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Do you want the US to "win" AI?
- sph 5mo agoThat investment chart is hilarious and terrifying. You Americans better hope this whole AI thing pans out.
- defrost 5mo agoIt's not a chart of investment by patriotic US citizens seeking to better the country such that the country "wins" .. more like a chart of military and motte and bailey investments made by individual feuding Norman clans each seeking to be the last castle standing and in control of all the throttle points and gates across the country and ideally the world.
- roenxi 5mo agoThis is a good time to reflect on the etymology of "Banana Republic" [0]. I suspect most people don't see fruit companies as a major threat, but they'll kill and ravage to get people cheap bananas. This idea that the morals of the people making investments is in any way relevant is a bit of a misframe. Investors are capable of any evil, the default position is of surprise if one of them is investing out of some sense of responsibility. The point of the economic system is it channels some of the most ghoulish and horrible people to do good as an accidental side effect of their mad rush to wealth and power. Works really well, on average everyone wins. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_republic#Etymology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_republic#Etymology
- defrost 5mo agoDid you enjoy reading Cabbages and Kings ? I'd say that we might both agree that the US economy is currently heavily dependent on the circular jerking of numbers between AI boosters .. remains to be seen what the average person gets to eat from slops.
- titzer 5mo ago> The point of the economic system is it channels some of the most ghoulish and horrible people to do good as an accidental side effect of their mad rush to wealth and power. Works really well, on average everyone wins. When there is a functioning justice system that enforces the law, rather than a corrupt oligarchy/kleptocracy/kakistocracy.
- tim333 5mo agoSlightly off topic but the Vice banana documentary is a surprisingly interesting 15 minutes https://youtu.be/2Bm5NWCMlPo https://youtu.be/2Bm5NWCMlPo Some on banana republics and also much other stuff.
- sph 5mo agoIf you prefer reading, I remember enjoying this article a lot on the Cavendish banana ages ago: https://www.damninteresting.com/the-unfortunate-sex-life-of-the-banana/ https://www.damninteresting.com/the-unfortunate-sex-life-of-...
- keybored 5mo ago> The point of the economic system is it channels some of the most ghoulish and horrible people to do good as an accidental side effect of their mad rush to wealth and power. Works really well, on average everyone wins. Now imagine how much money you have to invest in order to convince people that this weird theory makes sense.
- thrance 5mo ago> Works really well, on average everyone wins. How can you claim that just after speaking of Banana Republics? These clearly show that free markets alone are terrible for the vast majority of people.
- janpeuker 5mo agoThe chart is also misleading because it paints investment as morally good but ignores most of this investment goes into closed source APIs while the rest of the world does open weights, and does so way more efficiently (spending less money) due to export controls
- chrsw 5mo agoI had an indignant gasp reflex when he called Cursor "random AI bubble crap" and I'm just a user.
- rogermungo 5mo agoI suppose I'd rather the US wins AI as opposed to, say, China
- sunaurus 5mo agoRealistically I am starting to think China would be more responsible with it than the US.
- CharlieDigital 5mo agoThe US no longer feels like a place where the rule of law applies. For whatever you want to fault China with (human rights, personal freedoms, etc.), there is at least the facade of rule of law. US is masks off and not even a thin veneer that rule of law applies any more.
- davidgf 5mo agoIf you're an US citizen, I would understand why. If you're from elsewhere, looking at how both countries deal with foreign policies, perhaps the answer requires some serious reflection.
- cyanydeez 5mo agoYeah, there's nothing about the current America I want to "win" AI; nor the people leading it. I'm sure China has the same type of leadership, but they've yet to threaten to nuke a whole civilization. Obviously, we want to be in the middle between what America represents and China, and that's currently Europe.
- dartharva 5mo agoChina is fundamentally anti-elite. It is the whole principle the PRC was founded on. China does not have "the same type of leadership" at all. It has well-raised technocratic cadres who compete within the system, not above it unlike the US.
- oulipo2 5mo agoAI society is going to be: - you, chained on your sofa, watching ads "tailored-made by AI for you" - weaponized robots roaming the streets to ensure everyone is "at work" and not "at leisure activities" - "no need to vote", of course, because "AI already knows what's good for you"...
