Where does all this leave us? For one, you better hope and pray that AI delivers a magical transformation, because if it doesn't, the whole economy will collapse into brutal serfdom. When I say magic here, I mean it; because of the ~38T national debt bomb, a big boost is not enough. If AI doesn't completely transform our economy, the massive capital misallocation combined with the national debt is going to cause our economy to implode.
My summary: it's too big big to fail so let's transfer the risk on the taxpayer and if it fails anyway, let them eat cake. And by the way, that cake is a lie !
IMO, the backdrop to all of this is global warming. We're seeing so many warning signs and growth stagnating that governments need something, ANYTHING, to prop up their debt fueled economies and keep the music playing. In the face of impending GDP/population contraction due to global warming and the upcoming breadbasket collapses, GenAI isn't going to do shit for us. All of the money and effort being spent on it is money that could be spent on figuring out how to give our kids a glimmer of hope.
It's the American Way(tm)! We've been this way for a long time. Just look at the glut of holiday decorations made of plastic that will be bought, then end up in landfills in a few months. We have literally fought wars, killed millions, just for control of the oil from which they're made.
Is that true? I was under the impression that one reason NVIDIA is so entrenched is that their GPUs are highly flexible. Versus the ASIC offerings of other specialized players are more focused on transformers remaining the dominant architecture.
I think this is mostly about the US, right? Most countries haven't invested all that much in AI. Even if all this new AI would completely vanish overnight, I'm pretty sure most of the world wouldn't care one bit. Of course many AI companies and investors would be bankrupt; they'd be the real losers here. Many other companies and organisations would have wasted a lot of money on nothing, but they'll write it off and move on. If it bankrupts Microsoft, that would have a tremendous impact on many companies using Microsoft products of course (maybe MS should hurry up with that EU-US cloud split, so the EU branch would survive the crash).
Well, last few times the US had a big recession, they took down the whole world with them. The biggest recession led almost directly to WWII, and that was before the US centralized that much power or money.
I really feel like a leaf being blown over reading this stuff while planning on getting a Mortgage. Well, at least I have a rented roof over my head and eat every day. A lot of people can't afford that right now.
I think that the sentence is "Those who don't learn from history are condemned to send everyone else to the bread lines while they retire on their private luxury islands."
You can't invest in me currently (except by retaining me as a consultant/architect), and if I was in a position to be invested in, the article would have had a different structure. My position is integrity first, you can stalk my LinkedIn to see that if you need proof -- I've never worked in adtech or other predatory industries, most of my work has been in the interest of public good and the protection of democracy.
This talk of arms race with China is very, very dangerous. We need to start having a more important conversation if people really believe this because, otherwise, why shouldn't China just kinetically strike US infrastructure and vice versa?
If AI is an executioner's blow to your opponent by enabling you to dominate them in terms of hacking, economy, government, politics, etc. kinetic strikes are more than justified. You could destroy most of the US's ability to create AI for decades with Pearl Harbor-esque first strikes.
Do people think countries are just going to roll over and die?
Eh, I was just discussing this article on LinkedIn.
Even one wasn't _that_ cynical about AI, but yeah, this is clearly one possible reading of the events. I'm in no hurry to live in the future that it entails, though.
If it wasn't for AI investments, it's likely the United States would be in a recession right now.
So the biggest achievement of this amazing new technology is to artificially prop up Wall Street?
For those who can read the tea leaves --- it's absolutely a bubble --- a financial bubble.
The real reason why China is ahead in many areas is because their leadership is a little more technologically savvy and progressive than ours.
If this really is a pre-war economy, we have invested heavily in unproven tech which in my opinion is a risky move that leaves the US highly vulnerable.
If this is a pre-war economy, the US is screwed not because of AI but because we started a stupid trade war that's going to cut us off of our supply of dysprosium which is critical for defense manufacturing.
The US would only be screwed in that type of scenario if they allowed themselves to be. If things really got to that point they would just take over the deposits.
The idea that the Republicans are going to bail out AI and pay for it with massive tax raises on the plebs is just utter bonkers, if for no other reason than they're currently utterly incapable of getting any legislation passed, let alone one so deeply unpopular as that.
