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America is now one big bet on AI

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Re: America is now one big bet on AI

#61

Post by findthewords »

shubhamjain wrote: post #33

> Foreigners poured a record $290bn into US stocks in the second quarter and now own about 30 per cent of the market — the highest share in post-second world war history. Europeans and Canadians have been boycotting American goods but continue buying US stocks in bulk — especially the tech giants. I fail to find any plausible explanation for this other than the fact that yes, it is a bubble. Tesla, a car company faci…

Musk's greatest achievements are in the field of financial engineering. I wish he could write a book about it, because it's the only part about his life that's remained invisible.

Re: America is now one big bet on AI

#62

Post by tigerBL00D »

bad_haircut72 wrote: post #11

Its not a bubble because the economy isnt actually about trade any more, its about power. The people in power now know that control over technology is the name of the game. It doesnt have to have a return on investment, it has to enable control of public opinion and eventually, robots.

It's still a bubble if it happens that investors' expectations are unreasonably inflated. Most expect return on their invested capital.

Re: America is now one big bet on AI

#63

Post by gooob »

righthand wrote: post #14
xiphias2 wrote: post #3

While it's all true, I think it's exciting that there's a country that's not afraid of betting when all the signs point to AI being accerelated. USA already bet on software when it let China overtake manufacturing. Now the only worse thing to betting on AI would be slowing it down inside USA.

This is something I don’t get. The general cost of living is sky rocketing, largely due to this push and some of the population thinks there is prosperity for all on the otherside of the meat processing machine we’re pushing everyone toward. Groceries are going to get more expensive. Every dollar we spend on over building AI infrastructure is a dollar we never get back. We could use this money for other things such a…

the idea is to use AI to build super productive farms and greenhouses, improve the capability to do that in urban areas, automated and super efficient transportation. but it's not just AI doing all that, it's someone who wants to start a business using AI himself to figure out how to best start up a greenhouse in his community and setup the tech infra needed including the API for people to be able to view available produce, estimates on availability, initiate trades, etc. (this greenhouse thing is just one example).

another example could be someone wants to build an ecosystem monitoring station to monitor the nearby ravine (pollution levels with rainfall and other events etc.) and air quality over time. this is just a small datapoint but if people all over the place build their own ecosystem/weather monitoring things using basic electronics ordered from the internet and all plug them in to a standard observability software system then that could provide some pretty awesome outcomes including figuring the best way to clean polluted water (because some of the places will surely have implemented varying methods of sanitizing their own water).

Re: America is now one big bet on AI

#64

Post by tomrod »

bad_haircut72 wrote: post #11

Its not a bubble because the economy isnt actually about trade any more, its about power. The people in power now know that control over technology is the name of the game. It doesnt have to have a return on investment, it has to enable control of public opinion and eventually, robots.

Then it isn't the economy, since the economy is how people allocate scarce resources -- that is and always will be normalizable by the time a person has in a day. Abstract AI utilization of data centers don't impact my garden directly, so at least in partial equilibria I can ignore what David Brin in Existence calls the Message Flood, or otherwise known as the Fermi-Paradox Arms Race.

In Existence, Brin explores a speculative solution to the Fermi Paradox — the question of why we see no signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. The novel suggests that advanced civilizations create memetic or AI-based “message entities” — self-replicating digital ambassadors designed to spread across the galaxy to preserve their creators’ legacy or recruit new species.

This notion applies to other activities -- but basically, when a society puts all its resources to something other than its preservation then it expires in short order.

Re: America is now one big bet on AI

#65

Post by bgwalter »

softwaredoug wrote: post #13

There is other emerging tech we could be investing in that other economies are doubling-down on. But the Administration has made green energy harder for American companies. And a lot of health tech too is tougher under the current administration. Tarrifs, affordability, etc also hit hard on small businesses, making growth there tough.

That is the tragic part. This administration ran on a platform of bringing back the real economy and manufacturing. Now they fuel the Bitcoin and "AI" bubbles, which are nonessential and non-tangibles.

The GDP increases are fake. Mining Bitcoin produces nothing, in fact the money supply should not be increased to match the fake GDP increase. The same is true for "AI".

