"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.
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.
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.
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?
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> "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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 4× 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
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.
An anonymous site operator, serving CAPTCHAs to force users to enable Javascript, collecting a potential treasure trove of browsing history, trying to evade authorities with fluctuating IP addresses, an assortment of domain registrations and who knows what other tactics
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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®: Merge & Story.
Facebook's investment is to be $135bn [1]. The Channel Tunnel was "in 1985 prices, £4.65 billion", which is £15.34bn in December 2025 [3], or $20.5bn at current exchange rate.
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
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.
"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
> 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.
> 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
>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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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
> 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.
> 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 Böhm-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).
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%.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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?
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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.
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)
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?
> 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.
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/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
- 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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 . . .
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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"...
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.
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?
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).
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
https://archive.ph/J8pg5
This does not work for me.
It's a loop of captcha which never ends
[delayed]
"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.
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.
Someone in management read and misunderstood "The Velocity of Money" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocity_of_money)?
Or understood way too well. I promise it isn't Altman that will be left destroyed or jobless if this crashes.
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.
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?
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...
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
A lot of iPhone users will be given a subscription via their job. If they still have a job at that point.
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.
Why you even said you wouldn’t subscribe? It’s not relevant in the slightest.
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
Have you ever seen US GDP go up 5% yearly for several years?
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
Doesn't have to go up. It's also fine if they replace other parts of the economy.
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.
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.
China did it. It’s not inconceivable.
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_history_of_China_(191...
Developed countries have slow growth because they need to invent the improvements not just copy what works from other countries.
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.
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.
Yeah but China actively works in the best interest of their entire population.
Huh? No they don’t.
In what way? Bring some substance instead of a vague rebuttal
You're saying that the entire increase in US GDP goes into the pockets of like 5 companies.
The future is not looking bright at all....
I only have a meme to describe what we are facing https://imgur.com/a/xYbhzTj
> 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.
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.
> 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.
I was expecting to see Mark Baum on the phone saying "hey, we're in a bubble".
> "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.
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
What can we use fields of GPUs for next?
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.
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.
"much more demand than supply"? Demand from who?
The demand from middle managers trying to replace their dev teams with Claude Code, mainly.
Please respect other users of hacker news and don’t generate your replies with LLM
I never use LLMs to write for me (except code).
FWIW, GP doesn't look like clanker speak to me. It's a bit too smooth and on-point for that.
Whatever happened to crypto/blockchain ASICs
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/pii/S09213...
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.
Can they run Crysis?
Ironically, no
Heating!
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.
> 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.
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.
> 3d graphics
Seems like the G in GPU is very obsolete now:
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-h100-benchmarkedin-...
> 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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
cloud gaming?
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
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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"?
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 4× 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
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.
Alternative to archive.ph, no Javascript, no CAPTCHAs:
Isnt't the FBI trying to shut down archive.today
An anonymous site operator, serving CAPTCHAs to force users to enable Javascript, collecting a potential treasure trove of browsing history, trying to evade authorities with fluctuating IP addresses, an assortment of domain registrations and who knows what other tactics
It's a crowd favorite
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?
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.
> 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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Can most people venture outside their training data?
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.
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.
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.
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
Here's hoping you are chinese, then.
Why?
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.
Remember the good old days of complaining about Bitcoin taking the energy output of a whole town.
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.
> 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+sources+wa...
I'm a simple man, I just want these companies to pay taxes where they make money.
> 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.
Haters will say Sora wasn't worth it.
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®: Merge & Story.
Ok I’ll bite. Was it worth it? What have people missed that haven’t used it.
What is Sora?
If you see a video of a cat running away from a police traffic stop
One of many AI video generators that are filling up all video social media with rage bate garbage.
Inflation adjusted?
Seems to be.
Facebook's investment is to be $135bn [1]. The Channel Tunnel was "in 1985 prices, £4.65 billion", which is £15.34bn 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...
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
It's incredibly sad and depressing. We could be building green energy, parks, public transit, education, healthcare.
So, now you understand you can’t compare things with how much they cost
It's caused a massive shortage of interesting content that isn't related to AI.
The best part is every single thread on HN now has someone accusing the author of using AI.
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.
"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
> 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.
>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.
> 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
>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.
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.
Very important. There is more than just 1 bullshit line of business.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
Pareto is irrelevant, because they are talking about how to use all of this money not currently used in healthcare or education.
> 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?
> 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.
> 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 Böhm-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).
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
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%.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
I guess I don’t believe knowledge work will completely go away.
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.
>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.
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.
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?
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.)
No you would have the same house or better. That’s part of the condition.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Do you have source for your claim? I have source that supports what I have said - look at disposable income data from BLS
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.
>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?
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-...
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
So what? If that's the case, they clearly mean the 0.0001% or whatever number, which is way worse.
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.
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.
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)
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?
> 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.
That's not something that will affect the next quarter, so for US companies it might as well be something that happens in Narnia.
> 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?
esp when it comes down to integration with the rest of the business processes & people aroud this "single apps" :-)
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/
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.
At some point rich people stop caring about money and only care about power.
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.
At the end the day a medieval lord was poor but he lived a better life than the peasants.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Which cities, for example?
> 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
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.
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...
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.
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.
How AI will cure neurodegenerative diseases and cancer?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> I don't understand why all billionaires aren't doing this.
I know, shocking isn’t it?
Maybe it should give you pause then, that not everyone else is investing 98% of their savings?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
Your comment doesn't say anything
If
"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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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?
> 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.
Are you doctor or a farmer?
If you are a software engineer you are missing out a lot, literally a lot!
What is he missing? Do you have anything quantitative other than an AI marketing blog or an anecdote?
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
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:
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.
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
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.
And yet, the population of Singapore isn't 79% male.
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.
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.
…not to mention they are completely ignoring the existence of smart girls as well
>>It's incel and eugenic reasoning wrapped up all together.
More like French post-structuralism.
It’s the same nonsense as people going “Idiocracy is a documentary.“ Of course none of them think they’re the idiots.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
I can't tell if this is satire
MENA slop
> 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
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?
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.
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
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.
Glad there’s other fellow travelers here
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.
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.
A little less min-maxing, perhaps.
this is genius
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!
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
What a low quality article with zero new information or insights. WaPo is dead.
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.
Bezos must have forgot to censor this post before it published.
Sign me up to be an electrician. The line for that is pretty long and gatekept.
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)
> 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.
If AI can what it promises most of its big customers become useless but who else could pay enough to make them profitable?
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.
So where is the electrician? Busy at an AI data center being built?
AI "boom?"
Where's the "boom?" Doesn't that imply a bunch of people are getting rich off of new business?
Where are those?
I don't think these companies buying realize how much animosity they're creating with literally everyone until it explodes on their face.
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.
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 . . .
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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
RIP Washington Post.
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"...
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.
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?
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.
> why listen to uncle Harry's shoddy guitar play?
Uncle Harry is not playing guitar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXzz8o1m5bM
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If people can’t tell the difference, perhaps it doesn’t matter
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.
> 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.
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.
Think of the PC gamers
The battlecry of the new revolution?
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.
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
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.