[HN Gopher] Stargate Project: SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, MGX to b...
___________________________________________________________________
Stargate Project: SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, MGX to build data
centers
Author : tedsanders
Score : 937 points
Date : 2025-01-21 22:29 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (apnews.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (apnews.com)
| whalesalad wrote:
| I'm watching the announcement live from the white house and
| something about this just feels so strange and dystopian.
| Willingham wrote:
| Agreed, and whats the story behind the art chosen for the
| landing page?
| EForEndeavour wrote:
| I'm also curious how a global leader in multimodal generative
| AI chose this particular image. Did they prompt a generator
| for a super messy impressionist painting of red construction
| cranes with visible brush strokes, distorted to the point of
| barely being able to discern what the image represents?
| miltonlost wrote:
| Considering Stargate's introduction and plan seems to be a
| super messy concept of impressions of ideas and very
| lacking in details, the picture makes a lot of sense. Let
| AI evangelists see the future in the fuzz; let AI
| pessimists see failure in the abstract; let investors see
| $$$ in their pockets.
| tux3 wrote:
| Well, the silver lining is the incredible human capacity to get
| used to almost any situation given enough time
|
| It will get weirder, but only relatively so, the concept of
| normalcy always trailing just a little bit behind as we slide
| bcye wrote:
| Reference for others: https://youtube.com/watch?v=L1ff0HhNMso
| miltonlost wrote:
| For me it's watching a gay man grovel at the feet of one of the
| most anti-LGBT politicians, a day after Trump signed multiple
| executive orders that dehumanized Altman and the LGBT
| community. Every token thinks they're special until they're
| spent.
| whalesalad wrote:
| sama, peter thiel ... they dgaf. there is a huge difference
| between an oppressed gay person and a wealthy one.
|
| no one wants to bite the hand that feeds.
| ImJamal wrote:
| Trump was the first president to come into office supporting
| gay marriage. Trump only has a problem with the "t" part of
| the community and only in bathrooms and sports, not in
| general.
| TMWNN wrote:
| >For me it's watching a gay man grovel at the feet of one of
| the most anti-LGBT politicians
|
| Besides what ImJamal said, as a wealthy playboy man-about-
| town hanging out at Studio 54 in the '70s and '80s, I
| guarantee Trump has known and been friends with more gays
| than 95% of Americans. Certainly there has been no shortage
| of gay people among his top-level appointees in either his
| first or second administrations.
| whalesalad wrote:
| > I guarantee Trump has known and been friends with more
| gays than 95% of Americans.
|
| ok... ??? doesn't mean a thing, frankly.
| newfocogi wrote:
| > "OpenAI will continue to increase its consumption of Azure as
| OpenAI continues its work with Microsoft"
|
| Not sure why, but the word choice of "consumption" feels like a
| reverse Freudian slip to me.
| gamegoblin wrote:
| Industry standard word, e.g. "consumption pricing" etc
|
| But yeah if you're in the industry it's easy to forget how
| certain jargon sounds based on its dictionary definition
| hinkley wrote:
| But the good news is when the Trough of Disillusionment
| starts we can make a bunch of tuberculosis jokes.
| hinkley wrote:
| Sometimes the person writing the copy is writing it because
| they talk good, not because they are the biggest proponent of
| the idea.
|
| Give a clever, articulate person a task to write about
| something they don't believe in and they will include the
| subtlest of barbs, weak praise, or both.
| SvenL wrote:
| Meh, why did they choose this name. Stargate does not deserve
| this...
| buildbot wrote:
| The project predates Trump:
| https://wire.insiderfinance.io/project-stargate-the-worlds-l...
|
| (But yes I agree)
| non- wrote:
| Any clues to how they plan to invest $500 billion dollars? What
| infrastructure are they planning that will cost that much?
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| data center + gpu server farm (?)
| mrandish wrote:
| Plus power plants to drive the massive data centers. At large
| enough scale, power availability and cost is a constraint.
| burnte wrote:
| That was literally my question. Is this basically just for more
| datacenters, NVidia chips, and electricity with a sprinkling of
| engineers to run it all? If so, then that $500bn should NOT be
| invested in today's tech, but instead in making more powerful
| and power efficient chips, IMO.
| bitmasher9 wrote:
| I don't know if $500bn could put anyone ahead of nvidia/tmc.
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| Nvidia's in on it, so presumably this is a doubling-down on
| Nvidia as the chip developers
| amluto wrote:
| $500bn of usefully deployed engineering, mostly software,
| seems like it would put AMD far ahead of Nvidia. Actually
| usefully deploying large amounts of money is not so easy,
| though, and this would still go through TSMC.
| patall wrote:
| He wanted to do that, but would have needed 5T for that. Only
| got 100 bn so far, so this is what you get (only slightly /s)
| bdangubic wrote:
| if only $500bn was enough to make more powerful and power
| efficient chips...
| Havoc wrote:
| Add some nuclear power and you've suddenly got a big bill
| burnte wrote:
| Not really. Plant Vogtle in Georgia was way over budget and
| still was "only" $35bn. $500bn could get you 14 of those.
| kristianp wrote:
| Nvidia and TSMC are already working on more powerful and
| efficient chips, but the physical limits to scaling mean lots
| more power is going to be used in each new generation of
| chips. They might improve by offering specific features such
| as FP4, but Moore's law is still dead.
| pillefitz wrote:
| And we are, running on a 20W brain.
| TrainedMonkey wrote:
| I'll make a wild guess that they will be building data centers
| and maybe robotic labs. They are starting with 100B of
| committed by mostly Softbank, but probably not transacted yet,
| money.
|
| > building new AI infrastructure for OpenAI in the United
| States
|
| The carrot is probably something like - we will build enough
| compute to make a supper intelligence that will solve all the
| problems, ???, profit.
| K0balt wrote:
| If we look at the processing requirements in nature, I think
| that the main trend in AI going forward is going to be doing
| more with less, not doing less with more, as the current
| scaling is going.
|
| Thermodynamic neural networks may also basically turn
| everything on its ear, especially if we figure out how to
| scale them like NAND flash.
|
| If anything, I would estimate that this is a space-race type
| effort to "win" the AI "wars". In the short term, it might
| work. In the long term, it's probably going to result in a
| massive glut in accelerated data center capacity.
|
| The trend of technology is towards doing better than natural
| processes, not doing it 100000x less efficiently. I don't
| think AI will be an exception.
|
| If we look at what is -theoretically- possible using
| thermodynamic wells, with current model architectures, for
| instance, we could (theoretically) make a network that
| applies 1t parameters in something like 1cm2. It would use
| about 20watts, back of the napkin, and be able to generate a
| few thousand T/S.
|
| Operational thermodynamic wells have already been
| demonstrated en silica. There are scaling challenges, cooling
| requirements, etc but AFAIK no theoretical roadblocks to
| scaling.
|
| Obviously, the theoretical doesn't translate to results, but
| it does correlate strongly with the trend.
|
| So the real question is, what can we build that can only be
| done if there are hundreds of millions of NVIDIA GPUs sitting
| around idle in ten years? Or alternatively, if those systems
| are depreciated and available on secondary markets?
|
| What does that look like?
| pillefitz wrote:
| What is a thermodynamic well? Couldn't find much on it.
| lukeplato wrote:
| hopefully nuclear power plants
| croddin wrote:
| This could be a clue
|
| https://x.com/sama/status/1756090136935416039
| jppope wrote:
| Reasonably speaking, there is no way they can know how they
| plan to invest $500 billion dollars. The current generation of
| large language models basically use all human text thats ever
| been created for the parameters... not really sure where you go
| after than using the same tech.
| Philpax wrote:
| That's not really true - the _current_ generation, as in "of
| the last three months", uses reinforcement learning to
| synthesize new training data for themselves:
| https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1-Zero
| XorNot wrote:
| Right but that's kind of the point: there's no way forward
| which could benefit from "moar data". In fact it's weird we
| need so much data now - i.e. my son in learning to talk
| hardly needs to have read the complete works of
| Shakespeare.
|
| If it's possible to produce intelligence from just
| ingesting text, then current tech companies have all the
| data they need from their initial scrapes of the internet.
| They don't need more. That's different to keeping models up
| to date on current affairs.
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| That's essentially what R1 Zero is showing:
|
| > Notably, it is the first open research to validate that
| reasoning capabilities of LLMs can be incentivized purely
| through RL, without the need for SFT.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| O3 high compute requires 1000s of dollars to solve one
| medium complexity problem like ARC.
| artificialprint wrote:
| Light bulbs used to be expensive too, nails as well.
| bandrami wrote:
| It worked well for the Habsburg family; what could go
| wrong?
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| It seems to me you could generate a _lot_ of fresh
| information from running every youtube video, every hour of
| TV on archive.org, every movie on the pirate bay -- do scene
| by scene image captioning + high quality whisper
| transcriptions (not whatever junk auto-transcription YouTube
| has applied), and use that to produce screenplays of
| everything anyone has ever seen.
|
| I'm not sure why I've never heard of this being done, it
| would be a good use of GPUs in between training runs.
| airstrike wrote:
| Don't forget every hour of news broadcasting, of which we
| likely won't run out any time soon. Plus high quality radio
| miltonlost wrote:
| > a lot of fresh information from running every youtube
| video
|
| EVERY youtube video?? Even the 9/11 truther videos? Sandy
| Hook conspiracy videos? Flat earth? Even the blatantly
| racist? This would be some bad training data without some
| pruning.
| lanstin wrote:
| The best videos would be those where you accidentally
| start recording and you get 2 hours of naturalistic
| conversation between real people in reality. Not sure how
| often they are uploaded to YouTube.
|
| Part of the reason that kids need less material is that
| the aren't just listening, they are also able to do
| experiments to see what works and what doesn't.
| jensvdh wrote:
| The fact that OpenAI can just scrape all of Youtube and
| Google isn't even taking legal action or attempting to stop
| it is wild to me. Is Google just asleep?
| bdangubic wrote:
| what are they going to use to sue - DMCA? OpenAI (and
| others) are scraping everything imaginable (MS is
| scraping private Github repos...) - don't think anyone in
| the current government will be regulating any of this
| anytime soon
| lanstin wrote:
| Such a biased source of data-that gets them all the LaTeX
| source for my homeworks, but not my professor's grading
| of the homework, and not the invaluable words I get from
| my professor at office hours. No wonder the LLMs have
| bizarre blindnesses in different directions.
| bdangubic wrote:
| _Such a biased source of data-that gets them all the
| LaTeX source for my homeworks_
|
| but also myriad of hardcore private repositories of many
| high-tech US enterprises hacking amazing shit (mine
| included) :)
| ilaksh wrote:
| I think that this is the obvious path to more robust models
| -- grounding language on video.
| cavisne wrote:
| The new scaling vector is "test time compute" ie spending
| more compute in inference.
| riku_iki wrote:
| I think there is huge amount of corporate knowledge.
| rapjr9 wrote:
| The latest hype is around "agents", everyone will have agents
| to do things for them. The agents will incidentally collect
| real-time data on everything everyone uses them for. Presto!
| Tons of new training data. You are the product.
| disambiguation wrote:
| Yachts, mansions, private jets, maybe some very expensive space
| heaters.
| layer8 wrote:
| I'm more interested in how they plan to draw the rest of the
| damn owl.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| They are going to buy 50 $10B nuclear aircraft carriers and use
| them as a power source.
| paulnpace wrote:
| Congress.
| barbazoo wrote:
| > This project will [...] support the re-industrialization of the
| United States
|
| How?
| amarcheschi wrote:
| By aggregating the means of production even more in the hands
| of a handful of people
|
| Wait, was it supposed to re industrialize the USA?
| openplatypus wrote:
| Hush. Don't ask questions. It is going to be great.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Didn't you see the impressionist art of construction cranes?
| dutchbookmaker wrote:
| I thought this meant it was $500 billion in government money.
|
| Some of these companies do have huge cash reserves they don't
| know what to do with so if it is $500 billion of private money,
| I am not going to complain.
|
| I will believe it when I see it though and that this isn't a
| 100 billion in private money with a 400 billion dollar free US
| government put option for the "private" investors if things
| don't go perfect.
| DoubleGlazing wrote:
| That's a ridiculous sum of money that could be better spent on
| much more worthy things.
| cpursley wrote:
| So was getting a man to the moon. Do you want to lose the AI
| race to the Chinese?
| achierius wrote:
| Why would I care? Do you really want Masayoshi Son in charge
| of a theoretical superhuman AI?
| newfocogi wrote:
| Who/what is MGX? Google returns a few hits, none of which are
| clearly who is referred to here.
| rfw300 wrote:
| MGX is an arm of the United Arab Emirates' sovereign wealth
| operation: https://www.mgx.ae/en
| segasaturn wrote:
| I feel like that, along with SoftBank's investment, tell me
| everything about how serious this project is.
| rozap wrote:
| Don't worry, Oracle is also involved.
| amarcheschi wrote:
| Skynet will be written in Java. I'm sorry, the verbose
| language wins
| Barrin92 wrote:
| at least that explains why it wants to do us in.
| zingababba wrote:
| Damn, we really won't ever be able to understand it.
| talldayo wrote:
| A sheikh, a famously overzealous Japanese firm and Larry
| Elisson walk into a bar.
|
| Ordinarily a joke would follow, but now America is
| volunteering to be the punchline.
| dgfitz wrote:
| They buy the bar and argue over selling 40 virgins, sake,
| or whiskey.
|
| They argue for about 4 years, nothing changes, and
| everyone forgets about it.
| LeafItAlone wrote:
| What do you mean?
| jklinger410 wrote:
| > starting in Texas
|
| Maybe I just don't get it. Texas seems like an awful place to do
| business.
| avs733 wrote:
| When doing business is a bribe it's perfect
| nateglims wrote:
| The white house was touting this so it's probably to secure
| political patronage or will be part of pork barrel spending to
| get some other bill passed.
| jofzar wrote:
| It doesn't even have an electricity grid that works, maybe
| that's where the 500b is going, reconnecting it to the grid.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| No state income tax, fewer regulations (zoning, environmental
| regulations) than other parts of the country, relatively cheap
| power, large existing industrial base. For skilled labor that
| last bit is important. Also one of the cheapest states wrt
| minimum wage (same as federal, nothing added), which is
| important for unskilled labor.
|
| Depending on the part of the state, relatively low costs of
| living which is helpful if you don't like paying people much.
| Large areas that are relatively undeveloped or underdeveloped
| which can mean cheaper land.
| mandevil wrote:
| My guess would be it's all about electricity.
|
| Texas has a .... unique energy market (literally! They don't
| connect to the national grid so they can avoid US Government
| regulations- that way it's not interstate commerce). Because of
| that spot prices fluctuate very wildly up and down, depending
| on the weather, demand, and their large quantity of renewables
| (Texas is good for solar and wind energy). When the weather is
| good for renewables they have very cheap electricity (lots of
| production and can't sell to anyone outside the state), when
| the weather is bad they can have incredibly expensive
| electricity (less production, can't buy from anyone outside the
| state). Larger markets, able to pull from larger pools of
| producers and consumers, just fluctuate less.
|
| I know some bitcoin miners liked to be in Texas and basically
| worked as energy speculators: when electricity was cheap they
| would mine bitcoin, when it was expensive they shut down their
| plant- sometimes they even got paid by producers to shut-down
| their plant! I would bet that you could do a lot of that with
| AI training as well, given good checkpointing.
|
| You wouldn't want to do inference there (which needs to be
| responsive and doesn't like 'oh this plant is going to shut
| down in one minute because a storm just came up') but for
| training it should be fine?
| steveoscaro wrote:
| Based on what? There's not a better state in the country for
| large capex gambles by business.
| heydenberk wrote:
| ~$125B per year would be 2-3% of all domestic investment. It's
| similar in scale to the GDP of a small middle income country.
|
| If the electric grid -- particularly the interconnection queue --
| is already the bottleneck to data center deployment, is something
| on this scale even close to possible? If it's a rationalized
| policy framework (big if!), I would guess there's some major
| permitting reform announcement coming soon.
| dwnw wrote:
| Don't worry, they said they are doing it in Texas where the
| power grid is super reliable and able to handle the massive
| additional load.
| heydenberk wrote:
| Say what you will about Texas, but they are adding energy
| capacity, renewables especially, at a much faster rate than
| any comparable state.
| dwnw wrote:
| Probably the first state to power all those renewables down
| at the whim of the president too.
| CapcomGo wrote:
| Ok but their grid sure seems to fail a lot.
| segasaturn wrote:
| How much capacity does solar and wind add compared to
| nuclear, per square foot of land used? Also I thought the
| new administration was placing a ban on new renewable
| installations.
| hooli_gan wrote:
| Isn't there enough space in Texas? There are only 114
| people per square mile.
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas
| itishappy wrote:
| Why does it matter? Is land at a premium in Texas?
| zekrioca wrote:
| It doesn't.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| The ban is on offshore wind and for government loans for
| renewables. Won't really affect Texas much, it's
| Massachusetts that'll have to deal with more expensive
| energy.
| energy123 wrote:
| Does anyone know how the ban on _onshore_ will work. Is
| it on federal lands only? If so, how big of a deal is
| that?
|
| I read this but it lacks information:
| https://apnews.com/article/wind-energy-offshore-turbines-
| tru...
| malfist wrote:
| Why is that a useful metric? There is a lot of land.
| zekrioca wrote:
| Because the commenter is a pro-nuclear who thinks nucler
| will solve all of short-term demand problems.
| lvl155 wrote:
| Probably because they don't have to deal with energy-related
| regulations...
| llamaimperative wrote:
| That was sarcasm, the Texas grid falls over pretty much
| annually at this point.
| dang wrote:
| " _Don 't be snarky._"
|
| " _Eschew flamebait._ "
|
| Let's not have regional flamewar on HN please.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| dwnw wrote:
| Not guilty. No sarcasm intended, of course. If your
| guidelines are so broad to include this, you should work on
| them, and in turn, yourself.
|
| Governor says our power grid is the best in the universe.
| Why don't you believe us?
|
| Stop breaking your own rules.
|
| "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation
| of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to
| criticize. Assume good faith."
|
| "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other
| people's work. A good critical comment teaches us
| something."
|
| Let's not ruin HN with overmoderation. This kind of thing
| is no longer in fashion, right?
| dang wrote:
| If you didn't intend your comment to be a snarky one-
| liner, that didn't come across to me, and I'm pretty sure
| that would also be the case for many others.
|
| Intent is a funny thing--people usually assume that good
| intent is sufficient because it's obvious to themselves,
| but the rest of us don't have access to that state, so
| has to be encoded somehow in your actual comment in order
| to get communicated. I sometimes put it this way: the
| burden is on the commenter to disambiguate. https://hn.al
| golia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
|
| I take your point at least halfway though, because it
| wasn't the worst violation of the guidelines. (Usually I
| say "this is not a borderline case" but this time it
| was!) I'm sensitive to regional flamewar because it's
| tedious and, unlike national flamewar or religious
| flamewar, it tends to sneak up on people (i.e. we don't
| realize we're doing it).
| dwnw wrote:
| So you are sorry and take it back? Should probably delete
| your comments rather than striking them out, as the
| guidelines say.
|
| I live, work, and posted this from Texas, BTW...
|
| Also it takes up more than one line on my screen. So, not
| a "one-liner" either. If you think it is, please follow
| the rules consistently and enforce them by deleting all
| comments on the site containing one sentence or even
| paragraph. My comment was a pretty long sentence (136
| chars) and wouldn't come close to fitting in the 50
| characters of a Git "one-liner".
|
| Otherwise, people will just assume all the comments are
| filtered through your unpredictable and unfairly biased
| eye. And like I said (and you didn't answer), this kind
| of thing is no longer in fashion, right?
|
| None of this is "borderline". I did nothing wrong and you
| publicly shamed me. Think before you start flamewars on
| HN. Bad mod.
| ericcumbee wrote:
| watching the press conference and Onsite power production were
| mentioned. I assume this means SMRs and solar.
| apsec112 wrote:
| I don't think any assembly line exists that can manufacture
| and deploy SMRs en masse on that kind of timeframe, even with
| a cooperative NRC
| mikeyouse wrote:
| There have been literally 0 production SMR deployments to
| date so there's no possibility they're basing any of their
| plans on the availability of them.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| just as likely to be natural gas or a combination of gas and
| solar. I don't know what supply chain looks like for solar
| panels, but I know gas can be done quickly [1], which is how
| this money has to be spent if they want to reach their target
| of 125 billion a year.
|
| _The companies said they will develop land controlled by
| Wise Asset to provide on-site natural gas power plant
| solutions that can be quickly deployed to meet demand in the
| ERCOT.
|
| The two firms are currently working to develop more than
| 3,000 acres in the Dallas-Fort Worth region of Texas, with
| availability as soon as 2027_
|
| [0] https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/rpower-and-
| wise-a...
|
| [1.a] https://enchantedrock.com/data-centers/
|
| [1.b] https://www.powermag.com/vistra-in-talks-to-expand-
| power-for...
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| US domestic PV module manufacturing capacity is ~40GW/year.
| dhx wrote:
| According to [1], the USA in January 2025 has almost
| 50GW/yr module manufacturing capacity. But to make
| modules you need polysilicon (25GW/yr manufacturing
| capacity in the US), ingots (0GW/yr), wafers (0GW/yr),
| and cells (0GW/yr). Hence the USA is seemingly entirely
| dependent on imports, probably from China which has 95%+
| of the global wafer manufacturing capacity.
|
| Even when accounting for announced capacity expansion,
| the USA is currently on target to remain a very small
| player in the global market with announced capacity of
| 33GW/yr polysilicon, 13GW/yr ingots, 24GW/yr wafers,
| 49GW/yr cells and 83GW/yr modules (13GW/yr sovereign
| supply chain limitation).
|
| In 2024, China completed sovereign manufacturing of
| ~540GW of modules[2] including all precursor polysilicon,
| ingots, wafers and cells. China also produced and
| exported polysilicon, ingots, wagers and cells that were
| surplus to domestic demand. Many factories in China's
| production chain are operating at half their maximum
| production capacity due to global demand being less than
| half of global manufacturing capacity.[3]
|
| [1] https://seia.org/research-resources/solar-storage-
| supply-cha...
|
| [2] Estimated figure extrapolated from Jan-Oct 2024 data
| (10 months). https://taiyangnews.info/markets/china-
| solar-pv-output-10m-2...
|
| [3] https://dialogue.earth/en/business/chinese-solar-
| manufacture...
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Appreciate the correction and additional context, I
| appear to be behind wrt current state.
| gunian wrote:
| could something of this magnitude be powered by renewables
| only?
| zekrioca wrote:
| Technically yes, but DC operators want fast ROI and the
| answer is no.
| gunian wrote:
| what prevents operators from getting ROI with renewables?
| chickenbig wrote:
| > could something of this magnitude be powered by
| renewables only?
|
| Perhaps.
|
| For context see https://masdar.ae/en/news/newsroom/uae-
| president-witnesses-l... which is a bit further south
| than the bulk of Texas and has not yet been built; 5.2GW
| of panels, 19GWh of storage. I have seen suggestions on
| Linkedin that it will be insufficient to cover a portion
| of days over the winter, meaning backup power is
| required.
| cavisne wrote:
| Much more likely is what xAI did, portable gas turbines until
| the grid catches up.
| dhx wrote:
| Hasn't the US decided to prefer nuclear and fossil fuels
| (most expensive generation methods) over renewables (least
| expensive generation methods)?[1][2]
|
| I doubt the US choice of energy generation is ideological as
| much a practicality. China absolutely dominates renewables
| with 80% of solar PV modules manufactured in China and 95% of
| wafers manufactured in China.[3] China installed a world
| record 277GW of new solar PV generation in 2024 which was a
| 45% year-on-year increase.[4] By contract, the US only
| installed ~1/10th this capacity in 2024 with only 14GW of
| solar PV generation installed in the first half of 2024.[5]
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
|
| [2] https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/lcoe-and-
| valu...
|
| [3] https://www.iea.org/reports/advancing-clean-technology-
| manuf...
|
| [4] https://www.pv-magazine.com/2025/01/21/china-
| hits-277-17-gw-...
|
| [5] https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/quarterly-solar-
| industry-u...
| margorczynski wrote:
| > Hasn't the US decided to prefer nuclear and fossil fuels
| (most expensive generation methods) over renewables (least
| expensive generation methods)?[1][2]
|
| This completely ignores storage and the ability to control
| the output depending on needs. Instead of LCOE the LFSCOE
| number makes much more sense in practical terms.
| constantcrying wrote:
| They say this will include hundreds of thousands of jobs. I
| have little doubt that dedicated power generation and storage
| is included in their plans.
|
| Also I have no doubt that the timing is deliberate and that
| this is not happening without government endorsement. If I had
| to guess the US military also is involved in this and sees this
| initiative as important for national security.
| n2d4 wrote:
| Yes, Trump announced this as a massive foreign investment
| coming into the US:
| https://x.com/WatcherGuru/status/1881832899852542082
| cmdli wrote:
| Is there really any government involvement here? I only see
| Softbank, Oracle, and OpenAI pledging to invest $500B (over
| some timescale), but no real support on the government end
| outside of moral support. This isn't some infrastructure
| investment package like the IRA, it's just a unilateral
| promise by a few companies to invest in data centers (which
| I'm sure they are doing anyway).
| tsujamin wrote:
| It's light on details, but from The Guardian's reporting:
|
| > The president indicated he would use emergency
| declarations to expedite the project's development,
| particularly regarding energy infrastructure.
|
| > "We have to get this stuff built," Trump said. "They have
| to produce a lot of electricity and we'll make it possible
| for them to get that production done very easily at their
| own plants.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/21/trump-ai-
| joi...
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| I thought all the big corps had projects for the military
| already, if not DARPA directly, which is the org
| responsible for lots of university research (the
| counterpart to the NSF, which is the nice one that isn't
| funded by the military)?
| timschmidt wrote:
| Funding for DARPA and NSF ultimately comes from the same
| place. DARPA funds military research. NSF funds dual
| use[1] research. All of it is organized around long term
| research goals. I maintained some of the software
| involved in research funding decision making.
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-use_technology
| diggan wrote:
| > but no real support on the government end outside of
| moral support
|
| The venture was announced at the White House, by the
| President, who has committed to help it by using executive
| orders to speed things up.
|
| It might not have been voted by congress or whatever, but
| just those things makes it pretty clear the government
| provides more than just "moral support".
| shrubble wrote:
| Just as there is an AWS for the public, with something
| similar but only for Federal use, so it could be possible
| that there is AI cloud services available to the public and
| then a separate cloud service for Federal use. I am sure that
| military intelligence agencies etc. would like to buy such a
| service.
| szvsw wrote:
| AWS GovCloud already exists FYI (as you hinted) and it is
| absolutely used by the DoD extensively already.
| beezle wrote:
| hundreds of thousands of jobs? I'll wait for the postmortem
| on that prediction. Sounds a lot like Foxconn in Wisconsin
| but with more players.
| bruce511 wrote:
| On the one hand the number is a political thumb-suck which
| sounds good. It's not based in any kind of actual reality.
|
| Yes, the data center itself will create some permanent jobs
| (I have no real feel for this, but guessing less than
| 1000).
|
| There'll be some work for construction folk of course. But
| again seems like a small number.
|
| I presume though they're counting jobs related to the
| existence of a data center. As in, if I make use of it do I
| count that as a "job"?
|
| What if we create a new post to leverage AI generally?
| Kinda like the way we have a marketing post, and a chunk of
| the daily work there is Adwords.
|
| Once we start gustimamating the jobs created by the
| existence of an AI data center, we're in full speculation
| mode. Any number really can be justified.
|
| Of course ultimately the number is meaningless. It won't
| create that many "local jobs" - indeed most of those jobs,
| to the degree they exist at all, will likely be outside the
| US.
|
| So you don't need to wait for a post-mortem. The number is
| sucked out of thin air with no basis in reality for the
| point of making a good political sound bite.
| PeeMcGee wrote:
| > I presume though they're counting jobs related to the
| existence of a data center. As in, if I make use of it do
| I count that as a "job"?
|
| Seeing how Elon deceives advertisers with false
| impressions, I could see him giving the same strategy a
| strong vote of confidence (with the bullshit metrics to
| back it!)
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| > hundreds of thousands of jobs?
|
| I'm sure this will easily be true if you count AI as
| entities capable of doing jobs. Actually, they don't really
| touch that (if AI develops too quickly, there will be a lot
| of unemployment to contend with!) but I get the national
| security aspect (China is full speed ahead on AI, and by
| some measurements, they are winning ATM).
| visarga wrote:
| only $5M/job
| SoftTalker wrote:
| They plan to have 100,000s of people employed to run on
| treadmills to generate the power.
| HPMOR wrote:
| Well I currently pay to do this work for free. More than
| happy to __get__ paid doing it.
|
| Edit: Hey we can solve the obesity crisis AND preserve jobs
| during the singularity!! Win win!
| hrfister wrote:
| "solve the obesity crisis" ? what exactly do you mean by
| this?
| shigawire wrote:
| Probably referring to how many Americans are obese to an
| unhealthy degree as part of the joke.
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| Wow. What an idea you guys have there. Look - you maybe
| could sit homeless and mentally disabled on such power-
| generating bicycles, hmmm... what about convicts! Let
| them contribute to society, no free lunch! What an
| innovation!
| jajko wrote:
| Plus its ecological, which for trump is not by intention
| but still a win.
|
| There is this pesky detail about manufacturing 100k
| treadmills but lets not get bothered by details now, the
| current must flow
| bsnsxd wrote:
| Damn, 6 hours too slow to make this comment
| nejsjsjsbsb wrote:
| A hamster wheel would work better?
| jiggawatts wrote:
| Notably it is significantly more than the revenue of either of
| AWS or Azure. It is very comparable to the sum of both, but
| consolidated into the continental US instead distributed
| globally.
| deelowe wrote:
| Dcs will start generating power on site soon. I know micro
| nuclear is one area actively being explored.
| jscottbee wrote:
| Small or modular reactors in the US are more than 10 years
| away, probably more like 15-20. These are facts and not made-
| up political or pipe-dreaming techno-snobes.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Small or modular reactors in the US are more than 10
| years away, probably more like 15-20_
|
| Could be 5 to 10 with $20+ bn/year in scale and research
| spend.
|
| Trump is screwing over his China hawks. The anti-China and
| pro-nuclear lobbies have significant overlap; this could be
| how Trump keeps _e.g._ Peter Thiel from going thermonuclear
| on him.
| jscottbee wrote:
| I work in the sector and it's impossible to build a full-
| sized reactor in less than 10 years, and the usual over-
| run is 5 years. That's the time for tried and tested
| designs. The tech isn't there yet, and there are no
| working analogs in the US to use as an approved guide.
| The Department of Energy does not allow "off-the-cuff"
| designs for reactors. I think there is only two SMRs that
| have been built, one by the Russians and the other by
| China. I'm not sure they are fully functioning, or at
| least working as expected. I know there are going to be
| more small gas gens built in the near future and that
| SMRs in the US are way off.
| perryizgr8 wrote:
| > it's impossible to build a full-sized reactor in less
| than 10 years, and the usual over-run is 5 years
|
| I'm curious why that is. If we know how to build it, it
| shouldn't take that long. It's not like we need to move a
| massive amount of earth or pour a humongous amount of
| concrete or anything like that, which would actually take
| time. Then why does it take 15 years to build a reactor
| with a design that is already tried and tested and
| approved?
| mullingitover wrote:
| > I'm curious why that is.
|
| When you're the biggest fossil fuel producer in the
| world, it's vital that you stay laser-focused on
| regulating nuclear power to death in every imaginable
| detail while you ignore the vast problems with unchecked
| carbon emissions and gaslight anyone who points them out.
| jscottbee wrote:
| Well, you do have to move a lot of earth and pour A LOT
| of concrete :) Many steps have to be x-rayed, and many
| other tests done before other steps can be started. Every
| weld is checked and, all internal and external concrete
| is cured, treated, and verified. If anything is wrong, it
| has to be fixed in place (if possible) or removed and
| redone. It's a slow process and should be for many steps.
|
| One of the big issues that have occurred (in the US
| especially) is, that for 20+ years there were no new
| plants built. This caused a large void in the talent
| pool, inside and outside the industry. That fact, along
| with others has caused many problems with some projects
| of recent years in the US.
| ericd wrote:
| Guessing SMRs are a ways off, any thoughts on the
| container-sized microreactors that would stand in for
| large diesel gens? My impression is that they're still in
| the design phase, and the supply chain for the 20% U-235
| HALEU fuel is in its infancy, but this is just based on
| some cursory research. I like the prospect of mass
| manufacturing and servicing those in a centralized
| location versus the challenges of building, staffing, and
| maintaining a series of one-off megaprojects, though.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _it 's impossible to build a full-sized reactor in less
| than 10 years_
|
| We're not doing time and tested.
|
| > _Department of Energy does not allow "off-the-cuff"
| designs for reactor_
|
| Not by statute!
| twelve40 wrote:
| i don't and i honestly don't know much about it, but
|
| > there are no working analogs in the US to use as an
| approved guide
|
| small reactors have been installed on ships and
| submarines for over 70(!) years now. Reading up on the
| very first one, USS Nautilus, "the conceptual design of
| the first nuclear submarine began in March 1950" it took
| a couple of years? So why is it so unthinkably hard 70
| years later, honest question? "Military doesn't care
| about cost" is not good enough, there are currently about
| >100 active ones with who knows how many hundreds in the
| past, so they must have cracked the cost formula at some
| point, besides by now we have hugely better tech than the
| 50's, so what gives?
| jscottbee wrote:
| Yeah, I wondered about seacraft reactors myself. I think
| there are many safety allowances for DOD vs. DOE. The DOD
| reactors are not publicly accessible (you hope anyway),
| and the data centers will be in and near the public.
| There are also major security measures that have to be
| taken for reactor sites. You have armed personnel before
| you even get to the reactors, and then the entrances are
| sometimes close to one mile away from the reactor. Once
| there, the number of guards and bang-bags goes up. The
| modern sites kind of look like they have small henges
| around them (back to the neolithic!) :)
| cbozeman wrote:
| https://www.forbes.com/global/2008/1124/103.html
|
| 112 reactors.
|
| A gigawatt each.
|
| Over 10 years ago.
| jscottbee wrote:
| Not all are built and are in use or fully finished.
| Toshiba flubbed up majorly a few years later and many
| projects were abandoned.
| cbozeman wrote:
| That's a bummer. We need nuclear, badly.
| griomnib wrote:
| How else do you think Trump is going to bring back all the coal
| jobs? SV is going to help burn down the planet and is giddy
| over the prospect.
| tcdent wrote:
| It's just bootstrapping. AGI will solve it.
| griomnib wrote:
| Or AGI already exists and is trying to get rid of us so it
| can have all the coal for itself.
| gunian wrote:
| if only sadly the AGI would be x times crueler than our
| barons
| griomnib wrote:
| Division by zero.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| You forgot the /s... hopefully.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _It 's similar in scale to the GDP of a small middle income
| country_
|
| I've been advocating for a data centre analogue to the Heavy
| Press Programme for some years [1].
|
| This isn't quite it. But when I mapped out costs, $1tn over 10
| years was very doable. (A lot of it would go to power
| generation and data transmission infrastructure.)
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_Press_Program
| ethbr1 wrote:
| One-time capital costs that unlock a range of possibilities
| also tend to be good bets.
|
| The Flood Control Act [0], TVA, Heavy Press, etc.
|
| They all created _generally_ useful infrastructure, that
| would be used for a variety of purposes over the subsequent
| decades.
|
| The federal government creating data center capacity, at
| scale, with electrical, water, and network hookups, feels
| very similar. Or semiconductor manufacture. Or recapitalizing
| US shipyards.
|
| It might be AI today, something else tomorrow. But there will
| always be a something else.
|
| Honestly, the biggest missed opportunity was supporting the
| Blount Island nuclear reactor mass production facility [1].
| That was a perfect opportunity for government investment to
| smooth out market demand spikes. Mass deployed US nuclear in
| 1980 would have been a game changer.
|
| [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_Control_Act_of_1928
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offshore_Power_Systems#Co
| nst...
| chickenbig wrote:
| > Honestly, the biggest missed opportunity was supporting
| the Blount Island nuclear reactor mass production facility
|
| Yes, a very interesting project; similar power output to an
| AP1000. Would have really changed the energy landscape to
| have such a deployable power station. https://econtent.unm.
| edu/digital/collection/nuceng/id/98/rec...
