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Lots of dismissive comments ITT, very few tackling the substance of the article. > AI Cannot Afford To Slow Down — It Needs $3 Trillion Or More In Revenue By E

• irishcoffee 4mo ago
  If I thought there were some actual small cabal of people running the global economy, this is almost like a novel: massive amounts of money entered the economy starting in 2008 and 2020-2023, the rich became insanely wealthy. Their wealth is now all tied up in the 2020s version of the railroad/fiber, we're going to essentially erase trillions of dollars from the global economy and reset. We sure do need a reset.
  • philipallstar 4mo ago
    [flagged]
  • marcosdumay 4mo ago
    I really doubt the US will erase any money any time soon. The reset is prone to happen by other means.
    • irishcoffee 4mo ago
      I consider myself of average intelligence, and I see this coming. Maybe I assume too much.
      • marcosdumay 4mo ago
        Every government has complete control on how much of their money exists. If it disappears from the private finance market, it can compensate with any amount it wishes.
        • throwaway27448 4mo ago
          It would be better to lean into inflation and just dump a ton of money into the bottom of the market to dilute the top. Of course this only makes sense if the government is willing to regulate market control, which it has demonstrated time and time again it will not.
    • bobthepanda 4mo ago
      Rapid inflation/devaluation is certainly a way to do it.
• ido 4mo ago
  Why only US wages rather than global wages? The US is the biggest economy but it’s still only a minority of the global economy.
  • zymhan 4mo ago
    Just consider the math there for a second, when you factor in the average US wage.
    • ido 4mo ago
      But we know global GDP per capita (a proxy to wages)- the US represent about 25% of total global GDP (a metric which accounts for US wages being higher than average). I’m not being contrarian, I genuinely think the addressable market is the global market and not just the US (and by a wide margin) and as such thats the real potential of anthropic/openai/et al.
      • rob74 4mo ago
        You're partly right. But OTOH, China is (pretty successfully) developing its own AI solutions, and even the (former?) US allies in Europe, America and Asia have become painfully aware that they are dependent on a hostile US administration and tech companies cozying up to that administration, and will be wary of further deepening this dependency, so they will also prefer home-grown solutions. So the addressable market for US companies is much smaller than the global market, even in countries that could theoretically afford Anthropic's and OpenAI's prices.
      • baq 4mo ago
        Globally available AI means cheap LLM pilots offshore means huge wage deflation in white collar jobs in the US. …assuming the AI pace of progress slows down enough that there are still meaningful white collar jobs to have.
        • pjc50 4mo ago
          This is just the offshoring and remote discourse all over again. It turns out that the prestige of having a big office full of workers that the CEO can see is well worth the massive expense of siting it in California and paying California salaries. For whatever reason. (also I suspect the anti-globalization discourse will get even more pointed)
• beloch 4mo ago
  It's more interesting to ask, "Does AI need to follow the current model of evil megacorps building massive data centres that, collectively, guzzle more energy than most nations on Earth?" Perhaps LLM's (or something better) will develop to be more efficient and quickly become something most people run on local hardware. Perhaps fad-obsessed management types will move onto the next big thing and AI will start being used more judiciously. Perhaps society will set sane regulatory limits that shape the direction AI is going in, from models that take jobs people want to models that, given the right hardware, can do the jobs few want. Anthropic and OpenAI don't have to succeed for AI to succeed. If they turn out to be a bubble that bursts and torches a lot of investors, it might actually be a fundamentally good thing for everybody else.
  • vessenes 4mo ago
    To be clear, nobody WANTS to have to go build all these datacenters. Well, maybe some pure-play hyperscalers do. But there's an immense amount of economic incentive to be able to do this more efficiently, capital and energy. And, what those hyperscalers want will not matter for a second if there isn't demand for the tokens output by those datacenters - they'll go instantly dark and have to seek new forms of valuable compute to offer. If this current building spree ends in massive solar and other power generation being overbuilt and cutting energy costs, we've had a really good outcome.
  • s08148692 4mo ago
    This is why there is so much interest in space based AI compute. It's not just SpaceX - Google, Anthropic and Nvidia have openly expressed interest If you look at SpaceX plans and ambitions, they hope to deploy massive compute to orbit (multiple Terrawatts, hundreds of thousands of sats). If their ambitions even slightly materialise it would make ground based compute pale in comparison. Whether or not they succeed in their plans is beside the point - the point is they know that terrestrial electric infra can't sustain the growth they need
    • joebe89 4mo ago
      How would cooling work in space based computing? To a layman like me it seems like a significant hurdle to overcome.
• madaxe_again 4mo ago
  The other question nobody seems to ask - what will $3tn in 2030 be worth? I would bet quite a bit less than it is today.
  • pjc50 4mo ago
    US inflation is slightly under 4%, so by my maths receiving $3tn in 2030 would be worth about $2.5tn in 2026 dollars.
