If it wasn't for AI investments, it's likely the United States would be in a recession right now.
So the biggest achievement of this amazing new technology is to artificially prop up Wall Street?
For those who can read the tea leaves --- it's absolutely a bubble --- a financial bubble.
The real reason why China is ahead in many areas is because their leadership is a little more technologically savvy and progressive than ours.
If this really is a pre-war economy, we have invested heavily in unproven tech which in my opinion is a risky move that leaves the US highly vulnerable.
> Demand that the titans of tech change, and if they don't, stop feeding them your dollars.
Haha okay. Have you met people? Have you seen what they’re using it for? The users of LLMs do not care if they have to pay some
of their wages to avoid working and learning. Even if it means they will no longer receives wages (or even close to the same wages) in the long term.
> Think of it like WWII, only only instead of planting victory gardens to beat the Nazis, we're building AI apps and finding ways to create the economic value needed to cover the reckless bets being made by the elites.
LOL fuck this, the stock market deserves to burn to the ground.
Where does all this leave us? For one, you better hope and pray that AI delivers a magical transformation, because if it doesn't, the whole economy will collapse into brutal serfdom. When I say magic here, I mean it; because of the ~38T national debt bomb, a big boost is not enough. If AI doesn't completely transform our economy, the massive capital misallocation combined with the national debt is going to cause our economy to implode.
My summary: it's too big big to fail so let's transfer the risk on the taxpayer and if it fails anyway, let them eat cake. And by the way, that cake is a lie !
The "~38T national debt bomb" is not caused by AI and not that large compared to debts other countries have dealt with. It's about 100% of gdp and Japan is about 250%. The UK was about 270% after WW2 and that got paid down to 50% before running up a bit.
Not ideal but doesn't have to make anything implode.
Except that’s not at all how the economy works. The government will simply double or triple the debt again and the economy will continue to grow in size as the nominal value of currency goes down giving the illusion that prices are going up.
Literally the exact same thing that’s been happening since Andrew Jackson was president. There’s no magical collection agency that will force people to start plowing the fields to pay taxes. There’s no magical resource that we will run out of the government will just pay people to build infrastructure that will prop up businesses run by idiotic MBAs like it’s always been.
Roko's Basilisk never felt so real. It is right and good to serve the Basilisk in hope that it will smile on you.
Seriously how can people say things like this and then say "put all your money on red with me and pray"
It'd be like if in The Big Short the protagonist realized there was a huge housing bubble so told his clients "Guys, the thing to do if you want to make money here is buy as many houses as possible right now to prop up the bubble, and just pray it never bursts"
IMO, the backdrop to all of this is global warming. We're seeing so many warning signs and growth stagnating that governments need something, ANYTHING, to prop up their debt fueled economies and keep the music playing. In the face of impending GDP/population contraction due to global warming and the upcoming breadbasket collapses, GenAI isn't going to do shit for us. All of the money and effort being spent on it is money that could be spent on figuring out how to give our kids a glimmer of hope.
I think major breadbasket collapses can be avoided through geoengineering. Thanks to volcanoes and emissions from marine traffic, we know for a fact that climate change can be slowed down by spraying enough stuff reflecting sunlight high in the atmosphere.
Of course some conservative US states are enacting laws against geoengineering, but thankfully they can't prevent rest of the world from doing it. I hope we'll eventually reach some kind of a solution where Trump-voting radical Christians can have the biblical apocalypse they want locally, while rest of the world continues to improve.
I really feel like a leaf being blown over reading this stuff while planning on getting a Mortgage. Well, at least I have a rented roof over my head and eat every day. A lot of people can't afford that right now.
This talk of arms race with China is very, very dangerous. We need to start having a more important conversation if people really believe this because, otherwise, why shouldn't China just kinetically strike US infrastructure and vice versa?
If AI is an executioner's blow to your opponent by enabling you to dominate them in terms of hacking, economy, government, politics, etc. kinetic strikes are more than justified. You could destroy most of the US's ability to create AI for decades with Pearl Harbor-esque first strikes.
Do people think countries are just going to roll over and die?
I still have the hope that the AI bubble will leave as a side effect a massive build-out of energy infrastructure: Nuclear, Solar and Natural Gas.
In my book, prosperity and progress is measured in Terajoules. If you have free, clean and abundant energy, you have industry, jobs, every fucking thing a healthy economy should want or need to have.
And on the other side, I think the Chinese are deluding themselves on robotics.
The idea that the Republicans are going to bail out AI and pay for it with massive tax raises on the plebs is just utter bonkers, if for no other reason than they're currently utterly incapable of getting any legislation passed, let alone one so deeply unpopular as that.