I still have the hope that the AI bubble will leave as a side effect a massive build-out of energy infrastructure: Nuclear, Solar and Natural Gas.
In my book, prosperity and progress is measured in Terajoules. If you have free, clean and abundant energy, you have industry, jobs, every fucking thing a healthy economy should want or need to have.
And on the other side, I think the Chinese are deluding themselves on robotics.
China (or rather the CCP) have their hands are tied by 3 opposing forces
1. Birthrates
2. Revolt
3. Economic collapse
For example, if they try to increase the birthrate by liberalising the economy, reducing social control measures (e.g. hukou), etc. it will give the people the tools to rise up. But it would potentially fix the economy long term.
On the other hand, if they try to crack down on freedom to ensure their own power and economic survival - it will collapse the birthrate even further and/or cause revolt.
Lastly, if they do nothing the economy will collapse under the weight of the one child policy.
Robots would be the perfect solution - birthrates can collapse, they can maintain economic control - and their "workforce" will never decrease. It's of course a pipe-dream.
This line of thinking is of course similar to how the US requires the forever growth of the services economy which drives the need/hope for AI to solve that problem.
China's birthrate has fallen like it has in other richer countries because people have become rich and the amount of time and money needed to raise a kid is expensive. Becoming even richer won't help things at all.
Freedom has little to do with the birthrate, you could even say a crackdown on liberalization that has occurred would make china poorer and therefore the birthrate would go up.
China just wants to be rich, robots are one way to do that with the demographics that happen in rich economies.
Internet was too big to fail in 2000, and in the long run was a net positive for the economy. Yet, a lot of internet companies still have not recovered the bubble bursting
I think a lot of HNers are too close to the topic for the right perspective.
LLMs are as much of a feature of an existing technology as computers are features of electricity. ML and neural networks have been around for a long time and the transition to LLM usage for us feels like "yup, another feature, just a really good auto-complete".
For most users of LLMs, this is a magical feature that answers any questions and saves so much time and effort. I would even dare say that LLMs are a bigger leap in technology than the internet itself was. The internet connected people, "AI" made it so that we need less of each other!
What was the cause of the enlightenment and renaissance period in europe that led to a boom in science, technology and the industrial revolution which is responsible for computers to begin with? It was the discovery of the new world and the expansion of europe into asia and africa. Get gold and pearls from the new world and sell use it to buy things in the near and far east. This meant people can spend time studying science, but it also meant military R&D. Better ships, better guns,better cannons. You need better science for that. Not just for colonization but the competition between european powers.
What's my point? AI/LLMs, are a leap in that people can now do a lot less things they don't want to do. Even if it means social instability. There is a very active arms-race in military capability, disinformation, control of markets and influence of governments going on as we speak. and this in turn is going to result in better and better improvements in every sector.
The internet meant we had to learn new things, move to more efficient work. LLMs meant without learning as much we tell the computer to do things and all it needs is guidance and some correction.
We all see the fads and the hype all over. But there are very real and very dramatic advantages and values to be extracted from LLMs, which in the long run would be the equivalent of the industrial revolution.
The pessimism feels a lot like people were being pessimistic about the internet back in the 90s.
AI isn't just too big to fail, it isn't something that can fail. Can long distance communication "fail" , can electronic computing fail? can transportation on wheels fail?
All the grifters slapping AI on everything will fail, but the AI tech and all the value and change that comes with it, isn't something worth even consider as having a potential for failure.
> Demand that the titans of tech change, and if they don't, stop feeding them your dollars.
Haha okay. Have you met people? Have you seen what they’re using it for? The users of LLMs do not care if they have to pay some
of their wages to avoid working and learning. Even if it means they will no longer receives wages (or even close to the same wages) in the long term.
I prefer to view people through a positive lens. I believe we are capable of living up to our lofty goals, and we should encourage each other to do that.
> Think of it like WWII, only only instead of planting victory gardens to beat the Nazis, we're building AI apps and finding ways to create the economic value needed to cover the reckless bets being made by the elites.
