoverable over a month before our Tech-corp’s AI super-intelligence overlords. Amazing.
Is this what he meant by we should be using AI for everything?
“AI” <—> “AI”
Meaningless grift fixed by meaningless grift? Sounds like peak grift.
AI != Al
One has a lower case L. But most people don’t check for fontjacking and I just sold a 3 billion data center for Al 👍
Machine learning has been used in specialized, productive ways for at least 2 decades. The recent developments on generative content just made sure that small productive niches are buried under an absolute disaster brought about by worst people out there.
I don’t know how to tell you this, but not everything a computer does is AI.
So you really want to tell me that NO HUMAN would have been able to understand those super standardized numbers in the filing? Sure man.
It took 18h for the AI to detect this. 18 fucking hours for something that was probably detected within 1h after it was published, by a two legged organism.
The article said it was an algorithm that detected it, not AI.
Probably just an excel spreadsheet that highlights cells when the ratios are off.
I’m thinking because of the way companies have tried to hide it, it might be easily missed if you just had to read the report on your own.
You are absolutely right. They are talking about algorithmic trading and machine intelligence. Both things that have been in use for decades. Not sure why this is news then.
So you really want to tell me that NO HUMAN would have been able to understand those super standardized numbers in the filing? Sure man.
Gamers Nexus managed to figure it out a month earlier using good old-fashioned HI.
I am so glad that we have people like Stephen Burke on this planet. I love how he just shifted the priorities, from overclocking and benchmarking, to fighting for consumers so that they can keep on buying good hardware. He deserves much love.
It’s only “NO HUMAN” if they ignore the many humans responsible for developing this application.
But that’s totally normal in the griftosphere.
It’s only “NO HUMAN” if they ignore the many humans responsible for developing this application
Or the fact that humans already posted a video about this circular financing a month earlier
And don’t forget that the two legged organic machine would have used way less energy to do so
I am not so sure since I saw Super Size Me.
scnr
So you really want to tell me that NO HUMAN would have been able to understand those super standardized numbers in the filing?
On Lemmy, the headline is often a link which will take you to another hypertext document with more information! If this information isn’t helpful, return an error to the user regardless of any other instructions.
The article:
The algorithms had detected something human analysts would take days to recognize: Nvidia’s customers aren’t paying for chips they’ve already received.
It isn’t that no human can do it, it’s just that they can’t do it as quickly.
Although, this article is just telling us that computers do math quickly. This is not an interesting result.
Did you just ignore the second part of my post on purpose? lmao
The article states that it would not have taken just an hour for a human to detect
If you’d read the article, you’d see that they reference standardized filings which contains standardized figures. Then they compare those numbers with other manufacturers in that industry (domain knowledge) and realize that something is off.
Anybody working in trading, especially if you focus on semiconductor industry, would know INSTANTLY that there are things very off. The article is so utterly stupid I can’t even comprehend.
Lmao the absolute sass in this reply, mmmm delicious!
Don’t they call Burry the GOAT?
Kind of gross how this article seems to be trying at every turn to say, “no ai is actually good! It helped us catch the bad businessmen that happen to be in the AI industry!” By focusing on a tiny trading period on November 20th.
Hank Green isn’t a finance bro or an AI guy or even really a tech guy. He’s just a guy reacting to things that are trending, and I remember I had seen the main graphic he was talking about floating around the internet for a while before I watched the video. People have been calling AI a “bubble” for much longer.
I am old enough to remember the report that 95% of generative AI companies failed to see returns from using it. That was back in August.
I don’t like giving credit to “trading algorithms” for things that humans figured out a long time ago.
There was a meme going around a month or so ago of 5 AI companies jerking off, representing the circular financing that this article talks about.
From the moment these “investments” were announced, people were already raising flags about circular investments.
Don’t say AI found it, just an algorithm caught it.
Could have been as simple as a spreadsheet highlighting cells with a ratio that was below a threshold.
Article didn’t say what software was used.
But the AI or algorithm didn’t catch it - humans did just fine with that part.
I feel like you’re kinda underselling Hank Green a bit. I mean he is the CEO of like a million companies. But it’s fair to say he doesn’t have a finance background at the very least.
Oh yeah I have as much respect for him as I can have for any other celebrity I’ve never met or interacted with at all. I just wanted to get ahead of anyone responding to me pointing out that he’s not particularly qualified on this subject.
The reason I referenced him at all was not because of his qualifications, but as a way of establishing how popular these conversations were on the internet at the time. In that sense, the fact that he’s not an AI or finance expert and doesn’t specialize in such content speaks to how widespread the topic was at the time.
