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After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

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Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#301

Post by CuriouslyC »

redwood wrote: post #281
CuriouslyC wrote: post #84

This is where we're headed: https://sibylline.dev/articles/2025-10-12-ai-is-too-big-to-f...

I feel like on the one hand you're exactly right that this is kind of like a cold war level investment... and it's not necessarily being pursued through a business return lens; something deeper and more visceral is driving it. However your conclusions are what throw me off.. you kind of have this Doom and Gloom mindset which may be fair but I don't really think it's related to this particular bubble.. in other words…

That would be my take under different circumstances as well, but there are two key differences in this situation:

1. The debt bomb. Not dealing with this could cause a great depression by itself. Having it go off at the same time as we're underwater on bad capex with a misaligned economy could produce something the likes of which we've never seen.

2. We have an authoritarian president that has effectively captured the entire government, and the window to prevent consolidation of power is closing rapidly. Worse, he's an ego driven, reckless, ham-fisted decision maker with a cabinet of spineless yes men.

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#302

Post by voidfunc »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #295
voidfunc wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ain't happening in 2026 or 2028. Democrats havent positioned anyone compelling and there positions are too flaky to capture a culture that is captivated by the idea every position is zero-sum.

Gavin Newsom has shown himself to be a savvy operator, I think he has a legitimate shot in 28 if there are free and fair elections. That caveat is pulling way too much weight here though.

While I'd support a Newsom run, I feel like he's never going to get strong support from the Progressive side of the party and they'll sink one of the few viable candidates.

Also thats 2028.. 2026 midterms look grim.

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#303

Post by grafmax »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #201
grafmax wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im not convinced the geopolitical rivalry between US and China is a given. To a large degree it’s been manufactured - Friday’s antics a case in point. The US indeed seems destined to fall behind due to decades of economic mismanagement under neoliberalism while China’s public investment has proved to be the wise choice. Yet this fact wounds the pride of many in the US, particularly its leaders, so it now lashes out i…

I think prior to Trump, Europe could have been mediator to a benevolent China. Now the hawks are ascendant in Beijing. Trump has shown that his ego pushes him to escalate to try and show others who the "big man" is, this will not end well with China, and I'm not sure he's wise enough to accept that. Do you really prefer brutal serfdom to the AI supremacy scenario? From where I sit, people have mixed (trending positiv…

I just don’t think the AI supremacy scenario is realistic. I think it ignores our current context and postulates a clean break, almost a kind of magical thinking to be frank. AI is likely to intensify current trends not suddenly subvert and reverse them. Palantir, deepfakes, LLM propaganda. The seeds are all here today. To think otherwise - that’s just not how human societies work, not history, none of it. AI is likely to continue to be weaponized, only more so as tech advances.

What I found persuasive was the argument that this bubble could be worse than others due to the perceived geopolitical stakes by US leadership, plausibly leading to mass serfdom as our society implodes, based on the argument that we already have a version of serfdom today. I found that astute.

I do NOT think that scenario is favorable - it just seems like the most likely future. I hold that we should view our situation with clear eyes so that we can make the best decision from where we stand.

Thinking through this, what does that mean for how we should face our present moment? Eventually people will throw off their chains; our leadership is so incompetently invested in class war that the working class is going to continue to be squeezed and squeezed - until it pops. It’s a pattern familiar in history. The question in my mind is not if but when. And the sooner we get our collective act together the less painful it’s going to be. There’s some really bad stuff waiting for us round the bend.

What should we do? The economy depends on us the serfs and soon-to-be serfs. It’s the workers who can take control of it and can shut it down with mass strikes. It’s only this in my view that can plausibly free us from our reckless leadership (which goes beyond the current administration) and the bleak future they are preparing for us.

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#304

Post by seanmcdirmid »

voidfunc wrote: post #302
CuriouslyC wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gavin Newsom has shown himself to be a savvy operator, I think he has a legitimate shot in 28 if there are free and fair elections. That caveat is pulling way too much weight here though.

While I'd support a Newsom run, I feel like he's never going to get strong support from the Progressive side of the party and they'll sink one of the few viable candidates. Also thats 2028.. 2026 midterms look grim.

The Democrats haven't run anyone but moderates since Bill Clinton, so I'm pretty sure that won't happen unless they do finally decide to run a progressive (which is still much less likely than running another moderate).

