3 ms·

> undeniable, massive productivity gains. Take any stock index, remove AI stocks, what do you see? That's right! Nothing... So where is all the productivity g

> undeniable, massive productivity gains. Take any stock index, remove AI stocks, what do you see? That's right! Nothing... So where is all the productivity going? Where is the value? Where are the massive unemployment stats or the millions of new startups making big $$$?

moritzwarhier 5mo ago
Writing about AI, destroying the planet for data centers, there's a lot of money to be made. That being said, AI seems kind of miraculous sometimes. Similar to cars. So enticing that we make everything else in the world worse in order to maximize the profit, make it indispensable, subsidize it, and make the dependency on it irreversible. And it's not even something to blame individual people for. Driving away from all the other cars to spend a weekend feels like freedom. Using AI to answer a question feels like a "bicycle for the mind". But in fact it's more like a car. It requires massive resources and creates perverse incentives, and the result is ineffective and corrupt. Both cars and AI are amazing technology and extremely useful, but using them is not an individual responsibility. It requires societal subsidy.
- MSFT_Edging 5mo ago
  Vonnegut said in his last living work that the greatest addiction modern people face is the drug of cheap oil. We got addicted to the convenience and overuse, and have started a mass extinction event because of it. The perverse incentives will come for us all.
  - moritzwarhier 5mo ago
    It is exactly this thought, in the form of this sentence, that could replace almost all of my comments in this thread. It feels depressing, but I think the same. When thinking about the larger world, it becomes increasingly hard to ignore. And of course it is not new. There were "doomers" already in the midst of the 20th century, but it doesn't mean that they were wrong.
    - MSFT_Edging 5mo ago
      There's nothing the selfish hate more than hearing their "choices" have a net negative effect. They hate the "doomers", because it puts a damper on their little side-effect free party. Doomers are more often correct because it only requires bare minimum pattern recognition. It requires more effort to defend an action that will certainly be different this time. AI, Crypto, car-centric urban planning, cardboard suburbs in a barren field with bright green grass. You tell someone that their selfish choice to drive a pickup truck only to haul something maybe one time a year, they shit their pants. They can't stand it, they start personal attacks and ask "what about you??". They seem to know it's wasteful, damaging, etc but they deserve it for some reason.
- nfw2 5mo ago
  The environmental impact of answering a question on an obscure topic with ai model is less than an the impact of answering the question with an hour-long google search hunting for references or a drive to the public library.
  - toasty228 5mo ago
    It's like saying if we didn't have cheap commercial flights people would travel by foot anyways and would consume more resources for food &co. than the plane would consume in fuel... 80% of generative AI queries wouldn't even exist as google searches.
    - moritzwarhier 5mo ago
      I do plenty of AI queries, both pragmatic ones and some for entertainment: witnessing talktotransformer was mind-bending already at the time! And since then, I've tried frontier models, local, coding agents, and use plenty of them on the regular. I awe at the capabilites of generative AI. I also enjoy sitting in or driving a car. I did not want to make a moral argument, unless you consider each and every form of utilitarianism as moralism.
    - nfw2 5mo ago
      To be clear, your position here is that insurmountable barriers to information is the preferable state of the world? One claim of the parent comment was that AI is ineffective. For the purpose of finding answers to questions, it is more resource-efficient than the alternatives, and, to your point, capable of answering questions that were impossible to answer via other means before. In what way is that ineffective?
      - deleted 5mo ago
        [deleted]
      - 16bitvoid 5mo ago
        No, they're saying that 80% of genai queries (aka anything sent to an LLM; I won't speak on the validity of the percentage) are not things someone would search on Google. It's things like trial-and-error vibecoding, openclaw-like agentic loops, talking to chatgpt like it's a person, etc. In other words, most genai queries are not for getting "obscure information" or even getting direct information at all. It's about either getting it to do something you don't want to do yourself, or using it as a replacement for someone else (junior dev, therapist, friend, significant other, etc).
- bloomca 5mo ago
  I agree with your message but not sure about the conclusion. Cars themselves are commodified luxury available (in the US pretty much required) to everyone, and they do need to be subsidized, both in terms of infrastructure and the lifestyle they require. But with AI what is the exact price? My understanding is that R&D is extremely expensive, but running non-SOTA models is not that bad. We are getting pretty close to models which can be useful locally in many applications. Or do you mean that at scale running them locally is not possible and hence the infrastructure price is in data centers, which will be expensive to maintain and scale for demand?
  - moritzwarhier 5mo ago