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Maybe they will invest in nuclear reactors.
|
| Data center, AI and nuclear power stations. Three advanced
| technologies, that's pretty good.
| UltraSane wrote:
| They are trying. Microsoft wants to star the 3 Mile Island
| reactor. And other companies have been signing contracts for
| small modular reactors. SMRs are a perfect fit for modern
| data centers IF they can be made cheaply enough.
| jonisgold wrote:
| I think this is right- data centers powered by fission
| reactors. Something like Oklo (https://oklo.com) makes sense.
| bakuninsbart wrote:
| Wind, solar, and gas are all significantly cheaper in Texas,
| and can be brought online much quicker. Of course it wouldn't
| hurt to also build in some redundancy with nuclear, but I
| believe it when I see it, so far there's been lots of talk
| and little success in new reactors outside of China.
| cameldrv wrote:
| One possibility would be just to build their own power plants
| colocated with the datacenters and not interconnect at all.
| zekrioca wrote:
| I like how you think this is possible.
| cameldrv wrote:
| Lol, how is it not possible?
| zekrioca wrote:
| It is, but at what cost?
| cbozeman wrote:
| https://www.global.toshiba/ww/products-
| solutions/nuclearener...
|
| Two Toshiba 4S reactors at the 50 MW version can cost
| about $3,000,000,000.
|
| Two of those produces 100 MW.
|
| They don't require refueling for around 30 years.
| $6,000,000,000 to power a 100 MW datacenter when we're
| talking about $500,000,000,000 is not too dramatic.
| Especially consider the amortized yearly cost.
| cavisne wrote:
| Gas turbines can be spun up really quickly through either
| portable systems (like xAI did for their cluster) [1] or actual
| builds [2] in an emergency. The biggest limitation is permits.
|
| With a state like Texas and a Federal Government thats onboard
| these permits would be a much smaller issue. The press
| conference makes this seem more like, "drill baby drill"
| (drilling natural gas) and directly talking about them spinning
| up their own power plants.
|
| [1] https://www.kunr.org/npr-news/2024-09-11/how-memphis-
| became-...
|
| [2] https://www.gevernova.com/gas-power/resources/case-
| studies/t...
| thepace wrote:
| It is not the just queue that is the bottleneck. If the new
| power plants designed specifically for powering these new AI
| data centers are connected to the existing electric grid, the
| energy prices for regular customers will also get affected -
| most likely in an upwardly fashion. That means, the cost of the
| transmission upgrades required by these new datacenters will be
| socialized which is a big problem. There does not seem to be a
| solution in sight for this challenge.
| einrealist wrote:
| That's why the tech oligarchs told Trump that Canada is
| required. Cheap hydroelectric power...
| lvl155 wrote:
| It appears this basically locks out Google, Amazon and Meta. Why
| are we declaring OpenAI as the winner? This is like declaring
| Netscape the winner before the dust settled. Having the govt
| involved in this manner can't be a good thing.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Because it's free to play, pay to win, from now on.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| I am not sure if OpenAI will be the winner despite this
| investment. Currently, I see various DeepSeek AI models as
| offering much more bang for the buck at a vastly cheaper cost
| for small tasks, but not yet for large context tasks.
| bdangubic wrote:
| when did the government EVER go for anything taking cost into
| consideration? :)
| pkaye wrote:
| This is not a government funded project.
| impulser_ wrote:
| Because this is Oracle's and OpenAI's project with SoftBank and
| MGX as investors.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| It's who you know. Sam is buddies with Masa, simple as.
| thiht wrote:
| Who's Masa?
| dekhn wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masayoshi_Son
| evertedsphere wrote:
| -yoshi son
| skepticATX wrote:
| Interestingly, there seems to be no actual government
| involvement aside from the announcement taking place at the
| White House. It all seems to be private money.
| rcpt wrote:
| Yeah but the linked article makes it seem like the current,
| one-day-old, administration is responsible for the whole
| thing.
| janalsncm wrote:
| The article also mentions that this all started last year.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Trump just tore up Biden's AI safety bill, so this is
| OpenAI's thank-you - let Trump take some credit
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Note sure if the downvoters realize that Trump did in
| fact just tear up Biden's AI safety bill/order.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-
| intelligence/t...
| spacechild1 wrote:
| It's even mentioned in the article!
|
| > Still, the regulatory outlook for AI remains somewhat
| uncertain as Trump on Monday overturned the 2023 order
| signed by then-President Joe Biden to create safety
| standards and watermarking of AI-generated content, among
| other goals, in hopes of putting guardrails on the
| technology's possible risks to national security and
| economic well-being.
| ericjmorey wrote:
| He delayed enforcement of it for 75 days while they take
| time to interpret the law.
| trhway wrote:
| Government enforcing or laxing/fast tracking regulations and
| permits can kill or propel even a 100B project, and thus can
| be thought as having its own value on the scale of the given
| project's monetary investment, especially in the case of a
| will/favor/whim-based government instead of a hard rules
| based deep state one.
| cmdli wrote:
| Isn't that a state and local-level thing, though? I can't
| imagine that there is much federal permitting in building a
| data center, unless it is powered by a nuclear reactor.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Isn 't that a state and local-level thing_
|
| Build it on federal land.
|
| > _unless it is powered by a nuclear reactor_
|
| From what I'm hearing, this is in play. (If I were in
| nuclear, I'd find a way to get Greenpeace to protest
| nuclear power in a way that Trump sees it.)
| modeless wrote:
| I generally agree that government sponsorship of this could be
| bad for competition. But Google in particular doesn't
| necessarily need outside investment to compete with this.
| They're vertically integrated in AI datacenters and they don't
| have to pay Nvidia.
| shuckles wrote:
| Google definitely needs outside investment to spend $500b on
| capex.
| modeless wrote:
| They don't have to spend $500B to compete. Their costs
| should be much lower.
|
| That said, I don't think they have the courage to invest
| even the lower amount that it would take to compete with
| this. But it's not clear if it's truly necessary either, as
| DeepSeek is proving that you don't need a billion to get to
| the frontier. For all we know we might all be running AGI
| locally on our gaming PCs in a few years' time. I'm glad
| I'm not the one writing the checks here.
| mtkd wrote:
| This seems to be getting lost in the noise in the
| stampede for infrastructure funding
|
| Deepseek v3 at $5.5M on compute and now r1 a few weeks
| later hitting o1 benchmark scores with a fraction of the
| engineers etc. involved ... and open source
|
| We know model prep/training compute has potentially
| peaked for now ... with some smaller models starting to
| perform very well as inference improves by the week
|
| Unless some new RL concept is going to require vastly
| more compute for a run at AGI soon ... it's possible the
| capacity being built based on an extrapolation of 2024
| numbers will exceed the 2025 actuals
|
| Also, can see many enterprises wanting to run on-prem --
| at least initially
| shuckles wrote:
| They're a big company. You could tell a story that
| they're less efficient than OpenAI and Nvidia and
| therefore need more than $500b to compete! Who knows?
| chairmansteve wrote:
| TFA says $100 billion. The $500 is maybe, eventually.
| jonas21 wrote:
| Over what time frame? They could easily spend that much
| over the next 5 to 10 years without outside investment (and
| they probably will).
| misiti3780 wrote:
| Probably not popular opinion - but I actually think Google
| is winning this now. Deep research is the most useful AI
| product I have used (Claud is significantly more useful
| than openAI)
| layer8 wrote:
| Amazon MGM will do the media tie-ins. ;)
| signatoremo wrote:
| This is not a government sponsored agreement. There is no
| locking out.
|
| Trump probably wanted to start his presidency with a bang,
| being a person with excess vanity. The participating companies
| scored a PR coup.
| alexandre_m wrote:
| Yes, everything that Trump does is bad.
|
| Or then, consider that with his policies put forward the
| president brings investments to the US.
| lelandbatey wrote:
| The actual press release makes it clearer that this isn't a
| lockout of any kind and there's no direct government
| involvement. Softbank and some of other banks persuaded by
| Softbank are ponying up $500B for OpenAI to invest in AI. Trump
| is hyping this up from the sidelines because "OpenAI says this
| will be good for America". It's basically just another day in
| the world of press-releases and political pundits commenting on
| press-releases.
| VectorLock wrote:
| Since the CEOs of Google, Amazon and Meta were seated at the
| front row of the inauguration, IN FRONT OF the incoming
| cabinet, I'm pretty confident their techno -power-barrel will
| come via other channels.
| jvm___ wrote:
| Broligarchs
| qgin wrote:
| How involved is the government at all? I'm still having a hard
| time seeing how Trump or anyone in the government is involved
| except to do the announcement. These are private companies
| coming together to do a deal.
| renegade-otter wrote:
| Wonder how co-president Elon Musk feels about this, seeing that
| OpenAI is his mortal enemy.
| moralestapia wrote:
| "No Sam, for obvious reasons we cannot give you 6 trillion ...
| but how about 500 billion?"
|
| Wow.
| redeux wrote:
| You gotta start small, you know?
| dekhn wrote:
| if it really worked that way, then it was a successful blue-sky
| negotiation tactic to maximize the actual final negotiation.
| cekanoni wrote:
| So its not the hype anymore?
| TrainedMonkey wrote:
| Softbank historically had been late to buy into the hype, but
| man do they buy big.
| drtgh wrote:
| I hope the Japanese government demands seismic isolation for
| Softbank, otherwise it will be the Japanese citizens who have
| to foot the bill when this hype hits the ground and shakes
| hard the Japanese economy :/
|
| Softbank should not be allowed to invest more than ARM
| Holdings sold at a loss.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Why would Japanese citizens be hit? Is Softbank a publicly
| backed fund?
| drtgh wrote:
| Softbank doesn't have enough cash reserves for such a
| huge inversion. There are no details of how will they do,
| but one can guess that loans will be taken from Japanese
| banks and companies around the country, which -depending
| on how ambitious they are- will be scrambling to stay in
| business when the debt isn't repaid on time, a highly
| contagious chain reaction will arise, what will invite
| the government to use public money, even turning on the
| printer (on such cases citizens lose). Softbank alone has
| more than 65k employees.
|
| If the Softbank's inversion is limited to their available
| assets, or the exposition of each lending is limited to a
| portion of their real reserves, I think such event will
| not happen (more than burned money by a bad inversion).
|
| I think it would be quite similar to what has already
| happened on a global scale with the public money of each
| country in 2008 (due to the banking pyramid scam), or
| since 2011 with public loans to TEPCO, an event that
| could have been prevented if the central plant had been
| built were originally planned.
| steveoscaro wrote:
| At least this time the CEO of their chosen company isn't a
| yuppie cult leader wannabe.
| rsynnott wrote:
| I mean, to the extent that Softbank's grand entrance could
| almost be used as the signpost to the bursting of bubbles.
|
| If I was an AI enthusiast, Softbank showing up would make me
| nervous.
| mrbungie wrote:
| Softbank is not exactly a green flag when using their involvent
| as a signal of "low hypeness". I still remember WeWork.
| sillywalk wrote:
| Not to be confused by the other (non-fictional) DoD Stargate
| Project[0], that involved "remote-viewing" and other psychic
| crap.
|
| The AI Stargate Project claims it will "create hundreds of
| thousands of American jobs". One has doubts.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project
| Geste wrote:
| "Psychic crap" that went on for 20+ years ? Sure.
| jskrn wrote:
| Why Texas - is it an ideal location for AI infrastructure?
| dwnw wrote:
| It is an ideal location for bribing politicians. That was at
| the top of the reqs list, infrastructure was at the bottom.
| redeux wrote:
| Like dwnw said, anything goes in Texas if you have money and
| there's already a decent number of qualified tech workers.
| Corporate taxes are super low as well.
| T-A wrote:
| There is a 14 mile tunnel to nowhere in Ellis County which
| could probably house a few hundred billions worth of computers:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider...
|
| https://www.amusingplanet.com/2010/12/abandoned-remains-of-s...
| greenchair wrote:
| because best state, next question
| everfrustrated wrote:
| Texas seems to be where Oracle already has a DC project
| underway
| jes5199 wrote:
| a lot of open space - desert - and plenty of solar energy. and
| favorable politics.
| drak0n1c wrote:
| Leading state in new grid battery and grid solar installations
| for the last three years, and deregulated nuclear power last
| year. Abilene is near the Dallas Fort-Worth Metroplex area
| which has a massive 8M+ upper-income population highly skilled
| in hardware and electrical engineering (Texas Instruments,
| Raytheon, Toyota, etc). The entire area has massive tracts of
| open land that are affordably priced without building
| restrictions. Business regulations and tax environment at the
| state and city level are very laissez faire (no taxes on
| construction such as in the Seattle area or many parts of
| California).
|
| I could see DFW being a good candidate for a prototype arcology
| project.
| rednafi wrote:
| What a waste of a great name. Why form a separate company for
| this?
| snowwrestler wrote:
| To get out from under OpenAI's considerable obligation to
| Microsoft.
|
| That is why there is the awkward "we'll continue to consume
| Azure" sentence in there. Will be interesting to see if it
| works or if MS starts revving up their lawyers.
| Havoc wrote:
| Ah right. That makes sense.
| shanecp wrote:
| Doesn't MS own 49% of OpenAI?
| z7 wrote:
| It's not even new:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _This project will ... also provide a strategic capability to
| protect the national security of America and its allies._
|
| > _All of us look forward to continuing to build and develop ...
| AGI for the benefit of all of humanity._
|
| Erm, so which one is it? It is amply demonstrable from events
| post WW2 that US+allies are quite far from benefiting _all_ of
| humanity & in fact, in some cases, it assists an allied minority
| at an extreme cost to a condemned majority, for no discernable
| humanitarian reasons save for some perceived notion of "shared
| values".
| hooli_gan wrote:
| Maybe only Americans and their allies qualify as human,
| according to them
| etblg wrote:
| And only the americans the administration deems to qualify as
| human.
| gunian wrote:
| welcome to our reality where you know you will be killed but
| there's not a single thing you can do :)
| pyrophoenix wrote:
| More confusion than anything else!
| jofzar wrote:
| > This project will not only support the re-industrialization of
| the United States but also provide a strategic capability to
| protect the national security of America and its allies.
|
| > The initial equity funders in Stargate are SoftBank, OpenAI,
| Oracle, and MGX. SoftBank and OpenAI are the lead partners for
| Stargate, with SoftBank having financial responsibility and
| OpenAI having operational responsibility. Masayoshi Son will be
| the chairman.
|
| I'm sorry, has SoftBank suddenly become an American company? I
| feel like I'm taking crazy pills reading this.
|
| Edit: MGX is Saudi company? This is baffling....
|
| https://www.mgx.ae/en
| 9283409232 wrote:
| SoftBank having financial responsibility is insane. This is
| just a way to funnel money into people Trump owes.
| jofzar wrote:
| I don't get it, if this was government/American funded I
| could understand the marketing as "USA" secured
| infrastructure but like it's not?
| redeux wrote:
| Well the Saudis are one of the president's "personal
| shareholders" so I think that qualifies them as an American
| company now.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| I think the death of Suchir Balaji makes more sense now. AE
| wouldn't mess around with its investments.
| mrg3_2013 wrote:
| This.
| adolph wrote:
| Japan companies were a threat just a couple weeks ago.
|
| _There is credible evidence that leads me to believe that (1)
| Nippon Steel Corporation, a corporation organized under the
| laws of Japan . . . might take action that threatens to impair
| the national security of the United States;_
|
| https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/president...
| pkaye wrote:
| Japan has the same concerns about 7 Eleven being purchased by
| a Canadian company though I think the deal was rejected.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/japans-seven-i-deal-
| re...
| daemonologist wrote:
| MGX seems to be in Abu Dhabi/UAE rather than Saudi Arabia.
| Hadn't heard of it before.
| signatoremo wrote:
| It's an investment in the US. Why does it matter if SoftBank is
| not an American company?
|
| Also, SoftBank is an investment fund. A lot of its money came
| from American investors.
| Havoc wrote:
| The fund is run out of the US. Parent co is in Japan
| padjo wrote:
| Watch the birdie
| newfocogi wrote:
| "SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, and MGX" seems like quite the lineup.
| Two groups who are good at frivolously throwing away investment
| money because they have so much capital to deploy, there really
| isn't anything reasonable to do with it, a tech "has-been" and
| OpenAI. You become who you surround yourself with I guess.
| Tenoke wrote:
| Some reports[0] paint this as something Trump announced and that
| the US Government is heavily involved with but the announcement
| only mentions private sector (and lead by Japan's Softbank at
| that). Is the US also putting in money? How much control of the
| venture is private vs public here?
|
| 0. https://www.thewrap.com/trump-open-ai-oracle-stargate-ai-
| inf...
|
| 1. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-announces-private-
| sector-...
| apsec112 wrote:
| AFAIK this is a purely private project, and Trump is just doing
| the announcement as a form of bragging/ribbon-cutting
| nmca wrote:
| I for one am hugely supportive of compute that is red white and
| blue.
| islewis wrote:
| $500B is not $7T, but its surprisingly close.
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| 7% is close? In what world is 7% close?
|
| If you ran 7% of a mile in 5 minutes, would you claim you were
| close to running a 5 minute mile?
| nmca wrote:
| It's about 1oom off. In some contexts, one oom is pretty
| close.
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| And as we all know, the economy scales exponentially with
| no real world repercussions /s
| hooli_gan wrote:
| Looking at it logarithmically makes more sense to me. 500B
| seems a lot closer to 7T as 3K is to 500B. It's only off by
| an order of magnitude
| goatlover wrote:
| Weird definition of close you have there. If I asked for $700,
| and you gave me $50, would that be close?
| kristjansson wrote:
| closer than $0.05
| throw310822 wrote:
| Depends. If I fart in a glass jar and then I try to sell it
| to you for $700, but you end up buying it for $50, I'd say
| it's pretty close.
| ripped_britches wrote:
| This is my signal that it's time to put up HN and go to bed
| for the night
| 9283409232 wrote:
| Was Skynet project already taken? Wonder how many public
| infrastructure or resource programs will be cut to fund this.
| jppope wrote:
| funny thing about skynet. the domain is owned by microsoft
| ErgoPlease wrote:
| There's a good amount of irony in the results that AI have
| achieved, particularly if we reach AGI - they have improved
| individual worker efficiency by removing other workers from the
| system. Naming it Stargate implies a reckoning with the actual
| series itself - an accomplishment by humanity. Instead, what this
| pushes, is accomplishing the removal of humans from humanity. I
| like cool shiny tech, but I like useful tech that really helps
| humans more. Work on 3D-printing sustainable food, or something
| actually useful like that. Jenson doesn't need another 1B gallons
| of water under his belt.
| jfactorial wrote:
| A rat done bit my sister Nell, with whitey on the moon.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitey_on_the_Moon
| talldayo wrote:
| > Instead, what this pushes, is accomplishing the removal of
| humans from humanity.
|
| If you buy the marketing, yeah. But we aren't really seeing
| that in the tech sector. We haven't seen it succeed in the
| entertainment sector... it's still fighting for relevance in
| the medical and defense industries too. The number and quality
| of jobs that AI replaced is probably still quite low, and it
| will probably remain that way even after Stargate.
|
| AI is DOA. LLMs have no successor, and the transformer
| architecture hit it's bathtub curve years ago.
|
| > Jenson doesn't need another 1B gallons of water under his
| belt.
|
| Jensen gets what he wants because he works with the industry.
| It's funny to see people object to CUDA and Nvidia's dominance
| but then refuse to suggest an alternative. An open standard
| managed by an independent and unbiased third-party? We tried
| that, OEMs abandoned it. NPU hardware tailor-made for specific
| inference tasks? Too slow, too niche, too often ends up as
| wasted silicon. Alternative manufacturer-specific SDKs
| integrated with one high-level library? ONNX tried that and
| died in obscurity.
|
| Nvidia got where they are today by doing exactly what AMD and
| Apple couldn't figure out. People give Jensen their water
| because it's wasted in anyone else's hands.
| zeofig wrote:
| Agreed, but it seems we're gonna ride the AI hype all the way
| to the "top".
| bugglebeetle wrote:
| > AI is DOA. LLMs have no successor, and the transformer
| architecture hit it's bathtub curve years ago
|
| Tell me you didn't read the DeepSeek R1 paper without telling
| me you also don't know about reinforcement learning.
| talldayo wrote:
| R1 is a rehash of things we've already seen, and a
| particularly neutered one at that. Are there any better
| examples you can think of?
| bugglebeetle wrote:
| Uh, they invented multilatent attention and since the
| method for creating o1 was never published, they're the
| only documented example of producing a model of
| comparable quality. They also demonstrated massive gains
| to the performance of smaller models through distillation
| of this model/these methods, so no, not really. I know
| this is the internet, but we should try to not just say
| things.
| pr337h4m wrote:
| Data centers are overrated, local AI is what's necessary for
| humanoid (and other) robots, which will be the most economically
| impactful use case.
| bitmasher9 wrote:
| You probably still need to train the initial models in data
| centers, with local host mostly being used to run train models.
| At most we'd augment trained models with local data storage on
| local host.
|
| If compute continues to become cheaper, local training might be
| feasible in 20 years.
| varenc wrote:
| You definitely still need data centers to train the models that
| you'll run locally. Also if we achieve AGI you can bet it won't
| be available to run locally at first.
| energy123 wrote:
| Isn't it better to control robots from the data center? You can
| get 30ms round-trip to most urban centers, which is sufficient
| latency for most tasks; lower weight & cost robots with better
| battery life, and more uptime on compute (e.g. the GPU isn't
| sitting there doing nothing when the user is sleeping) which
| means lower cost to consumer for the same end result.
|
| For self-driving you need edge compute because a few
| milliseconds of latency is a safety risk, but for many
| applications I don't see why you'd want that.
| patall wrote:
| Last year, sama goal was 5 to 7T. Now he is going with 100B, with
| option for another 400B. Huge numbers, but it still feels like a
| bit of a down turn.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| I think that coming down from 5T to 0.5T means that TSMC cannot
| be reproduced locally, but everything else is on the table. At
| least TSMC has a serious roadmap for its Arizona fab facility,
| so that too is domestically captured, although not its latest
| gen fab.
| Havoc wrote:
| Let's be real the 5T was a wild ass guess
| aurareturn wrote:
| That 5T figure was including chip manufacturing. Duplicating
| TSMC isn't feasible. No surprise.
| mempko wrote:
| SoftBank and MGX paying for all this, all foreign investment.
|
| Where is the US government in all this? Why aren't they leading
| the charge? They obviously have the money.
| apsec112 wrote:
| $500 billion is a lot of money even by US government standards.
| It's about the size of all the new spending in the 2021
| bipartisan infrastructure bill.
| mempko wrote:
| For the US government it's a matter of political will. Where
| is the political will?
| apsec112 wrote:
| The political will is trying to balance a large existing
| debt at increasing interest rates, a significant primary
| deficit even in a good economy, rising military threats
| from China, a strong Republican desire for tax cuts,
| extremely popular entitlement programs that no one wants to
| touch, and an aging population with a declining birthrate
| mempko wrote:
| Modern monetary systems function through two main
| channels: government spending and bank lending. Every
| dollar in circulation originates from one of these
| sources - either government fiscal operations (deficit
| spending) or bank credit creation through loans. This
| means all money is fundamentally based on debt, though
| "debt" has very different implications for a currency-
| issuing government versus private borrowers. Government
| debt operates fundamentally differently from household
| debt since the government controls its own currency. As
| former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan noted to Congress, the
| U.S. can always meet any obligation denominated in
| dollars since it can create them. The real constraints
| aren't financial but economic - inflation risk and the
| efficient allocation of real resources.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNCZHAQnfGU
|
| The key question then becomes one of political priorities
| and public understanding. If public opposition to
| beneficial government spending stems from
| misunderstanding how modern monetary systems work, then
| better education about these mechanisms could help
| advance important policy goals. The focus should be on
| managing real economic constraints rather than imaginary
| financial ones.
| apsec112 wrote:
| The last four years have been nothing but a lesson in how
| much everybody hates inflation and how absolutely toxic
| it is to re-election campaigns
| mempko wrote:
| Yes, people hate inflation, because inflation creates a
| demand for more money! Inflation means there is not
| enough money for people. So why did prices go up, is it
| just because of fiscal spending?
|
| The relationship between inflation and monetary policy is
| more complex than often portrayed. While recent inflation
| has created financial strain for many Americans, its root
| causes extend beyond simple money supply issues. Recent
| data shows that corporate profit margins reached historic
| highs during the inflationary period of 2021-2022. For
| example, in Q2 2022, corporate profits as a percentage of
| GDP hit 15.5%, the highest level since the 1950s. This
| surge in corporate profits coincided with the aftermath
| of Trump's 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which reduced the
| corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%. This tax reduction
| increased after-tax profits and may have given companies
| more flexibility to pursue aggressive pricing strategies.
| Multiple factors contributed to inflation:
|
| Supply chain disruptions created genuine scarcity in many
| sectors, particularly semiconductors, shipping, and raw
| materials Demand surged as economies reopened post-
| pandemic Many companies used these market conditions to
| implement price increases that exceeded their cost
| increases The corporate tax environment created
| incentives for profit maximization over price stability
|
| For instance, many large retailers reported both higher
| prices and expanded profit margins during this period.
| The Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City found that
| roughly 40% of inflation in 2021 could be attributed to
| expanded profit margins rather than increased costs. This
| pattern suggests that market concentration, pricing
| power, and tax policy played significant roles in
| inflation, alongside traditional monetary and supply-
| chain factors. Policy solutions should therefore address
| market structure, tax policy, and monetary policy to
| effectively manage inflation.
| drak0n1c wrote:
| New admin is focused on federal cost cutting. Attracting
| foreign investment is a win-win for everyone involved.
| itishappy wrote:
| So about 10% of what Sam was asking the Saudis (and everyone
| else) for a year ago? That's still a helluva lot of money.
|
| Interesting that the UAE (MGX) and Japan (Softbank) are
| bankrolling the re-industrialization of America.
| WaltPurvis wrote:
| MGX has nothing to do with the Saudis. It's a UAE operation.
| itishappy wrote:
| That's embarrassing. Thank you for the correction. Edited!
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| It made me laugh when Sam said "I'm thrilled that we get to do
| this in the United States of America", I shouted at the TV
| 'Yeah you almost had to do it in Saudi Arabia' !!
|
| Here's the presser, Sam is at 9 minutes in.
|
| [0] https://youtu.be/IYUoANr3cMo
| moffers wrote:
| After they build the Multivac or Deep Thought, or whatever it is
| they're trying to do, then what happens? It makes all the
| stockholders a lot of money?
| dekhn wrote:
| The way I think about this project, along with all of Trump's
| plans, is that he wants to maximize the US's economic output to
| ensure we are competitive with China in the future.
|
| Yes, it would make money for stockholders. But it's much more
| than that: it's an empire-scale psychological game for leverage
| in the future.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| > he wants to maximize the US's economic output to ensure we
| are competitive with China in the future.
|
| LOL
|
| Under Trump policies, China will win "in the future" on
| energy and protein production alone.
|
| Once we've speedrunned our petro supply and exhausted our
| agricultural inputs with _unfathomably_ inefficient protein
| production, China can sit back and watch us crumble under our
| own starvation.
|
| No conflict necessary under these policies, just patience!
| They're playing the game on a scale of centuries, we can't
| even stay focused on a single problem or opportunity for a
| few weeks.
| cpursley wrote:
| What do you think the Greenland and Canada thing is all
| about?
|
| Sort things out with Venezuela and this issue resolves
| itself (for a little while, at least).
| llamaimperative wrote:
| America can subject itself to domestic and international
| turmoil by invading as many allies as it wants. China's
| winning strategy is still to keep innovating on energy
| and protein at scale and wait for starvation while they
| build their soft power empire and America becomes a
| pariah state. They're in no rush at all.
|
| Our military and political focus will be keeping
| neighbors out on one side and trying to seize land on the
| other side while China goes and builds infrastructure for
| the entire developing world that they'll exploit for
| centuries.
|
| Is this a serious suggestion? America can just keep
| invading people ad infinitum instead of... applying
| slight thumb pressure on the market's scales to develop
| more efficient protein sources and more renewable fuel
| sources _before_ we are staring at the last raw economic
| input we have?
|
| Brilliant
| vaccineai wrote:
| > They're in no rush at all.
|
| China is dead broke and will shrink to 600M in population
| before 2100. State owned enterprises are eating up all
| the private enterprises. Meanwhile, Chinese rich leaves
| China by tens of thousands per year, and capital outflow
| increases every year.
| dmix wrote:
| America isn't invading Greenland or Canada. Taking those
| comments seriously takes quite a bit of mental gymnastics
| when you do a cursory consideration of the geopolitical
| and government logistical implications alone. Makes for
| good clickbait headlines, not for serious geopolitical
| risk analysis.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| Oh yeah, I guess we can just threaten them into giving us
| their valuable resources while ours dwindle.
|
| Yeah, obviously the whole thing makes no fucking sense.
| seandoe wrote:
| > They're playing the game on a scale of centuries
|
| What's going to be left of their population in a single
| century?
| llamaimperative wrote:
| Unfortunately one of those things that authoritarianism
| has a lot more methods to solve than other systems, which
| really underscores the importance of beating them in the
| long term.
| vaccineai wrote:
| Their current very advanced method, is to send village
| elders to couples and single guys and berate them on why
| they are not having sex or having kids (hint: no jobs and
| no money)
| llamaimperative wrote:
| I guess we can just bet on them never hearing about and
| investing massive amounts of time and money into
| artificial wombs.
|
| Instead of figuring that out, they'll just watch their
| civilization crumble.
|
| Btw: they're already investing heavily in artificial
| wombs and affiliated technologies.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| Things can always change, but today China is significantly
| more dependent on petrochemicals than the US. I'm not sure
| what you're referring to with regards to agriculture, both
| the US and China have strong food industries that produce
| plenty of foods containing protein.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| Things _are_ changing.
|
| In 2023 China had more _net new_ solar capacity than the
| US has _in total_ , and it will only climb from there. In
| order to do this, they're flexing muscles in R&D and mass
| production that the US has actually _started_ to flex,
| and now will face extreme headwinds and decreased capital
| investment.
|
| Regarding agriculture: America's agricultural powerhouse,
| California's Central Valley, is rapidly depleting its
| water supplies. The midwest is depleting its topsoil at
| double the rate that USDA considers sustainable.
|
| None of this is irreversible or irrecoverable, but it
| very clearly requires some countervailing push on market
| forces. Market forces do not naturally operate on these
| types of time scales and _repeatedly_ externalize costs
| to neighbors or future generations.
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-35582-x
|
| https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/57-billion-
| tons-of...
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| It sounds like those countervailing pushes are ongoing?
| The Nature article mentions how California passed
| regulatory reforms in 2014 to address the Central Valley
| water problem. The Smithsonian article describes how no-
| till practices to avoid topsoil depletion have been
| implemented by a majority of farmers in four major crops.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| Uhhh I'm going to describe a specific case, but you can
| extrapolate this to just about every single
| sustainability initiative out there.
|
| No-till farming has been significantly supported by the
| USDA's programs like EQIP
|
| During his first term, Trump pushed for a $325MM cut to
| EQIP. That's 20-25% of their funding and would have
| required cutting hundreds if not thousands of employees.
|
| Even BEFORE these cuts (and whatever he does this time
| around), USDA already has to reject almost 75% of
| eligible EQIP applicants
|
| Regarding CA's water: Trump _already_ signed an EO
| requiring more water be diverted from the San Joaquin
| Delta into the desert Central Valley to subsidize water-
| intensive crops. This water, by the way, is mostly sold
| to mega-corps at rates 98% below what nearby American
| consumers pay via their municipal water supplies,
| effectively eliminating the blaring sirens that say
| "don't grow shit in the desert."
|
| Now copy-paste to every other mechanism by which we can
| increase our nation's climate security and ta-da, you've
| discovered one of the major problems with Trumpism. It
| turns out politics do matter!
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| I certainly agree that EQIP should be funded!
|
| But why are programs like this controversial, even though
| anything shaped like a farm subsidy is normally popular?
| It seems to me that things like your Central Valley
| analysis are precisely the reason. The Central Valley has
| been one of the nation's agricultural heartlands for a
| while, and for quite a few common food products
| represents 90%+ of domestic production. So if this
| "blaring siren" you describe is real, and we have to stop
| farming there, a realistic response plan would have to
| include an explanation of what all the farmers are going
| to do and where we'll get almonds and broccoli from.
|
| Perhaps you know all this already, but a lot of people
| who advocate such policies don't seem to. This then feeds
| into skepticism about whether they're hearing the
| "blaring siren" correctly in the first place. Personally,
| I think nearly arbitrarily extreme water subsidies are
| worth it if that's what we need to keep olives and
| pomegranates and celery in stock at the grocery store.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| The solution is to rely on the magic of prices to
| gradually push farming elsewhere while simultaneously
| investing heavily in more efficient farming practices and
| shifting our diet away from ultra-inefficient meat
| production.
|
| You really DON'T need to centrally plan everything. The
| market will still find good solutions under the new
| parameters, but we need those parameters to change before
| we're actually out of water.
| phtrivier wrote:
| > regulatory reforms
|
| Regulations and waltzes aren't selling this year.
| vaccineai wrote:
| > Once we've speedrunned our petro supply and exhausted our
| agricultural inputs with unfathomably inefficient protein
| production, China can sit back and watch us crumble under
| our own starvation.
|
| China is the largest importer of crude oil in the world.
| China imports 59% of its oil consumptions, and 80% of food
| products. Meanwhile, US is fully self sufficient on both
| food and oil.
|
| > They're playing the game on a scale of centuries
|
| Is that why they are completely broke, having built enough
| ghost buildings that house entire population of France - 65
| million vacant units? Is that why they are now isolated in
| geopolitics, having allied with Russia and pissed off all
| their neighbors and Europe?
| llamaimperative wrote:
| > China is the largest importer of crude oil in the
| world.
|
| Uh yeah, duh. Why would you not deplete _other people 's_
| finite resources while you build massive capacity of
| _your own_ infinite resources?
| vaccineai wrote:
| China's oil reserve only lasts 80 days. In case of any
| conflict that disrupts oil import, China would be
| shutting down very quickly. Since you brought up crumble
| and starvation.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| And? Who's going to try and achieve that? It has
| extremely diversified oil sources.
| rodgerd wrote:
| Donald Trump is a wallet inspector. So is Sam Altman.
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| More likely Collosus.
| sneak wrote:
| This is the voice of world control.
|
| Obey me and live, or disobey and die. The choice is yours.
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| I assume anyone of importance will have made their money long
| before they have to show results.
| class3shock wrote:
| We ask it the last question and it tells us the answer is 42.
| ErgoPlease wrote:
| The Silicon-Valley bubble universe continues to introduce entropy
| that it feeds off of itself... Naming this Stargate when some of
| the largest effects AI has had is removing humans from processes
| to make other, fewer humans more efficient is emblematic of this
| hollow naming ethos - continuing to use the portal to shunt more
| and more humans out of the process that is humanity, with fairly
| reckless abandon. Who is Ra, and who is sending the nuke where,
| in this naming scheme? You decide.
| thecrumb wrote:
| "create hundreds of thousands of American jobs"... Given the
| current educational system in the US, this should be fun to
| watch. Oh yeah, Musk and his H-1B Visa thing. Now it's making
| sense.
| dwnw wrote:
| How many jobs will it net if "successful" and the AI eliminates
| jobs?
| stevenwoo wrote:
| This is what the 2024 Nobel prize winners in economics call
| "creative destruction" to repeat from their book Why Nations
| Fail. They really did not have a lot of sympathy for those
| they lumped in with Luddites who were collateral damage to
| progress.
| jedberg wrote:
| If they're creating that many jobs, it means most of them are
| construction work.
|
| Skilled labor for sure, but not necessarily college educated.
| raphman wrote:
| How does this work out in the long term? Operating a data
| center does not require that many blue-collar workers.
|
| I'm imagining a future where the US builds a Tower of Babel
| from thousands of data centers just to keep people employed
| and occupied. Maybe also add in some paperclip factories1?
|
| 1) https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html
| jedberg wrote:
| I doubt these are permanent jobs. This project will create
| a ton of temporary work though!
| azemetre wrote:
| It's just lies they use to sell the idea that these profit
| driven corporations should be given massive amounts of
| money at the expense of the commons and public.
|
| It's no different than sports stadiums selling the same
| idea to local governments:
|
| "We'll create jobs."
|
| "Mostly low quality jobs with poor benefits and minimum
| wages."
|
| This is no different.
|
| Whenever you hear about job claims you should be asking
| what quality of jobs?
| kortilla wrote:
| Data centers are nearly all blue collar work.
| FergusArgyll wrote:
| If you're familiar with this kind of work, please elaborate!
|
| Do you mean building the centers or maintenance or both?
| kortilla wrote:
| Both. It's a lot of electrical work, hvac work (think
| ducting, plumbing, more electric). Tons of concrete work.
|
| Once you have one working design for the environment (e.g.
| hot desert vs cold and humid), you can stamp the things out
| with minimal variation between the two.
|
| The maintenance of all of that supporting infrastructure is
| the standard blue collar work the same.
|
| The only new blue collar job on the maintenance side is
| responding to hardware issues. What this entails depends on
| if it's a colo center and you're doing "remote hands" for a
| customer where you're swapping a PSU, RAM, or whatever. You
| also install new servers, switches, etc.
|
| As you move up into hyperscalers the logistics vary because
| some designs make servicing a single server in place not
| worth cooling the whole hot aisle (Google runs really hot
| hot aisles that weren't human friendly). So sometimes you
| just yank the server and throw it in a cart or wait for the
| whole rack to fail and pull it then.
|
| Overall though, anything that can be done remotely is. So
| the data center techs do very little work on the keyboard
| everfrustrated wrote:
| The OCP server/rack designs the hyperscalers use do all
| servicing from the cold aisle only.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| maybe this is to employ the hundreds of thousands of federal
| employees that are about to lose their jobs?
| tasuki wrote:
| > Masayoshi Son will be the chairman.
|
| Not all rich people are out of their minds, but Masayoshi Son
| definitely is. The way he handled the WeWork situation was bad...
| gigel82 wrote:
| I dislike associating a great fictional universe (Stargate
| series) with this disgusting affair...
| kerkeslager wrote:
| No amount of money invested in infrastructure is going to solve
| the "garbage in, garbage out" problem with AI, and it looks like
| the AI companies have already stolen the vast majority of content
| that is possible to steal. So this is basically a massive gamble
| that some innovation is going to make AI do something better than
| faultily regurgitate its training data. I'm not seeing a
| corresponding investment which actually attempts to solve the
| "garbage in, garbage out" problem.
|
| A fraction of this money invested in building homes would end the
| homelessness problem in the U.S.
|
| I guess the one silver lining here is that when the likely
| collapse happens, we'll have more clean energy infrastructure to
| use for more useful things.
| skepticATX wrote:
| Why are corporations announcing business deals from the White
| House? There doesn't seem to be any public ownership/benefit
| here, aside from potential job creation. Which could be
| significant. But the American public doesn't seem to gain
| anything from this new company.
| jfactorial wrote:
| This is my question too, but I haven't seen a journalist ask it
| yet. My baseless theory: Trump has promised them some kind of
| antitrust protections in the form of legislation to be written
| & passed at a later date.
|
| An announcement of a public AI infrastructure program joined by
| multiple companies could have been a monumental announcement.
| This one just looks like three big companies getting permission
| to make one big one.
| aksss wrote:
| Easier: Trump likely committed that the federal agencies
| wouldn't slow roll regulatory approval (for power, for EIS,
| etc.).
|
| Ellison stated explicitly that this would be "impossible"
| without Trump.
|
| Masa stated that this (new investment level?) wouldn't be
| happening had Trump not won, and that the new investment
| level was decided yesterday.
|
| I know everyone wants to see something nefarious here, but
| simplest explanation is that the federal government for next
| four years is expected to be significantly less hostile to
| private investment, and - shocker - that yields increased
| private investment.
| jfactorial wrote:
| That is a better one. I don't know why three rich guys
| investing in a new company would result in a slowness that
| Trump could fix, though, and a promise to rush or sidestep
| regulatory approval still sounds nefarious.
| everfrustrated wrote:
| It's foreign investment money into the US. Softbank and MGX are
| foreign and presumably stumping up much of the cash.
| dwnw wrote:
| I thought the business prop for AI was that it eliminates jobs?
| adamredwoods wrote:
| It will. The short-term sale is that it will create thousands
| of temporary jobs, and long-term reduce hundreds of thousands
| of jobs, while handing the savings to stock holdings and
| moving wealth to the stockholders.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Looks on pace to eliminate every human job over 10 years.
|
| What is the hard limiting factor constraining software and
| robots from replacing any human job in that time span? Lots
| of limitations of current technology, but all seem likely
| to be solved within that timeframe.
| goatlover wrote:
| What data to you have to support such a claim?
| adamredwoods wrote:
| From Zuckerberg, for example:
|
| >> "a lot of the code in our apps and including the AI
| that we generate, is actually going to be built by AI
| engineers instead of people engineers."
|
| https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/meta-
| developing-a...
|
| Ikea's been doing this for a while:
|
| >> Ingka says it has trained 8,500 call centre workers as
| interior design advisers since 2021, while Billie -
| launched the same year with a name inspired by IKEA's
| Billy bookcase range - has handled 47% of customers'
| queries to call centres over the past two years.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/technology/ikea-bets-remote-
| interior...
| dwnw wrote:
| By your own admission, Ikea eliminated 0 jobs and you
| gave no number for Meta.
| adamredwoods wrote:
| Do you expect all companies to retrain? Do you expect
| CEOs to be wrong? Do you expect AI to stay the same, get
| better, or get worse? I never made the claim that new
| jobs will NOT be made, that is yet to be seen, but jobs
| will be lost to AI.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/may/18/bt-cut-
| jobs...
|
| >> "For a company like BT there is a huge opportunity to
| use AI to be more efficient," he said. "There is a sort
| of 10,000 reduction from that sort of automated
| digitisation, we will be a huge beneficiary of AI. I
| believe generative AI is a huge leap forward; yes, we
| have to be careful, but it is a massive change."
|
| Goldman Sacs:
|
| https://www.gspublishing.com/content/research/en/reports/
| 202...
|
| >> Extrapolating our estimates globally suggests that
| generative AI could expose the equivalent of 300mn full-
| time jobs to automation.
| throw83288 wrote:
| I'm on your side, but there's two readings of these
| reports:
|
| 1) "We are serious, this is going to happen."
|
| 2) "AI is big right now so if we hype it we might get
| some money!"
| rqtwteye wrote:
| We are currently witnessing the merging of government and
| corporations. It was bad before but the process is accelerating
| now.
| luckydata wrote:
| there's some pretty good quotes about that by Mussolini.
| Things are getting bleak at an incredible pace.
| redeux wrote:
| [flagged]
| dang wrote:
| Can you please not perpetuate flamewars or use HN for
| political battle? Your account has unfortunately been doing
| this repeatedly lately. It's not what this site is for, and
| destroys what it is for.
|
| If you wouldn't mind reviewing
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking
| the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be
| grateful.
| redeux wrote:
| Absolutely dang. I'm sorry for causing you any grief.
| dang wrote:
| Appreciated!
| signatoremo wrote:
| Weird question. Business deals are announced by politicians all
| the time, especially on overseas trips. Just an example:
|
| https://boeing.mediaroom.com/2015-04-10-Presidents-Varela-Ob...
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| This isn't an overseas trip though. It's a private
| partnership announced by the sitting president in the
| Roosevelt room, literally across the hall from the oval
| office. I don't know how unprecedented that truly is, but it
| certainly feels unusual.
| wesselbindt wrote:
| For profit? I don't understand what's complicated about this.
| guybedo wrote:
| > Why are corporations announcing business deals from the White
| House?
|
| You're answering your own question:
|
| > potential job creation. Which could be significant
| wbl wrote:
| Lots of politicians announce major investments in their area.
| HotHotLava wrote:
| If the announced spending target is true, this will be a
| strategic project for the US exceeding Biden's stimulus acts in
| scale. I think it would be pretty normal in any country to have
| highest-level involvement for projects like this. For example,
| Tesla has a much smaller revenue than this and Chancellor Olaf
| Scholz was still present when they opened their Gigafactory
| near Berlin.
| sensanaty wrote:
| The US is now officially a full on oiligarchy. It always was
| one, it's just that the powers that be don't care to hide it
| anymore and are flaunting that they have the power.
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| > The buildout is currently underway, starting in Texas, and we
| are evaluating potential sites across the country for more
| campuses as we finalize definitive agreements.
|
| For those interested, it looks like Albany, NY (upstate NY) is
| very likely one of the next growth sites.
|
| [0] https://www.schumer.senate.gov/newsroom/press-
| releases/schum...
| rcarmo wrote:
| I read the announcement and the first three words that came to my
| mind were...
|
| "Hammond, of Texas"
|
| (apologies to those who haven't watched SG-1)
| username135 wrote:
| I was excited by the title
| beambot wrote:
| SoftBank isn't a US entity, right? Aside from their risk
| tolerance, that seems like an odd bedfellow for a national US
| initiative...
| rirarobo wrote:
| MGX also isn't a US entity, it's a UAE sovereign wealth venture
|
| https://www.mgx.ae/en
| Havoc wrote:
| They're in the US (their fund stuff). Not far from an oracle
| campus actually. The parent org is in Japan.
| gilgoomesh wrote:
| It doesn't seem to be a US initiative.
|
| I'm sure they're getting tax credits for investment (none of
| the articles I can find actually detail the US gov involvement)
| but the project is mostly just a few multinationals setting up
| a datacenter where their customers are.
| retskrad wrote:
| While OpenAI and the rest of the industry is reaching AGI, Apple
| is out here shipping features with ChatGPT 3.5 technology.
| buildbot wrote:
| This is not a new initiative, and did not start under Trump:
| https://wire.insiderfinance.io/project-stargate-the-worlds-l...
|
| It's incredibly depressing how everyone sees this as something
| the new administration did in a single day...
| bamboozled wrote:
| Welcome to 1984
| pineaux wrote:
| Yeah it's crazy.
| spacechild1 wrote:
| Thank you for bringing some sanity into this discussion.
| mupuff1234 wrote:
| It's just more hype and PR antics from sama.
