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“The AI capital influx means that mega-projects no longer seem outlandishly expensive. This is good for the world!” Is it? This whole piece just reads of mega
by bix6 1y ago
“The AI capital influx means that mega-projects no longer seem outlandishly expensive. This is good for the world!”
Is it? This whole piece just reads of mega funds and giga corps throwing ridiculous cash for pay to win. Nothing new there.
We can’t train more people? I didn’t know Universities were suddenly producing waaaay less talent and that intelligence fell off a cliff.
Things have gone parabolic! It’s giga mega VC time!! Adios early stage, we’re doing $200M Series Seed pre revenue! Mission aligned! Giga power law!
This is just M2 expansion and wealth concentration. Plus a total disregard for 99% of employees. The 1000000x engineer can just do everyone else’s job and the gigachad VCs will back them from seed to exit (who even exits anymore, just hyper scale your way to Google a la Windsurf)!
- anovikov 1y agoIronically, there's no M2 expansion going on since Covid days and M2 to GDP is back to what it was pre-Covid and overall didn't even increase much at all even since GFC. It's only 1.5x of what it was at the bottom in 1997 when cost of capital was much higher than today. I think this concern is misplaced.
- sfblah 1y agoM2 is the wrong statistic for sure, but the thrust of GP's comment is accurate, IMO. Fed intervention has not remotely been removed from the economy. The "big beautiful bill" probably just amounts to another round of it (fiscal excess will lead to a crisis which will force a monetary bailout).
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- immibis 1y agoWe should be using some kind of weighted total of all the things that get treated as money. When a company makes a deal in exchange for shares or something, those shares are being used as money and must be included in any currency-neutral calculation of the money supply. However, most shares don't flow like money. You also have cryptos, which flow more than shares but less than government bonds and cash. It could be that the total of all money has expanded, even as the US dollar specifically stabilizes and slightly contracts.
- bix6 1y agoYeah I just threw out M2 because it's easily understood / harped on but it's certainly much more complicated than that.
- pj_mukh 1y agoI think the author should've clarified that this is purely a conversation about the platform plays. There will be 100's of thousands of companies on the application layer, and mini-platform plays that will have your run-of-the-mill new grad or 1x engineer. Everything else is just executives doing a bit of dance for their investors ala "We won't need employees anymore!"
- LightBug1 1y agoOptimistic take. What's the say the application layer won't be dominated by the big players as they hoover up anything remotely promising. Leaving the crumbs on the mini-platform .. ala Apple App Store ... Sorry, I'm pessimistic as recent experience is one of hyper concentration of ideas, capital, talent, everything.
- bix6 1y agoO great so just the most important companies that are inherently monopolistic gate keepers. It's worked out so well with all these current platforms totally not restricting access and abusing everyone else with rent seeking and other anti competitive behaviors.
- systemvoltage 1y ago[flagged]
- pringk02 1y agoCan you write off everything popular with the normie zeitgeist?
- muzani 1y agoI would say if there is a decline in society, the normies are wrong. And if there's steady improvement in quality of life, then the normie zeitgeist is correct. But there's always a delay in these things, at least a generation.
- pringk02 1y agoHow would we be able to measure decline?
- gnz11 1y agoWhat if QoL improves for some but goes down for others?
- muzani 1y agoDemocracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.
- johnecheck 1y agoThe full quote is less bleak. Democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. ~Winston Churchill
- yifanl 1y agoOh well in the case, we should just wait and see and die.
- blitzar 1y agoThere is something immoral about a company saying "we are going to spend $100bn this year on building a LLM" The icing on the cake is when all their competitors say "so will we".
- Nasrudith 1y agoAll this time complaining about companies not investing in research and development for future prosperity and now when they actually do so it is suddenly outright immoral?
- suddenlybananas 1y agoBurning a pile of money is not investing in research.
- blitzar 1y ago> complaining about companies not investing in research and development Glancing over the last few decades of tax returns it looks like they are claiming a lot of tax credits for R&D, so much so that if someone had a closer look they might find some Fraud, Waste or Abuse.
- gameman144 1y agoWasteful R&D is still R&D, the company just presumably doesn't get a return on it. If the company does get a return, then the R&D wasn't wasteful. And regardless, the tax code doesn't and shouldn't (IMO) differentiate there, to encourage companies to take risks.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- hlynurd 1y agoI'm really struggling with seeing how this is immoral.
- 1y ago
- graeme 1y ago>We can’t train more people? I didn’t know Universities were suddenly producing waaaay less talent and that intelligence fell off a cliff. University enrolment is actually set to sharply decline. It's called the Demographic Cliff: https://www.highereddive.com/news/demographic-cliff-colleges-closures-retention-attendance-diversity-wiche/743636/ https://www.highereddive.com/news/demographic-cliff-colleges...
- AnimalMuppet 1y agoOff topic, but: Supply and demand says that, if university enrollment drops sharply, the price of a university education should go down. That sounds like good news to me.
- ewuhic 1y agoIn a homo economicus world. They will jack the prices up for the remaining few.
- thijson 1y agoHere in the USA, education at some schools is kind of a luxury good. When the price goes up, the demand increases.