- cyanydeez 5mo agoNah, the weaponized robots don't need to ensure you're working. They need to ensure you're either watching advertisements or working! Obviously, if you're a child you can't work, so you need to be advertising fodder.
- mindcrime 5mo ago> - you, chained on your sofa, watching ads "tailored-made by AI for you" Blipverts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blipvert https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blipvert
- azangru 5mo ago> weaponized robots roaming the streets to ensure everyone is "at work" and not "at leisure activities" But I thought everyone was going to lose their jobs...
- wongarsu 5mo agoNo, you see, if you lose your job you are poor. And in America, the poor don't deserve leisure. And any work they do has to be as punishing as possible, no matter how little effect that cruelty has on the bottom line If there's no work to do, we can always invent more work. We just have to figure out who pays for it. Enjoying life is for those "communist" Europeans /s
- happytoexplain 5mo agoHe praises a person for careful, nuanced takes, but then links to their writing where the first paragraph contains the sentence, "the human experience of art appreciation is indifferent to the source."
- AntiUSAbah 5mo agoAfter showing us that these people are willing to vote for Trump twice? Having people like Peter Thiel over there who thinks daemons exist? With Elon Musk having all social security numbers and no one cares about that? Or his blant disruption of democracy? In china people disappear, true, but at least with China you know what you get. With USA its schizophrenia every 4 years and it wouldnt matter to me if suddenly my air travels are no longer possible due to Trump or i have to pay a lot more due to market disruptions.
- comrade1234 5mo agoI assure you, daemons do exist. They've possessed my linux server.
- Diti 5mo agoThey live in the Dust gathered in your server!
- comrade1234 5mo agoI usually don't even know what ai I'm using at any one time. It's just a choice in my IDE between a bunch of different models, and I switch models every now and then when the response time slows down too much (usually when the Americans start waking up). I have no loyalty to any one product.
- deadbabe 5mo agoI don’t want the US to win anything ever again. They are a net negative in this world, obsessed with short term profits. Countries like China with long term objectives are better.
- throw42356 5mo agoAmerica, China and Russia are all same.
- AntiUSAbah 5mo agoI don't agree. China took a very rich business man and told him to stop showing his richness and start doing more for china. China has a real plan for renewable energy and pushing through it. China is smarter because it doesn't allow some people to vote for people like Trump and its smarter than russia because it is less motivated by one persons personal agenda.
- quater321 5mo agoyou don't really need to explain that to someone with common sense. If someone says a communist countrie should be the top of the world, they are obviously part of the communist party or simply re*rded.
- defrost 5mo ago> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes. ~ Hacker News Guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- AntiUSAbah 5mo agoI'm clarifying my viewpoint to a comment from someone else to have a proper discussion. It could lead to a good discussion, it often doesn't.
- throwaway-11-1 5mo ago
- fcantournet 5mo agoDon't mean to make Americans sad but "the US" doesn't win AI, a few oligarchs win AI (if US companies end up winning). The question is not US v China, it's Peter Thiel and Elon Musk vs literally anything else (that would be clearly better).
- WA 5mo agoThe question who will benefit from wealth generated by AI is never clearly answered. Or it's hand-waved away with some productivity gains mumbo jumbo (that never result in less work, just more, because everybody loads up on AI tools) or the good old trickle down lie.
- mindcrime 5mo ago> Do you want the US to "win" AI? I don't want any one particular country, or organization, to "win" AI. I want AI capabilities to remain diffuse and spread out, so that everybody has access to approximately equal levels of AI. If anything, you might say that I want "Open Source to win AI".
- oceansky 5mo agoThat's the last thing big tech companies want. Maybe Meta being the odd exception with Llama.
- awestroke 5mo agoMeta is not in the AI game any more
- oceansky 5mo agoJust saw Zuckerberg post from July 2025 saying they are going to be "careful" with what they release.
- pjc50 5mo agoDidn't they just announce they were going to be surveilling all their employees screens and keystrokes for AI training? Is that just for the love of the game rather than as part of a product?
- undeveloper 5mo ago[flagged]
- AntiUSAbah 5mo agoUrgh wtf :| Unfortunate i can't find the source though: "He had a video on Youtube where he proudly gloated about how he voted for Trump in not one but two elections, how happy he is that he can now openly talk about it, how its a fresh start for US, how catastrophic Harris would have been. Did he take down the video because of embarrassment or did he fear negative impact on his sales?" So i asked him and he voted for Trump only in 2016 so at least this source is not true.