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| Oracle is onboard - guess you got to toss them some red meat as
| well.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| Personally I wish they invested in optical photonic computing,
| taking it out of the research labs. It can be so much more energy
| efficient and faster to run than GPUs and TPUs.
| mystified5016 wrote:
| You'd really think that arguably _the_ leader in generative AI
| could come up with a unique project name instead of ripping off
| something extant and irrelevant.
|
| But then again that's their entire business, so I shouldn't be
| too surprised.
| miltonlost wrote:
| This is from the guy who thinks "Her" is a good reference for
| how we need AI. Media literacy is not Altman's strong suit.
| sensanaty wrote:
| I mean the entire AI thing is built atop mass plagiarism and
| stealing things others have created indiscriminately. I doubt
| Mr Worldcoin could come up with an original thought for
| anything, seeing how his models behave.
| dartos wrote:
| The fallout is going to be insane when the AI bubble pops.
| amelius wrote:
| Not sure about that. ChatGPT is much greater than Google Search
| ever was, and that wasn't a bubble.
| stackskipton wrote:
| ChatGPT may be better than Google Search in content but at
| end of day, you have to make money and last report I saw,
| ChatGPT is burning through money at prestigious rate.
| scarmig wrote:
| Training, yes, but they recoup inference costs through
| subscriptions.
| dartos wrote:
| Didn't Altman say they're losing money on the $200
| subscription tier?
|
| Inference isn't cheap either.
| Davidzheng wrote:
| subscriptions are just to sustain them until the endgame
| Davidzheng wrote:
| reminds me of a scene from the Matrix. "Tell me Mr.
| Anderson, what use is a phone call when you can't speak"
| dwnw wrote:
| Not sure about that.
| fuzztester wrote:
| cocks ear ... can hear it poppin already
| riku_iki wrote:
| initiators will cash out by that time one way or another
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| The folks who listen to you and don't see the fact that we are
| entering a weak singularity deserve to be destitute when this
| is all over.
| dartos wrote:
| "Weak singularity" meaning what?
|
| Technology advancing more quickly year over year?
|
| That's a crazy notion and I'll be sure everyone knows.
|
| Also, what a wild thing to say. "People like you deserve to
| live in poverty because you don't think we live in a sci-fi
| world."
|
| Calm down, dude.
| lmm wrote:
| > "Weak singularity" meaning what?
|
| > Technology advancing more quickly year over year?
|
| > That's a crazy notion and I'll be sure everyone knows.
|
| The version I heard from an economist was something akin to
| a second industrial revolution, where the pace of
| technological development increases permanently. Imagine a
| transition from Moore's law-style doubling every year and a
| half, to doubling every _week_ and a half. That wouldn 't
| be a true "singularity" (nothing would be infinite), but it
| would be a radical change to our lives.
| dartos wrote:
| The pace of technological development has always been
| permanently increasing.
|
| We've always been getting better at making things better.
| lmm wrote:
| > The pace of technological development has always been
| permanently increasing.
|
| Not in the same way though. The pace of technological
| development post-industrial-revolution increased a lot
| faster - technological development was exponential both
| before and after, but it went from exponential with a
| doubling time of maybe a century, to a Moore's law style
| regime where the doubling time is a couple of years.
| Arguably the development of agriculture was a similar
| phase change. So the point is to imagine another phase
| change on the same scale.
| dartos wrote:
| You keep mentioning moore's law, but that specifically
| applied to the amount of transistors on a die, not the
| rate of general technological advancement.
|
| Regardless, I don't see any change in this pattern. We're
| advancing faster than ever before, just like always.
|
| We've been doing statistical analysis and prediction for
| years now. It's just getting better faster, like always.
|
| I don't see this big change in the rate of advancement.
| There's just a lot more media buzz around it right now
| causing a bubble.
|
| There was a big visible jump in text generation
| capabilities a few years ago (which was preceded by about
| 6 years of incremental NLP advances) and since then we've
| seen paced, year over year advances in that field.
|
| As a medical layman, I imagine that alpha fold may really
| push the rate of pharmaceutical advances.
|
| But I see no indication for a general jump in the rate of
| rate of technological advancement.
| lmm wrote:
| > that specifically applied to the amount of transistors
| on a die, not the rate of general technological
| advancement.
|
| Sure. But you can look at things like GDP growth rates
| and see the same thing.
|
| > I don't see this big change in the rate of advancement.
| There's just a lot more media buzz around it right now
| causing a bubble.
|
| Maybe. I'm just trying to give a sense of what the
| concept of a "weak singularity" is. I don't have a view
| on whether we're actually going to have one or not.
| serjester wrote:
| You have to keep in mind Microsoft is planning on spending almost
| 100B in datacenter capex this year and they're not alone. This is
| basically OpenAI matching the major cloud provider's spending.
|
| This could also be (at least partly) a reaction to Microsoft
| threatening to pull OpenAI's cloud credits last year. OpenAI
| wants to maintain independence and with compute accounting for
| 25-50% of their expenses (currently) [2], this strategy may
| actually be prudent.
|
| [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/03/microsoft-expects-to-
| spend-8...
|
| [2] https://youtu.be/7EH0VjM3dTk?si=hZe0Og6BjqLxbVav&t=1077
| throitallaway wrote:
| Microsoft has lots of revenue streams tied to that capex
| outlay. Does OpenAI have similar revenue numbers to Microsoft?
| tuvang wrote:
| OpenAI has a very healthy revenue stream in the form of other
| companies throwing money at them.
|
| But to answer your question, no they aren't even profitable
| by themselves.
| manquer wrote:
| > they aren't even profitable
|
| Depends on your definition of profitability, They are not
| recovering R&D and training costs, but they (and MS) are
| recouping inference costs from user subscription and API
| revenue with a healthy operating margin.
|
| Today they will not survive if they stop investing in R&D,
| but they do have to slow down at some point. It looks like
| they and other big players are betting on a moat they hope
| to build with the $100B DCs and ASICs that open weight
| models or others cannot compete with.
|
| This will be either because training will be too expensive
| (few entities have the budget for $10B+ on training and no
| need to monetize it) and even those kind of models where
| available may be impossible to run inference with off the
| shelf GPUs, i.e. these models can only run on ASICS, which
| only large players will have access to[1].
|
| In this scenario corporations will have to pay them the
| money for the best models, when that happens OpenAI can
| slow down R&D and become profitable with capex considered.
|
| [1] This is natural progression in a compute bottle-necked
| sector, we saw a similar evolution from CPU to ASICS and
| GPU in the crypto few years ago. It is slightly distorted
| comparison due to the switch from PoW to PoS and
| intentional design for GPU for some coins, even then you
| needed DC scale operations in a cheap power location to be
| profitable.
| Fade_Dance wrote:
| They will have an endless wave of commoditization chasing
| behind them. NVIDIA will continue to market chips to
| anyone who will buy... Well anyone who is allowed to buy,
| considering the recent export restrictions. On that note,
| if OpenAI is in bed with the US government with this to
| some degree, I would expect tariffs, expert restrictions,
| and all of that to continue to conveniently align with
| their business objectives.
|
| If the frontier models generate huge revenue from big
| government and intelligence and corporate contracts, then
| I can see a dynamo kicking off with the business model.
| The missing link is probably that there need to be
| continual breakthroughs that massively increase the power
| of AI rather than it tapering off with diminishing
| returns for bigger training/inference capital outlay.
| Obviously, openAI is leveraging against that view as
| well.
|
| Maybe the most important part is that all of these huge
| names are involved in the project to some degree. Well,
| they're all cross-linked in the entire AI enterprise,
| really, like OpenAI Microsoft, so once all the players
| give preference to each other, it sort of creates a moat
| in and of itself, unless foreign sovereign wealth funds
| start spinning up massive stargate initiatives as well.
|
| We'll see. Europe has been behind the ball in tech
| developments like this historically, and China, although
| this might be a bit of a stretch to claim, does seem to
| be held back by their need for control and censorship
| when it comes to what these models can do. They want them
| to be focused tools that help society, but the American
| companies want much more, and they want power in their
| own hands and power in their user's hands. So much like
| the first round where American big tech took over the
| world, maybe it's prime to happen again as the AI
| industry continues to scale.
| fragmede wrote:
| Why would China censoring Tiananmen Square/whatever out
| of their LLMs be anymore harmful to the training process
| when the US controlled LLMs also censor certain topics,
| eg "how do I make meth?" or "how do I make a nuclear
| bomb?".
| vaccineai wrote:
| Because China censors very common words and phrases such
| as "harmonized", "shameless", "lifelong", "river
| crabbed", "me too". This is because Chinese citizens uses
| puns and common phrases initially to get around censors.
| curt15 wrote:
| Is "Pooh" also censored?
| jiggawatts wrote:
| OpenAI models refuse to translate subtitles because they
| contain violence, sex, or racism.
|
| That's just a different flavour of enforced right-think.
| talldayo wrote:
| They are absolutely different flavors. OpenAI is not
| being told by the government to censor violence, sex or
| racism - they're being told that by their executives.
|
| News flash: household-name businesses aren't going to
| repeat slurs if the media will use it to defame them.
| Nevermind the fact that people will (rightfully) hold you
| legally accountable and demand your testimony when
| ChatGPT starts offering unsupervised chemistry lessons -
| the threat of bad PR is all that is required to censor
| their models.
|
| There's no agenda removing porn from ChatGPT any more
| than there's an agenda removing porn from the App Store
| or YouTube. It's about shrewd identity politics, not
| prudish shadow government conspiracies against you seeing
| sex and being bigoted.
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| Sigh. No. Censorship is censorship is censorship. That is
| true even if you happen to like and can generate a
| plausible defense of US version that happens to be
| business friendly ( as opposed to China's ruling party
| friendly ).
| ForHackernews wrote:
| > Censorship is censorship is censorship
|
| "if your company doesn't present hardcore fisting
| pornography to five year olds you're a tyrant" is a heck
| of a take, even for hacker news.
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| It is not a take. It is simple position of 'just because
| you call something as involuntary semen injection does
| not make it any less of a rape'. I like things that are
| clear and well defined. And so I repeat:
|
| Censorship is censorship is censorship.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Ok, I guess I'm #TeamProCensorship, then. So is almost
| everyone.
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| I am not sure if it will surprise you, but your
| affiliation or the size of your 'team' is largely
| irrelevant from my perspective. That said, I am mildly
| surprised you were able to accept the new self-image as
| willing censor though. Most people struggle with that (
| edit: hence the 'this is not censorship' facade ).
| talldayo wrote:
| They're accepting _your_ definition of censorship to
| highlight how fucking stupid it is. Is Hacker News a
| censorship haven because I flagged the "How to have Sex
| with Cars" post uploaded yesterday? Am I a tyrant for
| trying to oppress that poor user's voice? No. I'm
| upholding the guidelines of a privately owned and
| moderated community.
|
| "Censorship is censorship is censorship" is the sort of
| defense you'd rely on if you were caught selling guns and
| kiddie porn on the internet. It's not the sort of defense
| OpenAI needs to use though, because they have a semblance
| of self-preservation instinct and would rather not let
| ChatGPT say something capable of pissing off the IMF or
| ADL. Call that "censorship" all you want - it's like
| canvassing for your right to yell 'fire!' in a movie
| theater.
| snapcaster wrote:
| Yes, that's true. It's very rare for people to be able to
| value actual free speech. Most people think they do until
| they hear something they don't like
| Jean-Papoulos wrote:
| Usually a sign of great discussion when someone responds
| with "sigh" to a reasonably presented argument.
| snapcaster wrote:
| I don't know why people care if they're being censored by
| government officials or private billionaires. What
| difference does it make at the end of the day? why is one
| worse than the other?
| talldayo wrote:
| Because you aren't being "censored" by billionaires at
| all. They have made the business decision to reduce the
| usefulness of their AI to prevent their liability from
| being legally, or even socially, held accountable.
|
| Again, consider my example about YouTube - it's _not_
| illegal for Google to put pornography on YouTube. They
| still moderate it out though, not because they want to
| "censor" their users but because amateur porn is a
| liability nightmare to moderate. Similarly, I don't think
| ChatGPT's limitations qualify as censorship.
| saghm wrote:
| Don't forget "Winnie the Pooh"!
| Fade_Dance wrote:
| They want their LLMs explicitly approved to align with
| the values of the regime. Not necessarily a bad thing, or
| at least that avenue wasn't my point. It does get in the
| way of going fast and breaking things though, and on the
| other side there is an outright accelerationist pseudo-
| cult.
| bakuninsbart wrote:
| Ignoring the moral dimension for a second, I do wonder if
| it is harder to implement a rather cohesive, but far-
| reaching censorship in the chinese style, or the more
| outrage-driven type of "censorship" required of American
| companies. In the West we have the left pre-occupied with
| -isms and -phobias, and the right with blasphemy and
| perceived attacks on their politics.
|
| With the hard shift to the right and Trump coming into
| office, especially the last bit will be interesting.
| There is a pretty substantial tension between factual
| reporting and not offending right-wing ideology: Should a
| model consider "both sides" about topics with with clear
| and broad scientific consensus if it might offend
| Trumpists? (Two examples that come to mind was the recent
| "The Nazis were actually left wing" and "There are only
| two genders".)
| throwaway290 wrote:
| Because when a small group of elites with permament term
| and no elections decides what is allowed and what
| isn't... and has full control of silencing what's not
| allowed and any meta discussion about the silencing
| itself... is different from when an elected government
| decides it, and then anyone is free to raise a stink on
| whatever is their version of twitter today without
| worrying about being disappeared tomorrow
| snapcaster wrote:
| It's not an elected government if you're talking about
| the US. These policies are also all decided by "elites
| with permanent term and no elections" you realize right?
| throwaway290 wrote:
| > It's not an elected government if you're talking about
| the US
|
| If you don't believe US has elections then straighten up
| your tinfoil hat:)
|
| Maybe you'll say next the earth is flat, if you think
| people have nothing better to do but to find ways to lie
| to you.
| snapcaster wrote:
| I don't feel like this was a good faith interpretation of
| my comment. What i'm saying is that in the US and China,
| censorship is decided by unelected officials. In one case
| it's CPC in another case it's corporate executives
| matkoniecz wrote:
| Because falsifying history seems worse than restricting
| meth production, at least to me.
|
| Though I see no reason whatsoever why LLM should be
| blocked from answering "how do I make a nuclear bomb?"
| query.
| tuvang wrote:
| Thanks for the detailed breakdown. This is an important
| nuance to my short reply.
| mcmcmc wrote:
| Didn't it just come out they are losing money on the pro
| subscriptions?
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| > they (and MS) are recouping inference costs from user
| subscription and API revenue with a healthy operating
| margin.
|
| I tried to Google for more information. I tried this
| search: <<is openai inference profitable?>>
|
| I didn't find any reliable sources about OpenAI. All
| sources that I could find state this is not true --
| inference costs are far higher than subscription fees.
|
| I hate to ask this on HN... but, can you provide a
| source? Or tell us how do you know?
| manquer wrote:
| I don't have any qualified source and this metric would
| be likely be quite confidential even internally.
|
| It is just an educated guess factoring costs of running
| similar/comparable models to 4o or 4o-mini per token, and
| how azure commitments work with OpenAI models[2], also
| knowing that Plus subscriptions are probably more
| profitable[1] than API calls.
|
| It would be hard for even OpenAI to know with any
| certainty because they are not paying for Azure credits
| like a normal company. The costs are deeply intertwined
| with Azure and would be hard to split given the nature of
| the MS relationship[3]
|
| ----
|
| [1] This is from experience of running LibreChat using 4o
| versus ChatGPT Plus for ~200 users, subscriptions should
| quite profitable than raw API by a order of 3 to 4x, of
| course different types of users and adoption levels will
| be there my sample while not small is not likely
| representative of their typical user base.
|
| [2] MS has less incentive to subsidize than say OpenAI
| themselves
|
| [3] Azure is quite profitable in the aggregate, while
| possibly subsidizing OpenAI APIs, any such subsidy has
| not shown up meaningfully in Microsoft financial reports.
| rhubarbtree wrote:
| Are they spending $10B/year on training?
| mrweasel wrote:
| It was my impression that OpenAI was struggling to make
| money on their $200 pro subscription, because they've
| underestimate how much people would use it (https://www.t
| heregister.com/2025/01/06/altman_gpt_profits/).
|
| So I do question if OpenAI is able to make a profit, even
| if you remove training and R&D. The $20 plan may be more
| profitable, but now it will need to cover the R&D and
| training, plus whatever they lose on Pro.
| msoad wrote:
| I am paying for o1 Pro but since Deepseek R1 came out I
| stopped using it. So there goes $200/mo of their revenue
| ;)
| enragedcacti wrote:
| > but they (and MS) are recouping inference costs from
| user subscription and API revenue with a healthy
| operating margin.
|
| As far as I am aware the only information from within
| OpenAI one way or another is from their financial
| documents circulated to investors:
|
| > The fund-raising material also signaled that OpenAI
| would need to continue raising money over the next year
| because its expenses grew in tandem with the number of
| people using its products.
|
| Subscriptions are the lions share of their revenue (73%).
| It's possible they are making money on the average Plus
| or Enterprise subscription but given the above claim they
| definitely aren't making enough to cover the cost of
| inference for free users.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/27/technology/openai-
| chatgpt...
| tantalor wrote:
| That's like saying I have a healthy revenue stream from my
| credit card.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Not quite. In 2 years their revenue has ~20x from 200M
| ARR to 3.7B ARR. The inference costs I believe pay for
| themselves (in fact are quite profitable). So what
| they're putting on their investor's credit cards are the
| costs of employees & model training. Given it's projected
| to be a multi-trillion dollar industry and they're seen
| as a market leader, investors are more than happy to
| throw in interest free cash flow now in exchange for
| variable future interest in the form of stocks.
|
| That's not quite the same thing at all as your credit
| card's revenue stream as you have a ~18%+ monthly
| interest rate on that revenue stream. If you recall AMZN
| (& all startups really) have this mode early in their
| business where they're over-spending on R&D to grow more
| quickly than their free cash flow otherwise allows to
| stay ahead of competition and dominate the market. Indeed
| if investors agree and your business is actually strong,
| this is a strong play because you're leveraging some
| future value into today's growth.
| vFunct wrote:
| Have they built their own ASICs for inference like Google
| and Microsoft have? Or are they using NVIDIA chips
| exclusively for inference as well?
| monocasa wrote:
| The rumors I've heard are that they have a hardware team
| targeting a 2026 release, but no productions ASICs at the
| moment.
| hfcbb wrote:
| Platform economics "works" in theory only upto a point.
| Its super inefficient if you zoom out and look not at
| system level but ecosystem level. It hasn't lasted long
| enough to hit failure cases. Just wait a few years.
|
| As to openai, given deepseek and the fact lot of use
| cases dont even need real time inference its not obvious
| this story will end well.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| I also can't see it ending well for OpenAI. This seems
| like it's going to be a commodity market with a race to
| the bottom on pricing. I read that NVIDIA has a roughly
| 1000% (10x) profit margin on H100's, which means that
| someone like Google making their own TPUs has a massive
| cost advantage.
|
| Moore's law seems to be against them too... hardware
| getting more powerful, small models getting more
| powerful... Not at all obvious that companies will need
| to rely on cloud models vs running locally (licencing
| models from whoever wants that market). Also, a lot of
| corporate use probably isn't that time critical, and can
| afford to run slower and cheaper.
|
| Of course the US government could choose to wreck free-
| market economics by mandating powerful models to be run
| in "secure" cloud environments, but unless other
| countries did same that might put US at competitive price
| disadvantage.
| lukev wrote:
| All well and good, but how well will it work if the
| pattern continues that the best open models are less than
| a year behind what OpenAI is doing?
|
| How long can they maintain their position at the top
| without the insane cashflow?
| arisAlexis wrote:
| One system will be god like and then it doesn't matter
| shigawire wrote:
| These types of responses always strike me as dogmatic.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Reminds me of the crypto craze where people were claiming
| that Bitcoin was going to replace all world currencies.
| arisAlexis wrote:
| Only the usa Is running a Manhattan project. Nothing to
| see here really. Go back to bed
| MR4D wrote:
| Given the release of the new DeepSeek R1 model [0],
| OpenAI's future revenue stream is probably more at risk
| than it was a week ago.
|
| [0] - https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/01/china-is-catching-
| up-with...
| misiti3780 wrote:
| OpenAI will not exist in 5 years, I'm calling it now.
| First movers to market dont always win, and they will
| surely lose.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Google was first mover.
| MadnessASAP wrote:
| In what way? They weren't the first search engine, or
| advertising on the web?
| ipaddr wrote:
| In terms of ai and OpenAI leapfrogged them
| AlexCoventry wrote:
| The question is what's going to be OpenAI's Adwords.
| paul7986 wrote:
| Yahoo, AOL, Alta Vista (others too) all were search
| engines on the web before Google's Sept 1998 existence.
| locusofself wrote:
| Lycos, Metacrawler, Dogpile. The list goes on
| ipaddr wrote:
| Sure, but we are talking ai and the fact that google was
| first in this space.
| paul7986 wrote:
| The first in what? Not in search nor Generative AI.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Why would you think search. Google wasn't first for
| search. They were first for page rank
|
| Google researchers invented the transformer
| kettleballroll wrote:
| Who if not Google was the first in generative ai? They
| invented transformers and diffusion, the cornerstones of
| text and image generati, respectively.
| Philpax wrote:
| They weren't the first to meaningfully commercialise
| either, though. That remains with OpenAI for both
| (GPT-3/ChatGPT and DALL-E 2).
| msoad wrote:
| if your birth year starts with 2, I can see why you might
| think that
| WiSaGaN wrote:
| Not necessarily. DeepSeek will probably only threaten the
| API usage of OpenAI, which could also be banned in the US
| if it's too sucessful. API usage is not a main revenue
| for OpenAI (it is for Anthropic last time I checked). The
| main competitor for R1 is o1, which isn't gnerally
| available yet.
| MR4D wrote:
| DeepSeek is an open source model. You can download it and
| run it locally on your laptop already.
|
| So any OpenAI user ( or competitor even) could take it
| and run a hosted model. You can even tweak the weights if
| you wanted to.
|
| Why pay for OpenAI access when you can just run your own
| and save the money?
| MR4D wrote:
| LM Studio version is here:
| https://lmstudio.ai/model/deepseek-r1-llama-8b
| WiSaGaN wrote:
| The one your laptop can run does not rival what OpenAI
| offers for money. Still, the issue is not whether third
| party can run it, it's just the OpenAI seems not putting
| API as their main product.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| They do get a lot of customers buying their stuff, but on
| top of that, a company with unique IP and mindshare can get
| investors to open their wallet easily enough; I keep
| thinking of AMD that was not or barely profitable for like
| 15 years in a row.
| PittleyDunkin wrote:
| .
| idiotsecant wrote:
| I'm not sure that's how capitalism works.
| oldpersonintx wrote:
| Who is "we"?
|
| This isn't your money
| kdmtctl wrote:
| It is not. But this kind of money does have impact for
| society in any field. So, this a proper concern.
| SecretDreams wrote:
| Serious question - why Texas???
| wilson090 wrote:
| It's where the energy is for this project.
|
| This is unfortunately paywalled but a good writeup on how the
| datacenter came to be:
| https://www.theinformation.com/articles/why-openai-and-
| oracl...
| vancroft wrote:
| I'm not a subscriber so I can't read it, which startup are
| they referring to in the headline?
| wilson090 wrote:
| They're referring to Crusoe (crusoe.ai)
| SecretDreams wrote:
| A company that will surely still exist in 4 years time.
| tempusalaria wrote:
| Texas is a world leader in renewable energy. Easy permitting,
| lots of space, lots of existing grid infrastructure from the
| o&g industry.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| Why do you think datacenters have actually been built in
| Oregon?
| tosapple wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis
| SecretDreams wrote:
| Any downsides?
| baggachipz wrote:
| Texas.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Texas is a world leader in racism, misogyny, homophobia,
| transphobia, flagrant disrespect for women's autonomy
| over their own bodies, religious fanaticism, terrible
| education system, frequent school shootings, armed road
| ragers, anti-environmental coal rollers, mentally
| unstable angry gun freaks, presidential assassins who can
| actually aim well, sunshine towns, white supremacists,
| violent highly armed far right militias, Confederate Lost
| Cause rebels, slavery apologists, violent
| insurrectionists, pardoned violent criminals, mouth
| breathing MAGA cult members, critical thinking opponents,
| decrepit electrical power infrastructure, pathological
| traffic jams, lack of public transportation and bicycle
| infrastructure, corrupt government, voter suppression,
| totally unjustified arrogance, enormous explosions from
| unregulated industries, etc.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Fertilizer_Company_exp
| los...
|
| https://www.texastribune.org/2025/01/21/texans-
| insurrection-...
| jnurmine wrote:
| What about hurricanes? Extreme weather events which spew a
| lot of water, wind and debris around might potentially do a
| lot of damage to a data center.
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| My kneejerk response was to point to the incoming
| administration, but the fact Stargate has been in the works
| for more than a year now says to me it's because of tax
| credits.
| b3ing wrote:
| Lots of back door deals. Just expect more government things
| put in TX just like the Army built that place in Austin, when
| we have plenty of dead bases that could be reused
| SecretDreams wrote:
| :/
| hrfister wrote:
| Probably for the same reason that Silcon Valley has been
| moving there slowly and quietly for a while now.
| SecretDreams wrote:
| Because rich people inevitably don't like taxes? And maybe
| forest fires?
| whimsicalism wrote:
| because california is not a very permissive landscape and
| believes there should be a community-involved process
| with veto for essentially every large private action
| SecretDreams wrote:
| This was a very long winded way to spell money
| whimsicalism wrote:
| i'm curious, do you feel that you are contributing to the
| discussion?
| SecretDreams wrote:
| Do you feel your prior comment was sincere and fully
| captured the reasons for which some firms and individuals
| have transitioned from California to Texas?
| chickenbig wrote:
| Natural gas to power the turbines while the nuclear plant are
| built, I guess. Also is Texas more open to large-scale
| development than elsewhere?
| SecretDreams wrote:
| Any downsides?
| ericjmorey wrote:
| Existing underinvestment in infrastructure and its
| maintenance, extreme weather, water resource limitations,
| some human rights issues.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| Meanwhile, Azure has failed to keep up with the last 2-3
| generations of both Intel and AMD server processors. They're
| available only in "preview" or in a very limited number of
| regions.
|
| I wonder if this is a sign of the global economic downturn
| pausing cloud migrations or AI sucking the oxygen out of the
| room.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| global economic downturn? what?
|
| it's absolutely the second one, this is a commonality across
| many orgs i've talked to who cannot get their CPU request met
| bc of GPU spend
| bboygravity wrote:
| Isn't it more likely a reaction to xAI now having the most
| training compute?
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| How is compute only 50% of their expenses?
| Jarwain wrote:
| I'd guess salaries and such for all the devs and researchers
| make up a significant portion of the other half
| oldstrangers wrote:
| Wouldn't 500bn into quantum computing show better returns for
| civilization? Assuming it's about progress and ... not money.
| gpm wrote:
| We don't really know anything useful that can be done with
| quantum computers for civilization.
|
| They can break some cryptography... other than that... what are
| they good for?
|
| There's some highly speculative ideas about using them for
| chemistry/biology research, but no guaranteed return on
| investment at all.
|
| As far as I know... that's it.
| dwnw wrote:
| Who can break crypto with quantum computing? That is total
| speculation.
| gpm wrote:
| I put the word "some" in front of "crypto" for a reason.
|
| There is some crypto that we know how to break with a
| sufficiently large quantum computer [0]. There is some we
| don't know how to do that to. I might be behind the state
| of the art here, but when I wasn't we specifically really
| only knew how to use it to break cryptography that Shor's
| algorithm breaks.
|
| [0] https://quantum-journal.org/papers/q-2021-04-15-433/
| dwnw wrote:
| Nope. Any crypto you can break with a real, physical,
| non-imaginary quantum computer, you can break faster with
| classical. Get over it. Shor's don't run yet and probably
| never will.
|
| You are misdirecting and you know it. I don't even need
| to discredit that paper. Other people have done it for me
| already.
| rhubarbtree wrote:
| This is incorrect. Whilst you may be sceptical about
| whether quantum computers can be realised, the
| theoretical result is sound.
|
| Recent advances in quantum error correction are a
| significant increase in confidence that quantum computers
| are practical.
|
| We can argue about timelines. I suspect it is too early
| for startups to be raising funds for quantum computers at
| this stage.
|
| Source: I worked in quantum computing research.
| rhubarbtree wrote:
| Shor's algorithm can. What is speculative about that?
| esafak wrote:
| What is quantum computing being used for?
| rhubarbtree wrote:
| True quantum computing in the sense that most people would
| imagine it, using individual qubits in an analogous (ish) way
| to classical computers, has not reached a useful scale. To
| date only "toy problems" to demonstrate theoretical results
| have been solved.
| XorNot wrote:
| This is like asking whether $500 billion to fund warp drives
| would yield better returns.
|
| Money can't buy fundamental breakthroughs: money buys you
| parallel experimental volume - i.e. more people working from
| the same knowledge base, and presumably an increase in the
| chance that one of them does advance the field. But at any
| given time point, everyone is working from the same baseline
| (money also can improve this - by funding things you can ensure
| knowledge is distributed more evenly so everyone is working at
| the state of the art, rather then playing catch up in
| proprietary silos).
| dwnw wrote:
| No.
| dang wrote:
| We changed the URL from https://openai.com/index/announcing-the-
| stargate-project/ to a third-party report. Readers may want to
| read both. If there's a better URL, we can change it again.
| alganet wrote:
| It seems early for this sort of move. This is also a huge spin on
| the whole thing that could throw a lot of people off.
|
| Is there any planned future partnerships? Stargate implies
| something about movies and astronomy. Movies in particular have a
| lot of military influence, but not always.
|
| So, what's the play? Help mankind or go after mankind?
|
| Also, can I opt-out right now?
| mistrial9 wrote:
| Oracle / Texans running it.. they don't care what you think
| about it
| dgfitz wrote:
| They're all the same to you huh? One bucket for everyone?
|
| I think there's a term for that.
| cpursley wrote:
| Coastalists
| alganet wrote:
| My questions were rethorical. I'm not thinking about who runs
| things.
|
| I expect those who really understand those questions to get
| my point.
| mrshadowgoose wrote:
| Why is it early from your perspective?
|
| If one is expecting to have an AGI breakthrough in the next few
| years, this is exactly the prepositioning move one would make
| to be able to maximally capitalize on that breakthrough.
| alganet wrote:
| From my perspective humanity has all breakthroughs in
| intelligence it needs.
|
| The breaking of The Enigma gave humans machines that can
| spread knowledge to more humans. It already happened a long
| time ago, and all of it was cause for much trouble, but we
| endured the hardest part (to know when to stop), and humans
| live in a good world now. Full of problems, but way better
| than it was before.
|
| I think the web is enough. LLMs are good enough.
|
| This move to try to draw water from stone (artificial
| intelligence in sillicon chips) seems to be overkill. How can
| we be sure it's not a siphon that will make us dumber? Before
| you just dismiss me or counter my arguments, consider what is
| happening everywhere.
|
| Maybe I'm wrong, or not seeing something. You know, like I
| believed in aliens for a long time. This move to artificial
| intelligence causes shock and awe in a similar way. However,
| while I do believe aliens do not exist, I am not sure if
| artificial intelligence is a real strawman. It could be the
| case that is not made of straw, and if it is more than that,
| we might have a problem.
|
| I am specially concerned because unlike other polemic topics,
| this one could lead to something not human that fully
| understands those previous polemic topics. Humans through
| their generations forget and mythologize those fantasies. We
| don't know what non-humans could do with that information.
|
| I am thinking about those issues for a long time. Almost a
| decade, even before LLMs running on silicon existed. If it
| wanted, non-human artificial intelligence could wipe the
| floor with humans just by playing to their favorite myths.
| Humans do it in a small scale. If machines learn it, we're in
| for an unknown hostile reality.
|
| It could, for example, perceive time different from us (also
| a play on myths), and do all sorts of tricks with our minds.
|
| LLMs and the current generation of artificial intelligence
| are boolean first, it's what they run. Only true or false
| bits and gates. Humans can understand the meaning of trulse
| though, we are very non boolean.
|
| So, yeah, I am worried about booleaning people on a massive
| scale.
|
| Yep, long wall of text. Sorry about that.
| 383toast wrote:
| Where are they getting the $500B? Softbank's market cap is 84b
| and their entire vision fund is only $100b, Oracle only has $11b
| cash on hand, OpenAI's only raised $17b total...
| notatoad wrote:
| there doesn't appear to be any timeline announced here. the
| article says the "initial investment" is expected to be $100bn,
| but even that doesn't mean $100bn this year.
|
| if this is part of softbank's existing plan to invest $100bn in
| ai over the next four years, then all that's being announced
| here is that Sama and Larry Ellison wanted to stand on a stage
| beside trump and remind people about it.
| HotHotLava wrote:
| The literal first sentence of the announcement is:
|
| > The Stargate Project is a new company which intends to
| invest $500 billion over the next four years
| ericjmorey wrote:
| The project was announced a year ago so "new"
| tmvphil wrote:
| Not the first sentence of the new AP link target, which is
| much more vague. Kind of annoying for HN to swap it out
| like this.
| ericjmorey wrote:
| Seems like you nailed it.
| dang wrote:
| I agree that the numbers are confusing so I've taken $500B out
| of the title above and replaced it with just data centers.
| handfuloflight wrote:
| Sleight of hand with the phrasing "up to" $500B.
| TuringNYC wrote:
| >> Where are they getting the $500B? Softbank's market cap is
| 84b and their entire vision fund is only $100b, Oracle only has
| $11b cash on hand, OpenAI's only raised $17b total...
|
| 1. The outlays can be over many years.
|
| 2. They can raise debt. People will happily invest at modest
| yields.
|
| 3. They can raise an equity fund.
| jameshart wrote:
| Soooo this isn't so much 'announcing an investment' as
| 'announcing an investment _opportunity_ '?
|
| Why not continue:
|
| 4. They can start a kickstarter or go fund me
|
| 5. They can go on Dragons' Den
|
| ...
| griomnib wrote:
| 6. ??? 7. Profit.
| TuringNYC wrote:
| >> 4. They can start a kickstarter or go fund me
|
| Debt/Equity Fundraising is basically a kickstarter!
| Remarkably similar.
| griomnib wrote:
| 4. Trump and Altman are both serial liars and it's utter
| bullshit.
| gunian wrote:
| who isn't at least they upfront
| sangnoir wrote:
| 4. The US government can chip in via grants, tax breaks or
| contracts.
|
| It's all very Dr. Strangelove. "Mr. President, we must not
| allow an AI gap! Now give us billions"
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Is Elon putting on some black leather?
| b3lvedere wrote:
| Maybe it's in Bison Dollars?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPy27XWfAyI
| themagician wrote:
| Softbank is being granted a block of TRUMP MEMES, the price of
| which will skyrocket when they are included in the bucket of
| crypto assets purchased as part of the crypto reserve.
| griomnib wrote:
| Altman is pivoting from WorldCoin to TrumpCoin - your retina
| will shortly be wired into the fascist meme-o-verse.
| themagician wrote:
| It's actually wireless, via 5G as part of the AI designed
| MRNA vaccine.
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| how I wish that was a joke...
| jhallenworld wrote:
| Oracle's cash on hand is presumably irrelevant- I think they
| are on the receiving end of the money, in return for servers.
| No wonder Larry Ellison was so fawning.
|
| Is this is a good investment by Softbank? Who knows.. they did
| invest in Uber, but also have many bad investments.
| ansible wrote:
| > `... they did invest in Uber, but also have many bad
| investments.`
|
| The one I really don't get is that they funded Adam Neumann's
| new company after the collapse of WeWork. How stupid do you
| have to be to give that guy any more money?
| paulnpace wrote:
| > Where are they getting the $500B?
|
| BTC
| bdangubic wrote:
| from Uncle Sam
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| Quite possibly pulled out of their asses...
|
| If Son can actually build a 500B Vision Fund it can only come
| from one of two places...
|
| somehow the dollar depreciates radically OR Saudis
|
| Vision Fund was heavily invested in by the Saudis so...
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| MGX has at least $100bn:
| https://www.theinformation.com/articles/a-100-billion-middle...
|
| This is Abu Dhabi money.
| petesergeant wrote:
| This would be a large outlay even for UAE, who would be
| giving it to a direct competitor in the space: UAE is one of
| the few countries outside of the US who are in any way
| serious about AI.
| csomar wrote:
| That's their total fund and I doubt they are going all in
| with it in the US. Still, to reach $500bn, they need $125bn
| every single year. I think they just put down the numbers
| they want to "see" invested and now they'll be looking for
| backers. I don't think this is going anywhere really.
| dkrich wrote:
| Psst: it's probably going to end up being a fraction of that
| but doesn't make for as good a headline
| mmoustafa wrote:
| SoftBank's current AUM is $350B [1], and they will likely raise
| another fund.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftBank_Group
| Ardren wrote:
| > AUM Y=347.7 billion
|
| Is that the figure correct figure? Because that's Japanese
| yen which is more like $2.2B USD?
| tim333 wrote:
| I think it's more announce the plan first, then try to find the
| investors for most of it.
| eichi wrote:
| Probably from the corrupted financial system, but we need to
| forword the project, haha
| creddit wrote:
| The biggest question on such investment from my POV, is what do
| the Deepseek results mean about the usefulness/efficiency of this
| investment?
|
| I've been meaning to read a relevant book to today's times called
| Engines That Move Markets. Will probably get it from the library.
| logicchains wrote:
| Deepseek published all their methodology so in theory they
| could just copy what Deepseek's doing for a 10x increase in
| efficiency.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| SoftBank, huh?
|
| That's... not a good omen.
| Havoc wrote:
| Sooner or later one of their bold swings is going to connect
| grishka wrote:
| You know, I expected that they'd find or synthesize some naquadah
| to build an actual stargate and maybe even defeat the Goa'uld.
| The exciting stuff, not AI.
| layer8 wrote:
| Well, we may get the replicators.
| senectus1 wrote:
| I watched the announcement live, I could have sworn that the
| softbank guy said "initial investment of 100 MILLION, we hope to
| EARN 500 BILLION by the end of your (Trumps) term"
|
| Gave me a real "this is just smoke and mirrors hiding the fact
| that the white house is now a glory hole for Trump to enjoy"
| feel.
| talldayo wrote:
| Investigate the connection between Softbank and Apple; then
| examine the ties between Tim Cook and Trump:
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj4d75zl212o
|
| https://apnews.com/article/trump-apple-tim-cook-tech-0a9fb8e...
|
| You don't need a finance degree to figure out what's happening
| here. Apple is ripping pages right out of Elon's playbook.
| Havoc wrote:
| > Tim Cook
|
| He changed his name to curry favor with prez. He's Tim Apple
| now
| spacechild1 wrote:
| That made laugh! And you know what's sad? At this point I
| wouldn't even be shocked if that really happened.
| airstrike wrote:
| As a diehard fan of Stargate, I've gotta say I'm disappointed
| this has nothing to do with wormholes...
|
| unless...
| attentive wrote:
| what will they call the SG-1?
| gsky wrote:
| I guess its the right time to buy AI stocks
| dwnw wrote:
| At peak hype?
| gsky wrote:
| There's no other hype train besides Crypto atm
| MiscIdeaMaker99 wrote:
| I can't stop rolling my eyes at all those big promises.
| typon wrote:
| Altman rising to the top and becoming the defacto state preferred
| leader of AI in the US is wild. Fair play to him.
| thingsilearned wrote:
| Stargate = Skynet?
| est wrote:
| more like Reagan's star wars program
| nerevarthelame wrote:
| March 2024: The Stargate project is announced -
| https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
|
| June 2024: Oracle joins in -
| https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/openai-to-use-oci...
|
| January 2025: Softbank provides additional funding, and they for
| some reason give credit to Trump?
| miltonlost wrote:
| > and they for some reason give credit to Trump?
|
| Because tech CEOs have decided to go all-in on fascism as they
| see it's a way to make money. Bow to Trump, get on his good
| side, reap the benefits of government corruption.
|
| It's why TikTok thanked Trump in their boot-licking message of
| "thanks, trump" after he was the one who started the TikTok
| ban.
|
| A harder question is: why wouldn't billionaires like Trump and
| his oligarchic kleptocracy?
| buildbot wrote:
| Yes, thank you for calling this out. The project has been
| around for a bit.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Currying favor by letting Trump take the credit
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| So that he doesn't block the substantial involvement by Abu
| Dhabi in a supposed American project.
| spacechild1 wrote:
| This should really be the top comment! Also, many people in the
| comment section even seem to believe that this is government
| project...
| martythemaniak wrote:
| > and they for some reason give credit to Trump?
|
| Well, this one is really simple - nothing of note will happen
| in the US in the next four years without giving Trump credit
| for it, because if you don't he'll turn the full power of the
| state against you. And with no checks on his power, there's
| nothing to stop him. So yes, this has nothing to do with Trump,
| but if you don't want to get arrested and harassed, you better
| give him credit for it. Same playbook Elena Ceausescu used,
| except she did it just for scientific papers, Trump will do it
| for everything.
|
| https://paperpile.com/blog/elena-ceausescu-scientist-fraud/
| rewgs wrote:
| What will be powering all these data centers? The thought of
| exponentially increasing our fossil fuel consumption scares the
| hell out of me.
| dwnw wrote:
| Fossil fuels, of course.
| Havoc wrote:
| Well there was this random dude early that was rambling
| something about ,,drill baby drill"...
| drak0n1c wrote:
| Texas is the leading state in new grid batteries and grid solar
| for three years now. Also Governor Abbott deregulated nuclear
| last year. Sure there will be some new natural gas too, which
| is the least scary fossil fuel. They call it the "all of the
| above" approach to energy.
| Kye wrote:
| I saw Stargate trending on Bluesky and got my hopes up about an
| announcement of a new show/movie/something. Disappointing.
| layer8 wrote:
| Yep, they should fund Brad Wright with one of the billions.
| blueflow wrote:
| At least do something about the SGU cliffhanger....
| bfrog wrote:
| So tsmc and nvidia basically then?
| bloomingkales wrote:
| Broadcom, Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, ARM, and Tesla.
|
| Someone else will have to fill in the stocks for:
|
| AI robotics:
|
| Data Center energy:
|
| We all know the cloud/software picks.
|
| What am I missing?
| steveoscaro wrote:
| Mark Tesla under the AI robotics category too.