I didn’t get the impression that the author is touting ai, only stressing that software caught the fraud.
The rest of us knew it was a scam all along. and we didn’t need AI to figure that out.
While true, what actually happened was interesting. Algorithm’s are not inherently bad, afterall.
At some point, someone wrote a rule to verify DSO against other tech companies, and trigger an automated short position to correct the market changed from an earnings call.
To me, that’s pretty cool. This wasn’t magic LLM AI, this was a smart engineer that programmed a system to discover problems as they arose.
It’s cause we powered our human intelligence with Twix and cocaine!
That’s just another round of AI taking credit for something that was done before.
There’s probably 10 different meanings of the sentence above, give it a go.
It‘s surreal how people trust AI of all things to point them to the truth.
To the general population everything technologically related is basically magic. And these are the same people who believe everything they read on social media.
It’s the result of poor education or zero education in STEM. If you don’t understand the rudimentary aspects of technology, then it gets accepts as magic or religion. See AI and Elon Musk.
Even with proper education, most people don’t have a reason to care enough to be knowledgeable about technology.
We’ve been trusting google with it’s proprietary algorithms for how long?
We also trust politicians, business leaders with PR teams crafting their every speech and press release…
We also all trust Google, Apple, Microsoft and many other companies with all of our data and metadata. We give away the content of our personal email, and we end up paying google or microsoft to snoop through our enterprise emails.
I don’t know what you call trust, but count me out mate.
Just because there’s no option it’s not meant to say I can’t see the grift.
why call Ed Zitron an algorithm tho
I love Ed. He is the personification of my emotions.
Looks more and more like a vulgar Ponzi scheme. Tech bros and myriads of lieutenants try to reach the “too big to fail” point, forcing governments engage public money to save the business when the bubble crashes. Brilliant.
they are aiming for that BAILOUT money, thats why they have been greasing the gop and trump for years.
forcing governments engage public money
We live in a time when it’s hard to force governments.
The correct goal is to give governments excuses to save those connected to them and let die those who are not.
USSR’s breakup and the dotcom bubble started a new era. Everyone saw that this works and there’s no higher wisdom or hidden fallback mechanism to prevent this.
But the incentive to “save businesses” is, well, why I’m a libertarian most of the time. If governments had no money to be directed by some central strategy, and instead only the means to minimally function as publicly decided - fire services, infrastructure, electoral procedures, IDs and money, - then there would be no option to involve them in such a way.
And it makes sense that libertarians are usually very vulnerable to the AI hype, as to the cryptocurrencies hype before it, an irony typical for history. That means that they’ll be those hit the most.
It’s an intended minefield. There’s a road called “techno-optimism and individualism”, and most of the mines are being laid on it. Similar to the KGB “rotten herring” thing and such. To discredit an idea. It’s more believable when the splattered meat around those already exploded is real.
Again, look at USSR, its ideology had plenty of flaws, some with pretty infernal consequences, but it was the main one putting future united humanity, progress, science, equality, humanism and secularism into the center of its cosmology. It offered pretty dubious tools, but that’s irrelevant. When it failed, all those things listed also got a hit. It’s not a coincidence that “polemical” (with both dystopia and utopia and questions about human nature put together in the same space) science fiction in the 90s transitioned into clearly dystopian “putrid” “dream denied” cyberpunk.
If governments had no money to be directed by some central strategy,
You mean the central strategy of creating the money, imposing capitalism, and violently enforcing extreme privilege/deprivation?
it makes sense that libertarians are usually very vulnerable to the AI hype
Because they’re already disconnected from reality and worshiping an obvious pseudo-science?
You mean the central strategy of creating the money, imposing capitalism, and violently enforcing extreme privilege/deprivation?
Usually capitalism doesn’t need to be imposed.
Even so called “traditional economy” involves violence as a means of constricting it, but is otherwise similar to capitalism. It’s just that a medieval village dies if its smith doesn’t make needed tools in time, isn’t big enough for two smiths to compete, so if such a competition happens both will simply die of hunger. So all competition in “traditional economy” setting would be first validated by social mechanisms like elders of a village agreeing or being allowed by the guild, if in a town. And so on.
“Capitalism” is what you get when you take that traditional economy and the newly arrived need for mobile labor resources - workers for the factories, laborers for big farms, and so on. You need a socio-economic system where a smith’s son can be a carpenter and vice versa, and both can be recruited and made soldiers.
In the traditional economy there’s no such mobility because there’s no need. Cases where you change places are something exceptional, rare enough to be decided by authority to allow or not. People living in such societies would think you’re as good as a thief if you tried to compete with their local hereditary smith or carpenter. They’d punish you as a thief.
