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America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom

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Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom

#651

Post by integralid »

Braxton1980 wrote: post #584
SaltyBackendGuy wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But worth a shot. Worth betting the entire US economy on it?

No. Nothing is but is that what's happening? Huge bets were made on the Internet technology in the US and it paid off even with the dot com bubble bursting. If we don't stay on top of technology then we will simply be passed by China. People also said the Internet was going revolutionize everything in the 90s and it did. AI is already pretty impressive and we are just in the infancy of the technology.

>AI is already pretty impressive and we are just in the infancy of the technology.

What do you mean by infancy? AI research exists for at least 50 years, longer than web development.

Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom

#652

Post by NalNezumi »

toephu2 wrote: post #599

What many Americans don't realize is that China has already surpassed the United States in terms of development (developing country vs developed country sense of the word). Obviously both are 'developed' countries at this point but compare Chinese tier 1 cities vs American tier 1 cities. I would argue Chinese tier 1 cities are 10-20 years ahead of their American counterparts. source: visit any Chinese tier 1 city (Be…

Feels like a weird comparison. Granted, I've neither been in US nor China but from my Chinese/US friends that I mingled with while living in Tokyo, I feel like except for that flashy silly thing you cherish (cashless, drones) Chinese cities don't offer much compared to say Seoul or Tokyo.

And even Seoul or Tokyo, depending on your metric, probably fails compared to some European cities (Dutch, Scandinavian, etc)

Comparing to US cities feels weird. Because they don't got much going on for them anyway, except diverse culture and vibrant businesses

Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom

#653

Post by euler2100 »

chasd00 wrote: post #612
nikanj wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My go-to example is Al Bundy. He was a loser, but most zoomers can only dream of having a house, a few kids, a car project in the garage et cetera

you guys understand that was a fictional comedy show right? It had no resemblance to reality on purpose.

Sure, but the shows tried to relate somehow to the reality of the time they depicted. They could've also make the character have another profession but it would be much less credible.

Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom

#654

Post by DroneBetter »

vilhelm_s wrote: post #630
nradov wrote: post #624

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only crime rate data which is really reliable is the murder rate. This peaked in 1991 and has been generally stable (not steadily declining) since 1999, with a spike during the COVID-19 pandemic. Almost all murders do get reported and counted. https://www.consumershield.com/articles/murder-rate-by-year I don't trust the statistics for lesser crimes because so many of the victims never file a report. In many citie…

Surely your graph shows it declining dramatically? If you zoom out a bit [ https://crimeforecast.substack.com/p/explaining-the-crime-de... ] we're currently at almost an all-time low, you have to go back to the 1950s to find similarly low numbers.

I imagine the 2025 section is anomalously low due to lack of data availability and the graph's unwillingness to extrapolate

Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom

#655

Post by atleastoptimal »

jimbohn wrote: post #249
atleastoptimal wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My argument is based on 1. The first company to get AGI will likely have a multitude of high-leverage problems it would immediately put AGI to task on 2. One of those problems is simply improving itself. Another is securing that company's lead over its competitors (by basically helping every employee at that company do better at their job) 3. The company that reaches AGI for a language-style model will likely do so d…

The AGI argument assumes there is a 0 -> 1 moment where the model suddenly becomes "AGI" and starts performing miraculous tasks, accompanied by recursive self-improvement. So far, our experience shows that we are getting incremental improvements over time from different companies. These things are being commoditized, and we are still at the start of the curve when it comes to hardware, data centers, etc. Arguing for…

It won't be one miraculous moment, but once a model is capable of performing tasks on its own and verifying its outputs better than a domain-expert using that AI, a human no longer being a bottleneck will allow this model to be deployed on a far larger scale, which would appear much like a 0-1 moment on the outside, even if the improvement over a previous model is minor and only involves a slight tweak of something that increases reliability.

Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom

#656

Post by coderenegade »

schmidtleonard wrote: post #366
ffsm8 wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They built this knowledge up only in the last 10-15 yrs though. It's absolutely possible to reverse this trend within a much shorter time period then this argument always implies.

Wars are won or lost in 5 years, not 15. I agree that it's possible to reverse the trend, but we have to decide that we want to independently of a physical conflict, before someone else teaches us that deindustrialization is not advancement. Otherwise the lesson will come too late.