LOL fuck this, the stock market deserves to burn to the ground.
I'm anti-establishment because the establishment doesn't care about anyone but themselves. What are we doing all this work for? Progress would be getting universal healthcare for all in this country. Getting better work life balance. Being able to afford a home. Now it's just all the "haves" fighting bitterly to keep getting more and more until they have everything and nothing for anyone else.
That's one negative quality that Hacker News always had to me, compared to older hacker spaces such as newsgroups and Slashdot: The Petit bourgeois conformism and materialism. People always drunk the Venture Capital pseudo-libertarian cool-aid with too much enthusiasm here.
Being anti-establishment should not be viewed as a sin, unless in extreme cases.
I have noticed that it coincides with the re-election of a certain political candidate (He who must not be named).
The facade of "critical and rational thinker" has all but completely fallen away and this place has revealed itself for the true ideological echo chamber that it is.
While there are a lot of problems with the current market dynamics, burning it to the ground would cause a ridiculous amount of suffering. We need to spin up a new alternative then wind down the market gently.
The only problem is that the stock market is tied to a bunch of retirement/pension and other accounts. Yes stock market should burn to the ground but also I think pensioners and retirees shouldn’t be put out, just the finance bros and private equity folks which money is just a plaything.
This is pretty myopic, or something. Shows, at least, a real ignorance about the available possibilities (or lack thereof)—at scale—to the common worker for “saving for a later day”.
But I’m all ears. Now that you’ve diagnosed how 401K investing fools get what they deserve, care to offer any alternative solutions as to the entire work force should have been saving towards retirement.
(kinda unrelated but) I personally hate these forced savings schemes from the government. At least in my country the rates are low so it almost feels like I'm donating the entire difference in rates between the pension scheme and the S&P500 + taxes straight to the government.
At least give those of us brave (or stupid) enough to do something different with the money the option to.
Pension funds should be diversified and have a mix of asset classes that includes more than the stock market. Ideally, most of these assets will move independently so if one is doing particularly badly the others can balance it out to reduce overall volatility. If your pension fund is too heavily weighted to the market, that's a management problem with your fund.
I'm honored that you would attribute my words to Jan :)
Honestly you don't have to believe me, I'm trying to make some things clear to drive change but if you don't want to take a critical look at the world around you and try to push for things to get better, that's your call.
that's been going on for decades, rinse and repeat
IMO, the backdrop to all of this is global warming. We're seeing so many warning signs and growth stagnating that governments need something, ANYTHING, to prop up their debt fueled economies and keep the music playing. In the face of impending GDP/population contraction due to global warming and the upcoming breadbasket collapses, GenAI isn't going to do shit for us. All of the money and effort being spent on it is money that could be spent on figuring out how to give our kids a glimmer of hope.
Yep, but instead of that we're wasting land, energy and resources in data centers that run "you are not the father" memes based on Sora 2.
It's the American Way(tm)! We've been this way for a long time. Just look at the glut of holiday decorations made of plastic that will be bought, then end up in landfills in a few months. We have literally fought wars, killed millions, just for control of the oil from which they're made.
>~75–80% of S&P 500 gains
Dot com bust was 50% of S&P / 80% on Nasdaq... we survived it..
For Nvidia: all it will take is for one smart grad student to find a better training algorithm to destroy 75% of their value.
Why I think a better algorithm is out there:
Total installed GPU Tflops = 4 billion. Tflops of human brain = 1 million
Computation on human brain is on a totally different substrate than silicon. It's in memory and highly error prone.
It's questionable a mere algorithm would get us there without a fundamental change in computer architecture. (in terms of Intelligence / W)
Is that true? I was under the impression that one reason NVIDIA is so entrenched is that their GPUs are highly flexible. Versus the ASIC offerings of other specialized players are more focused on transformers remaining the dominant architecture.
Maybe the better algorithm will be able to run on GPUs.
> For Nvidia: all it will take is for one smart grad student to find a better training algorithm to destroy 75% of their value.
I don't think so. We've already seen several generations of better training algorithms, but they all rely on CUDA, hence on NVidia.
