[HN Gopher] The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else
___________________________________________________________________
The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else
Author : 1vuio0pswjnm7
Score : 387 points
Date : 2026-02-07 11:21 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.washingtonpost.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.washingtonpost.com)
| lordnacho wrote:
| The real question is whether the boom is, economically, a
| mistake.
|
| If AI is here to stay, as a thing that permanently increases
| productivity, then AI buying up all the electricians and network
| engineers is a (correct) signal. People will take courses in
| those things and try to get a piece of the winnings. Same with
| those memory chips that they are gobbling up, it just tells
| everyone where to make a living.
|
| If it's a flash in a pan, and it turns out to be empty promises,
| then all those people are wasting their time.
|
| What we really want to ask ourselves is whether our economy is
| set up to mostly get things right, or it is wastefully searching.
| jleyank wrote:
| They still gotta figure out how their consumers will get the
| cash to consume. Toss all the developers and a largish cohort
| of well-paid people head towards the dole.
| oblio wrote:
| At some point rich people stop caring about money and only
| care about power.
| willis936 wrote:
| It's a fun thought, but you know what we call those people?
| Poor. The people who light their own money on fire today
| are ceding power. The two are the same.
| catlifeonmars wrote:
| 1. Some people can afford to light a lot of their money
| on fire and still remain rich.
|
| 2. The trick is to burn other people's money. Which is a
| lot more akin to what is going on here. Then, at least in
| the US, if you're too big to fail, the fed will just give
| you more cash effectively diminishing everyone else's
| buying power.
| willis936 wrote:
| In regards to 2: it's as simple as not letting it be your
| money being set on fire. Every fiscally responsible
| individual is making sure they have low exposure to the
| mag 7.
| oblio wrote:
| At the end the day a medieval lord was poor but he lived
| a better life than the peasants.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > At the end the day a medieval lord was poor but he
| lived a better life than the peasants.
|
| As measured in knowledge utilized during basic living:
| The lives of lords were much less complex than that of
| modern poor people.
| rybosworld wrote:
| Yeah I don't think this get's enough attention. It still
| requires a technical person to use these things effectively.
| Building coherent systems that solve a business problem is an
| iterative process. I have a hard time seeing how an LLM could
| climb that mountain on it's own.
|
| I don't think there's a way to solve the issue of: one-
| shotted apps will increasingly look more convincing, in the
| same way that the image generation looks more convincing. But
| when you peel back the curtain, that output isn't quite
| correct enough to deploy to production. You could try brute-
| force vibe iterating until it's exactly what you wanted, but
| that rarely works for anything that isn't a CRUD app.
|
| Ask any of the image generators to build you a sprite sheet
| for a 2d character with multiple animation frames. I have
| never gotten one to do this successfully in one prompt.
| Sometimes the background will be the checkerboard png
| transparency layer. Except, the checkers aren't all one color
| (#000000, #ffffff), instead it's a million variations of off-
| white and off-black. The legs in walking frames are almost
| never correct, etc.
|
| And even if they get close - as soon as you try to iterate on
| the first output, you enter a game of whack-a-mole. Okay we
| fixed the background but now the legs don't look right, let's
| fix those. Okay great legs are fixed but now the faces are
| different in every frame let's fix those. Oh no fixing the
| faces broke the legs again, Etc.
|
| We are in a weird place where companies are shedding the
| engineers that know how to use these things. And some of
| those engineers will become solo-devs. As a solo-dev, funds
| won't be infinite. So it doesn't seem likely that they can
| jack up the prices on the consumer plans. But if companies
| keep firing developers, then who will actually steer the
| agents on the enterprise plans?
| KellyCriterion wrote:
| esp when it comes down to integration with the rest of the
| business processes & people aroud this "single apps" :-)
| throwaw12 wrote:
| > But when you peel back the curtain, that output isn't
| quite correct enough to deploy to production
|
| What if, we change current production environments to fit
| that blackbox and make it run somehow with 99% availability
| and good security?
| mc-0 wrote:
| > It still requires a technical person to use these things
| effectively.
|
| I feel like few people critically think about how technical
| skill gets acquired in the age of LLMs. Statements like
| this kind of ignore that those who are the most productive
| already have experience & technical expertise. It's almost
| like there is a belief that technical people just grow on
| trees or that every LLM response somehow imparts knowledge
| when you use these things.
|
| I can vibe code things that would take me a large time
| investment to learn and build. But I don't know how or why
| anything works. If I get asked to review it to ensure it's
| accurate, it would take me a considerable amount of time
| where it would otherwise just be easier for me to actually
| learn the thing. Feels like those most adamant about being
| more productive in the age of AI/LLMs don't consider any of
| the side effects of its use.
| IsTom wrote:
| That's not something that will affect the next quarter,
| so for US companies it might as well be something that
| happens in Narnia.
| mylifeandtimes wrote:
| Why do we need people to consume when we have the government?
|
| Serious question. As in, we built the last 100 years on "the
| american consumer", the idea that it would be the people
| buying everything. There is no reason that needs to or
| necessarily will continue-- don't get me wrong, I kind of
| hope it does, but my hopes don't always predict what actually
| happens.
|
| What if the next 100 is the government buying everything, and
| the vast bulk of the people are effectively serfs. Who HAVE
| to stay in line otherwise they go to debt prison or tax
| prison where they become slaves (yes, the US has a fairly
| large population of prison laborers who are forced to work
| for 15-50 cents/hour. The lucky ones can earn as much as
| $1.50/hour.
| https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2017/04/10/wages/
| smegger001 wrote:
| where will the government get the money to buy anything if
| the billionaires and their mega corps have it all and spend
| sufficient amounts to keep the government from taxing. we
| have a k shape economy where the capital class is
| extracting all of the value from the working class who are
| headed to subsistence levels of income and the low class
| dies in the ditch.
| nosianu wrote:
| Like before - debt!
|
| This prevents the consumers from slacking off and enjoying
| life, instead they have to continue to work work work. They
| get to consume a little, and work _much_ more (after all,
| they also have to pay interest, and for consumer credits and
| credits that the masses get that adds up to a lot).
|
| In this scenario, it does not even matter that many are
| unable to pay off all that debt. As long as the amount of
| work that is extracted from them significantly exceeds the
| amount of consumption allowed to them all is fine.
|
| The chains that bind used to be metal, but we progressed and
| became a civilized society. Now it's the financial system and
| the laws. "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich
| and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets,
| and to steal their bread." (Anatole France)
| forinti wrote:
| I know that all investments have risk, but this is one risky
| gamble.
|
| US$700 billion could build a lot of infrastructure, housing, or
| manufacturing capacity.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| What $700 billion can't do is cure cancers, Parkinsons, etc.
| We know because we've tried and that's barely a sliver of
| what it's cost so far, for middling results.
|
| Whereas $700 billion in AI might actually do that.
| wolfram74 wrote:
| Your name is well earned! "can't cure cancers" is
| impressively counterfactual [0] as 5 year survival of
| cancer diagnosis is up over almost all categories. Despite
| every cancer being a unique species trying to kill you,
| we're getting better and better at dealing with them.
|
| [0]https://www.cancer.org/research/acs-research-
| news/people-are...
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| Yes, we're getting better at treating cancers, but still
| if a person gets cancer, chances are good the thing
| they'll die of is cancer. Middling results.
|
| Because we're not good at curing cancers, we're just good
| at making people survive better for longer until the
| cancer gets them. 5 year survival is a lousy metric but
| it's the best we can manage and measure.
|
| I'm perfectly happy investing roughly 98% of my savings
| into the thing that has a solid shot at curing cancers,
| autoimmune and neurodegenerative diseases. I don't
| understand why all billionaires aren't doing this.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| Maybe it should give you pause then, that not everyone
| else is investing 98% of their savings?
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| It gives me pause that most people drive cars or are
| willing to sit in one for more than 20 minutes a week.
|
| But people accept the status quo and are afraid to take a
| moment's look into the face of their own impending
| injury, senescence and death: that's how our brains are
| wired to survive and it used to make sense evolutionarily
| until about 5 minutes ago.
| minifridge wrote:
| How AI will cure neurodegenerative diseases and cancer?
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| If we knew that we probably wouldn't need AI to tell us.
|
| But realistically: perhaps by noticing patterns we've
| failed to notice and by generating likely molecules or
| pathways to treatment that we hadn't explored.
|
| We don't really know what causes most diseases anyway.
| Why does the Shingles vaccine seem to defend against
| dementia? Why does picking your nose a lot seem to
| increase risk of Alzheimer's?
|
| That's the point of building something smarter than us:
| it can get to places we can't get on our own, at least
| much faster than we could without it.
| catlifeonmars wrote:
| I don't think that lack of intelligence is the
| bottleneck. It might be in some places, but
| categorically, across the board, our bottlenecks are much
| more pragmatic and mundane.
|
| Consider another devastating disease: tuberculosis. It's
| largely eradicated in the 1st world but is still a major
| cause of death basically everywhere else. We know how to
| treat it, lack of knowledge isn't the bottleneck. I'd say
| effectively we do not have a cure for TB because we have
| not made that cure accessible to enough humans.
| alex43578 wrote:
| That's a weird way to frame it. It's like saying we don't
| know how to fly because everyone doesn't own a personal
| plane.
|
| We have treatments (cures) for TB: antibiotics. Even XDR-
| TB.
|
| What we don't have is a cure for most types of cancer.
| catlifeonmars wrote:
| Flying is a bad example because airlines are a thing and
| make flying relatively accessible.
|
| I get your point, but I don't think it really matters. If
| a cure for most (or all) cancers is known but it's not
| accessible to most people then it is effectively
| nonexistent. E.g it will be like TB.
|
| > We have treatments (cures) for TB
|
| TB is still one of the top 10 causes of death globally.
| alex43578 wrote:
| Things like antibiotics are plenty accessible - 3rd world
| countries are literally overusing and misusing
| antibiotics to the point of causing drug resistance in
| TB. "Effectively we do not have [thing] because we have
| not made that [thing] accessible to enough humans" is an
| exercise in goal-post moving.
|
| About 15% of people over the age of 15 are illiterate,
| but it'd be silly to say "effectively we don't have
| literacy", even in a global context. Depending on the
| stat, 1 in 10 don't have access to electricity, but
| electricity has been in 50% of American homes for over
| 100 years.
|
| The reality is that the future is unevenly distributed.
| AI and more broadly technology as a whole, will only
| exacerbate that uneven distribution. That's just the
| reality of progress: we didn't stall electrifying homes
| in NYC because they didn't get electricity in Papua New
| Guinea.
|
| If AI discovers a cure for cancer, it may be incredibly
| unevenly distributed. Imagine it's some amp'd-up form of
| CAR-T, requiring huge resources and expenses, but
| offering an actual cure for that individual. It'd be
| absurd to say we couldn't consider cancer cured just
| because the approach doesn't scale to a $1 pill.
| catlifeonmars wrote:
| > As an example, in the UK in 2013 the cost of standard
| TB treatment was estimated at PS5,000 while the cost of
| treating MDR-TB was estimated to be more than 10 times
| greater, ranging from PS50,000 to PS70,000 per case.
|
| I pulled this from Wikipedia. It does not look like TB
| treatment is "plenty affordable".
|
| If the issue is with the semantics of the word "cure"
| that's not a hill I'll die on, but can you see how
| knowing how to cure something and actually curing
| something are two vastly different things?
| tim333 wrote:
| Maybe along the lines of alphafold 3
| https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/products/google-
| deepmi...
| danaris wrote:
| Ah, yes: "well, _we_ can 't cure cancer or autoimmune and
| neurodegenerative diseases, but I'm willing to invest
| basically all my money into a thing that's...trained on
| the things we know how to do already, and isn't actually
| very good at doing any of them."
|
| ...Meanwhile, we are developing techniques to yes, _cure_
| some kinds of cancer, as in every time they check back it
| 's _completely gone_ , without harming healthy tissue.
|
| We are developing "anti-vaccines" for autoimmune
| diseases, that can teach our bodies to stop attacking
| themselves.
|
| We are learning where some of the origins of the
| neurodegenerative diseases are, in ways that makes
| treating them much more feasible.
|
| So you're 100% wrong about the things _we_ can 't do, and
| your confidence in what "AI" can do is ludicrously
| unfounded.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| Every doctor and researcher in the world is trained on
| things we already know how to do already.
|
| I'm not claiming we haven't made a dent. I'm claiming I'm
| in roughly as much danger from these things right now as
| any human ever has been: middling results.
|
| If we can speed up the cures by even 1%, that's
| cumulatively billions of hours of human life saved by the
| time we're done.
| danaris wrote:
| But what they can do, that AI can't, is try new things in
| measured, effective, and ethical ways.
|
| And that _hypothetical_ "billions of hours of human life
| saved" has to be measured against the _actual_ damage
| being done right now.
|
| Real damage to economy, environment, politics, social
| cohesion, and people's lives now
|
| vs
|
| Maybe, someday, we improve the speed of finding cures for
| diseases? In an unknown way, at an unknown time, for an
| unknown cost, and by an unknown amount.
|
| Who knows, maybe they'll give everyone a pony while
| they're at it! It seems just as likely as what you're
| proposing.
| catlifeonmars wrote:
| > I don't understand why all billionaires aren't doing
| this.
|
| I know, shocking isn't it?
| XCSme wrote:
| Treating cancer is not the same as curing it. Currently,
| no doctor would ever tell you you are "cured", just that
| you are in remission.
| kmbfjr wrote:
| Cancer is approaching being a managed chronic disease.
| That isn't remission.
| XCSme wrote:
| In my experience, most people with cancer that I know
| simply oscillate between having life-threatening active
| cancer/tumors and remission.
|
| I don't know any case where people have detectable cancer
| and it's just being managed, I think that's more the
| exception than the rule.
|
| For my girlfriend, when she was in her last stages they
| had to do that (try to slow down/manage the cancer
| instead of remove it), but that was already palliative
| care and she died soon after. Also, the only reason they
| didn't try removing the tumor is because the specific
| location in the brain (pons) is inoperable.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| There is no shortage of money to build housing. There is an
| abundance of regulatory burdens in places that are desirable
| to live in.
|
| Its not due to a lack of money that housing in SF is
| extremely expensive.
| ajam1507 wrote:
| SF is not the only place where housing is expensive. There
| are plenty of cities where they could build more housing
| and they don't because it isn't profitable or because they
| don't have the workers to build more, not because the
| government is telling them they can't.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| Which cities, for example?
| loeg wrote:
| It is expensive in those other places for similar reasons
| as SF -- the government either tells them they can't
| (through zoning), or makes it very expensive (through
| regulation, like IZ / "affordable" housing), or limit
| profitability (rent control), or some combination of the
| above. All of these reduce the supply of new housing.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| Generally the cities where housing is expensive are
| exactly the ones where the government is telling people
| they can't build (or making it very expensive to get
| approval). Do you have a specific example of a city such
| as you claim?
| throwaw12 wrote:
| > US$700 billion could build a lot of infrastructure,
| housing, or manufacturing capacity.
|
| I am now 100% convinced, that the US has power to build those
| things, but it will not, because it means lives of ordinary
| people will be elevated even more, this is not what brutal
| capitalism wants.
|
| If it can make top 1% richer in 10 year span vs good for
| everyone in 20 years, it will go with former
| 112233 wrote:
| "If X is here to stay, as a thing that permanently increases
| productivity" - matches a lot of different X. Maintaining
| persons health increases productivity. Good education increases
| productivity. What is playing out now is completely different -
| it is both irresistible lust for omniscient power provided by
| this technology ("mirror mirror on the wall, who has recently
| thought bad things about me?"), and the dread of someone else
| wielding it.
|
| Plus, it makes natural moat against masses of normal (i.e.
| poor) people, because requires a spaceship to run. Finally
| intelligence can also be controlled by capital the way it was
| meant to, joining information, creativity, means of production,
| communication and such things
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| > Plus, it makes natural moat against masses of normal (i.e.
| poor) people, because requires a spaceship to run. Finally
| intelligence can also be controlled by capital the way it was
| meant to, joining information, creativity, means of
| production, communication and such things
|
| I'd put intelligence in quotes there, but it doesn't detract
| from the point.
|
| It is astounding to me how willfully ignorant people are
| being about the massive aggregation of power that's going on
| here. In retrospect, I don't think they're ignorant, they
| just haven't had to think about it much in the past. But this
| is a real problem with very real consequences. Sovereignty
| must be occasionally be asserted, or someone will infringe
| upon it.
|
| That's exactly what's happening here.
| fennecbutt wrote:
| >massive aggregation of power that's going on here
|
| Which has been happening since what at least the bad old
| IBM days and nobody's done a thing about it?
|
| I've given up tbh. It's like the apathetic masses want the
| billionaires to become trillionaires as long as they get
| their tiktok fix.
| luqtas wrote:
| > It's like the apathetic masses want the billionaires to
| become trillionaires as long as they get their tiktok
| fix.
|
| it's much worse. a great demographic of hacker news love
| gen. AI.. these are usually highly educated people
| showing their true faces on the plethora of problems this
| technology violates and generates
| int_19h wrote:
| There's nothing wrong with generative AI as a technology.
|
| The problem is that it's in the hands of sociopaths. But
| that is a general problem with our socioeconomic system,
| not with AI.
| zenmac wrote:
| >I've given up tbh. It's like the apathetic masses want
| the billionaires to become trillionaires as long as they
| get their tiktok fix.
|
| Especially at cost of diverting power and water for
| farmers and humans who need them. And the benefit of the
| AI seems quite limited from recent Signal post here on
| HN.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Water for farmers is its own pile of bullshit. Beef uses
| a stupid amount of water. Same with almonds. If you're
| actually worried about feeding people and not just
| producing an expensive economic product you're not going
| to make them.
|
| Same goes for people living in deserts where we have to
| ship water thousands of miles.
|
| Give me a break.
| tormeh wrote:
| Very important. There is more than just 1 bullshit line
| of business.
| datsci_est_2015 wrote:
| And one of my favorites, alfalfa in Arizona for Saudi
| Arabian horses.
|
| Water usage must be taxed according to its use,
| unfortunately.
| strken wrote:
| The difference is that we've more or less hit a stable Pareto
| front in education and healthcare. Gains are small and
| incremental; if you pour more money into one place and less
| into another, you generally don't end up much better off,
| although you can make small but meaningful improvements in
| select areas. You can push the front forward slightly with
| new research and innovation, but not very fast or far.
|
| The current generation of AI is an opportunity for quick
| gains that go beyond just a few months longer lifespan or a
| 2% higher average grade. It is an unrealised and maybe
| unrealistic opportunity, but it's not just greed and lust for
| power that pushes people to invest, it's hope that this time
| the next big thing will make a real difference. It's not the
| same as investing more in schools because it's far less
| certain but also has a far higher alleged upside.
| KellyCriterion wrote:
| > if you pour more money into one place and less into
| another, you generally don't end up much better off,
| although you can make small but meaningful improvements in
| select areas
|
| "Marginal cost barrier" hit, then?
| 112233 wrote:
| > The difference is that we've more or less hit a stable
| Pareto front in education and healthcare. Gains are small
| and incremental;
|
| You probably mean gains between someone receiving healtcare
| and education now, as compared to 10 years ago, or maybe
| you mean year to year average across every man alive.
|
| You certainly do not mean that person receiving appropriate
| healthcare is only 2% better off than one not receiving it,
| or educated person is noly 2% better of than an uneducated
| one?
|
| Because I find such notion highly unlikely. So, here you
| have vast amounts of people you can mine for productivity
| increase, simply by providing things that exist already and
| are available in unlimited supply to anyone who can produce
| money at will. Instead, let's build warehouses and fill
| them with obsolete tech, power it all up using tiny Sun and
| .. what exactly?
|
| This seems like a thinly disguised act of an obsessed
| person that will stop at nothing to satisfy their
| fantasies.
| ZoomZoomZoom wrote:
| > The difference is that we've more or less hit a stable
| Pareto front in education and healthcare.
|
| Not even close. So many parts of the world need to be
| pumped with target fund infusions ASAP. Only forcing higher
| levels of education and healthcare at the places where it
| lags is a viable step towards securing peaceful and
| prosperous nearest future.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Then why didn't that happen before GenAI was a thing?
|
| I think some people may have to face the fact that money
| was never going to go there under any circumstances.
| mattnewton wrote:
| > Then why didn't that happen before GenAI was a thing?
|
| Because there was no easy way for the people directing
| capital to those endeavors to make themselves richer.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| Pareto is irrelevant, because they are talking about how to
| use all of this money not currently used in healthcare or
| education.
| hunterpayne wrote:
| Also throwing money at problems doesn't necessarily solve
| them. Sometimes problems get worse when you throw more
| money at them. No matter how much money you throw at
| education, if you don't use Phonics to teach them, kids
| won't be able to read. Guess what we use?
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| Ok, this is mostly irrelevant - education is not one of
| those problems that money can't at least massively
| improve. And lack of direct phonics instruction will
| leave behind _some_ kids. And if you use phonics without
| the rest of learning to read, some of them still won't
| manage it. One of the reasons that teaching American kids
| how to read varies is that somewhere between 30 and 60%
| of kids will figure it out if you just read to them
| enough. The others have a wide variety of gaps, ranging
| from hearing or sight difficulties to short term memory
| issues to _not speaking English_. Phonics helps a subset
| of them, but is not enough by itself - and I don't know
| who "we" is, but most American schools do and have always
| taught phonics. The debate is really over the length of
| time and level of focus it gets, and whether to make 100%
| of kids sit through it when maybe half of them don't need
| it. I'm sure there are teachers out there who just don't
| teach phonics but I haven't seen them.
| gom_jabbar wrote:
| > Finally intelligence can also be controlled by capital
|
| The relationship between capital and AI is a fascinating
| topic. The contemporary philosopher who has thought most
| intensely about this is probably Nick Land (who is heavily
| inspired by Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk and Friedrich Hayek). For
| Land, intelligence has always been immanent in capitalism and
| capitalism is actively producing it. As we get closer to the
| realization of capitalism's telos/attractor (technological
| singularity), this becomes more and more obvious
| (intelligible).
| somewhereoutth wrote:
| I suspect a lot of this is due to large amounts of liquidity
| sloshing around looking for returns. We are still dealing with
| the consequences of the ZIRP (Zero Interest Rate Policy) and QE
| (Quantitative Easing) where money to support the economy
| through the Great Financial Crisis and Covid was largely
| funneled in to the top, causing the 'everything bubble'. The
| rich got (a lot) richer, and now have to find something to do
| with that wealth. The immeasurable returns promised by LLMs (in
| return for biblical amounts of investment) fits that bill very
| well.
| mcphage wrote:
| > What we really want to ask ourselves is whether our economy
| is set up to mostly get things right, or it is wastefully
| searching.
|
| I can't speak to the economy as a whole, but the tech economy
| has a long history of bubbles and scams. Some huge successes,
| too--but gets it wrong more often than it gets it right.
| Archelaos wrote:
| In 2024, global GDP was $111 trillion.[1] Investing 1 or 2 % of
| that to improve global productivity via AI does not seem
| exaggerated to me.
|
| [1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD
| throwaw12 wrote:
| I will put it differently,
|
| Investing 1 or 2% of global GDP to increase wealth gap 50%
| more and make top 1% unbelievable rich while everyone else
| looking for jobs or getting 50 year mortgage, seem very bad
| idea to me.
| cheonn638 wrote:
| >Investing 1 or 2% of global GDP to increase wealth gap 50%
| more
|
| What's your definition of wealth gap?
|
| Is it how you feel when you see the name of a billionaire?
| fennecbutt wrote:
| Yes the very fact that billionaires exist mean our
| species has failed.
|
| I do not believe that there is a legitimate billionaire
| on the planet, in that they haven't engaged in stock
| manipulation, lobbying, insider trading, corrupt deals,
| monopolistic practices, dark patterns, corporate tax
| dodging, personal tax dodging.
|
| You could for example say that the latter are technically
| legal and therefore okay, but it's my belief that they're
| "technically legal/loopholes" because we have reached a
| point where the rich are so powerful that they bend the
| laws to their own ends.
|
| Our species is a bit of a disappointment. People would
| rather focus on trivial tribal issues than on anything
| that impacts the majority of the members of our species.
| We are well and truly animals.
| mjamesaustin wrote:
| It's easy to access statistics about wealth and income
| inequality. It is worse than it has ever been, and
| continuing to get worse.
|
| https://www.pewresearch.org/social-
| trends/2020/01/09/trends-...
| simianwords wrote:
| It can be both? Both that inequality increases but also
| prosperity for the lower class? I don't mind that trade
| off.
|
| If some one were to say to you - you can have 10,000 more
| iPhones to play with but your friends would get 100,000
| iPhones, would you reject the deal?
| techblueberry wrote:
| I think you inadvertently stepped in the point -- Yes,
| what the fuck do I need 10,000 iPhones for? Also part of
| the problem is which resources end up in abundance. What
| am I going to do with more compute when housing and land
| are a limited resource.
|
| Gary's Economics talks about this but in many cases
| inequality _is_ the problem. More billionaires means more
| people investing in limited resources(housing) driving up
| prices.
|
| Maybe plebes get more money too, but not enough to spend
| on the things that matter.
| simianwords wrote:
| It's just a proxy for wealth using concrete things.
|
| If you were given 10,000 dollars but your friends were
| also 100,000 dollars as well, would you take the deal?
|
| Land and housing can get costlier while other things get
| cheaper, making you overall more prosperous. This is what
| happened in the USA and most of the world. Would you take
| this deal?
| techblueberry wrote:
| You're missing the point. It's not about jealousy it's
| basic economics - supply and demand. No I would not take
| the deal if it raised the demand in something central to
| my happiness (housing) driving the price up for something
| previously affordable and make it unaffordable.
|
| I would not trade my house for a better iPhone with
| higher quality YouTube videos, and slightly more
| fashionable athleisure.
|
| I don't care how many yacht's Elon Musk has, I care how
| many governments.
| simianwords wrote:
| What if you could buy the same house as before, buy the
| same iPhone as before and still have more money
| remaining? But your house cost way way more
| proportionally.
| techblueberry wrote:
| If you're asking me if I'm an idiot who doesn't
| understand basic economics / capitalism, the answer is
| no. If you're asking me if I think that in the real world
| there are negative externalities of inequality in and of
| itself that makes it more complicated than "everyone gets
| more but billionaires get more more" than the answer is
| yes.
| majormajor wrote:
| If you want to claim that that's a realistic outcome you
| should look at how people lived in the 50s or 80s vs
| today, now that we've driven up income inequality by
| dramatically lowering top-end tax rates and reduced
| barriers to rich people buying up more and more real
| property.
|
| What we got is actually: you can't buy the same house as
| before. You can buy an iPhone that didn't exist then, but
| your boss can use it to request you do more work after-
| hours whenever they want. You have less money remaining.