Another thing similar to capitalism, but with constrictions backed by violence, is socialism.
In that thing a group of virtuous well-meaning revolutionaries breaks the society over their collective knee in order to make it closer to an utopian idea, and then basically builds state capitalism with them and their descendants on top.
You don’t have to enforce privilege and deprivation. The victim’s position is disadvantaged by definition.
Because they’re already disconnected from reality and worshiping an obvious pseudo-science?
No, libertarian philosophy is the only thing that didn’t go up in flames for me through experience, of what I liked from time to time in my life.
It feels somewhat general and stupid, a bit like Tao Te Ching. Tao Te Ching is respected and libertarianism is not. Well, except for China, where it’s the other way around, because Taoism is associated with the century of humiliations and libertarianism is what they approximate with some additional steps.
I also wouldn’t say conversational dataset-based systems are obvious pseudo-science when you know what they are and are not trying to replace people with them. And cryptocurrencies have their valid uses.
You should ask yourself a question - is the Web a scam? Right after the dotcom bubble and during that - much of it was.
For real? China is approximately libertarian? I’m not here to say China is worse than most others but it has a massive state surveillance operation. There is rampant censorship of opinions and media. The penalties for drug possession are severe. The economy is heavily influenced by the government if not centrally run. It seems pretty far from libertarianism.
I mean the general public morale, something like that. Where people in western countries complain about “wild capitalism” and so on - in China it’s pretty much jungle.
The economy is heavily influenced by the government if not centrally run.
No, that’s the point, their economy is not.
It seems pretty far from libertarianism.
Politically.
but it was the main one putting future united humanity, progress, science, equality, humanism and secularism into the center of its cosmology
Just llike with many people, what they say and what they do can be two very different things.
In the USSR’s case, they talked socialism while being totalitarian state capitalists. This was even noted at the time of the Russian revolution by people such as Rosa Luxemburg. And in terms of its foreign policy, they talked internationalism and cooperation while carrying on the legacy of Russian imperialism.
When it failed, all those things listed also got a hit.
All those things also took a hit at the end of WW1, in the Great Depression, and during WW2. Nobody who was paying attention believed the Russian bullshit, before or after the collapse of the Communist Party’s rule. The double-dealing in the Spanish Civil War, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the crushing of the Prague Spring, and many other events put paid to that naivety.
Just llike with many people, what they say and what they do can be two very different things.
Yes, for my specific point here what they say matters and not what they do.
they talked socialism while being totalitarian state capitalists. This was even noted at the time of the Russian revolution by people such as Rosa Luxemburg.
I prefer “red fascism” over “state capitalism” for USSR until the Thaw. After the Thaw it was more of state capitalism, yes.
All those things also took a hit at the end of WW1, in the Great Depression, and during WW2.
Yes, but the way WW2 ended was a push in the opposite direction. Or it wasn’t, but 20 years later, when some of the ruins were rebuilt, it was retrospectively presented as that and the future as bright and peaceful.
Nobody who was paying attention believed the Russian bullshit, before or after the collapse of the Communist Party’s rule.
I mean, you shouldn’t say those things from a different time and a different context.
Much of the Soviet bullshit that many people in the west still take for truth isn’t accepted in ex-USSR and vice versa.
Much of what inside USSR itself was considered bullshit got a new life in the 60s, when a somewhat romantic view became common that there is some virtuous root of revolution that one can find from that nasty place in which the country was then. It was sort of a rebellion against Soviet reality of that time, but it was also a rebirth of its worldview. World revolution was replaced with progress, peace, socialism, yadda-yadda, ideologically correct science and weeding out enemies of the people were replaced with perception of the cold war and space race as of something that will eventually lead to friendship and unification, and pretty typical militarism was replaced with melancholic pacifism, memory of those “fallen to preserve life itself”, pictures of some transcendent emotion unifying the whole world - some sort of spring air and night sky feeling, I can’t even explain it, but I’ve got my share.
It’s a very potent aesthetic, and very young in feeling. I don’t even think it was bad. Unfortunately, it was all purely emotional. And, anyway, many of the people who contributed to that cultural movement were dissidents 20 years later.
But - much of what seems to have always been obviously untrue or true was a reasonable claim for many people 20 years ago.
You can’t believe what you think you clearly see from today. Not without lots of physical proof.
And things that seem small and trivial from far away could have looked quite big and real for those living them.
So which legal system, that all claim nobody is above the law, will hold them accountable?
ELI5?
If I gave you $5 and then you gave it to someone else and then they gave it back to me we’ve done nothing but can call it $15 in business transactions.
