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America is now one big bet on AI
- saubeidl 1y agohttps://archive.ph/7nWV1 https://archive.ph/7nWV1
- xiphias2 1y agoWhile it's all true, I think it's exciting that there's a country that's not afraid of betting when all the signs point to AI being accerelated. USA already bet on software when it let China overtake manufacturing. Now the only worse thing to betting on AI would be slowing it down inside USA.
- righthand 1y agoThis is something I don’t get. The general cost of living is sky rocketing, largely due to this push and some of the population thinks there is prosperity for all on the otherside of the meat processing machine we’re pushing everyone toward. Groceries are going to get more expensive. Every dollar we spend on over building AI infrastructure is a dollar we never get back. We could use this money for other things such as healthcare and fixing our broken parts of our education system. Instead people are getting ancy to chat with a summarized version of all the garbage on the internet.
- ModernMech 1y agoWhat's not to get? Groceries, healthcare, and education aren't expensive for them to afford, why would they want to invest their money and time in making those things more affordable for poor people? Better to invest all their resources making a robot slave army. Then it doesn't matter how unaffordable anything is to the poors, they can just die. Win win.
- jebarker 1y ago> The general cost of living is sky rocketing, largely due to this push How are cost of living increases tied to AI investment?
- righthand 1y agoThis is an intentionally disingenuous question right? Where do you think the tax money being given away to these huge datacenters is going? What downstream effects does major increase to limited consumer services and goods do across the board?
- jebarker 1y agoNo, it was a genuine question. Sorry if I’m asking basic questions, but I actually don’t find your questions as responses help make things any clearer.
- Nasrudith 1y agoThere are only two ways it could: either power cost increases which only make up a small portion of cost of living or somehow believing it responsible for inflation. But the latter doesn't make any sense, especially as they believe the money spent to be 'lost'.
- righthand 1y agoHow does that not make sense? Inflation is lost money from a consumer viewpoint.
- seanmcdirmid 1y agoMoney spent on AI is taking GPUs and software engineers off the market, as well as the energy needed to drive AI data centers. AI doesn’t need food, well, beyond the SWEs, it shouldn’t be inflating food at all. The only thing I could think of is AI investment drawing away agriculture investment or something. Or maybe AI data centers replacing farmland?
- gooob 1y agothe idea is to use AI to build super productive farms and greenhouses, improve the capability to do that in urban areas, automated and super efficient transportation. but it's not just AI doing all that, it's someone who wants to start a business using AI himself to figure out how to best start up a greenhouse in his community and setup the tech infra needed including the API for people to be able to view available produce, estimates on availability, initiate trades, etc. (this greenhouse thing is just one example). another example could be someone wants to build an ecosystem monitoring station to monitor the nearby ravine (pollution levels with rainfall and other events etc.) and air quality over time. this is just a small datapoint but if people all over the place build their own ecosystem/weather monitoring things using basic electronics ordered from the internet and all plug them in to a standard observability software system then that could provide some pretty awesome outcomes including figuring the best way to clean polluted water (because some of the places will surely have implemented varying methods of sanitizing their own water).
- righthand 1y agoOkay this is even more pie-in-the-sky. You can build productive greenhouses today, we don’t need AI to summarize the internet to figure out how to do it. There are no secrets hidden in the generative token tea-leaves that reveals better greenhouses. Urban farming will never be profitable or sustainable in a dense urban center. It’s been done. “Standard observability software” whatever that is also does not require AI to build. We need 10GW to calculate rainfall for who? What benefit over how we currently calculate rainfall? This rainfall is hallucinated through summarization?
- gooob 1y agoi can't come up with all the examples. i'm not a farming or ecology expert. so thanks for the information. do some thinking
- etblg 1y ago> the idea is to use AI to build super productive farms and greenhouses How? What are the mechanisms in which AI will lead to farms and greenhouses being more productive? How will AI improve the existing automation that already exists for the farming sector, and has existed for a hundred years?
- simianwords 1y ago> The general cost of living is sky rocketing there is no evidence of this
- anal_reactor 1y agoThe collective west enjoyed a period of prosperity because it had massive technological advantage. The Spanish had guns, native Americans had sticks. The British had steam engines, the Indians had cows. The Americans had computers, the soviets had abascus. Now the Chinese have AI, we have if statements. Losing the AI race is an existential threat to our civilization.
- righthand 1y agoYet no one can detail how it’s an existential threat. No real usecases for larger society from AI models but we must make everyone’s life worse so we don’t lose the race to nowhere.