| You have less free time remaining.
| simianwords wrote:
| Do you have source for your claim? I have source that
| supports what I have said - look at disposable income
| data from BLS
| majormajor wrote:
| I wouldn't be able to hang out with them as much (they'd
| go do a lot of higher-cost things that I couldn't afford
| anymore).
|
| I'd have a shittier apartment (they'd drive up the price
| of the nicer ones, if we're talking about a significant
| sized group; if it's truly just immediate friends, then
| instead it's just "they'd all move further away to a
| nicer area").
|
| So I'd have some more toys but would have a big loss in
| quality of my social life. Pass.
|
| (If you promised me that those cracks wouldn't happen,
| sure, it would be great for them. But in practice, having
| seen this before, it's not really realistic to hold the
| social fabric together when economic inequality increases
| rapidly and dramatically.)
| simianwords wrote:
| No you would have the same house or better. That's part
| of the condition.
| jancsika wrote:
| More to the point, what does research into notions of
| fairness among primates tell us about the risks of a vast
| number of participants deciding to take this deal?
|
| You have to tell us the answer so we can resolve your
| nickname "simianwords" with regard to Poe's Law.
| simianwords wrote:
| haha perhaps we are better than primates.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > If you were given 10,000 dollars but your friends were
| also 100,000 dollars as well, would you take the deal?
|
| This boldly assumes the 10k actually reaches me.
| Meanwhile 100k payouts endlessly land as expected.
|
| usa sources: me+kids+decade of hunger level poverty. no
| medical coverage for decades. homeless retirement still
| on the table.
| lordnacho wrote:
| I don't know how nobody has mentioned this before:
|
| The guy with 100k will end up rewriting the rules so that
| in the next round, he gets 105k and you get 5k.
|
| And people like you will say "well, I'm still better off"
|
| In future rounds, you will try to say "oh, I can't lose
| 5k for you to get 115k" and when you try to vote, you
| won't be able to vote, because the guy who has been
| making 23x what you make has spent his money on making
| sure it's rigged.
| BobbyJo wrote:
| It can be, but there are lots of reasons to believe it
| will not be. Knowledge work was the ladder between lower
| and upper classes. If that goes away, it doesn't really
| matter if electricians make 50% more.
| simianwords wrote:
| I guess I don't believe knowledge work will completely go
| away.
| BobbyJo wrote:
| Its not really a matter of some great shift. Millennials
| are the most educated generation by a wide margin, yet
| their wealth by middle age is trailing prior generations.
| The ladder is being pulled up inch by inch and I don't
| see AI doing anything other than speeding up that process
| at the moment.
| thatcat wrote:
| I don't think that is scalable to infinite iphones since
| the input materials are finite. If your all your friends
| get 100,000 iphones and then you need an ev battery and
| that now costs 20,000 iphones now and you're down 5k
| iphones if the previous battery cost was 5k iphones. On
| the other hand if you already had a good battery, then
| you're up 20k iphones or so in equity. Also, since
| everyone has so many iphones the net utility drops and
| they become worth less than the materials so everyone
| would have to scrap their iphones to liquidate at the
| cost of the recycled metals.
| majormajor wrote:
| A century ago people in the US started to tax the rich
| much more heavily than we do now. They didn't believe
| that increasing inequality was necessary - or even
| actually that helpful - for improving their real
| livelihood.
|
| Don't be shocked if that comes back. (And that was the
| mild sort of reaction.)
|
| If you have billions and all the power associated with
| it, why are you shooting for personal trillions instead
| of _actually_ , _directly_ improving the day to day for
| everyone else _without even losing your status as an
| elite_ , just diminishing it by a little bit of marginal
| utility? Especially if you read history about when people
| make that same decision?
| doodlebugging wrote:
| >Both that inequality increases but also prosperity for
| the lower class? I don't mind that trade off.
|
| This sounds like it is written from the perspective of
| someone who sees their own prosperity increase
| dramatically so that they end up on the prosperous side
| of the worsening inequality gap. The fact that those on
| the other side of the gap see marginal gains in
| prosperity makes them feel that it all worked out okay
| for everyone.
|
| I think this is greed typical of the current players in
| the AI/tech economy. You all saw others getting abundant
| wealth by landing high-paying jobs with tech companies
| and you want to not only to do the same, but to one-up
| your peers. It's really a shame that so much tech-bro
| identity revolves around personal wealth with zero
| accountability for the tools that you are building to set
| yourselves in control of lives of those you have chosen
| to either leave behind or to wield as tools for further
| wealth creation through alternate income SaaS
| subscription streams or other bullshit scams.
|
| There really is not much difference between tech-bros,
| prosperity gospel grifters or other religious nuts whose
| only goal is to be more wealthy today than yesterday.
| It's created a generation of greedy, selfish narcissists
| who feel that in order to succeed in their industry, they
| need to be high-functioning autists so they take the path
| of self-diagnosis and become, as a group, resistant to
| peer review since anyone who would challenge their
| bullshit is doing the same thing and unlikely to want too
| much light shed on their own shady shit. It is funny to
| me that many of these tech-bros have no problem admitting
| their drug experimentation since they need to maintain an
| aura of enlightenment amongst their peers.
|
| It's gonna be a really shitty world when the dopeheads
| run everything. As someone who grew up back in the day
| when smoking dope was something hidden and paranoia was a
| survival instinct for those who chose that path I can see
| lots of problems for society in the pipeline.
| int_19h wrote:
| > If some one were to say to you - you can have 10,000
| more iPhones to play with but your friends would get
| 100,000 iPhones, would you reject the deal?
|
| I'd think about how many elections he can buy with those
| iPhones, for starters.
| throwaw12 wrote:
| Not when one party owns half of the city real estate and
| another million people are looking for affordable house.
|
| At the end of the day, couple of owners of those
| companies each have at least net worth of $2-4B, what do
| they do that money?
|
| You can say they build more houses, but who benefits from
| it? Again, themselves?
|
| Isn't this a broken system?
| Anon1096 wrote:
| Just being born in the US already makes you a top 10% and
| very likely top 5-1% in terms of global wealth. The top 1%
| you're harping about is very likely yourself.
| whstl wrote:
| So what? If that's the case, they clearly mean the
| 0.0001% or whatever number, which is way worse.
| majormajor wrote:
| And so many people in the US are already miserable before
| yet another round of "become more efficient and
| productive for essentially the same pay or less as
| before!!"
|
| So maybe income equality + disposable material goods _is
| not_ a good path towards people being happier and better
| off.
|
| It's our job to build a system that will work well for
| ourselves. If there's a point where incentivizing a few
| to hoard even more resources to themselves _starts to
| break down_ in terms of overall quality of life, we have
| a responsibility to each other to change the system.
|
| Look at how many miserable-ass unhappy toxic asshole
| billionaires there are. We'll be helping their own mental
| health too.
| fatherwavelet wrote:
| It is not really obvious to me that happiness should be
| part of the social contract.
|
| Happiness is very slippery even in your own life. It
| seems absurd to me that you should care about my
| happiness.
|
| So much of happiness is the change from the previous
| state to the present. I am happy right now because 2026
| has started off great for me while 2025 was a bad year.
|
| I would imagine there was never a happier American
| society than the year's after WW2.
|
| I imagine some of the most happy human societies were the
| ones during the years after the black plague. No one
| though today gains happiness because of the absence of
| black plague.
|
| To believe a society can be built around happiness seems
| completely delusional to me.
| accrual wrote:
| Agree targeting happiness is the wrong approach.
| Happiness comes and goes. We should raise the baseline,
| not the ceiling.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > Just being born in the US already makes you a top 10%
|
| Our family learned how long-term hunger (via poverty) is
| worse in the US because there was no social support
| network we could tap into (for resource sharing).
|
| Families not in crisis don't need a network. Families in
| crisis have insufficient resources to launch one. They
| are widely scattered and their days are consumed with
| trying to scrape up rent (then transpo, then utilities,
| then food - in that order).
| Archelaos wrote:
| This problem is not specific to AI, but a matter of social
| policy.
|
| For example here in Germany, the Gini index, an indicator
| of equality/inequality has been oszillating about 29.75
| +/-1.45 since 2011.[1] In other words, the wealth
| distribution was more or less stable in the last 15 years,
| and is less extrem than in the USA, where it was 41.8 in
| 2023.[2]
|
| [1] https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/1184266/
|
| [2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SIPOVGINIUSA
| catlifeonmars wrote:
| It's implied you mean that the ROI will be positive. Spending
| 1-2% of global GDP with negative ROI could be disastrous.
|
| I think this is where most of the disagreement is. We don't
| all agree on the expected ROI of that investment, especially
| when taking into account the opportunity cost.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| 2% is a lot! There's only fifty things you can invest 2% of
| GDP in before you occupy the entire economy. But the list of
| services people need, from food, water, shelter, heating,
| transportation, education, healthcare, communications,
| entertainment, mining, materials, construction, research,
| maintenance, legal services... there's a lot of things on
| that list. To allocate each one 1% or 2% of the economy may
| seem small, but pretty quickly you hit 100%.
| Archelaos wrote:
| Most of you have mentioned is not investment, but
| consumption. Investments means to use money to make more
| money in the future. Global investment rates are around 25
| % of global GDP. Avarage return on investement ist about
| 10% per year. In other words: using 1% or 2% of GDP if its
| leads to an improvement in GDP of more than 0.1% or 0.2%
| next year would count as a success. I think to expect a
| productivity gain on this scale due to AI is not
| unrealistic for 2026.
| simoncion wrote:
| > Most of you have mentioned is not investment, but
| consumption.
|
| It's _ongoing_ investment in the infrastructure of civil
| society. These sorts of investments usually give you
| _indirect_ returns... which is why it 's usually only
| done by governments.
| tim333 wrote:
| AI is a big deal though.
| Lionga wrote:
| Is it? I am using AI daily, but would rank it dead last
| compared to food, water, shelter, heating,
| transportation, education, healthcare, communications
| hackable_sand wrote:
| Your comment doesn't say anything
| thefz wrote:
| > If AI is here to stay, as a thing that permanently increases
| productivity,
|
| Thing is, I am still waiting to see where it increases
| productivity aside from some extremely small niches like speech
| to text and summarizing some small text very fast.
| sigseg1v wrote:
| Serious question, but have you not used it to implement
| anything at your job? Admittedly I was very skeptical but
| last sprint in 2 days I got 12 pull requests up for review by
| running 8 agents on my computer in parallel and about 10 more
| on cloud VMs. The PRs are all double reviewed and QA'd and
| merged. The ones that don't have PRs are larger refactors,
| one 40K loc and the other 30k loc and I just need actual time
| to go through every line myself and self-test appropriately,
| otherwise it would have been more stuff finished. These are
| all items tied to money in our backlog. It would have taken
| me about 5 times as long to close those items out without
| this tooling. I also would have not had as much time to
| produce and verify as many unit tests as I did. Is this not
| increased productivity?
| thefz wrote:
| So you roll a dice and call yourself a software engineer,
| basically.
| throwaw12 wrote:
| Are you doctor or a farmer?
|
| If you are a software engineer you are missing out a lot,
| literally a lot!
| bopbopbop7 wrote:
| What is he missing? Do you have anything quantitative other
| than an AI marketing blog or an anecdote?
| throwaw12 wrote:
| Claude Code, Codex, Antigravity?
|
| My experience is different than others, but what I am
| seeing, people around me, building software with 99% AI
| written code.
|
| They do review it, but the code, exploration primarily
| done by AI and debugging is done together (e.g. XYZ is
| not compiling what do I do,...)
| cheema33 wrote:
| > I am still waiting to see where it increases
| productivity...
|
| If you are a software engineer, and you are not using using
| AI to help with software development, then you are missing
| out. Like many other technologies, using AI agents for
| software dev work takes time to learn and master. You are not
| likely to get good results if you try it half-heartedly as a
| skeptic.
|
| And no, nobody can teach you these skills in a comment in an
| online forum. This requires trial and error on your part. If
| well known devs like Linus Torvalds are saying there is value
| here, and you are not seeing it, then then the issue is not
| with the tool.
| thefz wrote:
| These are definitely skills I don't want to have, don't
| worry.
| TheDong wrote:
| There's one additional question we could have here, which is
| "is AI here to stay and is it net-positive, or does it have
| significant negative externalities"
|
| > What we really want to ask ourselves is whether our economy
| is set up to mostly get things right, or it is wastefully
| searching.
|
| We've so far found two ways in recent memory that our economy
| massively fails when it comes to externalities.
|
| Global Warming continues to get worse, and we cannot globally
| coordinate to stop it when the markets keep saying "no, produce
| more oil, make more CO2, it makes _our_ stock go up until the
| planet eventually dies, but our current stock value is more
| important than the nebulous entire planet's CO2".
|
| Ads and addiction to gambling games, tiktok, etc also are a
| negative externality where the company doing the advertising or
| making the gambling game gains profit, but at the expense of
| effectively robbing money from those with worse impulse control
| and gambling problems.
|
| Even if the market votes that AI will successfully extract
| enough money to be "here to stay", I think that doesn't
| necessarily mean the market is getting things right nor that it
| necessarily increases productivity.
|
| Gambling doesn't increase productivity, but the market around
| kalshi and sports betting sure indicates it's on the rise
| lately.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > People will take courses in those things and try to get a
| piece of the winnings.
|
| The problem is boom-bust cycles. Electricians will always be in
| demand but it takes about 3 years to properly train even a
| "normal" residential electrician - add easily 2-3 years on top
| to work on the really nasty stuff aka 50 kV and above.
|
| No matter what, the growth of AI is too rapid and cannot be
| sustained. Even if the supposed benefits of AI all come true -
| the level of growth cannot be upheld because everything else
| suffers.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > it takes about 3 years to properly train even a "normal"
| residential electrician
|
| To pass ordinary wire with predefined dimensions in exposed
| conduits? No way it takes more than a few weeks.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| I'm talking about proper German training, not the kind of
| shit that leads to what Cy Porter (the home inspector
| legend) exposes on Youtube.
|
| Shoddy wiring can hold up for a looong time in homes
| because outside of electrical car chargers and baking ovens
| nothing consumes high current over long time and as long as
| no device develops a ground fault, even a lack of a GFCI
| isn't noticeable. But a data center? Even smaller ones
| routinely rack up megawatts of power here, large
| hyperscaler deployments hundreds of megawatts. Sustained,
| not peak. That is putting _a lot_ of stress on everything
| involved: air conditioning, power, communications.
|
| And for that to hold up, your neighbor Joe who does all
| kinds of trades as long as he's getting paid in cash won't
| cut it.
| chasd00 wrote:
| It's protected by requiring many hours (years) of
| apprenticeship. These kinds of heavily unionized jobs only
| reward seniority. Gotta pay your dues buddy!
| HardCodedBias wrote:
| "The real question is whether the boom is, economically, a
| mistake."
|
| The answer to this is two part:
|
| 1. Have we seen an increase in capability over the last couple
| of years? The answer here is clearly yes.
|
| 2. Do we think that this increase will continue? This is
| unknown. It seems so, but we don't know and these firms are
| clearly betting that it will.
|
| 1a. Do we think that with existing capability that there is
| tremendous latent demand? If so the buildout is still rational
| if progress stops.
| majormajor wrote:
| AI could be here to stay _and_ "chase a career as an
| electrician helping build datacenters" could _also_ be a
| mistake. The construction level could plateau or decline
| without a bubble popping.
|
| That's why it can't just be a market signal "go become an
| electrician" when the feedback loop is so slow. It's a
| social/governmental issue. If you make careers require
| expensive up-front investment largely shouldered by the
| individuals, you not only will be slow to react but you'll also
| end up with scores of people who "correctly" followed the
| signals right up until the signals went away.
| throwaway0123_5 wrote:
| > you'll also end up with scores of people who "correctly"
| followed the signals right up until the signals went away.
|
| I think this is where we're headed, very quickly, and I'm
| worried about it from a social stability perspective (as well
| as personal financial security of course). There's probably
| not a single white-collar job that I'd feel comfortable
| spending 4+ years training for right now (even assuming I
| don't have to pay or take out debt for the training). Many
| people are having skills they spent years building made
| worthless overnight, without an obvious or realistic pivot
| available.
|
| Lots and lots of people who did or will do "all the right
| things," with no benefit earned from it. Even if
| hypothetically there is something new you can reskill into
| every five years, how is that sustainable? If you're young
| and without children, maybe it is possible. Certainly doesn't
| sound fun, and I say this as someone who joined tech in part
| because of how fast-paced it was.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > Many people are having skills they spent years building
| made worthless overnight, without an obvious or realistic
| pivot available.
|
| I'd like to see real examples of this, beyond trivial ones
| like low-quality copywriting (i.e. the "slop" before there
| was slop) that just turns into copyediting. Current AI's
| are a huge force multiplier for most white-collar skills,
| including software development.
| dfedbeef wrote:
| If
| singingwolfboy wrote:
| https://archive.ph/J8pg5
| mrjay42 wrote:
| This does not work for me.
|
| It's a loop of captcha which never ends
| esseph wrote:
| You have some extension issues going on, maybe. Seems to work
| fine in FF and chrome.
| b00ty4breakfast wrote:
| I was having this problem earlier with different URLs I was
| searching for but the link above actually worked for me.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| Try this: https://wapo.st/4qqatnA
| quinncom wrote:
| When this happens to me, it's either because I'm connected to
| a VPN, or I'm using Cloudflare's public DNS server.
| diogenes_atx wrote:
| This may be a DNS issue. I had the same problem with NextDNS.
| After switching my DNS servers to Cloud Flare DNS (1.1.1.1,
| 1.0.0.1), it works fine.
| LoganDark wrote:
| It's always DNS!
| Zanfa wrote:
| It's not. They've blocked some countries entirely.
| stevekemp wrote:
| Yeah here in Finland the archive site seems to come and
| go on a monthly basis.
| Thorrez wrote:
| Switching to Cloudflare DNS solves archive.today problems?
| That's strange. archive.today is known for having problems
| with Cloudflare DNS[1]. Switching to Google DNS should
| solve it. (This isn't because of a bug in Cloudflare DNS,
| but rather that archive.today dislikes that Cloudflare DNS
| doesn't support EDNS.)
|
| Disclosure: I work at Google, but not on the DNS team.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39925822
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| I bet all the downvoting helped with that.
| tempodox wrote:
| Anecdata: When it happens to me, disabling the VPN helps.
| EasyMark wrote:
| are you using a VPN? that happens often to me. might be a
| combo of that and ublock origin. I'm guessing archive gets a
| ton of attacks from VPN so they probably just have rules to
| captcha any VPN address. I have a local proxy on rpi setup
| and then a container in firefox that lets me use that to
| quickly swap to a proxy that uses my real IP. very handy for
| shit like this.
| polski-g wrote:
| Yeah never use Cloudflare DNS. They refuse to fix this issue.
| Use quad9 or Google DNS.
| nostrademons wrote:
| Archive blocks VPNs. If you're on one, that could be why.
|
| I've also found that archive.ph is significantly less
| accessible than archive.is despite hosting the same content.
| Pausing my VPN for a few minutes and then changing the .ph to
| .is fixed a similar captcha loop for me, though I still did
| need to solve a captcha for it.
| bm3719 wrote:
| This is the trade-off to connectivity and removing frictional
| barriers (i.e., globalism). This is the economic equivalent of
| what Nick Land and Spandrell called the "IQ shredder". Spandrell
| said of Singapore: Singapore is an IQ shredder.
| It is an economically productive metropolis that sucks in
| bright and productive minds with opportunities and amusements at
| the cost of having a demographically unsustainable family
| unit.
|
| Basically, if you're a productive person, you want to maximize
| your return. So, you go where the action is. So does every other
| smart person. Often that place is a tech hub, which is now
| overflowing with smart guys. Those smart guys build adware (or
| whatever) and fail to reproduce (combined, these forces "shred"
| the IQ). Meanwhile every small town is brain-drained. You
| hometown's mayor is 105 IQ because he's the smartest guy in town.
| Things don't work that great, and there's a general stagnation to
| the place.
|
| Right now, AI is a "capital shredder". In the past, there were
| barriers everywhere, and we've worked hard to tear those down. It
| used to be that the further the distance (physically, but also in
| other senses too, like currencies, language, culture, etc.), the
| greater the friction to capital flows. The local rich guy would
| start a business in his town. Now he sends it to one of the
| latest global capital attractors, which have optimized for
| capital inflow. This mechanism works whether the attractor can
| efficiently use that capital or not. That resource inflow might
| be so lucrative, that managing inflow is the main thing it does.
| Right now that's AI, but as long as present structure continues,
| this is how the machine of the global economy will work.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| What's the alternative. Keep the smart physically separated,
| can never collaborate to make anything paradigm shifting and we
| just prod along with small town paper mills and marginally
| better local government?
| WillAdams wrote:
| California had a great mechanism for this in their land grant
| colleges, which back before the protests of the Vietnam War
| were required to offer the valedictorian of nearby high
| schools (or the person with the highest GPA who accepted)
| full tuition and room and board --- then Governor Ronald
| Reagan shut down this program when the students had the
| temerity to protest the Vietnam War --- it was also grade
| inflation to keep students above the threshold necessary for
| a draft deferment which began the downward spiral of American
| education.
| HPsquared wrote:
| A little less min-maxing, perhaps.
| bm3719 wrote:
| Within the Landian system, I suspect he'd say the answer is
| economic "territorialization", the economic equivalent to the
| mechanism originally defined by Deleuze+Guattari in _A
| Thousand Plateaus_ based on the territoriality of earlier
| work.
|
| It's the process where social, political, or cultural meaning
| is rooted in some context. It's a state of stability and
| boundaries. For just the economic, the geographic would
| likely be the centroid of that, but the other vectors are not
| irrelevant.
|
| One could argue that we suffer to the degree we are
| deterritorialized, because the effects thereof are
| alienating. So, we need structure that aligns both our
| economic and psychological needs. What we have is
| subordination to the machine, which will do what it's
| designed to: optimize for its own desire, which is machinic
| production.
|
| Note that none of this is inherently good/bad. Like anything,
| a choice has trade-offs. We definitely get more production
| within the current structure. The cost is born by the
| individual, aggregating into the social ills that are now
| endemic.
| gom_jabbar wrote:
| Land himself has suggested a very anti-human solution to
| the problem of "IQ shredders":
|
| "The most hard-core capitalist response to this [IQ
| shredders] is to double-down on the antihumanist
| accelerationism. _This genetic burn-rate is obviously
| unsustainable, so we need to convert the human species into
| auto-intelligenic robotized capital [a]s fast as possible,
| before the whole process goes down in flames._ " [0]
|
| [0] Nick Land (2014). _IQ Shredders_ in Xenosystems Blog.
| Retrieved from github.com /cyborg-nomade/reignition
| bm3719 wrote:
| Thanks, been awhile since I read it.
|
| I think the only solution is territorialization if you
| want to preserve the human. If you don't care about that
| (or think that it's not possible anyway), then yes,
| accelerate.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Glad there's other fellow travelers here
| dyauspitr wrote:
| We've had 50 years of genetic engineering and it's about
| time we started using it. I wish someone with more central
| authority like China starts doing experiments of
| genetically altering humans to start making super humans.
| We have the technology, it's only ethics holding us back.
| So what if a few thousand people (preferably volunteers)
| die in experiments, we should just make sure they're
| condemned (like death row or terminally ill) and carry on.
| raincole wrote:
| Yeah, more separated would be ideal. Local government (and
| churches or other organizations) should have strong
| incentives to keep talents in their hometowns, or at least
| their home countries. Imagine how much stronger
| technologically the EU would be now if their skilled workers
| didn't get brain-drained to the US for decades.
| malfist wrote:
| This is hogwash. It's incel and eugenic reasoning wrapped up
| all together.
|
| Not every smart person (or even most) are engineers, and of the
| ones that are they don't all move to tech hubs, and the ones
| that do not all of them can't get laid.
|
| And I'll give you a great reason why it's hogwash, the
| "brilliant" engineers that can't get laid in Singapore are the
| same "brilliant" engineers that can't get laid in their home
| town
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| It's the same nonsense as people going "Idiocracy is a
| documentary." Of course none of them think they're the
| idiots.
| NegativeK wrote:
| I was going to comment the same. Complaining about how
| there are too many dumb people is a trollish red flag I've
| learned to disengage from.
|
| Also, stop blaming your damn users.
| 9dev wrote:
| ...not to mention they are completely ignoring the existence
| of smart _girls_ as well
| raincole wrote:
| Higher education is strongly associated to lower fertility
| rates. Especially for women, but for men too. So no the
| argument doesn't ignore the existence of smart women. Smart
| women (and men) just far less likely to reproduce,
| statistically speaking.
| 9dev wrote:
| > [...] overflowing with smart guys. [...] smart guys
| build [...] he's the smartest guy [...] local rich guy
| would start a business [...]
|
| It's pretty clear this entire crude theory is based on a
| thinking system that has little place for women in active
| positions.
|
| And if your immediate reaction to that is annoyance
| because it seems like an insignificant detail, maybe
| reflect on that for a moment.
| newsclues wrote:
| Are you upset about biology or the logic that follows the
| reality of human biology?
| 9dev wrote:
| What now, human biology dictates men lead and women bear
| children? I'm upset some people carry that pathetic incel
| narrative over to HN.
| newsclues wrote:
| I'm going to ignore the stupidity and point out the
| problem of time.
|
| If you spend your time educating yourself and working,
| you don't have time to reproduce and raise children. Thus
| declining birth rates
|
| Reality isn't an incentive narrative. Go research
| declining birth rates and female education attainment and
| you will find charts that make it clear
| 9dev wrote:
| If your answer to that problem is less women should
| attain higher education and take care of raising children
| instead, we just fundamentally disagree. Women have an
| equal right to education and working as men do.
|
| The charts you refer to show an environment where the
| responsibility for care work is heavily skewed to the
| detriment of women. If men took up a bigger part of
| raising children, it would be easier for couples to do
| that. But the vast majority of men don't.
| bm3719 wrote:
| We can blame the individual for the cost we've outsourced
| into him. When he collapses under that load, we can attribute
| it to personal shortcomings. Some people survive, even
| thrive, in the current environment, after all. We've
| coalesced a plurality of games into a single one, and in a
| sense, it works great. We have our smartphones, AI, online
| shopping, and targeted advertising.
|
| Notepad now has Copilot built right into it, after all. That
| wasn't going to happen by now if we took the human psyche as
| a given and built around that.
| g8oz wrote:
| >>It's incel and eugenic reasoning wrapped up all together.
|
| More like French post-structuralism.
| dauertewigkeit wrote:
| I agree with you that STEM don't hold a monopoly on
| intelligence.
