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Bank of England flags risk of 'sudden correction' in tech stocks inflated by AI

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Re: Bank of England flags risk of 'sudden correction' in tech stocks inflated by AI

#111

Post by frumper »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #61
alphazard wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> either increase taxes or reduce spending I see this sentiment a lot, they are not equivalent. The US must reduce spending, if it wants to protect the dollar. Tax increases may also help. The relationship between tax rates, GDP, government revenue, the market value of new US debt, and the value of the dollar, is complicated and depends on uncertain estimates and models of the economy. Increasing taxes can reduce GDP…

> Tax increases may also help. I don't live in a costal state, but when I do consulting work typically at charity rates alongside my standard full-time job, I have to pay 24% federal tax, 15.3% FICA, and 7.85% state tax. I am already taxed whenever I want to help anyone at 47.15% . That's before the required tax structures and consulting for doing all the invoicing legally. God himself only wanted 10%, so it seems a…

If you're at a 24% marginal rate then you're at least approaching the point you stop paying Social Security taxes. Sounds like you just need to work a little more to keep 12% more of your money. It's funny how making more money reduces your tax rate. You just don't make enough to benefit.

Re: Bank of England flags risk of 'sudden correction' in tech stocks inflated by AI

#112

Post by Jtsummers »

frumper wrote: post #111
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tax increases may also help. I don't live in a costal state, but when I do consulting work typically at charity rates alongside my standard full-time job, I have to pay 24% federal tax, 15.3% FICA, and 7.85% state tax. I am already taxed whenever I want to help anyone at 47.15% . That's before the required tax structures and consulting for doing all the invoicing legally. God himself only wanted 10%, so it seems a…

If you're at a 24% marginal rate then you're at least approaching the point you stop paying Social Security taxes. Sounds like you just need to work a little more to keep 12% more of your money. It's funny how making more money reduces your tax rate. You just don't make enough to benefit.

If they're married and paying 24% federal tax rate on any of their income, they almost certainly aren't paying any social security taxes on their consulting income. That would mean their adjusted gross income is in the $200-400k range for their full-time day job which exceeds the Social Security cap by a good margin, it's $176k.

They'd still have to pay for Medicare, but it knocks 12.4% off their estimated taxes for consulting.

If they're single, then the math is different. 24% for single people starts at just over $100k and runs to about $200k so they may have to pay those taxes. It's always frustrating when people whine about taxes but giving insufficient information to evaluate their complaint.

Re: Bank of England flags risk of 'sudden correction' in tech stocks inflated by AI

#113

Post by justlikereddit »

Pxtl wrote: post #66
whimsicalism wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we have only scratched the surface of what we can do with the existing technology. A much more present risk from stagnation IMO is that if we stagnate, it is almost certain that the value of the tech will not be able to be enclosed /captured by its creators.

Imho it will take off in animation/illustration as soon as Adobe (or some competitor) figures out how to make good tooling for artists . Not for idiot wantrepeneurs who want to dump fully-generated-slop onto Amazon, but so that a person can draw rough pencil sketches and storyboards and reference character sheets and get back proper illustrations. Basically, don't replace the penciler but replace the inker and the co…

There's a free addon for free Krita that did pretty much that when I tried it, last year.

The glaring issue with it back then was that unlike an LLM that can be understanding of what you try to explain and bit more consistent the diffusion models ability to read and understand your prompt wasn't really there yet, you're more shotgunning keywords and hope the seed lottery gives you something nice.

But recent image generation models are significantly better in stable output. Something like qwen image will care a lot more about your prompt and not entirely redraw the scene into something else just because you change the seed.

Meaning that the UI experiments already exist but the models are still a bit away from maturity.

On the other hand, when looking at how models are actually evolving I'm not entirely convinced we'll need particularly many classically trained artists in roles where they draw static images with some AI acceleration. I expect people to talk to an LLM interface that can take the dumbest of instructions and carefully adjust a picture, sound, music or an entire two hour movie. Where the artist would benefit more by knowing the terminology and the granular abilities of the system than by being able to hold a pencil.

The entertainment and media industry is worth trillions on an annual basis, if AI can eat a fraction of that in addition to some other work-roles it will easily be worth the current valuations.

Re: Bank of England flags risk of 'sudden correction' in tech stocks inflated by AI

#114

Post by an0malous »

lossolo wrote: post #75
an0malous wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to believe in AGI but the more AI has advanced the more I’ve come to realize that there’s no magic level of intelligence that can cure cancer and figure out warp drives. You need data, which requires experimentation, which requires labor and resources of which there is a finite supply. If you had AGI tomorrow and asked it to cure cancer, it would just ask for more experimental data and resources. Isn’t that wh…

Generally, I agree, but it also depends on perspective. Intelligence exists on many levels and manifests differently across species. From a monkey's standpoint, if they were capable of such reflection they might perceive themselves as the most capable creatures in their environment. Yet, humans possess cognitive abilities that go far beyond that, abstract reasoning, cumulative culture, large scale cooperation etc A c…

I think I see what you’re getting at, but the difference between apes and humans isn’t that we can reason in 3D. If someone could actually articulate the intellectual breakthrough that makes humans smarter than apes, then maybe I would accept there’s some intellectual ability AI could achieve that we don’t have, but I don’t see how it could be higher dimensional reasoning.