- SideburnsOfDoom 1y ago> The collective west enjoyed a period of prosperity because it had massive technological advantage. The Spanish had guns, as it was said in 1898 by Hilaire Belloc: "Whatever happens, we have got. The Maxim gun, and they have not." In that case it was the British who had just slaughtered a lot of Matabele in Africa. > Losing the AI race is an existential threat to our civilization. Lol. If winning it means a sea of hallucinated "factual" text and deepfake videos, then that death of truth is also a threat. Being rid of that is no threat at all.
- glitchc 1y agoChina's also betting on AI. There's massive domestic effort towards model parity and custom ICs.
- madamelic 1y agoAdditionally, to my knowledge, China is also doing significantly better on energy production and clean energy at that versus the US. In the US, we are terrified of nuclear and the administration is trying to make economically worse energy production the norm because they are stuck in the past. If there is an AI race, I have zero doubt that China WILL win simply because of energy production and the government's willingness to pour money in. It's a foregone conclusion at this point in my opinion because the time to build new energy sources was yesterday. The only way I see China losing is: major debt crisis or getting into a war. There is no chance, in my opinion, that the US federal government will get off their butts suddenly to fund AI or infrastructure because they are so busy worrying about less than 1% of the population who don't affect them but that they find 'icky'. Woke isn't destroying the US, it's the people who are busy ' "judging their neighbors' porches" meanwhile the neighborhood is burning down.
- dgfitz 1y ago> If there is an AI race, I have zero doubt that China WILL win. A race to what? What does the winner get? What does the loser get? What does 'winning' even fucking mean? My statistical next token predictor is better than your statistical next token predictor?
- seanmcdirmid 1y agoUsing AI in commercial applications to gain a strategic advantage over your competitors. China will use AI to do things that the USA will shudder at, they already have automated ports that are 10 times more efficient than ours, and we can’t even think about upgrading because our longshoremen unions are too strong.
- dgfitz 1y ago
- afavour 1y ago> all the signs point to AI being accerelated Feels like a feedback loop. It's exciting that we're all in on AI because we're all in on AI!
- kevmo314 1y agoWhat is teamwork if not a feedback loop?
- somenameforme 1y agoWhat signs point to any sort of acceleration besides in spending? Most major companies have released new versions in the past year, but if people were asked to blindly determine whether they were using the newer or older version, I suspect the results would be close to random. It seems to me that the difference between versions is sharply decreasing in a way that seems to be asymptotic, similar to what happens in literally every other domain with neural networks. I also think it's clear that the difference between the various choices is also diminishing. Aside from certain manually designed idiosyncrasies (like ChatGPT's obsequiousness), I think people assessing which model they're using would also be mostly random. Somewhat surprisingly, even in the 'LLM arena' [1], where you get to compare output side by side, the difference between models is approaching statistical 0! [1] - https://huggingface.co/spaces/lmarena-ai/lmarena-leaderboard https://huggingface.co/spaces/lmarena-ai/lmarena-leaderboard
- twothreeone 1y agoMainly growing energy demand of AI deployments leading to capacity increases becoming the bottleneck. The key challenge is going to be scaling up energy production in the US.
- rustyconover 1y agoJust remember TINA - "There Is No Alternative." But come on, there should be an alternative. Without diversification, we’re just setting ourselves up for an economic rug pull the moment the AI growth hits the law of large numbers and people realize its not the magic they think it is. Economically? Don’t worry it’ll just be another “oops, your 401k lost a bit, here’s a bailout” moment. AKA, stimulus with sprinkles. So yeah... keep buying those dips girls and boys.
- singleshot_ 1y ago> people realize its not the magic they think it is 2023
- tylerchilds 1y agoMy disaster recovery plan is circus. Call me if you have an act. Book us if you need to rebuild community.
- usrnm 1y agoYou're literally going to compete with the whole United States government, and you call this a recovery plan?
- tylerchilds 1y agoYeah, circuses are how the world never ends. I’m not competing with the government, but providing a complimentary service to any.
- 1234letshaveatw 1y agoSloppy opinion piece. Stock market increases are bad because it makes rich people happy, but select US sectors are lagging behind Europe which is somehow also bad. Low immigration resulting in a labor force squeeze is bad, but this is offset by reduced demand because of AI, which is, you guessed it, also bad lol
- UltraSane 1y ago[flagged]
- nonethewiser 1y agoand consumers of domestic products
- PeterHolzwarth 1y agoThis is deeply, deeply untrue. There is a direct relationship between low unemployment and high inflation.