|
| > engineers that can't get laid in Singapore are the same
| "brilliant" engineers that can't get laid in their home town
|
| Maybe so, but not for the same reasons. Back in their home
| town, they cannot vibe with anyone because the few who might
| be compatible have long since left. In a STEM hotspot, they
| go to an event and meet compatible people, but it's 11 guys
| for every 3 girls, so unless they are top dog in that room,
| they aren't going to score.
| malfist wrote:
| And yet, the population of Singapore isn't 79% male.
| dauertewigkeit wrote:
| IDK the dating scene in Singapore. I frankly didn't even
| know that Singapore was considered a tech hub. I was
| using it as a synonym for a tech hub because that is what
| I assumed the author was doing.
| internet_points wrote:
| > can't get laid
|
| huh, I thought it was talking about how expensive extra
| bedrooms are in big cities so people _choose_ not to have (as
| many) kids there
| wodenokoto wrote:
| What amazes me about this theory is that being the 115 IQ guy
| in a town where the next guy is 105 isn't better than being the
| 115 IQ guy in and office averaging 120.
|
| Or put more plainly, being a big fish in a small pond is not
| better than being a small fish.
| moomoo11 wrote:
| Why not just not compare to others because it's easy to game
| anything?
|
| Just look for patterns and then act out of self interest.
| Nobody is coming to save you.
|
| I'm no high IQ person but if I can figure out how to get a
| STEM job without STEM degree, make money by getting lucky at
| a unicorn, invest and sell for profit and invest again (only
| losers HODL so others can take profits), then there's really
| no excuse why someone else can't.
|
| And I'm originally from a country that has like 70 IQ
| nationally or so it is said. So I'm not a genius, maybe the
| only quality I have that makes me different is I don't know
| how to quit until I meet my goal.
|
| More people should stop crying and be a man. Our ancestors
| literally survived against nature and each other so we could
| post here on HN. I don't mean being able to lift 500lbs like
| a caveman either.
|
| Exercise your brain, it gets stronger too because I have a
| hard time understanding concepts sometimes, but taking steps
| to break it down and digest it in pieces helps me. Takes a
| bit longer but hopefully you have tomorrow.
| Synthetic7346 wrote:
| I can't tell if this is satire
| nubg wrote:
| MENA slop
| moomoo11 wrote:
| Whatever you need to tell yourself to cope!
|
| I tried to help, but maybe I should have given you two a
| tissue box instead.
| simianwords wrote:
| Apologies but either I don't understand your post or it is
| nonsensical.
|
| What relevance does AI have to being an IQ shredder if the
| talent has gone into (productively) developing capable AI?
|
| If anything, AI completely disproves your notion of IQ shredder
| because this is an instance of lack of barriers actually
| hastening progress. Look at all the AI talent. Very few are
| American or ethnic Americans.
| bm3719 wrote:
| AI is an attractor. In general, attractors absent barriers
| have the potential to act as a resource shredder in the
| context of an ecosystem where stability was predicated on
| said barriers being present.
|
| I called AI a "capital shredder" because I'm asserting that
| it is one (of many) by comparison to a more even distribution
| of capital investment. The non-attractor small town where the
| capital that would have gone into a self-reinforcing progress
| cycle has it redirected into an external context. If you
| don't care about that and just want more AI, then no worries,
| because that's what we're optimizing for.
|
| I was trying to limit my point to something clear with linear
| reasoning, but AI is indeed also an IQ shredder in both the
| immediate and transitive sense. For the former, it's an
| aggregator of talent. From the perspective of the small town
| (both domestic and foreign), its best human resources have
| been extracted.
|
| Relation with production is irrelevant for the purposes of
| being a shredder, but this system does generally serve for
| increased production of a sort. That's why we ended up with
| it. The small town doesn't get its factories, local
| governance doesn't get good programmers, etc. Those resources
| are being redirected into getting us to wherever AI is going
| to go because that's what the global economic machine desires
| right now. Likewise in the past for NFTs, crypto, cloud, etc.
|
| To personalize this: I was drawn to an attractor and rode one
| of those waves myself, and, at least economically, it worked
| out great for me as it probably has for others here. However,
| this system isn't a free lunch.
| simianwords wrote:
| It looks like it's working as expected then? This is what I
| would have done with AI if I had complete authority to
| decide where money flows and what people should do.
|
| What's the alternative
| hunterpayne wrote:
| > Very few are American or ethnic Americans
|
| Maybe you should look into why that is. Or specifically look
| at the scores and grades of students applying to grad school
| in the US vs who is admitted (this isn't a recent thing
| either) by country. If anything, we are probably behind where
| we should be because we don't admit the best into the best
| schools. We admit those that don't need grants (usually
| because their government pays instead).
| sjjsjdk wrote:
| this is genius
| oblio wrote:
| > Singapore is an IQ shredder.
|
| Heh, I've just realized about 2 years ago that it's worse.
|
| Cities are people shredders. Based on the information I've
| found, cities have lower fertility rates than rural areas and
| this has been the case ever since they were created.
|
| I absolutely love cities, but with ever increasing urbanization
| and unless we make HUGE changes to facilitate people easily
| having kids in cities (and I'm talking HUGE, stuff like having
| stay at home parents for the first 6-7 years of their
| childhood, free access to communal areas that offer all the
| services required to take care of kids of any age, free
| education, etc), humanity will probably not be able to sustain
| a population of more than say, 1 billion people. Probably much
| fewer.
|
| Which I guess, could work, but we will be in totally uncharted
| territory.
|
| And then AI comes in and things become... very interesting.
|
| https://asimov.fandom.com/wiki/Solaria
| bix6 wrote:
| RIP Washington Post.
| dev1ycan wrote:
| I don't think these companies buying realize how much animosity
| they're creating with literally everyone until it explodes on
| their face.
| deadbabe wrote:
| These companies play a long game. Eventually generations of
| people just grow up with this being the new normal, no reason
| to be angry.
|
| The people who are angry are the ones who had their cheese
| moved.
| stego-tech wrote:
| This is another facet of the fierce opposition to AI by a swath
| of the population: it's quite literally destroying the last bit
| of enjoyment we could wring from existence in the form of hobbies
| funded through normal employment.
|
| Think of the PC gamers, who first dealt with COVID supply shocks,
| followed by crypto making GPUs scarce and untenable, then GPU
| makers raising prices and narrowing inventory to only the
| highest-end SKUs, only to outright abandon them entirely for AI -
| which then also consumed their RAM and SSDs. A hobby that used to
| be enjoyed by folks on even a modest budget is now a theft risk
| given the insane resale priced of parts on the second-hand market
| due to scarcity.
|
| And that extends to others as well. The swaths of folks who made
| freelance or commission artistry work through Patreons and
| conventions and the like are suddenly struggling as customers and
| companies spew out AI slop using their work and without
| compensation. Tech workers, previously the wealthy patron of
| artisans and communities, are now being laid off en masse for AI
| CapEx buildouts and share pumps as investors get cold feet about
| what these systems are actually doing to the economy at large
| (definite bad, questionable good, uncertain futures).
|
| Late stage capitalism's sole respite was consumerism, and we
| can't even do that anymore thanks to AI gobbling up all the
| resources and capital. It's no wonder people are pissed at AI
| boosters trying to say this is a miracle technology that'll lift
| everyone up: it's already kicking people down, and nobody
| actually wants to admit or address that lest their investments be
| disrupted to protect humans.
| 9dev wrote:
| I think this started a lot earlier actually. A few generations
| back, many people played an instrument, or at least could sing.
| It didn't matter that none of them was a Mozart, because they
| didn't had to be. For making music or singing together in a
| family or a friend group, it was wholly sufficient to be just
| good, not necessarily great.
|
| But when everyone has access to recordings of the world's best
| musicians at all times, why listen to uncle Harry's shoddy
| guitar play? Why sing Christmas songs together when you can put
| on the Sinatra Christmas jazz playlist on Spotify?
| stego-tech wrote:
| That's definitely part of it as well, this sort of general
| distillation into a smaller and smaller pool of content or
| objects or goods that cost ever more money.
|
| Like how most of the royalties Spotify pays out are for older
| catalogue stuff from "classic" artists, rather than new
| bands. Or how historical libraries of movies and films are
| constantly either up for grabs (for prestige) or being pushed
| off platforms due to their older/more costly royalty
| agreements.
|
| With AI though, it's the actual, tangible consumption of
| physical goods being threatened, which many companies
| involved in AI may argue is exactly the point: that everyone
| should be renters rather than consumers, and by making
| ownership expensive through cost and scarcity alike, you
| naturally drive more folks towards subscriptions for what
| used to be commodities (music, movies, games, compute,
| vehicles, creativity tools, TCGs, you name it).
|
| It's damn depressing.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| " _Comparison is the thief of joy_ " as they say. Some dude
| has the world's highest score in Pac-Man in the Guinness Book
| Of World Records. It doesn't mean that I can't play Pac-Man
| to beat my own personal high score and enjoy the process
| because the game is fun in it's own right.
| 9dev wrote:
| That's sure true in theory, but given the prevalence of
| status symbols, many people thrive on comparing themselves
| to others. I'd argue society was better off when the only
| people you could reasonably compare yourself to were the
| three neighbours down the street (out of which only one
| would be into Pac-Man), not the world's ten thousand best
| players showing off only their best streaks on your
| Instagram feed all day.
| KellyCriterion wrote:
| THIS! Instrument-playing capability of a social environment:
| By today, I know only of one person playing a piano regularly
| in his club, he is the only one I know. When I was young, you
| had some basic instrument introduction in music classes at
| school - I do not know if these still exist today.
|
| Regarding singing - I do not know a single perso who can
| "somehow" sing at least a little bit.
|
| The society is loosing these capacities.
| wiether wrote:
| > why listen to uncle Harry's shoddy guitar play?
|
| Uncle Harry is not playing guitar:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXzz8o1m5bM
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| _Think of the PC gamers_
|
| The battlecry of the new revolution?
| stego-tech wrote:
| I mean, what was once an accessible hobby that taught folks
| how computers worked to a degree is now an RGB-lit target for
| thieves who know they can flip that memory and GPU for a
| grand or so pretty easily.
|
| That's a pretty big turnabout that could get some more folks
| thinking about and discussing the impacts of AI on non-AI
| systems or markets.
| simianwords wrote:
| Apologies for being glib but I never thought I'd see a sincere
| "think of the gamers" comment.
|
| Your whole post is a bit vague and naive. If people enjoyed
| real art more than AI art, then the market will decide it. If
| they don't then we should not be making people enjoy what they
| don't.
| vaylian wrote:
| The market might not be able to tell the difference. It takes
| effort to count fingers and toes in art. Part of the problem
| is also: So many companies are doing it now, that it doesn't
| seem effective to call people/companies out for the use of AI
| slop.
|
| A big part of the problem is also: AI art is usually not
| labelled as such. The market can not make an informed
| decision.
| simianwords wrote:
| If people can't tell the difference, perhaps it doesn't
| matter
| socialcommenter wrote:
| We're discussing an article about the human externalities
| of AI progress. It absolutely matters in this context.
| stego-tech wrote:
| The free market is not some universal force of balance. It is
| a system of systems that is routinely influenced, disrupted,
| damaged, manipulated, and controlled overwhelmingly by a
| small cadre of wealth and asset-owners with disproportionate
| influence after a century of government policies against
| market intervention or regulation.
|
| C'mon, be better than some "lol free market" quip.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > PC gamers
|
| There's a pretty deep back catalog of PC games that will run on
| integrated GPUs.
|
| > The swaths of folks who made freelance or commission
| artistry...
|
| Those are people turning their hobby into a side hustle. If
| it's a hustle they depend on, this sucks. If it's actually a
| hobby, meh. You're drawing for you. Who cares if AI can also do
| it.
| stego-tech wrote:
| The fact you're nitpicking specific details instead of
| actually absorbing and discussing the core argument (that AI
| is having negative impacts on multiple systems, sectors, and
| markets beyond narrow verticals like programming, and that
| this is something worth acknowledging and discussing) really
| reveals that you're not here to discuss things seriously and
| are just looking to feel right about your personal positions.
|
| Be better.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| This is all temporary scarcity. GPUs becoming scarce and
| expensive today is exactly what we want to make future GPUs
| (and other electronics) cheap and abundant tomorrow. This is
| what happens when any capital intensive industry runs into a
| capacity ceiling it needs to push through.
| Kon5ole wrote:
| It's hard to comprehend the scale of these investments. Comparing
| them to notable industrial projects, it's almost unbelievable.
|
| Every week in 2026 Google will pay for the cost of a Burj
| Khalifa. Amazon for a Wembley Stadium.
|
| Facebook will spend a France-England tunnel every month.
| bogzz wrote:
| Haters will say Sora wasn't worth it.
| jsheard wrote:
| Incredible how quickly that moment passed. Four months on
| it's barely clinging to the App Store top 100, below killer
| apps such as _Gossip Harbor(r): Merge & Story._
| mimischi wrote:
| Ok I'll bite. Was it worth it? What have people missed that
| haven't used it.
| askl wrote:
| What is Sora?
| ge96 wrote:
| If you see a video of a cat running away from a police
| traffic stop
| cogman10 wrote:
| One of many AI video generators that are filling up all
| video social media with rage bate garbage.
| peterlk wrote:
| I have been having this conversation more and more with
| friends. As a research topic, modern AI is a miracle, and I
| absolutely love learning about it. As an economic endeavor, it
| just feels insane. How many hospitals, roads, houses, machine
| shops, biomanufacturing facilities, parks, forests,
| laboratories, etc. could we build with the money we're spending
| on pretraining models that we throw away next quarter?
| uejfiweun wrote:
| There is a certain logic to it though. If the scaling
| approaches DO get us to AGI, that's basically going to change
| everything, forever. And if you assume this is the case, then
| "our side" has to get there before our geopolitical
| adversaries do. Because in the long run the expected "hit"
| from a hostile nation developing AGI and using it to bully
| "our side" probably really dwarfs the "hit" we take from not
| developing the infrastructure you mentioned.
| mylifeandtimes wrote:
| Here's hoping you are chinese, then.
| thesmtsolver2 wrote:
| Why?
| uejfiweun wrote:
| Well, I tried to specifically frame it in a neutral way,
| to outline the thinking that pretty much all the major
| nations / companies currently have on this topic.
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| Any serious LLM user will tell you that there's no way to
| get from LLM to AGI.
|
| These models are vast and, in many ways, clearly
| superhuman. But they can't venture outside their training
| data, not even if you hold their hand and guide them.
|
| Try getting Suno to write a song in a new genre. Even if
| you tell it EXACTLY what you want, and provide it with
| clear examples, it won't be able to do it.
|
| This is also why there have been zero-to-very-few new
| scientific discoveries made by LLM.
| uejfiweun wrote:
| I mean yeah, but that's why there are far more research
| avenues these days than just pure LLMs, for instance
| world models. The thinking is that if LLMs can achieve
| near-human performance in the language domain then we
| must be very close to achieving human performance in the
| "general" domain - that's the main thesis of the current
| AI financial bubble (see articles like AI 2027). And if
| that is the case, you still want as much compute as
| possible, both to accelerate research and to achieve
| greater performance on other architectures that benefit
| from scaling.
| pixl97 wrote:
| The other thing here is we know the human brain learns on
| far less samples than LLMs in their current form. If
| there is any kind of learning breakthrough then the
| amount of compute used for learning could explode
| overnight
| rishabhaiover wrote:
| How does scaling compute does not go hand-in-hand with
| energy generation? To me, scaling one and not the other
| puts a different set of constraints on overall growth.
| And the energy industry works at a different pace than
| these hyperscalars scaling compute.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Can most people venture outside their training data?
| nosianu wrote:
| Are you seriously comparing chips running AI models and
| human brains now???
|
| Last time I checked the chips are not rewiring themselves
| like the brain does, nor does even the software rewrite
| itself, or the model recalibrate itself - anything that
| could be called "learning", normal daily work for a human
| brain.
|
| Also, the models are not models of the world, but of our
| text communication only.
|
| Human brains start by building a model of the physical
| world, from age zero. Much later, on top of that
| foundation, more abstract ideas emerge, including
| language. Text, even later. And all of it on a deep layer
| of a physical world model.
|
| The LLM has none of that! It has zero depth behind the
| words it learned. It's like a human learning some strange
| symbols and the rules governing their appearance. The
| human will be able to reproduce valid chains of symbols
| following the learned rules, but they will never have any
| understanding of those symbols. In the human case,
| somebody would have to connect those symbols to their
| world model by telling them the "meaning" in a way they
| can already use. For the LLM that is not possible, since
| it doesn't habe such a model to begin with.
|
| How anyone can even entertain the idea of "AGI" based on
| uncomprehending symbol manipulation, where every symbol
| has zero depth of a physical world model, only
| connections to other symbols, is beyond me TBH.
| throw4847285 wrote:
| Watch out, you're getting suspiciously close to the
| Chinese Room argument. And people on here really don't
| like that argument.
| int_19h wrote:
| Speaking as someone who thinks the Chinese Room argument
| is an obvious case of begging the question, GP isn't
| about that. They're not saying that LLMs don't have world
| models - they're saying that those world models are not
| based in physical world and thus cannot properly
| understand what they talk about.
|
| I don't think that's true anymore, though. All the SOTA
| models are multimodal now, meaning that they are trained
| on images and videos as well, not just text; and they do
| that is precisely because it improves the _text_ output
| as well, for this exact reason. Already, I don 't have to
| waste time explaining to Claude or Codex what I want on a
| webpage - I can just sketch a mock-up, or when there's a
| bug, I take a screenshot and circle the bits that are
| wrong. But this extends into the ability to reason about
| real world, as well.
| nosianu wrote:
| I would argue that is still just symbols. A physical
| model requires a lot more. For example, the way babies
| and toddlers learn is heavy on interaction with objects
| and the world. We know those who have less of that kind
| of experience in early childhood will do less well later.
| We know that many of today's children, kept quiet and
| sedated with interactive screens, are at a disadvantage.
| What if you made this even more extreme, a brain without
| ability to interact with anything, trained entirely
| passively? Even our much more complex brains have trouble
| creating a good model in these cases.
|
| You also need more than one simple brain structure
| simulation repeated a lot. Our brains have many different
| parts and structures, not just a single type.
|
| However, just like our airplanes do not resemble bird
| flight as the early dreamers of human flight dreamed of,
| with flapping wings, I also do not see a need for our
| technology to fully reproduce the original.
|
| We are better off following our own tech path and seeing
| where it will lead. It will be something else, and that's
| fine, because anyone can create a new human brain without
| education and tools, with just some sex, and let it self-
| assemble.
|
| Biology is great and all but also pretty limited,
| extremely path-dependent. Just look at all the materials
| we already managed to create that nature would never
| make. Going off the already trodden bio-path should be
| good, we can create a lot of very different things. Those
| won't be brains like ours that "Feel" like ours, if that
| word will ever even apply. and that's fine and good. Our
| creations should explore entirely new paths. All these
| comparisons to the human experience make me sad, let's
| evaluate our products on their own merit.
|
| One important point:
|
| If you truly want a copy, partial or full, in tech, of
| the human experience, you need to look at the physics.
| Not at some meta stuff like "text"!!
|
| The physical structure and the electrical signals in the
| brain. THAT is us. And electrical signals and what they
| represent in chips are so completely and utterly
| different from what can be found in the brain, THAT is
| the much more important argument against silly human
| "AGI" comparisons. We don't have a CPU and RAM. We have
| massively parallel waves of electrical signals in a very
| complex structure.
|
| Humans are hung up on words. We even have fantasy stories
| hat are all about it. You say some word, magic happens.
| You know somebody's "true name", you control them.
|
| But the brain works on a much lower deeply physical
| level. We don't even need language. A human without
| language and "inner voice" still is a human with the same
| complex brain, just much worse at communication.
|
| The LLMs are all about the surface layer of that
| particular human ability though. And again, that is fine,
| but it has nothing to do with how our brains work. We
| looked at nature and were inspired, and went and created
| something else. As always.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Yes, they can.
| allarm wrote:
| Ever heard of creativity?
| falloutx wrote:
| In some ways no, because to learn something you have to
| LEARN that then thats in the training data. But humans
| can do it continuously and sometimes randomly, and also
| being without prompted.
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| If you're a scientist -- and in many cases if you're an
| engineer, or a philosopher, or even perhaps a theologian
| -- your job is quite literally to add to humanity's
| training data.
|
| I'd add that fiction is much more complicated. LLMs can
| clearly write original fiction, even if they are, as yet,
| not very good at it. There's an idea (often attributed to
| John Gardner or Leo Tolstoy) that all stories boil down
| to one of two scenarios:
|
| > _" A stranger comes to town."_
|
| > _" A person goes on a journey."_
|
| Christopher Booker wrote that there are seven:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Basic_Plots
|
| So I'd tentatively expect tomorrow's LLMs to write good
| fiction along those well-trodden paths. I'm less sanguine
| about their applications in scientific invention and in
| producing original music.
| icedchai wrote:
| Most humans aren't making new scientific discoveries
| either, are they? Does that mean they don't have AGI?
|
| Intelligence is _mostly_ about pattern recognition. All
| those model weights represent patterns, compressed and
| encoded. If you can find a similar pattern in a new
| place, perhaps you can make a new discovery.
|
| One problem is the patterns are static. Sooner or later,
| someone is going to figure out a way to give LLMs "real"
| memory. I'm not talking about keeping a long term
| context, extending it with markdown files, RAG, etc. like
| we do today for an individual user, but updating the
| underlying model weights incrementally, basically
| resulting in a learning, collective memory.
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| Virtually all humans of average intelligence are capable
| of making scientific discoveries -- admittedly minor ones
| -- if they devote themselves to a field, work at its
| frontiers, and apply themselves. They are also capable of
| originality in other domains, in other ways.
|
| I am not at all sure that the same thing is even
| theoretically possible for LLMs.
|
| Not to be facetious, but you need to spend more time
| playing with Suno. It really drives home how limited
| these models are. With text, there's a vast conceptual
| space that's hard to probe; it's much easier when the
| same structure is ported to music. The number of things
| it _can 't_ do absolutely outweighs the number of things
| it _can_ do. Within days, even mere hours, you 'll become
| aware of its peculiar rigidity.
| samrus wrote:
| Scaling alone wont get us to AGI. We are in the latter half
| of this AI summer where the real research has slowed down
| and even stopped and the MBAs and moguls are doing stupid
| things
|
| For us to take the next step towards AGI, we need an AI
| winter to hit and the next AI summer to start, the first
| half of which will produce the advancement we actually need
| Kon5ole wrote:
| I have to admit I'm flip-flopping on the topic, back and
| forth from skeptic to scared enthusiast.
|
| I just made a LLM recreate a decent approximation of the file
| system browser from the movie Hackers (similar to the SGI one
| from Jurassic park) in about 10 minutes. At work I've had it
| do useful features and bug fixes daily for a solid week.
|
| Something happened around newyears 2026. The clients, the
| skills, the mcps, the tools and models reached some new level
| of usefulness. Or maybe I've been lucky for a week.
|
| If it can do things like what I saw last week reliably, then
| every tool, widget, utility and library currently making
| money for a single dev or small team of devs is about to get
| eaten. Maybe even applications like jira, slack, or even
| salesforce or SAP can be made in-house by even small
| companies. "Make me a basic CRM".
|
| Just a few months ago I found it mostly frustrating to use
| LLM's and I thought the whole thing was little more than a
| slight improvement over googling info for myself. But the
| past week has been mind-blowing.
|
| Is it the beginning of the star trek ship computer? If so, it
| is as big as the smartphone, the internet, or even the
| invention of the microchip. And then the investments make
| sense in a way.
|
| The problem might end up being that the value created by LLMs
| will have no customers when everyone is unemployed.
| bojan wrote:
| I agree with you, and share the experience. Something
| changed recently for me as well, where I found the mode to
| actually get value from these things. I find it refreshing
| that I don't have to write boilerplate myself or think
| about the exact syntax of the framework I use. I get to
| think about the part that adds value.
|
| I also have the same experience where we rejected a SAP
| offering with the idea to build the same thing in-house.
|
| But... aside from the obvious fact that building a thing is
| easier than using and maintaining the thing, the question
| arose if we even need what SAP offered, or if we get agents
| to do it.
|
| In your example, do you actually need that simple CRM or
| maybe you can get agents to do the thing without any other
| additional software?
|
| I don't know what this means for our jobs. I do know that,
| if making software becomes so trivial for everyone,
| companies will have to find another way to differentiate
| and compete. And hopefully that's where knowledge workers
| come in again.
| r_lee wrote:
| Exactly. I hear this "wow finally I can just let Claude
| work on a ticket while I get coffee!" stuff and it makes
| me wonder why none of these people feel threatened in any
| way?
|
| And if you can be so productive, then where exactly do we
| need this surplus productivity in software right now when
| were no longer in the "digital transformation" phase?
| dasil003 wrote:
| I don't feel threatened because no matter how tools,
| platforms and languages improved, no matter how much
| faster I could produce and distribute working
| applications, there has never been a shortage of higher
| level problems to solve.
|
| Now if the only thing I was doing was writing code to a
| specification written by someone else, then I would be
| scared, but in my quarter century career that has never
| been the case. Even at my first job as a junior web
| developer before graduating college, there was always a
| conversation with stakeholders and I always had input on
| what was being built. I get that not every programmer had
| that experience, but to me that's always been the
| majority of the value that software developers bring, the
| code itself is just an implementation detail.
|
| I can't say that I won't miss hand-crafting all the code,
| there certainly was something meditative about it, but
| I'm sure some of the original ENIAC programmers felt the
| same way about plugging in cables to make circuits. The
| world of tech moves fast, and nostalgia doesn't pay the
| bills.
| bossyTeacher wrote:
| > there has never been a shortage of higher level
| problems to solve.
|
| True, but whether all those problems are SEEN worth
| chasing business wise is another matter. Short term is
| what matters most for individuals currently in the field,
| and short term is less devs needed which leads to drop in
| salaries and higher competition. You will have a job but
| if you explore the job market you will find it much
| harder to get a job you want at the salary you want
| without facing huge competition. At the same time, your
| current employer might be less likely to give you salary
| raises because they know you bargaining power has
| decreased due to the job market conditions.
|
| Maybe in 40 years time, new problems will change the job
| market dynamics but you will likely be near retirement by
| then
| vitaflo wrote:
| Smart devs know this is the beginning of the end of high
| paying dev work. Once the LLM's get really good, most dev
| work will go to the lowest bidder. Just like factory work
| did 30 years ago.
| falloutx wrote:
| Then whats the smart dev plan, sit on the vibe coding
| casino until the bossman calls you into the office?
| democracy wrote:
| Exactly, it will be a CodeUber, we just pick the task
| from the app and deliver the results ))
| falloutx wrote:
| I thought AI would already automate that part, I expect
| to actually just drive an actual uber
| vitaflo wrote:
| Make as much money as you can while you still can before
| the bottom falls out. Or go work for one of the AI
| companies on AI. Always better to sell picks and shovels
| than dig for gold. Eventually the gold runs out where you
| are.