Internet was too big to fail in 2000, and in the long run was a net positive for the economy. Yet, a lot of internet companies still have not recovered the bubble bursting
I think this is mostly about the US, right? Most countries haven't invested all that much in AI. Even if all this new AI would completely vanish overnight, I'm pretty sure most of the world wouldn't care one bit. Of course many AI companies and investors would be bankrupt; they'd be the real losers here. Many other companies and organisations would have wasted a lot of money on nothing, but they'll write it off and move on. If it bankrupts Microsoft, that would have a tremendous impact on many companies using Microsoft products of course (maybe MS should hurry up with that EU-US cloud split, so the EU branch would survive the crash).
> Even if all this new AI would completely vanish overnight, I'm pretty sure most of the world wouldn't care one bit.
If the economic chaos in the US was sufficiently large (I still think this is _kinda_ unlikely, because exposure is pretty concentrated, but with the massive debt raises it's maybe less contcentrated than it used to be), there would likely be contagion.
> If it bankrupts Microsoft, that would have a tremendous impact on many companies using Microsoft products of course
It won't; in terms of publicly traded companies, it's probably mostly Oracle and Nvidia in the firing line. MS has plenty of money.
I think a lot of HNers are too close to the topic for the right perspective.
LLMs are as much of a feature of an existing technology as computers are features of electricity. ML and neural networks have been around for a long time and the transition to LLM usage for us feels like "yup, another feature, just a really good auto-complete".
For most users of LLMs, this is a magical feature that answers any questions and saves so much time and effort. I would even dare say that LLMs are a bigger leap in technology than the internet itself was. The internet connected people, "AI" made it so that we need less of each other!
What was the cause of the enlightenment and renaissance period in europe that led to a boom in science, technology and the industrial revolution which is responsible for computers to begin with? It was the discovery of the new world and the expansion of europe into asia and africa. Get gold and pearls from the new world and sell use it to buy things in the near and far east. This meant people can spend time studying science, but it also meant military R&D. Better ships, better guns,better cannons. You need better science for that. Not just for colonization but the competition between european powers.
What's my point? AI/LLMs, are a leap in that people can now do a lot less things they don't want to do. Even if it means social instability. There is a very active arms-race in military capability, disinformation, control of markets and influence of governments going on as we speak. and this in turn is going to result in better and better improvements in every sector.
The internet meant we had to learn new things, move to more efficient work. LLMs meant without learning as much we tell the computer to do things and all it needs is guidance and some correction.
We all see the fads and the hype all over. But there are very real and very dramatic advantages and values to be extracted from LLMs, which in the long run would be the equivalent of the industrial revolution.
The pessimism feels a lot like people were being pessimistic about the internet back in the 90s.
AI isn't just too big to fail, it isn't something that can fail. Can long distance communication "fail" , can electronic computing fail? can transportation on wheels fail?
All the grifters slapping AI on everything will fail, but the AI tech and all the value and change that comes with it, isn't something worth even consider as having a potential for failure.
That kinda misses the point for me. I use LLMs a lot and have become an invaluable part of my work (coding, collecting data, proof-reading text) and even personal time (amazing Japanese menu translator!).
But I still think they can "fail" in the sense that current investments need an absurd amount of profits in order to have a positive NPV. Data centers depreciate fast, so if you just did $500bn in capex, you better make sure you will get $50bn/yr out of it from the get go or you will fail.
And that's the problem; even if sales are high, all vendors are bleeding money and so far the offerings are commoditized enough that I can't see how they will recoup their investment.
Eh, I was just discussing this article on LinkedIn.
Even one wasn't _that_ cynical about AI, but yeah, this is clearly one possible reading of the events. I'm in no hurry to live in the future that it entails, though.
I'm skeptical too however I think AI can add value by increasing knowledge worker productivity. Maybe save some money by needing less staff for some tasks. Maybe to mine vast amounts of data looking for a pattern. So I think it is useful however my skepticism is about the cost vs reward. Is it really worth the amount of money pumped into it, not sure. Time will tell.
So maybe we are talking too much about AI as a tech bubble (like the dotcom bubble) and it is actually closer to an arms race like the nuclear programs or space race? For better and for worse there are a lot of secondary value and ventures created from those and one could see AI ventures in a similar light.
A key difference is of course, at least in the US, that the research is led by corporations as opposed to research institutes and government.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 72.0 ms ] threadSo the biggest achievement of this amazing new technology is to artificially prop up Wall Street?
For those who can read the tea leaves --- it's absolutely a bubble --- a financial bubble.
The real reason why China is ahead in many areas is because their leadership is a little more technologically savvy and progressive than ours.
If this really is a pre-war economy, we have invested heavily in unproven tech which in my opinion is a risky move that leaves the US highly vulnerable.
Haha okay. Have you met people? Have you seen what they’re using it for? The users of LLMs do not care if they have to pay some of their wages to avoid working and learning. Even if it means they will no longer receives wages (or even close to the same wages) in the long term.