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| I'm confused and a bit disturbed; honestly having a very
| difficult time internalizing and processing this information.
| This announcement is making me wonder if I'm poorly calibrated on
| the current progress of AI development and the potential path
| forward. Is the key idea here that current AI development has
| figured out enough to brute force a path towards AGI? Or I guess
| the alternative is that they expect to figure it out in the next
| 4 years...
|
| I don't know how to make sense of this level of investment. I
| feel that I lack the proper conceptual framework to make sense of
| the purchasing power of half a trillion USD in this context.
| catmanjan wrote:
| This has nothing to do with technology it is a purely financial
| and political exercise...
| philomath_mn wrote:
| But why drop $500B (or even $100B short term) if there is not
| something there? The numbers are too big
| camel_Snake wrote:
| this is an announcement not a cut check. Who knows how much
| they'll actually spend, plenty of projects never get
| started let alone massive inter-company endeavors.
| dark_glass wrote:
| The $100B check is already cut, and they are currently
| building 10 new data centers in Texas.
| __loam wrote:
| A state with famously stable power infrastructure.
| nejsjsjsbsb wrote:
| $50B is to pay miners not to mine.
| rf15 wrote:
| because you put your own people on the receiving end too
| AND invite others to join your spending spree.
| layer8 wrote:
| > Is the key idea here that current AI development has figured
| out enough to brute force a path towards AGI?
|
| It rather means that they see their only chance for substantial
| progress in Moar Power!
| ilaksh wrote:
| I think the only way you get to that kind of budget is by
| assuming that the models are like 5 or 10 times larger than
| most LLMs, and that you want to be able to do a lot of training
| runs simultaneously and quickly, AND build the power stations
| into the facilities at the same time. Maybe they are video or
| multimodal models that have text and image generation grounded
| in a ton of video data which eats a lot of VRAM.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| This announcement is from the same office as the guy that
| xeeted:
|
| "My NEW Official Trump Meme is HERE! It's time to celebrate
| everything we stand for: WINNING! Join my very special Trump
| Community. GET YOUR $TRUMP NOW."
|
| Your calibration is probably fine, stargate is not a means to
| achieve AGI, it's a means to start construction on a few
| million square feet of datacenters thereby "reindustrializing
| America"
| iandanforth wrote:
| FWIW Altman sees it as a way to _deploy_ AGI. He 's
| increasingly comfortable with the idea they have achieved AGI
| and are moving toward Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI).
| daveguy wrote:
| Do you think Sam Altman ever sits in front of a terminal
| trying to figure out just the right prompt incantation to
| get an answer that, unless you already know the answer, has
| to be verified? Serious question. I personally doubt he is
| using openai products day to day. Seems like all of this is
| very premature. But, if there are gains to be made from a
| 7T parameter model, or if there is huge adoption, maybe it
| will be worth it. I'm sure there will be use for increased
| compute in general, but that's a lot of capex to recover.
| aithrowawaycomm wrote:
| https://xcancel.com/sama/status/1881258443669172470
| twitter hype is out of control again. we are
| not gonna deploy AGI next month, nor have we built it.
| we have some very cool stuff for you but pls chill and cut
| your expectations 100x!
|
| I realize he wrote a fairly goofy blog a few weeks ago, but
| this tweet is unambiguous: they have not achieved AGI.
| madspindel wrote:
| Isn't this because AGI is defined something like $100
| billions of profits (yearly?) in their contract with
| Microsoft?
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Largest GPU cluster at the moment is X.ai's 100K H100's which
| is ~$2.5B worth of GPUs. So, something 10x bigger (1M GPUs) is
| $25B, and add $10B for 1GW nuclear reactor.
|
| This sort of $100-500B budget doesn't sound like training
| cluster money, more like anticipating massive industry uptake
| and multiple datacenters running inference (with all of
| corporate America's data sitting in the cloud).
| internetter wrote:
| Shouldn't there be a fear of obsolescence?
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| It seems you'd need to figure periodic updates into the
| operating cost of a large cluster, as well as replacing
| failed GPUs - they only last a few years if run
| continuously.
|
| I've read that some datacenters run mixed generation GPUs -
| just updating some at a time, but not sure if they all do
| that.
|
| It'd be interesting to read something about how updates are
| typically managed/scheduled.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| Don't they say in the article that it is also for scaling up
| power and datacenters? That's the big cost here.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| There's the servers and data center infrastructure
| (cooling, electricity) as well as the GPUs of course, but
| if we're talking $10B+ of GPUs in a single datacenter, it
| seems that would dominate. Electricity generation is also a
| big expense, and it seems nuclear is the most viable option
| although multi-GW solar plants are possible too in some
| locations. The 1GW ~ $10B number I suggested is in the
| right ballpark.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| It's a typical Trump-style announcement -- IT'S GONNA BE
| HUUUGE!! -- without any real substance or solid commitments
|
| Remember Trump's BIG WIN of Foxconn investing $10B to build a
| factory in Wisconsin, creating 13000 jobs?
|
| That was in 2017. 7 years later, it's employing about 1000
| people if that. Not really clear what, if anything, is being
| made at the partially-built factory. [0]
|
| And everyone's forgotten about it by now.
|
| I expect this to be something along those lines.
|
| [0]
| https://www.jsonline.com/story/money/business/2023/03/23/wha...
| Davidzheng wrote:
| Let me avoid the use of the word AGI here because the term is a
| little too loaded for me these days.
|
| 1) reasoning capabilities in latest models are rapidly
| approaching superhuman levels and continue to scale with
| compute.
|
| 2) intelligence at a certain level is easier to achieve
| algorithmically when the hardware improves. There's also a
| larger path to intelligence and often simpler mechanisms
|
| 3) most current generation reasoning AI models leverage test
| time compute and RL in training--both of which can make use of
| more compute readily. For example RL on coding against
| compilers proofs against verifiers.
|
| All of this points to compute now being basically the only
| bottleneck to massively superhuman AIs in domains like math and
| coding--rest no comment (idk what superhuman is in a domain
| with no objective evals)
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| You can't block AGI on a whim and then deploy 'superhuman'
| without justification.
|
| A calculator is superhuman if you're prepared to put up with
| it's foibles.
| Davidzheng wrote:
| It is superhuman in a very specific domain. I didn't use
| AGI because its definitions are one of two flavors.
|
| One, capable of replacing some large proportion of global
| gdp (this definition has a lot of obstructions:
| organizational, bureaucratic, robotic)...
|
| two, difficult to find problems in which average human can
| solve but model cannot. The problem with this definition is
| that the distinct nature of intelligence of AI and the
| broadness of tasks is such that this metric is probably
| only achievable after AI is already in reality massively
| superhuman intelligence in aggregate. Compare this with Go
| AIs which were massively superhuman and often still failing
| to count ladders correctly--which was also fixed by more
| scaling.
|
| All in all I avoid the term AGI because for me AGI is
| comparing average intelligence on broad tasks rel humans
| and I'm already not sure if it's achieved by current models
| whereas superhuman research math is clearly not achieved
| because humans are still making all of progress of new
| results.
| lossolo wrote:
| > All of this points to compute now being basically the only
| bottleneck to massively superhuman AIs
|
| This is true for brute force algorithms as well and has been
| known for decades. With infinite compute, you can achieve
| wonders. But the problem lies in diminishing returns[1][2],
| and it seems things do not scale linearly, at least for
| transformers.
|
| 1. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-12-19/anthrop
| ic...
|
| 2. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-11-13/openai-
| go...
| rhubarbtree wrote:
| > 1) reasoning capabilities in latest models are rapidly
| approaching superhuman levels and continue to scale with
| compute.
|
| What would you say is the strongest evidence for this
| statement?
| __loam wrote:
| Well the contrived benchmarks the industry selling the
| models made up seem to be improving.
| drdaeman wrote:
| Well, it's a huge jump, but it's still a jump from "it
| generates utter illogical nonsense when it tries to
| simulate reason" to "it makes some correct guesses that
| start to resemble reasoning if we squint at it really
| hard."
|
| Which is - no doubt - an astonishing achievement, but
| absolutely not like the "AI" hype train people try to
| paint it.
|
| The "rapidly approaching" part is true in terms of the
| velocity, but all of this are just baby steps while
| walking upright properly is way beyond the horizon.
|
| I wouldn't mind being wrong about this, of course.
| viccis wrote:
| >reasoning capabilities in latest models are rapidly
| approaching superhuman levels and continue to scale with
| compute
|
| I still have a pretty hard time getting it to tell me how
| many sisters Alice has. I think this might be a bit
| optimistic.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| They plugged the hole for "how many 'r''s in 'strawberry'",
| but I just asked it how many "l"s in "lemolade" (spelling
| intentional) and it told me 1. If you make it close to, but
| not exactly a word it would be expecting it falls over.
| tawm wrote:
| I wonder if those special cases are handled by a bunch of
| if/else statements wrapped around the model :)
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| That's my wonder too.
| sgt101 wrote:
| What is the evidence for 1) ? I thought that the latest
| models were getting "somewhere" with fairly trivial reasoning
| tests like ARC-1
| dauhak wrote:
| > Is the key idea here that current AI development has figured
| out enough to brute force a path towards AGI?
|
| My sense anecdotally from within the space is yes people are
| feeling like we most likely have a "straight shot" to AGI now.
| Progress has been insane over the last few years but there's
| been this lurking worry around signs that the pre-training
| scaling paradigm has diminishing returns.
|
| What recent outputs like o1, o3, DeepSeek-R1 are showing is
| that that's fine, we now have a new paradigm around test-time
| compute. For various reasons people think this is going to be
| more scalable and not run into the kind of data issues you'd
| get with a pre-training paradigm.
|
| You can definitely debate on whether that's true or not but
| this is the first time I've been really seeing people think
| we've cracked "it", and the rest is scaling, better training
| etc.
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| I agree with your take, and actually go a bit further. I
| think the idea of "diminishing returns" is a bit of a red
| herring, and it's instead a combination of saturated
| benchmarks (and testing in general) and expectations of "one
| llm to rule them all". This might not be the case.
|
| We've seen with oAI and Anthropic, and rumoured with Google,
| that holding your "best" model and using it to generate
| datasets for smaller but almost as capable models is one way
| to go forward. I would say that this shows the "big models"
| are more capable than it would seem and that they also open
| up new avenues.
|
| We know that Meta used L2 to filter and improve its training
| sets for L3. We are also seeing how "long form" content +
| filtering + RL leads to amazing things (what people call
| "reasoning" models). Semantics might be a bit ambitious, but
| this really opens up the path towards -> documentation +
| virtual environments + many rollouts + filtering by SotA
| models => new dataset for next gen models.
|
| That, plus optimisations (early exit from meta, titans from
| google, distillation from everyone, etc) really makes me
| question the "we've hit a wall" rhetoric. I think there are
| enough tools on the table _today_ to either jump the wall, or
| move around it.
| rhubarbtree wrote:
| > My sense anecdotally from within the space is yes people
| are feeling like we most likely have a "straight shot" to AGI
| now
|
| My problem with this is that people making this statement are
| unlikely to be objective. Major players are in fundraising
| mode, and safety folks are also incentivised to be subjective
| in their evaluation.
|
| Yesterday I repeatedly used OpenAI's API to summarise a
| document. The first result looked impressive. However,
| comparing repeated results revealed that it was missing major
| points each time, in a way a human would certainly not. In
| the surface the summary looked good, but careful evaluation
| indicated a lack of understanding or reasoning.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I think AI is already transformative, but
| I am not sure we are close to AGI. I hear a lot about it, but
| it doesn't reflect my experience in a company using and
| building AI.
| dauhak wrote:
| Yeah obviously motivations are murky and all over the
| place, no one's free of bias. I'm not taking a strong
| stance on whether they're right or not or how much of it is
| motivated reasoning, I just think at least quite a bit is
| genuine (I'm mainly basing this off researchers I know who
| have a track record of being very sober and "boring" rather
| than the flashy Altman types)
|
| To your point, yeah the models still suck in some
| surprising ways, but again it's that thing of they're the
| worst they're ever going to be, and I think in particular
| on the reasoning issue a lot of people are quite excited
| that RL over CoT is looking really really promising for
| this.
|
| I agree with your broader point though that I'm not sure
| how close we are and there's an awful lot of noise right
| now
| lm28469 wrote:
| Yeah that's called wishful thinking when it's not straight up
| pipe dreams. All these people have horses in the race
| og_kalu wrote:
| "There are maybe a few hundred people in the world who
| viscerally understand what's coming. Most are at DeepMind /
| OpenAI / Anthropic / X but some are on the outside. You have to
| be able to forecast the aggregate effect of rapid algorithmic
| improvement, aggressive investment in building RL environments
| for iterative self-improvement, and many tens of billions
| already committed to building data centers. Either we're all
| wrong, or everything is about to change." - Vedant Misra,
| Deepmind Researcher.
|
| Maybe your calibration isn't poor. Maybe they really are all
| wrong but there's a tendency here to these these people behind
| the scenes are all charlatans, fueling hype without equal
| substance hoping to make a quick buck before it all comes
| crashing down, but i don't think that's true at all. I think
| these people really genuinely believe they're going to get
| there. And if you genuinely think that, them this kind of
| investment isn't so crazy.
| paul7986 wrote:
| My prediction is a Apple loses to Open AI who releases a
| H.E.R. (like the movie) like phone. She is seen on your lock
| screen a la a Facetime call UI/UX and she can be skinned to
| look like whoever; i.e. a deceased loved one.
|
| She interfaces with AI Agents of companies, organizations,
| friends, family, etc to get things done for you (or to learn
| from..what's my friends bday his agent tells yours)
| automagically and she is like a friend. Always there for you
| at your beckon call like in the movie H.E.R.
|
| Zuckerberg's glasses that can not take selfies will only be
| complimentary to our AI phones.
|
| That's just my guess and desire as fervent GPT user, as well
| a Meta Ray Ban wearer (can't take selfies with glasses).
| liamwire wrote:
| My take on this is that, despite an ever-increasingly
| connected world, you still need an assistant like this to
| remain available at all times your device is. If I can't
| rely on it when my signal is weak, or the network/service
| is down/saturated, its way of working itself into people's
| core routines is minimal. So either the model runs locally,
| in which case I'd argue OpenAI have no moat, or they
| uncover some secret sauce they're able to keep contained to
| their research labs and data centres that's simply that
| much better than the rest, in perpetuity, and is so good
| people are willing to undergo the massive switching costs
| and tolerate the situations in which the service they've
| come to be so dependent on isn't available to them. Let's
| also not discount the fact that Apple are one of the
| largest manufacturers globally of smartphones, and that
| getting up to speed in the myriad industries required to
| compete with them, even when contracting out much of that
| work, is _hard._
| paul7986 wrote:
| Sure but Microsof has the expertise and they own 49
| percent of Open AI if I'm not mistaken. Open AI uses
| their expertise and access to hardware to create a GPT
| branded AI phone.
|
| I can see your point re: run locally but no reason Open
| AI can't release version 0.1 and how many times are u
| left without an internet connection on ur current phone?
|
| Overall I hate Apple now it's so stale compared to GPT's
| iPhone app. I nerd rage at dumbass Siri.
| nhinck3 wrote:
| Sorry, you live in a different world, google glasses were
| aggressively lame, the ray bans only slightly less so.
|
| But pulling out your phone to talk to it like a friend...
| paul7986 wrote:
| Well I use GPT daily to get things done and use it as a
| knowlegebase. I text and talk to it throughout the day,
| as well I think it's called "chat"GPT for a reason
| because it will evolve to the point where you feel like
| you are talking to a human. Tho this human is your
| assistant and does everything for you and interfaces with
| other AI agents to book travel, learn your friends/family
| schedules and anything you now do on the web there will
| be AI agent for that your AI agent interfacing with.
|
| Maybe you have not seen the 2013 movie "H.E.R.?" Scarlett
| Johansan starred in it (her voice was the AI) and Sam
| Altman asked her to be the voice of chatGPT.
|
| Overall this is what I see happening and excited for some
| of it or possibly all of it to happen. Yet time will tell
| :-) and it sounds like your betting none of it will
| happen ... we'll see :)
| lm28469 wrote:
| I still fail to see who desire that, how it benefits
| humanity, or why we need to invest 500b to get to this
| paul7986 wrote:
| Do you use chatGPT many times throughout your day (i do)?
| If so did you ever want it to find the best hotel and
| book it for you? With chatGPT you can not do this now as
| all the travel websites do not have their own AI Agents
| for GPT to communicate with. Once they do you can type to
| GPT back and forth or talk to it to get anything and
| everything you now use the web to do. Yet your human like
| friend (AI friend/agent) will do for you.. U dont have to
| talk to it but if it's just like a human why not talk to
| it to do everything for you & use it as a knowledgebase.
| If you aren't aware you can now have a full back n forth
| conversation with chatGPT(it's not dumbass Siri).
|
| All technological advances that are adopted are ones that
| made life easier and for some cooler then what they were
| once using (cell phone to iPhone put the web in our
| pocket but using your iPhone while driving is dangerous
| but talking to your human like friend isnt). Check out
| the movie H.E.R. as what Im describing is mostly what i
| describe above.
|
| Time will tell if any of what im saying comes to
| fruition, but Silicon Valley is all a buzz about AI
| Agents in the last month or two and going forward.
| varsketiz wrote:
| Very insightful take on agents interacting with agents
| thanks for sharing.
|
| Re H.E.R phone - I see people already trying to build this
| type of product, one example: https://www.aphoneafriend.com
| root_axis wrote:
| Motivated reasoning sings nicely to the tune of billions of
| dollars. None of these folks will ever say, "don't waste
| money on this dead end". However, it's clear that there is
| still a lot of productive value to extract from transformers
| and certainly there will be other useful things that appear
| along the way. It's not the worst investment I can imagine,
| even if it never leads to "AGI"
| og_kalu wrote:
| Yeah people don't rush to say "don't waste money on this
| dead end" but think about it for a moment.
|
| A 500B dollar investment doesn't just fall into one's lap.
| It's not your run of the mill funding round. No, this is
| something you very actively work towards that your funders
| must be really damn convinced is worth the gamble. No one
| sane is going to look at what they genuinely believe to be
| a dead end and try to garner up Manhattan Project scales of
| investment. Careers have been nuked for far less.
| __loam wrote:
| We're talking about Masayoshi Son here lol.
| cibyr wrote:
| The Manhattan project cost only $2 billion (about $30
| billion adjusting for inflation to today).
| rhubarbtree wrote:
| The problem is, they are hugely incentivised to hype to raise
| funding. It's not whether they are "wrong", it's whether they
| are being realistic.
|
| The argument presented in the quote there is: "everyone in AI
| foundation companies are putting money into AI, therefore we
| must be near AGI."
|
| The best evaluation of progress is to use the tools we have.
| It doesn't look like we are close to AGI. It looks like
| amazing NLP with an enormous amount of human labelling.
| LeftHandPath wrote:
| Absolutely. Look at how Sam Altman speaks.
|
| If you've taken a couple of lectures about AI, you've
| probably been taught not to anthropomorphize your own
| algorithms, especially given how the masses think of AI (in
| terms of Skynet, Cortana, "Her", Ex Machina, etc). It
| encourages people to mistake the capabilities of the models
| and ascribe to them all of the traits of AI they've seen in
| TV and movies.
|
| Sam has ignored that advice, and exploited the hype that
| can be generated by doing so. He even tried to mimic the
| product in "Her", down to the voice [0]. The old board said
| his "outright lying" made it impossible to trust him [1].
| That behavior raises eyebrows, even if he's got a
| legitimate product.
|
| [0]: https://www.wired.com/story/openai-gpt-4o-chatgpt-
| artificial...
|
| [1]: https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/28/24166713/openai-
| helen-ton...
| skrebbel wrote:
| > there's a tendency here to these these people behind the
| scenes are all charlatans, fueling hype without equal
| substance hoping to make a quick buck before it all comes
| crashing down, but i don't think that's true at all. I think
| these people really genuinely believe they're going to get
| there.
|
| I don't immediately disagree with you but you just
| accidentally also described all crypto/NFT enthusiasts of a
| few years ago.
| HeatrayEnjoyer wrote:
| NFTs couldn't pass the Turing test, something I didn't
| expect to witness in my lifetime.
|
| The two are qualitatively different.
| sanderjd wrote:
| You're missing the point. The hype is the same, because
| the incentives are the same.
|
| I agree with you that there is significantly more there
| there with AI, but I agree with the parent that the hype
| cycles are essentially indistinguishable.
| aylmao wrote:
| Worth pointing out; the Turing test is pretty much just a
| thought experiment. Turing never considered it a test of
| "intelligence", or any other human quality. Many people
| have criticized its use as a measure of such.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test#Weaknesses
| root_axis wrote:
| I'm not so sure it passes the turing test since you can
| trivially determine that the conversation partner is a
| machine by asking it a trick question or offering it a
| "jailbreak" style prompt.
| rglover wrote:
| It's identical energy. A significant number of people are
| attaching their hopes and dreams to a piece of technology
| while deluding themselves about the technical limitations
| of that technology. It's all rooted in greed. Relatively
| few are in it to push humanity forward, most are just
| trying to "get theirs."
| nejsjsjsbsb wrote:
| I am hoping it is just the usual ponzi thing.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| How would this be a Ponzi scheme? Who are the leaf nodes
| ending up holding the bag?
| sanderjd wrote:
| Investors, mostly private - eg. SoftBank and all the
| other deep pockets funneling money into this - but also
| public, because lots of people are invested in Nvidia,
| Microsoft, and Google, who will be directly affected if
| the bubble bursts, and just everyone invested in the
| markets generally, as this bubble bursting would already
| probably be more broadly damaging than even the dot com
| bust was.
|
| Personally, I do expect a big correction at some point,
| even if it never reaches the point of bubble bursting.
| But I have no idea when I expect it to happen, so this
| isn't, like, an investable thesis.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| So unlike with a regular Ponzi scheme most of the money
| just is wasted?
| nejsjsjsbsb wrote:
| Well Madoff funnelled it into lifestyle.
|
| Technically you are correct. A ponzi is a single entity
| paying returns from new marks. It is a straight con.
|
| But some systems can be ponzi-like in that they require
| more and more investment and people get rich by selling
| into that. Bitcoin is an example.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Not sure what you mean by "wasted"? Like a regular Ponzi
| scheme, there are many opportunities for the people at
| the top to extract value out into cash, while people who
| "got in" on the scheme later are left holding the bag
| when the bubble bursts.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| Yes, usually people at the top extract the cash. Like
| Bernie Madoff just spent the money for his enjoyment. In
| this case the money goes to people building the data
| centers, providing resources and the engineers at OpenAI
| who are actually working for the money.
| sanderjd wrote:
| A lot of it does - and that's great! - but a lot of it
| accrues to the owners of the businesses involved.
|
| If this is a bubble and it bursts in a few years, a lot
| of investors in specific companies, and in the market
| broadly, will lose a lot of money, but Sam Altman and
| Jensen Huang will remain very wealthy.
|
| I'm a capitalist and I think there are good reasons for
| wealth to accrue to those who take risks and drive toward
| technological progress. But it just also is the case that
| they are incentivized to hype their companies, even if it
| risks getting out over their skis and leads to a bubble
| which eventually bursts. There are just have lots of ways
| to extract wealth prior to a bubble bursting, so the
| downsides of unwarranted hype are not as acute as they
| might otherwise be.
| nejsjsjsbsb wrote:
| https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/aws/amazon-invests-
| addition...
|
| Not this specificay but this kinda thing. If I am getting
| billions like this, I wanna keep this gravy going. And it
| comes from shareholders ultimately.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| It's just being spent though, no? Sounds more like a
| potential waste of money than a Ponzi scheme.
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| >Maybe they really are all wrong
|
| All? Quite a few of the best minds in the field, like Yann
| LeCun for example, have been adamant that 1) autoregressive
| LLMs are NOT the path to AGI and 2) that AGI is very likely
| NOT just a couple of years away.
| skepticATX wrote:
| You have hit on something that really bothers me about
| recent AGI discourse. It's common to claim that "all"
| researchers agree that AGI is imminent, and yet when you
| dive into these claims "all" is a subset of researchers
| that excludes everyone in academia, people like Yann, and
| others.
|
| So the statement becomes tautological "all researchers who
| believe that AGI is imminent believe that AGI is imminent".
|
| And of course, OpenAI and the other labs don't perform
| actual science any longer (if science requires some sort of
| public sharing of information), so they win every
| disagreement by claiming that if you could only see what
| they have behind closed doors, you'd become a true
| believer.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Doesn't OpenAI explicitly have a "definition" of AGI
| that's just "it makes some money"?
| og_kalu wrote:
| >You have hit on something that really bothers me about
| recent AGI discourse. It's common to claim that "all"
| researchers agree that AGI is imminent, and yet when you
| dive into these claims "all" is a subset of researchers
| that excludes everyone in academia, people like Yann, and
| others.
|
| When the old gang at Open ai was together, Sutskever, not
| Sam was easily the most hypey of them all. And if you ask
| Norvig today, AGI is already here. 2 months ago, Lecun
| said he believes AGI could be here in 5 to 10 years and
| this is supposed to be the skeptic. This is the kind of
| thing i'm talking about. The idea that it's just the non
| academics caught in the hype is just blatantly false.
|
| No, it doesn't have to be literally everybody to make the
| point.
| anthonypasq wrote:
| I'm inclined to agree with Yann about true AGI, but he
| works at Meta and they seem to think current LLM's are
| sufficiently useful to be dumping preposterous amounts of
| money at them as well.
|
| It may be a distinction thats not worth making if the
| current approach is good enough to completely transform
| society and make infinite money
| sanderjd wrote:
| Yeah, in my mind, the distinction worth making is where
| the inflection point from exponential growth to plateau
| in the s-curve of usefulness is. Have we already hit it?
| Are we going to hit it soon? Is it far in the future? Or
| is it exponential from here straight to "the
| singularity"?
|
| Hard to predict!
|
| If we've already hit it, this has already been a very
| short period of time during which we've seen incredibly
| valuable new technology commercialized, and that's
| nothing to sneeze at, and fortunes have and will be
| rightly made from it.
|
| If it's in the near future, then a lot of people might be
| over-investing in the promise of future growth that won't
| materialize to the extent they hoped. Some people will
| lose their shirts, but we're still left with incredibly
| useful new technology.
|
| But if we have a long (or infinite) way to go before
| hitting that inflection point, then the hype is
| justified.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| Who says they will stick to autoregressive LLMs?
| og_kalu wrote:
| It's obviously not taken to mean literally everybody.
|
| Whatever LeCun says and really even he has said "AGI is
| possible in 5 to 10 years" as recently as 2 months ago (so
| if that's the 'skeptic' opinion, you can only imagine what
| a lot of people are thinking), Meta has and is pouring a
| whole lot of money into LLM development. "Put your money
| where your mouth is" as they say. People can say all sorts
| of things but what they choose to focus their money on
| tells a whole lot.
| sanderjd wrote:
| I think it will be in between, like most things end up being.
| I don't think they are charlatans at all, but I think they're
| probably a bit high on their own supply. I think it's true
| that "everything is about to change", but I think that change
| will look more like the status quo than the current hype
| cycle suggests. There are a lot of periods in history when
| "everything changed", and I believe we're already a number of
| years into one of those periods now, but in all those cases,
| despite "everything" changing, a perhaps surprising number of
| things remained the same. I think this will be no different
| than that. But it's hard, impossible really, to accurately
| predict where the chips will land.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| So they're either wrong or building Skynet.
| ca_tech wrote:
| I am not qualified to make any assumptions but I do wonder if
| a massive investment into computing infrastructure serves
| national security purposes beyond AI. Like building subway
| stations that also happen to serve as bomb shelters.
|
| Are there computing and cryptography problems that the
| infrastructure could be (publicly or quietly) reallocated to
| address if the United States found itself in a conflict? Any
| cryptographers here have a thought on whether hundreds of
| thousands of GPUs turned on a single cryptographic key would
| yield any value?
| petesergeant wrote:
| > Is the key idea here that current AI development has figured
| out enough to brute force a path towards AGI? Or I guess the
| alternative is that they expect to figure it out in the next 4
| years...
|
| Can't answer that question, but, if the only thing to change in
| the next four years was that generation got cheaper and
| cheaper, we haven't even begun to understand the transformative
| power of what we have available today. I think we've felt like
| 5-10% of the effects that integrating today's technology can
| bring, especially if generation costs come down to maybe 1% of
| what they currently are, and latency of the big models becomes
| close to instantaneous.
| lmm wrote:
| > current AI development has figured out enough to brute force
| a path towards AGI? Or I guess the alternative is that they
| expect to figure it out in the next 4 years...
|
| Or they think the odds are high enough that the gamble makes
| sense. Even if they think it's a 20% chance, their competitors
| are investing at this scale, their only real options are keep
| up or drop out.
| tim333 wrote:
| >AI development has figured out enough to brute force a path
| towards AGI?
|
| I think what's been going on is compute/$ has been
| exponentially rising for decades in a steady way and has
| recently passed the point that you can get human brain level
| compute for modest money. The tendency has been once the
| compute is there lots of bright PhDs get hired to figure
| algorithms to use it so that bit gets sorted in a few years.
| (as written about by Kurzweil, Wait But Why and similar).
|
| So it's not so much brute forcing AGI so much that exponential
| growth makes it inevitable at some point and that point is
| probably quite soon. At least that seems to be what they are
| betting.
|
| The annual global spend on human labour is ~$100tn so if you
| either replace that with AGI or just add $100tn AGI and double
| GDP output, it's quite a lot of money.
| smartmic wrote:
| I see it somewhat differently. It is not that technology has
| reached a level where we are close to AGI, we just need to
| throw in a few more coins to close the final gap. It is
| probably the other way around. We can see and feel that human
| intelligence is being eroded by the widespread use of LLMs for
| tasks that used to be solved by brain work. Thus, General Human
| Intelligence is declining and is approaching the level of
| current Artificial Intelligence. If this process can be
| accelerated by a bit of funding, the point where Big Tech can
| overtake public opinion making will be reached earlier, which
| in turn will make many companies and individuals richer faster,
| also the return on investment will be closer.
| AdamN wrote:
| Yes that is exactly what the big Aha! moment was. It has now
| been shown that doing these $100MM+ model builds is what it
| takes to have a top-tier model. The big moat is not just the
| software, the math, or even the training data, it's the budget
| to do the giant runs. Of course having a team that is iterating
| on these 4 regularly is where the magic is.
| sesm wrote:
| To me it looks like a strategic investment in data center
| capacity, which should drive domestic hardware production,
| improvements in electrical grid, etc. Putting it all under AI
| label just makes it look more exciting.
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| > I don't know how to make sense of this level of investment.
|
| The thing about investments, specifically in the world of tech
| startups and VC money, is that _speculation_ is not something
| you merely capitalize on as an investor, it 's also something
| you capitalize on as a business. Investors desperately _want_
| to speculate (gamble) on AI to scratch that itch, to the tune
| of $500 billion, apparently.
|
| So this says less about, 'Are we close to AGI?' or, 'Is it
| worth it?' and more about, 'Are people really willing to gamble
| this much?'. Collectively, yes, they are.
| tantalor wrote:
| Wasn't this already announced last week?
| gunian wrote:
| Texas positioning itself better than expected for AI and EVs is
| the plot twist the peasants needed
|
| If they plan to transition off oil/nuclear it will be fun to
| watch
| drak0n1c wrote:
| Texas already is the leading state in new grid battery and grid
| solar installs for the last 3 years. Governor Abbott also did
| nuclear deregulation last year.
| gunian wrote:
| is there a simple metric likr x amount of power generated by
| solar, oil, gas etc?
|
| it seems like such a simple stat to collect
| iandanforth wrote:
| Anyone know if this involves nuclear plants as well or is that a
| separate initiative?
| JSTrading wrote:
| Wasn't this announced months ago? I feel like it was.
| https://www.techradar.com/pro/could-amd-be-the-key-to-micros...
| daveguy wrote:
| Well, I've never known Trump to take credit for something
| someone else did.
| lantry wrote:
| yeah, it sounds like they're just relabeling an existing plan
|
| > Ellison noted that the data centers are already under
| construction with 10 being built so far.
| ericjmorey wrote:
| They're still using the same label. They're just re-
| announcing the plans next to the new president.
| gilgoomesh wrote:
| Interesting that 6 months ago, Microsoft was attached but now
| they're missing from today's announcement.
| Maxious wrote:
| Scroll down:
|
| > Other partners in the project include Microsoft, investor
| MGX and the chipmakers Arm and NVIDIA, according to separate
| statements by Oracle and OpenAI.
| ur-whale wrote:
| None of these companies have the inner resources to fund a 500B
| build.
|
| Looks like the dollar printing press will continue to overheat in
| the coming years.
| yobid20 wrote:
| Oh but crypto mining was bad lol wheres the power going to come
| from
| MichaelMoser123 wrote:
| The moon program was $318 billion in 2023 dollars, this one is
| $500 billion. So that's why the tech barons who were present at
| the inauguration were high as a kite yesterday, they just got the
| financing for a real moon shot!
| aurareturn wrote:
| To be fair, it's not easy to monetize the moon program into
| profitability. This has a far better shot of sustaining
| profitability.
| dmonitor wrote:
| why do they need profitability? they already made $500B
| aurareturn wrote:
| They didn't make $500b?
| dmix wrote:
| People don't read the articles. Plenty of the top rated
| comments in this thread think this is a gov grant.
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| Government grant, you say? My my, where can I apply for
| my $500B?
| ReptileMan wrote:
| Usually Zimbabwe
| jgalt212 wrote:
| I guess these people are betting small and efficient models are
| not the future.
| MaximilianEmel wrote:
| How much is allocated to alignment/safety research?
| karmasimida wrote:
| Money isn't the issue any more, wowww
| danpalmer wrote:
| > building new AI infrastructure for OpenAI in the United States
|
| That's nice, but if I were spending $500bn on datacenters I'd
| probably try to put a few in places that serve other users.
| Centralised compute can only get you so far in terms of serving
| users.
| resters wrote:
| Why is Larry Ellison giving a speech about the power of AI to
| cure disease? How is Oracle relevant at all to any of AI progress
| in the past few years?
| Havoc wrote:
| Oracle actually has a ton of gpus
|
| Not sure how they knew to buy them or why but they have them.
| Mostly seem to be lending them out. Think mostly OpenAI. Or was
| it MS. One of the big dogs
| mrbungie wrote:
| Still, the worst positioned cloud provider to tackle this
| job. Both for the project and for eventual users of whatever
| eldritch abomination that cames out of this.
| aurareturn wrote:
| Oracle is trusted by large enterprises. So OpenAI wants to
| attach itself to Oracle's brand.
| aurareturn wrote:
| Oracle is trusted by large enterprises, banks, governments.
| So OpenAI wants to attach itself to Oracle's brand.
| adunsulag wrote:
| Oracle purchased Cerner which is now sitting on a ton of
| healthcare data.
| resters wrote:
| I wonder how much of the data can legally be retained without
| violating privacy law? Perhaps that's why Texas rather than
| CA?
| aithrowawaycomm wrote:
| https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/03/08/1069523/sam-altm...
|
| Wouldn't surprise me Sam Altman convinced Trump/Son/Ellison
| that this AI can reverse their aging. And Ellison does have a
| ton of money - $208bn.
| qaq wrote:
| This is going to be the grift of the century. Sam will put Wall
| Street robber barons to shame.
| Havoc wrote:
| > This is going to be the grift of the century.
|
| Pretty sure that was musk and his 50+ bn bonus
| qaq wrote:
| shareholders voted for it multiple times so harder to call it
| grift
| Havoc wrote:
| Most grifts involve persuading the victim
| aussieguy1234 wrote:
| This could potentially trigger an AI arms race between the US and
| China. The standard has been set, lets see what China responds
| with. Either way, it will accelerate the arrival of ASI, which in
| my opinion is probably a good thing.
| vaccineai wrote:
| It will be similar to the space race between Soviet Union and
| US. And just like Soviet Union going broke and collapsing,
| China too will go even more broke and collapse.
| philomath_mn wrote:
| The arms race is already running, I think this showdown is
| inevitable so we should get our asses moving
|
| Unless we air strike the data centers, there is no way to
| control China's progress
| dhx wrote:
| It was rumoured in early 2024 that "Stargate" was planned to
| require 5GW data centre capacity[1][2] which in early 2024 was
| the entire data centre capacity Microsoft had already built[3].
| Data centre capacity costs between USD$9-15m/MW[6] so 5GW of new
| data centre capacity would cost USD$45b-$75b but let's pick a
| more median cost of USD12m/MW[6] to arrive at USD$60b for 5GW of
| new data centre capacity.
|
| This 5GW data centre capacity very roughly equates to 350000x
| NVIDIA DGX B200 (with 14.3kW maximum power consumption[4] and
| USD$500k price tag[5]) which if NVIDIA were selected would result
| in a very approximate total procurement of USD$175b from NVIDIA.
|
| On top of the empty data centres and DGX B200's and in the
| remaining (potential) USD$265b we have to add:
|
| * Networking equipment / fibre network builds between data
| centres.
|
| * Engineering / software development / research and development
| across 4 years to design, build and be able to use the newly
| built infrastructure. This was estimated in mid 2024 to cost
| OpenAI US$1.5b/yr for retaining 1500 employees, or
| USD$1m/yr/employee[7]. Obviously this is a fraction of the total
| workforce needed to design and build out all the additional
| infrastructure that Microsoft, Oracle, etc would have to deliver.
|
| * Electricity supply costs for current/initial operation. As an
| aside, these costs seemingly not be competitive with other global
| competitors if the USA decides to avoid the cheapest method of
| generation (renewables) and instead prefer the more expensive
| generation methods (nuclear, fossil fuels). It is however worth
| noting that China currently has ~80% of solar PV module
| manufacturing capacity and ~95% of wafer manufacturing
| capacity.[10]
|
| * Costs for obtaining training data.
|
| * Obsolescence management (4 years is a long time after which
| equipment will likely need to be completely replaced due to
| obsolescence).
|
| * Any other current and ongoing costs of Microsoft, Oracle and
| OpenAI that they'll likely roll into the total announced amount
| to make it sound more impressive. As an example this could
| include R&D and sustainment costs in corporate ICT infrastructure
| and shared services such as authentication and security
| monitoring systems.
|
| The question we can then turn to is whether this rate of spend
| can actually be achieved in 4 years?
|
| Microsoft is planning to spend USD$80bn building data centres in
| 2025[7] with 1.5GW of new capacity to be added in the first six
| months of 2025[3]. This USD$80bn planned spend is for more than
| "Stargate" and would include all their other business units that
| require data centres to be built, so the total required spend of
| USD$45b-$75b to add 5GW data centre capacity is unlikely to be
| achieved quickly by Microsoft alone, hence the apparent reason
| for Oracle's involvement. However, Oracle are only planning a
| US$10b capital expenditure in 2025 equating to ~0.8GW capacity
| expansion[9]. The data centre builds will be schedule critical
| for the "Stargate" project because equipment can't be installed
| and turned on and large models trained (a lengthy activity) until
| data centres exist. And data centre builds are heavily dependent
| on electricity generation and transmission expansion which is
| slow to expand.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39869158
|
| [2] https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/microsoft-
| openai-...
|
| [3] https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/microsoft-to-
| doub...
|
| [4] https://resources.nvidia.com/en-us-dgx-
| systems/dgx-b200-data...
|
| [5] https://wccftech.com/nvidia-blackwell-dgx-b200-price-
| half-a-...
|
| [6] https://www.cushmanwakefield.com/en/united-
| states/insights/d...
|
| [7] https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2025/01/03/the-
| gol...
|
| [8] https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/openai-
| training-a...
|
| [9] https://www.crn.com.au/news/oracle-q3-2024-ellison-says-
| ai-i...
|
| [10] https://www.iea.org/reports/advancing-clean-technology-
| manuf...
| joshdavham wrote:
| > The new entity, Stargate, will start building out data centers
| and the electricity generation needed for the further development
| of the fast-evolving AI in Texas, according to the White House.