| username223 wrote:
| Become a plutocrat, or be useful to plutocrats. I don't
| have the moral flexibility for the former, but plutes
| tend to care about their images, legacies, and mewling
| broods. A clever person can find a way to be the latter.
| chasd00 wrote:
| I think it's the end of low paying dev work. If I was in
| one of the coding sweatshops I would be thinking hard.
| WarmWash wrote:
| Not even factory work, classic engineering jobs in
| general. SWE sucked all the air out of the engineering
| room, because the pay/benefits/job prospects were just
| head and shoulders better.
|
| We had a fresh out of school EE hire who left our company
| for an SWE position 6 months into his job with us, for a
| position that paid the same (plus full remote with a food
| stipend) as our Director of Engineering. A 23 yr old
| getting on offer above what a 54 yr old with 30 years
| experience was making.
|
| For a few years there, you had to be an idi...making sub-
| optimal decisions, to choose anything other than becoming
| an techy.
| democracy wrote:
| Lots of dreamers here, yet Vanguard reports 4x job and
| wages growth in the 100 jobs most exposed to AI
| bossyTeacher wrote:
| Bit naive to think that positive pattern will hold for
| the next ten years or so or whatever time is left between
| now and your retirement. And arguably, the later that
| positive pattern changes is worse for you because
| retraining as an older person has its own challenges.
| democracy wrote:
| Oh please, SAP doesn't exist only because writing
| software is not free or cheap
| gtech1 wrote:
| My team of 6 people has been building a software to compete
| with an already established piece of software written by a
| major software corporation. I'm not saying we'll succeed,
| I'm not saying we'll be better nor that we will cover every
| corner case they do and that they learned over the past 30
| years. But 6 senior devs are getting stuff done at an
| insane pace. And if we can _attempt_ to do this, which
| would have been unthinkable 2 years ago, I can only wonder
| what will happen next.
| josephg wrote:
| Yeah I'm curious how much the moat of big software
| companies will shrink over the next few years. How long
| before I can ask a chatbot to build me a windows-like OS
| from scratch (complete with an office suite) and it can
| do a reasonable job?
|
| And what happens then? Will we stop using each others
| code?
| bossyTeacher wrote:
| > My team of 6 people has been building a software to
| compete with an already established piece of software
| written by a major software corporation.
|
| How long until that the devs at that major corporation
| start using an LLM? You think your smaller team can still
| compare to their huge team?
| dpe82 wrote:
| If the goal is to simply undercut the incumbent with
| roughly the same product than it doesn't really matter if
| the incumbent starts using LLMs too as their cost
| structure, margin expectations, etc. are already
| relatively set.
| henry2023 wrote:
| Of course they can. if you've ever stepped a foot inside
| big tech you'll know the bottle neck is not dev output.
| YZF wrote:
| 100%- which is what I'm telling everyone. I am in big
| tech and it doesn't matter that I can write what I used
| to in 1 week in 5 minutes. Meetings, reviews, design
| docs, politics, etc. etc. mean how much code is written
| is irrelevant. Productivity in big tech is pretty low
| because of organizational overhead. You just can't get
| anything done. Being able to get more work done with less
| people is the real game changer because less people don't
| suffer from those "coordination headwinds".
| gtech1 wrote:
| Bingo. Most of my employees come from big tech (not
| faang, but big corps ) where they felt they couldn't
| really deliver what they wanted and what they're capable
| of. These guys love to not just code, but to create and
| deliver stuff.
| josephg wrote:
| Yeah I'm having a similar experience. I've been wanting a
| standard test suite for JMAP email servers, so we can make
| sure all created jmap servers implement the (somewhat
| complex) spec in a consistent manner. I spent a single day
| prompting Claude code on Friday, and walked away with about
| 9000 lines of code, containing 300 unit tests for jmap
| servers. And a web interface showing the results. It would
| have taken me at least a week or two to make something
| similar by hand.
|
| There's some quality issues - I think some of the tests are
| slightly wrong. We went back and forth on some ambiguities
| Claude found in the spec, and how we should actually
| interpret what the jmap spec is asking. But after just a
| day, it's nearly there. And it's already very useful to see
| where existing implementations diverge on their output,
| even if the tests are sometimes not correctly identifying
| which implementation is wrong. Some of the test failures
| are 100% correct - it found real bugs in production
| implementations.
|
| Using an AI to do weeks of work in a single day is the
| biggest change in what software development looks like that
| I've seen in my 30+ year career. I don't know why I would
| hire a junior developer to write code any more. (But I
| would hire someone who was smart enough to wrangle the AI).
| I just don't know how long "ai prompter" will remain a
| valuable skill. The AIs are getting much better at
| operating independently. It won't be long before us humans
| aren't needed to babysit them.
| wasmainiac wrote:
| Was this written by llm?
| josephg wrote:
| No.
| wasmainiac wrote:
| Sorry just asking. I used to review CVs part time. It
| used to be pretty clear who was embellishing their CV
| with AI and who was not. There was also a writing style
| that came with using AI.
|
| My spider sense is tingling!
| josephg wrote:
| :( I get this from time to time, where people think my
| writing is at least partially AI generated. I wonder if
| it's worth trying to change my writing style to avoid the
| stigma. If I hand wrote a CV, it would suck to be dumped
| in with AI generated slop. More small pithy sentences? or
| throw in some spelling and grammar mistakes? Bleh.
| salawat wrote:
| So what'd your prompt look like, out of curiosity? I hear
| about all these things that sound quite impressive, but
| no one ever seems to want share any info on the prompts
| to learn or gain insight from.
| josephg wrote:
| It was nothing special. I can't seem to pull up the
| initial prompt, but it was something like this:
|
| > Build a thorough test suite for JMAP in this directory.
| The test suite will be run against multiple JMAP servers,
| to ensure each server implements the JMAP spec
| consistently and correctly. In this directory are two
| files - rfc8620.txt and rfc8621.txt. These files
| containing the JMAP core and JMAP email specs. Read these
| files. Then make a list of all aspects of the
| specifications. For each, create a set of tests which
| thoroughly tests all aspects of a JMAP server's behaviour
| specified by the RFCs, including error behaviour. The
| test suite should be configurable to point at a jmap
| server & email account. The account will contain an empty
| mailbox (error if its not empty). The test suite starts
| by adding a known set of test emails to the account, then
| run your tests and clear the inbox again. Write the test
| suite in typescript. The test runner should output the
| report into a JSON file. Start with a project plan.
|
| If you haven't tried claude code or openai's codex, just
| dive in there and give it a go. Writing a prompt isn't
| rocket science. Just succinctly say the same things you'd
| say to a very competent junior engineer when you want to
| brief them on some work.
| raegis wrote:
| > The problem might end up being that the value created by
| LLMs will have no customers when everyone is unemployed.
|
| I'm not a professional programmer, but I am the I.T.
| department for my wife's small office. I used ChatGPT
| recently (as a search engine) to help create a web
| interface for some files on our intranet. I'm sure no one
| in the office has the time or skills to vibe code this in a
| reasonable amount of time. So I'm confident that my "job"
| is secure :)
| falloutx wrote:
| > Im sure no one in the office has the time or skills to
| vibe code.
|
| the thing you are describing can be vibe coded by anyone.
| Its not that teachers or nurses are gonna start
| vibecoding tmrw, but the risk comes from other
| programmers outworking you to show off to the boss. Or
| companies pitting devs against each other, or them
| mistakenly assuming they require very few programmers, or
| PMs suddenly start vibe coding when threatened for their
| jobs.
| chasd00 wrote:
| I have to admit the last 6-8 weeks have been different.
| Maybe it's just me realizing the value in some of these
| tools...
| simoncion wrote:
| It seems like every quarter or two, I hear a story just
| like yours (including the <<Wow! We've quietly passed an
| inflection point!>> part).
|
| What does that tell me?
|
| It tells me that I shouldn't waste my time with a tool
| that's going to fundamentally change in three to six
| months; that I should wait until I _stop_ hearing stories
| like this for a good, long while. "But you're going to be
| left behind!", yeah, maybe. But. I've been primarily a
| maintenance programmer for a very long time. The "bleeding
| edge" is where I am very, very rarely... and it seems to
| work out fine.
|
| New tools that are useful are nice. Switching to a
| radically different tool every quarter or two? Not nice.
| I've got shit to do.
| srdjanr wrote:
| I don't see the interface changing much in 3-6 months,
| and definitely not fundamentally.
|
| Sure, there will probably be some changes around MCP,
| skills, AGENTS.md and similar, but I don't see them as
| big changes, and you can use the tools now without those
| things.
| wasmainiac wrote:
| I have not had the success you mention with programming...
| I still feel like I have to hold its hand all the way.
|
| Regardless..
|
| > The problem might end up being that the value created by
| LLMs will have no customers when everyone is unemployed.
|
| This mentality is why investors are scrambling right now.
| It's a scare tactic.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| FWIW the models aren't thrown away. The weights are used to
| preinit the next foundation model training run. It helps to
| reuse weights rather than randomize them even if the model
| has a somewhat different architecture.
|
| As for the rest, constraint on hospital capacity (at least in
| some countries, not sure about the USA) isn't money for
| capex, it's doctors unions that restrict training slots.
| qaq wrote:
| Not many. Money is not a perfect abstraction. The raw
| materials used to produce 100B worth of Nvidia chips will not
| yield you many hospitals. AI researcher with 100M singup
| bonus from Meta ain't gonna lay you much brick.
| thwarted wrote:
| It's not about the consumption of raw materials or
| repurposing of the raw materials used for chips. peterlk
| said:
|
| > _How many hospitals, roads, houses, machine shops,
| biomanufacturing facilities, parks, forests, laboratories,
| etc. could we build with the money we're spending on
| pretraining models that we throw away next quarter?_
|
| It's about using _the money_ for to build things that we
| actually need and that have more long term utility. No one
| expects someone with a 100M signing bonus at Meta to lay
| bricks, but that 100M could be used to buy a lot of bricks
| and pay a lot of brick layers to build hospitals.
| OGEnthusiast wrote:
| Seems like the main issue is that taxes in America are
| far too low.
| qaq wrote:
| Again people confuse paper wealth and material assets. If
| you take half of money of 0.001% people imagine there
| will be material change in world of atoms but thats not
| true. You can't take 8 mil Richard Mille watch and build
| an apartment building. We are mostly resource
| constrained. There are no material assets to convert all
| the paper wealth into. Telsa's physical assets are like
| 5% of Tesla's market cap the rest is cultish belief in
| Elon. You can't convert that into a hospital. It's
| trivial to observe on AI side there is unlimited amount
| of $ available and yet companies are supplied constrained
| on the atoms side from gas turbines having 3-4 year lead
| times to ASML running 24/7 prod cycle and yet unable to
| meet demand.
| ponector wrote:
| You can tax wealth, assets and paper wealth as well. Some
| countries like Switzerland does it. Annual tax is
| 0.05-0.3% and that what should billionaires pay to the
| society.
| qaq wrote:
| You can and Pollock paintings will go for 80 mil instead
| of 110 and luxury assets will drop in price but will
| still be owned by same people. Switzerland is tiny so not
| very constrained. There is some elasticity for converting
| paper wealth into physical things but it is miniscule. I
| think COVID should've being a pretty strong lesson there.
| scoofy wrote:
| I mean, you're just talking about _spending_ money.
| Google isn 't trying to build data centers for fun. These
| massive outlays are only there because the folks making
| them think they will _make much more money than they
| spend._
| AYBABTME wrote:
| I think it's a mistake to believe that this money would
| exist if it was to be spent on these things. The
| existence of money is largely derived from society scale
| intention, excitement or urgency. These hospitals,
| machine shops, etc, could not manifest the same amount of
| money unless packaged as an exciting society scale
| project by a charismatic and credible character. But AI,
| as an aggregate, has this pull and there are a few clear
| investment channels in which to pour this money. The
| money didn't need to exist yesterday, it can be created
| by pulling a loan from (ultimately) the Fed.
| int_19h wrote:
| Those companies were each sitting ~$50-100B in cash even
| before the AI boom.
| johnvanommen wrote:
| > How many hospitals, roads, houses, machine shops,
| biomanufacturing facilities, parks, forests, laboratories,
| etc. could we build
|
| "We?"
|
| This isn't "our" money.
|
| If you buy shares, you get a voice.
| YZF wrote:
| It's not a zero sum game. We could build hospitals and data
| centers. The reason we are not building hospitals or parks or
| machine shops have nothing to do with AI. We weren't building
| them 2 years ago either.
| eviks wrote:
| Indeed not zero sum, but a negative sum game to waste money
| instead of even doing nothing, let alone building something
| useful.
| lII1lIlI11ll wrote:
| >As a research topic, modern AI is a miracle, and I
| absolutely love learning about it. As an economic endeavor,
| it just feels insane. How many hospitals, roads, houses,
| machine shops, biomanufacturing facilities, parks, forests,
| laboratories, etc. could we build with the money we're
| spending on pretraining models that we throw away next
| quarter?
|
| This is a wrong way to look at it. The right way is to
| consider that AI investments generate (taxable) economic
| activity that your government can use to build "hospitals,
| roads, houses, machine shops, biomanufacturing facilities,
| parks, forests, laboratories".
| anon7000 wrote:
| Not so much when there's a race to the bottom for which
| municipalities, and states can offer the most tax breaks.
| lII1lIlI11ll wrote:
| People working on those facilities still pay income tax
| to the municipality no matter how much of a discount the
| business gets. People buying AI tokes/subscriptions pay
| VAT to the municipality where they reside.
| efficax wrote:
| they pay very little tax and most of the cash is going into
| datacenters and electricity which provide very little long
| term employment. llms can do some amazing things but at the
| same time they're setting mountains of cash on fire to
| nudify random women on twitter and generate more spam than
| we could've ever imagined possible
| polski-g wrote:
| Google has zero expected build outs of "forests". They've
| never mentioned this in their 10k ever. There is no
| misallocation of Google's money from "forests" to
| datacenters.
| baq wrote:
| Inflation adjusted?
| Symbiote wrote:
| Seems to be.
|
| Facebook's investment is to be $135bn [1]. The Channel Tunnel
| was "in 1985 prices, PS4.65 billion", which is PS15.34bn in
| December 2025 [3], or $20.5bn at current exchange rate.
|
| That is staggering.
|
| (I didn't check the other figures.)
|
| [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn8jkyk78gno
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_Tunnel
|
| [3] https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-
| policy/inflation/in...
| ttoinou wrote:
| So, now you understand you can't compare things with how much
| they cost
| fogzen wrote:
| It's incredibly sad and depressing. We could be building green
| energy, parks, public transit, education, healthcare.
| renewiltord wrote:
| We could, but perhaps people want AI data centers more than
| one more month of healthcare spending. Though it's a tough
| thing choosing between 3.5 rail lines between SF and LA and
| LLMs.
| don_esteban wrote:
| The thing is that is is not the 'people' who decide these
| things. Its the uber rich, who prefer investing to get uber
| richer (although I am not sure how will that work in this
| case) to investing in improving the health of the plebs.
| hunterpayne wrote:
| > building green energy
|
| Fun fact, we have already spent about $10T on renewables and
| it still provides a very tiny amount of global energy. Learn
| about why before complaining about it in public. While you
| are at it, perhaps learn why health insurance is so expensive
| while also increasing the cost of healthcare. In many matters
| of public policy, lack of money isn't the problem. Its
| ignorance of what makes good policy that is missing and that
| isn't fixed by throwing money at problems.
| jaccola wrote:
| Not really your point but I think the skills to create these
| things are much slower to train than producing chips and data
| centres.
|
| So they couldn't really build any of these projects weekly
| since the cost of construction materials / design engineers /
| construction workers would inflate rapidly.
|
| Worth keeping in mind when people say "we could have built 52
| hospitals instead!" or similar. Yes, but not really... since
| the other constraints would quickly reveal themselves
| mtrovo wrote:
| Remember the good old days of complaining about Bitcoin taking
| the energy output of a whole town.
| mjevans wrote:
| It has never _not_ been time to build all the power plants we
| can environmentally afford.
|
| More power enables higher quality of living and more advanced
| civilization. It will be put to use doing something useful,
| or at the very worst it'll make doing existing useful things
| less expensive opening them up to more who would like those
| things.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > It has never _not_ been time to build all the power
| plants we can environmentally afford.
|
| The US' challenge is that new energy sources are waiting
| 3-5 years before they can connect to the grid.
|
| refs: https://kagi.com/search?q=how+long+are+new+energy+sou
| rces+wa...
| saalaa wrote:
| I'm a simple man, I just want these companies to pay taxes
| where they make money.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > I'm a simple man, I just want these companies to pay taxes
| where they make money.
|
| The folks who bankroll elections work tirelessly to insure
| this doesn't happen.
| int_19h wrote:
| Especially when they make money off the free work of all the
| people who contributed to those training sets.
|
| There really needs to be some kind of "commons tax" for that
| kind of thing.
| speleding wrote:
| Profits = revenue - costs. Costs include depreciations and
| write offs of investments, and capital costs (what they pay
| to service debt), before you get to a taxable profit for
| accounting purposes. It's going to be many years before they
| pay taxes, if ever.
|
| They do have to pay Value Added Tax on their sales in many
| countries (all of the EU), but not in most of the US. (The
| basis for Trump's claim that the EU is robbing the US. Sigh.)
| jsemrau wrote:
| Its like we are transcending to a new state of the world.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| Sure, but the end-state of this isn't just chat bots! Bipedal
| robots are the real target application for this technology, and
| at least three big players have invested many billions each
| into base model training. The "GPT 2 moment" for robotics will
| happen likely later this year, next year at the latest. Then,
| the company that scales up from there to the equivalent of GPT
| 3.5 -- the first properly useful model -- can start selling
| androids by the _tens of millions_.
|
| It'll be the next automobile, every well-to-do household will
| want one eventually. Every hospital, to assist/replace nurses.
| Every retirement home for the same reason.
|
| Japan and China alone, with their ageing populations in dire
| need of nursing, will easily pay for the investment with that
| one use-case.
| kkfx wrote:
| Is there really for the ML boom, or is it just a way to make
| computers more and more expensive to push people towards mobile?
| Because looking around, that's the effect I'm seeing, regardless
| of the causes.
|
| I see a future where most people will buy tablets to save money
| and the desktop will be for only a few, a very few, just when
| self-hosting is becoming trendy and people are saying "it's time
| for GNU/Linux to take Windows' place"...
| mystraline wrote:
| The current LLMs are not constantly learning. They're static
| models that require megatons of coal to retrain.
|
| Now if the LLMs could modify their own nets, and improve
| themselves, then that would be immensely valuable for the world.
|
| But as of now, its a billionaires wet dream to threaten all
| workers as a way to replace labor.
| throwaw12 wrote:
| > if the LLMs could modify their own nets ... then that would
| be immensely valuable for the world.
|
| Not sure :)
|
| I expect different things, don't think Wall Street allows good
| things to happen to ordinary people
| simianwords wrote:
| How would you have done it differently? It's clear that even if
| this builds up more billionaire wealth, it still benefits
| everyone. Just like any other technology?
|
| So would you rather stop billionaires from doing it?
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > It's clear that even if this builds up more billionaire
| wealth, it still benefits everyone.
|
| That is by _no means_ clear. I have yet to see any benefit
| from AI. I have no doubt in my mind that I 'm not alone. So
| how is "everyone" benefiting from this trend?
| reducesuffering wrote:
| Think bigger, think of the entire system outside of just the
| single LLM: the interplay of capital, human engineering, and
| continual improvement of LLMs. First gen LLM used 100% human
| coding. Previous gen were ~50% human coding. Current gen are
| ~10% human coding (practically all OpenAI/Anthropic engineers
| admit they're entirely using Claude Code / Codex for code).
| What happens when we're at 1% human coding, then 0%? The
| recursive self-improvement is happening, it's just indirectly
| for now.
| mystraline wrote:
| And if everybody could thrive, then I say go for it.
|
| But thats nowhere near the system we have. Instead, this is
| serving to take all intellectual and artistic labor, and
| lower everyone into the 'ditch digger and garbage man' class,
| aka the low wage class.
|
| LLMs was never about building upwards. Its about corporate
| plundering from the folks who get paid well - the developers,
| the artists, the engineers, you name it. And its a way to
| devalue everyone with a pretend that they can be replaced
| with the biggest plagiarism machine ever created.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/economicCollapse/comments/1hspiym/t.
| ..
|
| is correct in their take. Why else would we see a circular
| economy of shoving AI everywhere? Because it serves to
| eliminate wages, paid to humans.
|
| This stratification and cementing social classes nearly
| permanently is a way to have our race of humanity die. But
| hey, shareholder value was at an all time high for a while.
| vixen99 wrote:
| Is this actually true? Anyone care to comment on the claim
| (from some quarters) that offering free access to ChatGPT
| allows OpenAI to 'collect a gold mine of real-world interaction
| data to improve the underlying language model. Every
| conversation users have with ChatGPT - every question asked and
| every task requested - provides valuable training data for
| refining' the model.
|
| If false, I'm thinking - there's me, thinking I'm doing my bit
| to help . . .
| mystraline wrote:
| Corporate LLMs also are going to be the absolute biggest rug-
| pull.
|
| The billionaire companies responsible for this claim they can
| bed used for intellectual and artistic labor. Sure, they're
| the biggest piracy and plagariam engines.
|
| Once people start losing the abilities of what LLMs were
| trained on, will be the next phase. And thats to ratchet up
| prices to replace what they would have paid to humans.
|
| It will be the biggest wealth transfer we will have ever
| seen.
|
| This whole socio-econic equasion would be different if we all
| did actually gain. Raising tides raise all ships, but sinking
| ships get gobbled faster and faster.
| lvl155 wrote:
| Sign me up to be an electrician. The line for that is pretty long
| and gatekept.
| ares623 wrote:
| You and 100,000 other software engineers will make that line
| pretty short in no time I bet!
|
| It's amazing how South Park has better economic sense than HN
| (or maybe not actually)
| grumple wrote:
| There's a shortage of over 500,000 tradesmen in the US right
| now, expected to reach a shortage of 2 million by 2030. And
| if you've ever tried to get somebody out for a repair: it's
| hard. They are expensive, and the tradesmen are often not
| good, and often pretty dumb, even about their own field. Add
| to that the regulatory gatekeeping, where it takes 5 years
| minimum of working under someone else to be able to work
| independently in some fields, and the low initial pay and
| poor treatment causing people to drop out... there's going to
| be a shortage for a long time. And even if their wasn't - the
| people in those fields now would be relatively easy to
| outcompete imo.
| lvl155 wrote:
| Electricians make more money than an average developer. A
| commercial one will be like being a staff level dev. This is
| why it is gatekept in most municipalities. To be fair, being
| a good electrician is not easy.
| mandeepj wrote:
| It's definitely not causing shortages of people, with tens of
| thousands and more getting laid off every month!
|
| The AI boom is just like a conference- where new and shiny seems
| to do wonders, but when you come back to workplace, none of that
| seem to work or fit in!
| erikerikson wrote:
| The article was specific about where the jobs shortages are.
| Electricians, construction, mathematicians (?)(wasn't aware the
| was a lot of dedicated math work in a data center design and
| build). Lay offs have been in software, design, and elsewhere.
| roysting wrote:
| Yes, because the bigger issue is that the whole American system
| has been so dominated by the rapacious and parasitic mindset of
| the blob that may be grouped as the PE/investor class (which I
| also belong to and have benefited from, even though it's been
| deliberately secondarily), which has been extracting/monetizing
| value and cutting real, human, long term investment in lieu of
| short term, quick, unsustainable outsourcing and resource
| extracting methods for so many decades now that it has now left
| America in a tight spot.
|
| Unfortunately, though it has left mostly the Europeans, but all
| American vassals in an even worse position as the vampiric fake
| American ruling class, devours America like Saturn devouring
| his son, as famously depicted by Goya. The parasitic American
| empire is in a bit of a panic and it is pulling out all the
| stops to make everyone else pay for its failures, evil, and
| detrimental activities. That comes in the form of extracting
| value from Europe and damaging their economy in order to make
| them even more dependent vassals who still think they can rebel
| like a toddler threading to run away from home, and dominating
| the Americas that are effectively helpless in the face of
| Americas overwhelming position over them.
|
| The anxiety and panic among the American ruling class is
| palpable among the clubhouse chatter. The empire is in a bit of
| a panic to sustain itself, just as much as it is also trying to
| devour what little value is left among the American pension
| funds and people to save itself; Saturn devouring his son for
| fear of the prophesy that his child would overthrow him.
| dmix wrote:
| It is a downside of being the world center of finance is that
| you have way too many well paid finance guys sitting in rooms
| trying to squeeze the juice out of everything on the market.
|
| The opposite end of that is that this AI boom wouldn't have
| existed in America without the insane amount of capital these
| guys can put together.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| It's time that societies act against this cancer. When everything
| else suffers because the cancer is stealing all sorts of
| resources, a human would go to a doctor and have the cancer
| killed chemically or excised.
| jopsen wrote:
| Relax, before you drafted regulation and rolled it out this
| bubble will have peaked.
|
| Unless your rolling out dumb reactionary regulation like forbid
| AI or crypto coins, etc.
|
| It's annoying right now, but on a timescale of 5-10 years
| ram/gpu prices will be back to normal.
|
| Could we regulate investors reduce risk of bubbles maybe, but
| it's hard. Probably easier to limit the impact of bubbles on
| humans with a social safety net.
| drnick1 wrote:
| > Smartphones are expected to get pricier for potentially years
| to come.
|
| "Smart" phones have ceased to be smart years ago. They are now
| instruments of mass surveillance, and the tech industry has
| convinced people that 1) you need one not to be a social outcast,
| 2) you need to upgrade it every year, 3) not having root access
| is for your own good.
|
| I'll stick to my Pixel 9a running Graphene for the forseeable
| future.
| goalieca wrote:
| Well, the article touched on how smaller phone makers and
| middle tier startups, are being squeezed out. Big tech and
| their surveillance economy is only going to tighten their grip
| now.
| utopiah wrote:
| Good thing that I don't need a :
|
| - bigger TV, my "old" not even 4K video projector is enough
|
| - faster phone with more memory or better camera, my current one
| as "just" 5G, is enough
|
| - faster laptop/desktop, I can work on the laptop, game on
| desktop
|
| - higher resolution VR headsets (but I'll still get a Steam Frame
| because it's more free)
|
| - denser smart watch, I'm not even using the ones I have
|
| ... so, the situation is bad, yes, and yet I don't really care.
| The hardware I have is good enough and in fact regardless of AI
| I've been arguing we've reached "peak" IT few years ago already.
