7 ms·

All these things are apparently valued at trillions of dollars these days. Where's the trillions, or hundreds of billions worth in improved quality of life? Wha

• JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
  > Where's the trillions, or hundreds of billions worth in improved quality of life? I think these IPOs are going to mint tens of thousands of new millionaires or something. That, in turn, will generate massive tax windfalls for all levels of government. > other than the ability to produce more crap? This is a big "other than." (And to be clear, the jury is still out on whether AI will let us produce more in the long run.)
  • nixon_why69 5mo ago
    It's not a pyramid scheme, it's a reverse funnel.
  • avmich 5mo ago
    If jury is still out on positivity, long term, of AI, I'd really like to see arguments for that. Historically all - almost? - technical improvements were net positive; even some blunders had upside. AI is dangerous, yes, but e.g. fission was developed for the bomb, and now powers significant numbers of households worldwide - the tech less than 90 years old.
    • JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
      > all - almost? - technical improvements were net positive I think it’s very likely AI is a technical improvement. But there is still a chance it’s a small improvement being massively overbuilt.
  • cloudfudge 5mo ago
    "Tens of thousands of new millionaires" sounds like a disaster tbh.
• Avicebron 5mo ago
  Raven, Raven.. that's for those who can borrow against that to know and you to likely never find out. What you thought your life would improve? Didn't you hear, wages are only increasing, why don't you invest some of that sweet cash into @JumpCrissCross' fund, it'll be alright. What were you going to do with healthcare anyway?
  • treyd 5mo ago
    Meanwhile the federal minimum wage is still $7.25/hr.
    • fakeBeerDrinker 5mo ago
      And how many earn this? Around 1% of hourly employees…if that. Not what I’d be concerned with right now.
      • georgemcbay 5mo ago
        Why shouldn't we be concerned about it? A society should be judged by how it treats those at the bottom and by that metric our current society is pretty awful.
        • SubmarineClub 5mo ago
          ? Who are you to say they deserve more than that.
          • harimau777 5mo ago
            Who are you to say that they don't?
          • georgemcbay 5mo ago
            My own lived experience tells me they deserve more. The vast majority of people I've known who have worked for minimum wage were much harder workers and frankly just much better humans (who happened to have less privileged starts in life) than the vast majority of people I've known who are financially secure. But even if you don't believe they deserve more inherently, it would still be dumb for us to continue to let income inequality grow at the ridiculous rates it has been over the last 40 years. This pattern never turns out well for society.
• throwawa1 5mo ago
  I think this is the story of tech in general. In my life, I've seen 3 really big steps down for the middle class: 2001, 2008 and then covid. Basic necessities are expensive today - people point to high GDP but what I see is high prices and poverty. And Tech, we've built a dystopian surveillance state.
  • JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
    > Basic necessities are expensive There is going to be a well-deserved shitshow when these IPO proceeds start hitting real estate markets.
    • sailfast 5mo ago
      A shitshow for whom? I see it as extremely unlikely for the United States of America to not allow individuals to purchase things for whatever money they can pull together. The only answer is to make it unacceptable socially, more costly economically (taxes, etc), or the third option which involves pitchforks (perhaps that also falls under "unacceptable socially") that I hope we can avoid at all costs. (is this the show you mention?) Feels like folks used to understand the balance a bit better - but I think I made that up. This next governance cycle is going to be a trust-busting, wealth-confiscating one I think.
      • JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
        > shitshow for whom? I think there will be a tremendous political opportunity in the next 6 months to capitalize on rage in cities against new tech wealth driving up housing costs.
        • throwawa1 5mo ago
          Housing prices aren't going up. They peaked in late 2022. Boomers are a huge generation, with homes millennials and Gen Z can't afford to buy. And they are smaller generations.
• giancarlostoro 5mo ago
  In terms of SpaceX (the space portion of it) they've produced the cheapest way to get any payload into space. If you pay anybody else, you will overpay drastically depending on who you want to take your payload into space. In terms of AI, we've seen even here on HN everything from mathematical problems that remaind unsolved, being solved, mathematical proofs being used to disprove theories, heck we even learned more about alzheimers, new antibiotics, precision targeting in oncology, using AI to flag healthcare anomalies in imaging. The benefits are easy to miss, but they're snowballing into place, there's definitely an explosion of useless crap, but you have to look for the real things and you will come to find, that AI is giving us things we otherwise either might not have discovered or wouldn't have within our lifetimes.
  • cowmix 5mo ago
    You'll overpay -- but not by trillions.
    • waterheater 5mo ago
      On one order, correct, but it's still on the order of hundreds of millions to billions. Also, keep in mind that a stock price discounts expected future cash flows. Is it likely that SpaceX will have a near-peer competitor within a few years? No, it's not, and that market share is being priced-in.
