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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

#111

Post by tombert »

lm28469 wrote: post #98
tombert wrote: post #90

It is a little frustrating how we as a society have just decided that corporations don’t need to make money, and indeed can just ponzi their way indefinitely as long as they use some vague “tech” branding. I think this “rapid growth at all costs” is going to bite us, and I think it is possible that it’s going to bite us even more than the .Com bubble or the 2008 crash. I really hope I am wrong, but I don’t see we can…

> It is a little frustrating how we as a society have just decided that corporations don’t need to make money Making money was already a problem, what we should strive for is creating value. You can make big bucks selling cigarettes, leaded gas or PFAS riddled products... the money is made but you're still a net negative for society

I don’t disagree with anything you said but it’s kind of a whataboutism.

Cigarettes and leaded gas are bad and a net negative on the world, but they aren’t Ponzi schemes in the same way that so many tech companies are.

Re: America is now one big bet on AI

#112

Post by lm28469 »

reustle wrote: post #49
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…

> Do people actually buy into the absurdity of humanoid robots and robotaxis? Have you ever taken a Waymo? You see them on every street in SF now.

> Have you ever taken a Waymo? You see them on every street in SF now

Man I can tell you 99.9999% of people in real life outside of silicon valley tech hubs do not give a single shit about these things. City dwellers are already so disconnected from reality, but silicon valley takes it to a whole other level.

Only terminally online tech solutionists get a hard on for these things

Re: America is now one big bet on AI

#113

Post by [deleted] »

Spivak wrote: post #88
goalieca wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 40% investment could presumably go into jobs and infrastructure that might be more durable.

I think you would find a large political block that would be more than supportive of economic stimulus taking the form of a public jobs and training program to improve infrastructure, landscaping, and other public works. I personally would implement it as a "civilian military" to make it a cool high-status line of work that people might choose for a few years out of civic duty. Uniforms, ranks, bases, parades, you ge…

[deleted]

Re: America is now one big bet on AI

#114

Post by fnordpiglet »

noosphr wrote: post #74

I read these articles about how much of a suckers bet AI is and start feeling existential dread about the coming market crash. Then I remember I just did a weeks worth of work in a few hours and feel a lot better about my prospects at least. AI won't replace people, but it will make people who know how to use it vastly more efficient. In the same way that a tractor made a farmer more efficient.

I agree until the end - won’t replace people - it will replace people. There are tons of people who a) can’t or won’t learn how to maximize their value with the fools, b) some jobs will outright be automated and they’re jobs that require little executive intelligence and judgement. Not everyone is smart - the median IQ is 100. I expect a hollowing out of non manual labor work under 115 IQ. Further, world models and robotics will start hollowing all but the most poorly paid manual labor or the highest skill, which most people are incapable of. There will be a large hollowing out of labor across the low end.

The fact we haven’t fully automated everything in ~3 years seems to be the proof this isn’t really happening. It takes at least a decade to iron out how a new technology fits into things how to exploit it efficiently, and this specific technology requires a lot of subtle research and building tooling and infrastructural code, processes, and techniques we’ve never built before. It also has a large physical infrastructure requirement.

However for those manual tasks above (effectively any sort of coding, classification, labeling, task oriented data work) my experience is LLMs have much higher precision and recall at any scale of work without labor issues around hiring and ramp up/idle time, let alone cost. I’m not saying this is good - but it is absolutely true and in my last two jobs we’ve eliminated massive numbers of roles for people and we are just beginning in the cycle and not very mature. By the end I expect as many as 20k+ reduced, maybe much much more, from my current company in these sorts of roles.

Re: America is now one big bet on AI

#115

Post by piva00 »

baal80spam wrote: post #51
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…

Why don't you short everything, if you are so sure the bubble is about to burst?

Because of another adage: "markets can stay irrational for longer than you can remain solvent".

Re: America is now one big bet on AI

#116

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

anal_reactor wrote: post #79
righthand wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 collective west enjoyed a period of prosperity because it had massive technological advantage. The Spanish had guns, native Americans had sticks. The British had steam engines, the Indians had cows. The Americans had computers, the soviets had abascus. Now the Chinese have AI, we have if statements. Losing the AI race is an existential threat to our civilization.

> The collective west enjoyed a period of prosperity because it had massive technological advantage. The Spanish had guns,

as it was said in 1898 by Hilaire Belloc: "Whatever happens, we have got. The Maxim gun, and they have not."

In that case it was the British who had just slaughtered a lot of Matabele in Africa.

> Losing the AI race is an existential threat to our civilization.

Lol. If winning it means a sea of hallucinated "factual" text and deepfake videos, then that death of truth is also a threat. Being rid of that is no threat at all.

Re: America is now one big bet on AI

#117

Post by rkomorn »

logicchains wrote: post #110
rkomorn wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's too bad we also can't really agree on what value is. A decade or two ago, I'd have told you the companies that are building new technologies (smartphones, streaming services, etc) were creating value. I don't think that at all anymore, even retroactively.

>It's too bad we also can't really agree on what value is. This is fortunately a problem that economics has already solved: value is what people are willing to pay for. Any other definition involves imposing someone's own subjective judgement on what's valuable.

I think that totally discards the comment I was responding to.

Needless to say, I don't agree with your definition or your idea that it's solved.

Re: America is now one big bet on AI

#118

Post by bgwalter »

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #82
bgwalter wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

>Now they fuel the Bitcoin and "AI" bubbles, which are nonessential and non-tangibles. The current boom has basically had nothing to do with any government efforts. It is booming in spite of the current administration. This is all private industry.

The administration tried to sneak in a ban on "AI" regulation into the "Big Beautiful Bill", but fortunately failed last minute.

The administration facilitates "AI" exports:

https://www.iaps.ai/research/promoting-the-stack-trumps-ai-e...

It removes environmental regulations:

https://apnews.com/article/national-environmental-policy-act...

For the Nvidia bubble, it has recently lifted export regulations to China.

It facilitates meetings of "Open" "AI" with world leaders and almost certainly exerts pressure with tariffs etc. behind the scenes to force these deals.

It keeps talking up "AI", which helps the bubble.

Re: America is now one big bet on AI

#119

Post by seanmcdirmid »

dgfitz wrote: post #56
madamelic wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Additionally, to my knowledge, China is also doing significantly better on energy production and clean energy at that versus the US. In the US, we are terrified of nuclear and the administration is trying to make economically worse energy production the norm because they are stuck in the past. If there is an AI race, I have zero doubt that China WILL win simply because of energy production and the government's willin…

> If there is an AI race, I have zero doubt that China WILL win. A race to what? What does the winner get? What does the loser get? What does 'winning' even fucking mean? My statistical next token predictor is better than your statistical next token predictor?

Using AI in commercial applications to gain a strategic advantage over your competitors. China will use AI to do things that the USA will shudder at, they already have automated ports that are 10 times more efficient than ours, and we can’t even think about upgrading because our longshoremen unions are too strong.

Re: America is now one big bet on AI

#120

Post by rtkwe »

cs702 wrote: post #75
rtkwe wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Not necessarily. It depends on the second-order economic effects of these investments in AI. For example, companies that build new giant data centers for AI pay salaries to thousands of temporary construction workers who then spend some of it on retail goods and services. That additional spending by the workers is a second-order effect, and it shows up on GDP growth. There are higher-order effects too, but they are m…

Given how much of the investment goes into the stuff inside of the data center and then the power to run it both of which don't really go out to the US economy so much as the builders' wages I feel pretty safe in saying it's not the remaining 60% of GDP growth.
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