Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars • Hacker News Board

Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#251

Post by bawana » Wed, Jul 16, 2025, 12:40 AM UTC

The bottom line is that scaling requires money and the only way to get that in the private sector is to lure those with money with the temptation they can multiply their wealth.

Things could have been different in a world before financial engineers bankrupted the US (the crises of enron, salomon bros, 2008 mortgage debacle all added hundreds of billions to us debt as the govt bought the ‘too big to fail’ kool-aid and bailed out wall street by indenturing main street). Now 1/4 of our budget is simply interest payment on this debt. There is no room for govt spending on a moonshot like AI.

This environment in 1960 would have killed Kennedy’s inspirational moonshot of going to the moon while it was still an idea in his head in his post coital bliss with Marilyn at his side.

Today our govt needs money just like all the other scrooge-infected players in the tower of debt that capitalism has built.

Ironically it seems china has a better chance now. It seems its release of deep seek and the full set of parameters is giving it a veneer of altruistic benevolence that is slightly more believable than what we see here in the west. China may win simply on thermodynamic grounds. Training and research in DL consumes terawatt hours and hundreds of thousands of chips. Not only are the US models on older architectures (10-100x more energy inefficient) but the ‘competition’ of multiple players in the US multiplies the energy requirements.

Would govt oversight have been a good thing? Imagine if General Motors, westinghouse, bell labs, and ford competed in 1940 each with their own manhattan project to develop nuclear weapons ? Would the proliferation of nuclear have resulted in human extinction by now?

Will AI’s contribution to global warming be just as toxic global thermonuclear war?

Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#252

Post by fc417fc802 » Wed, Jul 16, 2025, 4:59 AM UTC

joshmarlow wrote: post #247

dragonwriter wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My point is that the assets themselves mean less when the average person can use AI to design anything I’m not sure which assets you think that devalues; it certainly increases the value of the assets needed to run AI, and also of the assets needed to realize the things that people can design with AI. > In a world where production is cheap, the money required to produce has relative less value. In a world where you…

To clarify, I'm focusing on the costs of ramping up a startup. Currently VC has a great deal of power because up-front investment is required to hire staff and other expenses until the startup can become cash-flow positive. When a lone individual can start a venture using AI then the payroll costs go down. The investment requirements go down. Yes, automation means that people with assets don't have to pay other peopl…

I agree that lower up front expenses means less need for investment. I'll also note that it opens up the playing field to more people which increases competition. So it might or might not make your life easier.

However the technology that is expected to reduce labor requirements (and thus expenses) has an uncertain endpoint. It seems plausible that at some point a threshold could be crossed beyond which the human labor that you are able to add on top becomes essentially irrelevant. It is this second occurrence, or rather how society might react to it, that should be cause for at least some concern.

Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#253

Post by ehnto » Thu, Jul 17, 2025, 10:12 AM UTC

goopypoop wrote: post #250

ehnto wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is no coincidence that the most popular procedurally generated games feature highly systemic gameplay. These are systems sandboxes, places for players to explore a world and build their own stories. There are not many examples of popular games where the story is heavily procedural, and I think the reason is obvious. Players notice the pattern very quickly and get bored. Stories are entertainment and are meant to e…

What's worth active engagement that isn't worth active design? If a job's worth doing, it's worth doing, right? Proc gen makes a dose of art go further by diluting it. Good or bad, it means less of the artist in each bite. Where proc gen is strictly necessary i.e. infinite variation, the focus of the artist will be almost absent on average. If gameplay encourages endless passive consumption, the gamer's focus will dw…

If a game relies on proc gen to provide the materials necessary for someone to be creative and make their own story, build their own systems, solve their own problems etc, that is going beyond the cranial engagement of your average couch-sitting TV session.

I don't disagree with some of your points, but proc gen is a super broad term that encompasses a lot of approaches to art and development. I don't think you can so simply say "proc gen makes games bad".

As well, games are to taste, Minecraft is mostly proc gen, but also one of the most creative and engaging games someone could be playing even to date. Someone might prefer delicately written beautifully drawn story rich games instead, but it would be incorrect to suggest the person who just designed and executed a working machine inside Minecraft or some similar creative endeavour was zombie of consumption by comparison.

Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#254

Post by xandrius » Fri, Jul 18, 2025, 11:14 AM UTC

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…

Off-topic but I'd totally read a blog from you where you use this pent-up bitterness against the current system to present bs nobody really talks about. It's quite refreshing.

Just for your information.

Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#255

Post by xandrius » Fri, Jul 18, 2025, 11:28 AM UTC

mlsu wrote: post #24

The full bodied palate of this AI market mirrors the sharp nose of 2023 AI doomerism. The argument goes: if AI is going to destroy humanity, even if that is a 0.001% chance, we should all totally re-wire society to prevent that from happening, because the _potential_ risk is so huge. Same goes with these AI companies. What they are shooting for, is to replace white collar workers completely. Every single white collar…

We are not really doing anything about climate change which has maybe 0.001% of NOT happening, do you think we would do anything for the reverse? It was and it is always going to be business as usual.

Re: Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

#256

Post by lanstin » Tue, Jul 22, 2025, 1:25 AM UTC

dmbche wrote: post #151

_DeadFred_ wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The regulation is what makes it worth while for people to invent/write. Patents/copyrights have been a net benefit for society with a smaller negative downside.

Can you point to something that quantifies the positives vs the negatives? I have a hard time arguing that it's a net positive.

The situation has changed quite a lot with digitalization. When copyright was developed, giving up the right to copy something had low cost - you needed to have a printing press. Now you can’t even read a book without making multiple copies, so the cost of giving up copy right is a lot higher. The benefits to society of securing an exclusive right to control copies is possibly unchanged, or perhaps less as the writings can no longer be retelling of common stories (e.g. Disney movies from Grimm brothers; Shakespeare mixing popular stories into brilliant plays). I suspect making the timelines of copy right protection be shorter (as culture speeds up) rather than longer as we have done, due to the weirdly long lifetime of corporations, would fix most of the issues. Invention would be rewarded without the creation of IP monopolies and the restriction of mixing existing stuff as a creative method, and the loss of the right to copy stuff you have paid for all lessened.