      • hattmall 5mo ago
        Is it likely that SpaceX will have actual reasonable demand? Their major customer is Starlink. How legitimately confident are we in the numbers with regard to price reduction vs creative accounting to offload costs to Starlink and subsidize the launches to appear to offer huge cost reductions? If there exists sufficient demand for the product of space launches then it's probably reasonable to expect their to be a near-peer competitor soon, but that's only if SpaceX were to be profitable, which it isn't, even with the subsidization by Starlink on the order of many billions.
        • 5mo ago
• olalonde 5mo ago
  Comments like these make me feel like we're living in different worlds. I use LLMs multiple times a day and they've significantly improved my quality of life. They are also steadily becoming more useful over time (e.g. now solving math problems).
  • HerbManic 5mo ago
    I suppose many do live in different worlds. I haven't found anything out of LLM's that has improved my life. It was a fun little toy but could never find a use case. But clearly, your mileage varies greatly from mine. That's cool. I just personally don't the use in more when what I think many need is less. But that comes from essentially this point of view - “Better than a thousand hollow words is one word that brings peace.” ― Buddha
  • deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  • thuuuomas 5mo ago
    Do you use Grok multiple times per day? Is Grok solving Erdos problems?
    • worik 5mo ago
      > Do you use Grok multiple times per day? No body who has a choice is using Grok > Is Grok solving Erdos problems? Mēh! At a slower rate than models a fraction of the price
      • minton 5mo ago
        > No body who has a choice is using Grok The Grok app had over 100 million downloads in 2025, over 60 million active users, and generated $350 million in revenue. That’s a lot of people being forced to use it.
        • brazukadev 5mo ago
          Grok revenue is like 100x smaller than xai estimated capex? Doesn't look great.
• chasd00 5mo ago
  Try to keep perspective, these valuations are just functions of the stock market the end result of some spreadsheet. They have nothing to do with quality of life. Why would you relate those two things in the first place?
  • mindwok 5mo ago
    They are fundamentally different, but people desire they be aligned. The public expects the economy to producing higher quality of life for us, otherwise what is it doing? And for whom? But whether it actually does so is a function of other things. That gap seems bigger than usual right now with AI and tech eating the whole economy.
    • 1over137 5mo ago
      Yes, exactly. Many people fail to ask themselves: what is the economy for?
  • tim333 5mo ago
    In the long run stock prices are justified by sales which happen by producing things people want.
• wahern 5mo ago
  Nominal global financial wealth is about $350 trillion. If you include real estate global nominal wealth is about $600 trillion. A good portion of that[1] is what alot of people might call fake money--valuation inflation, etc. And global wealth, even just financial wealth, isn't quite as mobile across borders as one might assume. So marshalling a trillion dollars stateside is gonna make at least some moderate waves. Still, in the grand, global scheme of things a trillion dollars is a rounding error. A trillion isn't what it used to be, and there's trillions to be had even without any realized productivity gains from AI. [1] I'm no financial analyst, but judging by the last few recessions and the overall trajectory over the past 30 years, I'd ballpark at most about 1/3 of that to go up in smoke if we had a severe downturn tomorrow. It's not all fake money. The whole world has industrialized over the past 30 years on a scale that is still unfathomable for most people today.
• coliveira 5mo ago
  The stock market is just a game that rich people use to manipulate money. It is not a reflection of the real world. Consider for example Google, one of the companies with highest valuation in the market. If Google stops working now, the only problem we'll have is getting a few minutes back of our time. Nobody will have big issues in life because one cannot find a web page, view more ads, and watch silly videos! However they will swear that Google is the most important company in the world to justify the money people throw at it. I won't even go to Meta, which is like celebrating that people are using crack cocaine...
  • bdangubic 5mo ago
    you can replace “google” with every company that exists or has ever existed so no sure what the purpose of your comment is unless you are pitching abolishing the stock market. google is what they are because they make shitton of money and will continue to do so (more and more) into foreseeable future. that is stock market, always has been, always will be
    • whateveracct 5mo ago
      if kroger shut its doors, my life would be much worse
      • SJC_Hacker 5mo ago
        If Kroger shut its doors, you can search for a different grocery store … maybe even on Google …
  • ivankelly 5mo ago
    If everyone using Gmail permanently lost access to their gmail there’d be massive problems
• notepad0x90 5mo ago
  this sounds like a reddit comment too much. why would trillions of dollars improve your quality of life. a bunch of companies get investments from a bunch of VCs who took out loans... and that means your quality of life should improve? And what's more crap exactly? it feels like your grasping at straws to take one set of things and associate them with others. yeah, lots of terrible products out there, lots of enshittification, lots of topics of discussion there. But AI and GPUs are being used in such a diverse way it is impossible to have one opinion on it all like how you're trying to. I'm not even disagreeing (or agreeing with you), I'm just saying that's a lazy comment to make. if these companies making profits without paying taxes, that's a voter problem (not even politics, just people being shitty voters, self not excluded). For everyone else who might think they have a better formed opinion on this topic, I only ask that you apply the same level of passion to how the US national debt is now 120% of the GDP. The government is fighting wars and printing money, devaluing your wealth, and indebting your country to previously unseen levels. At least the banks and VCs are using their money (unless they get a bail out again), not your actual tax money, and the tax money and wealth of generations of Americans. You have a president literally stealing billions of dollars in broad day light from literally you.
