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Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

blog.johnluttig.com

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Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#191

Post by Konnstann »

nradov wrote: post #187
aziaziazi wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why people here brandish Communism when someone critics Capitalism? It’s like we’re still in the coldwar. Those two views have many sub-categories and there’s others in-between and on the sides. Just a few in the last decades: - socio-democratic countries are the norm in Europe, namely Norway, Denmark and Sweden. - Ordoliberalism: Germany, Switzerland - cooperative economics: Japan, Spain - market socialism: China, h…

What a weird comment, so disconnected from reality. Norway is fully capitalist with income inequality similar to the USA. China, despite being nominally run by communists, is actually a fascist dictatorship. And "Ubuntu" isn't a real thing: South Africa is a failed state run by kleptocrats who can't even keep the lights on.

The income inequality in Norway is roughly half that of the US, and the quality of life of the bottom income bracket is much higher there, due to social policies. Why lie about things that can easily be looked up?

Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#192

Post by discreteevent »

adventured wrote: post #161
emsign wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is about LLMs because it's the trillions being sunk into this bubble instead of more important issues like climate crisis and a pressing need to address the transformation of the energy sector or tackling the wealth inequality gap. These are all causing real world osues that are much bigger than beating (or rather faking to beat) some LLM benchmarks to impress investor.

What bubble? If anything it's 10x too small for the value it'll provide over the next century. The same exact premise was proclaimed about the Internet circa 1999-2003 (boom and bust). Then the entire global economy and nearly all electronic communication was rebuilt on top of the Internet. For the coming century AI is more important than the Internet.

> the value it'll provide over the next century.

The parent mentioned inequality and energy transition. But LLMs seem to be about crud apps and influence campaigns.

There's more to value than just quantity. Quantity of what?

Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#193

Post by bix6 »

nradov wrote: post #184
SquirrelOnFire wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speed of development of something important isn't necessarily good. Humans are bad at absorbing a lot of change at once and it takes time to recognize and mitigate second-order effects. There's plenty of benefit to the systems that disruptors operate within (society) to not moving as fast as possible... of course since our economic systems don't factor in externalities, we've instead turned all of society into a comm…

People said the same thing about the printing press. When you look across human history it's tough to make a moral case that slowing down technology development was ever a net positive. We can't reliably predict or prevent the problems anyway and it's pointless to even try. Just move forward and deal with the actual problems (which are usually different from the expected problems) as they arise.

Slowing oil would've been a net positive given how unsustainable it is and all the negative externalities it forces onto society.

Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#194

Post by bix6 »

almosthere wrote: post #188
bix6 wrote: post #11

“The AI capital influx means that mega-projects no longer seem outlandishly expensive. This is good for the world!” Is it? This whole piece just reads of mega funds and giga corps throwing ridiculous cash for pay to win. Nothing new there. We can’t train more people? I didn’t know Universities were suddenly producing waaaay less talent and that intelligence fell off a cliff. Things have gone parabolic! It’s giga mega…

if you're targetting $200M, then I guess each round is to hire one or two engineers for one year lol I'm curious if you're one of these AI engineers getting 100m, do you quibble over the health insurance? I mean at that point you can fully fund any operation you need and whatever long term care you need for 50 years easily.

"Yes sorry I'm turning down your $100M because I need 2 parking spots for my sidecar" :p

Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#195

Post by bix6 »

pj_mukh wrote: post #22
bix6 wrote: post #11

“The AI capital influx means that mega-projects no longer seem outlandishly expensive. This is good for the world!” Is it? This whole piece just reads of mega funds and giga corps throwing ridiculous cash for pay to win. Nothing new there. We can’t train more people? I didn’t know Universities were suddenly producing waaaay less talent and that intelligence fell off a cliff. Things have gone parabolic! It’s giga mega…

I think the author should've clarified that this is purely a conversation about the platform plays. There will be 100's of thousands of companies on the application layer, and mini-platform plays that will have your run-of-the-mill new grad or 1x engineer. Everything else is just executives doing a bit of dance for their investors ala "We won't need employees anymore!"

O great so just the most important companies that are inherently monopolistic gate keepers. It's worked out so well with all these current platforms totally not restricting access and abusing everyone else with rent seeking and other anti competitive behaviors.

Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#196

Post by bix6 »

anovikov wrote: post #16
bix6 wrote: post #11

“The AI capital influx means that mega-projects no longer seem outlandishly expensive. This is good for the world!” Is it? This whole piece just reads of mega funds and giga corps throwing ridiculous cash for pay to win. Nothing new there. We can’t train more people? I didn’t know Universities were suddenly producing waaaay less talent and that intelligence fell off a cliff. Things have gone parabolic! It’s giga mega…

Ironically, there's no M2 expansion going on since Covid days and M2 to GDP is back to what it was pre-Covid and overall didn't even increase much at all even since GFC. It's only 1.5x of what it was at the bottom in 1997 when cost of capital was much higher than today. I think this concern is misplaced.

Yeah I just threw out M2 because it's easily understood / harped on but it's certainly much more complicated than that.

Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#197

Post by bix6 »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #182
bix6 wrote: post #11

“The AI capital influx means that mega-projects no longer seem outlandishly expensive. This is good for the world!” Is it? This whole piece just reads of mega funds and giga corps throwing ridiculous cash for pay to win. Nothing new there. We can’t train more people? I didn’t know Universities were suddenly producing waaaay less talent and that intelligence fell off a cliff. Things have gone parabolic! It’s giga mega…

Fwiw universities are producing less talent. They have been getting hammered with budget shortfalls thanks to Trump cutting research funding and this manifests into programs accepting fewer students and professors being able to fund fewer students.

Sure but that's new as of a few months. The university I went to still accepts the same number of students per year as it has for many years. Those numbers don't change much without significant land / program expansion which is certainly being cut now.

Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#198

Post by bix6 »

systemvoltage wrote: post #30
bix6 wrote: post #11

“The AI capital influx means that mega-projects no longer seem outlandishly expensive. This is good for the world!” Is it? This whole piece just reads of mega funds and giga corps throwing ridiculous cash for pay to win. Nothing new there. We can’t train more people? I didn’t know Universities were suddenly producing waaaay less talent and that intelligence fell off a cliff. Things have gone parabolic! It’s giga mega…

[flagged]

Man it's hard to read stuff like this on the internet. When has wealth concentration ever been a good thing? Wealth is power and power leads to abuse almost universally.

Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#199

Post by bix6 »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #117
graeme wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We can’t train more people? I didn’t know Universities were suddenly producing waaaay less talent and that intelligence fell off a cliff. University enrolment is actually set to sharply decline. It's called the Demographic Cliff: https://www.highereddive.com/news/demographic-cliff-colleges...

Off topic, but: Supply and demand says that, if university enrollment drops sharply, the price of a university education should go down. That sounds like good news to me.

Except it won't because a degree is a gate and people will pay whatever is demanded of them for it. Numbers go up never down.

Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#200

Post by SJC_Hacker »

thedevilslawyer wrote: post #135
Quarrelsome wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

however they do result in flows of capitals feeding into otherwise unfundable enterprise like R&D; science and engineering, or culture; writing, music, art. Where's the ROI if you invest millions into R&D and your competitor invests $0 and can then just reproduce your works with their logo ontop of yours? To sack off IP and copyright would significantly narrow innovation and result in many artists, scientists and eng…

We can get rid of copyright, patents, trademarks and only have a new right called branding - it allows you to name the thing you invented/created. In the new world that's incentive for enough people to create. Let knowledge rein free.. bellowing through the lands.

Trademarks are branding
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