    Thanks for asking an open question about my point. First, because I initially failed to answer your more closed questions (this paragraph is edited in): > We are getting pretty close to models which can be useful locally in many applications. Or do you mean that at scale running them locally is not possible and hence the infrastructure price is in data centers, which will be expensive to maintain and scale for demand? I don't think there's a way around making the best of AI capabilities with minimum price and maximum control, and I'd agree this is met by on-prem data centers, just not in a rationally targeted way. Back to my original comment: Because it (my conclusion) was not so clear, and maybe I just wanted to highlight some observations without delivering a real argument for or against things [, I thank you for your open question]. The utility/leverage aspect for AI seems more esoteric than the one for cars because, apart from Chatbots, it's more hidden. And also, similar to cars (or many other phenomena of industrialization), yes, my first vague point was the subsidization of infrastructure. But also, the power gap: that's something not only associated with AI or cars, but with a lot of technologies we all hold dear: sewage, powerline, logistics, etc etc. What reminds me of cars in the current AI frenzy is the fixation on cementing infrastructure. And also, I think, a lot more people agree on, for example, some kind of universal right to, for example, clean water. But all of industrialization confronts people with questions of efficiency, inequality, and collective support. Most people would, for example, support a right to get a minimum amount of clean water when you are living and working in a tradionally inhabited space (if you're on the social-darwinist side) or at least not harming society (if you're more of a social democrat). And, similar to the buildup of car infrastructure, and the procurement of resources, space etc for maximum building, giant data centers can obstruct people in buying drinking water. Or walking outside (AI obstructs traditional methods of online collaboration).
onlyrealcuzzo 5mo ago
> Take any stock index, remove AI stocks, what do you see? That's right! Nothing... Where did all the stock gains go before AI? FAANG / MAG-7. Was everything from 2012-2020 fake, too?
- toasty228 5mo ago
  They went from ~9% of the sp500 to ~35% over your timeframe...
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
atleastoptimal 5mo ago
Not sure what your point is. Stock markets are based on money going into securities based on estimated future value. Even if AI were doubling productivity at a non-AI company, there is more leverage to that money going into an AI company. The question is, is AI leading to massive productivity gains in companies that implement it? AI productivity gains take time to diffuse, but so far companies in the S&P 500 are seeing very high growth. YOY earnings growth rate for the S&P 500 is 21.7% https://advantage.factset.com/hubfs/Website/Resources%20Section/Research%20Desk/Earnings%20Insight/EarningsInsight_060526.pdf https://advantage.factset.com/hubfs/Website/Resources%20Sect...
- toasty228 5mo ago
  > YOY earnings growth rate for the S&P 500 is 21.7% Now remove the companies selling the AI shovels: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HIAjbZxacAARHwD.png https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HIAjbZxacAARHwD.png > Not sure what your point is. My point is that they're selling us Skynet and the end of employment as we now it, things that we shouldn't even have to measure to perceive the results of, yet no one is able to measure any of it Pointing a finger at nvidia, google, and the other few companies stuck in circular investment schemes that shouldn't even be legal and saying "OOGA BOOGA line go UP, UP GOOD!" doesn't count in my book
  - atleastoptimal 5mo ago
    Is the image you provided depicting revenue, or stock value? My point is about revenue.
    - toasty228 5mo ago
      Revenues don't matter when you sell a dollar for 50ct and half of the deals are circular anyways
      - atleastoptimal 5mo ago
        So you're claiming that the revenue growth of the S&P 500 over the last few years is largely due to "selling dollars for 50ct" and circular deals?
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
nilkn 5mo ago
The original point of the stock market was to fund gigantic society-level projects (like railroads). Modern VC has replaced some of that at smaller scales but not all of it at the largest scales. So this could just be the stock market performing the function it was designed to perform -- helping fund something transformative on a societal level.
AussieWog93 5mo ago
Literally right here. eComm business turned around from losing money to profitable in less than 12 months after vibecoding a bunch of solutions to variousn problems we were having.
bawolff 5mo ago
> Take any stock index, remove AI stocks, what do you see? That's right! Nothing... I mean, do you know what the value of those stocks would be if AI didn't exist. Maybe they would be much more negative. Maybe we would be in a recession. Without a control this type of analysis is meaningless. And that is even assuming that AI productivity gains are happening now instead of 5-10 years from now.
trimbo 5mo ago
> So where is all the productivity going? Where is the value? Infrastructure doesn't produce value overnight. How long did it take the Interstate System to provide measurable value? I asked Gemini. Supposedly increased national productivity by 25% over 39 years[1]. But if you drove on a newly finished interstate in 1959, you saw the same cars just moving a lot faster. That's what we're seeing right now. People can produce an incredible amount of stuff really quickly with AI. Is it directly connected to measurable productivity across the entire economy? No, because, realizing a mass productivity increase from infrastructure takes time. [1] - https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/econ_focus/2021/q2-3/economic_history https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/econ_focus...

