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Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits

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Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits

#201

Post by epicureanideal »

bobthepanda wrote: post #182
Retric wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was trying to be objective which is why I didn’t try to compare individual shows. Thus average production quality seems like a useful metric. There’s currently a handful of “traditional media/streaming” shows with absolutely crazy budgets today and if you happen to like them then that’s great. However, if you don’t things quickly fall off a cliff in terms of production quality. The same is true of YouTube. The qual…

It's worth noting that due to advances in technology, it is possible to deliver the same show for less money and time. The average "how to cook on a food network" show was, ultimately, one person in the kitchen of a large home cooking for the camera, produced once a week. There are plenty of people delivering that style of cooking show with high production quality today. Obviously it's not the same because some thing…

I’m also a fan of Tasting History. Highly recommended.

Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits

#202

Post by Archonical »

pedalpete wrote: post #101
harmmonica wrote: post #92

Do I have this right that there have been no or at least very few pure AI IPO's during this cycle (I can't actually think of a single one)? So it's dissimilar to dotcom in that regard because during that time countless dotcoms went public with sky-high valuations and then failed. A bunch of reputable companies also went or were already public during that time and those saw huge valuation drops so that's more analogou…

This time is always different, until it isn't. However, it is different from the internet bubble partially for the reason you describe. There have been a few IPOs, but they perhaps happened earlier in the cycle, or companies are pivoting into AI. I'm thinking companies like Palantir, which was always AI, or Salesforce which is making a big AI pivot. Most of the funding is not coming from public sectors. There is so m…

How was Palantir always AI?

Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits

#203

Post by MountDoom »

martinohansen wrote: post #195
MountDoom wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bezos is a 0.0001-percenter. Most of people on HN are probably in the top 1% to 5%. You're in the top 10% in the US if you make $170k/yr.

True. But that’s income, to be top 10% in your net worth you need 1.5m USD and 12m USD for top 1%

Yeah, but net worth is weird because for most people, it just measures age. When you're young, you have nothing in your 401k and you have a brand new mortgage, so you're worth around $0. Negative if you have any student loans.

When you're in your 50s or 60s, the mortgage is repaid, and if nothing blew up, you probably also have a million or two in your 401k, so at that point, it's actually not that hard for a person who had a decent career in the SF Bay Area to be worth $4M+. And many FAANG retirees will probably flirt with $10M+ if they don't spend too much.

Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits

#204

Post by SoftTalker »

rogerrogerr wrote: post #186
irjustin wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thought experiment - Startrek replicators are real. This basically means almost everything can be built without human involvement. The guy who owns the replicators is the richest. The wealth gap is so massive you get revolts (because we're educated, not serfs, right?) So then government needs to step in. Either tax->ubi?, socialize it, or make it a state asset? Regardless, that's the goal of AGI/robotics/etc.

If you can make many replicators, money stops making much sense. You probably end up with energy (if these devices take a lot of energy to operate) as the new currency. My gut says that _somehow_ the middle class will get screwed as always, but I struggle to articulate the way that abundant cheap goods lead to that outcome. Maybe because the very few that control the replicators will be able to cut people they don’t…

But energy is essentially free also, at least on the margin, and if we're talking about sunlight.

Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits

#205

Post by SoftTalker »

lemonlearnings wrote: post #199
rogerrogerr wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, but why would we die on the vine? Wouldn’t we just… make a parallel economy without the AGI? The world works today without AGI.

Parallel economies are banned. Try making a new currency in the US.

Economies can work without currencies. It's a little inconvenient, but bartering/trading goods for services was common in the depression when nobody had any cash.

Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits

#206

Post by tbossanova »

Buttons840 wrote: post #198
rogerrogerr wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but who do they sell stuff to if no one has a job? We’re on the brink of some _very_ unexplored branches of human behavior.

That's the key. The poor are useful to business so long as they are a source of money and power. What happens if the time comes that the poor have nothing the rich want?

Oh, the rich will be very happy wielding sadistic power over the poor

Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits

#207

Post by SoftTalker »

davnicwil wrote: post #58
simonw wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true for the GPUs themselves, but the data centers with their electricity infrastructure and cooling and suchlike won't become obsolete nearly as quickly.

this is a good point, and it would be interesting to see the relative value of this building and housing 'plumbing' overhead Vs the chips themselves. I guess another example of the same thing is power generation capacity, although this comes online so much more slowly I'm not sure the dynamics would work in the same way.

The data centers built in 1998 don't have nearly enough power or cooling capacity to run today's infrastructure. I'd be surprised if very many of them are even still in use. Cheaper to build new than upgrade.

Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits

#208

Post by an0malous »

bko wrote: post #135
ceejayoz wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook has more. Was it a benefit? Does the benefit outweigh the harms?

Yes, Facebook is a benefit. Among other things, it gave me React which much of the modern web is built on, and React Native, PyTorch, GraphQL, Cassandra, Presto, and RocksDB just to name a few. The question is, what are billions of people doing on Facebook if it's harmful? I don't know. My daycare sends me updates, my barbershop tells me when they're closing and I used it to sell my fridge. This hole Facebook irratio…

> Yes, Facebook is a benefit. Among other things, it gave me React

No, this is peak HN

Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits

#209

Post by elbasti »

zerosizedweasle wrote: post #36
blast wrote: post #29

He's (unsurprisingly) making an analogy to the dotcom bubble, which seems to me correct. There was a bubble, many non-viable companies got funded and died, and nevertheless the internet did eventually change everything.

The biggest problem is the infrastructure left behind from the Dotcom boom that laid the path for the current world (the high speed fiber) doesn't translate to computer chips. Are you still using intel chips from 1998? And the chips are such a huge cost, and being backed by debt but they depreciate in value exponentially. It's not the same because so much of the current debt fueled spending is on an asset that has ve…

About 40% of AI infrastructure spending is the physical datacenter itself and the associated energy production. 60% is the chips.

That 40% has a very long shelf life.

Unfortunately, the energy component is almost entirely fossil fuels, so the global warming impact is pretty significant.

At this point, geoengineering is the only thing that can earn us a bit of time to figure...idk, something out, and we can only hope the oceans don't acidify too much in the meantime.

Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits

#210

Post by amatecha »

SoftTalker wrote: post #205
lemonlearnings wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parallel economies are banned. Try making a new currency in the US.

Economies can work without currencies. It's a little inconvenient, but bartering/trading goods for services was common in the depression when nobody had any cash.

Interestingly, new ad-hoc currencies pop up all over in times like that:

https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/history/europes-economic-...

https://collectingpapermoney.spmc.org/wiki/Scrip_Issued_duri...

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