6 ms·

Provided all this centralized governement owned and run infra somehow gets built, what it would be actually doing to warrant the expense ? I am quite skeptical

Provided all this centralized governement owned and run infra somehow gets built, what it would be actually doing to warrant the expense ? I am quite skeptical in this regard. :P

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Terr_ 2y ago
Well, it would funnel tax dollars to already-established companies that don't need the subsidies. :p I have some sympathy for certain domestic capabilities (e.g. chip fabrication) but this "AI" bubble cross-infecting government policy is frustrating to watch.
- phkahler 2y ago
  >> Well, it would funnel tax dollars to already-established companies that don't need the subsidies. Yeah it sounded like a gift to nVidia. My prediction was that nVidia would ride the quantum wave by offering systems to simulate quantum computers with huge classical ones. They would do that by asking the government to fund such systems for "quantum algorithm research" since nobody really knows what to use QC for yet. This move primes that relationship using the current AI hype boom. So look for their quantum simulation-optimized chips in the near future. GPU, gpgpu, crypto, ray tracing, AI, quantum. nvidia is a master at milking dollars from tech fads.
- JohnBooty 2y ago
  It's hard to know how much this effort is about the government's belief in AI, and how much of it is about supporting the technology sector while using AI as a convenient buzzword. I think, though, that even if LLMs turn out to be a dead-end and don't progress much further... there are a lot of benefits here. One of the US's key strategic advantages is brain drain. We are one of the world's premier destinations for highly educated, highly skilled people from other countries. Their loss, our gain. There are of course myriad other countries where they could go, many of them more attractive than the US in various ways. Every country in the world is in a sense competing for this talent.
  - cuteboy19 2y ago
    zero sum thinking has already infected public policy. turns out liberals can be just as "they took our jobs" as the redneck conservative. the real fear should be that people wouldnt want to come. already chinese intl students are break even when considering US vs going back to china. who wants to deal with all the bureaucracy and hatred when they could just go back and work for deepseek.
  - shafyy 2y ago
    > * One of the US's key strategic advantages is brain drain.* I think the brain drain has peaked. Many people here in Europe don't think much of the US anymore, while 20-30 years ago it was THE place to go. I'm sure many countries like India and China, for whom the US still might be somewhat attractive, are going to go the way of Europeans.
    - cadamsdotcom 2y ago
      It’d be worth comparing your opinion to data, so you aren’t stuck with an unverified opinion.
    - JohnBooty 2y ago
      Regardless of how the US ranks in terms of brain drain, and how that rank is trending, it's clearly an area where the government wants to compete.
    - int_19h 2y ago
      As of this year, the US employment-based green card backlog for citizens of India is such that they're currently still processing applications filed in 2019 for the top EB-1 category (that's "Extraordinary People, Outstanding Researchers and Professors, and Multinational Executives and Managers"), and 2012 for mere PhDs. So the numbers would have to go down a lot for US to even notice. Speaking as an immigrant myself, so long as there's still noticeable wealth disparity, people will make the jump. The other aspect that makes US specifically especially attractive compared to some others is its family immigration policy - people generally want their family to join them eventually, and US has an unusually large allotment for that compared to many other countries.
ericmay 2y ago
What would the cost be of not undertaking these actions?
- JohnBooty 2y ago
  In the micro, nothing. We'd have a bunch of extra cash we can spend on other stuff. In the macro? The overall goal is keeping the US competitive in technology. Both in terms of producing/controlling IP as well as (perhaps even more crucially) remaining a premier destination for technologists from all over the world. The cost of not achieving that goal is... incalculable, but large. Whether or not this is a good way to achieve that goal is of course up for debate.
  - SoftTalker 2y ago
    We have no extra cash. We are so far in debt as it is we'll never get out.
  - int_19h 2y ago
    It's not just the economic cost that is a consideration here. The military applications of AI are potentially staggering (as are the associated ethical concerns - but, as with any military tech, once someone does it and the advantages become clear, others will inevitably follow). No major power player is going to want to risk getting drastically outpaced by its primary competitors. Note that this isn't a hypothetical, either. Israel is already using AI to pick targets. Ukraine is already using AI-controlled drones to beat jamming. There's no indication that either one intends to stop anytime soon, which tells the others that the tech is working for this purpose.
FrustratedMonky 2y ago
Building Skynet of course. There is already AI flying F-16's. AI targeting systems. AI surveillance I mean, sky's the limit.
jay_kyburz 2y ago
I suspect we are not in a race for a better LLM, but a race to the singularity. "I. J. Good's intelligence explosion model of 1965, an upgradable intelligent agent could eventually enter a positive feedback loop of self-improvement cycles, each successive; and more intelligent generation appearing more and more rapidly, causing a rapid increase ("explosion") in intelligence which would ultimately result in a powerful superintelligence, qualitatively far surpassing all human intelligence.[4]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity
- Terr_ 2y ago
  > I suspect we are not in a race for a better LLM, but a race to the singularity. We are in the race for a better LLM*, deliberately disguised as a race to the singularity, because that's what gets investor-dollars and fame. * And anything else close enough to ride on their hype-coattails
- nradov 2y ago
  Belief in a coming technological singularity is completely unscientific and based on zero hard evidence. It is essentially a secular religion with computers cast as deities to either usher in a new utopia or exterminate us all. Surely I am coming quickly, sayeth the Lord.
- AnimalMuppet 2y ago
  Is there any reason whatsoever that I should think that I. J. Good's intelligence explosion model of 1965 corresponds to reality?
  - jay_kyburz 2y ago
    When I step through the logic in my mind, seems likely. Lets make the leap of faith that we can improve our AIs to actually understand code that it's reading and can suggest improvements. Current LLMs can't do it, but perhaps another approach can. I don't think this is a big leap. Might be 10 years, might be 100. It's not unreasonable to think there is a lot of cruft and optimization to be had in our current tech stacks allowing for significant improvement. The AI can start looking at every source file from the lowest driver all the way up to the UI. It can also start looking at hardware designs and build chips dedicated to the functions it needs to perform. You only need to be as smart as a human to achieve this. You can rely on a "quantitative" approach because even human level AI brains don't need to sleep or eat or live. They just work on your problems 24/7 and can you have have as many as you can manufacture and power. I think having "qualitatively" superiority is a little easier actually because with a large enough database the AI has perfect recall and all of the worlds data at its fingertips. No human can do that.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
__MatrixMan__ 2y ago
They'll be scouring the internet for signs of thoughtcrime and jamming the sources they find. Also, automating those sectors that tend to produce whistleblowers. Because if they don't do the bad thing first, some bogeyman might become better at it than they are. Same logic that gave us the Manhattan project.
j45 2y ago
If it's for the government.. Bureaucratic processes?
exe34 2y ago
corporate handouts.
torified 2y ago
All that illegal wiretapping has to be analyzed somehow!
- nostradumbasp 2y ago
  How else will we uncover what we could expose torified too so they flip out and lose their job so agent jackson can take their jerb by reading their hackernews comments and knowing all of the media they've been exposed too during the day? Or try to make them have a heart attack by making a digital twin of them which synchronizes their sentiment, smart watch health data, and man-in-the-middling all of their digital conversations with creepy GenAI? Our adversaries might be doing it, so line up some fresh specimens. Come on bruh it's the future, you gotta think bigger.
chrishtr 2y ago
It's not government owned and operated. It's just on government land.