moritzwarhier 5mo ago

Writing about AI, destroying the planet for data centers, there's a lot of money to be made. That being said, AI seems kind of miraculous sometimes. Similar to cars. So enticing that we make everything else in the world worse in order to maximize the profit, make it indispensable, subsidize it, and make the dependency on it irreversible. And it's not even something to blame individual people for. Driving away from all the other cars to spend a weekend feels like freedom. Using AI to answer a question feels like a "bicycle for the mind". But in fact it's more like a car. It requires massive resources and creates perverse incentives, and the result is ineffective and corrupt. Both cars and AI are amazing technology and extremely useful, but using them is not an individual responsibility. It requires societal subsidy.

MSFT_Edging 5mo ago
Vonnegut said in his last living work that the greatest addiction modern people face is the drug of cheap oil. We got addicted to the convenience and overuse, and have started a mass extinction event because of it. The perverse incentives will come for us all.
- moritzwarhier 5mo ago
  It is exactly this thought, in the form of this sentence, that could replace almost all of my comments in this thread. It feels depressing, but I think the same. When thinking about the larger world, it becomes increasingly hard to ignore. And of course it is not new. There were "doomers" already in the midst of the 20th century, but it doesn't mean that they were wrong.
  - MSFT_Edging 5mo ago
    There's nothing the selfish hate more than hearing their "choices" have a net negative effect. They hate the "doomers", because it puts a damper on their little side-effect free party. Doomers are more often correct because it only requires bare minimum pattern recognition. It requires more effort to defend an action that will certainly be different this time. AI, Crypto, car-centric urban planning, cardboard suburbs in a barren field with bright green grass. You tell someone that their selfish choice to drive a pickup truck only to haul something maybe one time a year, they shit their pants. They can't stand it, they start personal attacks and ask "what about you??". They seem to know it's wasteful, damaging, etc but they deserve it for some reason.
nfw2 5mo ago
The environmental impact of answering a question on an obscure topic with ai model is less than an the impact of answering the question with an hour-long google search hunting for references or a drive to the public library.
- toasty228 5mo ago
  It's like saying if we didn't have cheap commercial flights people would travel by foot anyways and would consume more resources for food &co. than the plane would consume in fuel... 80% of generative AI queries wouldn't even exist as google searches.
  - moritzwarhier 5mo ago
    I do plenty of AI queries, both pragmatic ones and some for entertainment: witnessing talktotransformer was mind-bending already at the time! And since then, I've tried frontier models, local, coding agents, and use plenty of them on the regular. I awe at the capabilites of generative AI. I also enjoy sitting in or driving a car. I did not want to make a moral argument, unless you consider each and every form of utilitarianism as moralism.
  - nfw2 5mo ago
    To be clear, your position here is that insurmountable barriers to information is the preferable state of the world? One claim of the parent comment was that AI is ineffective. For the purpose of finding answers to questions, it is more resource-efficient than the alternatives, and, to your point, capable of answering questions that were impossible to answer via other means before. In what way is that ineffective?
    - deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
    - 16bitvoid 5mo ago
      No, they're saying that 80% of genai queries (aka anything sent to an LLM; I won't speak on the validity of the percentage) are not things someone would search on Google. It's things like trial-and-error vibecoding, openclaw-like agentic loops, talking to chatgpt like it's a person, etc. In other words, most genai queries are not for getting "obscure information" or even getting direct information at all. It's about either getting it to do something you don't want to do yourself, or using it as a replacement for someone else (junior dev, therapist, friend, significant other, etc).
bloomca 5mo ago
I agree with your message but not sure about the conclusion. Cars themselves are commodified luxury available (in the US pretty much required) to everyone, and they do need to be subsidized, both in terms of infrastructure and the lifestyle they require. But with AI what is the exact price? My understanding is that R&D is extremely expensive, but running non-SOTA models is not that bad. We are getting pretty close to models which can be useful locally in many applications. Or do you mean that at scale running them locally is not possible and hence the infrastructure price is in data centers, which will be expensive to maintain and scale for demand?
- moritzwarhier 5mo ago
  Thanks for asking an open question about my point. First, because I initially failed to answer your more closed questions (this paragraph is edited in): > We are getting pretty close to models which can be useful locally in many applications. Or do you mean that at scale running them locally is not possible and hence the infrastructure price is in data centers, which will be expensive to maintain and scale for demand? I don't think there's a way around making the best of AI capabilities with minimum price and maximum control, and I'd agree this is met by on-prem data centers, just not in a rationally targeted way. Back to my original comment: Because it (my conclusion) was not so clear, and maybe I just wanted to highlight some observations without delivering a real argument for or against things [, I thank you for your open question]. The utility/leverage aspect for AI seems more esoteric than the one for cars because, apart from Chatbots, it's more hidden. And also, similar to cars (or many other phenomena of industrialization), yes, my first vague point was the subsidization of infrastructure. But also, the power gap: that's something not only associated with AI or cars, but with a lot of technologies we all hold dear: sewage, powerline, logistics, etc etc. What reminds me of cars in the current AI frenzy is the fixation on cementing infrastructure. And also, I think, a lot more people agree on, for example, some kind of universal right to, for example, clean water. But all of industrialization confronts people with questions of efficiency, inequality, and collective support. Most people would, for example, support a right to get a minimum amount of clean water when you are living and working in a tradionally inhabited space (if you're on the social-darwinist side) or at least not harming society (if you're more of a social democrat). And, similar to the buildup of car infrastructure, and the procurement of resources, space etc for maximum building, giant data centers can obstruct people in buying drinking water. Or walking outside (AI obstructs traditional methods of online collaboration).