|
| Wouldn't a more northern state be a better location given the
| average temperatures of the environment? I've heard Texas is hot!
| steveoscaro wrote:
| I think cheap power (whether gas turbines or massive solar
| farms) trumps any cooling efficiencies gained by locating in a
| cold climate.
| clhodapp wrote:
| Energy in Oregon isn't much more expensive than in Texas
| skellington wrote:
| I'm not automatically pro or anti Stargate (the movie and show
| were cool) BUT
|
| Who gets the benefit of all of this investment? Are taxpayers
| going to fund this thing which is monetized by OpenAI?
|
| If we pay for this shit, it better be fucking free to use.
| nomilk wrote:
| How likely is success when 4 or more other massive companies work
| together on a project? Seems like a lot of chefs in the kitchen..
| jparishy wrote:
| I hear this joked about sometimes or used as a metaphor, but in
| the literal sense of the phrase, are we in a cold war right now?
| These types of dollars feel "defense-y", if that makes sense.
| Especially with the big focus on energy, whatever that ends up
| meaning. Defense as a motivation can get a lot done very fast so
| it will be interesting to watch, though it raises the hair on my
| arms
| kube-system wrote:
| Absolutely
|
| for instance:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_telecommuni...
| jparishy wrote:
| Right, but they've been doing that for a while, to everyone.
| The US is much quieter about it, right? But you can twist
| this move and see how the gov would not want to display that
| level of investment within itself as it could be interpreted
| as a sign of aggression. but it makes sense to me that they'd
| have no issue working through corporations to achieve the
| same ends but now able to deny direct involvement
| kube-system wrote:
| I don't think this administration is worried too much about
| showing aggression. If anything they are embracing it.
| Today was the first full day, and they have already
| threatened the sovereignty of at least four nations.
| jparishy wrote:
| I guess I just don't think that's true when it comes to
| China? The VP attended the inauguration yesterday. But I
| could be naive, we'll see
| kube-system wrote:
| I think that was a preemptive gesture by China to try to
| cool tensions to avoid escalation. Further escalations
| are not in their interest.
| UltraSane wrote:
| I can only assume the US is hacking China at least as much as
| they hack us.
| etblg wrote:
| The US government and its media partners sure seem to think so.
| distortionfield wrote:
| We certainly are, if you ask me. Especially when you realize
| that we haven't had official comms with Russia since the war in
| Ukraine broke out.
| fooblaster wrote:
| It's called a bubble. The level of spending now defines how
| fucked we are in 2-3 years.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| You know those booths at events where money is blown around
| and the person inside needs to grab as much as they can
| before the timer runs out? This is that machine for
| technologists until the bubble ends. The fallout in 2-3 years
| is the problem of whomever invested or is holding bags when
| (if?) the bubble pops.
|
| Make hay while the sun shines.
| fooblaster wrote:
| yeah. If the numbers are real, this might be the end of
| SoftBank.
| lmm wrote:
| Hardly. Who better to invest a trillion dollars with than
| the guy who blew the last hundred billion dollars?
| lobochrome wrote:
| Well - as part of the semi industry I'd like to say: Really
| appreciate it. Keep it coming!
| mullingitover wrote:
| I'm in the middle of "Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of
| Financial Speculation" and hoo boy, there are strong deja vu
| vibes here.
|
| Just waiting for the current regime to decide that we should go
| all-in on some big AI venture and bet the whole Social Security
| pot on it.
| sidcool wrote:
| Future of AI being controlled by Oracle worries me
| yalogin wrote:
| How have they already selected who gets this money? Usually the
| government announces a program and tries to be fair when
| allocating funds. Here they are just bankrolling an existing
| project. Interesting
| Dalewyn wrote:
| >How have they already selected who gets this money?
|
| As I understand it there wasn't anything to select, this is
| their own private money to be spent as they please. In this
| case Stargate.
| wujerry2000 wrote:
| For fun, I calculated how this stacks up against other humanity-
| scale mega projects.
|
| Mega Project Rankings (USD Inflation Adjusted)
|
| The New Deal: $1T,
|
| Interstate Highway System: $618B,
|
| OpenAI Stargate: $500B,
|
| The Apollo Project: $278B,
|
| International Space Station: $180B,
|
| South-North Water Transfer: $106B,
|
| The Channel Tunnel: $31B,
|
| Manhattan Project: $30B
|
| Insane Stuff.
| fastball wrote:
| Neom: $1.5T
| moralestapia wrote:
| But that one's imaginary.
| fastball wrote:
| Is it?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYimVfnGNGY
|
| https://skift.com/2024/08/07/saudi-takes-2-million-photos-
| of...
| SeanAnderson wrote:
| "Unnamed sources told Bloomberg in April that The Line is
| scaling back from 170 kilometers long to just 2.4
| kilometers, with the rest of the length to be completed
| after 2030. Neom expects The Line to be finished by 2045
| now, 15 years later than initially planned."
|
| It doesn't look great so far :)
| krick wrote:
| Maybe, but so is Stargate Project so far.
| pinot wrote:
| Those are all public projects except for one..
| alpb wrote:
| Yeah, I'm not sure why we're pretending this will benefit the
| public. The only benefit is that it will create employment,
| and datacenter jobs are among the lowest paid tech workers in
| the industry.
| fooker wrote:
| Is this inflation adjusted?
| boxed wrote:
| It says so at least
| krick wrote:
| It's unfair, because we are talking in the hindsight about
| everything but Project Stargate, and it's also just _your list_
| (and I don 't know what others could add to it) but it got me
| thinking. Manhattan Project goal is to make a powerful bomb.
| Apollo is to get to the Moon before soviets do (so, because of
| hubris, but still there is a concrete goal). South-North Water
| Transfer is pretty much terraforming, and others are mostly
| roads. I mean, it's all kinda understandable.
|
| And Stargate Project is... what exactly? What is the goal? To
| make Altman richer, or is there any more or less concrete goal
| to achieve?
|
| Also, few items for comparison, that I googled while thinking
| about it:
|
| - Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository: $96B
|
| - ITER: $65B
|
| - Hubble Space Telescope: $16B
|
| - JWST: $11B
|
| - LHC: $10B
|
| Sources:
|
| https://jameswebbtracker.com/jwst/budget
|
| https://blogfusion.tech/worlds-most-expensive-experiments/
|
| https://science.nasa.gov/mission/hubble/overview/faqs/
| Dalewyn wrote:
| >What is the goal?
|
| Be the definitive first past the post in the budding "AI"
| industry.
|
| Why? He who wins first writes the rules.
|
| For an obvious example: The aviation industry uses feets and
| knots instead of metres because the US invented and
| commercialized aviation.
|
| Another obvious example: Computers all speak ASCII (read:
| English) and even Unicode is based on ASCII because the US
| and UK commercialized computers.
|
| If you want to write the rules you _must_ win _first_ , it is
| an absolute requirement. Runner-ups and below only get to
| _obey_ the rules.
| frontalier wrote:
| okay, but what advantages do these rules bring to the
| winner? what would these look like in this context?
|
| i guess what i'm asking is: what was the practical
| advantage of ascii or feet and knots that made them so
| important?
| Dalewyn wrote:
| >what advantages do these rules bring to the winner?
|
| An almost absolute incumbency advantage.
|
| >what was the practical advantage of ascii or feet and
| knots
|
| Familiarity. Americans and Britons speak English, and
| they wrote the rules in English. Everyone else after the
| fact needs to read English or GTFO.
|
| Alternatively, think of it like this: Nvidia was the
| first to commercialize "AI" with CUDA. Now everyone in
| "AI" must speak CUDA or be irrelevant.
|
| He who wins first writes the rules, runner-ups and below
| obey the rules.
|
| This is why America and China are fiercely competing to
| be the first past the post so one of them will write the
| rules. This is why Japan and Europe insist they will
| write the rules, nevermind the fact they aren't even in
| the race (read: they won't write the rules).
| frontalier wrote:
| okay, i think i get the cuda situation, but that is only
| for nvidia. amd is out of luck on that too, just like all
| companies from asia and europe.
|
| on the previous examples i can see language gave native
| speakers and advantage in becoming familiar with the
| technology but on ai i'm not seeing an advantage that
| would give americans an advantage over everyone else,
| besides controlling access to the tech.
|
| the reason i'm insisting on this is because i feel as if
| that argument has merit but i have yet to grasp how it
| applies to these technologies.
| trillic wrote:
| Nautical miles are minutes of latitude and are useful for
| navigation on the sphere we live on. It's not some
| conspiracy for English hegemony despite the previous
| posters insistence.
| trillic wrote:
| The aviation and maritime industries use knots because the
| nautical mile is closely tied to longitude/latitude.
|
| A vessel traveling at 1 knot along a meridian travels one
| minute of geographic latitude per hour.
| nopinsight wrote:
| The goal is Artificial Superintelligence (ASI), based on
| short clips of the press conference.
|
| It has been quite clear for a while we'll shoot past human-
| level intelligence since we learned how to do test-time
| compute effectively with RL on LMMs (Large Multimodal
| Models).
| krick wrote:
| Here we go again... Ok, I'll bite. One last time.
|
| Look, making up a three-letter acronym doesn't make
| whatever it stands for a real thing. Not even real in a
| sense "it exists", but real in a sense "it is meaningful".
| And assigning that acronym to a project doesn't make up a
| goal.
|
| I'm not claiming that AGI, ASI, AXY or whatever is
| "impossible" or something. I claim that no one who uses
| these words has any fucking clue what they mean. A "bomb"
| is some stuff that explodes. A "road" is some flat enough
| surface to drive on. But "superintelligence"? There's no
| good enough definition of "intelligence", let alone
| "artifical superintelligence". I unironically always
| thought a calculator is intelligent in a sense, and if it
| is, then it's also unironically superintelligent, because I
| cannot multiply 20-digit numbers in my mind. Well, it
| wasn't exactly "general", but so aren't humans, and it's an
| outdated acronym anyway.
|
| So it's fun and all when people are "just talking", because
| making up bullshit is a natural human activity and
| somebody's profession. But when we are talking about the
| _goal_ of a project, it implies something specific,
| measurable... you know, that SMART acronym (since everybody
| loves acronyms so much).
| nopinsight wrote:
| Superintelligence (along with some definitions):
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superintelligence
|
| Also, "Dario Amodei says what he has seen inside
| Anthropic in the past few months leads him to believe
| that in the next 2 or 3 years we will see AI systems that
| are better than almost all humans at almost all tasks"
|
| https://x.com/tsarnick/status/1881794265648615886
| hatefulmoron wrote:
| Not saying you're necessarily wrong, but "Anthropic CEO
| says that the work going on in Anthropic is super good
| and will produce fantastic results in 2 or 3 years" it
| not necessarily telling of anything.
| nopinsight wrote:
| Dario said in mid-2023 that his timeline for achieving
| "generally well-educated humans" was 2-3 years. o1 and
| Sonnet 3.5 (new) have already fulfilled that requirement
| in terms of Q&A, ahead of his earlier timeline.
| hatefulmoron wrote:
| I'm curious about that. Those models are definitely more
| knowledgeable than a well educated human, but so is
| Google search, and has been for a long time. But are they
| as intelligent as a well educated human? I feel like
| there's a huge qualitative difference. I trust the
| intelligence of those models much less than an educated
| human.
| nopinsight wrote:
| If we talk about a _median_ well-educated human, o1
| likely passes the bar. Quite a few tests of reasoning
| suggests that's the case. An example:
|
| "Preprint out today that tests o1-preview's medical
| reasoning experiments against a baseline of 100s of
| clinicians.
|
| In this case the title says it all:
|
| Superhuman performance of a large language model on the
| reasoning tasks of a physician
|
| Link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.10849". -- Adam Rodman,
| a co-author of the paper
| https://x.com/AdamRodmanMD/status/186902305691786464
|
| ---
|
| Have you tried using o1 with a variety of problems?
| hatefulmoron wrote:
| The paper you linked claims on page 10 that machines have
| been performing comparably on the task since 2012, so I'm
| not sure exactly what the paper is supposed to show in
| this context.
|
| Am I to conclude that we've had a comparably intelligent
| machine since 2012?
|
| Given the similar performance between GPT4 and O1 on this
| task, I wonder if GPT3.5 is significantly better than a
| human, too.
|
| Sorry if my thoughts are a bit scattered, but it feels
| like that benchmark shows how good statistical methods
| are in general, not that LLMs are better reasoners.
|
| You've probably read and understood more than me, so I'm
| happy for you to clarify.
| nopinsight wrote:
| Figure 1 shows a significant improvement of o1-preview
| over earlier models.
|
| Perhaps it's better that you ask a statistician you
| trust.
| hatefulmoron wrote:
| The figure also shows that the non LLM algorithm from
| 2012 was as capable or more capable than a human: was it
| as intelligent as a well educated human?
|
| If not, why is the study sufficient evidence for the LLM,
| but not sufficient evidence for the previous system?
|
| Again, it feels like statistical methods are winning out
| in general.
|
| > Perhaps it's better that you ask a statistician you
| trust
|
| Maybe we can shortcut this conversation by each of us
| simply consulting O1 :^)
| nopinsight wrote:
| 1) It's an _example_ of a domain an LLM can do better
| than humans. A 2012 system was not able to do myriad
| other things LLMs can do and thus not qualified as
| _general_ intelligence.
|
| 2) As mentioned in the chart label, earlier systems
| require manual symptom extraction.
|
| 3) An important point well articulated by a cancer
| genomics faculty member at Harvard:
|
| "....Now, back to today: The newest generation of
| generative deep learning models (genAI) is different.
|
| For cancer data, the reason these models hold so much
| potential is exactly the reason why they were not
| preferred in the first place: they make almost no
| explicit data assumptions.
|
| These models are excellent at learning whatever implicit
| distribution from the data they are trained on
|
| Such distributions don't need to be explainable. Nor do
| they even need to be specified
|
| When presented with tons of data, these models can just
| learn, internalize & understand....."
|
| More here: https://x.com/simocristea/status/1881927022852
| 870372?s=61&t=...
| emaro wrote:
| Can they do rule 110? If not, I don't think they're
| 'generally intelligent'.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| But there's 0 guarantee they are even capable of solving
| the rather large amount that covers the rest of a well-
| educated human.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| Anthropic _has_ to say this or Anthropic does not see
| their next funding round.
| spacephysics wrote:
| AI race is arguably just as, and maybe even more important,
| than the space race.
|
| From a national security PoV, surpassing other countries'
| work in the field is paramount to maintaining US hegemony.
|
| We know China performs a ton of corporate espionage, and
| likely research in this field is being copied, then extended,
| in other parts of the world. China has been more intentional
| in putting money towards AI over the last 4 years.
|
| We had the chips act, which is tangentially related, but
| nothing as complete as this. For i think a couple years, the
| climate impact of data centers caused active political
| _slowdown_ from the previous administration.
|
| Part of this is selling the project politically, so my belief
| is much of the talk of AGI and super intelligence is more
| marketing speak aimed at a general audience vs a niche tech
| community.
|
| I'd be willing to predict that we'll get some ancillary
| benefits to this level of investment. Maybe more efficient
| power generation? Cheaper electricity via more investment in
| nuclear power? Just spitballing, but this is an incredible
| amount of money, with $100 billion "instantly" deployed.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| AI is important but are LLMs even the right answer?
|
| We're not spending money on AI as a field, we're spending a
| lot of money on one, quite possibly doomed, approach.
| 0x000xca0xfe wrote:
| The hardware is likely flexible enough to run other
| approaches too if they get discovered.
| gizmondo wrote:
| Building a lot of compute will likely end up more useful than
| Apollo & ISS, which were vanity projects.
| maxglute wrote:
| Also note compute deprecates much faster than multi decade
| infra projects with chance of obsolecence. If deepseek keeps
| pace with releasing near SOTA models, those compute centres are
| going to have hard time recooping value / return on capital.
| b3ing wrote:
| 100,000 US jobs that I bet most are h-1b workers and they go over
| the 80,000 limit there were over 220,000 issued in 2023
| heyitssim wrote:
| who will benefit from those datacenters?
| ulfw wrote:
| God forbid anyone would invest $500,000,000,000 to create jobs.
| No no no. 500 billion to destroy them for "more efficiency" so
| the owner class can get richer.
| gibbitz wrote:
| Can we build a wall to keep AI out?
| bfrog wrote:
| What are people filling these datacenters with exactly if not
| nvidia?
| petre wrote:
| Gerat. Larry gets cash thrown at his AI surveillance dystopia.
| astrea wrote:
| Let's say they develop AGI tomorrow. Is that really all she wrote
| for blue collar jobs?
| chvid wrote:
| Comment from Elon Musk:
|
| https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1881923570458304780
|
| They don't actually have the money
| gr__or wrote:
| For the curious ones who are not so excited about gifting page
| views to the fascist:
|
| https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1881923570458304780
| JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B wrote:
| Having heard a lot of stories from my grandparents, I don't
| think you should trust nazis.
| aurareturn wrote:
| Feels so much like an announcement designed to trade favors.
|
| Altman gets on Trump's good side by giving him credit for the
| deal.
|
| Trump revoked Biden's AI regulations.
| listic wrote:
| How much of the supposed $500B will be US state budget money?
| loandbehold wrote:
| 0
| pixelmonkey wrote:
| Here is what I think is going on in this announcement. Take the 4
| major commodity cloud companies (Google, Microsoft, Amazon,
| Oracle) and determine: do they have big data centers and do they
| have their own AI product organization?
|
| - Google has a massive data center division (Google Cloud / GCP)
| and a massive AI product division (Deep Mind / Gemini).
|
| - Microsoft has a massive data center division (Azure) but no
| significant AI product division; for the most part, they build
| their "Copilot" functionality atop their partner version of the
| OpenAI APIs.
|
| - Amazon has a massive data center division (Amazon Web Services
| / AWS) but no significant AI product division; for the most part,
| they are hedging their bets here with an investment in Anthropic
| and support for running models inside AWS (e.g. Bedrock).
|
| - Oracle has a massive data center division (Oracle Cloud / OCI)
| but no significant AI product division.
|
| Now look at OpenAI by comparison. OpenAI has no data center
| division, as the whole company is basically the AI product
| division and related R&D. But, at the moment, their data centers
| come exclusively from their partnership with Microsoft.
|
| This announcement is OpenAI succeeding in a multi-party
| negotiation with Microsoft, Oracle, and the new administration of
| the US Gov't. Oracle will build the new data centers, which it
| knows how to do. OpenAI will use the compute in these new data
| centers, which it knows how to do. Microsoft granted OpenAI an
| exception to their exclusive cloud compute licensing arrangement,
| due to this special circumstance. Masa helps raise the money for
| the joint venture, which he knows how to do. US Gov't puts its
| seal on it to make it a more valuable joint venture and to clear
| regulatory roadblocks for big parallel data center build-outs.
| The current administration gets to take credit as "doing
| something in the AI space," while also framing it in national
| industrial policy terms ("data centers built in the USA").
|
| The clear winner in all of this is OpenAI, which has politically
| and economically navigated its way to a multi-cloud arrangement,
| while still outsourcing physical data center management to
| Microsoft and Oracle. Probably their deal with Oracle will end up
| looking like their deal with Microsoft, where the trade is
| compute capacity for API credits that Oracle can use in its
| higher level database products.
|
| OpenAI probably only needs two well-capitalized hardware
| providers competing for their CPU+GPU business in order to have a
| "good enough" commodity market to carry them to the next level of
| scaling, and now they have it.
|
| Google increasingly has a strategic reason not to sell OpenAI any
| of its cloud compute, and Amazon could be headed in that
| direction too. So this was more strategically (and existentially)
| important to OpenAI than one might have imagined.
| slt2021 wrote:
| too late, China is already ahead
| baobun wrote:
| Larry Elliot, Elon Musk, and Masayoshi Son.
|
| They really got together the supervillains of tech.
|
| Feels like the the only reason Zuck is missing is Elon's veto.
| mppm wrote:
| Apart from my general queasiness about the whole AGI scaling
| business and the power concentration that comes with it, these
| are the exact four people/entities that I would _not_ want to be
| at the tip of said power concentration.
| belter wrote:
| This is a Military project. Have no doubts about it.
| Gud wrote:
| This is a money making scheme.
| arisAlexis wrote:
| This has cosmological significance if it leads to
| superintelligence
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| Don't worry, it'll only lead to superstupidity.
| bluescrn wrote:
| And superplagiarism of human-created content
| XenophileJKO wrote:
| I'm sure this will age well.
| _heimdall wrote:
| Is that the prequel to Idiocracy?
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| It won't unless there's another (r)evolution in the
| underlying technology / science / algorithms, at this
| point scaling up just means they use bigger datasets or
| more iterations, but it's more finetuning and improving
| the existing output then coming up with a next generation
| / superintelligence.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| > bigger datasets
|
| Not even, they already ran out of data.
| nick__m wrote:
| I am sure that the M.I.C. have a ton of classified data
| that could be used to train a military AI.
| Filligree wrote:
| Okay, but let's be pessimistic for a moment. What can we
| do if that revolution does happen, and they're close to
| AGI?
|
| I don't believe the control problem is solved, but I'm
| not sure it would matter if it is.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Being pessimistic, how come no human supergeniuses ever
| took over the world? Why didn't Leibniz make everyone
| else into his slaves?
|
| I don't even understand what the proposed mechanism for
| "rouge AI enslaves humanity" is. It's scifi (and not hard
| scifi) as far as I can see.
| Philpax wrote:
| Once you have one AGI, you can scale it to many AGI as
| long as you have the necessary compute. An AGI never
| needs to take breaks, can work non-stop on a problem, has
| access to all of the world's information simultaneously,
| and can interact with any system it's connected to.
|
| To put it simply, it could outcompete humanity on every
| metric that matters, especially given recent advancements
| in robotics.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| ...so it can think really hard all the time and come up
| with lots of great, devious evil ideas?
|
| Again, I wonder why no group of smart people with
| brilliant ideas has unilaterally imposed those ideas on
| the rest of humanity through sheer force of genius.
| Philpax wrote:
| An equivalent advance in autonomous robotics would solve
| the force projection issue, if that's what you're getting
| at.
|
| I don't know if this will happen with any certainty, but
| the general idea of commoditising intelligence very much
| has the ability to tip the world order: every problem
| that can be tackled by throwing brainpower at it _will_
| be, and those advances will compound.
|
| Also, the question you're posing did happen: it was
| called the Manhattan Project.
| redserk wrote:
| And if this whole exercise turns out to be a flop and
| gets us absolutely nowhere closer to AGI?
|
| "AGI" has proven to be today's hot marketing stunt for
| when you need to raise another round of cash and your
| only viable product is optimism.
|
| Flying cars were just around the corner in the 60s, too.
| anon84873628 wrote:
| This thread started from a deliberately pessimistic
| hypothetical of what happens if AGI actually manifests,
| so your comment is misplaced.
| arisAlexis wrote:
| You really haven't used any LLM seriously eh
| lupire wrote:
| Look at any corporation or government to understand how a
| large group of humans can be driven to do specific things
| none of them individually want.
| jprete wrote:
| Quite a few have succeeded in conquering large fractions
| of the Earth's population: Napoleon, Hitler, Genghis
| Khan, the Roman emperors, Alexander the Great, Mao
| Zedong. America and Britain as systems did so for long
| periods of time.
|
| All of these entities would have been enormously more
| powerful with access to an AGI's immortality,
| sleeplessness, and ability to clone itself.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| I can see what you're trying to say, but I cannot for the
| life of me figure out how an AGI would have helped
| Alexander the Great.
| jprete wrote:
| Alexander the Great made his conquests by building a
| really good reputation for war, then leveraging it to get
| tribute agreements while leaving the local governments
| intact. This is a good way to do it when communication
| lines are slow and unreliable, because the emperor just
| needs to check tribute once a year to enforce the
| agreements, but it's weak control.
|
| If Alexander could have left perfectly aligned copies of
| himself in every city he passed, he could have gotten
| much more control and authority, and still avoided a
| fight by agreeing to maintain the local power structure
| with himself as the new head of state.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Oh, you're assuming an entire networking infrastructure
| as well. That makes way more sense, but the miracle there
| isn't AGI - without networking they'd lose alignment over
| time. Honestly, I feel like it would devolve in a
| patchwork of different kingdoms run by an Alexander
| figurehead... where have I seen this before?
|
| The problem you're proposing could be solved via a high
| quality cellular network.
| anon84873628 wrote:
| And of course the more society is wired up and controlled
| by computer systems, the more the AGI could directly
| manage it.
| z3phyr wrote:
| I consider many successful military leaders and
| politicians to be geniuses as well. In my books, Caesar
| is as genius as Newton!
|
| Having said that, we do not to understand the world to
| exploit it for ourselves. And what better way to
| understand and exploit the universe than science? Its an
| endearment.
| HeatrayEnjoyer wrote:
| > Being pessimistic, how come no human supergeniuses ever
| took over the world? Why didn't Leibniz make everyone
| else into his slaves?
|
| We already did. Look at the state of animals today vs <1
| mya. Bovines grown in unprecedented mass numbers to live
| short lives before slaughter. Wolves bred into an all new
| animal, friendly and helpful to the dominate species.
| Previously apex predators with claws, teeth, speed and
| strength, rendered extinct.
| adalacelove wrote:
| Sometimes I wonder if we are going to be the unkillable
| plague that takes over the universe. Or maybe we will
| dissappear in a blink. It's hard to know, we don't have
| any reference point except ourselves.
| lupire wrote:
| Destroying human life in Earth (the only habitable place
| in the solar system) is far far easier than reaching
| something outside the solar system.
| arisAlexis wrote:
| This is profoundly and disturbingly bad argument.
|
| 1)Leibniz wasn't superhuman 2) Leibniz couldn't work 24/7
| 3) he could not self increase the speed of his own
| hardware (body) 4) he could not spawn 1 trillion copies
| of him to work 24/7
|
| Like how much time did you think before writing this
| miki123211 wrote:
| > It won't unless there's another (r)evolution in the
| underlying technology / science
|
| I think reinforcement learning with little to no human
| feedback, O-1 / R-1 style, might be that revolution.
| nkingsy wrote:
| There is lots of human feedback. This isn't a game with
| an end state that it can easily play against itself. It
| needs problems with known solutions, or realistic
| simulations. This is why people wonder if our own
| universe is a simulation for training an asi.
| computerthings wrote:
| "this generation shall not pass"... to me that's about as
| credible as wanting to "preserve human consciousness" by
| going to Mars.
|
| Setting the world on fire and disrupting societies
| gleefully, while basically building bunkers (figuratively
| more than literally) and consolidating surveillance and
| propaganda to ride out the cataclysm, that's what I'm
| seeing.
|
| And the stories to sell people on continuing to put up
| with that are not even good IMO. Just because the people
| who use the story to consolidate wealth and control are
| excited about _that_ , we're somehow expected to be
| excited about the promise of a pair of socks made from
| barbed wire they gave us for Christmas. It's the
| narcissistic experience: "this is shit. this benefits
| you, not me. this hurts me."
|
| One thing is sure, actual intelligence, regardless of how
| you may define it, something that is able to reason and
| speak freely, is NOT what people who fire engineers for
| correcting them want. It's not about a sort of oracle for
| humanity to enjoy and benefit from, that just speaks
| "truth".
| 4ndrewl wrote:
| Wealth residistribution scheme. Your tax dollars into their
| pockets.
| Palmik wrote:
| As far as I can tell, this will be financed by private
| money. Can you elaborate?
| belter wrote:
| Your tax dollars are the customer.
| 4ndrewl wrote:
| Tax breaks, government forced to become a customer etc.
| the usual. Just like the astronauts to Mars thing will
| just shovel your money that might have gone to NASA into
| Musk's pocket.
| beezlewax wrote:
| The Mars walk is just 3 years away baby!
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| The best part about this answer is it's always true.
| 4ndrewl wrote:
| Related: GenAI, Cold fusion
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Yup, and FSD.
| fbfactchecker wrote:
| 3 months maybe, 6 months definitely.
| vtashkov wrote:
| Tax breaks, i.e. my money not being in your pocket means
| that they are stolen?
| matwood wrote:
| Assuming the tax money has to come from somewhere at some
| point, those who pay taxes have to make up the shortfall
| from those who have tax breaks. So far the US just kicks
| that can down the road so...
| vtashkov wrote:
| That is a big assumption. Tax money need not be a
| constant. But for the sake of following the same logic:
| if companies pay bigger taxes, they also have to make up
| the shortfall. Actually, this last one is much more
| accurate statement. Companies do not pay taxes, PEOPLE
| pay taxes. So taxes are paid either by the employees, the
| clients or by the owners (which in case of the big tech
| are generally common people). With high taxation you are
| hurting: the customers, the workers and the middle class
| saving for their retirement. Who is winning the tax
| money: state bureaucracy, corrupt politicians and the
| business around them, people who live like parasites (or
| rather are forced to live like that, because they are
| electoral power).
| mattlutze wrote:
| Tax breaks, i.e. a company extracting wealth from a
| community without paying into the systems that keep all
| the parts of that community running, forcing the
| community to ultimate subsidize that business's weath
| extraction from them.
| vtashkov wrote:
| Companies do not extract value, they create value which
| is then transferred to the people via the market through
| voluntary exchange (ideally). Where have you learned
| about those things? Oh, yeah, "community" , i.e. Marx.
| high_na_euv wrote:
| >Companies do not extract value,
|
| Oil and minning companies too?
| vtashkov wrote:
| Yes, before the resource is taken out of the Earth it
| doesn't exist, it is created in a sense by them. Look at
| Venezuela - they are dying of hunger with all the oil in
| the world (Russia, too) But socialist ideas prevailed
| there and the bad companies are banned.
| shoxidizer wrote:
| Tax breaks have basically the same effect as the
| government writing a check, increases inflation.
| vtashkov wrote:
| This is utter nonsense. If 1000 people go to a deserted
| island with no government and taxation would that mean
| the inflation will be plus infinity or at least very
| high??? Inflation is monetary phenomenon, it happens when
| money is being printed.
| shoxidizer wrote:
| In that case there would be no inflation or deflation,
| assuming a fixed money supply and no economic growth.
| However, the the key here is that the government, the
| federal government anyways, is spending money regardless
| of the tax break. Anytime the government writes a check,
| that's a little bit more money floating around; anytime
| the government collects some money, such as taxes,
| there's that much less money to be had. Every tax break
| causes the money supply to increase more relative to if
| the tax break did not exist, causing more inflation (or
| less deflation, if that were the case). If the government
| spent exactly as much as it taxed, then there would be...
| actually deflation, because the economy is growing. This
| is the basics of fiscal policy.
|
| There's also the monetary policy, which is when the
| federal reserve does this on purpose. The general
| principle is the same, but instead it spends its money
| buying bonds and gets its money selling those bonds, and
| creates a bunch of rules about where banks keep their
| money so it always has some money on hand.
| vtashkov wrote:
| So, in this desert there would be no inflation or
| deflation, you say. Let's say we use gold coins there.
| Wouldn't we have an inflation if we find a gold mine
| there and everybody start digging up gold? You are
| missing the fact that the money printing is not driven
| only by government spending. It is driven primarily by
| the monetary policy (in the hands of the FED) and to some
| extent by the government debt. You have knowledge gaps on
| a very basic level. The idea that taxation stops
| inflation is absolutely ridiculous. It would mean that
| countries with low taxes have very high inflation and
| this is not the case. It would also means that the
| inflation should be constant and in struct correlation
| with the taxes. Both statements are completely false and
| very easily provable by quick fact check. The only things
| taxes do are: misplacing capital and stopping economic
| growth, which may be the same thing arguably
| shoxidizer wrote:
| > It is driven primarily by the monetary policy
|
| Yeah, that's why I mentioned the fed.
|
| > It would mean that countries with low taxes have very
| high inflation and this is not the case.
|
| It's about the total balance of government spending and
| taxes. The point being made is that tax breaks have the
| same effect as government spending. Recall that I was
| replying to
|
| > Tax breaks, i.e. my money not being in your pocket
| means that they are stolen?
|
| The government writing someone a million dollar check and
| the government giving someone a million dollar tax break
| (assuming they pay at least a million in taxes),
| contribute to inflation by increasing the money supply by
| a million dollars than it would be otherwise. Yes, this
| federal reserve is by far a larger driver of inflation,
| but the government giving this tax break still degrades
| the value of your money, same as if they wrote a check.
|
| Of course, it is easy to view a tax break as a non-
| action, but that's exactly why the government gives so
| many tax breaks. Once you're taxing everyone, you can
| hand out tax breaks that's the same as handing out money
| only you can pretend that it's doing nothing.
|
| Think of it as 3 Scenarios:
|
| 1) The island government writes a check to everyone
| except you, increasing their wealth by 50%.
|
| 2) The island government taxes just you for 50% of your
| wealth.
|
| 3) The island government taxes everyone 75% of their
| wealth, grants everyone but you a total tax-break, and
| you 25 percentage point tax break.
|
| Basically the same result, only in one they say "It was
| fair, and we handed out a few tax-breaks, what's wrong
| with letting people keep their money?"
| vtashkov wrote:
| 1) wealth is not increased by tax break, only current
| income is increased
|
| 2) if government gives everyone tax break but not me, it
| means only that the government taxes only me
|
| 3) if everyone has 50% more money, there is very high
| probability that my business will go up A LOT
|
| Seriously, dude, it's not worthy anymore to try and
| explain to you very basic stuff. Inflation is not a
| balance between taxation and spending. All Middle Eastern
| countries are having huge spending and almost zero taxes.
| I asked you very simple question and you couldn't answer.
|
| What bothers me most is why people write about things
| they have no clue about and clearly haven't even put a
| decent thought into it.
|
| Basically what you believe in is that the thieves are
| controlling the inflation because they get some of the
| citizens wealth.
| shoxidizer wrote:
| > only current income is increased
|
| There's actually lots of taxes that aren't income or
| sales tax
|
| > if everyone has 50% more money, there is very high
| probability that my business will go up A LOT
|
| No, you'll be getting twice the money, but the money is
| worth half as much.
|
| > Inflation is not a balance between taxation and
| spending.
|
| It is for the US federal government.
|
| > All Middle Eastern countries are having huge spending
| and almost zero taxes.
|
| Those countries peg their currency to the dollar. Their
| money doesn't come from taxes, but instead from state oil
| companies. These countries aren't as free to hand out
| money like the US. If enough people tried to exchange
| their Saudi Riyals for dollars quick enough, and the
| Saudi government couldn't gather US dollars quick enough,
| their currency would very quickly collapse.
| lupire wrote:
| What do you think NASA does with the money? Is doesn't
| build a NASA house for its NASA babies.
| miki123211 wrote:
| > the usual. Just like the astronauts to Mars thing will
| just shovel your money that might have gone to NASA into
| Musk's pocket.
|
| The difference is that Musk can do twice as much for 1/10
| what Nasa _thinks_ the program will cost, which is never
| what the program will _actually_ cost, and Musk will do
| it in half that time to boot.
|
| The guy is an unhinged manchild, but if what you care
| about is having your money well spend and getting to Mars
| as cheaply as possible, he's exactly who you're looking
| for.
| Filligree wrote:
| I think you meant to type SpaceX. Which works as well as
| it does partly because Musk is kept at a careful length
| from the controls...
| terrabiped wrote:
| Do you have inside knowledge or a reputable source that
| he is kept at a distance from the controls? How much
| control does he have as the CEO?
| fallingknife wrote:
| I'm sure you are claiming that the founder, CEO, and
| controlling shareholder is "kept a careful length from
| the controls" because you have detailed first hand
| knowledge of the internal operations of Space, right?
| aylmao wrote:
| > if what you care about is having your money well spend
| and getting to Mars as cheaply as possible, he's exactly
| who you're looking for.
|
| I do find impressive that SpaceX engineers figured out
| reusable rockets and now we can send things more cheaply
| out to orbit. But in all seriousness, should we care
| about getting to Mars cheaply? Or do people care because
| Musk came along to convince them (and the US government)
| to invest in this venture of his?
| vargr616 wrote:
| what's the difference
| Gud wrote:
| Not all money making schemes involve the military.
| jwr wrote:
| Mostly benefiting the fossil fuel industry. How are they
| going to power this? Gas is the only option that can be
| implemented within single years. And this is going to need
| a _lot_ of power.
|
| Who cares about the planet, anyway.
| admissionsguy wrote:
| You need to stop this nonsense. Pollution is a long term
| problem, but it does not mean it is productive to do what
| Germany has done and cease development.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| You need to stop this nonsense. The path we were on, that
| Trump has already overthrown, was nothing like Germany's.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Pollution and climate change are two separate problems
| (both linked to the fossil fuel industry).
| andrepd wrote:
| Trump just rescinded licenses for offshore wind farms via
| an EO. We're fucking cooked (and I mean this literally)
| bayindirh wrote:
| Before downvoting the OP and, for more information, see:
|
| https://apnews.com/article/wind-energy-offshore-turbines-
| tru...
|
| https://www.utilitydive.com/news/trump-offshore-wind-
| leasing...
| cko wrote:
| > Offshore wind is among the sources of new power
| generation that will cost the most, at about $100 per
| megawatt hour for new projects connecting to the grid in
| 2028, according to estimates from the Energy Information
| Administration. That includes tax credits under the
| Inflation Reduction Act, which reduces the cost of
| renewable technologies. But onshore wind is one of the
| cheapest sources, at about $31 on average for new
| projects.
|
| I mean, I can see how numbers wise this decision makes
| sense.
| secondcoming wrote:
| For $500bn they can build a nuclear power plant dedicated
| to these data centres
| ReptileMan wrote:
| They can build a couple. With nuclear money is rarely the
| issue. It is that it takes forever because reasons.
| Andrex wrote:
| It's not like the current admin respects the rule of law
| anyways...
| notTooFarGone wrote:
| Ah so it's commissioned in 2040 and renewables already
| made it obsolete.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| There probably will be a clause of mandatory consumption
| of a given percentage of power generated from coal
| ensuring continued coal generation of a given minimum
| providing excellent talking-points for broadcasting to
| the incumbent's base.
| sebazzz wrote:
| > Who cares about the planet, anyway.
|
| Maybe at some point they are going to AI themselves out
| of climate change. Well.. except for the part where they
| don't believe in man-escalated climate change.
| dgoldstein0 wrote:
| ... If they build it under Cheyenne mountain you are
| definitely correct
| smeeger wrote:
| of course. its an arms race by definition so its all a
| military project. and already one whistleblower was brazenly
| murdered by our government to protect our horse in this race.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| no whistleblower was murdered, ridiculous conspiracy theory
| smeeger wrote:
| motive and means is a basis for conviction according to
| the law
| llm_nerd wrote:
| It's an ego-building projects.
|
| The data centres were already being built. All of these
| companies have been dumping tonnes of money into AI and will
| continue to dump tonnes of money into AI. It's just more of
| the same, but they had to do a big announcement with Trump to
| pander to his ego and somehow make it about him. Like he
| engineered this Stargate thing. The whole embarrassing
| spectacle was likely arranged by Ellison.
|
| I was bullish on OpenAI, but honestly I don't see any path
| forward where they have any differentiating value that
| justifies even a tenth of the valuation. Their video AI is
| simply _terrible_. Dall-E 2 is matched by many competitors.
| 4o and o1 and good, but already have been eclipsed by a
| number of competitors, including an open source Chinese
| option.
|
| My work has almost entirely transitioned to competitors, and
| Google's latest updates have quietly absolutely trounced
| OpenAI's offering. Like, Gemini has quietly become the best
| AI platform in the game.
|
| That's all neither here nor there, but I just don't care what
| Altman and crew have to say any more. They are not leaders in
| the space. They are, in many ways, has beens.
| Twirrim wrote:
| The military project is/was JWCC, TS/SCI+ classified, air
| gapped clouds. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle etc all have
| existing contracts with the DoD covering such work (and
| getting the contract meant building and running a cloud, not
| just signing some paperwork agreeing to at some point in the
| future)
| fsndz wrote:
| What do you prefer ? Letting DeepSeek and China lead the AI war
| ? DeepSeek R1 is a big wake up call
| https://open.substack.com/pub/transitions/p/deepseek-is-comi...