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#305

Post by cheschire »

firefoxd wrote: post #198

I wrote a similar article (not published yet), but my conclusion was "Free GPUs for everyone" or at least cheap ones. Right now H100 are very specialized for the AI pipeline, but so were GPUs before the AI boom. I expect we will find good use for them.

Is folding@home still a thing?

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#306

Post by dangus »

Belphemur wrote: post #179
CuriouslyC wrote: post #84

This is where we're headed: https://sibylline.dev/articles/2025-10-12-ai-is-too-big-to-f...

Quite an interesting read Basically saying we're in war time economy with a race to super intelligence. Whichever super power does it first has won the game. Seeing the last tariffs and what China done about the rare earth minerals (and also the deal the US made with Ukraine for said minerals), the article might have a point that the super power will cripple each other to be the first with the super intelligence. And…

This take is way too generous to the current US administration’s quality of long term planning.

Tariffs aren’t there to pay for a race to superintelligence, they’re a lever that the authoritarian is pulling because it’s one of the most powerful levers the president is allowed to pull. It’s a narcissist’s toy to feel important and immediately impactful (and an obvious vehicle for insider trading).

If the present administration was interested in paying for a superintelligence race they wouldn’t have signed a law that increases the budget deficit.

They also wouldn’t be fucking with the “really smart foreign people to private US university, permanent residence, and corporate US employment” pipeline if they were interested in the superintelligence race.

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#307

Post by wmf »

I think several of the assumptions are wrong.

GPUs will last much longer after the crash because there won't be any money available to replace them. You can either keep running the existing GPUs or throw them in the trash. The GPUs will keep running as long as they can generate enough revenue from inference to cover electricity. Tokens will become very cheap but free tokens might go away.

AI datacenters aren't that specialized. You can buy a 1 GW datacenter and put 300 MW of equipment in it and sell 2/3 of the gas generators. You'll have to buy some InRow units.

The AI stack isn't as proprietary as it sounds. GPU rental exists today and it's pretty interoperable. Ironically, Nvidia's moat has made their GPUs a de facto standard that is very well understood and supported by whatever software you want.

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#308

Post by southernplaces7 »

mikert89 wrote: post #131
dotnet00 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've done nothing but reuse the Sam Altman/Elon Musk playbook of making wild and extremely vague statements. Maybe say something concrete? What's a positive real world impact of LLMs where they aren't hideously expensive and error prone to the point of near uselessness? Something that isn't just the equivalent of a crypto-bro saying that their system for semi-regulated speculation (totally not a rugpull!) will end…

they speak in generalities because the models are profoundly general, a general learning system. below someone asked me to list the capabilities, its the wrong question to ask. its like asking what a baby can do

So to translate: You want concrete examples of capabilities for something billions are being spent on? What a Silly question! (hand waving about completely speculative future abilities "when they grow up")

The woo is laughable. A cryptobro could have pulled the same nonsense out of their ass about web 3.0

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#309

Post by mordymoop »

quesera wrote: post #70
rjh29 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who's going to pay to run those models? They are currently running at a huge loss.

Running the models is cheap. That will be worthwhile even if the bubble pops hard. Not for all of the silly stuff we do today, but for some of it. Creating new LLMs might be out of reach for all but very well-capitalized organizations with clear intentions, and governments. There might be a viable market for SLMs though. Why does my model need to know about the Boer wars to generate usable code?

Perhaps surprisingly considering the current stratospheric prices of GPUs, the performance-per-dollar of compute is still rising faster than exponentially. In a handful years it will be cheap to train something as powerful as the models that cost millions to train today. Algorithmic efficiencies also stack up an make it cheaper to build and serve older models even on the same hardware.

It’s underappreciated that we would already be in a pretty absurdly wild tech trajectory just due to compute hyperabundance even without AI.

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#310

Post by globalnode »

dangus wrote: post #306
Belphemur wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite an interesting read Basically saying we're in war time economy with a race to super intelligence. Whichever super power does it first has won the game. Seeing the last tariffs and what China done about the rare earth minerals (and also the deal the US made with Ukraine for said minerals), the article might have a point that the super power will cripple each other to be the first with the super intelligence. And…

This take is way too generous to the current US administration’s quality of long term planning. Tariffs aren’t there to pay for a race to superintelligence, they’re a lever that the authoritarian is pulling because it’s one of the most powerful levers the president is allowed to pull. It’s a narcissist’s toy to feel important and immediately impactful (and an obvious vehicle for insider trading). If the present admin…

i agree, the only thing theyre thinking about is how to hold onto power.
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