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Extinction-Level Capitalism

matthewbutterick.com

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Re: Extinction-Level Capitalism

#91

Post by munksbeer »

sucrosesucrose wrote: post #17

The fatalist philosophers and authors have been mostly proven right as time marched on. And this time will be no different, the existence of "AI" ensures the future will be as dark or worse as the predictions expect. Why? Because humans are flawed and corrupt, too prone to excesses (specially conformism and convenience) and the exploitation of the natural world.

> The fatalist philosophers and authors have been mostly proven right as time marched on.

In what sense? Most people today would not choose to go an live at any other point in history, except for window between about 1960 and 2008.

Life was much harder for the average person outside of this window at any other point.

Re: Extinction-Level Capitalism

#92

Post by euroderf »

thriftwy wrote: post #22
euroderf wrote: post #7

Socialism XOR Dystopia

I glimpsed last years of Soviet Union and it was pretty meh. I remember seeing anything in the street (a payphone or a playground for kids) and assumed it will only degrade because as a general principle, things in the streets are unmaintained. You could say that Soviet Union was bad specimen of socialism because of these stupid Russians? Except, Russia actually got 100% out of socialism with our space exploration, p…

I'm not sure it's fair to tar socialism with a Stalinist brush.

My own interest would be in finding out how management incentives can be made to work in a socialist scheme of ownership, so that management is on the ball - and not building empires at the expense of the underlying society.

Re: Extinction-Level Capitalism

#93

Post by overflow897 »

aniceperson wrote: post #79
swiftcoder wrote: post #45

There's a core problem this analysis overlooks: OpenAI and Anthropic don't have a moat. The Chinese labs are consistently able to replicate their LLM capabilities a few months after the fact, and then release open-weight models a few months later... The only way for "Big AI" to become a thing is for them to establish a moat, and right now the only path to that appears to be achieving regulatory capture in the US, whi…

You are not allowed to use any model from Chinese labs at American companies. Even from other companies like Mistral it is hard to get access, since enterprises require their own instances on vertex/bedrock/azure, and to run alternatives you have to go through multiple layers of management. In practice, no employee will proactively advocate for alternative models and the oligopoly is written in the wall, specially si…

For now. When they cost 5x less and are of comparable quality that may change very quickly. Cost cutting applies everywhere.

Re: Extinction-Level Capitalism

#94

Post by ShinyLeftPad »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #72
ShinyLeftPad wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

zionism as belief that a group of people has a right for self determination != zionism as war justification. I recall there are different flavors and lumping them together is not helping anything.

I wish you would have either read more carefully, or at least not make it seem as if I stated things, that I didn't. As it stands, your comment basically just makes me shrugg. Thanks for telling me that they are a belief group? Thanks for telling me basically any religious nuts group has various flavors?

You don't read what I write or you need to clarify why right to self determination is religious nuttery. Do your people have a right to self determination? Live on the land their ancestors are from etc? I betcha they do (unless they are colonized aboriginal people) and they didn't even need to invent a word for it

Re: Extinction-Level Capitalism

#95

Post by ShinyLeftPad »

swiftcoder wrote: post #88
ShinyLeftPad wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big AI is a thing. Insane money and construction projects makes the government invested in it one way or the other. It can't fail or it'll cause economic shock. It's a play to normalize it and make everyone depend on it before people question how they trained it all on their data and now drive them out of their jobs. If they ask for a moat they will get it, the government can simply require licensing for hardware req…

> If they ask for a moat they will get it, the government can simply require licensing for hardware required to run any model comparable to the cloud ones (for "national security") This is the "moat by US regulatory capture" I mentioned above, but it only extends to the US, and pretty much cedes the rest of the world to the Chinese labs. It only makes sense if the US is going to become an isolationist power

Why do you assume the rest of the world is going to be under PRC labs? First it assumes the rest if the world will go as nuts on LLMs as US which if they see the same future as the author they might not. But even if they do, if PRC could do it, Europe could do it.

Re: Extinction-Level Capitalism

#96

Post by swiftcoder »

ShinyLeftPad wrote: post #95
swiftcoder wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If they ask for a moat they will get it, the government can simply require licensing for hardware required to run any model comparable to the cloud ones (for "national security") This is the "moat by US regulatory capture" I mentioned above, but it only extends to the US, and pretty much cedes the rest of the world to the Chinese labs. It only makes sense if the US is going to become an isolationist power

Why do you assume the rest of the world is going to be under PRC labs? First it assumes the rest if the world will go as nuts on LLMs as US which if they see the same future as the author they might not. But even if they do, if PRC could do it, Europe could do it.

> But even if they do, if PRC could do it, Europe could do it.

Sure, my point is that in this scenario, the US labs would lose out on all the overseas business, regardless of whoever else is training models for the rest of the world

Re: Extinction-Level Capitalism

#97

Post by JuniperMesos »

jason_oster wrote: post #84

Uh, this read is completely insane. A fantastical look into the mind of someone who thinks about many disparate things and is looking for ways to connect them. This is post hoc rationalization at its finest. I had a much longer post here initially. Deleted it because I got tired of mental gymnastics required to follow the author's thought process. Instead, here are the salient parts of my response: ---- The only way…

What struck me about that section is that the author didn't even ask the question of how much tomatoes cost before and after the introduction of the mechanical tomato harvester. 32,000 people picking tomatoes is a lot of human labor, which is ultimately paid for by ordinary people buying and eating tomatoes.

Re: Extinction-Level Capitalism

#98

Post by ShinyLeftPad »

swiftcoder wrote: post #96
ShinyLeftPad wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you assume the rest of the world is going to be under PRC labs? First it assumes the rest if the world will go as nuts on LLMs as US which if they see the same future as the author they might not. But even if they do, if PRC could do it, Europe could do it.

> But even if they do, if PRC could do it, Europe could do it. Sure, my point is that in this scenario, the US labs would lose out on all the overseas business, regardless of whoever else is training models for the rest of the world

True. But they already lose out, in many places they cannot sell for national security. I think it will only tighten. Government contracts probably will make up difference

Re: Extinction-Level Capitalism

#99

Post by lenkite »

overflow897 wrote: post #93
aniceperson wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are not allowed to use any model from Chinese labs at American companies. Even from other companies like Mistral it is hard to get access, since enterprises require their own instances on vertex/bedrock/azure, and to run alternatives you have to go through multiple layers of management. In practice, no employee will proactively advocate for alternative models and the oligopoly is written in the wall, specially si…

For now. When they cost 5x less and are of comparable quality that may change very quickly. Cost cutting applies everywhere.

Well, some Chinese AI companies like Zhipu AI are actually increasing price. Let us see the trend in 2027 when the money runs out there too.

Re: Extinction-Level Capitalism

#100

Post by zombot »

overflow897 wrote: post #93
aniceperson wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are not allowed to use any model from Chinese labs at American companies. Even from other companies like Mistral it is hard to get access, since enterprises require their own instances on vertex/bedrock/azure, and to run alternatives you have to go through multiple layers of management. In practice, no employee will proactively advocate for alternative models and the oligopoly is written in the wall, specially si…

For now. When they cost 5x less and are of comparable quality that may change very quickly. Cost cutting applies everywhere.

And how, pray tell, will that make for trillions of dollars return on investments?
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