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The dead economy theory

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Re: The dead economy theory

#231

Post by fragmede »

ekidd wrote: post #127
alex_young wrote: post #53

Why is this time different? Won't super power AI tools allow companies to do more with the same number of people? Don't you think a smarter way to run a business is to capture more of the market if you have the resources to do so? If company A decides they just want the same slice of the market they have now and can fire half of their employees and pocket $$$, can't company B hire the same workers and compete harder…

> Why is this time different? If it was just programming being automated, then whatever. Lots of professions have been automated and society adapts. The underlying worry here is that current AI provides a partial automation of intelligence. The endgame for the investors and the corporations using AI is complete automation of intelligence (and manual labor, too). They want a $25,000 robot that works around the clock,…

> They want a $25,000 robot that works around the clock

Don't you? For the cost of less than a new car, I can have a live-in butler/maid? I'd sell my car and downgrade to afford one at $25k if it actually worked. I can't afford to and don't want to hire a human to live in my house and do all my chores for me, 24/7, plus the overhead and the headache and liability, but a robot for $25k is pretty tempting. Never have to fold laundry or the dishes again? Or remember that it's Tuesday and I was supposed to take out the trash, right when I'm in bed?

It's an iterated prisoner's dilemma and everyone's vocally defecting.

Re: The dead economy theory

#232

Post by ecommerceguy »

My 2 cents is in 3 years the inference products will be a commodity, extremely competitive with diminishing returns, seeing that the open weight models are getting so good and nearing par with sota.

I feel 90% of sota for 10% of cost / compute is good enough for 80% of workloads.

Question is, do we need all of this hardware? Are build outs going to get canceled. 4300 new data centers seems excessive. I personally haven't experienced any service disruptions...

Does Microsoft still have 1 million gpu's in storage? Is that what I heard earlier this year?

Re: The dead economy theory

#233

Post by PaulHoule »

alex_young wrote: post #130
dleslie wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Won't super power AI tools allow companies to do more with the same number of people? Don't you think a smarter way to run a business is to capture more of the market if you have the resources to do so? It is possible to have excess productivity. AI allows an existing labour pool to rapidly surpass necessary productivity levels for the existing demand. IE, let's say I live in a small town and I open a machine shop.…

The small town constraint is a bit artificial to this problem isn't it? If you operate a machine shop in a large urban area, have competitors, and access to much improved low cost tooling, would you: a) lay off a bunch of workers, or b) lower your prices and capture more orders? Same thing with accounting firms or marketers or business consultants.

The assumption that (b) happens is known as Say's Law

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Say's_law

I can say that people are loathe to do it for various reasons.

Re: The dead economy theory

#234

Post by logicchains »

rootusrootus wrote: post #226

I know this isn't exactly related, so maybe a low value comment, but it itches in my mind. Years ago I talked with a recruiter at Facebook and they bragged about how many floors of developers they had working on Messenger in just one location (Seattle). What on earth do you do with that many devs on a project like Messenger? I mean, really? I feel like in a way, AI just adds to that weird situation of overcapacity. M…

>What on earth do you do with that many devs on a project like Messenger

I thought the point was to minimize the amount of talented devs who instead try to do their own startups that could compete with Messenger, by hiring them and paying them well so they've got no appetite to try their own thing.

Re: The dead economy theory

#235

Post by the_af »

alex_young wrote: post #53

Why is this time different? Won't super power AI tools allow companies to do more with the same number of people? Don't you think a smarter way to run a business is to capture more of the market if you have the resources to do so? If company A decides they just want the same slice of the market they have now and can fire half of their employees and pocket $$$, can't company B hire the same workers and compete harder…

> Why is this time different?

I mean, this is a very long article about why, this time, it's qualitatively different...

Re: The dead economy theory

#236

Post by minimal_action »

I have led AI integration in a university faculty. From this experience I can conclude that good work is only produced when humans are in the loop. It's not a technical barrier, but a categorical one. "Good" work is defined by humans and our judgment is irrational but rooted in our evolutionary survival needs. In other words, AI don't have human motivation by definition. Without human in the loop, the top most motivation is never fully aligned with us, today, as humans. This removes the premise at the basis of this post.

Re: The dead economy theory

#237

Post by FuriouslyAdrift »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #134
10xDev wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does every business scale that way? Sure video games for example have only required more people and resources to develop games as the ability to create larger scale games have increased. But does that really apply to accounting? Not a rhetorical question.

Does it need to? 99% of people used to work on farms. Now they don't. Maybe ~99% of engineers won't write code in the future. They'll do some other engineering like thing... Maybe ~99% of accountant type people won't do accounting things. They'll do some other financial thing... We haven't even seen a rounding error in total unemployment directly attributed to AI, despite people saying the sky fell 24 months ago, and…

The world average is 25% work on farms. In 24 countries the percentage is greater than 50%.

It's still over 43% in India, 20% in China, 2.5% in lots of Europe.

Re: The dead economy theory

#238

Post by analog31 »

rootusrootus wrote: post #226

I know this isn't exactly related, so maybe a low value comment, but it itches in my mind. Years ago I talked with a recruiter at Facebook and they bragged about how many floors of developers they had working on Messenger in just one location (Seattle). What on earth do you do with that many devs on a project like Messenger? I mean, really? I feel like in a way, AI just adds to that weird situation of overcapacity. M…

If it's any consolation, this is also a mystery to non developers like me. And developers likewise wonder why a business needs so many managers and what they do all day.

Re: The dead economy theory

#239

Post by [deleted] »

ekidd wrote: post #127
alex_young wrote: post #53

Why is this time different? Won't super power AI tools allow companies to do more with the same number of people? Don't you think a smarter way to run a business is to capture more of the market if you have the resources to do so? If company A decides they just want the same slice of the market they have now and can fire half of their employees and pocket $$$, can't company B hire the same workers and compete harder…

> Why is this time different? If it was just programming being automated, then whatever. Lots of professions have been automated and society adapts. The underlying worry here is that current AI provides a partial automation of intelligence. The endgame for the investors and the corporations using AI is complete automation of intelligence (and manual labor, too). They want a $25,000 robot that works around the clock,…

[deleted]

Re: The dead economy theory

#240

Post by logicchains »

brightball wrote: post #215
daft_pink wrote: post #163

I think when these companies IPO later this year, we’re going to see the reality of the PNL numbers and whether they are sustainable etc as all the financials will become public. Rumor mill suggests that Anthropic might be profitable (but at what magnitude), OpenAI is not profitable, Google is mostly vertically integrated and has a low cost structure as they are have pre-existing data center buildouts, their own sili…

Google really needs to work on the user experience. The Google Cloud based approach to Gemini for coding is so clunky.

The current Gemini experience is "The Google Experience"; brilliant engineering underneath, disdain for customers on top.
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