It's very hard to find anything other than half saying AI is in a bubble, and we will pop any day now, and the other half declaring AGI by 2029, when a new revolution will begin. If you follow the hard science and not the money, you can see we're somewhere in-between these two takes. AI datacenters requiring new power plants is unsustainable for long-term growth. Meanwhile, we have LLMs accepting bullshit tasks and completing them. This is very hard to ignore.
Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits
501–510 of 668 posts
Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits
#502Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is true. It’s probably 2-3 times as long as a GPU chip. But it’s still probably half or a quarter of the depreciation timeline of a carrier fiber line.
Even if the building itself is condemnable, what it took to build it out is still valuable. To give a different example, right now, some of the most prized sites for renewable energy are former coal plant sites, because they already have big fat transmission lines ready to go. Yesterday's industrial parks are now today's gentrifying urban districts, and so on.
That’s true. The permitting is already dealt with, and that’s substantial lead time on any data center build.
Evnn moreso for carrier lines of course. Nimbyism is a strong block on right-of-way needs (except the undersea ones obviously).
Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits
#503Earlier quoted context omitted.
No they don't want that, because it could lead to an uprising against them. They want us provided with the essentials in exchange for being dutiful workers, so we have something to lose. Everyone should live in pods stacked together, eat insects, not drive our own automobiles around or fly places, we should be able to get our entertainment and everything to keep ourselves happy from their subscription entertainment s…
I'd actually love to eat insects but to my dismay I found out they're actually really expensive...
Soylent green will be affordable when the baby boomers start passing.
Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits
#504The big question is what "society" he is talking about? Is it the "society" that includes all people, or the "society" that includes only rich people?
Bezos didn't define "society", but knowing Devil is what Devil does, we can infer:
1. Amazon files the most petitions for H1-B work visas after Indian IT shops. 2. Amazon opposed minimum wage increase to $15/hr until 2018! 3. Amazon not only fires union organizers, it's claiming National Labor Relations Board is unconstitutional!
Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits
#505The big question is what "society" he is talking about? Is it the "society" that includes all people, or the "society" that includes only rich people?
It is all society as long as they have access, and they do. Even if the big labs get more closed off, open source is right there and won’t die.
AI increases everyone’s knowledge and ultimately productivity. It’s on every person the learn to leverage it. The dynamics don’t need to change, we just move faster and smarter
Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits
#506Earlier quoted context omitted.
And a lot of the gains from the Dotcom boom are being paid back in negative value for the average person at this point. We have automated systems that waste our time when we need support, product features that should have a one-time-cost being turned into subscriptions, a complete usurping of the ability to distribute software or build compatible replacements, etc.. The Dotcom boom was probably good for everyone in s…
> The Dotcom boom was probably good for everyone in some way, but it was much, much better for the extremely wealthy people that have gained control of everything. You are describing platform capture. Be it Google Search, YouTube, TikTok, Meta, X, App Store, Play Store, Amazon, Uber - they have all made themselves intermediaries between public and services, extracting a huge fee. I see it like rent going up in a regi…
>You can download a LLM, can't download a Google or Meta.
You can download a model. That doesn't necessarily mean you can download the best model and all the ancillary systems attached to it by whatever service. Just like you can download a web index but you probably cannot download google's index and certainly can't download their system of crawlers for keeping it up to date.
Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits
#507Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Everyone should live in pods stacked together, eat insects, not drive our own automobiles around or fly places, we should be able to get our entertainment and everything to keep ourselves happy from their subscription entertainment services. Yes of course capitalists love when economy is bad. Sorry, these dystopic visions do not pass even simplest smell test.
They love it when the richest people do well. They dont care about how anyone else lives. The poorer other people are better they feel about winning. Those you call "capitalists" love monopolies as long as they are theirs. They love captured market. They dont care about competition unless it is someone not them competing to provide for them on lower price. As of now, billionaires dont want or need strong economy as a…
The poorer people are that are still able to work, the cheaper labor is. It's really that simple.
Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits
#508Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, Sam Altman’s recent one saying that his LLMs would “cure cancer” if they built enough data centres was also a winner.
i have to say I'm a little disgusted by these statements. LLMs are useful for many problems, but is there really a conceivable path of them making progress into fighting the countless cancers tormenting humanity?
Without those sorts of revolutionary claims, would they still be receiving enough funding to keep the lights on?
Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits
#509He's (unsurprisingly) making an analogy to the dotcom bubble, which seems to me correct. There was a bubble, many non-viable companies got funded and died, and nevertheless the internet did eventually change everything.
The biggest problem is the infrastructure left behind from the Dotcom boom that laid the path for the current world (the high speed fiber) doesn't translate to computer chips. Are you still using intel chips from 1998? And the chips are such a huge cost, and being backed by debt but they depreciate in value exponentially. It's not the same because so much of the current debt fueled spending is on an asset that has ve…
This won’t even come close to maiming the economy, that’s one of the more extreme takes I’ve heard.
AI is already making us wildly more productive. I vibe coded 5 deep ML libraries over the last month or so. This would have taken me maybe years before when I was manually coding as an MLE.
We have clearly hit the stage of exponential improvement, and to not invest basically everything we have in it would be crazy. Anyone who doesn’t see that is missing the bigger picture.
Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits
#510Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're ever been to a third world country then you'd see how this is completely untrue. The dotcom boom has revolutionized the way of life for people in countries like India. Even for the average person in America, the ability to do so many activities online that would have taken hours otherwise (eg. shopping, research, DMV/government activities, etc). The fact that we see negative consequences of this like social…
With telecom, we benefited from skipping generations. I got into a telecom management program because in 2001-ish, I was passed by on a village street by a farmer bicycling while talking on his cellphone. Mind you my family could not afford cellphone call rates at the time. In fact, the technology was introduced out here assuming corporate / elite users. The market reality became such that telcos were forced kicking…
That kind of extreme poverty juxtaposed to extreme wealth, and all of the social ills that come along with it, have always been a fixture of the American experience. I don’t think it’s a good barometer or whether the USA is in decline when there has long been pockets of urban decay, massive inequality, drug use etc. Jump back to any point in American history and you’ll find something similar if not much, much worse. Even in SF of all places, back in the wild west era gold rush or in the 1970s… America has always held that contradiction.