    • madaxe_again 4mo ago
      Currently slightly under 4%. I have a feeling that part of the solution here is going to end up being, what was the euphemism? Quantitative easing - also known as “printing money”. I would not be surprised if we end up seeing near double digit inflation in USD - it has also significantly lost its status as a global reserve currency, which makes this all the more likely. Tbh I think it’s already happening in real terms, but the CPIs aren’t fully showing it yet.
      • pjc50 4mo ago
        > Quantitative easing Why though? This isn't a bank run situation. Sure, it's unwise to bet against "US President does something stupid", but the rationale is missing. The oil situation remains very concerning, and you can't print oil.
        • madaxe_again 4mo ago
          Oh but it is. The debt that’s funding the AI buildout ends up in the oddest of places - like pension funds. If defaults occur and work their way up the chain, it’s not dissimilar to the subprime affair - and at that point it’s bail out the poor pensioners or get crucified at the ballot box. There’s lots of precedent for this over the past decades, both in the U.S. and over the pond.
          • pjc50 4mo ago
• piokoch 4mo ago
  #3 Trillion, or even more, will be achievable. We are at the very beginning of the monetization of AI. It all started with the free Chat GPT, and a few others. Now the standard is $20 a month if you are not using AI tools too much and you don't need anything fancier. Otherwise you need to pay more, like $200 a month. Unless you are not company and you don't have some "enterprise deal". And you need an enterprise deal, as 1) it guarantees that your (and your customers) data will not be sold to someone else 2) you are scared that your competitor will have such deal and become much more productive. This is what we have now. What will be the future? Well, soon, if you want something like financial advice or medical advice or job search/CV polishing you will be told, that your $20/$200 is not covering that, you need to purchase additional model to have that. Will you do that? It depends how much you are desperate to get medical advice or find a job. Anthropic Mythos is an example. Soon, if you are programmer and you will ask AI Agent to spot a bugs, AI Agent will tell you that you need to buy extra model for this. Same with performance analysis, same with the design using tool X, Y or Z. This is pretty scary, as it will put our well-being, productivity in the hands of few corps. It will be event worst that Google Search monopoly we used to have (until AI chats broke this, replacing Google Monopoly with a few other vendors monopoly). Can this be prevented? Surely. Hopefully we will have capable open models and consumer-level hardware will catch up. But I think this is the place where governments should step in, invest into alternative models which will be at least comparable with flagships. Chinese models shows that this is doable, DeepSeek is worst than Chat GPT/Claude/Gemini, but not that much and is clearly better than Grok (which is a huge disappointment for me). I guess India would join this game (especially with nationalist like Modi as the leader). Europe could join this game, the problem is it kills its capabilities with high energy prices and inability to come out with some reasonable, well financed solution. So the only thing EU was able to come up with is some set of regulations that are blocking fast AI development in Europe... There is French Mistral, but it is French, it is under-financed, it is only-French, as France would not like to lose control over it. Germany have totally different strategy, they invest into manufacturing oriented AI, what makes a lot of sense, but does not help with the dangers we are facing. The rest of the Europe is just too poor to spend billions on AI. There is still time to buckle up for Europe, but given the course of events, stupidity of Brussels elites who does not see the storm coming I am not optimistic.
  • 4mo ago
• avarun 4mo ago
  There is no substance to the article to tackle. Ed Zitron is a clown that makes seven million dollars a year writing unsubstantiated bullshit on the internet. He has been consistently wrong in every single one of his predictions and will continue predicting the sky is falling, because his content has zero educational value. It is purely a confirmation-bias inducing dopamine hit for the perpetually aggrieved.
  • raincole 4mo ago
    The funniest thing is that his articles are constantly pushed to HN frontpage, and every time the top comments (or the comments one level nested below top comments) are pointing out how wrong he's always been. Either that he's HN mods's favorites or we're experiencing a special case of xkcd 1053[0]: there are always ten thousand people haven't realized how wrong Ed Zitron is. At this point I don't think even Ed himself believes what he writes. It's just fan service for subscribers. And that is totally reasonable if we view blogging as a business. [0]: https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
    • Pikamander2 4mo ago
      One of HN's quirks, for better or worse, is that the lack of ability to downvote submissions encourages "controversial" content to rise to the top. On Reddit, if 500 people like a submission and 500 people dislike it, then it'll end up with 0 points and fail to reach /r/all But on HN, the same content will end up at 500 points since only the people who like it can affect its rank (unless it dies after getting mass flagged). The end result is that HN's system favors "hot takes" while Reddit's system favors "preaching to the choir". The two systems have their pros and cons, but personally I dislike being unable to downvote articles that are full of nonsense.
      • pjc50 4mo ago
        People (ab)use the flagging system for that. I've seen plenty of categories of article that get upvoted onto the front page and then instantly vaporized off it by flagging.
• davemp 4mo ago
  Ah yes. Just need to displace 16 million people’s livelihoods. No big deal.