• s1artibartfast 5mo ago
  Quality of life doesnt matter. What matters is the choices people make to spend their money on. This is what drives profits. If you are upset about people spending their extra productivity and labor hours on poision and mental laxitives, i would mostly agree. This is a failure of culture to adapt to distratcions and shiny objects
• wyager 5mo ago
  > Where's the trillions, or hundreds of billions worth in improved quality of life? Starlink and Claude are both awesome and huge QoL improvements for me!
• __MatrixMan__ 5mo ago
  It would be very nice if we had a system where the money was backed by some kind of consensus about quality of life. But what we have has more to do with compulsion. The more dollars there are, the more deeply in debt we are. If these were interpersonal debts where we all owe the dollars to each other such that they go away when whatever promise is eventually kept, that would be a tight knit society. But instead we're all indebted to the banks, so instead we have a lot of collateral at risk, and a lot of uncertainty about whether it's a stable arrangement. If there isn't enough money to satisfy the asking prices set by the owners of these abstractions, then we can always go deeper into debt until there is. Or we could have a debt jubilee and let the prices re-settle to something more in tune with reality.
• chii 5mo ago
  High valuations and other people's wealth doesn't need to improve _your_ individual quality of life - just the quality of life of someone who's willing to pay and the participants of that system.
• karel-3d 5mo ago
  spacex makes starlink, which did improve quality of life. it is also allowing connectivity to drones in armed conflicts.
• jesterson 5mo ago
  Rest assured altman and other guys have improved their quality life significantly.
• throwaway2037 5mo ago
  Starlink a generational leap in Internet connectivity. The Starlink satellite constellation is over 10,000 satellites. It is hard to comprehend. Also, they will soon add mobile phone service. That will be yet another generational leap. I watched a (sadly) short YouTube video about the SpaceX factory in Seattle (area) that produces one Starlink satellite per day. That is incredibly fast. That alone sounds like a generational leap in satellite manufacturing. (Oh yeah, and they have a somewhat less technically impressive factory in Texas that produces millions of Starlink antennas per year.) Final sad note about Starlink: It is helping Ukraine to win the war. It makes their mid- and long-range drones almost impossible to jam. (Most short-range drones use fibre optics these days to avoid jamming.)
  • edhelas 5mo ago
    Yes, the help Ukraine... by not connecting Crimea by choice.
    • throwaway2037 5mo ago
      Why is this comment downvoted? It is factually correct. The reason why Ukraine has such an upper hand in the last 3-6 months with mid- to long-range drones is access to Starlink, even within Russian territory. Russia does not have the same, so it is harder to navigate their one way attack drones.
  • Havoc 5mo ago
    Id be more enthusiastic if I could buy starlink at a valuation based on starlink. Instead we’re getting a shitsandwich of a combo stock with a pile of regulatory manipulation on top
• killerstorm 5mo ago
  1. Valuation is based on the estimate of future profits. It has absolutely nothing to do with what have already been delivered. It's not a prize, it's an estimate. 2. There's a potential to optimize a lot of economic activity in there.
• vagab0nd 5mo ago
  Isn't that the market cap of the company? That doesn't mean the company creates trillions of dollars of value. It just means the number of shares times the last per share trading price is trillions of dollars.
  • flumpcakes 5mo ago
    One would assume that the "market cap" of the company is equivalent to it's *worth*. Asking how Anthropic is worth $1tn+ is a valid question when it doesn't do much, apart from the promise of making a large fraction of the world unemployed and the rest under the thumb of unethical American tech supremacy. It's arguably built on the largest intellectual property theft in the history of mankind. That's generally what people worry about. Whether that's "true" or not I guess is how you frame your world view.
• Rover222 5mo ago
  Why don't you start a company that fixes problems you care about, then?
• mschuster91 5mo ago
  > Where's the trillions, or hundreds of billions worth in improved quality of life? Stored in pension funds in the hope that by the time the current working class goes to pension age, there is enough left.