Re: Bank of England flags risk of 'sudden correction' in tech stocks inflated by AI

#115

Post by breuleux »

kragen wrote: post #81
an0malous wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to believe in AGI but the more AI has advanced the more I’ve come to realize that there’s no magic level of intelligence that can cure cancer and figure out warp drives. You need data, which requires experimentation, which requires labor and resources of which there is a finite supply. If you had AGI tomorrow and asked it to cure cancer, it would just ask for more experimental data and resources. Isn’t that wh…

Eliezer’s short story “That Alien Message” providing a convincing argument that humans are cognitively limited, not data-limited, through the device of a fictional world where people think faster: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5wMcKNAwB6X4mp9og/that-alien... > Yes. There is. The theoretical limit is that every time you see 1 additional bit, it cannot be expected to eliminate more than half of the remaining hypothes…

Regarding "Alien Message", I don't find that story particularly convincing. I think it's muddled and contrived.

The basic issue is that we have to deduce stuff about the world we live in, using resources from the world we live in. In the story, the data bandwidth is contrived to be insanely smaller than the compute bandwidth, but that's not realistic. In reality, we are surrounded by chaotic physical systems that operate on raw hardware. They are, in fact, quite fast, and probably impossible to simulate efficiently. For instance, we can obviously never build a computer that can simulate the behavior of its own circuitry, using said circuitry, faster than it operates. But I think there's a lot of physical systems that are just like that.

Being data-limited means that we get data slower than we can analyze and process it. It is certainly possible to improve our ability to analyze data, but I don't think we can assume that the best physically realizable intelligence would overcome data limitation, nor that it would be cost-effective in the first place, compared to simply gathering more data and experimenting more.

Re: Bank of England flags risk of 'sudden correction' in tech stocks inflated by AI

#116

Post by bryanlarsen »

justlikereddit wrote: post #101
whimsicalism wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're talking about your marginal rate and we simply are far to the left on the laffer curve, raising taxes will raise revenue. I'm not unsympathetic, my marginal is close to the same - but generally I think people's claims that they will stop working are generally more bark than bite and the evidence largely backs that up. If you don't want a tax-based solution, I do hope you are agitating for SS and medicare cuts.

>I think people's claims that they will stop working are generally more bark than bite They stop paying taxes and work off the books instead but you don't announce that publicly for obvious reasons. The incentive to do this increases with tax pressure. The willingness of people to pay for tax-free work equally increases because you'll pay less. There's also an increasing asymmetry of what the government gains from a…

The type of people who will work off book to avoid 50% taxes will generally also work off book to avoid 25% taxes, so increasing the tax rate does not have a large effect on the hidden economy ratio.

Re: Bank of England flags risk of 'sudden correction' in tech stocks inflated by AI

#117

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #97
disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's no longer the early 20th, there are other competitive & well-run jurisdictions for creditors to dump their money in if they lose faith in the US. Where, pray tell are these competitive and well-run jurisdictions? China has capital controls so that probably won't work. The EU might work if they ever get their sh*t together and centralise their bonds and markets, otherwise no. Like, I too believe that the US is…

Switzerland?

If you avoid their banks, then maybe.

Still not big enough though. I feel like eurobonds or remnibi bonds are the only options, but both don't work for various reasons.

Re: Bank of England flags risk of 'sudden correction' in tech stocks inflated by AI

#119

Post by frumper »

Jtsummers wrote: post #112
frumper wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're at a 24% marginal rate then you're at least approaching the point you stop paying Social Security taxes. Sounds like you just need to work a little more to keep 12% more of your money. It's funny how making more money reduces your tax rate. You just don't make enough to benefit.

If they're married and paying 24% federal tax rate on any of their income, they almost certainly aren't paying any social security taxes on their consulting income. That would mean their adjusted gross income is in the $200-400k range for their full-time day job which exceeds the Social Security cap by a good margin, it's $176k. They'd still have to pay for Medicare, but it knocks 12.4% off their estimated taxes for…

Also, FICA cap goes off gross and a 24% rate is based off AGI, just to muddle the numbers even more.

Re: Bank of England flags risk of 'sudden correction' in tech stocks inflated by AI

#120

Post by marcosdumay »

Theodores wrote: post #77
whimsicalism wrote: post #14

AI is a risk. The thing we know is going to bite us in the butt is our continued massive sovereign debt burden and lack of any political will whatsoever to either increase taxes or reduce spending. The dollar is not going to do well this century and creditors confidence is already starting to decline. In fact, the further we go into debt - the more we are implicitly betting our society on an AI hail mary.

Approximately half the S&P500 is in the Magnificent Seven. It doesn't matter what they sell, there is just too much money there. Calling this situation an 'AI risk' is disingenuous, or at best blinkered. Everyone outside of the American empire knows that the gig is up. When Uncle Sam has his money printing press on full blast, the American people don't feel the full effect, but everyone in the global majority, where…

> It was the 2022 sanctions on Russia that made the BRICS alliance take note.

IMO, it was the barriers imposed on the trade of oil, mostly from Iran and Syria. Not really Russia, because they adapted quickly. The countries on the group's name all had alternatives at that time.

Either way, the BRICS trading system wasn't a serious thing until this year. And what really kicked it out was Trump.

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