For inference they already face competition: that deal OpenAI announced with AMD .. at a certain point it will be worth broadening away from CUDA.
the 1 million is debatable, but you can't argue with the power consumption of 20W.
that said, if all the current infrastructure could run brain-equivalent models at 20W each, I'd wager we would have much more demand than currently.
But the flip side is excess capacity will be used for other fields which are not getting a chance.
On the other hand, GPUs die down fairly quickly, so this excess capacity had better prove useful rather quickly.
I think this is mostly about the US, right? Most countries haven't invested all that much in AI. Even if all this new AI would completely vanish overnight, I'm pretty sure most of the world wouldn't care one bit. Of course many AI companies and investors would be bankrupt; they'd be the real losers here. Many other companies and organisations would have wasted a lot of money on nothing, but they'll write it off and move on. If it bankrupts Microsoft, that would have a tremendous impact on many companies using Microsoft products of course (maybe MS should hurry up with that EU-US cloud split, so the EU branch would survive the crash).
But on the whole, I'm not too worried.
Well, last few times the US had a big recession, they took down the whole world with them. The biggest recession led almost directly to WWII, and that was before the US centralized that much power or money.
I don't live in the US, but I'm rather worried.
I really feel like a leaf being blown over reading this stuff while planning on getting a Mortgage. Well, at least I have a rented roof over my head and eat every day. A lot of people can't afford that right now.
Those who don't learn from... whatever, these clowns have it coming
I think that the sentence is "Those who don't learn from history are condemned to send everyone else to the bread lines while they retire on their private luxury islands."
Or maybe that's exactly what they learned from history.
Maybe we should learn from some revolutionary history, then.
"... but those who do learn from history are doomed to watch everyone else repeat it."
> AI is Too Big to Fail
Now invest in my Ai company, 100mil at 10bn valuation, can't fail, too big.
You can't invest in me currently (except by retaining me as a consultant/architect), and if I was in a position to be invested in, the article would have had a different structure. My position is integrity first, you can stalk my LinkedIn to see that if you need proof -- I've never worked in adtech or other predatory industries, most of my work has been in the interest of public good and the protection of democracy.
AI isn't going anywhere. It won't magically disappear, but that businesses are trying to use AI in situations that are unsustainable and unneeded.
The table of contents on the right blocks a good chunk of text. Safari on MacOS Sequoia
Also on Firefox. But making my screen narrower made that menu collapse.
Thanks for the note, I'll look into how I can make it flow better with the document.
This talk of arms race with China is very, very dangerous. We need to start having a more important conversation if people really believe this because, otherwise, why shouldn't China just kinetically strike US infrastructure and vice versa?
If AI is an executioner's blow to your opponent by enabling you to dominate them in terms of hacking, economy, government, politics, etc. kinetic strikes are more than justified. You could destroy most of the US's ability to create AI for decades with Pearl Harbor-esque first strikes.
Do people think countries are just going to roll over and die?
Eh, I was just discussing this article on LinkedIn.
Even one wasn't _that_ cynical about AI, but yeah, this is clearly one possible reading of the events. I'm in no hurry to live in the future that it entails, though.
If it wasn't for AI investments, it's likely the United States would be in a recession right now.
So the biggest achievement of this amazing new technology is to artificially prop up Wall Street?
For those who can read the tea leaves --- it's absolutely a bubble --- a financial bubble.
The real reason why China is ahead in many areas is because their leadership is a little more technologically savvy and progressive than ours.
If this really is a pre-war economy, we have invested heavily in unproven tech which in my opinion is a risky move that leaves the US highly vulnerable.
If this is a pre-war economy, the US is screwed not because of AI but because we started a stupid trade war that's going to cut us off of our supply of dysprosium which is critical for defense manufacturing.
Wouldn't the US be cut from the supply if there was a war, regardless of the current tariffs?
The US would only be screwed in that type of scenario if they allowed themselves to be. If things really got to that point they would just take over the deposits.
hah hah, yeah, the U.S is going to take the dysprosium from China by force. With Hegseth and Trump in charge no less!!