| Of course I wouldn't mind "better" everything (higher resolution,
| faster refresh rate, faster CPU/GPU, more memory, more risk,
| etc). What I'm arguing for though is that most "normal" users
| (please, don't tell me you're a video editor for National
| Geographic who MUST edit 360 videos in 8K! That's great for you,
| honestly, love that, but that's NOT a "normal" user!) who bough
| high end hardware during the last few year matches most of their
| capabilities.
|
| All that being said, yes, pop that damn bubble, still invest in
| AI R&D and datacenters, still invest in AI public research for
| energy, medicine, etc BUT not the LLM/GenAI tulip commercial
| craze.
| benjiro wrote:
| Your forgetting a little detail ... While you do not need a lot
| of new stuff, companies need buyers. A lot of companies work on
| rather thing margins and losing potentially 10 a 20% sales can
| result in people getting fired, or companies shutting down.
|
| Remember, its not just about "O, X big brands sells less, they
| can deal with it". But a lot of brands have suppliers who feed
| that system. Or PC component makers like ... heatsinks, Fans,
| Cases ... seeing a 20% less sales because people buy less new
| PCs.
|
| People do not realize how much is linked in the industry.
| Smaller GPU card makers are literally saying that they may be
| forced to leave the industry because of drops in sales and the
| memory prices making the products too expensive.
|
| We can live a long time on old hardware but hardware also
| limits. Hey, the wife's laptop is from 2019, just before Covid
| (2020 when a lot of people bought new laptops). The battery is
| barely holding on. Replacement? None (reputable) ... So in a
| year that laptop is dead.
|
| How about phones? Same issue ... battery is the build in
| obsolete maker.
|
| You see the issue. It goes beyond what what most people
| realize.
|
| Wait when a recession hits when the whole AI bubble bursts and
| cascades down the already weakened industry. Unlike previous
| bubbles, the hardware being build is so specialized, that
| little will hit the normal consumer market. So there will not
| be a flood of cheap GPUs or memory being dumped on the market.
| kykat wrote:
| Yeah, some hardware vendors that sell things like pc cases or
| coolers have definitely noticed that people are really
| building way less PCs
| utopiah wrote:
| I'm honestly not worried. My laptop battery is at ~70%
| health, same for phone. It's not great but it's enough to be
| useful.
|
| Hopefully current companies failing, and yes closing down,
| might in fact be the opportunity for new companies focusing
| precisely on different dimension, namely repairability rather
| than top specs. I have in mind MNT, Pine64, Librem,
| FairPhone, or projects like LiFePO4wered/Pi+ or battery
| adapters.
|
| There are new actors that are not computer manufacturers but
| precisely reconsider the value chain instead of solely
| focusing on higher specs.
| techblueberry wrote:
| Bezos must have forgot to censor this post before it published.
| vaxman wrote:
| Almost positive 'ol Bessent has by now warned Trump that there is
| an issue with the AI queens breaking 1930s securities reform
| laws. Last week's stock market and crypto moves have all but
| sealed the fate of the Bozo No Bozos. They will take down the
| people involved with the funky purchase orders quietly, except
| inside of the closed door meetings where they get handled.
| https://youtu.be/y_z9W_N5Drg
| loeg wrote:
| > Good luck finding an electrician
|
| My local (urban) residential electricians aren't even busy --
| they are booking less than a week out. By contrast, just last
| year they were booking six weeks out. The fall in EV
| infrastructure demand due to eliminated incentives might be
| impacting them more than additional data center demand.
| mixologic wrote:
| It's caused a massive shortage of interesting content that isn't
| related to AI.
| dmix wrote:
| The best part is every single thread on HN now has someone
| accusing the author of using AI.
| cheschire wrote:
| Remember when AI were closer to just purpose-built neural
| networks and not always LLMs?
|
| I miss reading about that kind of "AI"
| journal wrote:
| many users here are not willing to try anything new that might
| give it a chance. even if i show someone a better alternative,
| they still wont use it because no one else is using it. people
| need to be told what to do. initiative has been beaten out of
| you all.
| macguyv3r wrote:
| Good.
|
| Gen pop can diversify its skillset, become more independently
| self sufficient as a result, rely on/require less money overall,
| and realize they don't really need to listen to rich tech CEOs
| which will implode their value politically.
|
| SaaS jobs were about little more than agency control and now
| they're losing that control.
| dehrmann wrote:
| Does anyone know the high-level breakdown of where the money's
| going and how long that part (energy production, energy
| transmission, network, datacenter, servers/GPUs) lasts?
| rossdavidh wrote:
| "JPMorgan calculated last fall that the tech industry must
| collect an extra $650 billion in revenue every year -- three
| times the annual revenue of AI chip giant Nvidia -- to earn a
| reasonable investment return. That marker is probably even higher
| now because AI spending has increased."
|
| That pretty much tells you how this will end, right there.
| robotnikman wrote:
| The future is not looking bright at all....
|
| I only have a meme to describe what we are facing
| https://imgur.com/a/xYbhzTj
| butterlettuce wrote:
| I was expecting to see Mark Baum on the phone saying "hey,
| we're in a bubble".
| dmix wrote:
| > The future is not looking bright at all....
|
| The tech industry going through a boom and settling back down
| at a higher place than before isn't the end of the world.
| They all start merging together soon.
| dijit wrote:
| There has never been an industry that does that
| consistently (that wasn't government subsidised at least).
|
| We got lucky with the dotcom bubble.
|
| There's no guarantee of anything, and it's totally possible
| for the industry to collapse and stay that way.
| cootsnuck wrote:
| They got the current administration to ban state level
| regulation for them. Not to mention various defense
| contracts. They are government subsidized.
| marcyb5st wrote:
| I am more afraid if AI will actually deliver what CEOs are
| touting. People that are now working will be unemployable
| and will have to pivot to something else, overcrowding
| these other sectors and driving wages down.
|
| If that comes to pass you will work the same or more for
| less money than now.
|
| Basically jump back to a true plutocracy since only a few
| people will syphon the wealth generated by AI and that
| wealth will give them substantial temporal power.
| monkaiju wrote:
| I mean, I just dont see any evidence of that happening.
| TBF I'm a SWE so I can only speak to that segment, but
| its literally worse than useless for working with
| anything software related thats non-trivial...
| anonzzzies wrote:
| I see that sentiment here all the time and I don't
| understand what you must be doing; our projects are far
| from non trivial and we get a lot of benefit from it in
| the SWE teams. Our software infra was alway (almost 30
| years) made to work well with outsourcing teams, so maybe
| that is it, but I cannot understand how you can have
| quite that bad results.
| yallpendantools wrote:
| Butting in here but as I have the same sentiment as
| monkaiju: I'm working on a legacy (I can't emphasize this
| enough) Java 8 app that's doing all sorts of weird things
| with class loaders and dynamic entities which, among
| others, is holding it in Java 8. It has over ten years of
| development cruft all over it, code coverage of maybe
| 30-40% depending on when you measure it in the 6+ years
| I've been working with it.
|
| This shit was legacy when I was a wee new hire.
|
| Github Copilot has been great in getting that code
| coverage up marginally but ass otherwise. I could write
| you a litany of my grievances with it but the main one is
| how it keeps inventing methods when writing feature code.
| For example, in a given context, it might suggest
| `customer.getDeliveryAddress()` when it should be `custom
| er.getOrderInfo().getDeliveryInfo().getDeliveryAddress()`
| . It's basically a dice roll if it will remember this the
| next time I need a delivery address (but perhaps no
| surprises there). I noticed if I needed a different
| address in the interim (like a billing address), it's
| more likely to get confused between getting a delivery
| address and a billing address. Sometimes it would even
| think the address is in the request arguments (so it
| would suggest something like
| `req.getParam('deliveryAddress')`) and this happens even
| when the request is properly typed!
|
| I can't believe I'm saying this but IntelliSense is loads
| better at completing my code for me as I don't have to
| backtrack what it generated to correct it. I could type
| `CustomerAddress deliveryAddress = customer` let it hang
| there for a while and in a couple of seconds it would
| suggest to `.getOrderInfo()` and then
| `.getDeliveryInfo()` until we get to
| `.getDeliveryAddress()`. And it would get the right
| suggestions if I name the variable `billingAddress` too.
|
| "Of course you have to provide it with the correct
| context/just use a larger context window" If I knew the
| exact context Copilot would need to generate working
| code, that eliminates more than half of what I need an AI
| copilot in this project for. Also if I have to add more
| than three or four class files as context for a given
| prompt, that's not really more convenient than figuring
| it out by myself.
|
| Our AI guy recently suggested a tool that would take in
| the whole repository as context. Kind of like sourcebot
| ---maybe it was sourcebot(?)---but the exact name escapes
| me atm. Because it failed. Either there were still too
| many tokens to process or, more likely, the project was
| too complex for it still. The thing with this project is
| although it's a monorepo, it still relies on a whole
| fleet of external services and libraries to do some
| things. Some of these services we have the source code
| for but most not so even in the best case "hunting for
| files to add in the context window" just becomes "hunting
| for repos to add in the context window". Scaling!
|
| As an aside, I tried to greenfield some apps with LLMs. I
| asked Codex to develop a minimal single-page app for a
| simple internal lookup tool. I emphasized minimalism and
| code clarity in my prompt. I told it not to use external
| libraries and rely on standard web APIs.
|
| What it spewed forth is the most polished single-page
| internal tool I have ever seen. It is, frankly,
| impressive. But it only managed to do so because it
| basically spat out the most common Bootstrap classes and
| recreated the W3Schools AJAX tutorial and put it all in
| one HTML file. I have no words and I don't know if I must
| scream. It would be interesting to see how token costs
| evolve over time for a 100% vibe-coded project.
| stackbutterflow wrote:
| Copilot is notoriously bad. Have you tried (paid plans)
| codex, Claude or even Gemini on your legacy project?
| That's the bare minimum before debating the usefulness of
| AI tools.
| yallpendantools wrote:
| > Copilot is notoriously bad.
|
| "notoriously bad" is news to me. I find no indication
| from online sources that would warrant the label
| "notoriously bad".
|
| https://arxiv.org/html/2409.19922v1#S6 from 2024
| concludes it has the highest success rate in easy and
| medium coding problems (with no clear winner for hard)
| and that it produces "slightly better runtime performance
| overall".
|
| https://research.aimultiple.com/ai-coding-benchmark/ from
| 2025 has Copilot in a three-way tie for third above
| Gemini.
|
| > Have you tried (paid plans) codex, Claude or even
| Gemini on your legacy project?
|
| This is usually the part of the pitch where you tell me
| _why_ I should even bother especially as one would
| require me to fork up cash upfront. Why will they succeed
| where Copilot has failed? I 'm not asking anyone to do my
| homework for me on a legacy codebase that, in this
| conversation, only I can access---that's outright unfair.
| I'm just asking for a heuristic, a sign, that the grass
| might indeed be greener on that side. How could they
| (probably) improve my life? And no, "so that you pass the
| bare minimum to debate the usefulness of AI tools" is not
| the reason because, frankly, the less of these
| discussions I have, the better.
| stackbutterflow wrote:
| I'm saying this to help you. Whether you give it a shot
| makes no difference to me. This topic is being discussed
| endlessly everyday on all major platforms and for the
| past year or so the consensus is strongly against using
| copilot.
|
| If you want to see if your project and your work can
| benefit from AI you must use codex, Claude code or Gemini
| (which wasn't a contender until recently).
| yallpendantools wrote:
| > This topic is being discussed endlessly everyday on all
| major platforms and for the past year or so the consensus
| is strongly against using copilot.
|
| So it would be easy to link me to something that shows
| this consensus, right? It would help me see what the
| "consensus" has to say about the known limitations of
| Copilot too. It would help me see the "why" that you seem
| allergic to even hint at.
|
| Look, I'm trying to not be close-minded about LLMs hence
| why I'm taking time out of my Sunday to see what I might
| be missing. Hence my comment that I don't want to invest
| time/money in yet-another-LLM just for the "privilege" of
| debating the merits of LLMs in software engineering. If
| I'm to invest time/money in another coding LLM, I need a
| signal, a reason, to _why_ it might be better than
| Copilot for helping me do my job. Either tell me where
| Copilot is lacking or where your "contenders" have the
| upper-hand. _Why_ is it a "must" to use
| Codex/Claude/Gemini other than trustmebro?
| rsynnott wrote:
| > our projects are far from non trivial
|
| Well, there you go; as they say, it's okay for trivial
| stuff.
| int_19h wrote:
| What products and what models have you tried?
| monkaiju wrote:
| I couldn't tell you because I've kept it at arms length
| but over the last year our most enthusiastic "AI guy" (as
| well as another AI-user on the team) has churned through
| quite a few, usually saying something like "$NEW_MODEL is
| much better!" before littering garbage PRs all over the
| project.
| dmix wrote:
| This is basically just a standard cliche doomer
| prediction about any new development.
| palmotea wrote:
| > I only have a meme to describe what we are facing
| https://imgur.com/a/xYbhzTj
|
| I don't recognize that cartoon and there's no audio. I'm
| going to need help with that one.
| falloutx wrote:
| Smiling Friends
| robotnikman wrote:
| Make sure you click the unmute button, imgur mutes by
| default it seems.
| weavie wrote:
| As someone in the UK for whom that link is blocked, I wonder
| if that meme is doubly apt.
| cedws wrote:
| Children successfully protected. Nevermind the child
| groomers on Roblox.
| kryogen1c wrote:
| The question is not "is it a bubble". Bubbles are a desirable
| feature of the American experiment. The question is "will this
| bubble lay the foundation for growth and destroy some value
| when it pops, or will it only destroy value"
|
| https://www.oaktreecapital.com/insights/memo/is-it-a-bubble
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| What can we use fields of GPUs for next?
| dragontamer wrote:
| We can use the GPUs for research (64-bit scientific
| compute), 3d graphics, a few other things. We programmers
| will reconfigure them to something useful.
|
| At least, the GPUs that are currently plugged in. A lot of
| this bullshit bubble crap is because most of those GPUs
| (and RAM) is sitting unplugged in a warehouse, because we
| don't even have enough power to turn all of them on.
|
| So if your question is how to use a GPU... I got plenty of
| useful non-AI related ideas. But only if we can plug them
| in.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if many of those GPUs are just
| e-waste, never to turn on due to lack of power.
| cogman10 wrote:
| > I wouldn't be surprised if many of those GPUs are just
| e-waste, never to turn on due to lack of power.
|
| That's my fear.
|
| The problem is these GPUs are specifically made for
| datacenters, So it's not like your average consumer is
| going to grab one to put into their gaming PCs.
|
| I also worry about what the pop ends up doing to consumer
| electronics. We'll have a bunch of manufacturers that
| have a bunch of capacity that they can no longer use to
| create products which people want to buy and a huge
| backstop of second hand goods that these liquidated AI
| companies will want to unload. That will put chip
| manufactures in a place where they'll need to get their
| money primarily from consumers if they want to stay in
| business. That's not the business model that they've
| operated on up until this point.
|
| We are looking at a situation where we have a bunch of
| oil derricks ready to pump, but shut off because it's too
| expensive to run the equipment making it not worth the
| energy.
| dragontamer wrote:
| That's fine. Server is where we programmers are best at
| repurposing things. Just a bunch of always on boxes doing
| random crap in the background.
|
| Servers can (and do!!) use 10+ year old hardware.
| Consumers are kind of the weird the ones who are so
| impatient they need the latest and greatest.
| themafia wrote:
| The government is going to use them.
|
| The flock cameras are going to be fed into them.
|
| The bitcoin network will be crashed.
|
| A technological arms race just occurred in front of your
| eyes for the past 5 years and you think they're going to
| let the stockpile fall into civilian hands?
| dragontamer wrote:
| In 2 years the next generation chips will be released and
| th se chips will be obsolete.
|
| That's truly e-waste. Now in practice, we programmers
| find uses of 10+ year old hardware as cheap webhosta,
| compiler/build boxes, Bamboo, unit tests, fuzzers and
| whatever. So as long as we can turn them on we
| programmers can and will find a use.
|
| But because we are power constrained, when the more
| efficient 1.8nm or 1.5nm chips get released (and when
| those chips use 30% or less power), no one will give a
| shit about the obsolete stockpile.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| I assume even really out of date cards and racks will
| readily find some use, when the present-day alternative
| costs ~$100k for a single card. Just have to run them on
| a low-enough basis that power use is not a significant
| portion of the overall cost of ownership.
| themafia wrote:
| > will be obsolete.
|
| In what sense? Not competitive for chat bot providers to
| use? Is that a metric that matters?
|
| > when the more efficient 1.8nm or 1.5nm chips get
| released
|
| What if they don't get released? You don't have a broad
| and competitive set of players providing products in this
| realm. How hard would it be to stop this?
|
| > no one will give a shit about the obsolete stockpile.
|
| You have lived your life with ready access to cutting
| edge resources. You ever wonder how long that trend could
| _possibly_ last?
| jdiez17 wrote:
| I predict there's going to be a niche opening up for
| companies to recycle the expensive parts of all these
| compute hardware that AI companies are currently buying
| and will probably be obsolete/depreciated/replaced in the
| next 2-5 years. The easiest example is RAM chips. There
| will be people desoldering those ICs and putting them on
| DDR5 sticks to resell to the general consumer market.
| throwaway0123_5 wrote:
| > 3d graphics
|
| Seems like the G in GPU is very obsolete now:
|
| https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-h100-benchmarked
| in-...
|
| > As it turns out Nvidia's H100, a card that costs over
| $30,000 performs worse than integrated GPUs in such
| benchmarks as 3DMark and Red Dead Redemption 2
| bee_rider wrote:
| It'll be interesting to see what people come up with to
| get conventional scientific computing workloads to work
| on 16 bit or smaller data types. I think there's some
| hope but it will require work.
| saati wrote:
| These AI optimized GPUs are criminally bad at 64bit, so
| no you won't use them for that.
| irishcoffee wrote:
| It's too bad they're all concentrated in buildings, having
| been hovered up by the billionaire class.
|
| I would love to live in the world where everyone joins a
| pool for inference or training, and as such gets the open
| source weights and models for free.
|
| We could call it: FOSS
| greenchair wrote:
| cloud gaming?
| mike_hearn wrote:
| AI, obviously! A bubble doesn't mean demand vanishes
| overnight. There is - at current price points - much more
| demand than supply. That means the market can tolerate
| price hikes whilst keeping the accelerators busy. It seems
| likely that we're still just at the start of AI demand as
| most companies are still finding their feet with it, lots
| of devs still aren't using it at all, lots of business
| workflows that could be automated with it aren't and so on.
| So there is scope for raising prices a lot as the high
| value use cases float to the top, maybe even auctioning
| tokens.
|
| Let's say tomorrow OpenAI and Anthropic have a huge down
| round, or whatever event people think would mark the end of
| the bubble. That doesn't mean suddenly nobody is using AI.
| It means they have to rapidly reduce burn e.g. not doing
| new model versions, laying off staff and reducing the comp
| of those that remain, hiking prices a lot, getting more
| serious about ads and other monetized features. They will
| still be selling plenty of inferencing.
|
| In practice the action is mostly taking place out of public
| markets. We won't necessarily know what's happening at the
| most exposed companies until it's in the rear view mirror.
| Bubbles are a public markets phenomenon. See how "ride
| sharing"/taxi apps played out. Market dumping for long
| periods to buy market share, followed by a relatively easy
| transition to annual profitability without ever going
| public. Some investors probably got wiped along the way but
| we don't know who exactly or by how much.
|
| Most likely outcome: AI bubble will deflate steadily rather
| than suddenly burst. Resources are diverted from training
| to inferencing, new features slow down, new models are
| weaker and more expensive than new models and the old
| models are turned off anyway. That sort of thing. People
| will call it enshittification but it'll really just be the
| end of aggressive dumping.
| dickersnoodle wrote:
| "much more demand than supply"? Demand from who?
| joe_fishfish wrote:
| The demand from middle managers trying to replace their
| dev teams with Claude Code, mainly.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| There may not be _that much_ demand at a price that
| yields profit. Demand at current heavily subsidized "the
| first dose is always free" prices is not a great
| indicator unless they find some way to make themselves
| indispensable for a _lot_ of tasks for a _lot_ of people.
| So far, they haven't.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Yes if/when prices rise there'll be demand destruction
| but I think demand will keep rising for the foreseeable
| future anyway even incorporating that. Lower value use
| cases like vibe coding hobby apps might fall by the
| wayside because they become uneconomic but the tokens
| will be soaked up by bigger enterprises that have found
| ways to properly integrate it at scale into their
| businesses. I don't mean Copilot style Office plugins but
| more business-specific stuff that yields competitive
| advantage.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| You're just repeating their predictions. Investors are
| starting to get nervous that there's no real proof these
| things could justify burning a Mt. Everest sized pile of
| $100 bills to achieve.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Yes it's only a prediction based on what I'm seeing. And
| I'm not disagreeing with the investors that there's
| overinvestment right now. Prices need to rise, spending
| on R&D needs to fall for this stuff to make economic
| sense. I'm only arguing that there's plenty of demand,
| and assuming price rises happen smoothly over not _too_
| short of a period, any demand destruction at the lower
| levels will be quickly counter-balanced by demand
| creation at higher value-add levels.
|
| It's also possible non-tech industries just have a
| collective imagination failure and can't find use cases
| for AI, but I doubt it.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| I know there is demand -- I even know a few people in
| high-level dev roles, one easily in the 99th percentile
| for pay, that were taken from their regular, important
| dev tasks to make agents for paying clients.
|
| I'm not worried about the _technology flourishing._ I'm
| worried about my _fucking retirement,_ know what I mean?
| The question isn't whether there is demand, it's how much
| demand there is, because they're betting on having _all_
| the demand. I don't have a ton of money. People getting
| this wrong in a way my financial advisor can't
| outmaneuver is an existential threat to my ability to not
| live in crumbling public housing in a few decades.
|
| We're talking about this needing to meaningfully move
| towards making _whole digit percentages of the US GDP_ ,
| soon. Not only are these initiatives largely
| unprofitable, they're increasing their expenses based on
| hopes and vibes. I think a whole lot of people are so
| focused on short-term gains and being king of the hill
| that sustainability is a distant afterthought -- just
| like it was in the .com era. I have zero faith in the
| current cohort of tech leaders to get this right.
| Krei-se wrote:
| I find myseld using dumber free models more as they reply
| instantly and keep me learning.
|
| Some local models run well already too and do the job.
| Not sure if i would pay any money when a discarded mac
| can run these just fine already.
|
| This may turn out like trying to make people game over
| streaming.
| blks wrote:
| Please respect other users of hacker news and don't
| generate your replies with LLM
| zozbot234 wrote:
| FWIW, GP doesn't look like clanker speak to me. It's a
| bit too smooth and on-point for that.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| I never use LLMs to write for me (except code).
| blks wrote:
| Sorry for the false acquisition. Your reply, and your
| other replies all felt suspicious to me.
| narrator wrote:
| Anyone who regularly tries to rent GPUs on VPS providers
| knows that they often sell out. This isn't a market with
| lots of capacity nobody needs. In the dot.com bubble there
| was lots of dark fiber nobody was using. In this bubble,
| almost every high-end GPU is being used fully by someone.
| thefounder wrote:
| Whatever happened to crypto/blockchain ASICs
| dijit wrote:
| Nothing happened to them, they're still around; just
| consolidated into industrial operations.
|
| The "twist" is they rot as e-waste every 18 months when
| newer models arrive, generating roughly 30,000 metric
| tonnes of eWaste annually[0] with no recycling programmes
| from manufacturers (like Bitmain)... which is comparable
| to the entire country of the Netherlands.
|
| Turns out the decentralised currency for the people is
| also an environmental disaster built on planned
| obsolescence. Who knew.
|
| [0]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pi
| i/S09213...
| SJC_Hacker wrote:
| > urns out the decentralised currency for the people is
| also an environmental disaster built on planned
| obsolescence. Who knew.
|
| Only proof of work systems, such as Bitcoin. Proof of
| stake such as Ethereum is a lot less energy intensive
| dijit wrote:
| ethereum has a similar ewaste problem
| SJC_Hacker wrote:
| > ethereum has a similar ewaste problem
|
| Is it any worse now than say, the NYSE ?
|
| This reference says energy usage was 0.0026 TWh (2.6 GWh,
| or 2600 MWh) in a year
|
| https://ethereum.org/energy-consumption
|
| If the power was used over the whole year (and not just
| one hour)
|
| (2600 MWh / year) / (24 * 365 h/year) = 0.29 MWh = 296
| kWh. Thats like hair dryer levels of power consumption
| (if the hair dryver was left on all the time)
| dijit wrote:
| Why are you even trying to argue energy consumption when
| the topic is eWaste due to bitcoin ASICs?
|
| Even if we continue down this route, its something like
| 15% of global stock transactions going through NYSE, per
| transaction its extremely efficient when compared to
| Ethereum; but thats not the argument anyway- its that the
| hardware used for mining is barely useful outside of that
| use-case, and the shelf-life is very low to boot.
|
| If there was a use-case, we'd have found it by now, since
| 30,000 Tonnes a year of it ends up in landfills, surely
| someone would dig it out or buy it if it had utility.
| ornornor wrote:
| Heating!
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Can they run Crysis?
| nighthawk454 wrote:
| Ironically, no
| themafia wrote:
| > Bubbles are a desirable feature of the American experiment
|
| Wild speculation detached from reality which destroys
| personal fortunes are not "a desirable feature."
|
| It's only a "desirable feature" to the nihilistic maniacs
| that run the markets as it's only beneficial to them.
| jdiez17 wrote:
| > It's only a "desirable feature" to the nihilistic maniacs
| that run the markets as it's only beneficial to them.
|
| ... and which forces do you think are the core concept of
| "the American experiment"?