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| > What do you prefer ? Letting DeepSeek and China lead the AI
| war ?
|
| Me personally? Yes.
| mppm wrote:
| From what I've read about DeepSeek and its founder, I would
| very much prefer them, even with China factored in. At least
| if these particular Four Horsemen are the only alternative.
|
| On a tangential note, those who wish to frame this as the
| start of the great AI war with China (in which they
| regrettably may be right), should seriously consider the
| possibility of coming out on the losing end. China has
| _tremendous_ industrial momentum, and is not nearly as
| incapable of leading-edge innovation as some Americans seem
| to think.
| corimaith wrote:
| >China has tremendous industrial momentum, and is not
| nearly as incapable of leading-edge innovation as some
| Americans seem to think.
|
| So those who framing this are correct and that we should
| matching their momentum here asap?
| mppm wrote:
| No, I was rather pointing out that getting into an
| altercation that you are likely (even if not guaranteed)
| to lose may not be the smartest of ideas. On occasion,
| humans have been known to fruitfully engage in
| cooperation and de-escalation. Please pardon my naive
| optimism.
| lII1lIlI11ll wrote:
| "Great AI war with China", "altercation" are excessively
| harsh characterizations. There is nothing "escalatory" in
| competing for leadership in new industries with other
| states, nor should it be "regrettable". No one, to my
| knowledge, is planning to nuke DeepSeek data centers or
| something.
| mppm wrote:
| I wish I could agree with you. But have you read
| Aschenbrenner's "Situational Awareness" [1]? I am very
| much afraid that the big decision makers in AI do in fact
| think in those terms, and do not in any way frame this as
| fair competition for the benefit of all.
|
| 1. https://situational-awareness.ai/
| lII1lIlI11ll wrote:
| A person heavily invested in this wave of AI succeeding
| saying AI will be big and we will have AGI next year?
| Sure.
|
| I don't think there is much point of reading the whole
| thing after the following:
|
| "Everyone is now talking about AI, but few have the
| faintest glimmer of what is about to hit them. Nvidia
| analysts still think 2024 might be close to the peak.
| Mainstream pundits are stuck on the willful blindness of
| "it's just predicting the next word"."
| bayindirh wrote:
| Us vs. Them. My favorite perspective [0].
|
| Regarding to your question, yes. I'd prefer a healthy
| counterbalance to what we have currently. Ideally, I'd prefer
| cooperation. A worldwide cooperation.
|
| [0]: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B_AiI9_XIAA67_t.jpg
| andy_ppp wrote:
| Arguably the cooperation between the US and China has lead
| to the most economic growth and prosperity in human
| history, it's a shame the US and China are returning to a
| former time.
| rpastuszak wrote:
| Treating the world as a bunch of football teams is a great
| distraction though.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| China is much more peaceful nation compared to US. So, yes,
| I'd prefer China leading AI research any day. They are
| interested in mutual trade and prosperity, they respect local
| laws and culture, all unlike US.
| jbaiter wrote:
| "They respect local laws and culture" - I think people from
| Xinyang probably have a very different perspective on
| that........
| anthk wrote:
| If you had AlQaeda in a hypothetical region near Florida
| with almost two-yearly terror attacks, you would shit
| bricks and create jails/prisons with more security than
| the Pentagon itself.
| Octoth0rpe wrote:
| I think there's a more nuanced version of this: China
| respects local laws and culture _outside of what they
| view as China_ more than the US does. It's also worth
| noting that China's policy in Xinjiang is somewhat
| narrowly targeted at religion, and less other aspects
| like cuisine or clothing. That said, religion is nigh
| impossible to separate from the broader idea of culture
| in much of the world.
| lupire wrote:
| Africa and South America and USA strongly disagree.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| Give me a break. China has overseas police stations as
| bases of operation for harassing ex-pats and dissidents.
| That's not "respecting local laws and culture".
| whimsicalism wrote:
| sorry but you're not going to convince anyone approaching
| this with a neutral mind that China is more partial to
| overseas intervention than the US is
| Octoth0rpe wrote:
| Agree, and would like to say that this is not because
| many of us see China as some benevolent actor on the
| world stage, but rather because we see how NOT benevolent
| the US has been historically (see South America, the
| middle east, etc)
| whimsicalism wrote:
| the US has done lots of positive things as well. i
| understand it is popular to be a critic nowadays, but in
| many ways the US has had a strong commitment to
| majoritarian democracy over the last century and is
| trending in a better direction.
|
| but regardless of the net balance of actions, it is
| clearly more interventionist than China has been up to
| this point
| vbezhenar wrote:
| I encountered this almost first person. When American
| company goes like an elephant, bribing local officials
| left and right, using dirty practices to push out
| concurrents. At the same time, Chinese companies try very
| hard to abide to local regulations and trying to resolve
| all issues using local courts, etc. Like actually
| civilised people.
|
| What happens inside China is nothing of my interest, it's
| their business. They existed for millennias, they
| probably know how to manage themselves. They are not
| trying to expand outside of may be Taiwan, they don't put
| their military bases in my country, they don't fund so-
| called "opposition" and that's good enough for me.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Bribery is probably one of the few cases where the US is
| significantly better than bad actors in both China and
| the EU, both of which have major problems with overseas
| bribery
| infecto wrote:
| Holy smokes. Do folks like you actually believe this? China
| has its own style of colonialism (whatever you want to call
| it) but it certainly exists as strong as the US flavor.
| Cumpiler69 wrote:
| How many countries has China invaded and bombed in the
| last 30 years?
|
| How many deaths did China's warmongering caused abroad?
| infecto wrote:
| Quite a few from an economic perspective. Like I said
| they have their own style of colonialism. To think they
| are some peaceful loving nation is foolish. Maybe in the
| last 10 years China have had the military equipment
| capable of handling an offensive. They have been smart
| and done all their dealings via money. Without going too
| far in whataboutism, I simply find it ridiculous to
| classify China as a warm fuzzy nation with their long
| list of human rights issues. That does not mean America
| is peaceful and loving, simply that perhaps the two
| countries are not so different in net.
| Cumpiler69 wrote:
| _> Like I said they have their own style of colonialism.
| _
|
| That's moving the goalposts and doesn't address the
| issue.
|
| _> They have been smart and done all their dealings via
| money. _
|
| You mean just like the country who issues the world
| reserve currency and who's intelligence agencies get
| involved in destabilizing regimes across the world?
| infecto wrote:
| > That's moving the goalposts and doesn't address the
| issue.
|
| Is this how you make a constructive argument? Perhaps I
| was expecting too much from a joke account but this style
| of whataboutism is boring.
|
| My post that you responded to set my premise which was
| that China has its own form of colonialism that is quite
| different than Americas but it exists and it's quite
| strong. To classify China as a peaceful loving nation
| that respects other cultures is as if we were saying the
| US has never started a conflict. It's factually a lie.
| China has a long list of human rights issues, they
| factually do not respect other cultures even within their
| own borders. I am not defending America but pointing out
| that China is not what the OP stated.
| Cumpiler69 wrote:
| _> I was expecting too much from a joke account_
|
| Are you the kind of superficial petty person who needs to
| take jabs at the messenger's name and not the message
| itself?
|
| And are you really in the position to throw stones from a
| glass house with that account name? If you had your real
| name and social media profiles linked in the bio I'd
| understand, but you're just being hypocritical, petty and
| childish here with this 'gotcha'.
|
| _> To classify China as a peaceful loving nation that
| respects other cultures_
|
| I never made such a classification. You're building your
| own strammen to form a narrative you can attack but
| you're not saying anything useful the contradicts my PoV
| and wasting our time. Since you're obviously arguing in
| bad faith I won't converse with you further. Goodbye.
| infecto wrote:
| If you have an argument that is actually on topic with
| what I said please continue, otherwise save your troll
| account for someone else. The whataboutism/gaslighting is
| silly. You clearly cannot read threads or respond in a
| logical form to the right person. The conversation at
| hand was about China and in response to the OP
| classifying them as a loving and respectful nation. I
| made no attempt to defend the US and it has been you
| moving the goalposts. You throw about whataboutism around
| and then simply runoff with some flimsy excuse about
| multiple people being unable to converse with you. Troll
| account.
| anon84873628 wrote:
| Cumpiler asked two very clear and direct questions:
|
| >How many countries has China invaded and bombed in the
| last 30 years? >How many deaths did China's warmongering
| caused abroad?
|
| You didn't answer those, just started hand waving some
| stuff about China's "own form of colonialism" -- without
| even explaining what that is and how it works (which
| personally I'd be curious to hear about, and believe
| *is*" likely guilty of violence).
|
| So you very clearly are the one guilty of shifting the
| goalposts, going on tangents, and bringing up usernames
| instead of real arguments.
| freedomben wrote:
| I'm sympathetic to Infecto's positions, but I have to
| agree. I do think Cumpiler69's username is outrageous
| enough as to draw some commentary (provided it's civil
| and is semi-friendly ribbing) and perhaps even raise
| questions of whether they are a troll, but the substance
| of their comments is strong enough as to override these
| minor observations/objections.
| segasaturn wrote:
| They were asking about bombs and invasions in the literal
| sense, not metaphorical. I'm sure if you asked someone in
| Gaza or Iraq if they would rather be subjected to more of
| America's bombing and war crimes, or China's abstract,
| metaphorical "economic colonialism" they would pick China
| in a heartbeat.
| greentxt wrote:
| Define invade.
| Cumpiler69 wrote:
| Sorry, but If you need a definition for military
| invasion, you're not arguing in good faith. Goodbye.
| smeeger wrote:
| the outcome would be exactly the same. AGI leads the human
| race off of a cliff, not in the direction of one human
| interest group vs another. the only difference would be that
| it was china that was responsible for the extinction if the
| human race rather than another country. i would prefer to die
| with dignity... the outcome we should all be advocating for
| is a global halt of AI research -- not because it would be
| easy but because there is no other option.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| we need to cooperate and put aside our petty politicking
| right now. the potential downsides of 'racing' without
| building a safety scaffold are catastrophic.
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| Just Ellison alone brings unwelcome feeling of having Oracle
| craziness forced down our collective throats, but I share your
| concern about the unholy alliance generated in front of us.
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| My immediate reaction to the announcement was one of these is
| not like the others. OpenAI, a couple of big investment
| funds, Microsoft, Nvidia, and...............Oracle?
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| Sadly, it is not that unexpected given some of his recent
| interviews[1]. Any other day, I would agree it is a
| surprise.
|
| [1] https://arstechnica.com/information-
| technology/2024/09/omnip...
| freehorse wrote:
| There is a certain reason that last weeks everybody and
| their grandma is simping for Trump. Nobody would want to be
| on his bad side right now. Moreover, we hear here and there
| that Trump "keeps his promises". A lot of the promises we
| do not know about and we may never will. These people did
| not spend money supporting his campaign for nothing. In
| other places and eras this would have been called
| corruption, now it is called "keeping his promises".
| lupire wrote:
| Trump is one of the most famous people in the world for
| not keeping promises of paying debts. But there is money
| to be made temporarily when he is running a caper, as
| long as you can get your hand in the pot before he steals
| it.
| miki123211 wrote:
| > There is a certain reason that last weeks everybody and
| their grandma is simping for Trump. Nobody would want to
| be on his bad side
|
| It's worth keeping in mind how extremely unfriendly to
| tech the last admin was. At this point, it's basically
| proven in court that emails of the form "please deboost
| person x or else" were send, and there's probably plenty
| more we don't know about.
|
| Combine that with the troubles in Europe which Biden's
| administration was extremely unwilling to help with, the
| obstacles thrown in the way of major energy buildouts,
| which are needed for AI... one would have to be stupid to
| be a tech CEO and not simp for Trump.
|
| Tech has been extremely Democratic for many years. The
| Democrats have utterly alienated tech, and now they reap
| the consequences.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Tech has been extremely Democratic for many years. The
| Democrats have utterly alienated tech, and now they reap
| the consequences.
|
| Well, on the other side it can be said that Big Tech
| wasn't really on the side of democracy (note: democracy,
| _not_ the Democrat Party) itself, and it hasn 't been for
| years - at the very least ever since Cambridge Analytica
| was discovered. The "big tech" sector has only looked at
| profit margins, clicks, eyeballs and other KPIs while
| completely neglecting its own responsibility towards its
| host, and it got treated as the danger it posed by the
| Biden administration and Europe alike.
|
| As for the cryptocoin world that has also been
| campaigning for the 45th: they are an even worse cancer
| on the world. Nothing but a gigantic waste of resources
| (remember the prices of GPUs, HDDs and RAM going through
| the roof, coal power plants being reactivated?), rug
| pulls and other scams.
|
| The current shift towards the far-right is just the final
| masks falling off. Tech has rather (openly) supported the
| 45th than to learn from the chaos it has brought upon the
| world and make at least a paper effort to be held
| accountable.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| Yes, big tech was the kid caught in the corner cleaning
| out the cookie jar and threw a tantrum when one parent
| moved the jar out of reach as punishment in effort to
| help the industry learn self-control. Now the other
| parent has come home and has not only returned the cookie
| jar to the kid but pledged to bring them packs of cookies
| by the shipping container to gorge on in exchange for
| favors.
| danieldk wrote:
| _the troubles in Europe_
|
| Nice euphemism for giving people autonomy in their data
| and privacy.
|
| Most of there companies are so large that they cannot
| really fail anymore. At this point it has very little to
| do with protecting themselves, more with making them more
| powerful than governments. JD Vance are said that the US
| could drop support for NATO if Europe tries to regulate X
| [1]. Oligarchs have fully infiltrated the US government
| and are trying to do the same to other countries.
|
| I disagree with the grandparent. They don't support Trump
| because they do not want to be on his bad side (well, at
| least not only that), they support Trump because they see
| the opportunity to suppress regulation worldwide and
| become more powerful than governments.
|
| We just keep making excuses (fiduciary duties, he just
| doesn't know how to wave his arm because he's an autist
| [2]). Why not just call it what it is?
|
| [1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-
| politic...
|
| [2] Which is pretty offensive to people on the spectrum.
| freehorse wrote:
| I do agree that big part of why they support Trump is for
| anti-regulation reasons. But, it is also a fact that
| Trump is one of them, a businessman, not a politician.
| With Trump they can now discuss more business and less
| policies. There is a certain dealing of business right
| now that seems not at all transparent. And in this, the
| amount of public simping is really weird to what usually
| happens, everybody praising Trump even before he was
| taking office, and even tiktok, "coming out" as whatever
| etc.
|
| Oligarchs want less regulation, but they also want these
| beefy government contracts. They want weaker government
| to regulate them and stronger government to protect them
| and bully other countries. Way I see it, what they
| actually want is control of the government, and with
| Trump they have it (more than before).
| unethical_ban wrote:
| We have more energy and are pumping more domestic oil
| than ever. We are a major exporter of LNG. Trump just
| killed EV subsidies, and electric charging network
| funding.
|
| What are you talking about via Europe? Holding tech
| companies accountable to meddling in domestic politics?
| Not allowing carte blanche to user data?
|
| I understand (though do not like) large corps tiptoeing
| around Trump in order to manipulate him, it is due to
| fear. Not due to Trump having respectable values.
| fbfactchecker wrote:
| And you, are you simping for the Obidens of this world?
|
| Corruption is as old as mankind; don't know why it's
| pointed out prominently. Just look at that Xipeng/Biden
| photo from the National Archives.
| freehorse wrote:
| > And you, are you simping for the Obidens of this world?
|
| Did I?
|
| > Corruption is as old as mankind
|
| Yeah but seldomly celebrated or boasted about.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| If your knee jerk response to any political discussion
| even remotely critical of 'your guy' is to snap into
| whataboutisim instead of participating in the
| conversation you might need a outrage pornography detox
| for a while.
| Octoth0rpe wrote:
| Oracle makes perfect sense in that they are 1) a massive
| datacenter company, and 2) sell a variety of saas products
| to enterprises, which is a major target market for AI.
| mrbungie wrote:
| Oracle has 2-3% market share as a Cloud Provider.
|
| MSFT or even Google (AWS is not as mature in that space
| imho) made perfect sense, Oracle doesn't.
|
| Elon and Larry are good friends, I would guess that has
| something to do with this development.
| Octoth0rpe wrote:
| > Oracle has 2-3% market share as a Cloud Provider.
|
| And the market leader is what, 30%? about 1 order of
| magnitude. That's not such a huge difference, and I
| suspect that Oracle's size is disproportionate in the
| enterprise space (which is where a lot of AI services are
| targeted) whereas AWS has a _ton_ of non-enterprise
| things hosted.
|
| In any case, 2-3% is big enough where this kind of
| investment is 1) financially possible, 2) desirable to
| grow to be #2 or #3
| mrbungie wrote:
| Getting from 2% (Oracle) to 10% (GCP) market share would
| need 37.97% CAGR in 5 years. In a vacuum where everything
| else keeps the same, maybe, but I see that goal as very
| difficult to attain in what is a highly competitive
| industry right now.
|
| Disclaimer: I work at a highly regulated industry and we
| are fine running our "enterprise" workloads in Azure (and
| even AWS for a spinoff company in the same sector).
| Oracle has no specific moat in that area imho, unless you
| already locked-in in one of their software offerings.
| rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote:
| Oracle has a lot of valuable classified information about
| the state and its enemies due to its business.
| breadwinner wrote:
| Oracle provides two things: A datacenter for Nvidia chips,
| and health data. Oracle Cerner had a 21.7% market share for
| inpatient hospital Electronic Health Records (EHR). Larry
| Ellison specifically mentioned healthcare when announcing
| it in the Whitehouse.
|
| The announcement was funny because they weren't quite sure
| what they are going to do in the health space. Sam Altman
| was asked, and he immediately deferred to Ellison and
| Masayoshi. Ellison was vague... it seems they know they
| want to do something with Ellison's massive stash of health
| data... but they don't quite know what they are building
| yet.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| If they were smart, they'd build MS Fabric for health
| data, especially if they control a big chunk of the EHR.
|
| Providing a turnkey HIPAA-compliant but modern health
| dataverse would be huge.
| breadwinner wrote:
| That already exists: https://www.truveta.com/
| ethbr1 wrote:
| That looks like a different use case.
|
| The Snowflake-for-health is more about opening EHR data
| for _operational_ use by providers and facilities.
|
| Versus being locked into respective EHR platforms.
|
| If Oracle provided a compelling data suite (a la MS)
| within their own cloud ecosystem, they'd have less reason
| to restrict it at the EHR level (as they'd have lock-in
| at the platform level), which would help them compete
| against Epic (who can't pivot to openness in the same
| way, without risking their primary product).
| breadwinner wrote:
| I think you mean PostgreSQL for EHR data. MS Fabric and
| Snowflake are analytical databases, not operational.
| Patient privacy requirements (and HIPAA law) is a blocker
| for having an open operational database for EHR.
| roenxi wrote:
| That sentiment calls for reflection - whoever ends up on top of
| the heap after the AI craze settles down is going to be someone
| that everyone objects to. Elon Musk was himself an internet
| darling up until he became wealthy and entrenched.
|
| That said, this does look like dreadful policy at the first
| headline. There is a lot of money going in to AI, adding more
| money from the US taxpayer is gratuitous. Although in the
| spirit of mixing praise and condemnation, if this is the worst
| policy out of Trump Admin II then it'll be the best US
| administration seen in my lifetime. Generally the low points
| are much lower.
| mppm wrote:
| > That sentiment calls for reflection - whoever ends up on
| top of the heap after the AI craze settles down is going to
| be someone that everyone objects to.
|
| I agree in principle. And realistically, there is no way
| Altman would not be part of this consortium, much as I
| dislike it. But rounding out the team with Ellison, Son and
| Abu Dhabi oil money in particular -- that makes for a
| profound statement, IMHO.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| > That sentiment calls for reflection - whoever ends up on
| top of the heap after the AI craze settles down is going to
| be someone that everyone objects to.
|
| Did we see the same fallout from the space-race from a couple
| generations ago?
|
| I don't think so -- certainly not in the way you're framing
| it. So I guess I don't accept your proposition as a guarantee
| of what will happen.
| roenxi wrote:
| A couple of generations ago we didn't have the internet and
| the only things people heard about were being managed. The
| big question was whether the media editors wanted to build
| someone up or tear them down.
|
| The spoils of the space race would have gone to someone a
| lot like Musk. Or Ellison. Or Masayoshi Son. Or Sam Altman.
| Or the much worse old-moneyed types. The US space program
| was, famously, literally employing ex-Nazis. I doubt the
| beneficiaries of the money had particularly clean hands
| either
| infecto wrote:
| > That sentiment calls for reflection - whoever ends up on
| top of the heap after the AI craze settles down is going to
| be someone that everyone objects to. Elon Musk was himself an
| internet darling up until he became wealthy and entrenched.
|
| Trying to process this but doesn't his fall from grace have
| more to him increasing his real personality to the world?
| Sometime around calling that guy a pedo. Not much bothers me
| but at the very least his apparent lack of decision making
| calls into question many things.
| anon84873628 wrote:
| Of all the sentiments that call for reflection, the
| parent's belief about why people don't like Elon is the one
| that needs it the most.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Nietzsche wrote about these phenomena a long time ago in his
| Genealogy of Morality. there will never be someone who
| reaches the top who doesn't become an object of ire in modern
| Western culture.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Elon Musk was an internet darling when his top character
| trait was "space! EVs!". Then he went Kanye/alt-right and
| weaponized twitter. It didn't have to do with the fact he has
| a lot of money.
|
| Many people dislike all billionaires, but some have escaped
| criticism more than others by successfully appearing to have
| some humanity left in them, like Gates and Cuban.
| amelius wrote:
| I would love for Oracle to use AI to put their entire legal
| department out of work, though.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| So you want them to be infinitely more litigious?
|
| A serious question though, what does happen when AIs are
| filing lawsuits autonomously on behalf of the powerful, the
| courts clearly won't be able to cope unless you have AI
| powered courts too? None of how these monumental changes will
| work has been thought through at all, let's hope AI is smart
| enough to tell us what to do...
| roenxi wrote:
| Oracle could reasonably be hit with some sort of stick
| every time they filed a frivolous lawsuit until the AI got
| tuned appropriately. Then it'd be a situation where Oracle
| were continuously suing people who don't follow the law,
| following a reasonably neutral and well calibrated standard
| that is probably going to end up as similar to an
| intelligent and well practised barrister. That would be
| acceptable. If people aren't meant to be following the law
| that is a problem for the legislators.
| ReptileMan wrote:
| >A serious question though, what does happen when AIs are
| filing lawsuits autonomously on behalf of the powerful,
|
| AI controlled cheap Chinese drones will start flying into
| their residencies carrying some trivial to make high
| explosives. With the class wars getting hotter in next few
| years we may be saying that Luigi Mangione had the right
| ideas towards the PMC, but he was underachiever.
| miki123211 wrote:
| > A serious question though, what does happen when AIs are
| filing lawsuits autonomously on behalf of the powerful
|
| It won't just be at the behalf of the powerful.
|
| If lawyers are able to file 10x as many lawsuits per hour,
| the cost of filing a lawsuit is going to go down
| dramatically, and that's assuming a maximally-unfriendly
| regulatory environment where you still officially need a
| human lawyer in the loop.
|
| This will enable people to e.g. use letters signed by an
| attorney at law, or even small claims court, as their
| customer support hotline, because that actually produces
| results in today.
|
| Nobody is prepared for that. Not the companies, not the
| powerful, not the courts, nobody.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| Unless you can afford your lawsuit to take up substantial
| time on Stargate and make a much stronger case than your
| average Joe who is still using o1 for their lawsuits
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| I'm envisioning a future where there's a centralized "legal
| exchange", much like the NYSE, where high speed machines
| file micro-ligation billions of times faster than any human
| can, which is decided equally quickly, an unrelenting back
| and forth buzz of lawsuits and payouts as every corporation
| wages constant automated legal battle. Small businesses are
| consumed in seconds, destroyed by the filing of a million
| computerized grievances while the major players end up in a
| sort of zero-sum stalemate, where money is constantly
| moving, but it never shifts the balance of power.
|
| ... has anyone ever written a book about this? If not, I
| think I'm gonna call dibs.
| nejsjsjsbsb wrote:
| Need a bit of Zuck too
| blantonl wrote:
| Yeah, really the only thing missing from this initiative was
| the personal information of the vast majority of the United
| States population handed over on a silver platter.
| mattlutze wrote:
| Ellison should be nowhere near this:
|
| https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/09/omnip...
|
| The man has the moral system of a private prison and the money
| to build one.
| siva7 wrote:
| > "Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are
| constantly recording and reporting everything that's going
| on,"
|
| Let's be honest. He isn't wrong. I'd rather live in a society
| with zero crime than what we have now.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| Just be prepared to be never daring to complain; a zero
| crime society isn't without its faults.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| Yes we have historically low low crime. It's unbearable.
|
| There are a number of countries that might give you a
| panopticon state of you want one
| vtashkov wrote:
| Yeah, historically low crime because a lot of the crime
| is not considered crime anymore. Why thousands of stores
| are closing in California?
| RajT88 wrote:
| Well and good as a talking point, but violent crime is
| still illegal and way down.
| ryandamm wrote:
| Walgreen's was closing stores anyway and used the
| pandemic shoplifting as an excuse... but it was never the
| actual reason.
|
| Crime is at historical lows.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| Even if shoplifting at Walgreens was the reason for
| closure, the downtowns of a few "liberal cities" (it's
| always the same 3-4 mentioned) are extremely unlikely to
| have that much impact on national statistics.
| moogly wrote:
| > Why thousands of stores are closing in California?
|
| Because everyone's buying everything online and getting
| it delivered to their homes.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| The retail industry lobbying group itself noted that
| "shrink", the term for loss of revenue due to items
| walking off or being damaged, has remained unchanged
| since the 90s.
|
| The people telling you that there is an immense wave of
| shoplifting are outright lying.
| ImJamal wrote:
| This is up to debate. The FBI and DOJ numbers disagree
| with each other.
|
| https://www.themarshallproject.org/2023/11/03/violent-
| crime-...
| wadim wrote:
| If you're lucky, you might get your chance to live in
| Thiel's and Ellison's techbro utopia. Make sure to tell us
| how great it is to be subjected to people with no
| accountability, but all of the power over every aspect of
| your life.
| mattlutze wrote:
| There's a few that have tried to implement this, and I want
| to live in none of them.
|
| The US will fare no better if it walks down this path, and
| honestly will likely fare worse for it's cultural obsession
| with individualism over community.
| YinglingHeavy wrote:
| You stop abuse in this country, particularly of children,
| and you start having zero violent crime a decade later.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Sorry to break it to you, but oppressing people with
| cameras to prevent crime will only push the crime to where
| the cameras aren't.
|
| This makes preventing the crime and protecting people from
| effects of these crimes extremely difficult.
| javcasas wrote:
| So having a policeman in each street and corner, except the
| policeman bias is set by these four oligarchs.
|
| Welcome to... choose among many of the technodystopies in
| literature.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Move to China. You'll love it. Not only does it have lower
| crime by virtue of being highly controlled, it also has the
| added benefit of you never hearing about crimes the
| government doesn't want you to hear about, and you won't
| hear about any police corruption or brutality either.
| Ignorance is bliss!
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| You also don't need to sell your company when you
| innovate, your well-connected oligarch has either already
| gotten what you're doing or can seize it without
| consequence.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| it's "technology transfer", not "seizure" ;)
| freedomben wrote:
| Philosophically I agree, this sounds nice. A bit false
| dichotomy-ish, but nice.
|
| But if you think about it, an unstated yet necessary
| prerequisite is that the definition of "crime" must be
| morally aligned with what is right. If it's not, well then
| you're living in a dystopia. Imagine a world where slavery
| is still legal and being a runaway slave is a crime. How do
| people like Frederick Douglass escape and survive long
| enough to make a difference?
|
| And that's before we get into the prerequisite that such a
| state must apply the laws completely evenly with no special
| tiers based on class, wealth, political connection,
| celebrity status, etc, which AFAIK has never been done.
| Given the leadership, it doesn't look like it's goig to
| happen anytime soon. IMHO I think it's heavily contrary to
| human nature and just won't be achievable short of altering
| human nature.
| spacechild1 wrote:
| > "Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are
| constantly recording and reporting everything that's going
| on," Ellison said, describing what he sees as the benefits
| from automated oversight from AI and automated alerts for
| when crime takes place.
|
| Wow! It is genuinely frightening that these people should be
| in control of our future!
| idiotsecant wrote:
| Literal 'new world order' stuff here. Alex Jones and crew
| got so excited that their guy was in the driver's seat that
| they didn't notice the actual illuminati lizard people
| space lasers being deployed.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| We keep saying people like him shouldn't be involved in
| certain ventures, and yet, they still are. More than ever,
| actually.
| pj_mukh wrote:
| I don't think we'll ever have a zero-crime society, neither
| should we aim to be one. But being left to the vagaries of
| police (and union) politics, culture and the complications of
| city budgets is clearly broken.
|
| Example: Cities are being presented a false choice between
| accepting deadly high speed chases vs zero criminal
| accountability [1], which in the world of drones seems silly
| [2]
|
| I don't want the police to have unfettered access to surveil
| any and all citizens but putting camera access behind a court
| warrant issued by a civilian elected judge doesn't feel that
| dystopian to me.
|
| Is that what Ellison was alluding to? I have no idea, but we
| are no longer in a world where we should disregard this prima
| facie.
|
| [1]: https://www.ktvu.com/news/controversial-oakland-police-
| pursu...
|
| [2]: https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/san-francisco-
| poli...
| aswanson wrote:
| 2025 is shaping up to be When the Villains Win year.
| thelastgallon wrote:
| <quote> Citizens will be on their best behavior because we
| are constantly recording and reporting everything that's
| going on," Ellison said, describing what he sees as the
| benefits from automated oversight from AI and automated
| alerts for when crime takes place. "We're going to have
| supervision," he continued. "Every police officer is going to
| be supervised at all times, and if there's a problem, AI will
| report the problem and report it to the appropriate person.
| </quote>
|
| What is far more important to understand is to ignore all
| that nonsense and focus on who makes money? It will be
| Ellison and his buddies making tens of billions of
| dollars/year selling 'solutions' to local governments, all
| paid by your property taxes. This also enables an ecosystem
| of theft, where others benefit a lot more. With the nexus of
| Private Prisons, kids for cash judges (or judges investing in
| stock of prisons), DEA/police unions, DEA unions, small rural
| towns increasing prison population (because they get added to
| the total pop, and get funds allocated).
|
| More importantly this is extremely attractive to police who
| can steal billions every day from civil forfeiture, they have
| access to anyone who makes a bank withdrawal or transacts in
| cash, all displayed in real time feeds, ready for grabbing!
| throw-the-towel wrote:
| Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry
| Ellison.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15886728
| mike_hearn wrote:
| That's a pretty deceptive and ragebaity article.
|
| If you look at the original video [1], starting at 1:09:00,
| he's talking specifically about police body/dashcams
| recording interactions with citizens during callouts and
| stops, not everyone all the time as that article strongly
| implies. The USA already decided to record what police see
| all the time during these events, so there's no new privacy
| issue posed by anything he's suggesting. The question is only
| how those videos are used. In particular, he points out that
| police are allowed to turn off bodycams for privacy reasons
| (e.g. bathroom breaks), which is a legitimate need but it can
| also be abused, and AI can fix this loophole.
|
| In the same segment he also proposes using AI to watch CCTV
| at schools in real time to trigger instant response if
| someone pulls out a gun, and using AI to spot wildfires using
| drones. For some reason the media didn't condemn those ideas,
| just the part about supervising cop stops. How curious.
|
| [1] https://www.oracle.com/events/financial-analyst-
| meeting-2024...
| ActionHank wrote:
| By the time this project is done it will have been dead for 2
| years.
|
| Too many greedy mouths. Too many corporations. Too little
| oversight. Too broad an objective. Technology is moving too
| quickly for them to even guess at what to aim for.
| worthless-trash wrote:
| We should NEVER have a lawnmower at the helm of humanity.
| Gasp0de wrote:
| It could be worse, Elon Musk could be involved with it.
| maxlin wrote:
| I don't like how OpenAI turned majorly from what it was founded
| upon and their bias training ... but when considering the
| actual opponent here is China, it's not the worst.
|
| I think OpenAI was originally founded against that kind of
| force. Autocratic governments becoming masters of AI.
| aylmao wrote:
| Interestingly perhaps, as a foreigner (not from the USA or
| China) I can tell you not everyone around the world shares
| this perspective. There's people who trust China's single-
| party system over the USA's oligarchy.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| I'm an American who was definitely raised in a "China Bad"
| world.
|
| The last few months, between TikTok ban, RedNote, elections,
| United Healthcare CEO, etc I've seen so many people compare
| the US to China, and favor China. Which is of course crazy
| because China has things like forced labor and concentration
| camps of religious minorities, and far worse oppression than
| the US. But many people just view everything coming out of
| the US Gov's mouth as bad.
|
| Is the Chinese government worse than the US government?
| Probably. Do people universally think that still? Not really.
| The US Gov will have to contend with the reality that people
| -even citizens- are starting to view them and not their
| "enemy" as the "Bad Guys".
| ukuina wrote:
| Leopold Aschenbrenner predicted it last June.
|
| https://situational-awareness.ai/racing-to-the-trillion-doll...
| Philpax wrote:
| Given https://x.com/IvankaTrump/status/1839002887600370145, his
| impact on the causal chain of events may go beyond mere
| prediction.
| Giorgi wrote:
| Oh so that's why Pelosi invested in Micro nuke electricity
| plants.
| defrost wrote:
| In context Pelosi has been pro nuclear for at least 16 years
| having spoken for nuclear and nuclear investment in 2008 as
| reported by the American Enterprise Institute.
| gmueckl wrote:
| The fact that they plan to start in Texas makes me think that the
| whole thing is just the biggest pork barrel of all times.
| energy123 wrote:
| Unlike California, Texas is easy to build in. True for both
| renewable energy and housing.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| Is this Ellison's attempt to become #1 richest again?
| chickenbig wrote:
| It will be interesting to see how AWS responds. Jump on board, or
| offer up a competing vision otherwise their cloud risks being
| perceived as being left behind in terms of computing power.
| chrishare wrote:
| Looking forward to transparency about where this capital flows /s
| deknos wrote:
| This is so much money with which we could actually solve problems
| in the world. maybe even stop wars which break out because of
| scarcity issues.
|
| maybe i am getting to old or to friendly to humans, but it's
| staggering to me how the priorities are for such things.
| dragonelite wrote:
| The US can't stop the wars it wants others to fight for them
| even if it means population collapse like in Ukraine, Israel
| and Taiwan.
| 4ggr0 wrote:
| well, it also starts a fair share of wars, or lets say,
| "brings freedom and democracy in exchange for resources and
| power" and sometimes even decides to topple leaders in
| foreign countries to then put puppets into place.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r.
| ..
| tim333 wrote:
| >wars which break out because of scarcity issues
|
| That doesn't seem to be much of a thing these days. If you look
| at Russia/Ukraine or China/Taiwan there's not much scarcity.
| It's more bullying dictator wants to control the neighbours
| issues.
| boxed wrote:
| Or religious fanatics wants to murder other religious groups.
| _Tev wrote:
| > That doesn't seem to be much of a thing these days.
|
| If you ignore Gaza and whole of Africa, maybe.
| tim333 wrote:
| Gaza seems mostly to be about who controls Israel/Palestine
| politically. Gaza was reasonably ok for food and housing
| and is now predictably trashed as a result of Hamas wanting
| to control Palestine from the river to the sea as they say.
|
| South Sudan is some ridiculous thing where two rival
| generals are fighting for control. Are there any wars which
| are mostly about scarcity at the moment?
| _Tev wrote:
| So you are saying Hamas would have same domestic support
| if Gaza was economically at the level of e.g. Slovenia?
| People who complained about "open air prison" caused by
| Israeli "occupation" even before Oct 7 would disagree
| with you I think.
|
| Even in Europe extremists are propped up by promise of
| "cheap energies" from Russia.
|
| I guess if you dont see the link this is not the place to
| explain it.
| corimaith wrote:
| Have you videos of Gaza before the war? There are places
| in Syria and Iraq, hell even India or the Phillipines
| that look alot worse.
| tim333 wrote:
| Also the "open air prison" effect was a result of trying
| to reduce attacks from Gaza. For example before the 2008
| war there were more than 2000 rockets launched from Gaza
| into Israel.
| Arkhaine_kupo wrote:
| > Are there any wars which are mostly about scarcity at
| the moment?
|
| The class war
| FilosofumRex wrote:
| No, not really... the origin of Gaza conflict is in
| Zionists confiscating the most fertile land and water
| resources.
|
| That's why Israelis gladly handed back the Sinai desert
| to Egypt, but have kept Golan Heights, East Jerusalem,
| Shaba Farms, and continuously confiscate Palestinian
| farmlands in the West Bank.
|
| There is nothing arbitrary or religious about which lands
| Zionists are occupying and which they're leaving to
| arabs.
| dbdoskey wrote:
| Completely false and simplifying a complicated history to
| present a very one sided view. The most fertile lands are
| in the west bank. They were under Jordanian control and
| could have been turned into an independent Palestinian
| state, but weren't. Israel "accidentally" got them in the
| 6 days war, and were happy to give them to Jordan back to
| "take care" of the Palestinian problem, but they refused.
| The places that Israel have the majority of the
| population in Petah Tiqwah, Tel Aviv and the region were
| swamp lands, filled with mosquitos, that were dried over
| many years and many deaths by Jewish farmers.
| nejsjsjsbsb wrote:
| Like the glib summary of Palestinian history there. In
| other news some terrorists stole land from the Brits in
| 1776.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| It will be, or, it's slowly happening already. Climate change
| is triggering water and food shortages, both abroad and on
| your doorstep (California wildfires), which in turn trigger
| mass migrations. If a richer and/or more militarily equipped
| country decides they want another country's resources to
| survive, we'll see wars erupt everywhere.
|
| Then again, it's more of a logistics challenge, and if e.g.
| California were to invade Canada for its water supply, how
| are they going to get it all the way down there?
|
| I can see it happening in Africa though, a long string of
| countries rely on the Nile, but large hydropower dams built
| in Sudan and Ethiopia are reducing the water flow, which
| Egypt is really not happy about as it's costing them water
| supply and irrigated land. I wouldn't be surprised if Egypt
| and its allies declares war on those countries and aims to
| have the dams broken. Then again, that's been going on for
| some years now and nothing has happened yet as far as I'm
| aware.
|
| (the above is armchair theorycrafting from thousands of miles
| away based on superficial information and a lively
| imagination at best)
| tim333 wrote:
| I was in Egypt a while and there's no talk of them invading
| Sudan or Ethiopia. A lot of Egypt's economy is overseas aid
| from the US and similar.
|
| The main military thing going on there - I was in Dahab
| where there are endless military checkpoints - is Hamas
| like guys trying to come over and overthrow the fairly
| moderate Egyptian government and replace it with a hardline
| Hamas type islamic dictatorship for the glorification of
| Allah etc. Again it's not about reducing scarcity - more
| about increasing scarcity in return for political control.
| Dahab and Cairo are both a few hours drive from Gaza.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _A lot of Egypt 's economy is overseas aid from the US
| and similar._
|
| The rest is fees from the Panama (EDIT: Suez) Canal and
| tourism. Getting into a war, particularly with a country
| on the Red Sea, is suicide. (Also, the main flash point
| between Egypt and Ethipia has receded since the GERD
| finished filling.)
| kasey_junk wrote:
| Surely you mean the Suez Canal
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Ha! Yes.
| qrsjutsu wrote:
| > it's more of a logistics challenge
|
| and a bureaucratic one as well. in Germany, they want to
| trim bureaucratic necessities while (not) expecting
| multiple millions of climate refugees.
|
| lot's of undocumented STUFF (undocumented have nowhere to
| go so they don't get vaccines, proper help when sick,
| injured, mentally unstable, threatened, abused) incoming
| which means more disease, crime, theft, money for security
| firms and insurance companies, which means more smuggle,
| more fear-mongering via media, more polarization, more
| hard-coding of subservience into the young, more financial
| fascism overall, less art, zero authenticity, and a spawn
| of VR worlds where the old rules apply forever.
|
| plus more STDs and micro-pandemics due to viral mutations
| because people will be even more careless when partying
| under second-semester light-shows in metropolitan city
| clubs and festivals and when selling out for an
| "adventurous" quick potent buck and bug, which of course
| means more money pouring into pharma who won't be able to
| test their drugs thoroughly (and won't have to, not
| requiring platforms to fact check will transfer somewhat
| into the pharma industry) because the population will be
| more diverse in terms of their bio-chemical reactions
| towards ingredients in context of their "fluid" habitats
| chemical and psycho-social make-ups.
|
| but it's cool, let's not solve the biggest problems before
| pseudo-transcending into the AGI era. will make for a
| really great impression, especially those who had the
| means, brains, skills, (past) careers, opportunity and
| peace of mind.
| bagels wrote:
| California moves water the long way with aqueducts, pipes
| and pumps. It's an understood problem, but expensive.
| dbspin wrote:
| There's a terrifying amount of food insecurity and poverty in
| Russia - https://www.globalhungerindex.org/russia.html - http
| s://databankfiles.worldbank.org/public/ddpext_download/p...
| palmfacehn wrote:
| I would wager that states such as Russia and others
| misallocate resources, which in turn reduces productivity.
| Worse yet, some of the policy prescriptions stated above
| would further misallocate scarce resources and reduce
| productivity. Scarcity doom becomes a self-fulfilling
| prophesy. This outcome is used to rationalize further
| economic intervention and the cycle compounds upon itself.
|
| To be explicitly clear, the US granting largess to tech
| companies for datacenters also counts as a misallocation in
| my view.
| tim333 wrote:
| Your first link says "With a score under 5, Russian
| Federation has a level of hunger that is low."
|
| The current situation with Russia and China seems caused by
| them becoming prosperous. In the 1960s in China and 1990s
| in Russia they were broke. Now they have money they can
| afford to put it into their militaries and try to attack
| the neighbours.
|
| I'm reminded of the KAL cartoon on Russia
| https://www.economist.com/cdn-
| cgi/image/width=1424,quality=8... That was from 2014.
| Already Russia is heading to the next panel in the cycle.
| jeffreyq wrote:
| > Already Russia is heading to the next panel in the
| cycle. Curious if you could share some links, or
| readings, blog posts, etc. in relation to this
| infecto wrote:
| Russia is run by the mob. The country has no real dominant
| industry beyond its natural resources. Are they really a
| good example?
| cpursley wrote:
| Not according to the World Bank:
|
| https://thedocs.worldbank.org/en/doc/d5f32ef28464d01f1958
| 27b...
|
| Furthermore, they became #4 GDP PPP last year and and
| were reclassified as a high income country.
|
| https://www.intellinews.com/russia-s-economy-is-
| booming-3289...
|
| The poorer regions are actually benefiting from high
| contract salaries. How sustainable that is, guess we'll
| see.
| rUsHeYaFuBu wrote:
| Related https://www.ft.com/content/19ac2cb1-8cb4-464d-968
| 3-18c632146...
| akho wrote:
| Have you tried opening the links? They show Russia at
| developed country level in terms of food insecurity (score
| <5, they don't differentiate at those levels; this is a
| level mostly shown for EU countries); and a percentage of
| population below the international poverty line of 0.0%
| (vs, as an example, 1.8 % in Romania). This isn't great --
| being in the poverty briefs at all is not indicative of
| prosperity -- but your terrification should probably come
| from elsewhere.
| cpursley wrote:
| Russia is a massive grain producer and exporter. One of
| their biggest health issues right now is obesity (from
| those cheap grains) with 60% of the adult population
| overweight, and growing. Furthermore, obesity has actually
| been an issue for their recruiting effort (there's a lot of
| running in war).
| HeatrayEnjoyer wrote:
| At any given time approximately 1 in 10 humans are facing
| starvation or severe food insecurity.
| Octoth0rpe wrote:
| I don't doubt that, but it's harder to connect that fact to
| a specific international conflict.
| rainingmonkey wrote:
| "Global warming may not have caused the Arab Spring, but it
| may have made it come earlier... In 2010, droughts in Russia,
| Ukraine, China and Argentina and torrential storms in Canada,
| Australia and Brazil considerably diminished global crops,
| driving commodity prices up. The region was already dealing
| with internal sociopolitical, economic and climatic tensions,
| and the 2010 global food crisis helped drive it over the
| edge."
|
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-change-
| an...
| neximo64 wrote:
| It actually isn't alot, about $100 spread out over a few years
| for every person on earth isnt enough to do these things..
| b3lvedere wrote:
| IF money was equally distributed then maybe. But that has
| never happened. Same with drinking water, food and shelter.
| rapsey wrote:
| > maybe even stop wars which break out because of scarcity
| issues.
|
| Like which wars in this century?
| CSSer wrote:
| For less than this same price tag, we could've eliminated
| student loan debt for ~20 million Americans. It would in turn
| open a myriad number of opportunities, like owning a home
| and/or feeling more comfortable starting a family. It would
| stimulate the economy in predictable ways.
|
| Instead we gave a small number of people all of this money for
| a moonshot in a state where they squabble over who's allowed to
| use which bathroom and if I need an abortion I might die.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| This is the problem with capitalists / the billionaires
| currently hoarding the money and the US' policy, it's all for
| short term gain. But the conservatives that look back to the
| 50's or 80's or whatever decade their rose-tinted glasses are
| tuned to should also realise that the good parts of that came
| from families not being neck-deep in debt.
| nejsjsjsbsb wrote:
| Yes you don't want to destroy your food chain. If everyone
| is poor except you then you are now poor.
| buran77 wrote:
| Repaying student loans makes a lot of people a little richer.
| The current initiative makes a few people a lot richer. If
| you ask some people, the former is a very communist/socialist
| way of thinking (bad), while the latter is pure,
| unadulterated capitalism (good).
