281–290 of 296 posts
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maybe he's referring to people doing research on their own variant of disease through LLMs to find cures
That’s fine and dandy but it won’t do anything for most people with serious health problems.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47556729 (gitlab founder leveraging AI tools to find cure for his rare cancer)
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GDP adjustments are warranted, but it is more stark than both the estimates suggest. The megaprojects of the previous generations all had decades long depreciation schedules. Many 50-100+ year old railways, bridges, tunnels or dams and other utilities are still in active use with only minimal maintenance Amortized Y-o-Y the current spends would dwarf everything at the reported depreciation schedule of 6(!) years for…
The side effects of spending funds on these mega projects is also something to consider. NASA spending has created a huge pile of technologies that we use day to day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spin-off_technologies .
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It's not clear that Waymo is an improvement over existing infrastructure so much as ensuring that fewer humans benefit from each car ride (which was already pathetically low).
It’s an improvement over spending 1b/mi building public transit in HCOL car dependent areas
Further evidence that the US, for whatever reason, lacks basic ability to rationally use resources.
It's the richest large country by miles.
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It's the richest large country by miles.
That doesn't imply we know what to do with it. by all evidence we are one of the worst countries on earth at rationally distributing resources
I think all misgivings about AI would go away fast, if it solved one important problem for humanity. Carbon nanotubes for space elevators, sustainable nuclear fusion, or something in that ilk.
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I’m not sure tax depreciation rates are the best measure here. Those GPUs will be used for much longer than 6 years, and the returns from the businesses will be an order of magnitude longer.
> Those GPUs will be used for much longer than 6 years Will it be worth the cost of electricity to run them if the flops/watt of newer chips is lower?
If every latest-gen is booked solid and there is still unmet demand, why would you decommission?
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What an interesting paper you found! Home ownership stats in contemporary times are quite misleading because of debt. Most home owners now are still paying rent in the form of a mortgage to a bank. In the 50s most home owners genuinely owned their homes 'free and clear'. The exact rate was 56% in the 1951 per your paper (which was a local low), and now it's at 40% which is a local high. And the contemporary demograph…
I sometimes feel that the facts are all out there, but half the people pick one half the facts as causal and the other half pick the other half. Are home prices rising because people have fewer kids (and therefore more to spend on housing) or are people having fewer kids because house prices are rising (and therefore less to spend on kids)? I suspect that it's a complex mixture of all possibilities, and you can only…
I think my little hypothesis here works to cleanly explain fertility crises much better than any other alternative. For instance the typical income:fertility hypothesis or education:fertility hypothesis both have endless glaring counter-examples like Thailand where the society is relatively poor with relatively low education, yet has a fertility rate now lower than even Japan.
It also explains the paradox of upper middle class couples claiming that they aren't having children because they don't have enough money, while lower income couples continue to have relatively healthy fertility rates, and it's for the same reason that extremely high income couples have relatively healthy fertility rates. Extremes of high and low income largely exclude one from materialism simply because there's no carrot to chase, whether because you can have it at any time you want, or simply because it's so far away that there's no hope of ever getting closer to it.
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You have to agree that it's totally possible that none of those things you are envisioning getting built out actually end up working as products, right? AI (LLM) progress would stop, and then everything people try to do with those last and most capable models would end up uninteresting or at least temporary. That's the world I'm calling a "dead end". No matter how unlikely you think that is, you have to agree that it…
> then everything people try to do with those last and most capable models would end up uninteresting I believe that some of my made up examples won’t end up getting built, but my point is that there is _so much_ low hanging fruit like this. Of course, anything is _possible_, but let’s talk likelihood. In my forecast the possible worlds where progress stops and then the existing models don’t end up making anything in…
I find it interesting that you chose the shopping list and fridge examples, because my view on the whole LLM hype is that 99% of it is a solution looking for a problem, and shopping and the fridge are historically such a commonly advertised area for technologies desparately looking for an actual use case. I don't think fridge content management and shopping plans are actual pain points in most people's lives. It's not something people would see a benefit in if they didn't have to do it manually. And it's an area with a very low tolerance for the systemic unreliability. The guy needed eggs to bake his cake, but the AI got him eggos instead -- et voilà, another person who thinks this whole "smart" technology is shit and won't deal with it anymore.
And so it goes with most AI use cases I've seen so far. In my view the only thing they're good at is fuzzy search. Coding agents are helpful, but in the end, their secret sauce it just that: fuzzy search.
Can fuzzy search be helpful? Yes, even very helpful! "Bigger than the Internet" helpful? I think not.