- undeveloper 5mo agohttps://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2024/11/03/high-trust-society.html https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2024/11/03/high-...
- hiddencost 5mo agoThe brain rot required to call the EA people evil while praising the guy that did agree to give the Pentagon autonomous weapons...
- pjc50 5mo agoThe "effective altruism" people speedran the philosophical problem that good intentions do not necessarily produce good outcomes, far faster than any Communist revolution.
- UncleMeat 5mo agoThe EA people who give money directly to poor people are great. The EA people who decided to spend oodles of money working on AI ostensibly to prevent an insane thought experiment and then converted that effort into a for-profit corporation while insisting that actually giving money to the poor is bad because you'll have greater future utility by spending it on AI are worthy of scorn.
- zozbot234 5mo ago> The EA people who decided to spend oodles of money working on AI ostensibly to prevent an insane thought experiment and then converted that effort into a for-profit corporation while insisting that actually giving money to the poor is bad because you'll have greater future utility by spending it on AI are worthy of scorn. That was the e/acc folks though. Different acronym, even though they were a spinoff from the original EA folks.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- AntiUSAbah 5mo agoWhat i find interesting is the other article of geohot regarding AGI. It seems that its financial possible for a handful of companies to learn everything. It doesn't matter how we solve 'work': It can be AGI, it can also be the already existing massive global scale Reinforcement Loop we all feed through using ChatGPT and co, it could be to compute RL or by buying experts teaching this knowledge to some AI system. Companies also start to put the 'human' part into the agentic layer. A while back anyone was somehow a benefit even if they did some kind of shitty work. Today i don't think this is true anymore. I would prefer to manage some avg ai than a shitty person. This will and is already disrupting human lives.
- quater321 5mo ago[flagged]
- feverzsj 5mo agoIt's like the largest scam in history. No one will win it except some scammers.
- PunchyHamster 5mo agoThere is no "winning". It already proliferates. All US is doing is taking brunt of the cost of developing it
- trvz 5mo agoThe brunt cost is taken by the public, whose intellectual property has been expropriated. After all, the worth of our combined data would be at least the sum of the worth of the entire AI industry.
- perarneng 5mo agoIt would be interesting to see that chart per capita
- pu_pe 5mo agoThe US single-handedly dominating AI at this point probably means a handful of tech overlords in charge of a surveillance society which depends on AI for everything, with some vague promises that everyone else will get some sort of allowance if they feel benevolent enough. For all existential risks discussed about ASI or whatever, having an oligarchy in complete control of this tech is maybe even worse. So, I guess we all have to hope that more money does not necessarily lead to a "victory" here.
- keybored 5mo ago> By all accounts, I should be a neofeudalist. I should love what’s happening. The AI I dreamed of my whole life is being built, engineer-type strongmen are sort of in charge, and people are saying out loud the things I have just thought. You might argue that I like it and I’m just not happy with my seat at the table. I ask myself a lot if this is true, like what if I was Elon. Would I be enjoying it then from that position? > Of course it’s impossible to know for sure, but I think I really wouldn’t. Even the ideal version, industrial megaprojects at hyperhuman scale while constantly being out over your skis with leverage sounds hellish. It’s not a society I want to live in, regardless of my seat. I would much prefer someone like this design society, with careful nuanced takes about technology. Who writes like this? Hehe, my self-analysis says that I should be neofeudalist but I against the apparent odds am not. Congrats? > It is coming, and the anti AI people would do poorly to bury their heads in the sand. Doing that won’t stop AI from being built. The good world is where everyone has AI, and not as a revokable privilege through an API, but through hard possession. Pay attention to who is releasing AI to the world and who has released nothing, then think about who the good guys are. Who wants to follow these off the cuff rants? Oh right, the very reasonable move-to-Mars idea. But anyway, with regards to AI I hope the good tech bros win. The tech bros from the same milieu where you openly muse about whether you are a neofeudalist, Church of Singularity Adherent, Rationalist, or whatever other Silicon Valley mind-degeneracy? No thanks I don’t want any tech bro overlords. Bad or supposed good. And people wonder why there is a partial backlash to AI?