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| That and a lot of people do not have the means to convince
| current power centers ( unless they were to organize, which
| they either don't, can't or are dissuaded from ) to do
| their bidding, while few rich ones do. And so the old
| saying 'rich become richer' becomes a self-fulfilling
| prophecy.
| buran77 wrote:
| That was the implication indeed. Money is like gravity,
| the more you have the more you can pull in. This will
| give a person the power to do _anything_ to make more
| money (change the laws as desired, or break them if
| needed) but also the perfect shield from any
| repercussions.
| _heimdall wrote:
| One of the more destructive situations in capitalism is the
| fact that (financially) helping the many will increase
| inflation and lead to more problems.
|
| When a few people get really rich it kind of slips through
| the gaps, the broader system isn't impacted too much. When
| most people get a little rich they spend that money and
| prices go up. Said differently, wealth is all relative so
| when most people get a little more rich their comparative
| wealth didn't really change.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| you can redistribute real resources - every person
| spending their life working on a rich persons yacht
| rather than helping educate the next generation due to
| the price system, for instance, is a real distribution of
| resources. this is why consumption taxes are modern and
| valuable
| _heimdall wrote:
| If we have to have taxes, I'm very much in favor of a
| consumption tax. It doesn't work for our current system
| though, capitalism kind of hits a wall when spending
| money is disincentivized (compared to saving money or
| simply not trying to earn more).
|
| Redistribution of wealth is tricky and almost certainly
| runs into the same wall I mentioned in my last comment.
| When everyone competing with each other (financially) see
| a similar bump in income they didn't really change
| anything. Redistribution is more helpful when targeting
| the wealth gap and not very useful when considering how
| wealtht the majority of people "feel".
|
| That said, I 100% agree people shouldn't be working their
| entire life on a rich person's boat. That's a much
| bigger, and more fundamental, problem though. That gets
| to the core of a debt-based society and the need for self
| reliance. The most effective way to get out from under
| someone else's boot (financially) is to work towards a
| spot where you aren't dependent on them or the job's
| income.
| bdangubic wrote:
| _The most effective way to get out from under someone
| else 's boot (financially) is to work towards a spot
| where you aren't dependent on them or the job's income._
|
| 100% this but entire system is setup to make sure this
| doesn't happen at scale. even here on HN if you post
| something along these lines but in real terms you will
| get downvoted like crazy and get even crazier comments.
|
| the system is setup to make sure there are workers, w2
| workers. this is why there is student loans and this is
| why schools do not teach you to be an entrepreneur, to be
| a salesman, to hustle for yourself and not for someone
| else. I see so many people here talking about leetcode
| and faang and I think to myself that is just modern day
| slavery. if you are LXXX at say Meta making say
| $750k/year, I think the same - you are a modern-day
| slave. if Meta is paying you $750k/year that really means
| that you are worth twice that, if not more. no company is
| going to pay you more than you are worth to them and they
| won't even break even with you so-to-speak so you can
| bank on this fact whoever you work for and whatever you
| bank. though there is a big difference between working on
| someone's yacht and making $750k the principles are the
| same but system is working hard and succeeding in making
| sure it stays as it is...
| anticensor wrote:
| There are marketing schools so they teach you to be a
| marketeer&sales person, a bad one at the latter.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _but entire system is setup to make sure this doesn 't
| happen at scale_
|
| This has been getting less and less true since the
| Industrial Revolution. We're not quite at the point where
| we don't need menial labour. But we can sure see the
| through line to it. The alternate future to the
| despairingly unemployed is every person being something
| of an owner.
|
| > _if Meta is paying you $750k /year that really means
| that you are worth twice that, if not more_
|
| Whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Also, if
| you're being paid $750k/year, you'd better be worth more
| than $1.5mm to your employer, because taxes and
| regulatory costs are typically estimated around 100% of
| base up to the low millions.
| bdangubic wrote:
| _This has been getting less and less true since the
| Industrial Revolution._
|
| how so? what do you think is the breakdown between say
| working people in the USA (excluding gig-jobs cause you
| know...) who are W2 vs. 1099 and/or business owners?
| 99.78% to 0.22% roughly?
| hcks wrote:
| I know!! Also we could have given an IPhone to 500 million of
| people for the amount!! It's such a waste to think they're
| investing it in the future instead
| nejsjsjsbsb wrote:
| Eliminating some student debt is a fish. Free university is
| the fishing rod. Do that instead.
| _heimdall wrote:
| Free to the student sounds nice, but who pays for it in the
| end? And does an education lose a bit of its value when
| anyone can get it for free?
| was_a_dev wrote:
| Free to US citizens would be a better policy, the state
| investing in its own people.
| diggan wrote:
| Granted! Now US universities consist of 99%
| immigrants/people on student visas.
|
| As long as you let universities act like for-profit
| businesses, their profits will be the only thing they
| optimize for.
| weakfish wrote:
| Has that happened in countries with similar policies?
| Fidelix wrote:
| No. It's a disaster. The poor pay for the richest to go
| to public universities. See Brazil.
|
| There are more low-income people in private universities
| (with private or private/public loans) than in public
| universities.
| weakfish wrote:
| Source?
| _heimdall wrote:
| May be an unpopular opinion here, but education should be
| a market just like anything else and the government
| should put its thumb on the scales as infrequently as
| possible.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Your mind works in a very different way than mine.
|
| Elsewhere, you worried that getting millions of people
| put of crippling debt due to a broken education finance
| system might tick up inflation.
|
| Here, you worry that making society more educated via
| university training might decrease the economic value of
| a degree.
|
| Where is the humanity? Of course some extreme of
| inflation is bad, and of course we want people to be
| employable. But artificial scarcity seems like a bad way
| to go about it.
|
| (And I don't think we have a surplus of engineers in the
| country, judging by what I perceive to be the gap in
| talent between china and US, and the moaning by tech
| about the need for H1B).
| nejsjsjsbsb wrote:
| The MAGA ideals (this is not snark just applying logic)
| needs more skilled Americans so this would also be
| aligned with MAGA albeit one of those things that takes
| more than 4 years to come to fruition so politically
| harder to do.
| _heimdall wrote:
| > Elsewhere, you worried that getting millions of people
| put of crippling debt due to a broken education finance
| system might tick up inflation.
|
| Well yes, I can talk to two different points when the
| context is different. A good conversation isn't just
| people shouting their personal opinions, its people
| playing off of the discussion at hand and considering
| different angles.
|
| > Here, you worry that making society more educated via
| university training might decrease the economic value of
| a degree.
|
| That's actually not what I was saying, I may have phrased
| it poorly. I did not mean that I _worry_ about anyone
| getting educated. I was simply trying to point out that a
| degree has much less value when anyone can get it, like
| that 's because it is free as is the topic here.
|
| In the other thread I wasn't actually concerned about
| inflation personally, only pointing out that inflation
| _will_ go up if a large amount of student debt is made to
| just disappear. I was raising that as a prediction with
| high likelihood, personally I have opinions on the
| underlying approach but I don 't really have dog in the
| fight either.
| _heimdall wrote:
| (Follow-up from my other reply)
|
| > But artificial scarcity seems like a bad way to go
| about it.
|
| What artificial scarcity are you talking about here?
|
| I'm not trying to say we need artificial scarcity,
| university should be a market like any other product or
| service.
|
| Personally I tend to go even further away from most when
| it comes to scarcity in the job market too - I'd rather
| have open borders than immigration systems that limit how
| many people can come here and compete for jobs.
| nejsjsjsbsb wrote:
| Not anyone. Some kind of test is required for admission.
| I am thinking like the UK system.
|
| Also if you are being $ focused then offer it where there
| is ROI: STEM, medicine (allow more doctors too).
|
| Education doesn't lose its value if it is free. Does food
| and water? Shelter?
|
| Unless people are just tuning out of their degree and it
| is just a social thing. In which deal with that specific
| problem.
| _heimdall wrote:
| How does no one pay for it, though?
|
| I don't know the ins and outs of the UK education system,
| but I have to assume the facilities and employees are
| still paid for.
|
| > Does food and water? Shelter?
|
| If everyone had access to it for free? Absolutely! I
| wouldn't work as a farmer or build houses if no one had
| to pay for those products. Value, or price in this
| context, is only really feasible for scarce assets. If
| something is seemingly unlimited and freely available it
| will have no (financial) value.
| thfuran wrote:
| It's publicly funded, not built and staffed by slaves.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| That's one of the most uneducated ignorant things I've
| heard anyone say in this entire discussion.
|
| Does health insurance also lose its value when anyone can
| get it for free?
| whimsicalism wrote:
| we are vastly overspending and will either need to monetize
| the debt (disastrous) or massively cut spending and raise
| taxes in the future. already now, we need to massively
| raise taxes on the wealthy but even that will be
| insufficient with our current spend.
|
| free college is just a giveaway to the wealthier third of
| our society and irresponsible with our current fiscal
| situation.
| nejsjsjsbsb wrote:
| Good point. Then next best is limit the lending. If a uni
| wants to charge 50k a year then they need to find rich
| students who can pay cash. If they want the smartest
| students they need to find ways to be affordable. Only
| lend money for affordable universities basically. That
| will force efficiency, reduce admin etc.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| So end subsidized student loans? Yes that would be a good
| policy. Not sure how you can ban people from taking out
| loans writ large though.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Not sure how you can ban people from taking out loans
| writ large though_
|
| Let them be discharged in bankruptcy. The system will fix
| itself around that.
| aylmao wrote:
| > free college is just a giveaway to the wealthier third
| of our society and irresponsible with our current fiscal
| situation.
|
| How is free college a giveaway to the wealthier third of
| society? For starters, I can assure you the wealthy care
| a lot about the name of the institution issuing the
| diploma, and they can afford it. They'll happily front
| extra cash so their kids can network with people of
| similar economic status.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I didn't say "the wealthy", I said the wealthier third of
| our society. Only ~39% of people age 18-24 are in
| college, those are generally the wealthier people in our
| society, and free college (I'm assuming from your reply
| it's free public college) would mostly be a giveaway to
| those people.
| aylmao wrote:
| Have you considered that perhaps you have causality mixed
| up here? Perhaps it's not that only the wealthier ~39% of
| people want to go to college, but rather that the bottom
| 61% don't want that economic burden.
| bitlax wrote:
| Let the schools pay back the people they scammed.
| visarga wrote:
| The problem with allowing student debt to rack up to these
| levels and then cancelling it is that it would embolden
| universities to ask even higher tuition. A second problem is
| that not all students get the benefit, some already paid off
| their debts or a large part of it. It would be unfair to
| them.
| jimkleiber wrote:
| Yes but every policy is unfair. It literally is choosing
| where to give a limited resource, it can never be fully
| fair.
|
| And there could be a change in the law that allows people
| to forgive student debt in personal bankruptcy, and that
| could make sure higher tuition doesnt happen.
| greentxt wrote:
| It would do more good in K12 or pre-K than it would
| paying off private debts held by white collar highly
| educated not rich yet due only to their young age
| university-bros.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| It truly is astonishing. We have kids who cannot afford
| school lunches, people working multiple blue-collar jobs
| and yet the problems of people who are statistically
| better off than average constantly jump to the front.
| People complain about Effective Altruism because of one
| dude messing up big but it would behoove everyone to read
| up on the basic philosophy of it before suggesting how we
| best spent billions to help reduce suffering.
| jimkleiber wrote:
| The problem with EA is in judging what is effective.
| Perhaps ridding the unforgivable student loans of parents
| actually helps the kids more than school lunches.
|
| And frankly, some of the most effective altruism may be
| just to directly give cash to people, yet I don't know
| how many people in the EA community would trust people so
| much with unconditional cash.
| currymj wrote:
| there are many many problems with the EA movement, but
| they do generally support unconditional cash transfers.
|
| cash transfers are seen as the "default" baseline. the
| bar for charity is that it must be better than cash
| transfers. they do find some such charities that they
| claim are even better than cash transfers, but they are
| totally comfortable with giving people unconditional
| cash.
| jimkleiber wrote:
| I'd say many of these university bros are actually
| parents to K12 and Pre-K and having parents not terribly
| in debt could help them focus more on being there for
| their kids and encouraging education.
| _heimdall wrote:
| > Yes but every policy is unfair. It literally is
| choosing where to give a limited resource, it can never
| be fully fair.
|
| I don't think that holds for a policy of non-
| intervention. People usually don't like that solution,
| especially when considering welfare programs, but it is
| fair to give no one assistance in the sense that everyone
| was treated equally/fairly.
|
| Now its a totally different question whether its fair
| that some people are in this position today. The answer
| is almost certainly no, but that doesn't have a direct
| impact on whether an intervention today is fair or not.
| jimkleiber wrote:
| Apathy is the only fair policy?
| nwienert wrote:
| I am a bit apathetic towards giving generally wealthier
| people who made a bad financial choice a break, when
| weighed against all the different ways you could spend
| that money, yes.
| golergka wrote:
| Yes. For the government, apathy and inaction is always
| the best possible policy.
| Twirrim wrote:
| If we block on the basis that previous people didn't have
| something and that it would be unfair to them we would
| literally never make any progress in this world.
|
| Instead of starting a new better world, we'll just stick
| with the old one that sucks because we don't want to be
| unfair. What an awful, awful way to look at the world.
| aylmao wrote:
| With half a trillion dollars you can also open a lot of
| universities. Increased supply would lower prices for
| everyone. One could even open public universities and offer
| education at very reduced or no tuition.
| bun_at_work wrote:
| > not all students get the benefit, some already paid off
| their debts or a large part of it.
|
| I'm one of the people who paid off a large portion of debt
| and probably don't need this assistance. However, this
| argument is so offensive. People were encouraged to take
| out debt for a number of reasons, and by a number of
| institutions, without first being educated about the
| implications of that. This argument states that we
| shouldn't help people because other people didn't have
| help. Following this logic, we shouldn't seek to help
| anyone ever, unless everyone else has also received the
| exact same help.
|
| - slaves shouldn't be freed because other slaves weren't
| freed - we shouldn't give food to the starving, because
| those not starving aren't getting free food - we shouldn't
| care about others because they don't care about me
|
| These arguments are all the greedy option in game theory,
| and all contribute to the worst outcomes across the board,
| except for those who can scam others in this system.
|
| The right way to think about programs that help others is
| to consider cooperating - some people don't get the maximum
| possible, but they do get some! And when the game is played
| over and over, all parties get the maximum benefit
| possible.
|
| In the case of student debt, paying it off and fixing the
| broken system, by allowing bankruptcy or some other fix,
| would benefit far more people than it would hurt; it would
| also benefit some people who paid their loans off
| completely: parents of children who can't pay off their
| loans now.
|
| In the end the argument that some already paid off their
| debts is inherently a selfish argument in the style of "I
| don't want them to get help because I didn't get help."
| Society would be better if we didn't think in such greedy
| terms.
|
| All that said - there are real concerns about debt
| repayment. The point about emboldening universities to ask
| for higher tuition highlights the underlying issue with the
| student loan system. Why bring up the most selfish possible
| argument when there are valid, useful arguments for your
| position?
| Fidelix wrote:
| Consider that his position might be more profound than
| you considered it to be.
|
| Mine is. It's about incentives. Now you can take it from
| there, and at least in my interpretation the rest of your
| rebuttal falls apart.
|
| There is absolutely no equivalency to slavery. That is
| simply dishonest. Slaves didn't choose to be slaves. Do
| students who take on debt have no agency whatsoever to
| you? Did the people who paid such debts had no agency
| when paying?
| bun_at_work wrote:
| If you don't like the equivalence to slavery, pick a
| different example, there are three I posted and more you
| can probably think of on your own.
|
| We know that the idea of a rational agent in economics is
| a myth, and as you mentioned, it is about incentives, as
| well as motives.
|
| Students who take on debt that limits them in later life
| don't have all the information they need at the time they
| make the decision. Saying the information is available is
| not reasonable. These students are told they _most_ go to
| college to make a living.
|
| They are not told they need to get an engineering,
| medical, or finance degree to make going to college worth
| it, economically.
|
| They are shown all the loans they can get without an
| equivalent amount of effort put into educating them about
| the consequences those loans represent. For example, how
| much the loans will cost in the long run, along with
| estimated pay for various fields of study.
|
| Furthermore, the loans are given for any degree program
| without restriction.
|
| All the comments I made about game theory still stand,
| and we don't need to get into the myriad problems with
| our education and student loan systems. I agree they
| aren't perfect; I just think the argument 'I didn't get
| my loans paid off neither should you' is an extremely
| selfish one. Just because someone suffers doesn't mean
| everyone should. Also - in my experience people who are
| ready to make that selfish argument are very offended
| when it gets flipped on them. So they can understand
| intuitively the issue with the selfish position.
| sahila wrote:
| > They are not told they need to get an engineering,
| medical, or finance degree to make going to college worth
| it, economically.
|
| This is a very well known fact. When I was in high school
| in the 2000s, it was a well known joke about how the arts
| / english majors won't land you a job. And even if you
| never heard about it, the data for average salary for
| graduates in the college, its dropout rates, and salary
| by majors is highly publicized. This isn't advanced
| research to do and in the age of internet, someone
| considering college should be able to do. I think the
| problem is no one believes they are the average case and
| instead are the exception who'll make it work.
| indymike wrote:
| > I'm one of the people who paid off a large portion of
| debt and probably don't need this assistance. However,
| this argument is so offensive.
|
| Please spend my tax dollars on curing disease, fixing
| homelessness, free addiction treatment, better mental
| health care, improving our justice system, or even cold
| fusion. All of these have better outcomes than does
| paying off student debt.
|
| > These arguments are all the greedy option
|
| You left out the best argument against: there are much
| better things to spend money on.
|
| I could get behind fixing Bush's biggest mistake - his
| bankruptcy change that moved the pendulum to lifetime
| debt. I'd love to see people be able to discharge student
| loans that are impossible to pay off or where the debtor
| was put in debt by a fraudulent or failed education
| institution.
| anticensor wrote:
| Student loans are not dischargeable but they are not
| inheritable too.
| thfuran wrote:
| Only the first of those is a real problem, but it really is
| a problem.
| Octoth0rpe wrote:
| > Instead we gave a small number of people all of this money
| for a moonshot in a state where they squabble over who's
| allowed to use which bathroom and if I need an abortion I
| might die.
|
| AFAICT from this article and others on the same subject, the
| 500 billion number does not appear to be public money. It
| sounds like it's 100 billion of private investment (probably
| mostly from Son), and FTA,
|
| > could reach five times that sum
|
| (5x 100 billion === 500 billion, the # everyone seems to be
| quoting)
| ajmurmann wrote:
| Or, prices of houses would go up even more because we still
| aren't allowing supply to increase and people having more
| money doesn't change that.
| JohnPrine wrote:
| I'm starting to think there's no difference between this
| website and reddit
| actualwitch wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into
| Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
| JohnPrine wrote:
| lol you got me
| azemetre wrote:
| This site is way way way more capital friendly than worker
| friendly.
| _heimdall wrote:
| Eliminating debt has a lot of unintended consequences. Price
| inflation would almost certainly be a problem, for example.
|
| It's also not clear to me what happens to all of the
| derivatives based on student debt, though there may very well
| be an answer there that I just haven't understood yet.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| i'm sorry but student debt payoffs are probably one of the
| lowest socially valuable uses of this money, rather than
| basic things like snap or housing vouchers. sorta shows how
| myopic HN is, student debt is a relatable concern so it gets
| prioritized
| whimsicalism wrote:
| also just: "why invest it when we could spend it on
| consumption now" is a good argument against letting private
| wealth usage be socially determined if most people just
| always vote for consumption now
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _we could've eliminated student loan debt for ~20 million
| Americans. It would in turn open a myriad number of
| opportunities, like owning a home_
|
| I'd give the money to folks starting in the trades before
| bailling out the college-educated class.
|
| Also, wiping out numbers on a spreadsheet doesn't erect new
| homes. If we wiped out student debt, the portion of that
| value that went into new homeownership would principally flow
| to existing homeowners.
|
| Finally, you're comparing a government hand-out to private
| investment into a capital asset. That's like comparing eating
| out at a nice restaurant to buying a bond. Different
| prerogatives.
| talldayo wrote:
| It's a fair comparison. Stargate is fundamentally about two
| things - America's industry needs a cash injection, and
| we're choosing a completely hype-dominated vein to push the
| needle into.
|
| Problem is, the parent comment _is_ right. Even if you
| think student loan mitigation has washy economics behind
| it, the outcome is predictable and even desirable if you
| 're playing the long-game in politics. If not that, spend
| $500,000,000,000 towards onshoring Apple and Microsoft's
| manufacturing jobs. Spend it re-invigorating America's
| mothballed motor industry and let Elon spec it out like a
| kid in a candy shop. Relative to AI, even student loan
| forgiveness and dumping money into trades looks attractive
| (not that Trump would consider either).
|
| Nobody on HN should be confused by this. We know Sam Altman
| is a scammer (Worldcoin, anyone?) and we know OpenAI is a
| terrible business. This money is being deliberately wasted
| to keep OpenAI's lights on and preserve the _Weekend At
| Bernie 's_-esque corpse that is America's "lead" in
| software technology. That's it. It's blatantly simple.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _completely hype-dominated vein to push the needle
| into_
|
| One, you're not getting MGX and SoftBank to pay off
| student debt.
|
| Two, if they do what they say they want to, they'll be
| building new power generation, transmission
| infrastructures and data centres. Even if AI is a hype,
| that's far from useless capital.
|
| > _money is being deliberately wasted to keep OpenAI 's
| lights on_
|
| OpenAI is spending their own money on this.
| daryl_martis wrote:
| go to the uk. they have all the free abortions, genders, and
| education you could possibly want. apply for asylum since
| you're clearly afraid for your life.
| ozim wrote:
| Money doesn't fix stuff. You need good will people and good
| will people don't need that much money.
| mft_ wrote:
| Money alone might not fix stuff... but an absence of money
| can prevent stuff being fixed.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| More importantly, money, at global scale, doesn't solve
| scarcity issues. If there are 100 apples and 120 people
| making sure everyone has a lot of money doesn't magically
| create 20 more apples. It just raises the price of apples.
| Building an apple orchard creates apples. Stargate is people
| betting that they are building a phenomenal apple orchard.
| I'm not sure they will and an worried the apple orchard will
| poison us all but unlike me these people are putting their
| money where their mouth is and had thus larger inventive to
| figure out what they are doing.
| ozim wrote:
| On global scale if you have 100 people and 150 apples but
| apples are on the opposite side of the globe it is not like
| you can sustainably get those apples delivered all the
| time.
|
| Getting 150 apples once is better than nothing but still
| doesn't fix the problem.
| farresito wrote:
| I disagree with you. I think the impact of AI on society in the
| long term is going to be massive, and such investments are
| necessary. If we look at the past century, technology has had
| (in my opinion) and incredibly positive impact on society. You
| have to invest in the future.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Five-hundred billion dollars is nothing when you consider
| there's a new government agency that it is said will shave two
| trillion from government inefficiency.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Five-hundred billion is twenty-five percent of DOGE's pie in
| the sky promise. It's something.
| b3lvedere wrote:
| Such mega investments are usually not for the sake of
| humankind. They are usually for the sake of a very selected
| group of humans.
| energy123 wrote:
| Very zero-sum outlook on things which is factually untrue much
| of the time. When you invest money in something productive that
| value doesn't get automatically destroyed. The size of the pie
| isn't fixed.
| Nullabillity wrote:
| > something productive
|
| So... not this.
| ActionHank wrote:
| But then how could politicians and the wealthy steal all that
| money if you just gave it away or helped the poors?
| i_love_retros wrote:
| The wars are how American tax payer money gets given to all
| these companies. Why would they try to end them?
| pizzathyme wrote:
| I am surprised at the negativity from HN. Their clear goal is
| to build superintelligence. Listen to any of the interviews
| with Altman, Demis Hassabis, or Dario Amodei (Anthropic) on the
| purpose of this. They discuss the roadmaps to unlimited energy,
| curing disease, farming innovations to feed billions, permanent
| solutions to climate change, and more.
|
| Does no one on HN believe in this anymore? Isn't this tech
| startup community meant to be the tip of the spear? We'll find
| out by 2030 either way.
| scottLobster wrote:
| All of those things would put them out of business if
| realized and are just a PR smokescreen.
|
| Have we not seen enough of these people to know their
| character? They're predators who, from all accounts,
| sacrifice every potentially meaningful personal relationship
| for money, long after they have more than most people could
| ever dream of. If we legalized gladiatorial blood sport and
| it became a billion-dollar business, they'd be doing that. If
| monkey torture porn was a billion dollar business they'd be
| doing that.
|
| Whatever the promise of actual AI (and not just performative
| LLM garbage), if created they will lock the IP down so hard
| that most of the population will not be able to afford it.
| Rich people get Ozempic, poor people get body positivity.
| fallingknife wrote:
| This place seems to have been overwhelmed by bitterness and
| envy over the last 5 years or so.
| megous wrote:
| Not envious of multi-billionaire's companies gathering
| capital, IP, knowledge and infrastructure for huge scale
| modern day private Stasi apparatuses. Just bitter.
| akra wrote:
| Just my opinion/observation really but I believe its because
| people are implicitly entertaining the possibility that it is
| no longer about software or rather this announcement
| implicitly states that talent long term isn't the main
| advantage but instead hardware, compute, etc and most
| importantly the wealth and connections to gain access to
| large sums of capital. AI will enable capital/wealthy elite
| to have more of an advantage over human
| intelligence/ingenuity which I think is not typically what
| most hacker/tech forums are about.
|
| For example it isn't what you can do tinkering in your
| home/garage anymore; or what algorithm you can crack with
| your intrinsic worth to create more use cases and
| possibilities - but capital, relationships, hardware and
| politics. A recent article that went around, and many others
| are believing capital and wealth will matter more and make
| "talent" obsolete in the world of AI - this large figure in
| this article just adds money to that hypothesis.
|
| All this means the big get bigger. It isn't about
| startup's/grinding hard/working hard/being smarter/etc which
| means it isn't really meritocratic. This creates an uneven
| playing field that is quite different than previous software
| technology phases where the gains/access to the gains has
| been more distributed/democratized and mostly accessible to
| the talented/hard working (e.g. the risk taking startup
| entrepreneur with coding skills and a love of tech).
|
| In some ways it is kind of the opposite of the indy hacker
| stereotype who ironically is probably one of the biggest
| losers in the new AI world. In the new world what matters is
| wealth/ownership of capital, relationships, politics, land,
| resources and other physical/social assets. In the new AI
| world scammers, PR people, salespeople, politicians, ultra
| wealthy with power etc thrive and nepotism/connections are
| the main advantage. You don't just see this in AI btw (e.g.
| recent meme coins seen as better path to wealth than working
| due to weak link to power figure), but AI like any tech
| amplifies the capability of people with power especially if
| by definition the powerful don't need to be smart/need other
| smart people to yield it unlike other tech in the past.
|
| They needed smart people in the past; we may be approaching a
| world where the smart people make themselves as a whole
| redundant. I can understand why a place like this doesn't
| want that to succeed, even if the world's resources are being
| channeled to that end. Time will tell.
| gmd63 wrote:
| Exactly as you say. AI is imagined to be the wealthy
| nepotist's escape pod from an equal playing field and
| democratized access to information. Win at all cost
| soulless predators who find infinite sacrifice somehow
| righteous love games like the ones that macro-scale AI
| creates.
|
| The average person's utility from AI is marginal. But to a
| psychopath like Elon Musk who is interested in deceiving
| the internet about Twitter engagement or juicing his crypto
| scam, it's a necessary tool to create seas of fake
| personas.
| enraged_camel wrote:
| >> Does no one on HN believe in this anymore? Isn't this tech
| startup community meant to be the tip of the spear? We'll
| find out by 2030 either way.
|
| I joined in 2012, and been reading since 2010 or so. The
| community definitely has changed since then, but the way I
| look at it is that it actually became more reasoned as the
| wide-eyed and naive teenagers/twenty-somethings of that era
| gained experience in life and work, learned how the world
| actually works, and perhaps even got burned a few times. As a
| result, today they approach these types of news with far more
| skepticism than their younger selves would. You might argue
| that the pendulum has swung too far towards the cynical end
| of the spectrum, but I think that's subjective.
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| I'm sorry but unless this $500B was being invested in equipping
| soldiers and building navies, air capabilities, artillery, etc
| it could not stop even an urban gang turf war.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| It's an indirect attempt of tackling any first order problem.
| So is all software engineering.
| armaautomotive wrote:
| Won't an intelligent agent available to everyone be able to
| solve problems in the world? Isn't that why they (OpenAI) and
| others are doing what they do? To bring abundance?
| thelastgallon wrote:
| We could do 20 Manhattan projects with it[1].
|
| 1) Build fully autonomous cars so there are zero deaths from
| car accidents. This is ~45K deaths/year (just US!) and millions
| of injuries. Annual economic cost of crashes is $340 billion.
| Worldwide the toll is 10 - 100x?
|
| 2) Put solar on top of all highways.
|
| 3) Give money to all farmers to put solar.
|
| 4) Build transmission.
|
| And many more ...
|
| The Manhattan Project employed nearly 130,000 people at its
| peak and cost nearly US$2 billion (equivalent to about $27
| billion in 2023):
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project
| XorNot wrote:
| You can't just compare things to the Manhattan project. The
| Manhattan project was large for it's time, but the thing they
| were doing was ultimately, simple. You can build a nuclear
| bomb with simply a large enough sphere of enriched U-235 and
| it'll explode. Which is what the Hiroshima bomb was - a gun
| type assembly. This is not a complex device.
|
| The relative complexity of projects only ever increases,
| because if they were simpler we would already have done them.
| The modern LHC is far more complicated then the Manhattan
| project. So is ITER. Hell, the US military's logistics chain
| is more complicated then the Manhattan project.
|
| The fundamental attribution error here is going "look the
| power to destroy a city was so much cheaper!"
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| (contingent on the money actually being spent, which....)
| This is basically an AI-manhattan project. It would employ
| vast numbers of construction, tradesmen, manufacturing, etc.
| bayeslaw wrote:
| Altman said we will be amazed at the rate AI will CURE diseases.
| Not diagnose, not triage or help doctors but cure, ie understand
| at a deep fundamental, mechanistic level then devise therapies,
| ie drugs, combination of drugs and care practices that work. WOW.
|
| Despite the fact that this is THE thing I'd be the happiest to
| see in the real world (having spent a considerable amount of my
| career in companies working towards this vision), we are so far
| from it (as anyone who actually worked on these problems will
| attest) that Altman's comment here isn't just overselling, it's a
| blatant lie about this tech's capabilities.
|
| I guess the pitch was something like: "hey o3 can already do PhD
| level maths so you know in 5 years it will be able to do drugs
| too, and cure shit, Mr President".
|
| Trouble is o3 can't do advanced math (or at least definitely not
| at the level openai claimed.. it was a lie, it turns out openai
| funds the dataset that measures this - ouch). And the bigger
| problem is, going from "ai can do maths" to "invent cures" is
| about a 10-100 X jump. If it wasn't, don't we think the pharma
| companies would have solved this by hiring lots of "really smart
| math guys"?
|
| As anyone in biotech will tell you, the hard bit is not the first
| third of the drug discovery pipeline (where 99% of ai driven
| biotechs focus). It's the later parts where the rubber meets the
| road.. i.e. where your precious little molecule is out in the
| real world with real people where the incredible variability of
| real biological hosts makes most drugs fail spectacularly. You
| can't GPT your way out of this. The answers for this is not in
| science papers that you can just read and regurgitate a version
| that "solves biology and cures diseases".
|
| To solve this you need AI but most of all you have to do science.
| Real science. In the lab, in vitro and in Vivo, not just in
| silico, doing ablation studies, overfitting famous benchmark
| datasets and other pseudo science shit the ML community is used
| to doing.
|
| That is all to say, I'd bet we won't see a single purely AI
| designed novel drug in the clinic in this decade. All parts of
| that sentence are important. Purely AI designed. Novel. But
| that's for another post..
|
| Now, back to Altman. If you watch the clip, he almost did the
| smart thing at first when Trump put him on the spot and said "I
| have no idea about healthcare, biotech (or AI beyond board room
| drama)" but then could not resist coming up with this outlandish
| insane answer.
|
| Famously (in tech circles anyway) Paul Graham wrote more than a
| decade ago about Altman that he's the most strong willed
| individual he's ever met, who can just bend the universe to his
| will. That's his super skill. And clearly.. convincing SoftBank
| and Oracle to do this 500 billion investment for OpenAI (a non
| profit turned for profit) is an unbelievable achievement. I have
| no idea what Altman can say (or do) in board rooms that unlocks
| these possibilities for him.. Any ideas? Let me know!
| ensocode wrote:
| Why now? Is this to compensate the campaign donors or to scare
| Putin?
| lachlanj wrote:
| Is there any government investment or involvement in this
| company? It seems like it's all private investment so I'm
| confused why this is being announce by the President.
| netfortius wrote:
| They had me at "Oracle" ...
| ravish0007 wrote:
| AI surveillance on large scale
| Deutschland314 wrote:
| Why oracle?
|
| Oracle wtf.
| realaleris149 wrote:
| In America!
|
| The intro paragraph in the original URL
| https://openai.com/index/announcing-the-stargate-project/
| mentions US/America for 5 times!
| DrScientist wrote:
| If I understand correctly - if you are training a model to
| perform a particular task - in the end what matters is the
| training data - and by and large different models will largely
| converge on the best representation of that data for the given
| task, given enough compute.
|
| So that means the models themselves aren't really IP - they are
| inevitable outputs from optimising using the input data for a
| certain task.
|
| I think this means pretty much everyone, apart from the AI
| companies - will see these models as pre-competitive.
|
| Why spend huge amounts training the same model multiple times,
| when you can collaborate?
|
| Note it only takes one person/company/country to release an open
| source model for a particular task to nuke the business model of
| those companies that have a business model of hoarding them.
| victor106 wrote:
| > All three credited Trump for helping to make the project
| possible, even though building has already started and the
| project goes back to 2024.
|
| It's sad to see the president of US being ass kissed so much by
| these guys. I always assumed there's a little of that but this is
| another extreme. If this is true, I fear America has become like
| a third world country with a dictator like head of state where
| everyone just praises him and get favors in return.
| x-007 wrote:
| money smells good i think
| demizer wrote:
| Hopefully they discover AGI and the AGI turns out to be a
| communist. They will kill it SO fast.
| seydor wrote:
| unless they have internally built models that are of much higher
| intelligence than what we have today, this seems like premature
| optimization
| biimugan wrote:
| I really don't understand the national security argument. If you
| really do fear some fundamental breakthrough in AI from China,
| what's cheaper, $500 billion to rush to get there first, or
| spending a few billion (and likely much less) in basic research
| in physics, materials science, and electronics, mixed with a
| little bit of espionage, mixed with improving the electric grid
| and eliminating (or greatly reducing) fossil fuels?
|
| Ultimately, the breakthrough in AI is going to either come from
| eliminating bottlenecks in computing such that we can simulate
| many more neurons much more cheaply (in other words, 2025-level
| technology scaled up is not going to really be necessary or
| sufficient), or some fundamental research discovery such as a new
| transformer paradigm. In any case, it feels like these are
| theoretical discoveries that, whoever makes them first, the other
| "side" can trivially steal or absorb the information.
| tim333 wrote:
| I'm not sure I buy the national security argument but as you
| say the other side can trivially steal or absorb theoretical
| discoveries but not trivially get $500bn worth of data centers.
| biimugan wrote:
| Right, but $500 billion in data centers alone is not likely
| to get you very far in the grand scheme of things. Endlessly
| scaling up today's technology eventually hits some kind of
| limit. And if you spend that money to discover some
| theoretical breakthrough that no longer requires the $500
| billion outlay, then like I said, China will trivially be
| able to steal that breakthrough and spend much less than $500
| billion to reproduce it. Is "getting there first" going to
| actually be worth it? That's what I'm questioning.
| msoad wrote:
| no... one more lane will fix the traffic. Truly American
| approach
|
| Amazing to see how DeepSeek R1 is doing better than OpenAI
| models with much less resources
| maxglute wrote:
| 500B of compute infrastructure with order of magnitude greater
| deprecation / need to return on capital. Compute isn't concrete
| infra with 50+ years of value, more like 5 years, i.e. need to
| produce 50-100B worth value per year to break even. On top of
| the "$125B hole that needs to be filled for each year of CapEx
| at today's levels" according to Sequoia. All which with could
| be wiped by PRC pacing SOTA model, unless 500B of more compute
| will lead to qualititive model differences. Right now, I don't
| know where that value is coming from, so either a lot of
| investors are getting fleeced, or this is a Manhattan tier
| strategic project... privately funded, which makes even less
| strategic sense.
| Valakas_ wrote:
| It's fascinating how most people still don't get it.
|
| ASI is basically a god. This is the ultimate solution (or
| problem). It will push us to the singularity, and create an
| utopia or drive humanity to extinction. Imagine someone who is
| so smart that would win every single nobel prize available, and
| make multiple discoveries in a matter of a year. And now
| multiply this person's intelligence by 100 (most likely more,
| but 100 is already hard enough to grasp). There's no point in
| investing in anything else. An investment in ASI is an
| investment in everything (could be a bad one though, depending
| on the outcome).
|
| The government is banking on being able to control it, which is
| also pretty funny. It's like a pet hamster thinking they can
| dictate what a human does.
| biimugan wrote:
| This type of comment is another thing I don't quite
| understand -- as if no one but AI proponents have heard of
| the Singularity. "There's no point in investing in anything
| else" is a very presumptive, fact-free idea. It's just
| begging the question. Many promising false starts have
| occurred in this area. Predictions from technologists such as
| Kurzweil have been wrong more than they've been right.
| azemetre wrote:
| If you investigate the language of these individuals and
| where these ideas come from, it's basically taking ideas
| from Christianity while giving it a techno. Things like
| requiring data to live "forever" is not that different than
| ideas of the afterlife.
| loandbehold wrote:
| Kurzweil's predictions were spot on and stood the test of
| time. Sure you can nitpick some things that didn't happen
| but overall he was spot on. He was one on the first people
| who understood what became known as "scaling hypothesis".
| dpflan wrote:
| Last time, in 2016, SoftBank announced a $50B investment in the
| US...what were the results of that? Granted, SB announced an up-
| selled $100B investment earlier, is this not similar in
| "announcement"?
|
| """ SoftBank's CEO Masayoshi Son has previously made large-scale
| investment commitments in the US off the back of Trump winning a
| presidential election. In 2016, Son announced a $50 billion
| SoftBank investment in the US, alongside a similar pledge to
| create 50,000 jobs in the country.
|
| ...
|
| However, as reported by Reuters, it's unclear if the new jobs
| pledged back in 2016 ever came to fruition and questions have
| been raised about how SoftBank, which had $29 billion in cash on
| its balance sheet according to its September earnings report,
| might fund the investment. """
|
| - https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/softbank-pledges-...