The idea that the Republicans are going to bail out AI and pay for it with massive tax raises on the plebs is just utter bonkers, if for no other reason than they're currently utterly incapable of getting any legislation passed, let alone one so deeply unpopular as that.
What? Did you miss the BBB? They’ll pass any legislation they’re told to.
I still have the hope that the AI bubble will leave as a side effect a massive build-out of energy infrastructure: Nuclear, Solar and Natural Gas.
In my book, prosperity and progress is measured in Terajoules. If you have free, clean and abundant energy, you have industry, jobs, every fucking thing a healthy economy should want or need to have.
And on the other side, I think the Chinese are deluding themselves on robotics.
China (or rather the CCP) have their hands are tied by 3 opposing forces 1. Birthrates 2. Revolt 3. Economic collapse
For example, if they try to increase the birthrate by liberalising the economy, reducing social control measures (e.g. hukou), etc. it will give the people the tools to rise up. But it would potentially fix the economy long term.
On the other hand, if they try to crack down on freedom to ensure their own power and economic survival - it will collapse the birthrate even further and/or cause revolt.
Lastly, if they do nothing the economy will collapse under the weight of the one child policy.
Robots would be the perfect solution - birthrates can collapse, they can maintain economic control - and their "workforce" will never decrease. It's of course a pipe-dream.
This line of thinking is of course similar to how the US requires the forever growth of the services economy which drives the need/hope for AI to solve that problem.
This is a really bad analysis:
China's birthrate has fallen like it has in other richer countries because people have become rich and the amount of time and money needed to raise a kid is expensive. Becoming even richer won't help things at all.
Freedom has little to do with the birthrate, you could even say a crackdown on liberalization that has occurred would make china poorer and therefore the birthrate would go up.
China just wants to be rich, robots are one way to do that with the demographics that happen in rich economies.
Imagine robots doing chemistry or biology experiments 24x7. There is so much potential. We don't need grad students to waste their precious time.
A lot of lab work that could be automated have already been.
Internet was too big to fail in 2000, and in the long run was a net positive for the economy. Yet, a lot of internet companies still have not recovered the bubble bursting
Twice the pride, double the fall.
I think a lot of HNers are too close to the topic for the right perspective.
LLMs are as much of a feature of an existing technology as computers are features of electricity. ML and neural networks have been around for a long time and the transition to LLM usage for us feels like "yup, another feature, just a really good auto-complete".
For most users of LLMs, this is a magical feature that answers any questions and saves so much time and effort. I would even dare say that LLMs are a bigger leap in technology than the internet itself was. The internet connected people, "AI" made it so that we need less of each other!
What was the cause of the enlightenment and renaissance period in europe that led to a boom in science, technology and the industrial revolution which is responsible for computers to begin with? It was the discovery of the new world and the expansion of europe into asia and africa. Get gold and pearls from the new world and sell use it to buy things in the near and far east. This meant people can spend time studying science, but it also meant military R&D. Better ships, better guns,better cannons. You need better science for that. Not just for colonization but the competition between european powers.
What's my point? AI/LLMs, are a leap in that people can now do a lot less things they don't want to do. Even if it means social instability. There is a very active arms-race in military capability, disinformation, control of markets and influence of governments going on as we speak. and this in turn is going to result in better and better improvements in every sector.
The internet meant we had to learn new things, move to more efficient work. LLMs meant without learning as much we tell the computer to do things and all it needs is guidance and some correction.
We all see the fads and the hype all over. But there are very real and very dramatic advantages and values to be extracted from LLMs, which in the long run would be the equivalent of the industrial revolution.
The pessimism feels a lot like people were being pessimistic about the internet back in the 90s.
AI isn't just too big to fail, it isn't something that can fail. Can long distance communication "fail" , can electronic computing fail? can transportation on wheels fail?
All the grifters slapping AI on everything will fail, but the AI tech and all the value and change that comes with it, isn't something worth even consider as having a potential for failure.
(sorry for the long post)
> Demand that the titans of tech change, and if they don't, stop feeding them your dollars.
Haha okay. Have you met people? Have you seen what they’re using it for? The users of LLMs do not care if they have to pay some of their wages to avoid working and learning. Even if it means they will no longer receives wages (or even close to the same wages) in the long term.