- yomismoaqui 5mo agoI want open weights models to win AI, don't care if Satan himself does the training and finetuning.
- dd8601fn 5mo agoThat would be nice. Kinda seems unlikely though, doesn’t it? The way they’re made is so resource intensive it kinda feels like saying “the best free and open source nuclear powered aircraft carrier.” We get whatever the massively well funded companies are inclined to give us.
- aggakake 5mo agoIt's weird to see geohot rooting against Elon considering his involvement in the early days following Twitter's acquisition.
- pjc50 5mo agoReal error of judgement in not being able to see when Elon went overtly bad. Of course, the libertarian classic: he was only harming other people.
- sph 5mo agoI dislike Elon and all his fanboys, but I recognize maturity when one is able to move past their mistakes and wrong assumptions, so good on Geohot for that. It's weird to expect anyone never to make a wrong step in their life, though I can see where this kind of armchair activism tends to be very popular (i.e. on social media)
- motbus3 5mo agoI think this is a late realisation that people are having that none of those guys are good guys. People passionate by science see rockets to go to mars, politicians see missiles and spy satellites. I have a conviction that this was the intention all along. I really hope to be wrong about of this and there is a super good guy who will step up and stop all this nonsense. I agree that the world where AI is a tool that everybody should have real access too should be the way, but history shows that power never came without oppression. Majority of people took all the risks as paranoia and/or do not have enough understanding. The moment those tools became slightly better, they started to being used against the wills of everyone who helped building them. We should stop believing that those folks in charge are good guys or simply doing mistakes. They are doing exactly what they have been working on for 10+ more years.
- silexia 5mo agoThe author doesn't really address the question in the title. Read "Superintelligence", we are basically racing towards the extinction of our species by creating a self generating alien intelligence that will quickly grow and escape any controls we attempt to place on it.
- api 5mo agoThis assumes two things: that AI will not asymptote due to limits in things like training data or compute, and that a superintelligence would necessarily cause our extinction. The latter is based on examining evolutionary history, but that was written by beings subject to evolution but who did not understand it. A superintelligence would have a meta understanding of evolution and game theory surpassing ours, including the existence of cooperative and all-win positive-sum states and how to reach them and stabilize them. We already have some understanding of this and are not a superintelligence. And with that, I just added that as a prompt to the training data. Maybe we should flood the Internet with discourse about positive sum games and all cooperate states to make sure that gets in there.
- politelemon 5mo agoThe contents of this post, in some parts, is somewhat alien to me. The need to pick a side, root for someone, and figure out a winner. It's very sports team like and detracts from the goals, effects and outcomes of the topic itself. It is entirely possible that there are no good and bad sides, nor is there any need for someone to win any kind of made up trophy.
- yencabulator 5mo agoIt does start with > By all accounts, I should be a neofeudalist. That kind of language is a neofeudalist cliche, "us vs them" while conveniently not mentioning the billionaire overclass.
- Jamesbeam 5mo agoIf the US wins AI like they won the Iran war, hell yeah. Glad to see they are not tired of winning yet. I wouldn’t know what to do with all those wins.
- aworks 5mo agoI don't have any comment on the post but that chart is fascinating. Both because the US bar is comparatively way off to the right. But also what's up in say, Belgium re: AI? My old (US) company's AI expert was in Belgium for reasons but the country being on the leader board surprises me.
- CodeArtisan 5mo agoBelgium could be in the top5 in the next report chart due to Google alone. https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/infrastructure-and-cloud/global-network/google-ai-infrastructure-investment-belgium/ https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/infrastructure-and-clo...
- insane_dreamer 5mo agoAnyone "winning" AI means that most of us will "lose".
- josefritzishere 5mo agoI define Winning AI as burying it in the back yard like Quibi and Netscape.
- cindyllm 5mo ago[dead]
- guzfip 5mo ago> The AI I dreamed of my whole life is being built, engineer-type strongmen are sort of in charge Not sure the sort of pedophilic drug addicts running Silicon Valley companies really evoke the idea of an “engineer type strongman”. But I understand that colloquially “strongman” most means “paranoid loudmouth”. Maybe this was the case when the researchers themselves had a small level of clout/influence, but I’ve seen more product acquisition announcements recently from AI than deep technical improvements.
- theturtle 5mo ago[dead]