onlyrealcuzzo 5mo ago

> Take any stock index, remove AI stocks, what do you see? That's right! Nothing... Where did all the stock gains go before AI? FAANG / MAG-7. Was everything from 2012-2020 fake, too?

toasty228 5mo ago
They went from ~9% of the sp500 to ~35% over your timeframe...
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]

atleastoptimal 5mo ago

Not sure what your point is. Stock markets are based on money going into securities based on estimated future value. Even if AI were doubling productivity at a non-AI company, there is more leverage to that money going into an AI company. The question is, is AI leading to massive productivity gains in companies that implement it? AI productivity gains take time to diffuse, but so far companies in the S&P 500 are seeing very high growth. YOY earnings growth rate for the S&P 500 is 21.7% https://advantage.factset.com/hubfs/Website/Resources%20Section/Research%20Desk/Earnings%20Insight/EarningsInsight_060526.pdf https://advantage.factset.com/hubfs/Website/Resources%20Sect...

toasty228 5mo ago
> YOY earnings growth rate for the S&P 500 is 21.7% Now remove the companies selling the AI shovels: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HIAjbZxacAARHwD.png https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HIAjbZxacAARHwD.png > Not sure what your point is. My point is that they're selling us Skynet and the end of employment as we now it, things that we shouldn't even have to measure to perceive the results of, yet no one is able to measure any of it Pointing a finger at nvidia, google, and the other few companies stuck in circular investment schemes that shouldn't even be legal and saying "OOGA BOOGA line go UP, UP GOOD!" doesn't count in my book
- atleastoptimal 5mo ago
  Is the image you provided depicting revenue, or stock value? My point is about revenue.
  - toasty228 5mo ago
    Revenues don't matter when you sell a dollar for 50ct and half of the deals are circular anyways
    - atleastoptimal 5mo ago
      So you're claiming that the revenue growth of the S&P 500 over the last few years is largely due to "selling dollars for 50ct" and circular deals?

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

nilkn 5mo ago

The original point of the stock market was to fund gigantic society-level projects (like railroads). Modern VC has replaced some of that at smaller scales but not all of it at the largest scales. So this could just be the stock market performing the function it was designed to perform -- helping fund something transformative on a societal level.

AussieWog93 5mo ago

Literally right here. eComm business turned around from losing money to profitable in less than 12 months after vibecoding a bunch of solutions to variousn problems we were having.

bawolff 5mo ago

> Take any stock index, remove AI stocks, what do you see? That's right! Nothing... I mean, do you know what the value of those stocks would be if AI didn't exist. Maybe they would be much more negative. Maybe we would be in a recession. Without a control this type of analysis is meaningless. And that is even assuming that AI productivity gains are happening now instead of 5-10 years from now.

trimbo 5mo ago

> So where is all the productivity going? Where is the value? Infrastructure doesn't produce value overnight. How long did it take the Interstate System to provide measurable value? I asked Gemini. Supposedly increased national productivity by 25% over 39 years[1]. But if you drove on a newly finished interstate in 1959, you saw the same cars just moving a lot faster. That's what we're seeing right now. People can produce an incredible amount of stuff really quickly with AI. Is it directly connected to measurable productivity across the entire economy? No, because, realizing a mass productivity increase from infrastructure takes time. [1] - https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/econ_focus/2021/q2-3/economic_history https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/econ_focus...