This. The century of shame, when Western powers came knocking on their door, is etched into the Chinese cultural psyche. East Asia was home to mature nations that learned the hard way that self determination is fundamentally tied to your ability to defend your interests. This is especially the case for China, which saw itself as the center of the universe.

The US won the cold war and came to believe they were untouchable. Private interests don't care about nation states, and there was more money to be made by selling the foundation of the West's security than there was in preserving it, especially since the enemy had been vanquished.

Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom

#657

Post by atleastoptimal »

mkl wrote: post #222
atleastoptimal wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My argument is based on 1. The first company to get AGI will likely have a multitude of high-leverage problems it would immediately put AGI to task on 2. One of those problems is simply improving itself. Another is securing that company's lead over its competitors (by basically helping every employee at that company do better at their job) 3. The company that reaches AGI for a language-style model will likely do so d…

All of that stuff takes time and resources. Self-improvement may not be easy, e.g. if they end up in a local maximum that doesn't extend, and it probably won't be cheap or fast (if it's anything like frontier LLMs it could be months of computation on enormous numbers of cutting-edge devices, costing hundreds of millions or billions, or it may not even be possible without inventing and mass-manufacturing better hardwa…

All the major companies are setting up to have all the hardware necessary to leverage an AGI-level system when it does emerge. The entire purpose of Starbase for OpenAI or the memphis supercomputer for X.ai is such that there would be very little delay between hitting the right marks on an AGI-capable model and deploying its capabilities en masse towards the highest-leverage aims. Certainly there will be bottlenecks, but the advantages will significantly accelerate progress.

Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom

#658

Post by atleastoptimal »

rhubarbtree wrote: post #331
atleastoptimal wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My argument is based on 1. The first company to get AGI will likely have a multitude of high-leverage problems it would immediately put AGI to task on 2. One of those problems is simply improving itself. Another is securing that company's lead over its competitors (by basically helping every employee at that company do better at their job) 3. The company that reaches AGI for a language-style model will likely do so d…

Wait, but why would an AGI be better at improving itself compared to an AI researcher doing it? AGI is not super intelligence.

Every frontier lab has maybe 100 top tier researchers, all of whom have limited short-term memory, need to sleep, eat, have biases, and can't rigorously parallelize themselves and run thousands of simultaneous experiments, while also modifying their own internal thought processes to a quantifiable degree. An AGI merely on the level of a mediocre AI researcher would be able to trivially leverage all these benefits, while also simply scaling its own compute (it is unlikely that the scaling gains would level out precisely at the level of a smart human)

Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom

#659

Post by atleastoptimal »

thundoe wrote: post #219
atleastoptimal wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My argument is based on 1. The first company to get AGI will likely have a multitude of high-leverage problems it would immediately put AGI to task on 2. One of those problems is simply improving itself. Another is securing that company's lead over its competitors (by basically helping every employee at that company do better at their job) 3. The company that reaches AGI for a language-style model will likely do so d…

Unless AGI includes a speed requirement, AGI is not sufficient to win the market. Take any genius in human history, the impact they had has been hugely limited by their lifespan, they didn’t solve every problem, and each discovery took them decades. The first AGIs will be the same, hyper slow for a while, giving competitors a chance to copy and stay in the race

If Einstein could replicate himself 1000x, perform all his thought experiments in parallel, not have to eat, sleep, or be limited by his human short-term memory, he would have likely have accomplished all he did far faster. AGI will at the very minimum have all the advantages of humans plus all the advantages of computers, which would be a huge automatic boon even without the fact that an AGI at human level would likely be able to scale even further.

Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom

#660

Post by atleastoptimal »

ahoka wrote: post #223
atleastoptimal wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My argument is based on 1. The first company to get AGI will likely have a multitude of high-leverage problems it would immediately put AGI to task on 2. One of those problems is simply improving itself. Another is securing that company's lead over its competitors (by basically helping every employee at that company do better at their job) 3. The company that reaches AGI for a language-style model will likely do so d…

These companies already have access to the best meat-brains in the world and what tasks do they work on? Advertisement mostly?

Ads pay the bills, but the top tier researchers are all working on top-tier AI research.
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