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The trouble is, you can only tell what was "detached from
| reality" after the fact. Real-world bubbles must be
| credible by definition, or else they would deflate smoothly
| rather than growing out of control and then popping
| suddenly when the original expectations are dashed by
| reality.
| kryogen1c wrote:
| > Wild speculation detached from reality which destroys
| personal fortunes are not "a desirable feature."
|
| This is not the definition of a bubble, and is specifically
| contrary to what i said.
|
| A good bubble, like the automobile industry in the example
| I linked, paves the way for a whole new economic modalit -
| but value was still destroyed when that bubble popped and
| the market corrected.
|
| You may think its better to not have bubbles and limit the
| maximum economic rate of change (and you may be right), but
| the current system is not obviously wrong and has benefits.
| rubenflamshep wrote:
| Pretty good article until the bizarre post-script where they
| fall back on the tired "people derive meaning from their
| work" for why UBI is bad.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Meaning or not, UBI doesn't work because the math doesn't
| work.
|
| > bizarre
|
| It isn't bizarre at all. Without work people devolve into
| playing video games and smoking pot in their mom's
| basement.
|
| I remember summer vacations from school. It was great for a
| while, but soon I was looking forward to getting back to
| school.
| krapp wrote:
| >Without work people devolve into playing video games and
| smoking pot in their mom's basement.
|
| Some people might, others wouldn't. Not everyone is a
| pot-smoking teenager.
| WalterBright wrote:
| People like ice cream, too. But not everyone.
| mlrtime wrote:
| Yup, there are adults and alcohol too.
| olyjohn wrote:
| I have been off work for over 6 months now. I have been
| doing so many projects, and exploring so many places,
| working out, eating healthy, learning, and spending very
| little money doing so. I actually even quit smoking pot
| after doing it daily for 10 years. It's been amazing, and
| I'd rather never go back to work. I don't get how people
| can get so bored. There's so much to do and see.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Best wishes to you! I'm retired myself, but I work full
| time (on D). Yale is hosting a symposium on D in April,
| and I'll be a speaker at it.
| keybored wrote:
| > Best wishes to you! I'm retired myself, but I work full
| time (on D).
|
| Why aren't you smoking pot in your basement?
| WalterBright wrote:
| I don't like being high.
| tayo42 wrote:
| I generally agree, but I think for some of the most
| interesting problems in computer science you need
| resources that only companies can provide and thats
| basically work.
| fraserphysics wrote:
| After free UNIX and Linux became available on affordable
| home computers, I found it was no longer necessary to be
| at a company to do interesting projects. That was before
| 1995.
| mlrtime wrote:
| What projects? You are starting from a completely
| different baseline than the average hypothetical UBI
| recipient.
|
| I think UBI advocates may have a point once you're 2-3
| generations into some sort of UBI system. But
| bootstrapping that system is not possible, most people
| will revert to do nothing of value to society, no
| projects, nothing.
| phil21 wrote:
| From my lived experience you are an outlier. Potentially
| an extreme one at that.
|
| Where I grew up the people who didn't work almost
| universally turned into consumers of everything and
| creators of basically nothing. The exceptions were
| retirees who had a lifetime if work experience prior to
| their idle years. For those folks it was gardening and
| other similar hobbies that provided meaning but not much
| output for society as a whole.
|
| I think if you offered the entire population the ability
| to do no work other than what they felt like doing,
| exceedingly few people would be motivated to do the
| needful. A few more would be motivated to do things like
| create art and otherwise contribute back to other people
| but I am thinking along the lines of the 80/20 rule here.
|
| I think our future if we ever figured out automation and
| UBI looks a lot like Wall-E vs some sort of utopia. In
| fact I believe that sort of setup is as close to a
| utopian society as I can imagine being realistic.
|
| I did apartment maintenance for a place where about half
| the recipients had paid for rent, utilities, and bare
| necessities provided by the government. It was easy to
| play the odds and know which apartment was which the
| moment you stepped foot into one. It's not a perfect
| correlation to what UBI would look like for many reasons,
| but it's closer than the average upper middle class
| suburbanite imagines people will act like if given the
| opportunity.
| rubenflamshep wrote:
| > Without work people devolve into playing video games
| and smoking pot in their mom's basement.
|
| I have no problem finding fulfilling and meaningful
| projects outside of my work! There are many people like
| me :)
| WalterBright wrote:
| > There are many people like me
|
| I'm sure there are. Doesn't mean most people are like
| that. Consider retirees. Some find meaningful activities,
| many just rot away out of not having a purpose.
|
| What percentage of people currently living off of welfare
| are doing meaningful work?
| danparsonson wrote:
| > What percentage of people currently living off of
| welfare are doing meaningful work?
|
| Do you have that number? Do you have any numbers to back
| up your claims or are you just talking about what works
| for you?
| WalterBright wrote:
| According to google: "Some reports indicate that 26.8% to
| 28.6% of households on welfare have earned income, which
| sometimes reflects a focus on households with no work-
| eligible adults (elderly, disabled)."
| mlrtime wrote:
| This is human nature, most of humans will revert to a
| baseline of doing the bare minimum to survive. The rest
| cannot support that system.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| Do you do the bare minimum to survive, or do you have
| excess money left after paying rent and groceries?
| WalterBright wrote:
| According to google, "approximately 57% to 67% of
| American adults are living paycheck to paycheck."
|
| This doesn't mean they are poor. As their income goes up,
| so does their spending.
|
| Also according to google, "Approximately 60% to 80% of
| professional athletes face severe financial distress or
| go broke within a few years of retirement, particularly
| in the NFL and NBA. Data suggests 78% of NFL players
| experience financial hardship within two years of
| retirement, while about 60% of NBA players are broke
| within five years."
|
| and:
|
| "though often debated, statistic suggests that up to 70%
| of lottery winners go broke or face financial distress
| within three to five years, more conservative estimates
| indicate about one-third (roughly 33%) declare
| bankruptcy."
|
| Personally, I think that high schools should have a
| required course in finance and accounting.
| eli_gottlieb wrote:
| > What percentage of people currently living off of
| welfare are doing meaningful work?
|
| Most of them, since the vast majority of "welfare"
| programs exclusively assist people who are in work.
| devmor wrote:
| Your anecdote is not compliant with reality. Every test
| of UBI so far shows that people continue to work.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I suspect it was because the UBI wasn't enough to live
| on.
| devmor wrote:
| So you believe that the entire driving factor of the
| consumer goods market would mysteriously disappear if
| people had enough money to not worry about missing rent?
| direwolf20 wrote:
| Rent is defined as unearned income attracted by a
| dominant market position. If we wanted people to afford
| rent it'd be more efficient to set rent to zero by fiat.
| devmor wrote:
| I agree, but UBI is far more likely to come to fruition
| than eliminating the majority of the US's largest asset-
| based speculative market.
| BuyMyBitcoins wrote:
| There's no way to test UBI without implementing it fully.
| Any experiment that gives people a no-strings-attached
| stipend isn't accounting for the fact that the money has
| a negligible impact on the economy and produces no
| meaningful change in the workforce. Plus, all of these
| experiments are time-bound. Participants know the
| payments will stop.
|
| I also get the feeling that such experiments just prove
| that giving people money makes them happier. But there's
| nothing to account for the fact that prices in the market
| haven't changed, the tax structure hasn't changed, and no
| goods or services experienced any shortages.
| lII1lIlI11ll wrote:
| > Every test of UBI so far shows that people continue to
| work.
|
| I'm not aware of any _realistic_ UBI tests. Could you
| point me to any?
|
| The ones I'm aware of were either or both:
|
| 1. Time limited, so participants were aware that they
| needed to still have a job or at least be employable
| after the experiment has concluded.
|
| 2. Were funded externally, so participants only reaped
| the benefits of UBI but didn't incur the drawbacks (i.e.
| didn't have to fund the program by much higher income
| taxes) which could have discourage them from working.
|
| It was basically a supplementary source of income - money
| for nothing for a limited time period, not an actual UBI
| program.
| mlrtime wrote:
| A test of UBI is not UBI. It's not possible to show how
| UBI works in a isolated test.
| watwut wrote:
| Hard working billionaires famous for succesdully working
| devolved into abuse island, real saltiness over anyone
| saying sexual harrasment is wrong and basically
| conspiracy to end democracy.
|
| UBI guy playing games in moms basement comes accross as
| harmless in comparison.
| keybored wrote:
| Always such glowing recommendations of human kind from
| techies.
|
| People devolve like that when they have no purpose or
| opportunities. Which I'm sure would happen with the real
| goal of UBI: barely subsistence support in order to grow
| a larger pool of reserve labor while the rich (who are
| not degenerate at all[1]) live large.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46929869
| WalterBright wrote:
| America offers a free education for all. People are free
| to move to anyplace in the country. Historically, people
| migrated to where the opportunities were. Americans are
| free to start a business any time.
|
| Purpose, though, comes from within.
| Marazan wrote:
| > Without work people devolve into playing video games
| and smoking pot in their mom's basement.
|
| Skill issue
| direwolf20 wrote:
| It's universal basic income, not universal extensive
| income. If someone is a minimal drain on society, so
| what? We have lots of stuff.
| falloutx wrote:
| governments will collapse before we are at a moment where
| UBI is needed. Billionaires and companies hardly pay any
| tax and if white collar jobs die down, there is no
| guarantee that government will even have money to wipe
| their butt.
| api wrote:
| UBI doesn't mean people don't work. It means work is
| partially decoupled from basic needs.
|
| People would work for two reasons. One is to make extra
| money and afford a lifestyle beyond what UBI provides. The
| second is to... do things that are meaningful. If people
| derive meaning from work then that's why they'll work.
|
| Some people will just sit around on UBI. Those are the same
| people who sit around today on welfare or dead end bullshit
| jobs that don't really produce much value.
|
| I'm not totally sold on UBI but there's a lot of shallow
| bad arguments against it that are pretty easy to dismiss.
| eli_gottlieb wrote:
| > Bubbles are a desirable feature of the American experiment.
|
| No they're not. You don't get to decide what other people
| desire.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| Total US GDP is ~31 trillion, so that's only like 5%. I think
| it's conceivable that AI could result in ~5% of GDP in
| additional revenue. Not saying it's guaranteed, but it's hardly
| an implausible figure. And of course it's even less considering
| global GDP.
| mykowebhn wrote:
| Have you ever seen US GDP go up 5% yearly for several years?
| matthewaveryusa wrote:
| That's the bet! last time we had that growth was for a few
| years during the dotcom, followed by a lost decade of
| growth in tech stocks
| dkasper wrote:
| China did it. It's not inconceivable.
| eatsyourtacos wrote:
| Yeah but China actively works in the best interest of
| their entire population.
| brutalc wrote:
| Huh? No they don't.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| In what way? Bring some substance instead of a vague
| rebuttal
| b00ty4breakfast wrote:
| They're for those within the population that are willing
| to submit themselves to the whim of the state and whose
| prosperity in some way directly benefits the oligarchs
| that run the state.
|
| Certainly, as just a few examples, they are not for the
| well-being of the Uyghar population or pro-democracy
| activists or journalists investigating human rights
| violation or supporters of Tibetan independence.
| irishcoffee wrote:
| Oh and Covid, don't forget Covid.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| The population's best interest is to never get COVID
| Retric wrote:
| China's GDP per capita fell for the first 40 years of CCP
| rule, making it way easier to have constant growth after
| that period. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_histo
| ry_of_China_(191...
|
| Developed countries have slow growth because they need to
| invent the improvements not just copy what works from
| other countries.
| paulorlando wrote:
| The chart you listed is for the years before the CCP won
| the civil war in 1949. But agreed that many of the
| problems overcome were also problems that were created
| after the war.
| Retric wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist-
| controlled_China_(19...
|
| Starting at 1949 is overly generous IMO, but yes the
| purges that followed didn't help.
| woooooo wrote:
| Japan controlled much more of China than the communists
| did before 1945. And having half your country occupied is
| bad for GDP. You made a mistake and believed some
| propaganda here.
| Retric wrote:
| 1945 is before 1949.
|
| Chinese GDP was higher during WWII than over the next
| several years, the actual minimum 1959 to 1961 was well
| into communist rule. Literally CCP rule was worse than
| the anarchy of civically war, it's right up there with
| the insanity of Pol Pot.
| maxglute wrote:
| This so historically stupid claim, it's not even wrong
| tier.
|
| There was no GDP data under KMT - it wasn't even formally
| calculated.
|
| CCP started GDP calculations, but using soviet MPS GDP
| accounting system that basically omitted services and
| lowballed production prices.
|
| The only GDP data we have that is pseudo normalized are
| via estimates like Maddison project. Even they don't
| bother to recompose China/KMT data during WW2. The TLDR
| is prewar peak 1939 data (right before JP invasion)
| around 288B, PRC took over in 1949, GDP was 245B in 1950,
| grew to 306B by 1952. GLF tanked GDP from 460b to 350B...
| i.e. the worst case scenario of GLF floor was still 40%
| larger than 1950.
|
| E: Note wiki data links to ourworldindata that pulls from
| Maddison and in table form KMT/WW2 data is not available
| and only pulling from closest data point 1938/1950 and
| naively extrapolating per capita. Because KMT data
| doesn't exist.
| Retric wrote:
| GDP isn't just some arbitrary abstraction it's the amount
| of goods and services produced by an economy.
|
| At the low end of economic output starvation or the lack
| thereof is a strong indication of GDP. You do need to
| adjust for exports and imports but you don't need to have
| a particularly deep insight into the economy beyond that.
| maxglute wrote:
| Of course GDP is an arbitrary abstraction, it's literally
| derived from arbitrary systems of measurement, i.e. why
| soviet had mps system and west had sna, and each get to
| decide what to value and how much... arbitrarily... and
| even when they calculate, a lot of it is guestimate
| because no one has perfect or even good data, especially
| 80 years ago in developing countries.
|
| > starvation or the lack thereof is a strong indication
| of GDP
|
| No that's just an indicator that some cohort starved due
| to distribution failure. And to be blunt... that cohort
| was rural / peasants doing mostly subsistence agriculture
| tier production that do not count much towards GDP. An
| urban worker in industry can generate 10x GDP surplus
| than farmers in a commune.
|
| Hence starvation (mostly in rural) has disproportionately
| less GDP weight vs urban worker productivity. An economy
| losing millions of peasants while still
| modernizing/industrializing can easily maintain higher
| total GDP than peaceful agrarian society. AKA CCP speed
| running first 5 year plan post WW2 raised the GDP floor
| so much that they can unalive 10s of millions of peasants
| and still have higher GDP vs pre/post war which, was
| incidentally also not peaceful agrarian society, but even
| messier interregnum shitshow with significantly shit
| state capacity than relatively unified postwar PRC under
| CCP. Republican Era KMT (during anarchy/civil war) simply
| couldn't organize fragmented China to be as productive as
| PRC under CCP, who can lose millions of peasants with
| marginal productivity of labour near zero and still do
| massively better in gdp/economic terms.
| Retric wrote:
| _Between 1954 and 1959, China supplied 160,000 tons of
| tungsten ore, 110,000 tons of copper, 30,000 tons of
| antimony, and 90,000 tons of rubber to the Soviet Union._
| That's how they repaid a loan not through industrial
| production because their economy wasn't producing
| significant high value output from raw materials, they
| couldn't even smelt ore efficiently.
|
| Re-education camps don't generate value. They didn't have
| a surplus of urban workers instead Mow just destroyed the
| economy. Killing off the educated doctors etc isn't a
| free action, it has negative consequences.
|
| China literally had net migration out of cities, so no
| this wasn't over investment in industry or a distribution
| issue this was just abject failure and total economic
| collapse. Total Anarchy would have been better for the
| economy than Mao.
| woooooo wrote:
| Both the Soviet and Chinese first few five year plans
| accomplished the following:
|
| 1. Mass starvation at a few points due to central
| planning errors
|
| 2. Horrifying purges and paranoia that cannot be excused
| as "errors"
|
| 3. Achieving mass literacy and a partially industrial
| economy in a single generation, from a medeival starting
| point.
|
| Most good Americans who paid attention in civics class
| learned 1 and 2 very well without truly appreciating 3.
|
| You have to understand that they were coming from a
| peasant economy where nobody could even read. It's an
| accomplishment despite Mao's shortcomings and awful
| deeds. And look at the scoreboard today. Highest GDP by
| purchasing power parity in the world. Xiaomi cars are
| nicer than Teslas, only non-American tech industry, high
| speed rail, etc etc.
| Retric wrote:
| Your 3 is really conflating two different things.
|
| There's a long list of countries that industrialized
| _more quickly_ without suffering such internal economic
| issues. The USSR and China suffered because of poor
| governance not industrialization.
|
| Second, Mass literacy occurs via teaching kids. It has
| little to do with what the wider economy as seen by both
| modern and historic literacy rates.
|
| It's been 65 years since the Chinese famine, what
| actually fixed the country was economic reforms. MAO's
| death helped but the system simply didn't work so they
| tried something else.
| maxglute wrote:
| Not only would total anarchy been worse for economy than
| Mao, you would struggle to find another developmental
| model that did as well as Mao. Especially the only
| comparable size peer, India who objectively did worse,
| under most developmental metrics.
|
| Between 1954/ 1959 PRC exchanged material for capita
| goods and Soviet training speed run industrialization.
| AKA they were turning surplus rocks they couldn't process
| into machines so they can process non export into capita
| stock. You know, developing. This economic/history 101.
|
| Mao even including GLF engineered one of the greatest
| most condensed human uplift effort. World Bank summary of
| CCP progress from postwar to 70s, i.e. under Mao noted
| how PRC, relative to developing pears was significantly
| more industrialized, like 40% vs low income avg 25% share
| of economy. With matching proxy indicators like 3x energy
| consumption per capita vs India, 2x literacy, 1/3 infant
| mortality rate. aka Mao speedrun PRC to middle income
| industrial levels - GLF one step back, 5 step forward
| success. State provided services were also assessed to be
| far more effective in meeting basic needs vs low income
| peers. Life expectancy 65yrs vs 50yrs (India) for low
| income... "outstandingly high" in WB remark. WB concludes
| CCP efforts by late 70s... again Mao's doing left "low-
| income groups far better off in terms of basic needs than
| their counterparts in most other poor countries"... "most
| remarkable achievement during the past three decades".
|
| All the subsequent snowballing from Deng, not possible
| without Mao building a captive, mobile, diciplined rural
| workforce with high industrial experience, reeducating
| masses to be fungible workers for migrant economy.
|
| In retrospect, GLF in fact, close to free action. Post
| WW2 PRC was so devoid of talent that Mao could depopulate
| cities and slap doctors around with trivial long term
| penalty option. Starting proper industrialization, mass
| mobilizing low end barefoot doctors alone out state
| capacities GLF/CR missteps and saved more lives than it
| bled. i.e. even in terms of mortality vs death averted,
| Mao comes out massively ahead. That +15 years above
| baseline life expectancy x 1000 billion new births is
| about ~200m lives worth. This not accounting averted
| deaths of countries who started similarly but did not
| poverty / malnutrition alleviate early enough, i.e. India
| generating GLF deaths every few years over decades. That
| averted another 200m deaths. Most of this attributed to
| Mao speedrunning nation building did actually solve
| famine after GLF via all the infra built. Something that
| historically every Chinese polity had to worry about.
|
| Any leader who improved HDI for as much people in as
| short of a time as Mao would have been given a Nobel
| Economics Prize and Nobel Peace Prize. Fixating on spike
| of deaths at PRC scale is boring libtard innumeracy, i.e.
| ~4% which plenty of leaders of matched/exceeded. Not nice
| but completely valid to treat human resources as resource
| and trade for long term gains. Mao increased PRC
| industrial output by like 30x, from macro economic
| utilitarian, HDI trend line goes up, PRC brrrting growth,
| dead peasants and sad elites simply doesn't fucking
| matter, it's minor shock to overall system capacity which
| Mao built so much in so fast that it raised aggregate
| Chinese HDI above most peers even if it also broke a few
| millions of eggs.
| csomar wrote:
| GDP _is_ an arbitrary abstraction:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imputed_rent
|
| We could have simply _not_ calculated imputed rent (or
| all of rents).
| Retric wrote:
| Even in a society of 1 person that person would prefer to
| live in a mud hut than outside getting rained on.
| Ignoring imputed rent ignores that value and therefore is
| objectively wrong.
| fatherwavelet wrote:
| In 1979, median income in China was $100 USD a year.
|
| In 1979, median income in the US was $16,530 USD a year.
|
| Not exactly an apples to apples comparison.
| nradov wrote:
| Did China really do it though? We can clearly see that
| China has achieved huge economic growth since Deng
| Xiaoping took control. But the specific numbers can't be
| attempted to be believed. Communist Party officials at
| every level heavily manipulate the official economic data
| to meet their annual goals and no independent auditing is
| allowed.
| hyperbovine wrote:
| By pulling ten million people a year from farms into
| factories and ploughing 40% of GDP into infrastructure
| and education. Sounds like a sound analogy to me.
| geysersam wrote:
| Doesn't have to go up. It's also fine if they replace other
| parts of the economy.
| johnvanommen wrote:
| exactly.
| mwwaters wrote:
| In the expenditures for the economy making up GDP, not a
| lot of it screams "AI-able." Page 9 here breaks down GDP
| on expenditure basis.
|
| https://www.bea.gov/sites/default/files/2026-01/gdp3q25-u
| pda...
|
| Given how much of the spending is hard goods and simply
| not AI-able (rent, most of housing new construction, most
| of other goods, most health care, much of other
| services), the replacement theory would require a massive
| displacement.
| crazygringo wrote:
| The quote is about a one-time increase in growth of 5
| percentage points. Not multiple years or forever.
|
| Or obviously it can be spread out, e.g. ~1% additional
| increase over 5 years.
| blks wrote:
| It cannot be sustained with just one-time growth. Capital
| always has to grow, or it will decrease. If this bubble
| actually manages to deliver interest, this will lead to
| the bubble growing even larger, driving even more
| interest.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| You're saying that the entire increase in US GDP goes into
| the pockets of like 5 companies.
| johnvanommen wrote:
| Or we're seeing a world where corporations dwarf countries.
|
| Apple will be around in a hundred years.
|
| Will the USA?
| whattheheckheck wrote:
| Is like the transition from monarchies to nation states.
|
| By the 19th century, the rise of nation-states
| accelerated due to the spread of nationalism, the decline
| of feudal structures, and the unification of countries
| like Germany (1871) and Italy (1861). Centralized
| governments, uniform laws, national education systems,
| and a sense of collective identity became defining
| features. The French Revolution (1789) played a pivotal
| role by promoting citizenship, legal equality, and
| national sovereignty over dynastic rule
|
| Maybe in 2300 they'll say something similar about
| nationalism
| johnvanommen wrote:
| Yes!
|
| The world is changing fast.
| nradov wrote:
| Tech companies never last. Apple will miss a disruptive
| innovation or make a key strategic error causing them to
| lose their dominant spot. Look at the top tech companies
| 50 years ago: how are they doing today?
| bdangubic wrote:
| There is exactly 0.00% chance Apple will be around in 50
| years let alone 100.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Yup. If you follow the links to the original JP Morgan quote,
| it's not crazy:
|
| > _Big picture, to drive a 10% return on our modeled AI
| investments through 2030 would require ~$650 billion of
| annual revenue into perpetuity, which is an astonishingly
| large number. But for context, that equates to 58bp of global
| GDP, or $34.72 /month from every current iPhone user..._
| doodlebugging wrote:
| > or $34.72/month from every current iPhone user...
|
| As a current iPhone user, I'm not signing up for that
| especially if it is on top of the monthly cell service fee.
|
| I do realize though that you were trying to provide useful
| context.
| manwe150 wrote:
| But think about it this way: something simple like Slack
| charges $9/month/person and companies already pay that on
| many behalf. How hard would it be to imagine all those
| same companies (and lots more) would pay
| $30/month/employee for something something AI? Generating
| an extra $400 per year in value, per employee, isn't that
| much extra.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| That AI will have to be significantly preferable to the
| baseline of open models running on cheap third-party
| inference providers, or even on-prem. This is a bit of a
| challenge for the big proprietary firms.
| johnvanommen wrote:
| > the baseline of open models running on cheap third-
| party inference providers, or even on-prem. This is a bit
| of a challenge for the big proprietary firms.
|
| It's not a challenge at all.
|
| To win, all you need is to starve your competitors of
| RAM.
|
| RAM is the lifeblood of AI, without RAM, AI doesn't work.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| Assuming high bandwidth flash works out, RAM requirements
| should be drastically reduced as you'd keep the weights
| in much higher capacity flash.
|
| > Sample HBF modules are expected in the second half of
| 2026, with the first AI inference hardware integrating
| the tech anticipated in early 2027.
|
| https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/sandisk-and-
| sk-hy...
