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AI Is Too Big to Fail

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Re: AI Is Too Big to Fail

#91

Post by anon84873628 »

igleria wrote: post #86
OptionOfT wrote: post #83

What I really find really weird here is that when I buy stock in Apple, I do so because I think Apple will create new value. But with AI the hope is that the value created will be proportional to wages being removed. I.e. if AI creates more value, it means that the large majority of people will actually have less money, bar a few lucky ones. You have to remember that AI is being touted as the final solution to basica…

UBI never "mathed" to me. It always smelled like a pseudo solution to distract the soon-to-be-replaced long enough until they are replaced.

Well, wealth redistribution makes sense. But the idea that it would be voluntary does not.

Especially since we're going to have AI soldier robots before AI farmer robots.

Re: AI Is Too Big to Fail

#92

Post by jqpabc123 »

miningape wrote: post #38
thewebguyd wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this is a pre-war economy, the US is screwed not because of AI but because we started a stupid trade war that's going to cut us off of our supply of dysprosium which is critical for defense manufacturing.

Wouldn't the US be cut from the supply if there was a war, regardless of the current tariffs?

The idea from the Chinese side to prevent a war by limiting the ability of the US to produce weapons.

The USA and it's allies won WWII mainly due to superior production capacity. This advantage now works in China's favor. And the USA no longer has allies.

Bottom line: If China decides to take Taiwan, the USA will have to choose between either doing nothing or mutual annihilation.

Re: AI Is Too Big to Fail

#93

Post by Yoric »

jhallenworld wrote: post #82
Yoric wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, last few times the US had a big recession, they took down the whole world with them. The biggest recession led almost directly to WWII, and that was before the US centralized that much power or money. I don't live in the US, but I'm rather worried.

On the Oct 10 drop, I made a list of a bunch country specific ETFs to see who is and who isn't so correlated with the US. oct 10 drop yield ytd total return mchi china -5.73 2.19 28.48 ewh hong kong -4.22 3.54 23.05 qqq nasdaq 100 -3.47 0.46 12.4 argt argentina -3.34 1.39 -16.04 currency problems ech chile -3.2 2.18 24.8 ewz brazil -2.98 5.42 26.49 spy USA: s&p 500 -2.69 1.08 9.15 epu peru -2.62 3.5 52.16 metals norw…

Very nice!

Interesting that Chile and Brazil went further down than S&P, but I guess it's noisy.

Re: AI Is Too Big to Fail

#94

Post by Yoric »

jhallenworld wrote: post #71
Yoric wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For Nvidia: all it will take is for one smart grad student to find a better training algorithm to destroy 75% of their value. I don't think so. We've already seen several generations of better training algorithms, but they all rely on CUDA, hence on NVidia.

For inference they already face competition: that deal OpenAI announced with AMD .. at a certain point it will be worth broadening away from CUDA.

Possibly, yes, but so far, it's barely noticeable, hardly a threat.

Re: AI Is Too Big to Fail

#95

Post by sph »

tonmoy wrote: post #44

Internet was too big to fail in 2000, and in the long run was a net positive for the economy. Yet, a lot of internet companies still have not recovered the bubble bursting

Just because one bubble also brought better infrastructure for everybody, doesn't mean that every bubble has a silver lining.

I wish AI wasn't so easily compared with the Internet just because they have exuberant investors in common.

Re: AI Is Too Big to Fail

#96

Post by sph »

Fernicia wrote: post #14
terandle wrote: post #8

> Think of it like WWII, only only instead of planting victory gardens to beat the Nazis, we're building AI apps and finding ways to create the economic value needed to cover the reckless bets being made by the elites. LOL fuck this, the stock market deserves to burn to the ground.

When did the HackerNews comment section turn into this? Low quality, aggressive, fervently anti-establishment.

Some of us just want to see the (AI) world burn.

Re: AI Is Too Big to Fail

#97

Post by zzleeper »

jhallenworld wrote: post #82
Yoric wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, last few times the US had a big recession, they took down the whole world with them. The biggest recession led almost directly to WWII, and that was before the US centralized that much power or money. I don't live in the US, but I'm rather worried.

On the Oct 10 drop, I made a list of a bunch country specific ETFs to see who is and who isn't so correlated with the US. oct 10 drop yield ytd total return mchi china -5.73 2.19 28.48 ewh hong kong -4.22 3.54 23.05 qqq nasdaq 100 -3.47 0.46 12.4 argt argentina -3.34 1.39 -16.04 currency problems ech chile -3.2 2.18 24.8 ewz brazil -2.98 5.42 26.49 spy USA: s&p 500 -2.69 1.08 9.15 epu peru -2.62 3.5 52.16 metals norw…

Quick q what does "yield" mean here?

Also, in which currency are these returns? Because forex shifts (which for sure happened on oct10) mess up the observed returns quite a bit

Re: AI Is Too Big to Fail

#98

Post by zzleeper »

notepad0x90 wrote: post #58

I think a lot of HNers are too close to the topic for the right perspective. LLMs are as much of a feature of an existing technology as computers are features of electricity. ML and neural networks have been around for a long time and the transition to LLM usage for us feels like "yup, another feature, just a really good auto-complete". For most users of LLMs, this is a magical feature that answers any questions and…

That kinda misses the point for me. I use LLMs a lot and have become an invaluable part of my work (coding, collecting data, proof-reading text) and even personal time (amazing Japanese menu translator!).

But I still think they can "fail" in the sense that current investments need an absurd amount of profits in order to have a positive NPV. Data centers depreciate fast, so if you just did $500bn in capex, you better make sure you will get $50bn/yr out of it from the get go or you will fail.

And that's the problem; even if sales are high, all vendors are bleeding money and so far the offerings are commoditized enough that I can't see how they will recoup their investment.

Re: AI Is Too Big to Fail

#99

Post by tim333 »

nick__m wrote: post #11

Where does all this leave us? For one, you better hope and pray that AI delivers a magical transformation, because if it doesn't, the whole economy will collapse into brutal serfdom. When I say magic here, I mean it; because of the ~38T national debt bomb, a big boost is not enough. If AI doesn't completely transform our economy, the massive capital misallocation combined with the national debt is going to cause our…

The "~38T national debt bomb" is not caused by AI and not that large compared to debts other countries have dealt with. It's about 100% of gdp and Japan is about 250%. The UK was about 270% after WW2 and that got paid down to 50% before running up a bit.

Not ideal but doesn't have to make anything implode.

Re: AI Is Too Big to Fail

#100

Post by itsme0000 »

nick__m wrote: post #11

Where does all this leave us? For one, you better hope and pray that AI delivers a magical transformation, because if it doesn't, the whole economy will collapse into brutal serfdom. When I say magic here, I mean it; because of the ~38T national debt bomb, a big boost is not enough. If AI doesn't completely transform our economy, the massive capital misallocation combined with the national debt is going to cause our…

Except that’s not at all how the economy works. The government will simply double or triple the debt again and the economy will continue to grow in size as the nominal value of currency goes down giving the illusion that prices are going up.

Literally the exact same thing that’s been happening since Andrew Jackson was president. There’s no magical collection agency that will force people to start plowing the fields to pay taxes. There’s no magical resource that we will run out of the government will just pay people to build infrastructure that will prop up businesses run by idiotic MBAs like it’s always been.

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