Provided all this centralized governement owned and run infra somehow gets built, what it would be actually doing to warrant the expense ? I am quite skeptical in this regard. :P

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

Terr_ 2y ago

Well, it would funnel tax dollars to already-established companies that don't need the subsidies. :p I have some sympathy for certain domestic capabilities (e.g. chip fabrication) but this "AI" bubble cross-infecting government policy is frustrating to watch.

phkahler 2y ago
>> Well, it would funnel tax dollars to already-established companies that don't need the subsidies. Yeah it sounded like a gift to nVidia. My prediction was that nVidia would ride the quantum wave by offering systems to simulate quantum computers with huge classical ones. They would do that by asking the government to fund such systems for "quantum algorithm research" since nobody really knows what to use QC for yet. This move primes that relationship using the current AI hype boom. So look for their quantum simulation-optimized chips in the near future. GPU, gpgpu, crypto, ray tracing, AI, quantum. nvidia is a master at milking dollars from tech fads.
JohnBooty 2y ago
It's hard to know how much this effort is about the government's belief in AI, and how much of it is about supporting the technology sector while using AI as a convenient buzzword. I think, though, that even if LLMs turn out to be a dead-end and don't progress much further... there are a lot of benefits here. One of the US's key strategic advantages is brain drain. We are one of the world's premier destinations for highly educated, highly skilled people from other countries. Their loss, our gain. There are of course myriad other countries where they could go, many of them more attractive than the US in various ways. Every country in the world is in a sense competing for this talent.
- cuteboy19 2y ago
  zero sum thinking has already infected public policy. turns out liberals can be just as "they took our jobs" as the redneck conservative. the real fear should be that people wouldnt want to come. already chinese intl students are break even when considering US vs going back to china. who wants to deal with all the bureaucracy and hatred when they could just go back and work for deepseek.
- shafyy 2y ago
  > * One of the US's key strategic advantages is brain drain.* I think the brain drain has peaked. Many people here in Europe don't think much of the US anymore, while 20-30 years ago it was THE place to go. I'm sure many countries like India and China, for whom the US still might be somewhat attractive, are going to go the way of Europeans.
  - cadamsdotcom 2y ago
    It’d be worth comparing your opinion to data, so you aren’t stuck with an unverified opinion.
  - JohnBooty 2y ago
    Regardless of how the US ranks in terms of brain drain, and how that rank is trending, it's clearly an area where the government wants to compete.
  - int_19h 2y ago
    As of this year, the US employment-based green card backlog for citizens of India is such that they're currently still processing applications filed in 2019 for the top EB-1 category (that's "Extraordinary People, Outstanding Researchers and Professors, and Multinational Executives and Managers"), and 2012 for mere PhDs. So the numbers would have to go down a lot for US to even notice. Speaking as an immigrant myself, so long as there's still noticeable wealth disparity, people will make the jump. The other aspect that makes US specifically especially attractive compared to some others is its family immigration policy - people generally want their family to join them eventually, and US has an unusually large allotment for that compared to many other countries.