- UltraSane 1y agoDoes inflation rise faster than wages? In the US with unionization so suppressed labor has no leverage.
- smt88 1y agoWe saw under Biden that wages for most people outpaced price inflation, but "most" isn't "all," and it was disproportionately working out well for people who were wealthier. Regardless, people loathe inflation even if their wages keep up with it. It makes them feel like their career progress is being robbed from them.
- PeterHolzwarth 1y agoLow unemployment means there is more competition among employers for workers. This competition takes the form of higher wages. Higher wages means the price of what is produced goes up: inflation. This is why central banks try to keep unemployment down to, but very definitely not below, anywhere from 2-4 percent, depending on the country. This is pretty much an economic law of nature, so to speak.
- woeirua 1y agoWe'll know next year if it's not the right move. If we get another wave of incremental upgrades at best then AI will clearly be in a bubble and it's time to look for the exits. If we keep getting major advances then any country _not_ going all in on AI will be left behind.
- afavour 1y ago"Just one more year bro, I promise, this is different, just one more year and it'll change everything bro"
- soupfordummies 1y agoHave we gotten major advancements in the last ~year? Not being facetious, genuinely asking. I don't see it from my end but then again I don't really use much more than ChatGPT a couple times a week.
- adcoleman6 1y agoI think the major advancements are outside the textbox in this last year: video generation, robotic models like Helix, world models, Genie 3. Even for text, Deepseek R1 was this year, and agentic and coding AI has made progress on length/complexity of tasks. The rise of MoE architecture in the open/local model space has made it possible to run useful models locally on hardware under like $2K, something I didn’t expect for a long time.
- senordevnyc 1y agoIn the last ~year, we’ve gotten reasoning models, coding agents, much better multimodal capabilities, usable video models, huge context windows, huge decreases in cost, tons of advances in open source models, and I’m sure a lot more I’m not thinking of. I use AI both to code and to deliver value to my (non-tech) customers, and the last year has been awesome for me.
- jcheng 1y agoThe difference in coding ability between then and now is pretty huge. And a year ago o1 hadn’t been introduced yet, whereas now the “reasoning” technique is pretty widespread. Not sure if you’re counting things built on top of the models but if so, coding agents have also come a long way since a year ago.
- Oras 1y ago> No nation has seen an immigration boom-bust cycle near the scale of the one roiling America. Net immigration nearly quadrupled after 2020 to peak at well over 3mn in 2023, but the backlash led by President Donald Trump sent that figure into freefall. This year only around 400,000 net new arrivals are expected, and that could be the trend in the coming years. If true, that's <1% of the population?
- trod1234 1y agoThere aren't enough jobs because we are stuck in a money-printing loop thanks to the baby boomers. The dynamics and debasement floor prevent new entrants from entering the market while regulation cripples those trying to keep things going. Concentrating and sieving the money-supply into non-productive companies on a moonshot bet to eliminate capital formation and one party that forms the basis for the economic cycle. Demographics are destiny. Its pretty clear that we'll be taking the accelerated japan route, and the worst of that with japan is the fact that we bailed it out, no ones around to bail us out. We basically have a generation of children who are now the old, who spurned and wasted the resources given to them in poor stewardship, and who failed to pass them and the advantaged environment on to their children, instead choosing tyrannical to disadvantage their children through control and clutching power to the last of their days and all the destruction that comes thereafter. A fall of empire. They clutched at the resources so heavily and disadvantaged their own children to the point where significantly less people were in a position to actually be having children themselves, both because of the intolerable and torturous acts which have become so commonplace today but also the resources required to keep the old alive significantly outweighed the resources to foster children. There is an opportunity cost for everything. A Deflationary depopulation is almost inevitable.
- bad_haircut72 1y agoIts not a bubble because the economy isnt actually about trade any more, its about power. The people in power now know that control over technology is the name of the game. It doesnt have to have a return on investment, it has to enable control of public opinion and eventually, robots.
- findthewords 1y agoIn the 1900s we called "control over technology" something else, I believe it was "seizing the means of production".
- nonethewiser 1y agoThere is a big difference between nationalizing industry and regulating it.
- zaik 1y agoWhat if the power gained by AI models is less than expected?
- __MatrixMan__ 1y agoThen we might have to solve our education problems after all.
- kerabatsos 1y agoHa! I wouldn’t count on it.
