Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

America is now one big bet on AI

ft.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 193 posts

Re: America is now one big bet on AI

#181

Post by missedthecue »

GOD_Over_Djinn wrote: post #174
missedthecue wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like I am living in another reality when I hear about all these "studies" confirming LLMs have no value and how no one uses them. I am using LLMs all day. I have more ideas about how to use them than I have time to build out.

> I have more ideas about how to use them than I have time to build out. Can’t you just use your AI-supercharged productivity to build them? What’s the bottleneck here?

My day job and then family life consumes a lot of my time, but in 2025 so far I have shipped 8 personal tools and side-projects from zero, which is a record for me.(not to mention a lot of smaller stuff like custom browser extensions). That probably would have been 1 maybe 2 in a world without AI.

Re: America is now one big bet on AI

#182

Post by seanmcdirmid »

dgfitz wrote: post #159
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As long as you realize a strong Chinese dollar is the worst thing that could happen to China right now, and as long as we just excuse away the whole “LLMs make more money than they cost” (which they absolutely do not) sure thing.

Strong Chinese yuan isn’t that much of a concern, only 15% of the economy is exports.

Re: America is now one big bet on AI

#183

Post by seanmcdirmid »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #148
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I rode a few in SF and can’t wait for them to come to Seattle. They don’t use actual human remote drivers, and the support person I spoke to when I had an issue had a Filipino accent, so I’m not sure they were even in the usa (although that totally could have been California also). I don’t think they wound need that many people anyways to do live support. Waymo is definitely being cautious, but the cities they move i…

They say they don't have drivers, but they do admit to having actual people that solve live issues that the car cannot understand, which seems like a semantic difference to me. If its one support person per 1k cars, its probably a non issue, if its one per 5 cars then its a totally different problem. In any case, the "can it make money" question is still unanswered (at least according to Waymo as of March). https://w…

If those faults are limited to 1 5 minute session every 20 or so rides, then it isn’t a big deal to cover them.

Re: America is now one big bet on AI

#184

Post by nonethewiser »

GOD_Over_Djinn wrote: post #174
missedthecue wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like I am living in another reality when I hear about all these "studies" confirming LLMs have no value and how no one uses them. I am using LLMs all day. I have more ideas about how to use them than I have time to build out.

> I have more ideas about how to use them than I have time to build out. Can’t you just use your AI-supercharged productivity to build them? What’s the bottleneck here?

Couldn't they be useful but not necessarily so powerful that he could do that?

Re: America is now one big bet on AI

#185

Post by GOD_Over_Djinn »

gooob wrote: post #162
etblg wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the idea is to use AI to build super productive farms and greenhouses How? What are the mechanisms in which AI will lead to farms and greenhouses being more productive? How will AI improve the existing automation that already exists for the farming sector, and has existed for a hundred years?

fully automated with robots. the AI designs thousands of experiments and deploys them at scale. idk, i'm not an agriculture expert. it was just one example. what other possibilities are there? electronics recycling, disassembling old computers to get the raw materials into a form that can be used again. we'll need programs to automate the production and testing and analysis of the robots that will recycle the compone…

> idk, i'm not an agriculture expert.

That much is obvious. The fact that you’re straining so hard to come up with these bongcloud “ideas” should clue you in that maybe this isn’t the revolutionary tech that the suits are selling it as

Re: America is now one big bet on AI

#186

Post by wing-_-nuts »

GOD_Over_Djinn wrote: post #175
wing-_-nuts wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 current boom has basically had nothing to do with any government efforts. You must have missed the federal governments 500B “stargate” project

Give me a source that show's taxpayer funds are being used for that, cause all I see is private investment and vague promises of 'future partnership'

Re: America is now one big bet on AI

#187

Post by wing-_-nuts »

diffeomorphism wrote: post #146
wing-_-nuts wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That 40% investment used to be sitting in giant cash slushfunds on company balance sheets. This isn't government investment. It would have never been spent on 'infrastructure'. On the upside, even if AI is a bubble and implodes spectacularly we're going to have metric tons of compute available for climate models, drug discovery and anything else that requires a super computer to model.

Will we? The hardware you want for AI and the hardware you want for super computing seem to have different priorities, e.g. concerning floating point precision.

compute is compute, yes. Maybe some older models might have to be rewritten to take advantage of a gpu farm's parallel processing capabilities, but humanity will ultimately benefit if the current AI boom fizzles

Re: America is now one big bet on AI

#189

Post by tylerchilds »

usrnm wrote: post #163
tylerchilds wrote: post #5

My disaster recovery plan is circus. Call me if you have an act. Book us if you need to rebuild community.

You're literally going to compete with the whole United States government, and you call this a recovery plan?

Yeah, circuses are how the world never ends.

I’m not competing with the government, but providing a complimentary service to any.

Re: America is now one big bet on AI

#190

Post by marmarama »

zzzeek wrote: post #96
DebtDeflation wrote: post #77

We're in this weird situation where: 1) the average American is heavily dependent on equities in their 401k for retirement, 2) so the stock market has to go up, 3) but the stock market is already at record valuations and it's difficult to see how forecasted growth levels justify the current valuation let alone an increased valuation, 4) without revenue growth, the only way for companies to sustain EPS growth is massi…

> That leaves us with only 2 possibilities - AI either replaces a significant part of the workforce or it does not. If it does not, the bubble bursts and the economy crashes. If it does, the economy still crashes because consumer spending is 70% of GDP and if the majority of the population becomes unemployed close, but you see, part of the plan is also that immigration is basically shut off. so the majority of the po…

> the majority of the population laid off from their office jobs will have plenty of work to do in the fields and food processing plants if they want to eat.

Indeed. The destination is agricultural serfdom, with current billionaires or their descendants as Lords of the manor.

Post reply on HN