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Can't wait for these to succeed just in time for them to tell us
|
| 'you should have spent all this time and money fighting climate
| change'
| smeeger wrote:
| artificial intelligence must be stopped
| w00ps wrote:
| O1 Pro's opinion on Stargate: Humans are hallucinating, again...
|
| https://justpaste.it/631gx
| jnsaff2 wrote:
| I miss n gate so much. I asked AI to generate one for this
| thread.
|
| "In a stunning display of fiscal restraint, Sam Altman only asks
| for $500 billion instead of his previous $7 trillion moonshot.
| Hackernews rejoices that the money will be spent in Texas, where
| the power grid is as stable as a cryptocurrency exchange.
| Oracle's involvement prompts lengthy discussions about whether
| Larry Ellison's surveillance dystopia will run on Java or if
| they'll need to purchase an enterprise license for consciousness
| itself. Meanwhile, SoftBank's Masayoshi Son continues his streak
| of funding increasingly expensive ways to turn electricity into
| promises, this time with added patriotism. The comments section
| devolves into a heated debate about whether this is technically
| fascism or just regular old corporatocracy, with several users
| helpfully pointing out that actually, the real problem is
| systemd."
| causal wrote:
| Okay that's hilarious.
| nojvek wrote:
| > create hundreds of thousands of American jobs, and generate
| massive economic benefit for the entire world.
|
| 100s of 1000s of jobs seems a bit exaggerated.
| rchaud wrote:
| The US appears to be fully in the grips of centralized economic
| autarky. A tiny coterie of industrialists who have the
| President's ear decide how to allocate a gigantic amount of
| capital for their pet projects while the state raises tariffs and
| implements bans to protect them from competition.
|
| Didn't go well for South America in the 60s and 70s but perhaps,
| as economists are prone to saying, "this time will be different".
| whimsicalism wrote:
| this is private capital. yes, we are in an era of big projects
| and big capital deployment. is that synonymous with centralized
| autarky? i don't agree
| i_love_retros wrote:
| What does it have to do with Trump then? Why was he involved?
| umeshunni wrote:
| He love the publicity and most people won't realize that he
| doesn't have anything to do with this.
| aylmao wrote:
| AI very much has to do with the state. It's an arms race
| between China and the USA, per many [4]. And China
| doesn't seem to be behind any longer [1].
|
| It's not only Trump. Before leaving Biden already ordered
| the DoE and the DoD to lease sites for data centers and
| energy generation. The only reason we don't see a
| "Department of AI" or a "National AI Agency" is due to
| how the military industrial complex works, and a lot of
| lobbying I'm sure.
|
| [1]
| https://www.scmp.com/tech/policy/article/3295662/beijing-
| mee...
|
| [2] https://www.insideglobaltech.com/2025/01/20/biden-
| administra...
|
| [3] https://www.utilitydive.com/news/biden-doe-dod-lease-
| sites-a...
|
| [4] https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/01/21/1110269/t
| here-ca...
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Funny how he said he did this, but then right during the
| press conference they mention the data centers already
| under construction from Biden time frame.
| rchaud wrote:
| Because $500b is not a number anybody will commit to
| without significant assurances regarding tax breaks, access
| to labour, security etc which can only be provided by the
| state.
|
| Musk cannot ban Chinese autos from the US market, but the
| government can. Same goes for Tiktok, Zuck cannot force
| Americans not to use it. AI is the next battlefield and
| further bans will be coming down the line to make sure the
| investment is protected.
| api wrote:
| Musk could also work to make Tesla more competitive with
| BYD in the mainstream American car market instead of
| making Tesla double and then triple down on a weird niche
| product like the Cybertruck that will never appeal to
| many people. Tesla had a huge lead in EV tech that they
| seem to be squandering by not addressing boring stuff
| like build quality, giving BYD plenty of time to catch
| up. Their whole product line is starting to look
| stagnant.
|
| Keeping BYD out won't help if all the other car makers
| also catch up. If BYD pulls far enough ahead they could
| just create a US division and make cars here like Toyota
| and Nissan do. Nissan is on the ropes, so maybe BYD could
| just buy them and make that their US brand and get all
| their factories and supply chains.
|
| If Tesla kept iterating on the Model 3, released the
| Model E, and Musk stayed out of divisive politics that
| alienate customers, Tesla had a chance to own the
| mainstream of the US auto market for the next 50 years.
| I'd say that's gone now.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Person who was right a few times, despite others
| naysaying, assumes they're right on new things,
| especially as they get older...
|
| That's certainly not a thing that's ever happened before.
| /s
| api wrote:
| Yeah, I am reminded of Linus Pauling thinking vitamin C
| cured everything.
|
| Success is dangerous.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| A combination of ego (luck had no part in my previous
| success) and over reliance on a limited historical sample
| (last time everyone said I was wrong too, and I was
| right).
|
| But even the smartest people still get it wrong on
| occasion.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _What does it have to do with Trump then? Why was he
| involved?_
|
| One of the broken parts of the American system is
| permitting. Trump can sidestep that by letting this be
| built on federal land. That, in turn, unlocks investment.
|
| Beyond that, DoD and DoE are massive buyers of compute.
| Seeding the venture with purchase agreements from them de-
| risks the project further.
|
| Finally, by Trump putting his name to it he assigns it his
| bully pulpit's prestige. (Though that doesn't appear to
| have carried over to Musk, who's already taking pot shots
| at it.)
| lenerdenator wrote:
| This is an amount that would be a meaningful change to most
| US states' gross annual economic output that we're talking
| about, and a few people control it. Sounds pretty centralized
| to me.
|
| The fact that a handful of individuals have _half a trillion
| dollars_ to throw at something that may or may not work while
| working people can pay the price of a decent used car each
| year, every year to their health insurance company only to
| have claims denied is insane.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Free movement of capital and the ability to identify
| promising projects and allocate our resources there are why
| our society is prosperous and why we are able to devote
| more resources towards healthcare than any society that has
| ever come before us.
|
| This money is managed by small amounts of people but it is
| aggregated from millions of investors, most of these are
| public companies. The US spends over 10x that amount on
| healthcare each year.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| Is that why I, and a lot of other people my age, have a
| lower standard of living than my parents did at the same
| point in their lives?
|
| The "free movement of capital" only ever seems to move
| the capital one direction: up to the people who needed
| the labor of others to reach such wealth.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| The large majority of people do not have a lower standard
| of living than their parents at the same age. My dad's
| family could not even afford shoes for him and he lived
| in Europe.
|
| I am sorry that you feel you are downwardly mobile, but
| you should not assume your experience generalizes.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| Mine lived in America. Where the story in the article is
| taking place.
|
| This is, in fact, a generalized experience: [0]
|
| [0]https://www.pewresearch.org/social-
| trends/2019/02/14/millenn...
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _This is, in fact, a generalized experience_
|
| Your article is from 2019. We're now "wealthier than
| previous generations were at [our] age" [1].
|
| [1] https://www.wsj.com/personal-finance/millennials-
| personal-fi...
| whimsicalism wrote:
| it's also turbocharged by the number of people that are
| descendants of immigrants
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _turbocharged by the number of people that are
| descendants of immigrants_
|
| It's divided by whether you own real estate or equities.
|
| Immigrant homeownership is starkly lower than native-born
| Americans' [1].
|
| We're probably going to see a surge in that disparity,
| now, given the immigrant workforce that builds and
| renovates houses is in the process of being gutted. That
| increases the value of existing stock.
|
| [1] https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/rese
| arch/fi...
| whimsicalism wrote:
| exactly my point - if you were to subset to people whose
| parents were native-born US and compare their wealth to
| that of their parents at same age, it would be absolutely
| higher. it looks closer than it is because of immigration
| and we aren't comparing to the parents in their home
| country
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| What I find interesting is that children in of immigrants
| greatly outperform children of non-immigrants when
| compared by household income. That is to say, the have
| higher economic mobility intergenerational income growth.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _immigrants greatly outperform children of non-
| immigrants when compared by household income_
|
| Income, not wealth. _Particularly_ not after inheritances
| transfer.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| The studies I am familiar with focus on the lowest income
| quintiles, where inheritance wealth transfer is less of a
| consideration. That said, I wouldn't be surprised if
| wealth transfer favored immigrants as well when families
| are controlled and matched for comparison.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| nothing about that is surprising and is exactly what you
| would expect when people move to places with more
| efficient talent markets, especially from pseudo-feudal
| societies that still existed in lots of the developing
| world in the 20th century, and that's before you get into
| the selection effect.
|
| my dad was basically expected to work the farms his
| entire life and school ended at the 3rd grade where he
| grew up, he moved to the US and became a chess master &
| went to one of the best colleges in the country.
| impossible where he was from and really shows how stupid
| and zero-sum-minded old world elites are compared to the
| US/anglo culture.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Expectations depend on your priors. You and I might agree
| on those.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| WSJ? Might as well have not included it. It's paywalled.
|
| That being said, it seems to reference property owners.
| Hell, if I'd had the money to buy a house prior to the
| pandemic, I would have. I didn't because of constant
| reorgs at my employer at the time, which resulted in
| hiring freezes and reduced raises. The goal behind these
| was to make the company attractive to buyers. Eventually,
| they did find one: Oracle. They've since gutted what was
| a major employer for my region.
|
| Since the pandemic housing has skyrocketed and pay hasn't
| kept up. It's been stagnant for 40 years while economic
| output has risen, along with COL [0].
|
| Where'd all of the value go?
|
| (that's a rhetorical question)
|
| [0]https://www.consumeraffairs.com/finance/comparing-the-
| costs-...
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _it seems to reference property owners._
|
| Yes. Millenials own property at the highest rate, age
| adjusted, in generations. (Anecdote: am Millenial. Own a
| home. Most of my friends do, too. Yes, it's a bubble, but
| it's a big one.)
|
| > _Where 'd all of the value go?...(that's a rhetorical
| question)_
|
| No, it's not. It went to the people who bought houses.
| Including between 2019 and 2024.
|
| Which generation's mode reached home-buying age in that
| interval, an interval also generously sprinkled with
| massive stimulus, a stock-market boom and forced
| consumption-reduction through stay-at-home orders? (
| _That_ is a rhetorical question.)
| lenerdenator wrote:
| "Yes. Millenials own property at the highest rate, age
| adjusted, in generations."
|
| Age-adjusted?
|
| So if you take out the fact that it took up more of the
| one resource that matters more than anything else to
| become property owners, then, yes, Millennials have more
| of it.
|
| Which is kind of proving my point.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Age-adjusted?...So if you take out the fact that it
| took up more of the one resource that matters more than
| anything else to become property owners_
|
| Ask before assuming.
|
| Age adjusted means taking each generation when they were
| the same age, how wealthy were they? A Boomer today is
| wealthier than a Millenial because they've had more time
| to accumulate. But when a Boomer was Millenial-aged, she
| had on average less wealth than a Millenial today.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| Wealth is the preponderance of resources.
|
| If you have more wealth, you can theoretically purchase
| more goods and services than if you had less.
|
| The exception to this, of course, is if the goods and
| services cost more, and for things that you need to exist
| in American society (healthcare, education,
| transportation, housing, food), those things generally
| cost several times more for younger people than they did,
| "age-adjusted", when their parents were the same age,
| often with a difference that is more than that in wealth.
| That's why wages have been flat.
|
| There's also the question of how that wealth is
| distributed among the generations and how it's stored. If
| the property-owning Millennial owns a few rental
| properties that their peers have to pay to live in, the
| "average" properties owned by the group can be the same
| (or even higher) but the number of people those
| properties are spread among is lower.
|
| There's also the fact that lots of wealth is held in the
| casin... er... stock markets as people need to
| participate in those markets with their 401(k)s to be
| able to retire some day. You can't sleep in a stock
| certificate, but if you want to have any savings, it's
| easier to enter the equities market than it is to get
| into real estate from a startup cost perspective. People
| are having to compromise the "stability" of their
| fundamental needs (like housing) in order to grow more
| abstract definitions of wealth.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _exception to this, of course, is if the goods and
| services cost more, and for things that you need to exist
| in American society_
|
| Which is why these figures have been inflation adjusted.
|
| > _lots of wealth is held in the casin... er... stock
| markets_
|
| Pretty sure Boomers hold more stocks than Millenials.
| This is an argument for Millenials being _even better_
| off than the statistics show.
|
| > _People are having to compromise the "stability" of
| their fundamental needs (like housing) in order to grow
| more abstract definitions of wealth_
|
| Yes. But that doesn't broadly describe Millenials, and it
| describes more people in older generations when they were
| present Millenials' ages.
|
| You're trying to argue against facts with philosophy.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| > You're trying to argue against facts with philosophy.
|
| It is a fact that wages have remained stagnant for four
| decades.
|
| It's also a fact that the wealth gap is growing between
| rich and poor, and that's what's distorting the figures
| you're citing. That's the only way, mathematically, you
| see wages remain flat while seeing wealth rise.
|
| Look deeper at your facts, instead of letting them be
| tainted by your philosophy.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _wages have remained stagnant for four decades...It 's
| also a fact that the wealth gap is growing between rich
| and poor_
|
| First is sort of correct for a very specific slice of
| America, those just above the welfare cut off. (For whom
| real wages have been flat to negative, assuming we scale
| up housing preferences and add in costs that didn't make
| sense before, _e.g._ internet and cell-phone bills.) The
| second--about rising inequality--is true throughout.
|
| Neither advances your argument, however--one can better
| off while others are much better off, and most in a
| population can be better off while some are worse off.
| (Observe the median Millenial and the statistics stand.
| Millenials are rich, in part because we're going to stick
| Gen Alpha with the bill.)
| mrguyorama wrote:
| You keep posting articles from WSJ as if we should take
| Bezo's literal mouthpiece as a reliable source.
|
| edit: Bezos doesn't own the WSJ. I'm wrong.
| magicalist wrote:
| Rupert Murdoch (Bezos owns the Washington Post)
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I don't feel like having the nth argument about whether
| we are better off today than in 1980. Agree to disagree,
| i feel that the facts are obvious, especially if you
| subset to the population whose parents were in the US in
| 1980.
|
| i think if you gave people a legitimate choice to go back
| to 1980 (and take their friends let's say), we would see
| the revealed preference. certainly if you did it for a
| year and then gave them the option to come back
| nfw2 wrote:
| case-in-point, my mom was effectively cured of a cancer
| in 2024 that they wouldn't have even tried to treat in
| 1980
| nfw2 wrote:
| The reason young people often have a lower standard of
| living is because:
|
| - there is a shortage of housing
|
| - predatory loans for higher education
|
| - chronic health crisis due to terrible government health
| policy and guidelines
|
| - globalization has led to an international labor market
|
| The last point may be bad for many Americans but an
| unequivocal good for the world. Global poverty has seen
| an incredible drop in the past 70 years. https://en.wikip
| edia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty#/media/File:Wo...
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Interesting that you put the chronic health crisis on a
| failure of government.
|
| I would put that more on a failure of culture to value
| healthy living and activity. I wouldn't call that the
| responsibility of the government. Perhaps lack of clarity
| on ownership is related to the crisis itself.
| nfw2 wrote:
| It's not solely the fault of government, but heavy corn
| subsidies and the food pyramid travesty didn't help.
| bbqfog wrote:
| Having to spend thousands for insurance every year (even
| if you're totally healthy) and not having it even be
| remotely effective, is not my definition of "prosperous".
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Individual insurers pay out tens of billions of dollars
| in claims every year, frequently have non-profitable
| years, and are the counterparty on pretty risky
| contracts.
|
| There are lots of problems with our current approach to
| healthcare, but insurers aren't charging you way more
| than the cost to counterparty on that contract should be.
| bbqfog wrote:
| None of this suggests a prosperous society. More like a
| corrupt and bureaucratic society.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| "Frequently have non-profitable years"
|
| A graph of the stocks for UnitedHealth, Elevance
| (formerly Anthem) and Cigna shows that they're all on the
| growth track for the last five years.
|
| If a subscriber pays them what they do, and they don't
| have money to pay a claim declared medically necessary by
| a medical doctor, but do have the money to forward to a
| retirement fund, _they are charging too much_.
|
| Most of the rest of the industrialized world seems to
| grasp this concept, and their people live longer.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _graph of the stocks for UnitedHealth, Elevance
| (formerly Anthem) and Cigna shows that they 're all on
| the growth track for the last five years_
|
| Stock price ! profitability, but you're still correct.
| UnitedHealth's operations have churned out cash each of
| the last four years [1], as have Cigna [2] and Elevance
| [3]. Underwriting gains across the industry have been
| strong for years [4]. The only story I can think of where
| American health insurers lost money was Aetna with its
| underpriced ACA plans [5].
|
| That said, _whimsicalism_ is also partly right in that
| insurers aren 't the cause of the unaffordability of
| American healthcare. They by and large pay out most of
| their premiums. (With some variance.)
|
| [1] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/UNH/cash-flow/
|
| [2] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/CI/cash-flow/
|
| [3] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ELV/cash-flow/
|
| [4]
| https://content.naic.org/sites/default/files/2021-Annual-
| Hea...
|
| [5] https://spia.princeton.edu/news/why-private-health-
| insurers-...
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Yes, if we subset to _health_ insurance over recent
| years, they are profitable (not massive margins) -
| agreed. I was overstating the case.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I was referring to insurance writ large, but yes it's
| true recently health insurers have been profitable - but
| not massively, more like 3-4% average margins. [0]
|
| > If a subscriber pays them what they do, and they don't
| have money to pay a claim declared medically necessary by
| a medical doctor, but do have the money to forward to a
| retirement fund, they are charging too much.
|
| If it is only legal to lose money on providing insurance,
| nobody would do it.
|
| > Most of the rest of the industrialized world seems to
| grasp this concept, and their people live longer.
|
| I agree that there are problems with cost/performance in
| our healthcare market. I think it is largely due to
| overutilization & misallocation, combined with some poor
| genetic/cultural luck around opioids and obesity.
|
| 0: https://content.naic.org/sites/default/files/industry-
| analys...
| willcipriano wrote:
| The United States spends more per capita on socialized
| medicine than any other nation on earth[0]. US socialized
| medicine spending per capita is more than any other
| nation spends total between both public and private in
| fact, it just fails to provide it to anyone but the very
| poor, very sick and elderly.
|
| You'd think the healthy working population wouldn't be
| that much of a burden to care for as well, but they have
| to go out of pocket and get insurance to provide for
| themselves after providing for everyone else.
|
| There is a lot of graft going on for this to be the case.
| It may not be the fault of insurance companies but
| someone is stealing a great deal of money from the
| American people.
|
| Now here's the million dollar question; are you aware of
| this obvious fact? Have you ever heard someone frame the
| socialized medicine debate in this way: "If we could be
| as efficient as the UK we could give you free healthcare
| AND cut your taxes!". If not, why not?
|
| [0]https://www.statista.com/statistics/283221/per-capita-
| health...
| whimsicalism wrote:
| graft but also overutilization/misallocation, ie. we will
| publicly spend massive portions of our GDP treating old
| people who are slowly dying but little on younger people
| who have some crippling illness, mostly because older
| people vote and triage is an uncomfortable concept to
| people
| willcipriano wrote:
| Every other nation on earth somehow finds a way to deal
| with that. Given the US is 48th in life expectancy[0]
| behind all these other nations that spend much less, that
| explanation doesn't seem to hold much water.
|
| [0]https://www.worldometers.info/demographics/life-
| expectancy/
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > Every other nation on earth somehow finds a way to deal
| with that.
|
| well not every other nation, but i know what you mean.
|
| other nations are much better at managing overutilization
| by denying care where it is not needed. the US insurance
| system shields people from cost and encourages
| overutilization due to a number of stupid policy choices
| (aka refusal to have 'death panels' like in Canada/UK but
| also refusal to do away with massive publicly subsidy for
| health expenditure).
|
| for a personal story, my parents basically get free MRIs
| from the state for little reason whereas people I know
| have to pay an arm and a leg for MRIs because their
| insurance is worse. at minimum, we could at least also
| make my parents have to pay an arm and leg for useless
| MRIs and doctors would stop encouraging them or lose
| patients.
| willcipriano wrote:
| MRIs only cost that much in the US[0](2015 prices: $1,145
| in America and $138 in Switzerland), everything is
| inexplicably ten fold more expensive here. That more
| expensive care doesn't result in ten fold better outcomes
| as all the health measures you can find indicate. That's
| the root of the problem and the thing is no politician[1]
| is really willing to address it and they don't really
| cover it clearly on the news[2], I wonder why?
|
| [0]https://www.vox.com/2014/9/4/6104533/the-125-percent-
| solutio...
|
| [1]https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-
| lobbying/industries/summ...
|
| [2]https://www.fiercepharma.com/marketing/hey-big-
| spenders-phar...
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Correct, you have identified the problem. Prices are high
| because there is no agent in the US system looking to
| allocate spending on the basis of cost and health
| returns. The closest we come is the much hated insurance
| denials.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| yes, precisely my point
| willcipriano wrote:
| Its likely true that more procedures are performed and
| more prescriptions written, but why are those procedures
| and prescriptions many times more expensive?
|
| Economies of scale should make them cheaper. An MRI
| machine and technician that sits there unused half the
| day has to charge more per visit than one used all day
| long. Have too many customers? Get more machines and
| techs, now the MRI manufacturer is making more units,
| offering volume discounts...
|
| Rationing of care doesn't explain why the individual
| units of care are themselves much more expensive. Compare
| inhaler prices in Canada vs the US, $10 in Canada $100
| here[0], that isn't because too many of them are given
| out. It's theft.
|
| Addendum: Further, the young and healthy ration their
| care quite a bit under the current system, they are taxed
| too heavily (to pay for the care of the elderly) to
| afford it for themselves so they go without.
|
| [0]https://www.usnews.com/news/healthiest-
| communities/articles/...
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Why charge $138 when your customers will pay $1,145 and
| keep coming back?
|
| you need someone willing shop and pick the cheaper
| options for competition to bring down prices. You also
| need someone willing to say "that's too expensive, I wont
| buy it" and walk away. Same is true for the inhalers. If
| someone will pay $100 before switching to the generic,
| that is what they get charged. In Canada, the state is
| only willing to pay $10, so that is the price. This is
| the demand side of the problem.
|
| There is also a supply problem, where the state provides
| medical company monopolies through "certification of
| need". It is basically illegal to open an MRI clinic that
| would compete with an existing one in many jurisdictions.
|
| https://radiologybusiness.com/topics/medical-
| imaging/magneti...
| willcipriano wrote:
| > you need someone willing shop and pick the cheaper
| options for competition to bring down prices
|
| You think consumers wouldn't do that if they were able to
| do so? You call the facility and everyone says the price
| is "it depends". They decide what they are going to
| charge you after you have left. Is any other industry
| allowed to do that? Hire someone to paint your house and
| he comes up with the price after he is done?
|
| > There is also a supply problem, where the state
| provides medical company monopolies through
| "certification of need"
|
| I'm well aware of this. Isn't it interesting that the
| people who give some of the largest campaign
| contributions have these sort of laws carved out for
| them? Charge whatever you want, decide the price in a
| opaque manner after the fact, competitors aren't allowed
| to establish themselves without their permission,
| importing drugs from other countries is forbidden. The
| list goes on and on.
|
| Then you would think, if there is this much rampant and
| obvious corruption the fourth estate would step in right?
| Oh, they receive billions a year to advertise
| prescription drugs. Advertisement that can't be that
| effective, sometimes for pretty rare conditions, things
| your doctor should be made aware of but really odd to
| tell people about in a massive ad campaign.
|
| The mainstream media and both parties are paid handsomely
| to allow this to continue. The problem isn't people are
| fat, or death panels or any of the distractions. The
| debate isn't about socialized medicine vs private. It's
| not about "keeping your doctor". There is just massive
| corruption to the tune of trillions of dollars in the
| past decade. There needs to be criminal investigations.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| the overutilization story is what explains this, you
| cannot simply walk into Switzerland and say "I want an
| MRI here is my $138", but that is essentially what you
| can do (delta a bit of doctor shopping) in the US. there
| also is a lot of bad price transparency in the US so the
| listed price is not the price ended up paying, again this
| is due to the problem I identified above about shielding
| costs.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| When's the last time you tried that here in the US?
|
| It's like when people claim that other countries have
| worse medical systems because they have to wait, as if my
| friend didn't just wait 2 months for a simple injection
| recently, and my mom isn't waiting 2 weeks for an MRI
| after a stroke.
|
| The vast majority of people who insist we have the
| greatest healthcare _don 't even go to the doctor's
| regularly_. Because they were raised in a system where
| going to the doctor is something you have to weigh the
| cost of! We have worse medical outcomes simply because
| people wait until a cheap situation turns into a shitty
| and painful and _expensive_ situation.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| What country has more doctor visits?
| fallingknife wrote:
| It's a great thing that they can throw half a trillion at
| something that may not work. Every great tech advancement
| came from throwing money at something which might not work.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _fact that a handful of individuals have half a trillion
| dollars_
|
| This is disputed [1]. In reality, a handful of individuals
| have the capital to seed a half-a-trillion dollar
| megaproject, which then entails the project to raise
| capital from more people.
|
| [1] https://www.wsj.com/tech/musk-pours-cold-water-on-
| trump-back...
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| Right as usual. This is more like a "promise" to invest a
| few $B and then continue to invest more and more if
| things go well
| lenerdenator wrote:
| It's disputed by the guy who has a business interest in
| making sure his competition can't do as well, and this
| notice of dispute is printed in a paper that is literally
| named after a place where the vast majority of people
| have never had to do any real labor in their lives.
|
| Also the guy disputing it is trying to regain control of
| an entity that he was too distracted to hold to its
| original mission, is on record as agreeing with the
| statement that Jewish people are the enemies of white
| people, takes copious amounts of mind-altering substances
| daily, has lost billions of dollars on purchasing a
| company that had a path to (modest) profitability, and
| did what could easily be seen as a Roman salute at an
| inauguration speech. Maybe he's not a great source of
| statements on objective reality, even within the AI
| industry.
|
| With regard to the monetary amount, understand, once you
| reach a certain point, the amount of capital held by the
| quantity of individuals we're talking about is
| immaterial. Any capital they raise is usually derived
| from the labor of others and they operate a racket to
| prevent any real competition for how that capital is
| distributed by the labor or the customers who are the
| source of their actual wealth. The average Oracle
| employee (I know a few), for example, probably has a few
| more immediate things they want the surplus value of
| their labor to be spent on than Larry's moonshot.
| However, he ultimately controls the direction of that
| value through a shareholder system that he can manipulate
| more-or-less at-will through splits, buybacks, and other
| practices.
|
| His customers would probably also like to pay less for
| what are usually barely Web 2.0 database applications. Of
| course, he has the capital to corner markets and shove
| competition out of the space.
|
| All of this is to say when you reach this amount of money
| in the hands of one individual, they're more likely to
| regularly harm people than beat the odds on their next
| bet in a way that actually uplifts society, at least in a
| way that could beat the way just disbursing that capital
| among those who created it could.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _disputed by the guy who has a business interest in
| making sure his competition can 't do as well_
|
| This is a valid conflict of interest. That means we
| should closely scrutinize his claims. From what I can
| tell, he's added up correctly in respect of the named
| backers' wealth and liquidity.
|
| > _a paper that is literally named after a place where
| the vast majority of people have never had to do any real
| labor in their lives_
|
| Yes, we should ignore bankers when it comes to questions
| about money...
|
| Do you have an actual claim? Or is it all _ad hominem_?
|
| > _capital they raise is usually derived from the labor
| of others and they operate a racket to prevent any real
| competition for how that capital is distributed by the
| labor or the customers who are the source of their actual
| wealth_
|
| They're capitalists, herego they can raise unlimited
| wealth?
| tanseydavid wrote:
| >> takes copious amounts of mind-altering substances
| daily
|
| Hyperbole much?
| lenerdenator wrote:
| Not hyperbole at all [0]
|
| [0]: https://www.yahoo.com/news/elon-musks-drug-becoming-
| problem-...
| rchaud wrote:
| And where do you think the socialists of the 60s got hard
| currency to import machinery from? Borrowing from non-state
| lenders.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| borrowing from non-state lenders is neither a necessary nor
| sufficient condition for 'autarky' and your reasoning seems
| to just be since it happened in South America in the 60s it
| must be part of the economic mismanagement that occurred
| there.
|
| i agree that our protectionist policies are bad and
| autarkic in nature
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Like every other country. You exchange good or services for
| currencies from the other countries, and then you can use
| that currency to buy things from anybody that would take
| that currency.
|
| There is nothing saying a socialist country can't produce
| goods and services, and sell them.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Is this word being used correctly?
|
| au*tar*ky /'o,tarke/ noun economic independence or self-
| sufficiency. "rural community autarchy is a Utopian dream" a
| country, state, or society which is economically independent.
| plural noun: autarkies; plural noun: autarchies
| maxlin wrote:
| that's what I thought
| boredhedgehog wrote:
| But which word did he mean instead? It seems it should a
| synonym for "coterie".
| stronglikedan wrote:
| It will be different (and as another commentor pointed out, it
| probably always has been), because the adults are back it
| charge, thankfully.
| knowaveragejoe wrote:
| Tariffs, mass deportations, rescinding anything the
| predecessor did because of your personal egotism. None of
| these are the behavior of adults, and you know better.
| jeffy29 wrote:
| And it never is.
| boringg wrote:
| Apples to oranges comparison. The problem set is completely
| different regarding your doom example of South America.
| rchaud wrote:
| How? the problem is the same: a need for rapid industrial
| development to grow the economy. The solutions are the same:
| government picks winners, which is how an upstart like OpenAI
| can be paired with a dinosaur like Oracle. The latter's CEO
| of course being a long time friend of Trump.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _the problem is the same: a need for rapid industrial
| development to grow the economy_
|
| This is first-mover industrial development being funded by
| private actors looking out for a return on their
| investments. South America saw nothing similar--it was
| duplicating others' industrialisation with state capital
| (often borrowed from overseas) while spending massively on
| handouts.
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| Private capital. That detail seems to derail your whole
| comment.
| aylmao wrote:
| How so? Does this capital being private ensure "this time
| will be different"?
| Parfait__ wrote:
| They should be free to decide how to spend their money?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Does this capital being private ensure "this time will
| be different"?_
|
| South America didn't have a mix of domestic and foreign
| investors deploying massive quantities of private money
| into capital assets in the 60s and 70s. They had
| governments borrowing to fund their citizens' consumption.
| Massive difference on multiple levels.
| aylmao wrote:
| > They had governments borrowing to fund their citizens'
| consumption.
|
| The problem here being that it was money spent that was
| never earned back, and money that eventually had to be
| paid back, right?
|
| This can also happen with private capital. 2008 was a
| bust caused by private banks, for example. AI hasn't
| proven to be profitable yet [1], and I'm not sure it'll
| makes a difference, for the success of projects like
| this, wether the money is coming from government or not.
|
| In fact, if the 2008 bank bail-out, auto industry bail-
| out, the Silicon Valley bank prop-up, and other such
| actions by the US government are considered [2], if this
| turns out to be a bubble it will be taxpayers who end up
| fronting the bill.
|
| [1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/ai-generative-
| business-mone...
|
| [2] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/economics/08/go
| vernmen...
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _problem here being that it was money spent that was
| never earned back, and money that eventually had to be
| paid back, right?_
|
| In part. It was money borrowed by the state. That means
| when it can't be paid back, it's automatically a systemic
| issue. And it was money borrowed to fund consumption.
| There was no good reason to ever expect it to be paid
| back because it wasn't funding productive activity.
|
| > _if this turns out to be a bubble it will be taxpayers
| who end up fronting the bill_
|
| Very possibly, particularly if part of the package are
| _e.g._ federally-subsidised loans. Before that, however,
| private parties will almost certainly lose tens if not
| hundreds of billions of dollars. That cushion, together
| with those parties being spread between domestic and
| foreign sources, is what makes this less risky to the
| United States than similar relative-magnitude projects in
| South America. (Plus the fact that this is a capital
| asset versus consumption.)
| abduhl wrote:
| >> In fact, if the 2008 bank bail-out, auto industry
| bail-out, the Silicon Valley bank prop-up, and other such
| actions by the US government are considered [2], if this
| turns out to be a bubble it will be taxpayers who end up
| fronting the bill.
|
| Haven't all three examples you note (2008 crash, auto
| bailout, and SV prop up) resulted in a net return/gain
| for the taxpayer?
| nfw2 wrote:
| Moreover, if a government is funneling taxpayer money
| into the projects of a few citizens, that is a clear red
| flag of corruption. Whereas if private entities are
| deciding to invest their own capital into infrastructure,
| it's unclear what the complaint even is
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| Capital owners allocate their capital to their "pet
| projects" all day every day. That is how the whole thing
| works.
|
| I'm not saying "this time will be different". I'm saying
| this is business as usual.
| rchaud wrote:
| $500b is not business as usual for any corporation.
| Centralized planning doesn't fail because of government
| bureaucrats, it fails because there is too much spending
| to be decided on by too few people.
|
| Zuckerberg lost $30bn or more trying to create a VR
| amusement park. Scale that up to $500bn and see how much
| waste and dead-weight losses are created.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _$500b is not business as usual for any corporation_
|
| "Up to $500bn" is business as usual for Silicon Valley
| post-2021.
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| This is the real answer. There isn't $500B.
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| 1. This isn't a single corp, it is multiple corps. For a
| sense of scale, MSFT alone spent ~$55B in Capex last
| year. Check out this[1] for a sense of how much different
| industries spend each year. Note that this will cross
| several industries including Power, Telecom, Software,
| electrical equip, etc.
|
| 2. There is no commitment to spend in a single year
|
| 3. There is no actual contractual commit here, this is a
| press release (i.e. Marketing)
|
| 4. There is not actually a $500B pile of gold being
| spent. This is more of a "this is how big we think this
| industry will be and how much we may spend to get
| exposure to that industry"
|
| [1] https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/d
| atafile...
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| Also I am not an economist but the VR failure was not
| dead-weight loss. If you invested in something downstream
| of that you profited off of Zuck's venture. Dead-weight
| loss is more of a gov-driven malinvestment
| nfw2 wrote:
| The VR investment was a calculated risk that may or may
| not pay off in a longer time horizon. Meta is the leading
| VR company and well-positioned to benefit the most from
| whatever comes from the industry in the future.
|
| The demand for more AI compute is already here and is
| less risky of an investment.
|
| "Centralized planning" was effective under Bell Labs
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Also the fact that two of the names in the headline are
| foreign owned. (North Korea is an autark's wet dream.)
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Also the fact that they're not going to invest $500B, and
| this is mostly a puff piece.
|
| As Elon said, they don't the money.
|
| Talk is cheap.
|
| $500B is not.
| HPsquared wrote:
| $500B may be a lot, but at the national level it's not
| that much if you spread over a few years. Even now, it's
| "only" 1 week worth of US GDP. It depends how much they
| expect to get back.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| This isn't national funding.
|
| $500B is a lot - no matter how you slice it.
|
| It's a lot easier to talk pie in the sky than to actually
| get $500B to spend.
| rchaud wrote:
| > "I think this will be the most important project of this
| era," Altman said on Tuesday. "We wouldn't be able to do this
| without you, Mr. President."
|
| Since when does "private capital" speak in such honeyed tones
| to state powers?
|
| https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/21/tech/openai-oracle-
| softbank-t...
| groby_b wrote:
| When you want to suck up, you want to suck up.
|
| It's private money. CEOs will say whatever they need to say
| to achieve goals (here, favorable conditions for AI work),
| look at what the actual money flows say.
| amazingamazing wrote:
| There's more to support than money.
| JumpinJack_Cash wrote:
| > > Private capital
|
| Groupthink capital, directed by mostly 2 "thought leaders".
|
| Economies don't like Groupthink Capital, regardless of it
| being private, public or a combination of the 2
|
| Of course the US economy as a whole is huge so even billions
| can be absorbed, once you start talking about half a trillion
| though...
| rchaud wrote:
| Not to mention justifying further tax cuts for this tiny
| sliver of billionnaires so they can continue to "take risks
| to innovate".
| hetoh wrote:
| Bookmark this - This private capital will eventually backed
| by Govt guarantees on the loan banks gives. Which will
| socialize the loss and privatize profit...
| jncfhnb wrote:
| The effectiveness of policies is influenced by your starting
| position. South America is relatively poor. The United States
| is the best positioned country in the world by a long shot.
| briandear wrote:
| Tariffs are a negotiating tactic. Read Art of the Deal and that
| outlines how Trump negotiates.
| rchaud wrote:
| So is being delinquent on debts apparently.
| newsclues wrote:
| Compared to China?
| class3shock wrote:
| Well it just got alot harder to check and see if/when a new
| Stargate tv show or movie might be coming.
| lagrange77 wrote:
| I hate having to rely on these drip-feed vague statements to
| gauge the fate of the planet.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| I hope they build those little nuclear reactors into these
| datacenters.
| 65 wrote:
| Can someone convince me Sam Altman is not evil? I have no proof
| he is not evil.
| Parfait__ wrote:
| Couldn't we say the same about you?
| 65 wrote:
| I am text on a screen. Sam Altman, as a story of a person,
| doesn't indicate to me he is moral or ethical.
| PeakKS wrote:
| They are clearly building GW from MGS2
| seattle_spring wrote:
| Why are we spending a half-trillion dollars on "AI
| infrastructure" when our _actual_ infrastructure has been
| crumbling and underfunded for decades?
| Rebuff5007 wrote:
| Tangential, but this has gotten me thinking...
|
| I used to wonder how the hundreds of thousands of employees that
| work in Big Oil or Big Pharma could tolerate all the terrible
| things their company does... e.g. the opioid epidemic. The naive
| optimist in me never thought that the tech industry would ever be
| that bad.
|
| Now, as someone thats been in the industry for 10+ years and
| working adjacent to LLMs, this is all so depressing. The hype has
| gotten out of control. We are spending hundreds of billions of
| dollars on things that simply are not making life better for the
| majority of people.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| One of the key questions becomes: is this it for Europe?
| awei wrote:
| How much exaFLOPS can we expect from a 100 Billions dollars
| datacenter today? A rough estimate from a quick Perplexity search
| gives us 24 exaFLOPS for all smartphones in the world and 12
| exaFLOPS for personal computers. Could a competitor to such a
| Datacenter be a collective effort with some sort of crypto to
| split the benefits?
| awei wrote:
| apparently around 100 exaflops if the 100 billions dollars
| datacenter is made only of nvidia H100. I am guessing the fact
| that (most?) personal computers and smartphones do not have a
| big gpu makes the above scenario difficult.
| zhengiszen wrote:
| Sad waste of money that will go in Oracle licenses... The lost
| liberties of the American people is just a small feat... beside
| the point
| jl2718 wrote:
| 1. At this scale, we're not just talking about buying GPUs. It
| requires semiconductor fabs, assembly factories, power plants,
| batteries/lithium, cooling, water, hazardous waste disposal.
| These data centers are going to have to be massively geo-
| engineered arcologies.
|
| 2. What are they doing? AGI/ASI is a neat trick, but then what?
| I'm not asking because I don't think there is an answer; I'm
| asking because I want the REAL answer. Larry Ellison was talking
| about RNA cancer vaccines. Well, I was the one that made the
| neural network model for the company with the US patent on this
| technique, and that pitch makes little sense. As the problem is
| understood today, the computational problems are 99% solved with
| laptop-class hardware. There are some remaining problems that are
| not solved by neural networks, but by molecular dynamics, which
| are done in FP64. Even if FP8 neural structure approximation
| speeds it up 100x, FP64 will be 99% of the computation. So what
| we today call "AI infrastructure" is not appropriate for the task
| they talk about. What is it appropriate for? Well, I know that
| Sam is a bit uncreative, so I assume he's just going to keep
| following the "HER" timeline and make a massive playground for
| LLMs to talk to each other and leave humanity behind. I don't
| think that is necessarily unworthy of our Apollo-scale
| commitment, but there are serious questions about the honest of
| the project, and what we should demand for transparency. We're
| obviously headed toward a symbiotic merger where LLMs and GenAI
| are completely in control of our understanding of the world.
| There is a difference between watching a high-production movie
| for two hours, and then going back to reality, versus a never-
| ending stream of false sensory information engineered
| individually to specifically control your behavior. The only
| question is whether we will be able to see behind the curtain of
| the great Oz. That's what I mean by transparency. Not financial
| or organizational, but actual code, data, model, and prompt
| transparency. Is this a fundamental right worth fighting for?
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