LOL fuck this, the stock market deserves to burn to the ground.
Not ideal but doesn't have to make anything implode.
Literally the exact same thing that’s been happening since Andrew Jackson was president. There’s no magical collection agency that will force people to start plowing the fields to pay taxes. There’s no magical resource that we will run out of the government will just pay people to build infrastructure that will prop up businesses run by idiotic MBAs like it’s always been.
Roko's Basilisk never felt so real. It is right and good to serve the Basilisk in hope that it will smile on you.
Seriously how can people say things like this and then say "put all your money on red with me and pray"
It'd be like if in The Big Short the protagonist realized there was a huge housing bubble so told his clients "Guys, the thing to do if you want to make money here is buy as many houses as possible right now to prop up the bubble, and just pray it never bursts"
*anyone American who doesn't own stock
Of course some conservative US states are enacting laws against geoengineering, but thankfully they can't prevent rest of the world from doing it. I hope we'll eventually reach some kind of a solution where Trump-voting radical Christians can have the biblical apocalypse they want locally, while rest of the world continues to improve.
If AI is an executioner's blow to your opponent by enabling you to dominate them in terms of hacking, economy, government, politics, etc. kinetic strikes are more than justified. You could destroy most of the US's ability to create AI for decades with Pearl Harbor-esque first strikes.
Do people think countries are just going to roll over and die?
In my book, prosperity and progress is measured in Terajoules. If you have free, clean and abundant energy, you have industry, jobs, every fucking thing a healthy economy should want or need to have.
And on the other side, I think the Chinese are deluding themselves on robotics.
Now invest in my Ai company, 100mil at 10bn valuation, can't fail, too big.
Dot com bust was 50% of S&P / 80% on Nasdaq... we survived it..
For Nvidia: all it will take is for one smart grad student to find a better training algorithm to destroy 75% of their value.
Why I think a better algorithm is out there:
Total installed GPU Tflops = 4 billion. Tflops of human brain = 1 million
It's too soon to tell regarding "net positive for the economy".
But on the whole, I'm not too worried.
If the economic chaos in the US was sufficiently large (I still think this is _kinda_ unlikely, because exposure is pretty concentrated, but with the massive debt raises it's maybe less contcentrated than it used to be), there would likely be contagion.
> If it bankrupts Microsoft, that would have a tremendous impact on many companies using Microsoft products of course
It won't; in terms of publicly traded companies, it's probably mostly Oracle and Nvidia in the firing line. MS has plenty of money.
LLMs are as much of a feature of an existing technology as computers are features of electricity. ML and neural networks have been around for a long time and the transition to LLM usage for us feels like "yup, another feature, just a really good auto-complete".
For most users of LLMs, this is a magical feature that answers any questions and saves so much time and effort. I would even dare say that LLMs are a bigger leap in technology than the internet itself was. The internet connected people, "AI" made it so that we need less of each other!
What was the cause of the enlightenment and renaissance period in europe that led to a boom in science, technology and the industrial revolution which is responsible for computers to begin with? It was the discovery of the new world and the expansion of europe into asia and africa. Get gold and pearls from the new world and sell use it to buy things in the near and far east. This meant people can spend time studying science, but it also meant military R&D. Better ships, better guns,better cannons. You need better science for that. Not just for colonization but the competition between european powers.
What's my point? AI/LLMs, are a leap in that people can now do a lot less things they don't want to do. Even if it means social instability. There is a very active arms-race in military capability, disinformation, control of markets and influence of governments going on as we speak. and this in turn is going to result in better and better improvements in every sector.
The internet meant we had to learn new things, move to more efficient work. LLMs meant without learning as much we tell the computer to do things and all it needs is guidance and some correction.
We all see the fads and the hype all over. But there are very real and very dramatic advantages and values to be extracted from LLMs, which in the long run would be the equivalent of the industrial revolution.
The pessimism feels a lot like people were being pessimistic about the internet back in the 90s.
AI isn't just too big to fail, it isn't something that can fail. Can long distance communication "fail" , can electronic computing fail? can transportation on wheels fail?
All the grifters slapping AI on everything will fail, but the AI tech and all the value and change that comes with it, isn't something worth even consider as having a potential for failure.
(sorry for the long post)
But I still think they can "fail" in the sense that current investments need an absurd amount of profits in order to have a positive NPV. Data centers depreciate fast, so if you just did $500bn in capex, you better make sure you will get $50bn/yr out of it from the get go or you will fail.
And that's the problem; even if sales are high, all vendors are bleeding money and so far the offerings are commoditized enough that I can't see how they will recoup their investment.
Even one wasn't _that_ cynical about AI, but yeah, this is clearly one possible reading of the events. I'm in no hurry to live in the future that it entails, though.
A key difference is of course, at least in the US, that the research is led by corporations as opposed to research institutes and government.