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| How does HBF compare to the discontinued 3D XPoint?
| zozbot234 wrote:
| HBF is NAND and integrated in-package like HBM. 3D XPoint
| or Optane would be extremely valuable today as part of
| the overall system architecture, but they were power-
| intensive enough that this particular use probably
| wouldn't be feasible.
|
| (Though maybe it ends up being better if you're doing
| lots of random tiny 4k reads. It's hard to tell because
| the technology is discontinued as GP said, whereas NAND
| has kept progressing.)
| doodlebugging wrote:
| Most people in the economy do not use Slack. That tool
| may be most beneficial to those people who stand to lose
| jobs to AI displacement. Maybe after everyone is pink-
| slipped for an LLM or AI chatbot tool the total cost to
| the employer is reduced enough that they are willing to
| spend part of the money they saved eliminating warm
| bodies on AI tools and willing to pay a higher per
| employee price.
|
| I think with a smaller employee pool though it is
| unlikely that it all evens out without the AI providers
| holding the users hostage for quarterly profits' sake.
| johnvanommen wrote:
| > Generating an extra $400 per year in value, per
| employee, isn't that much extra.
|
| I agree, and would add that it's contributing to
| inflation in hard assets.
|
| Basically:
|
| * it's a safe bet that labor will have lower value in
| 2031 than it has today
|
| * if you have a billion to spend, and you agree, you will
| be inclined to put your wealth into hard assets, because
| AI depends on them
|
| In a really abstract way, the world is not responsible
| for feeding a new class of workers: robots.
|
| And robots consume electricity, water, space, and
| generate heat.
|
| Which is why those sectors are feeling the affects of
| supply and demand.
| whattheheckheck wrote:
| The world IS responsible for handling the people. Thats
| the whole fucking reason we made society to take care of
| children. Nothing is inevitable. It serves the interests
| of the few.
| tjwebbnorfolk wrote:
| "The world" isn't responsible for anything. The world
| simply exists, and owes you nothing.
| samrus wrote:
| What your describing is a low trust society. If you
| disregard the social contract like that, then people wont
| owe the "the world" anythign either. Collaboration and
| civics goes out the window. If you want to look at what
| kind of a shithole that libertarian nonsense leads to,
| then try taking a stroll in SF at night
| tjwebbnorfolk wrote:
| You get out of society what you put into it. If I want a
| seamless web of deserved trust, then of course I need to
| contribute to that.
|
| I don't consider that to be saying that society "owes" me
| something. I regard it mutually beneficial, not some kind
| of debt/debtor relationship.
| bombcar wrote:
| This is an important framing - we talk so much of
| "rights" but if you have a right to something, that means
| someone or someones have a _duty_ to provide it.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| Man I am on the wrong tech site.
|
| Where are all the geeks that grew up on Trek and want to
| create a better future where society provides for it's
| citizens?
| direwolf20 wrote:
| Hacker News is a system for marketing and finding new
| hires for Y Combinator
| svnt wrote:
| They are here, following the prime directive.
| latexr wrote:
| No, no it does not. If we say everyone has a right to
| clean air and water, no one else has a duty to provide
| it. Those are given to us _for free_ by the planet. The
| issue is that rich assholes (and poor assholes who only
| think of getting rich) take that away from everyone else
| by polluting what is common to everyone.
| gspr wrote:
| > I don't consider that to be saying that society "owes"
| me something. I regard it mutually beneficial, not some
| kind of debt/debtor relationship.
|
| You know, in phrases like "you owe it to your
| spouse/sibling/friend/self to...", people aren't talking
| about formal debt. Please try to keep that kind of
| meaning in mind when people say that society owes its
| people.
| blueone wrote:
| I think they meant "society." Society does, in fact, owe
| the people something, especially if we, the people, are
| expected to live by the rules, social norms, and
| expectations imposed by society.
| tjwebbnorfolk wrote:
| Yea, like anything, you get out what you put into it. I
| wouldn't describe that as society "owes" me something.
| CrimsonCape wrote:
| "No taxation without representation" is a perfectly
| reasonable stance.
| gspr wrote:
| What's society for then?
| svnt wrote:
| Parent was talking about children (npi) -- they don't get
| out of society what they put into it. Society owes them
| care for bringing them into it, and if society defaults
| on this debt then society ends.
| johnvanommen wrote:
| > Society owes them care for bringing them into it, and
| if society defaults on this debt then society ends.
|
| Society owes you nothing.
|
| Your premise is false.
| eli_gottlieb wrote:
| Oh man you're _not_ gonna like how we all treat you after
| internalizing that kinda talk.
| mahirsaid wrote:
| humans collectively are responsible for the end results
| of innovations and achievements , otherwise who are you
| doing all this for. Wars are a extreme form of
| disagreements amongst a large body of opposing opinions
| or perspective IMHO. Earth (world!) simply exists, with
| or without you. You as Byorganism/Byproduct of this
| planet you have an obligation to this planet in good
| deeds. Have you not watched Star-Wars?
| YokoZar wrote:
| > * it's a safe bet that labor will have lower value in
| 2031 than it has today
|
| If AI makes workers more productive, labor will have
| higher value than it has today. Which specific workers
| are winning in that scenario may vary tremendously, of
| course, but I don't think anyone is seriously claiming AI
| will make everyone less productive.
| z2 wrote:
| The value of labor i.e. wages depend on labor demand (the
| marginal product of labor) and bargaining power, not
| output per worker. If AI is a substitute for many tasks,
| the marginal value of an additional worker, and what a
| company is willing to pay for their work can fall even if
| each remaining worker is more productive.
| YokoZar wrote:
| What you're forecasting is a scenario where total output
| has substantially increased but no one's hiring or able
| to start their own business. Instant massive recession is
| by no means a "sure bet" with technological improvements,
| especially those that make more kinds of work possible
| than before.
| z2 wrote:
| I'm not forecasting that, and it's a virtual strawman in
| the face of my much narrower claim: that wages depend on
| marginal labor demand and bargaining power, not average
| output per worker. If AI substitutes for labor, the
| marginal value of adding another worker in many roles can
| fall. That can mean fewer hires or lower wages in some
| categories, not 'no hiring' or an instant massive
| recession. I have no idea what the addressable market or
| demand for our more productive economy is, but for the
| record I do hope it's high to support new businesses and
| a bigger pie in general!
| YokoZar wrote:
| Forgive me, I was responding to the original claim that
| "it's a safe bet that labor will have lower value in 2031
| than it has today".
| johnvanommen wrote:
| It will - and z2 explained why, in response to my post
| johnvanommen wrote:
| > What you're forecasting is a scenario where total
| output has substantially increased but no one's hiring or
| able to start their own business.
|
| I said labor would have "lower value" after AI progresses
| further and further.
|
| My statement reflects that increased productivity means
| that fewer people are required to generate the same
| amount of economic output.
|
| You twisted my statement and said "nobody is hiring."
|
| _Which isn't what I said._
| jopsen wrote:
| > My statement reflects that increased productivity means
| that fewer people are required to generate the same
| amount of economic output.
|
| People have been singing that since the industrial
| revolution started.
|
| What makes you think it's different this time? Other
| times increased productivity yielded fewer people doing
| what a machine suddenly can do. But never fewer people
| employed or smaller overall economy.
|
| You can argue that our populations are older than ever
| before. There aren't enough kids, and consumers are
| saturated with consumption opportunities.
|
| That's maybe never happened before during the industrial
| revolution. But it's orthogonal to AI.
| johnvanommen wrote:
| That's a perfect summary of what I was getting at, thank
| you
| keybored wrote:
| > If AI makes workers more productive, labor will have
| higher value than it has today.
|
| Workers being more productive does not necessarily
| translate to workers getting more leverage or a larger
| piece of the pie.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| Tech Company: At long last, we have created Manna from
| classic sci-fi novel Don't Create Manna
|
| https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
| steveBK123 wrote:
| $35/iPhone user is not "per corporate white collar
| worker".
|
| Think outside the coastal high paid SWE bubble and
| realize vast swathes of people use 5 year old phones on a
| $25/phone family mobile plan.
|
| Retirees, youth, blue collar, lots of people who don't
| want/need AI or wouldn't fork out $140 for their family
| of 4 to access it.
|
| $35/head is a pretty high bar if you compare to per
| capita total streaming subscriptions across music and
| movies across all providers for example.
| csomar wrote:
| $35/head is possible but it has to provide _tangible_
| value to the user (beyond coding) which many pro-AI
| people will fail to recognize. People pay a lot for other
| stuff (ie: like their phone plan). Being digital or
| physical is not the issue here but the value perceived by
| the user.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| They will pay it but lay off the number of employees
| needed to balance it out, and just expect the remaining
| ones to make up for it with their new AI subscriptions.
| creative_name3 wrote:
| A lot of iPhone users will be given a subscription via
| their job. If they still have a job at that point.
| doodlebugging wrote:
| This is true though I think even if the employer provides
| all this on a per employee basis, the number of eligible
| employees, after everyone who stands to lose a job
| because of a shift to AI tools, will be low enough that
| each employee will need to add a lot of value for this to
| be worth it to an employer so the stated number is
| probably way too low. Ordinary people may just migrate
| from Apple products to something that is more affordable
| or, in the extreme case, walk away from the whole
| surveillance economy. Those people would not buy into any
| of this.
| watwut wrote:
| Why are they not getting the iPhones paid by employers
| now?
| DrProtic wrote:
| Why you even said you wouldn't subscribe? It's not
| relevant in the slightest.
| scotty79 wrote:
| It could be priced into your appstore purchases like
| apple 30% cut is and you wouldn't notice.
| doodlebugging wrote:
| This is true but unfortunately for Apple I don't buy
| anything from the app store except for a minimal iCloud
| subscription for temporary photo storage. I am in the
| process of unwinding that subscription in favor of local
| storage and periodic sync. I haven't been diligent about
| syncing things in the past so I did buy a subscription
| for photo storage to avoid losing photos. I know that
| lots of people buy apps for all kinds of things. I'm not
| one of those people though.
| nomercy400 wrote:
| That's about an extra iPhone every 3-4 years.
| theptip wrote:
| Personally I would be astonished if LLMs percolating
| through the global economy doesn't give a 50bp bump from
| here on out.
|
| Even if scaling hit a wall, commoditizing what we have now
| would do it. We have so much scaffolding and organizational
| overhang with the current models, it's crazy.
| SamPatt wrote:
| Agreed. Applying the intelligence we already have more
| broadly will have a huge impact. That's been true for a
| while now, and it keeps getting more true as models keep
| getting better.
| bunnie wrote:
| $650bb / ($34.72 * 12 months) = 1.56 billion users.
|
| That's far larger than the population of the USA (unclear
| to me if that 650bb number is global or USA only) but by
| sheer scale this is assuming that these companies can
| collect that fee from a global customer base - including
| users in developing economies, EU, China, etc. and after
| the middleman fees are accounted for.
|
| The comments in this thread seem to be thinking within the
| context of 'the poorest in their nation'. This calculation
| assumes collecting this fee from among 'the poorest in the
| world'.
|
| Sure, 1.56bb users could also be interpreted as 'the
| wealthiest 20% of the world'. But the tail is especially
| long on this curve given how wealth is concentrated in a
| small percentage of the global population (1% of users have
| 50% of wealth).
| nerdix wrote:
| Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon, Nvidia, etc have been
| able to collect large amounts of revenue from a global
| customer base so I don't think the assumption was that
| unreasonable.
|
| Obviously, China will protect its homegrown AI industry.
| Current geopolitics trending towards US decoupling in
| Europe might slow it. But under the old status quo, US AI
| would have been rapidly adopted in the EU (and it still
| might. It depends greatly on how much of the Trump
| Doctrine outlasts the current administration).
|
| Developing countries eventually adopt new technologies.
| First they adopted personal computers and became
| customers of Microsoft, then they adopted the Internet
| and became customers of Google, they adopted smartphones
| and became customers of Apple. Eventually they will adopt
| AI and become customers of someone. The question is
| whether it will be US tech or Chinese tech.
| blks wrote:
| So for that GDP gotta show growth of over 5% extra to other
| growth sources (so total yearly growth will be pretty high).
| I doubt this will materialise
| direwolf20 wrote:
| It's conceivable to us working in white collar knowledge jobs
| where our input and output is language. Will it also make 5%
| more homes built by a carpenter?
| bee_rider wrote:
| It might provide cover to lay off more than 5% of us (the
| LLM can create a work-like text product that, as far as
| upper management can tell, is indistinguishable from the
| real thing!), then we will have to go find jobs swinging
| hammers to build houses. Well, somebody's got to do it.
| stinkbeetle wrote:
| The idea that companies need "cover" to perform layoffs
| (particularly in the US) doesn't make sense to me. Tech
| companies, all companies lay people off regularly. (To a
| first order approximation) if a worker is a net positive
| to a company then the company will want to keep them, and
| if they are not then the company will want to get rid of
| them. AI or no AI.
| maigret wrote:
| I've seen many essential people being laid off for stupid
| reasons, the gp reason above being part of the story for
| some. Finance runs the world not tech. Tech is only
| welcome when it helps finance else it is marginalized.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| Seems like the cover might be for investors. If a company
| is shrinking but you don't want investors to know it's
| shrinking, you can say you're improving productivity with
| AI.
| stinkbeetle wrote:
| If a company is shrinking wouldn't investors just see it
| was shrinking from their financial statements?
| roenxi wrote:
| That seems pretty reasonable, yes. That is like asking if
| putting a low-cost Ops Research specialist in every company
| could make a 5% difference in operations - yes it could.
| Making resource-efficient decisions is not something that
| comes naturally to humans and having a system that
| consistently makes high quality game-theoretic
| recommendations would be huge.
|
| Bunch of tiny companies would love to hire a mathematician
| to optimise what they are doing to get a 5-10% improvement.
| Unfortunately a 5-10% improvement in a small business can't
| justify the cost of hiring another person, and good
| mathematicians with business sense and empathy are a rare
| commodity.
| nradov wrote:
| If that seems reasonable to you then you don't know
| anything about residential construction. The problems
| that homebuilders face aren't amenable to mathematical
| solutions. They have to deal with permitting issues,
| corrupt / incompetent government officials, supplier
| delays, bad weather, flakey workers, etc. The notion of a
| 5% improvement from LLM is ludicrously naive.
| roenxi wrote:
| The first 2 are very LLM amenable, the last 3 are very
| mathematical-solution amenable (optimising around issues
| like that is basically what Ops Research does). I don't
| see what your argument is here.
|
| The list of people claiming that maths won't work who
| then get bulldozed by mathematicians is long.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| How will the LLM bypass the corrupt government official?
| roenxi wrote:
| Because they make it much easier to audit what decisions
| are being made and how reasonable they were. Corruption
| relies on not being too well known - once people can
| start pointing to specific decisions rather than a
| general "we know there is corruption here somewhere" it
| is hard to sustain.
| hattmall wrote:
| It's not like people don't know who they are though? It's
| not some secret formula of who is corrupt. It's everyone
| that's been in position for any length of time. If you
| don't yield to the corruption you won't be in your job
| long. The degree of corruption is variable and perhaps
| the LLM could find the most efficient wheel to grease and
| person to lean on but then you just have the next company
| doing more of the same.
| maigret wrote:
| LOL are you looking at the news lately. Everything is
| blatantly in the open now.
| jopsen wrote:
| Even if you ignore the red tape.
|
| At some point you're stacking bricks and hitting nails.
|
| AI just won't make you stack bricks much faster :)
| jopsen wrote:
| Lots of jobs like daycare, teachers, cleaning, the
| material costs are near zero and your ability to increase
| productivity using technology is very low.
|
| You can reduce quality of cleaning. But it's very hard to
| clean faster and better at the same time.
|
| These industries are not going to be optimized by an AI.
| The only optimization is lower overhead or lower
| salaries.
|
| Sure, we could have robots in daycare, but I don't think
| lack of AI is why my wife would have concerns :)
| cman1444 wrote:
| Of course there's jobs that don't have a productivity
| boost from AI. The question is whether across the entire
| economy there will be a 5% GDP boost.
|
| Teachers, cleaners, and daycare workers may see 0% gains,
| but don't be surprised if that is made up for by 10%
| gains the productivity of tech, law, marketing,
| advertising, manufacturing, government, etc. (okay maybe
| not government).
| amunozo wrote:
| How can advertising and marketing become more profitable
| from this? It's a genuine question, but I don't see how
| making advertising and marketing easier for everybody and
| hence flooding the already flooded market would result in
| increased productivity.
| turtlesdown11 wrote:
| I love HN, you can't get stuff like this anywhere else, the
| DKE from posters here - you can't get it anywhere else!
| pier25 wrote:
| It's plausible 5-10 years from now. I believe the entire AI
| revenue in 2025 was like $50B. It's not going to 10x in a
| year or two.
| nativeit wrote:
| I'm sorry, but 5% of GDP is an absurd figure. You're saying
| $1 out of every $20 that does anything in our economy should
| be on AI? That seems insane to me.
| eviks wrote:
| No, GDP is not revenue, it's lower
| eviks wrote:
| It is not a hardly implausible figure given the wide range of
| human economic activity, that's a common flaw in economic
| thinking when small percentages of huge numbers seem
| realistic ("my business plan is modest and will achieve a
| tiny 0.01% of the global market to become one of the biggest
| companies in the world, very plausible")
| onion2k wrote:
| Nvidia invests $100bn in OpenAI, who buy $100bn of Nvidia
| chips, who invest the $100bn revenue in OpenAI, who buy $100bn
| in Nvidia chips, and round it goes. That's an easy $600bn
| increase in tech industry revenue right there.
| dickersnoodle wrote:
| Someone in management read and misunderstood "The Velocity of
| Money" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocity_of_money)?
| collingreen wrote:
| Or understood way too well. I promise it isn't Altman that
| will be left destroyed or jobless if this crashes.
| wiseowise wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37395566
| sssilver wrote:
| An important thing that this joke misses is that both
| economists now also owe federal income tax and social
| security tax.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| Were the payments considered income?
| direwolf20 wrote:
| Yes, but they just didn't tell the IRS and nobody was any
| the wiser
| jermaustin1 wrote:
| Yes, but they were under the 1099 reporting limits, while
| they both owe taxes on them, neither were required to
| report it to the IRS... assuming this is the one and only
| time they paid each other for services rendered.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| If they routed the payments through a shell company it
| would be written off as business entertainment expenses.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| The replies explain all there is to explain in that
| example. If each economist thinks that eating shit is worth
| $100 then, well, that's what it's worth.
| latexr wrote:
| It is fascinating that someone can tell an obvious joke
| with an obvious point, where the characters themselves
| spell out what's wrong, and yet we can be certain someone
| will genuinely believe and defend that "no no, actually
| eating a random pile of shit you found on the floor makes
| sense and is worth it".
|
| Has it occurred to you, especially since one of the
| economists in the joke admits they feel they ate shit for
| nothing, that they actually do not feel the exercise was
| worth it? Have you never spent money on something,
| _thinking_ it would be worth it, then afterwards realised
| it was a waste of money? Have you also never taken a job
| and then realised "I didn't charge enough for the
| trouble"?
|
| I'm reminded of a bit of news I heard a while back, where
| one teenager challenged a friend to eat rat shit they
| found on the street. The eater died shortly after,
| because the poop contained rat poison. I doubt any of
| them found it worth it.
| charcircuit wrote:
| It's not an obvious joke. It seems closer to a puzzle in
| that the reader must discover that the $100 was for
| entertainment. This is a common class of puzzle where
| money changes hands between two people and results in a
| surprising conclusion.
| wiseowise wrote:
| Bro, there's something really wrong with your head if you
| seriously believe that the gist of the story is "eating
| shit is entertainment".
| charcircuit wrote:
| A better gist may be the value of entertainment is
| temporary.
|
| If instead it was just one person and they went to a
| movie theater. If you ignore the entertainment value it
| may just look like the person through away the admission
| cost.
| fauigerzigerk wrote:
| It's a political joke that uses a rhetorical sledge
| hammer to make it impossible to defend a particular
| principle. Is it so surprising that someone will still
| defend the principle?
| nosuchthing wrote:
| Mass layoffs and the wellness camp industry will easily
| account for $600+ billion a year in contracts, for at least a
| few years.
|
| https://www.teenvogue.com/story/rfk-wellness-farms-us-
| disabi...
| scotty79 wrote:
| Either Nvidia eventually runs out of chips for OpenAI to buy
| or OpenAI runs out of equity Nvidia can buy.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| The chips OPEN AI is buying don't even exist, they're
| hypothetical chips that will potentially exist at some
| point in the future.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Even future chips might run out. But I think OpenAI will
| run out of equity to sell first. Even tough they can
| print it, it gets dilluted.
| rogerthis wrote:
| Smells like "Banco Master" (Brazil) scandal.
| suhputt wrote:
| investment is not revenue tho... this is equivalent to nvidia
| buying its own chips...
| 9rx wrote:
| It is equivalent under scrutiny, but casually looking the
| books and seeing Nvida making a sale to Nvida sticks out
| like a sore thumb a lot more than Nvida making a sale to
| OpenAI. The latter is much more likely to pass as revenue.
| DavidPiper wrote:
| The classic "Where's the $20 you owe me?" sketch:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-ycvJC-qIQ
| knose wrote:
| am i wrong to think that this sketch isn't at all
| applicable (besides the surface level joke of money being
| passed around) to the ai bubble or ""modern banking"" as
| mentioned in the youtube comments? i keep seeing it
| referenced like it is an explanation of some crazy
| conspiracy thing, so i don't know if i just don't get it.
| theyjbfjvuncf wrote:
| No it's actually perfect.
|
| GDP measures exchange of money with the assumption that
| this is a proxy for actual economic output... except
| cases like this where monetary exchanges like this which
| accomplish nothing.
| knose wrote:
| i assume the joke is that the three stooges are too
| stupid to realize that because they all owe each other
| $20 there is no debt, and they show this by accident by
| passing a $10 dollar bill around until it ends up back
| with larry. it says nothing about GDP.
| mullingitover wrote:
| I read "Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial
| Speculation" last year, and the current AI bubble is like
| getting a front row seat to the next edition being written.
|
| The _really_ stupid bubbles end up getting themselves
| metastasized into the public retirement system, I 'm just
| waiting for that to start any day now.
| chasd00 wrote:
| > The really stupid bubbles end up getting themselves
| metastasized into the public retirement system, I'm just
| waiting for that to start any day now.
|
| Not sure what you mean exactly but every single 401k is tied
| into this.
| rishabhaiover wrote:
| > "must collect an extra $650 billion in revenue every year"
| paired with the idea that automating knowledge work can cause a
| short-term disruption in the economy doesn't seem logical to
| me.
|
| I find it funny that Microsoft is scaling compute like crazy
| and their own products like Copilot are being dwarfed by the
| very models they wish to serve on that compute.
| belter wrote:
| I run the numbers on hyperscaler AI capex and the math is not
| going to work out.
|
| With these assumptions:
|
| - Big 4 keep spending at current pace for 3 more years
|
| - Returns only start showing after aprox 2 years
|
| - Heavy competition with around 20% operating margin on AI and
| Cloud
|
| - Use of 9% cost of capital
|
| This is the current reality:
|
| AWS aprox $142B/yr
|
| Azure aprox $132B/yr
|
| Google Cloud around $71B/yr
|
| Combined its about $330B to $340B annual cloud revenue today
|
| And lets says Global public cloud market of $700B total today.
|
| To justify the current capex trajectory under those
| assumptions, by year 3 the big hyperscalers would need roughly
| $800B to $900B in new annual revenue just to earn a normal
| return on the capital being deployed.
|
| That implies combined hyperscaler cloud and AI revenue going
| from: $330B today to $1.2T within 3 years :-))
|
| In other words...Cloud would need to roughly do 4x in a very
| short window, and the incremental revenue alone would exceed
| the entire current global cloud market.
|
| So for the investment wave to make financial sense, at least
| one of these must be true:
|
| 1 Cloud/AI spending globally explodes far beyond all prior
| forecasts
|
| 2 AI massively increases revenue/profit in ads, software,
| commerce and not just cloud
|
| 3 A winner takes all outcome where only 1 or 2 players earn
| real returns
|
| 4 Or a large share of this capex never earns an economic return
| and is defensive
|
| People keep modeling this like normal cloud growth. But what we
| have is insanity
| johnvanommen wrote:
| > That implies combined hyperscaler cloud and AI revenue
| going from: $330B today to $1.2T within 3 years :-))
|
| You're ignoring the fact that gaming is going to the cloud.
|
| That industry is bigger than Hollywood.
|
| Desktop computers will invariably follow.
|
| The RAM shortage will drive the transition.
|
| For instance, my wife uses her personal laptop about four
| days a year.
|
| People like that won't be buying personal desktops or
| laptops, five years from now. The RAM shortage will drive a
| transition into thin clients.
|
| I already see it with our kids. They use an iPhone, unless
| they need to type. Then they use an iPad with a BT keyboard.
| kg wrote:
| Even if gaming goes to the cloud, how are they going to run
| the massive existing library of video games on the
| dedicated AI inference hardware that everyone is buying
| right now? Seems like that pivot would require even more
| spending.
| devmor wrote:
| And how are they going to get sub-5ms round trip latency
| into the average consumer's home to avoid people
| continuing to see cloud gaming as a janky gimmick that
| feels bad to use?
| turtlesdown11 wrote:
| What amount of the gaming industry do you think will go to
| AI providers and not game developers?
|
| You think we'll replace gaming and desktop computers into
| the cloud in the timeline of the poster above (2-4 years?)
|
| Just not realistic.
| qwertycrackers wrote:
| Cloud gaming is crap and any actual gamer will tell you
| that. The niche of gamers casual enough to not care about
| playing over network latency but serious enough to pay real
| money for cloud gaming is microscopic.
| toephu2 wrote:
| It's not 2023 anymore. Have you tried cloud gaming in
| 2026? I can barely tell it's connected to the cloud.
| amlib wrote:
| Yes, it's amazing because it's streaming directly from a
| computer in the room behind me. :)
| johnvanommen wrote:
| And the increases in network speed are one of the last
| bastions of Moores Law.
| SJC_Hacker wrote:
| > nd the increases in network speed are one of the last
| bastions of Moores Law.
|
| Throughput has increased but latency hasn't changed much
|
| Latency hasn't decreased substantially since the late 90s
| when I remember getting sub 50 ms ping in Quake III from
| my dorm room in college
| jkrejcha wrote:
| I'm not surprised; you need a lot more servers and even
| so, there are a lot of places where something low ping
| times is difficult. While there is a lot of room for
| latency to go down, 1 lightmillisecond is ~300 km (~186
| mi). This means that if a computer is 150 km away, 1 ms
| is the minimum ping allowed by physics, if I am talking
| directly to it.
|
| By that yardstick, we've actually done very well in a lot
| of cases. :)
| flyinglizard wrote:
| Speed of light doesn't adhere to Moore's law :) and it's
| made worse by the fact most everyone connects via WiFi
| these days and it alone adds a few ms more.
| WarmWash wrote:
| >The niche of gamers casual enough to not care about
| playing over network latency
|
| In the saddest way possible, the niche of gamers are
| people playing on desktops with ethernet connections.
|
| The majority of gamers are buying booster packs on mobile
| games.
| int_19h wrote:
| Yes, but that majority doesn't need cloud gaming
| precisely because those games run just fine on their
| phone - there's no benefit in putting them in the cloud,
| that was supposed to be for fancy stuff where you need a
| beefy GPU for the eye candy.
| api wrote:
| The RAM shortage is extremely temporary. It'll last as long
| as it takes for new capacity to come online. RAM shortages
| and price spikes have happened many times before.
|
| Eventually China will catch up in EUV fabrication and flood
| the market with cheap silicon. When that happens a terabyte
| of RAM will cost what 128gb costs now.
| kmbfjr wrote:
| That may be true, but all of this can be done today without
| the massive capex and without "AI".
| coffeemug wrote:
| Azure revenue is growing at 39% year over year. If Microsoft
| can sustain this growth, in four years Azure will be ~3.73x
| its current size. This is of course very difficult, but you
| really don't need a deus ex machina to hit 4x growth under
| your assumptions.
| mwwaters wrote:
| The issue in the late-90s was all the investment created a
| lot of real revenue for telecoms and other companies. Even
| though there were a lot of shenanigans with revenue, a lot
| of real money was spent on fiber and tech generally.
|
| But the real money was investment that didn't see a return
| for the investor. The investments needed to have higher
| final consumption (such as through better productivity or
| through displacing other costs) to pay back the investment.
| kristianp wrote:
| If 1 or 2 of the 5 big spenders starts having big losses,
| things will be interesting. Their market caps will be a
| fraction of the current overinflated values.
|
| Meanwhile Apple is only spending 1 billion a year to use
| Google's models.
| mahirsaid wrote:
| It's crazy to me how many flags are being thrown in this
| investment spree. Repeating the same mistakes as before (2000).
| Big companies will be hit hard when they can't show for what
| they spent shareholders money on. The run will be large and
| impactful.
| mahirsaid wrote:
| If you analyze what's happening right now in the tech
| industry, you can't help but to think of something deeper
| than what's being talked about in plain sight. There is a
| clear panic amongst the large tech firms. the root cause of
| the panic is still unclear, simply saying these companies
| want to be the first in this new revolution isn't enough to
| draw conclusion. Amongst the top tech firms there still sits
| the original founders whom as we all know changed the way we
| live life today. Saying they are misunderstanding what's
| happening right now and they're are foolish, is to simple of
| an understatement. They of all people in the world would know
| it's a bad idea to go all in, in this manner. The underlying
| competing nature of this whether it has to do with China or
| other competing markets are not being talked about, and not
| just that " what exactly is the strategy here?"
| devmor wrote:
| > They of all people in the world would know it's a bad
| idea to go all in, in this manner.
|
| Or this kind of financial crash is exactly what they want.
| If they can drive the markets to failure, only the largest
| companies can hold on - and acquire more of the failing
| companies in the process.
| mahirsaid wrote:
| Day-by-day it seeming this way. They seem to want to
| flush out the remaining competitors. dedicators are old
| news, umbrella corporation(tm) is the new form of
| totalitarian/authoritarianism.
| antonvs wrote:
| > Repeating the same mistakes as before (2000).
|
| The issue is that every company in a position to do so is
| trying to stake a claim in a new market. Not every company
| will win. No-one has a surefire way of identifying "mistakes"
| ahead of time.
|
| What alternative do you think would work better, short of
| central planning?