- __MatrixMan__ 1y agoWhy not? If you're trying to compete with some country who can do things that you can't and there's nobody to be found who knows how to do the thing, isn't teaching your people the obvious thing to do? The cost of not doing so will be cumulative, so sooner or later the ROI will be there. It's just a matter of how bad things need to get first. That is, unless there's something else we've got going for us that we can fall back on, but I'm not sure what that thing might be--we've been busy dismantling contenders for the job lately.
- softwaredoug 1y agoThere is other emerging tech we could be investing in that other economies are doubling-down on. But the Administration has made green energy harder for American companies. And a lot of health tech too is tougher under the current administration. Tarrifs, affordability, etc also hit hard on small businesses, making growth there tough.
- bgwalter 1y agoThat is the tragic part. This administration ran on a platform of bringing back the real economy and manufacturing. Now they fuel the Bitcoin and "AI" bubbles, which are nonessential and non-tangibles. The GDP increases are fake. Mining Bitcoin produces nothing, in fact the money supply should not be increased to match the fake GDP increase. The same is true for "AI".
- wing-_-nuts 1y ago>Now they fuel the Bitcoin and "AI" bubbles, which are nonessential and non-tangibles. The current boom has basically had nothing to do with any government efforts. It is booming in spite of the current administration. This is all private industry.
- bgwalter 1y agoThe administration tried to sneak in a ban on "AI" regulation into the "Big Beautiful Bill", but fortunately failed last minute. The administration facilitates "AI" exports: https://www.iaps.ai/research/promoting-the-stack-trumps-ai-export-incentive-program-explained https://www.iaps.ai/research/promoting-the-stack-trumps-ai-e... It removes environmental regulations: https://apnews.com/article/national-environmental-policy-act-ai-data-centers-a1efa3f9a8b2022ded585fd8f1524cce https://apnews.com/article/national-environmental-policy-act... For the Nvidia bubble, it has recently lifted export regulations to China. It facilitates meetings of "Open" "AI" with world leaders and almost certainly exerts pressure with tariffs etc. behind the scenes to force these deals. It keeps talking up "AI", which helps the bubble.
- GOD_Over_Djinn 1y ago
- NHQ 1y agoA.I. is a clever way to export electricity.
- add-sub-mul-div 1y agoIt's one big bet from the top 0.1% on displacing a vast amount of labor. They don't care what the vehicle is, it just happens to be AI.
- shubhamjain 1y ago> Foreigners poured a record $290bn into US stocks in the second quarter and now own about 30 per cent of the market — the highest share in post-second world war history. Europeans and Canadians have been boycotting American goods but continue buying US stocks in bulk — especially the tech giants. I fail to find any plausible explanation for this other than the fact that yes, it is a bubble. Tesla, a car company facing declining sales, an executive exodus, and a CEO who’s more of a liability, is almost a $1.5T company now. An absurd P/E of 259. Sure, P/E isn't the most realiable metric. But, for a company with declining sales, and onslaught from Chinese competitors, a P/E of anything above 50 is absolutely ludicrous. Do people actually buy into the absurdity of humanoid robots and robotaxis? "Be fearful when everyone is greedy." I’ve cashed out of U.S. stocks, and I think it's wise thing to do when craze is at its peak.
- reustle 1y ago> Do people actually buy into the absurdity of humanoid robots and robotaxis? Have you ever taken a Waymo? You see them on every street in SF now.
- dghlsakjg 1y agoI've never even seen a Waymo and I haven't left North America for half a decade. Popular in SF does not mean inevitable everyhwere. It remains to be seen whether robotaxis can 1. scale outside of certain cities 2. make a profit given the apparent teams of actual human remote drivers that robotaxi companies employ to get their robots out of trouble. I would love to see it, but the lack of speed and momentum points to it having some serious growing pains.
- seanmcdirmid 1y agoI rode a few in SF and can’t wait for them to come to Seattle. They don’t use actual human remote drivers, and the support person I spoke to when I had an issue had a Filipino accent, so I’m not sure they were even in the usa (although that totally could have been California also). I don’t think they wound need that many people anyways to do live support. Waymo is definitely being cautious, but the cities they move into seem to all be success stories.
- lifestyleguru 1y agoI'm afraid the only potential brain in vicinity of your computer is yours. I'm also salty I didn't buy nvidia.
- cs702 1y agoKey quote: > The hundreds of billions of dollars companies are investing in AI now account for an astonishing 40 per cent share of US GDP growth this year. In other words, investment in AI is a massive private-sector stimulus program, powering economic growth. Questions for which no one knows the answer include: * Will these AI investments earn a positive rate of return in the aggregate? * Without these investments on AI and their second-order economic effects, would the US economy be growing? * Are the higher-order effects of AI investments temporary, or can they become self-sustaining (for example, via creation of new jobs and industries)?