I prefer to view people through a positive lens. I believe we are capable of living up to our lofty goals, and we should encourage each other to do that.
> Think of it like WWII, only only instead of planting victory gardens to beat the Nazis, we're building AI apps and finding ways to create the economic value needed to cover the reckless bets being made by the elites.
LOL fuck this, the stock market deserves to burn to the ground.
When did the HackerNews comment section turn into this? Low quality, aggressive, fervently anti-establishment.
I'm anti-establishment because the establishment doesn't care about anyone but themselves. What are we doing all this work for? Progress would be getting universal healthcare for all in this country. Getting better work life balance. Being able to afford a home. Now it's just all the "haves" fighting bitterly to keep getting more and more until they have everything and nothing for anyone else.
I agree. HN basically became Reddit.
That's one negative quality that Hacker News always had to me, compared to older hacker spaces such as newsgroups and Slashdot: The Petit bourgeois conformism and materialism. People always drunk the Venture Capital pseudo-libertarian cool-aid with too much enthusiasm here.
Being anti-establishment should not be viewed as a sin, unless in extreme cases.
100%. I work in tech and frequent this sub daily but it is morally and politically neutered to a fault. It is the enlightened centrist utopia.
Anti-establishment is sort of a requirement for doing a start-up.
Aggressiveness is a requirement for doing a start-up in times of constrained capitalism
Low quality is driven the by the availability of capital for dumb ideas.
So... a while now?
These startups backed by venture funds are anti-establishment? Are you joking?
People like to think that they are anti-establishment and disruptive at a startup. They conveniently ignore who is writing the cheques.
This is a core tenet of Startupist religious dogma. People really believe it.
I have noticed that it coincides with the re-election of a certain political candidate (He who must not be named).
The facade of "critical and rational thinker" has all but completely fallen away and this place has revealed itself for the true ideological echo chamber that it is.
won't somebody think of the establishment
While there are a lot of problems with the current market dynamics, burning it to the ground would cause a ridiculous amount of suffering. We need to spin up a new alternative then wind down the market gently.
The only problem is that the stock market is tied to a bunch of retirement/pension and other accounts. Yes stock market should burn to the ground but also I think pensioners and retirees shouldn’t be put out, just the finance bros and private equity folks which money is just a plaything.
Pensioners and retirees willingly dumping money into index funds without oversight are the dumb money that enables all of this.
So yes, they deserve a haircut.
This is pretty myopic, or something. Shows, at least, a real ignorance about the available possibilities (or lack thereof)—at scale—to the common worker for “saving for a later day”.
But I’m all ears. Now that you’ve diagnosed how 401K investing fools get what they deserve, care to offer any alternative solutions as to the entire work force should have been saving towards retirement.
(kinda unrelated but) I personally hate these forced savings schemes from the government. At least in my country the rates are low so it almost feels like I'm donating the entire difference in rates between the pension scheme and the S&P500 + taxes straight to the government.
At least give those of us brave (or stupid) enough to do something different with the money the option to.
Pensioners don’t have a choice where their stuff goes. A teacher or something simply doesn’t deserve that kind of hardship.
Pension funds should be diversified and have a mix of asset classes that includes more than the stock market. Ideally, most of these assets will move independently so if one is doing particularly badly the others can balance it out to reduce overall volatility. If your pension fund is too heavily weighted to the market, that's a management problem with your fund.
Deserve is a strong word.
We're talking about regular folks who want to do nothing else but secure their future in the face of a market that regularly tries to screw it up.
Can you explain why you suggest "deserve"?
Or perhaps we shouldn't have killed off the concept of pensions in the United States so we weren't all beholden to godforsaken 401Ks?
> The government is practically manufacturing a ponzi scheme and the losers will be anyone who doesn't own stock
*anyone American who doesn't own stock
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I'm honored that you would attribute my words to Jan :)
Honestly you don't have to believe me, I'm trying to make some things clear to drive change but if you don't want to take a critical look at the world around you and try to push for things to get better, that's your call.
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