ericmay 2y ago

What would the cost be of not undertaking these actions?

JohnBooty 2y ago
In the micro, nothing. We'd have a bunch of extra cash we can spend on other stuff. In the macro? The overall goal is keeping the US competitive in technology. Both in terms of producing/controlling IP as well as (perhaps even more crucially) remaining a premier destination for technologists from all over the world. The cost of not achieving that goal is... incalculable, but large. Whether or not this is a good way to achieve that goal is of course up for debate.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  We have no extra cash. We are so far in debt as it is we'll never get out.
- int_19h 2y ago
  It's not just the economic cost that is a consideration here. The military applications of AI are potentially staggering (as are the associated ethical concerns - but, as with any military tech, once someone does it and the advantages become clear, others will inevitably follow). No major power player is going to want to risk getting drastically outpaced by its primary competitors. Note that this isn't a hypothetical, either. Israel is already using AI to pick targets. Ukraine is already using AI-controlled drones to beat jamming. There's no indication that either one intends to stop anytime soon, which tells the others that the tech is working for this purpose.

FrustratedMonky 2y ago

Building Skynet of course. There is already AI flying F-16's. AI targeting systems. AI surveillance I mean, sky's the limit.

jay_kyburz 2y ago

I suspect we are not in a race for a better LLM, but a race to the singularity. "I. J. Good's intelligence explosion model of 1965, an upgradable intelligent agent could eventually enter a positive feedback loop of self-improvement cycles, each successive; and more intelligent generation appearing more and more rapidly, causing a rapid increase ("explosion") in intelligence which would ultimately result in a powerful superintelligence, qualitatively far surpassing all human intelligence.[4]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity

Terr_ 2y ago
> I suspect we are not in a race for a better LLM, but a race to the singularity. We are in the race for a better LLM*, deliberately disguised as a race to the singularity, because that's what gets investor-dollars and fame. * And anything else close enough to ride on their hype-coattails
nradov 2y ago
Belief in a coming technological singularity is completely unscientific and based on zero hard evidence. It is essentially a secular religion with computers cast as deities to either usher in a new utopia or exterminate us all. Surely I am coming quickly, sayeth the Lord.
AnimalMuppet 2y ago
Is there any reason whatsoever that I should think that I. J. Good's intelligence explosion model of 1965 corresponds to reality?
- jay_kyburz 2y ago
  When I step through the logic in my mind, seems likely. Lets make the leap of faith that we can improve our AIs to actually understand code that it's reading and can suggest improvements. Current LLMs can't do it, but perhaps another approach can. I don't think this is a big leap. Might be 10 years, might be 100. It's not unreasonable to think there is a lot of cruft and optimization to be had in our current tech stacks allowing for significant improvement. The AI can start looking at every source file from the lowest driver all the way up to the UI. It can also start looking at hardware designs and build chips dedicated to the functions it needs to perform. You only need to be as smart as a human to achieve this. You can rely on a "quantitative" approach because even human level AI brains don't need to sleep or eat or live. They just work on your problems 24/7 and can you have have as many as you can manufacture and power. I think having "qualitatively" superiority is a little easier actually because with a large enough database the AI has perfect recall and all of the worlds data at its fingertips. No human can do that.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

__MatrixMan__ 2y ago

They'll be scouring the internet for signs of thoughtcrime and jamming the sources they find. Also, automating those sectors that tend to produce whistleblowers. Because if they don't do the bad thing first, some bogeyman might become better at it than they are. Same logic that gave us the Manhattan project.

j45 2y ago

If it's for the government.. Bureaucratic processes?

exe34 2y ago

corporate handouts.

torified 2y ago

All that illegal wiretapping has to be analyzed somehow!

nostradumbasp 2y ago
How else will we uncover what we could expose torified too so they flip out and lose their job so agent jackson can take their jerb by reading their hackernews comments and knowing all of the media they've been exposed too during the day? Or try to make them have a heart attack by making a digital twin of them which synchronizes their sentiment, smart watch health data, and man-in-the-middling all of their digital conversations with creepy GenAI? Our adversaries might be doing it, so line up some fresh specimens. Come on bruh it's the future, you gotta think bigger.

chrishtr 2y ago

It's not government owned and operated. It's just on government land.