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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?

#401

Post by tim333 »

alganet wrote: post #299
tim333 wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>people were not predicting the dotcom bubble I don't know if you were there at the time but saying wow what a bubble was much of the conversation back then. I don't know if it was predicting it as saying gosh just look - you can take any company and put ".com" in the name and the stock goes up 5x, it's nuts.

Was there anyone saying "wow, when this bubble bursts there will be infrastructure everywhere!"? It seems that in the current AI craze, some people stopped saying "it's nuts" and started saying "it will leave something nuts in its place!". As if the bubble had already burst! Do you understand better now what I am trying to say?

Sort of.

I don't remember "wow, there will be infrastructure everywhere!". It was kind of more will they hurry up and build more infrastructure as it was seriously bad in 1999. I only had slow unreliable dial up. General broadband availability didn't happen till about a decade later and I still don't have fiber where I am in central London.

That's one difference - people wanted internet access, were willing to pay and there was a shortage. This time they've built more LLM stuff than people really want and they have to shove it into everything for free.

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

#402

Post by saubeidl »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #335
taurath wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me this reads like someone's been inside the echo chamber too long. > For you AI skeptics, this is going to be rough to hear, but given the suffering that will occur if AI fails, I believe we have a moral imperative to make sure it succeeds. What if, and hear me out here, the prediction is that it will fail because it can't succeed. It hasn't proven it is capable of producing the results that would justify itself.…

I'm actually from a science, government and defense background, I've never worked in the valley. It might be possible that it can't succeed, but we don't know that and the evidence in terms of what happens if it fails is pretty compelling, so I think morality dictates we have to at least try, at least until we have more information or another path emerges.

You're making the (imo incorrect) assumption that a revolutionary moment isn't the exact thing the US needs right now. Morality dictates we have to try and force one.

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

#403

Post by dangus »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #321
dangus wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

While I agree about the competence of the high level decision makers in the administration, the people advising them are incredibly smart and should under no circumstances be underestimated. Peter and his circle are totally crazy, but if you're playing against them you better bring your A game.

I would submit the idea that the people advising this administration are not very smart. In what discernible way has this administration biased its selection process to include “smart?”

I don’t underestimate their ability to do damage but calling them smart is generous.

Not even Peter Thiel, he’s one of the most over-hyped people in tech. Access to capital is not intelligence, and a lot of his capital comes from the equivalent of casino wins with PayPal and Facebook.

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

#404

Post by tim333 »

mrcwinn wrote: post #315
tim333 wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Either it doesn't remove the income of its consumers like it's not doing at the moment, or we get universal basic income or something like that.

And how is UBI funded? Higher corporate taxes on (over time, as gross margins improve from inference cost deductions) more profitable companies? Or rather than higher taxes, more money printing because inflation is just so incredibly low because of advancements in productivity. That’s the only thing I can imagine so far. All other paths in my mind lead me thinking about uprising and political unrest. (I’m not a doome…

I think either productivity advances and we get money printing/tax, or it doesn't and things continue as now.

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

#405

Post by fennecbutt »

tyleo wrote: post #146
rz2k wrote: post #108

Local/open-weight models are already incredibly competent. Right now a Mac Studio with 256GB can be found for less than $5000, and an equivalent workstation will likely be 50% cheaper in a year. If anything that price is higher because of the boom, rather than subsidized by a potential bubble. It can run a 8bit quant of GPT-OSS 120B, or 4bit quant of GLM-4.6 using only an extra 100-200W. That energy use comes out to…

I have an M4 MBP and I also think Apple is set up quite nicely to take real advantage of local models. They already work on the most expensive Apple hardware. I expect that price to come down in the next few years. It’s really just the UX that’s bad but that’s solvable. Apple isn’t having to pay for each users power and use either. They sell hardware once and folks pay with their own electricity to run it.

Lmao it took Apple like a decade or soaafter everyone else to offer 16gb ram as default.

You won't be getting cheap Apple machines chock full of ram any time soon, I can tell you that. That goes against Apple's entire pricing structure/money making machine.

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

#406

Post by [deleted] »

jhanschoo wrote: post #391
CuriouslyC wrote: post #84

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

A pillar of the author's argument is that > Chinese will not pull back on AI investment, and because of their advantages in robotics and energy infrastructure, they don't have to. > The gap matters because AI's value capture depends on having the energy and hardware to deploy frontier models in the physical world. I understand energy infrastructure because of power-hungry GPUs and ASICs, but I was wondering about the…

[deleted]

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

#407

Post by card_zero »

archerx wrote: post #377
trollbridge wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Robots still haven’t come close to replicating human and animal touch as a sense, and LLMs don’t do anything to help with that.

Have you seen what Boston dynamics has been up to? Progress is happening faster than you think.

So, they released a new gripper with touch sensors.

Then there's this article:

https://rodneybrooks.com/why-todays-humanoids-wont-learn-dex...

Talking about human hands having tens of thousands of receptors of several different types, and the difficulty of tasks like picking up a match, and the trouble with the project of learning dexterity by brute force.

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

#408

Post by jononor »

jhanschoo wrote: post #391
CuriouslyC wrote: post #84

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

A pillar of the author's argument is that > Chinese will not pull back on AI investment, and because of their advantages in robotics and energy infrastructure, they don't have to. > The gap matters because AI's value capture depends on having the energy and hardware to deploy frontier models in the physical world. I understand energy infrastructure because of power-hungry GPUs and ASICs, but I was wondering about the…

Early day for robotics and AI still. But for a superpower, the potential for (more) autonomous weapons in that intersection is something that (unfortunately) cannot be ignored.

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

#409

Post by grafmax »

test6554 wrote: post #359
andy99 wrote: post #147

Cell phones have been through how many generations between the 80s and now? All the past generations are obsolete, but the investment in improving the technology (which is really a continuation of WWII era RF engineering) means we have readily available low cost miniature comms equipment. It doesn’t matter that the capex on individual phones was wasted. Same for GPUs/LLMs? At some point things will mature and we’ll b…

I'm worried all that cheap easily accessible LLM capacity will be serving us ads if we're lucky and subtly pushing us to use brands that pay money if we're not. If AI says don't buy a subaru it's not worth the money, then Subaru pays attention and they are willing to pay money to get a better rec. Same for Univerisites. Students who see phrases like "If the degree is from brown flush it down" (ok hyperbole, but still…

It’s a tried and true method of Silicon Valley VCs. Produce something as a loss leader. Build a moat. Then extract rent. Not only can you stop having to produce anything of value, you can even degrade your product and people won’t be able to leave thanks to lock-in.

We wonder why the US has lost or losing competitiveness with China in most industries. Their government has focused on public investment and public ownership of natural monopolies, preventing rent extraction and keeping the costs of living lower. That means employers don’t have to pay workers as much so their businesses can be more competitive. Contrast with the US whose working class is parasitized by various forms of rent extraction - land, housing, medicine, subscription models, etc. US employers effectively finance these inefficiencies. It’s almost like the US wants to fall behind.

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

#410

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #277
nebula8804 wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Though to be honest with Trump at the helm they're already ~50% there. Those people have never felt real pain. They may say they have but they haven't. If this article is real and the whole shitbox falls apart, I don't think even loyalty to Trump will stop these people from finally reckoning with reality.

Honestly I've never wanted to be more wrong in my life. There were so many moments when I was doing research and analysis for this article that I said to myself: "We're so fucked"

And you didn't even touch on the "if anyone builds it, everyone dies" aspect of super intelligence.
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