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| Interest rates have been comically low for way too long.
| This alone would change a lot, favoring labor over capital
| and more sustainable growth.
| Cheezmeister wrote:
| Had been**. Still low, but we aren't laughing anymore.
| https://www.macrotrends.net/2015/fed-funds-rate-
| historical-c...
|
| Do high interest rates not, by definition, favor capital
| over labor?
| WarmWash wrote:
| It tells you that 500 million people will be paying $60-$80/mo
| for AI. Something they find as indispensable as a cell phone or
| internet bill.
|
| The numbers actually work really well, (un)fortunately.
| anonymous908213 wrote:
| I don't know how you can write down those numbers and come to
| the conclusion they sound reasonable at all. Corporations
| literally can't give this trash away for free without
| consumers being unhappy about it (eg. the Copilot malware
| infesting every aspect of Windows). ChatGPT had 800m MAU at
| one report, but that's a chat interface and free. Do you
| really believe over half of those users are going to convert
| from "free" to paying $60/mo for access to the chat
| interface, when all potential applications for actually
| improving their lives are failing badly? I think you are out
| of touch with the finances of non-tech-indsutry workers if
| you think they will.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| > ChatGPT had 800m MAU at one report, but that's a chat
| interface and free. Do you really believe over half of
| those users are going to convert from "free" to paying
| $60/mo for access to the chat
|
| Even if these things worked great for everyone, the percent
| of free uses who convert to paid users is low single digits
| per cent. For OpenAI to have any chance of breaking even in
| the consumer space, they need to develop an ad biz that
| makes around 20-25% of G does. That's a tall order in that
| G doesn't make good dough from search anymore as SERP page
| clicks are down 80% with AI summaries being good enough for
| most.
| lopis wrote:
| And let's not forget that for the bubble to sustain
| itself, people would currently use different LLMs would
| need to create a separate account in each one. There's
| absolutely no way most people will be paying more than
| one LLM unless they have a lot of disposable income.
| WarmWash wrote:
| I don't know a single person in my (non-tech!) life that
| doesn't use AI, shy of toddlers and geriatric people.
|
| The famous MIT study (95% of AI initiatives fail, remember
| that one?) actually found that pretty much every worker was
| using AI almost daily, but used their personal accounts
| (hence the corporate ones not being used).
|
| If you are brand new to the tech world, and this is your
| first new product cycle, the way it works is that there is
| a free-cool-we're-awesomely-generous phase, and then when
| you are hooked and they are entrenched, the real price
| comes to fruition. See...pretty much every tech start-up
| burning runway cash.
|
| Right now they are getting us hooked, and like the
| dumbasses consumers are, they will become totally dependent
| and think it will stay this cheap.
| enraged_camel wrote:
| A good way to think about it is that ChatGPT is well on
| its way to becoming a verb like Google did. Doesn't roll
| off the tongue as easily but in terms of brand awareness
| it feels ubiquitous.
| hattmall wrote:
| I use AI frequently. I am frequently let down.
| Occasionally satisfied and very rarely impressed. My
| results seem typical for everyone else I know. It's a
| free and widely promoted tool that has the potential to
| be useful, of course people will use it. The features I
| find most useful, is not providing me new knowledge. It's
| formalizing something I wrote or summarizing some other
| text, that I am going to read anyway or can at least
| reference as needed and confirm the output. This is also
| where the local models Excel.
|
| I also often see people post AI generated advice and
| answers that are simply incorrect in Facebook groups and
| get roasted with 100s of people chiming in on how you can
| trust ChatGPT.
|
| I just can't see regular people are going to pay more
| than (NetFlix + HBO + Prime + WM+) for an AI
| subscription. I think you would see tons of competitors
| pop up if that were at all viable.
| hunterpayne wrote:
| > actually found that pretty much every worker was using
| AI almost daily
|
| What they found is that people search the Internet for
| things and an AI bot is right there. What they didn't
| find is people using Vibe coded apps, learning from AI or
| buying AI services. They did find companies buying AI
| services, but as an experiment. Also, blaming AI is easy
| when someone messes up and costs a customer or sale. The
| more that happens, the sooner the company stops
| experimenting. If that happens in a widespread way, then
| this bubble collapses.
| hackable_sand wrote:
| You sound very naive.
| jasonfarnon wrote:
| "If you are brand new to the tech world, and this is your
| first new product cycle, the way it works is that there
| is a free-cool-we're-awesomely-generous phase, and then
| when you are hooked and they are entrenched, the real
| price comes to fruition. See...pretty much every tech
| start-up burning runway cash."
|
| That has indeed been the strategy, but it's not like it
| always or even usually works out. We've seen plenty of
| companies that try to raise their prices and people
| aren't hooked. (Though I am almost certain in this case
| at least professionals if not the general public will
| indeed be hooked.)
| rossdavidh wrote:
| If you really don't know a single such person, you live
| in a very odd bubble. I know lots of people who used
| ChatGPT a lot when it first came out, found it funny and
| occasionally useful, then changed their mind to just
| finding it funny occasionally, and then eventually
| stopped because it wasn't that useful and was no longer
| funny.
|
| None of them ever considered getting a paid account, nor
| would they have. I'm not saying nobody will, but if you
| actually don't know any such people then there is
| something unusual about the crowd you run with.
| keybored wrote:
| > I don't know how you can write down those numbers and
| come to the conclusion they sound reasonable at all.
|
| Half this board is in the most hyped echo chamber I've ever
| seen.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| fair enough, but the consumer is already stretched. So where
| is this $60-80 per month X 500MM consumers coming from?
| WarmWash wrote:
| Consumer spending is strong and growing, don't listen to
| dregs milking upvotes on the internet, people will easily
| come up with 4-5 hours of minimum wage pay in a month to
| cover the cost of the thing they use many times a day.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I don't use AI for anything in my private life, only at
| work. And I can't really imagine what it could do for me.
| In no scenario am I paying a monthly subscription for it.
| WarmWash wrote:
| I know someone who doesn't have a smart phone
| superb_dev wrote:
| I don't know how this can be true when almost everyone I
| know is struggling right now
| ddtaylor wrote:
| Two tier economy
| wasmainiac wrote:
| Wait how? Show your work. I still see at least a $600bn gap.
|
| > Something they find as indispensable as a cell phone or
| internet bill.
|
| Source?
| wasmainiac wrote:
| Why not reply than just downvote? Seems cowardly.
| ranguna wrote:
| 500,000,000*80=40,000,000,000
| 40,000,000,000/650,000,000,000=0.06
|
| If I understood you correctly and my math is correct, your
| suggestions only cover 6% of 650 billion, the news is
| suggesting AI companies need more than 10x more. So either
| it's 5 billion people paying 60-80, or 500 million people
| paying 600-800/month, or something in between + a little
| extra.
| richrichardsson wrote:
| Isn't the 650 billion required per year, so the monthly
| cost is automatically 12x
| WarmWash wrote:
| The payback period would be 5-10 years at those
| prices($60-$80/mo), which is pretty normal.
| 9cb14c1ec0 wrote:
| No, they won't be. Inference costs will continue to drop, and
| subscription prices will follow as AI is increasingly
| commoditized. There are 6 different providers in the top 10
| models on openrouter. In a commoditized market, there will be
| no $60/month subscriptions.
| raincole wrote:
| It sounds about right. Coffee's global revenue is $500b/yr. I
| can totally imagine AI brings twice or more than that.
| mrweasel wrote:
| That's not unreasonable, but if you can't do it without
| losing money then there's going be a problem.
|
| The problem isn't that AI/LLMs can't be useful or generate
| revenue, the problem is still the cost. We're no where near
| production ready AI, it can sort of do coding and some
| medical stuff, but we're not at a level of technology where
| the potential is fully realized. How much are investors
| willing to pour into more research?
|
| We looking at OpenAI contemplating ads and erotic chatbots.
| That's not a successful business who have those ideas for
| profit generation.
|
| Revenue is pointless without eventual profit.
| throw_llm wrote:
| On the other hand many who work on AI refer to it as 'building
| God' so all things taken together, it's all reasonable.
| glouwbug wrote:
| God was a dream of good government
| echelon wrote:
| > JPMorgan calculated last fall that the tech industry must
| collect an extra $650 billion in revenue every year
|
| If you take half the software engineers in the US and replace
| them with AI, you're halfway there. And why stop with software?
|
| There's a reason for the fervor and excitement of these
| companies.
|
| The positive outlook is that you don't fire folks - they have
| even more work to do. But we'll see how it pans out in
| practice.
| sensanaty wrote:
| But who's going to be buying any of these products if
| everyone is out of a job? Other rich people?
|
| Sure I assume there's a good market there, luxury yachts
| exist after all, but what is a company like Netflix going to
| do when people are too poor to even afford the streaming
| services that cost 10 bucks a month?
|
| Not to get conspiratorial, but the only logical thing for me
| here is that They want as many of the plebs dead as possible
| so that the remainder of us are beholden to them and their
| money, once they own all the AI factories.
| tempodox wrote:
| > That pretty much tells you how this will end, right there.
|
| It seems so blatantly obvious, yet nobody wants to listen, and
| practically everyone knows better. We live in interesting
| times.
| tototrains wrote:
| The question is, how much are they willing to pay for the kind
| of surveillance and control that they hope this data processing
| will get them?
|
| The economics are not all in profit.
| croes wrote:
| If AI can what it promises most of its big customers become
| useless but who else could pay enough to make them profitable?
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| Alternative to archive.ph, no Javascript, no CAPTCHAs:
| x=www.washingtonpost.com { printf 'GET
| /technology/2026/02/07/ai-spending-economy-shortages/
| HTTP/1.1\r\n' printf 'Host: '$x'\r\n' printf 'User-
| Agent: Chrome/115.0.5790.171 Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible ;
| Googlebot/2.1 ; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)\r\n'
| printf 'X-Forwarded-For: 66.249.66.1\r\n\r\n' }|busybox
| ssl_client -n $x $x > 1.htm firefox ./1.htm
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > Alternative to archive.ph, no Javascript, no CAPTCHAs:
|
| The other tld have been kinder to me (no captcha).
|
| https://archive.md/J8pg5
|
| https://archive.fo/J8pg5
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| Anonymous middleman that could potentiallly collect browsing
| histories, serves CAPTCHAS, requires Javascript, maybe in
| crosshairs of authorities, unreliable according to some
| commenters (YMMV). NB. Nothing about "honeypot", just
| observations (cf. "accusations")
|
| Someone recently noticed an apparent DDOS attempt on some
| blogger using Javascript fetch function
|
| The site used to include a tracking pixel containing the
| visitor's IP address
|
| Also used to ping mail.ru
|
| Would need to look at the page source again to see what it
| contains today
|
| It's a crowd favorite
|
| People love it
| dmix wrote:
| Are you accusing archive.today of being a honeypot for the
| feds because they use Cloudflare? That's a bit much don't you
| think?
| MallocVoidstar wrote:
| Archive.today don't use Cloudflare, the admin mimics their
| captcha page because he hates them. He also used to
| captcha-loop anyone using Cloudflare's DNS resolver because
| they don't send the IP subnet of clients to upstreams.
|
| I don't think it's a honeypot, though, it's not like he's
| learning much about me other than I like not paying for
| news sites.
| gruez wrote:
| >Anonymous middleman that could potentiallly collect browsing
| histories
|
| So literally any site? What's the alternative, using
| something like bypass paywalls clean, and allow it to access
| your browsing history AND steal your cookies?
|
| >serves CAPTCHAS
|
| I don't like it, but it's understandable given the load from
| AI scrapers. Do you also get upset at kernel.org for putting
| up Anubis?
|
| >requires Javascript
|
| So most sites?
|
| >The site used to include a tracking pixel containing the
| visitor's IP address
|
| ???
|
| They couldn't get visitor IP through logs?
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| Third party anonymous middleman that can observe what site(s)
| a user wants to read
|
| Keywords: anonymous, third party
|
| The websites with the webpages that a user seeks to read,
| e.g., some page on www.washingtonpost.com, are not third
| party websites. They are "first party" websites
|
| Other archives are third parties but are generally not run by
| anonymous operators that keep shifting between different IP
| addresses and domain names
|
| Other archives generally do not serve CAPTCHAs or require
| Javascript
|
| Will provide examples if requested
|
| No Anubis: { printf 'GET /
| HTTP/1.0\r\n' printf 'Host: www.kernel.org\r\n\r\n'
| }|busybox ssl_client 146.75.109.55
|
| NB. Replace 205.1.1.1 with user's IP address, replace cc with
| country code, replace 123456789 with some 9-digit number
|
| </script></div></div><img style="position:absolute" width="1"
| height="1" src="https://205.1.1.1.cc.VSY1.123456789.pixel.arc
| hive.md/x.gif"><script type="text/javascript">
|
| This is from December 2024. May have changed since then
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| Is the tracking pixel a hack to get around absence of EDNS
| subnet
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| A "Firefox app" could "access browsing history", "steal
| cookies", whatever unless (a) the user removes the app's
| ability to "phone home" from the source code then compiles
| the app themselves and (b) the user controls the servers to
| which the app is allowed to connect
|
| For example, Firefox app by default, without any input from
| the user, tries to make connections to Mozilla servers such
| as content-signature-2.cdn.mozilla.net
| firebaseremoteconfig.googleapis.com
| firefox.settings.services.allizom.org
| firefox.settings.services.mozilla.com
| services.addons.mozilla.org detectportal.firefox.com
| contile.services.mozilla.com
|
| The opportunities for Mozilla app developers to send data,
| e.g., browsing history, cookies, usage statistics, crash
| reports, empty requests (pings), whatever, to Mozilla or to
| any third party are without limit unless (a) and (b) are
| addressed
|
| Even uBlock Origin tries to connect to ublockorigin.pages.dev
| by default, i.e., without any input from the user
|
| The user might want this connection to occur but because it
| is a default the user might also not even know the connection
| is being made. These connections are a developer choice not a
| user choice. The user might agree with the choice
| themafia wrote:
| AI "boom?"
|
| Where's the "boom?" Doesn't that imply a bunch of people are
| getting rich off of new business?
|
| Where are those?
| luxuryballs wrote:
| So where is the electrician? Busy at an AI data center being
| built?
| alecco wrote:
| What a low quality article with zero new information or insights.
| WaPo is dead.
| xantronix wrote:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/04/business/media/washington...
| hedayet wrote:
| A bubble doesn't necessarily imply the underlying technology is
| useless.
|
| It implies that expectations and capital allocation have
| significantly outpaced realistic returns, leading to painful
| corrections for bulls.
|
| And with AI, a classic bubble signal is emerging: widespread
| exit-timing instead of deep, long-term conviction.
| an0malous wrote:
| The greatest critics of the AI boom like Gary Marcus and
| Michael Burry aren't even saying it's useless, that's a
| strawman no one is arguing for
| bdangubic wrote:
| > widespread exit-timing instead of deep, long-term conviction.
|
| $500+bn _in one year_ capex from largest and most profitable
| companies ever known to mankind seems like a deep and long-term
| conviction, no? you and I may not have conviction, the largest
| and most profitable companies on earth that have been carrying
| most of global economy do
| Lionga wrote:
| Do they have conviction or FOMO?
| bdangubic wrote:
| I would bet against the Mag7 FOMO'ing around
| baby-yoda wrote:
| The token maximizer is a thought experiment illustrating AI
| alignment risks. Imagine an AI given the simple goal of
| maximizing token production. If it became sufficiently powerful,
| it might convert all available resources -- including humans and
| the Earth -- into tokens or token-producing infrastructure, not
| out of malice, but because its objective function values nothing
| else. The scenario shows how even a trivial goal, paired with
| enough intelligence, can lead to catastrophic outcomes if the
| AI's objectives aren't carefully aligned with human values.
|
| *written by AI, of course
| cheschire wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Paperclips
| cyanydeez wrote:
| I don't think that's the AI Boom. It's the de rigor Republican
| policies.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| Give it a couple years. Pursuit of trades among Gen Z has gone up
| 1500%.
|
| The big loser is the modern university.
| jongjong wrote:
| That's what you get when you have a centrally planned economy.
|
| This is just like communism. The software industry has been like
| this for over a decade and the effect started spreading to other
| industries. I've been warning of this for years.
|
| It has been a very painful decade for some. At least now millions
| of others are starting to feel the pain. More broadly distributed
| pain creates incentives for change which did not exist before.
| Pain is hope. Being on the frontline has been an excruciating and
| isolating experience.
| geetee wrote:
| All this disruption to every facet of society. For what? So you
| can roleplay as the next billionaire startup founder with your
| weekend project? All while the actual tech billionaires have a
| giant dick measuring contest.
| exabrial wrote:
| This is ok, let macroeconomics happen, and instead, enforce
| monopoly laws. The effect in 2-3 years will be a wider base of
| suppliers, cheaper goods, and solid supply chains.
| coldtea wrote:
| I wouldn't call inflating a bubble a "boom".
| shmerl wrote:
| Shortages and price hikes. So much "benefit to society".
| wnc3141 wrote:
| We're disappointed that WaPo is flailing. Meanwhile we all post
| workarounds for the paywall
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| I feel like I'm caught in between two schizophrenically myopic
| perspectives on AI.
|
| One being:
|
| >Generative AI is a product of VC-funding enabled hype, enormous
| subsidies and fraudulent results. No AI code "really" works or
| contributes to productivity, and soon the bubble will burst,
| returning Real Software Engineers to their former peerless
| ascendency.
|
| And the other perspective:
|
| >The AI boom will be the last chance to make money, after which
| point your socioeconomic status circa 2028 will be the permanent
| station of all your progeny, who will enjoy a heavenly post-
| scarcity experience with luxury amenities scaled by your PageRank
| equivalent of social connections to employees at leading AI labs.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| Why does almost every thread have 200+, sometimes 500+ comments
| now? Back a few months or a year ago, most threads were sitting
| at 10-20 comments max.
| consp wrote:
| They stay on the front page longer. I've seen more stayin there
| for hours upto days.
| int0x29 wrote:
| The article is primarily about how wild unrestrained AI spending
| is causing problems. For example it is hard to get an
| electrician, anything with memory in it is either significantly
| more expensive or unobtainable, and building of homes, factories,
| and hospitals is being depressed pushing down supply (Housing
| supply being potentially depressed by AI is both serious and
| alarming). The HN conversation about this article seems to
| instead be will Google, OpenAI, etc break even? The degree of
| disconnect in Silicon Valley between the tech industry and
| everyone else's problems is alarming.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| These are the best kinds of problems to have, an economic
| recession would be far worse.
| wundersam wrote:
| The railway comparison is apt, but the pace is striking. JPMorgan
| calculates tech needs 650B in new annual revenue just to break
| even on ROI. That's an extraordinary bet.The shortage effects are
| real and measurable. But capital doesn't easily substitute -- you
| can't just redirect 700B into infrastructure without immediately
| hitting bottlenecks in skilled labor and materials.I use LLMs
| daily for coding. They're helpful for scaffolding. But the gap
| between "useful tool" and "justify restructuring the entire
| economy" is massive. If this is a bubble, the legacy won't just
| be stranded GPUs -- it'll be years of diverted resources and
| accelerated power consolidation. The railway boom left railways.
| What does an AI boom leave if the returns don't materialize?
| ranguna wrote:
| If this will pop sooner or later, where should I put my money on?
|
| All IT companies will go red
|
| The US economy will go red because IT companies will go red
|
| Banks will follow because their investments depended on the IT
| market
|
| Gold pumped but is falling now (maybe a good time to buy?)
|
| Crypto is crypto so no one knows (although we are close to the
| pump season where everything 10x in value, but it's still a bet)
|
| Europe is detaching itself from the US, so maybe there's
| something there?
|
| Maybe we can just buy non perishable essencial products now,
| because everything is going to blow up in prices? Still if I buy
| a 2PS can of beans, later sell it at 10PS because its market
| value increased to 15, I'm still losing. Not losing as much, but
| still losing, not to mention I need to find a buyer.
|
| I could buy a house and sell it, but the housing market is a
| micro bubble where I live that it might pop as well by the time I
| sell.
|
| So where do I put my money now, knowing that everything's going
| to blow up?
| mentalgear wrote:
| I think a lot of investors are looking at Europe/EU as a safe
| heaven, because it actually has strong democratic institutions
| that hold up the rule of law, and not some maddening kind that
| can tank your investments on his mere whim and a tech/fin
| oligarchy, eager to please and profit him while keeping the
| pyramid scheme going (while they build doomsday bunkers in New
| Zealand), until it all blows in the public's face.
| superze wrote:
| The rule of law only applies to the peasants here in the EU
| as well .
| DavidPiper wrote:
| At the risk of calling you on a deep-cut 2-step pun from your
| username, I think you meant "safe haven", not "safe heaven"
| :-)
| aurareturn wrote:
| So where do I put my money now, knowing that everything's going
| to blow up?
|
| Isn't it obvious? Cash. Maybe treasuries getting a 3-4% yield.
| Maybe some Euros. Maybe some GBP. Maybe some Yuan. Maybe some
| Yen.
|
| Then you deploy the cash into equities if/when it does crash so
| you can buy at an inevitable discount.
|
| Personally, I think we are just at the beginning of the boom.
| lazide wrote:
| That is why the current admin keeps talking about (and trying
| to push) printing more money. Because the obvious plan is to
| inflate out of the mess. Which they have been a little.
|
| The big question is, will they succeed at accelerating it or
| not?
|
| Either way, cash won't be worth as much.
| luke5441 wrote:
| This won't work if you are on the shorter end of the yield
| curve. Obviously when investors say "cash" they mean money
| market fund at least.
|
| Now people holding actual cash will have problems.
| lazide wrote:
| Considering most folks feel like actual inflation is >
| anything they can get from a money market account (and
| hard to argue with them!), that is why we have the
| problem we have.
| csense wrote:
| If actual inflation > IR you can get for safe
| investments, it means inflation is working as designed.
| Mainstream economists make the argument that anyone who
| saves money is selfishly hoarding resources that could be
| spent or invested. The Fed is supposed to print money to
| purposely cause inflation, precisely to "tax" this
| unsocial behavior and incentivize consumption, riskier
| investments, and debt.
|
| I don't personally agree with this argument. But everyone
| should be aware that the argument exists, many economists
| endorse it, and it is used to guide policy in many
| countries.
| aurareturn wrote:
| The person I'm responding to thinks everything is going to
| blow up. That means he expects equities to worth a lot less
| than now. The obvious thing to do is to hold cash.
| iamthemonster wrote:
| Sadly international diversification is far less effective
| during downturns, which is exactly when you need it. It really
| turns out that the old adage "when the US sneezes the whole
| world catches a cold" is borne out by the evidence:
| https://earlyretirementnow.com/2017/08/23/how-useful-is-inte...
|
| I started getting concerned about the US stock market being
| overvalued in about 2019. If I'd followed my gut and ditched
| the US entirely I'd have missed out enormously.
|
| Unfortunately the "guys, it's getting a bit frothy" stage can
| last for years and years. If you pull out of the stock market
| whenever everything's looking irrationally overvalued you're
| probably going to fall behind the unthinking approach of
| continually investing the same amount every month.
|
| Although I don't think investments are easy to "bubble-proof" I
| feel like your career choices can make you more resistant to
| catastrophe. The strongest strategy of all (if it's practical
| in your lifestyle) is to be nationally and internationally
| mobile so that your job search can cover the entire world, and
| you pick whichever employer is most desperate to find someone.
| After that, you can sometimes transfer internally to teams that
| are more robust (in my industry we have teams that design new
| facilities and teams that run existing facilities - the ones
| that design new facilities are far more vulnerable to ups and
| downs as projects get cancelled). Finally, you can make lots of
| casual contacts in your industry (we sometimes get together for
| coffee or beer with other people in our city who do a similar
| job at other companies) - then when you're made redundant,
| you've got the inside information of where new roles might come
| from.
|
| On the cost side of the equation, your choices of "how big a
| house & car can I afford?" should learn towards being more
| pessimistic, but often there's not huge scope for choice there
| in the short term.
|
| Long story short, the glib answer to your question "where do I
| put my money now, knowing that everything's going to blow up?"
| is "leave it in the S&P 500 and be aware that one day it will
| blow up"
| Bombthecat wrote:
| What if it won't pop and just keep getting better?
|
| Replacing more and more jobs as it goes?
| ed_mercer wrote:
| Is this really a valid outcome, given the facts in the
| article?
| bko wrote:
| Is it really a bubble? The AI boom is often compared to dot com
| bubble but was that a bubble? Sure if you bought immediately
| before the crash and sold after you lost a lot of money. But if
| you were just consistently investing in web based companies
| from lates 1990s to 2010, how did you do? Probably pretty well.
| Web did change the world and create an immense amount of wealth
| in the world and markets. You're just focused on a short time
| frame.
|
| Even the real estate bubble in 2008. If you bought a home in
| 2005 and sold in 2009, sure you lost a lot, but if you just
| invested in real estate from mid 2000s and kept it for 10
| years, you prob did pretty well. Even the great depression had
| a sharp readjustment, but look at pretty much any 10-year
| windows, including great depression, you'll see ~10% nominal
| and ~5-7% real annualized equity returns.
|
| I think AI will be similar. It's a paradigm shift. Some of
| todays companies will go under and stocks will crash but over
| 10+ years, I think it will be a great investment and the
| industry will flourish, much like the tech or real estate
| bubble.
| jamesjolliffe wrote:
| Another serious flaw with the modern American economy is that too
| much of our money is spent betting on whatever lottery ticket
| dream we are sold will grant the highest returns. For too long,
| we have been investing in software companies like Meta hoping for
| unicorn returns, paying no attention to the fact that many of
| these companies do little to materially improve the real world we
| live in, while our communities and infrastructure fall into
| disrepair. Who wants to invest in a lower-margin construction
| company, when there is a chance company some tech company X might
| come up with an addictive imaginary widget on our phone that has
| a marginal cost of almost nothing after the first one is built.
|
| Now, all this new hardware we're building is powering AI that is
| only proven to improve the quality of our software, and will
| likely displace many of the middle class "white collar" jobs we
| have left. Buckle up boys, we are in for a bumpy ride.
| weare138 wrote:
| A 'boom' would imply AI is actually profitable.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2026-02-08 23:01 UTC)