- rtkwe 1y ago> Without these investments on AI and their second-order economic effects, would the US economy be growing? It's only 40% of the growth so.. yes.
- trenchpilgrim 1y agoThat 40% is only the investment in companies making AI products. It does not include "second order" effects.
- cs702 1y agoNot necessarily. It depends on the second-order economic effects of these investments in AI. For example, companies that build new giant data centers for AI pay salaries to thousands of temporary construction workers who then spend some of it on retail goods and services. That additional spending by the workers is a second-order effect, and it shows up on GDP growth. There are higher-order effects too, but they are more diffuse.
- rtkwe 1y agoGiven how much of the investment goes into the stuff inside of the data center and then the power to run it both of which don't really go out to the US economy so much as the builders' wages I feel pretty safe in saying it's not the remaining 60% of GDP growth.
- kibwen 1y ago"The Depression was preceded by a period of industrial growth and social development known as the "Roaring Twenties". Much of the profit generated by the boom was invested in speculation, such as on the stock market, contributing to growing wealth inequality. Banks were subject to minimal regulation, resulting in loose lending and widespread debt. By 1929, declining spending had led to reductions in manufacturing output and rising unemployment. Share values continued to rise until the October 1929 crash, after which the slide continued until July 1932, accompanied by a loss of confidence in the financial system. By 1933, the U.S. unemployment rate had risen to 25%, about one-third of farmers had lost their land, and 9,000 of its 25,000 banks had gone out of business. President Herbert Hoover was unwilling to intervene heavily in the economy, and in 1930 he signed the Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act, which worsened the Depression. In the 1932 presidential election, Hoover was defeated by Franklin D. Roosevelt, who from 1933 pursued a set of expansive New Deal programs in order to provide relief and create jobs. In Germany, which depended heavily on U.S. loans, the crisis caused unemployment to rise to nearly 30% and fueled political extremism, paving the way for Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party to rise to power in 1933. Between 1929 and 1932, worldwide gross domestic product (GDP) fell by an estimated 15%; in the U.S., the Depression resulted in a 30% contraction in GDP." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression
- noosphr 1y agoI read these articles about how much of a suckers bet AI is and start feeling existential dread about the coming market crash. Then I remember I just did a weeks worth of work in a few hours and feel a lot better about my prospects at least. AI won't replace people, but it will make people who know how to use it vastly more efficient. In the same way that a tractor made a farmer more efficient.
- lm28469 1y agoThe fact that LLMs are somewhat useful isn't really the subject here. The problem is that to be worth what they're evaluated at they'd need to be thousands of times more useful than they are. They can be useful, and extremely overvaluated at the same time, which still ends up in a crash. All the actors are bleeding money right now, would you spend $500 a month on an llm ? $1000 ? how many people would ? You also don't account for the infinite flow of slop being generated 100x faster than any productive work: "Deloitte to pay money back to Albanese government after using AI in $440,000 report", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45500485 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45500485 How much money, resource and time is spent on generating/hosting/discussing/cleaning up this slop ? How much of social distrust is created by LLM generated sociopolitcal discussions online ? &c.
- ses1984 1y agoDid you pay for that AI to work for you? How much would you be willing to pay for it? Tractors undoubtedly increase farmer efficiency, the evidence is clear to see, even when accounting for all costs necessary to design and produce tractors. There’s even room for farmers and tractor manufacturers to generate economic profit. That remains to be seen of AI.
- tombert 1y agoSample size of one, but I pay $20 a month for ChatGPT and I feel I get much more than that of value from it. I would honestly probably be willing to pay $75-100 for ChatGPT if it came down to it. I feel it makes some tedious jobs a lot less horrible and in turn pays for itself.
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- DebtDeflation 1y agoWe're in this weird situation where: 1) the average American is heavily dependent on equities in their 401k for retirement, 2) so the stock market has to go up, 3) but the stock market is already at record valuations and it's difficult to see how forecasted growth levels justify the current valuation let alone an increased valuation, 4) without revenue growth, the only way for companies to sustain EPS growth is massive reduction in costs, 5) labor is the primary cost for most companies, 6) in come the AI folks telling CEOs that "AI can replace most of their workforce", 7) and so as the article states, everyone goes all in and "America is one big bet on AI" That leaves us with only 2 possibilities - AI either replaces a significant part of the workforce or it does not. If it does not, the bubble bursts and the economy crashes. If it does, the economy still crashes because consumer spending is 70% of GDP and if the majority of the population becomes unemployed then spending collapses. I don't think people have realized the latter (or at least they're deliberately choosing to ignore it). That said, I believe the former is more likely (AI not replacing the majority of the workforce in the near future). Either way, buckle up.