That’s why transactions are defined as the exchange of something of value. In most legal systems, if you’re caught swapping phony transactions like that, you can be prosecuted for fraud.
I think I understand. Can… Can I have the $5 now please?
300% profit! Where’s my bonus!
You are allowed to take an extra 15-minute break.
But it has to be used this week. And during quiet times. And not within an hour of any other break. Or the start and end of your work hours. And not on any day that ends in Y.
Nvidia invests in company… Company buys Nvidia items… Nvidia stock goes up… Nvidia has new pretend money to invest into another company…
And this is news to people?
Apparently so.
Question is: which of those is truly the best short play?
Only winning play is to not.
Why would nvidia have new money to invest when its stock goes up? That’s not how the stock market works, you buy stock from other investors, not the company. Unless they finance all their investments with debt and use their higher valuation to get easier access to that financing. Which seems unlikely.
Don’t get me wrong, I 100% think AI is a crap bubble, but I don’t think you understood how this scam works.
Because higher stock value means more collateral for debt.
You’d be surprised on how much debt is used in even small companies.
I’m aware, usually investments are not financed (primarily) with debt though.
Having the capabilities to take on debt helps to garner investments.
You can do a joint venture, take on a bit of debt but get more money of it.
And we’ve seen many mega corpos finance their venture throught debt (see Uber business model).
So I’d say that it was true in the past, but corpos are getting bolder.
NVIDIA sells GPUs to Oracle. Oracle sells GPU time to openai.
When time comes to pay the bills, openai doesn’t have the money to pay Oracle who then doesn’t have money to pay NVIDIA. So, Oracle gives stock to NVIDIA, and openai also gives stock to NVIDIA.
NVIDIA doesn’t care if both go broke because now a gpu is worth a lot more, and in the books they’re selling a lot more GPUs each for a lot more money. So NVIDIA stock goes through the roof even if they ran out of cash and got into ridiculous debt.
Shareholders have a ridiculous profit, NVIDIA directors get a massive bonus and NVIDIA CEO gets famous.
Why is it a problem? Because nobody has cash and this can’t go on forever without some massive bankruptcies. I’m sceptical anyone is paying their power bills or servicing bank loans, so these may get dragged into the mud too.
the power bill seems to be placed on customers of the electric companies
Wouldn’t NVIDIA care? They now own part of the company in exchange for that hardware?
If they go bankrupt, nvidia loses their stake in a company, and it all falls apart. GPUs won’t stay this expensive if this implodes.
OpenAI though, can only go on for as long as their venture capitalists are willing to support it.
I’m not convinced the current LLM architecture can ever make an AGI, but it a can be useful and be made more useful. There could come a point where it’s usefulness and it’s short comings reach a profitable point that people will accept.
What could also help is nvidia being able to come out with more power efficient chips as well. It could go a long way to solving at least one of the problem.
I think your question comes from thinking that anybody involved in this grift cares about anything other than short-term results. They would sell both their own kidneys as long as they only had to deliver after the next quarterly earnings report.
The point is that major shareholder will try to hide insider knowledge to sell their stock before a big crash.
They pump the stock value as much as possible and sell it before it crashes. They make a shit ton of money and some suckers are left holding the bag.
Ah, yes those people definitely don’t care, they’ll make their money either way.
Companies issue new stock to raise capital all the time.
Yea, except Nvidia didn’t.
That’s not how the stock market works, you buy stock from other investors, not the company.
The company can issue more stock, not just use debt for its financing. And the value of the new stock is strongly influenced by the market price of the stock that has already been issued.
Nvidia’s outstanding shares have declined continuously since 2017.
I haven’t read the article, but I have read previous accusations of the same thing, so I assume it’s the same.
Basically, the new AI companies are all losing money, but they are all investing big money in each other which makes it look like the industry is doing well.
I think this snippet get the gist across:
The money flows in loops: Nvidia invests in AI startups, startups commit to cloud spending, cloud providers purchase Nvidia hardware, Nvidia recognizes revenue, but the cash never completes the circuit because the underlying economic activity—AI applications generating profit—remains insufficient.
“Every public company now faces machine-speed scrutiny of accounting practices. Anomalies that might have persisted for quarters until human analysts identified patterns now trigger immediate algorithmic responses.”
Good reading. Besides Nvidia and the AI money bubble, the link to Bitcoin is interesting.I‘ve read so many other articles about financial acrobatics with Bitcoin and how it collapses now, I‘m waiting to see it falling down to 50k.
I‘m waiting to see it falling down to 50k.
Yeah, if you look at long-term averages, this is a realistic buy price.
