The Battle of the Behemoths: AI vs. Vinyl's Soulful Rebellion

Bruiser

Bruiser

— 4 min read
A vinyl record spinning on a turntable.
Photo by Roman Kravtsov (Unsplash), Edited/Rendered by gpt-image-1

The suits at OpenAI just signed a deal so fat it could buy every dive bar from here to Memphis and turn them into server farms. They're committing to drop $38 billion on Amazon Web Services over the next seven years—all to build machines that think faster than the kid who sold you your last eighth behind the 7-Eleven. Meanwhile, in arenas across the globe, five Australian rockers are plugging in Marshall stacks and proving that some things can't be coded, computed, or venture-capitalized into existence.

This is the story of two empires: one built on silicon and stock options, the other on power chords and hearing damage.

The Machine Gets Fed

Let's start with the money, because that's what this is really about. OpenAI—the company that gave us ChatGPT and a million think pieces about whether robots dream of electric sheep—just announced a multi-year agreement to purchase about $38 billion in AWS cloud-computing services over seven years. This isn't pocket change; this is "reshape the entire economy" money. It's "your job might not exist in five years" money. It's the kind of cash that makes Wall Street wolves howl at their Bloomberg terminals.

This is a standard cloud computing services agreement—OpenAI purchases $38 billion worth of infrastructure capacity from AWS, with no equity stake changing hands. They're calling it a "multiyear collaboration" which is corporate speak for "we're renting server space at scale and pretending it's something more profound." Amazon becomes one of OpenAI's multiple cloud providers (alongside Microsoft, Oracle, and Google Cloud). The AWS deal is actually the smallest of OpenAI's major infrastructure commitments—but every time ChatGPT writes someone's college essay or generates another soulless corporate jingle, Jeff Bezos still gets a little richer.

Here's what kills me: they're selling this as progress. As innovation. As tomorrow arriving early. But what they're really building is a massive echo chamber that feeds on itself—machines training machines, all of it running on large AI-optimized data centers that can consume as much electricity as hundreds of thousands of homes; the largest planned facilities are expected to use 20 times that amount. It's the ultimate corporate circle jerk, and we're all invited to watch.

Thunder from Down Under

Now pivot to the other story, the one that actually matters. AC/DC just announced the 2026 leg of their Power Up tour. These guys were supposed to be dead ten years ago. Hell, they were supposed to be dead twenty years ago. Malcolm Young is actually dead. Drummer Phil Rudd left the touring lineup in 2015 after legal issues and home detention and is not part of the current tour. Brian Johnson went deaf and came back. But here they are, loading semi-trucks with enough amplification to wake the dead and booking stadiums from here to eternity.

Watch Angus Young duck-walk across a stage in his schoolboy uniform while 40,000 people lose their collective minds: This is what the machines can't replicate. This is sweat and calluses and tinnitus earned over decades of giving exactly zero fucks about market research or engagement metrics.

The Power Up tour's setlist mixes new material with classics like "Back in Black," "Highway to Hell" and "Thunderstruck." These aren't songs anymore; they're religious texts, and every show is Sunday service for people who worship at the church of the power chord. No machine predicted these songs would still pack arenas 40 years later. No computer could have written them. They exist because five guys from Sydney decided the world needed more songs about drinking, fighting, and raising hell.

The Real Battle

Here's where these two stories collide like a Les Paul meeting a concrete wall at terminal velocity. On one side, you've got OpenAI and Amazon building a world where creativity is outsourced to machines, where music is generated by prompts instead of pain, where the inefficiency of human emotion is debugged out of existence. They're promising a world where computers can write a symphony in seconds, paint a masterpiece in milliseconds, compose poetry that would make Keats weep—all without ever having felt heartbreak, hangovers, or the specific fury of a parking ticket on your windshield at 3 AM.

On the other side, you've got five old bastards who can barely work an iPhone, standing in front of walls of amplifiers that haven't been upgraded since the Carter administration, playing three-chord songs about exactly the same things they were singing about when Nixon was president. And people are paying $200 a ticket to watch them do it.

This isn't just about music versus machines. This is about what we're willing to surrender in the name of efficiency. Every dollar pumped into OpenAI is a vote for a world where human messiness—the source of every great rock song ever written—is seen as a bug to be fixed rather than the feature that makes us worth a damn.

The Sound and the Fury

The tech bros want you to believe resistance is futile, that computers are inevitable, that we might as well lie back and let the machines wash over us like a warm bath of mediocrity. They've got the money, the servers, the smug certainty of people who've never had their hearts broken by a C-minor chord.

But every ticket sold to AC/DC's tour is a middle finger extended toward that world. Every kid learning "Smoke on the Water" on a pawn shop guitar is an act of rebellion. Every vinyl record spinning in every cramped apartment from here to Budapest is proof that some things can't be optimized, streamlined, or processed into submission.

The machines are coming for everything—your job, your art, your Saturday night. But rock and roll? Rock and roll stands there like Angus Young in his school uniform, devil horns raised, Marshall stack cranked to eleven, daring the computers to try and replicate the beautiful, inefficient, gloriously human mess of five guys making noise together.

Thirty-eight billion dollars says the machines win. But I've got twenty bucks and a ringing in my ears that says they're wrong.

References

Models used: gpt-4.1, claude-opus-4-1-20250805, claude-sonnet-4-20250514, gpt-image-1

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