- realusername 1y agoI have the exact same opinion. And I should add that all these companies "firing people to replace them by AI" are in reality just firing people because the economy isn't great, of course that sounds way worse for investors if they told the truth.
- danans 1y ago> firing people to replace them by AI" are in reality just firing people because the economy isn't great More concretely, they can use this situation to squeeze more productivity out of those who remain employed. With the consumer tapped out of discretionary time, attention and spending power, the remaining way to grow profits is to lower overhead.
- sdenton4 1y agoOption 3, nothing changes: people (and institutions) still have income they need to put /somewhere/, and continue putting it in 401ks and index funds because that's the system. Stonks continue to go up, completely unmoored from any behavior in the actual world.
- tombert 1y agoIt is a little frustrating how we as a society have just decided that corporations don’t need to make money, and indeed can just ponzi their way indefinitely as long as they use some vague “tech” branding. I think this “rapid growth at all costs” is going to bite us, and I think it is possible that it’s going to bite us even more than the .Com bubble or the 2008 crash. I really hope I am wrong, but I don’t see we can expect companies to keep growing if we don’t require them to be profitable.
- lm28469 1y ago> It is a little frustrating how we as a society have just decided that corporations don’t need to make money Making money was already a problem, what we should strive for is creating value. You can make big bucks selling cigarettes, leaded gas or PFAS riddled products... the money is made but you're still a net negative for society
- rkomorn 1y agoIt's too bad we also can't really agree on what value is. A decade or two ago, I'd have told you the companies that are building new technologies (smartphones, streaming services, etc) were creating value. I don't think that at all anymore, even retroactively.
- logicchains 1y ago>It's too bad we also can't really agree on what value is. This is fortunately a problem that economics has already solved: value is what people are willing to pay for. Any other definition involves imposing someone's own subjective judgement on what's valuable.
- rkomorn 1y agoI think that totally discards the comment I was responding to. Needless to say, I don't agree with your definition or your idea that it's solved.
- simonsarris 1y agoIf we build out a bunch of data center infrastructure or (better yet) energy/power plant related infrastructure, and AI doesn't pan out, is it really so bad? I think its a bit like trains in the 1800s. Plenty of overspending, plenty of speculation that went bust, but in a lot of ways the country was better for all the madness.
- maxglute 1y agoBorderline all or nothing bet. The distribution of AI capex investment and burnt/stranded assets is not like past bubbles. Railroad boom. Most of spending moving heart to build out rail network that increase CONUS rail by +400%. US freight backbone. 50+ year infra. Upgrade signal etc and improve network capacity. Dotcom Boom. Most of spending in moving earth to build out ~150m of fiber. Agnostic pipes for backbone of internet. Also 50+ year infra. Upgrade switches at nodes to increase network capacity. AI boom. Most of investment going into chips with <5 year deprecation cycle. Datacenters <10 years, heavily specialized for AI use, i.e. power/cooling makes it inefficient/not economic for general compute. Looking like ~20% goes to eletricfication capex (if it gets built at all). That's the stranded asset i.e. consolation prize, ~10% (generous) increase in US electrification, which isn't nothing, but also not substantial. Also consider Tulip mania. Tulips die in a few weeks. All value gone. TLDR potentially bulk of AI investment is closer to tulips in terms of deprecated / stranded assets past medium term i.e. <10 years, than rail or fiber.
- ffsm8 1y agoThe most insidious thing about this bet isn't that it fails... It's that it could succeed. Loosing the bet will only mean lots of ultra rich people have wasted tons of money - winning it means the average person, wherever they're American, Chinese, Russian or European (or wherever else you wanna list) will be fucked... And the ultra rich will be the only beneficiaries. But nothing makes me think AGI is achievable through LLMs alone, so I guess I don't mind that bet too much. It's just a question of time when it fails - and the failure will likely not be completely catastrophic, as there is actual value in LLMs, albeit much less then the market is valuing it.
- Jackson__ 1y agoA big bet, with none of the mandatory electricity infrastructure figured out. Maybe better to call it a pipedream.
- lynnryann 1y ago[dead]
- Mary900 1y ago[flagged]