- solatic 1y agoUniversity enrollment doesn't drop sharply evenly across all universities. The lowest-desirability universities will go bust while the Ivy League continues to have hyper-competitive admissions and yearly tuition increases that outpace inflation.
- bix6 1y agoExcept it won't because a degree is a gate and people will pay whatever is demanded of them for it. Numbers go up never down.
- tom_m 1y agoBubbles do what bubbles do.
- BurningFrog 1y agoIf AI is important, speeding up development of it is good. > We can’t train more people? Of course people are being trained at Universities. Outside of The Matrix, it takes a few years for that to complete.
- UncleOxidant 1y agoNuclear weapons were/are important, speeding up the development of nuclear weapons doesn't seem like it would be good, though.
- BurningFrog 1y agoThat's literally what the Manhattan Project was! I think that was good, but not everyone agrees.
- SquirrelOnFire 1y agoSpeed of development of something important isn't necessarily good. Humans are bad at absorbing a lot of change at once and it takes time to recognize and mitigate second-order effects. There's plenty of benefit to the systems that disruptors operate within (society) to not moving as fast as possible... of course since our economic systems don't factor in externalities, we've instead turned all of society into a commons.
- nradov 1y agoPeople said the same thing about the printing press. When you look across human history it's tough to make a moral case that slowing down technology development was ever a net positive. We can't reliably predict or prevent the problems anyway and it's pointless to even try. Just move forward and deal with the actual problems (which are usually different from the expected problems) as they arise.
- yoyohello13 1y agoI don’t really disagree with you. I think there really is no stopping progress. For better or worse, it’s happening and there ain’t no slowing down. But, I wish people would shut up about the printing press in these discussions already. AI disrupting literally everyone’s job at the same time is not the same as a printing technology disrupting the very niche profession of scribe. Or electric lamps putting some lamp lighters out of work.
- marcosdumay 1y ago> This is just M2 expansion and wealth concentration. I just want to point that there's no scientific law that says those two must move together. A government very often needs to print money, and it's important to keep in mind that there's no physical requirement that this money immediately must go to rich people. A government can decide to send it to poor people exactly just as easily as to rich. All the laws forbidding that are of the legal kind.
- hammock 1y agoAll true of course, with a clarification: even if all the newly printed money is put in the hands of the poor, the resultant inflation raises the prices of hard assets which are overwhelmingly held by the rich (fueling wealth inequality)
- marcosdumay 1y agoYou can say that they fail to dilute the value of hard assets, yes. So they don't really "punish" the extra-rich. But they only inflate prices by the amount of money you print, you can't make the poor poorer by giving them money.
- fc417fc802 1y agoThat depends on your metric and time frame. Purchasing parity and relative wealth could certainly be reduced beyond the immediate term.
- v5v3 1y agoWhat does M2 expansion mean?
- kjkjadksj 1y agoFwiw universities are producing less talent. They have been getting hammered with budget shortfalls thanks to Trump cutting research funding and this manifests into programs accepting fewer students and professors being able to fund fewer students.
- bix6 1y agoSure but that's new as of a few months. The university I went to still accepts the same number of students per year as it has for many years. Those numbers don't change much without significant land / program expansion which is certainly being cut now.
- SJC_Hacker 1y agoThey are producing less talent as industry defines it. It is because a large percentage of the people who could teach them anything useful (to industry) are actually employed by industry, and don't want to work in academia. Another complication is academia simply does not have the resources to remotely compete with the likes of Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, etc.
- almosthere 1y agoif you're targetting $200M, then I guess each round is to hire one or two engineers for one year lol I'm curious if you're one of these AI engineers getting 100m, do you quibble over the health insurance? I mean at that point you can fully fund any operation you need and whatever long term care you need for 50 years easily.
- bix6 1y ago"Yes sorry I'm turning down your $100M because I need 2 parking spots for my sidecar" :p
- ploxiln 1y ago> mega funds and giga corps throwing ridiculous cash for pay to win > This is just M2 expansion and wealth concentration I actually think "throwing ridiculous cash" _reduces_ the wealth concentration, particularly if a chunk of it is developer talent bidding war. This is money that had been concentrated, being distributed. These over-paid developers pay for goods or services from other people (and pay income taxes!). Money spent on datacenters also ends up paying people building and maintaining the data-centers, people working in the chip and server component factories, people developing those chips, etc etc. Perhaps a big chunk ends up with Jensen Huang and investors in NVidia, but still, much is spent on the rest of the economy along the way. I don't feel bad about rich companies and people blowing their money on expensive stuff, that distributing the wealth. Be more worried of wealthy companies/people who are very efficient with their spending ...
- UncleOxidant 1y ago> I actually think "throwing ridiculous cash" _reduces_ the wealth concentration, particularly if a chunk of it is developer talent bidding war. Very few developers are benefiting from this "talent bidding war". Many more developers are being let go as companies decide to plow more of their money into GPUs instead of paying developers.
- bmitc 1y agoI agree with your sentiment. > This is just M2 expansion What is "M2 expansion"?
- xandrius 1y agoOff-topic but I'd totally read a blog from you where you use this pent-up bitterness against the current system to present bs nobody really talks about. It's quite refreshing. Just for your information.