61–70 of 168 posts
A poor man's Gary Marcus, basically.
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Completely agree. I would ask also what “infrastructure” the dotcom bubble created?
They’re referring to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_fibre
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If there's anything that can be reliably predicated to be true over multiple decades it's that capitalism will continually seek to reduce labour costs and automate everything. You can bet that even if the specific forms attempted in this interval don't take hold, they will eventually. You and I are too expensive, and have had too much power.
> If there's anything that can be reliably predicated to be true over multiple decades it's that capitalism will continually seek to reduce labour costs and automate everything. what about improved life quality? what about an explosion of types of jobs? > You and I are too expensive, and have had too much power. do you think the average citizen (or the collective) have MORE power or LESS power than 100 years ago, tha…
These sound very much in tone like the criticisms of Web 1.0 AI/LLMs are an infant technology, it’s at the beginning. It took many many years until people figured out how to use the internet for more than just copying corporate brochures into HTML. I put it to you that the truly valuable applications of AI/LLMs are yet to be invented and will be truly surprising when they come (which they must of course otherwise we’…
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> "good" bubble in the sense how can massively buying hardware that will have to be thrown away in a few years be a "good" bubble in the sense of being a lasting infrastructure investment?
I am pretty optimistic that as long as hardware capacity exists, people will find ways of using it. Whether it will be profitable or not is another story of course.
Up to a point it is better than having additional compute sitting idle at the edge, economies of scale and all that, but after some point it becomes excess and wasteful, even if people figure out ways to entertain themselves with it.
And if people don't want to pay what it costs to improve and maintain these city-sized electronic brains? Then it all becomes waste, or the majority transformed into office or warehouse space or something else.
Proceeding with combined 1% (US GDP)-sized budgets despite this risk being an elephant in the room is what makes it a bubble.
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If there's anything that can be reliably predicated to be true over multiple decades it's that capitalism will continually seek to reduce labour costs and automate everything. You can bet that even if the specific forms attempted in this interval don't take hold, they will eventually. You and I are too expensive, and have had too much power.
> If there's anything that can be reliably predicated to be true over multiple decades it's that capitalism will continually seek to reduce labour costs and automate everything. what about improved life quality? what about an explosion of types of jobs? > You and I are too expensive, and have had too much power. do you think the average citizen (or the collective) have MORE power or LESS power than 100 years ago, tha…
What I said vs what you imagined I said are two different things.
These sound very much in tone like the criticisms of Web 1.0 AI/LLMs are an infant technology, it’s at the beginning. It took many many years until people figured out how to use the internet for more than just copying corporate brochures into HTML. I put it to you that the truly valuable applications of AI/LLMs are yet to be invented and will be truly surprising when they come (which they must of course otherwise we’…
It was immediately clear for many people how it could be used to express themselves. It took a lot of years to figure out how to kill most of those parts and turn the remainder into a corporate hellscape thats barely more than corporate brochures.
I believe this is a "good" bubble in the sense that the 19th century railroad bubble and original dot com bubble both ended up invested in infrastructure that created immense value. That said, all of these LLMs are interchangeable, there are no moats, and the profit will almost entirely be in the "last mile," in local subject matter experts applying this technology to their bespoke business processes.
> "good" bubble in the sense how can massively buying hardware that will have to be thrown away in a few years be a "good" bubble in the sense of being a lasting infrastructure investment?
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Surveillance? They have an exceptionally valuable product if they package it right.
> Surveillance? They have an exceptionally valuable product if they package it right. So valuable that it will be next main source of growth (what was claimed) for Amazon, Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Nvidia, Meta, and Tesla? The US military budget is less than $1 trillion per annum. these companies had a combined revenue of $2 trillion. For military contracts to be THE new source of growth, the military budget would…
To be fair, it wasn't suggested that the growth would be equivalent to or surpassing of past growth, just growth of some kind. The budget doesn't necessarily have to become any larger, they just need a piece of the pie.