Re: America is now one big bet on AI

#66

Post by rhetocj23 »

softwaredoug wrote: post #23
bad_haircut72 wrote: post #11

Its not a bubble because the economy isnt actually about trade any more, its about power. The people in power now know that control over technology is the name of the game. It doesnt have to have a return on investment, it has to enable control of public opinion and eventually, robots.

This would be true if the bubble pops and the gov't spend money propping up OpenAI or something. But those big companies going out of business won't be how the bubble pops. It'll be the 95% of projects / startups that don't have any ROI.

Assuming chatgpt is an input to those projects - how are those projects going to see ROI given that OAIs focus now is to be profitable through its own ventures?

OAI all over the place and doesnt seem to have a direct thing its focused on executing, which only makes the idea of a bubble more real.

Re: America is now one big bet on AI

#67

Post by simianwords »

righthand wrote: post #14
xiphias2 wrote: post #3

While it's all true, I think it's exciting that there's a country that's not afraid of betting when all the signs point to AI being accerelated. USA already bet on software when it let China overtake manufacturing. Now the only worse thing to betting on AI would be slowing it down inside USA.

This is something I don’t get. The general cost of living is sky rocketing, largely due to this push and some of the population thinks there is prosperity for all on the otherside of the meat processing machine we’re pushing everyone toward. Groceries are going to get more expensive. Every dollar we spend on over building AI infrastructure is a dollar we never get back. We could use this money for other things such a…

> The general cost of living is sky rocketing

there is no evidence of this

Re: America is now one big bet on AI

#68

Post by kibwen »

"The Depression was preceded by a period of industrial growth and social development known as the "Roaring Twenties". Much of the profit generated by the boom was invested in speculation, such as on the stock market, contributing to growing wealth inequality. Banks were subject to minimal regulation, resulting in loose lending and widespread debt. By 1929, declining spending had led to reductions in manufacturing output and rising unemployment. Share values continued to rise until the October 1929 crash, after which the slide continued until July 1932, accompanied by a loss of confidence in the financial system. By 1933, the U.S. unemployment rate had risen to 25%, about one-third of farmers had lost their land, and 9,000 of its 25,000 banks had gone out of business. President Herbert Hoover was unwilling to intervene heavily in the economy, and in 1930 he signed the Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act, which worsened the Depression. In the 1932 presidential election, Hoover was defeated by Franklin D. Roosevelt, who from 1933 pursued a set of expansive New Deal programs in order to provide relief and create jobs. In Germany, which depended heavily on U.S. loans, the crisis caused unemployment to rise to nearly 30% and fueled political extremism, paving the way for Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party to rise to power in 1933. Between 1929 and 1932, worldwide gross domestic product (GDP) fell by an estimated 15%; in the U.S., the Depression resulted in a 30% contraction in GDP."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression

Re: America is now one big bet on AI

#69

Post by rhetocj23 »

andxor wrote: post #57
shubhamjain wrote: post #33

> Foreigners poured a record $290bn into US stocks in the second quarter and now own about 30 per cent of the market — the highest share in post-second world war history. Europeans and Canadians have been boycotting American goods but continue buying US stocks in bulk — especially the tech giants. I fail to find any plausible explanation for this other than the fact that yes, it is a bubble. Tesla, a car company faci…

Bears always sound smarter, but making money in the markets is a whole different game.

Im a bear of LLMs, doesnt mean I havent made money off it.

I have. Intrinsic valuation and pricing are not the same thing.

Re: America is now one big bet on AI

#70

Post by trenchpilgrim »

rtkwe wrote: post #43
cs702 wrote: post #39

Key quote: > The hundreds of billions of dollars companies are investing in AI now account for an astonishing 40 per cent share of US GDP growth this year. In other words, investment in AI is a massive private-sector stimulus program, powering economic growth. Questions for which no one knows the answer include: * Will these AI investments earn a positive rate of return in the aggregate? * Without these investments o…

> Without these investments on AI and their second-order economic effects, would the US economy be growing? It's only 40% of the growth so.. yes.

That 40% is only the investment in companies making AI products. It does not include "second order" effects.
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