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I know it has become a meme by now, but IIRC the market for all foods (agriculture, processed food, etc.) on earth is around $10 trillion. So according to Spac
by TrackerFF 4mo ago
I know it has become a meme by now, but IIRC the market for all foods (agriculture, processed food, etc.) on earth is around $10 trillion.
So according to SpaceX, the market for AI is 2.5 larger than all the food sold on this planet.
They're also saying that the AI market is worth roughly 10% of all global real estate.
- imron 4mo ago> They're also saying that the AI market is worth roughly 10% of all global real estate. Why limit yourself to one planet? Space is infinite ;-)
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- f6v 4mo ago> the market for AI is 2.5 larger than all the food sold on this planet. It just shows how much the automation has impacted agriculture and the food industry. Sure, there're rural farms that apply 200 yo technology. But e.g. the grain production and farming are incredibly efficient at scale. So, it's not that costly for as a humanity to feed 8 billion people (at a varying level, of course).
- TrackerFF 4mo agoRemove 20% of AI supply, and the world goes on like nothing happened. Remove 20% of food supply, and watch prices explode, global unrest, and famine take place.
- zamadatix 4mo agoI don't think anyone is claiming AI and food have the same elasticity of demand, which is what this really talks to, but, after a claim the AI market is 26 trillion dollars... I wouldn't be surprised if someone did.
- zoom6628 4mo agoWe could remove 100% of world AI supply and humanity would not be worse off. It is still additive and in areas of generally indeterminate value except in hype. Reasoning and RAG is amazing already and is a productivity gain but I'm yet to be convinced GenAI is anything but a slop machine. #startflamingmenow
- thewebguyd 4mo agoI half agree, but I'd still had software development to the list. AI is useful as a search & information synthesis tool, and as a dev tool. The problem is, when has a dev tool ever command such ridiculous valuations and investment in infrastructure? The market is going to realize that yes, it's useful, but no, it's not over $1T useful.
- anuramat 4mo ago> dev tool do you expect people to quit research for some reason?
- porridgeraisin 4mo agoValuation and elasticity of demand not related even if you ignore consumer surplus
- schnitzelstoat 4mo agoFood is a solved problem. We can grow far more food than we need and we stop doing so simply because the low prices mean it's not economically viable. In the places where famine remains a problem, it's due to political issues, not that we can't grow enough. And growing all that food requires a tiny workforce compared to 400 years ago before the Agricultural Revolution. AI might extend such a massive reduction in labour requirements to many other industries.
- ben_w 4mo ago> We can grow far more food than we need and we stop doing so simply because the low prices mean it's not economically viable. Half. This depends on there being a reliable source of cheap fertiliser, which would be much more secure if not for the situations regarding Hormuz and Russia.
- Daishiman 4mo ago> In the places where famine remains a problem, it's due to political issues, not that we can't grow enough. The political issues are still there so I really don't think we can call that a solved problem.
- pixl97 4mo agoThat's what you misunderstand, that's why we're making the AI. Have the AI get rid of all the people then AI can grow all the crops it needs!
- dminik 4mo agoTechnologically yes, but this is a vast oversimplification. You need lots of money to be able to buy the tech you need to do so. And you can't exactly earn that from not using the tech, since foreign (or even local) competition will slaughter you on prices. And if you do make it, you're stuck with a low-margin race to the bottom on price.
- pixl97 4mo agoSo capitalism with market protections?
- anuramat 4mo agodo you spend most of your money on food?
- Raed667 4mo agodo you spend most of your money on grok subscriptions ?
- anuramat 4mo agoI might at some point be spending more money on somebody elses claude subscriptions than on food my point is that the amount of calories a person needs is limited, and the efficiency is non-decreasing, so the per capita spending has an upper bound "ai" does not have such an upper bound
- jmalicki 4mo agoMost employers are spending a large fraction of SWE salaries on AI tokens right now. It's not unthinkable that trend continues (even if it's rationalizing at the moment), and moves over into other fields as well.
- TrackerFF 4mo agoI spend roughly 10% of my take-home pay on food. I spend 0.2% on AI. Exactly one subscription.
- Chris2048 4mo agoThen I assume you'll happily pay $20 for a bottle of water, given how important it is?
- minraws 4mo agoYou can't food maxx a trillion calories a day to generate a multi million dollar bill. You can token maxx it though. I think the issue is the reality that most life is worth a lot less (in US Freedom units) than some software running doing absolutely nothing truly valuable for anyone.
- pixl97 4mo agoNozick was right, the Utility Monster wins.
- darkerside 4mo agoI'm sure the finance market is much larger as well
- bryanlarsen 4mo agoFood is worth a lot more than that. If the alternative was starvation, we would pay approximately all the money for food. By that metric food is worth more than $100T. The difference between $100T and $10T is called the consumer surplus, one of the largest benefits of a free market economy. AI might eventually provide $26T worth of value, but if it captures anywhere close to that amount of revenue that'll indicate a failure of the free market economy. Competition and open source will have failed and the oligarchy has won. (Either that, or inflation will have made $26T a relatively smaller number).
- bcrl 4mo agoWhat precisely is the moat surrounding AI that SpaceX is using to justify this kind of spending spree? I don't how SpaceX and other AI companies will be able to keep the weights of their AI models private in the face of interest by virtually everyone in the world. It would be absolutely trivial for a nation state to walk into a data center using a state issued security certificate to seize a few of the physical servers running the cloud services of OpenAI / Grok / Claude. Copying the weights is trivial. Infiltrating a company with spies as new hire coders to gain access to source code is also trivial. This is really starting to feel like the pets.com era again.
- yifanl 4mo agoBecause there's nowhere else for the money to go, the money must go to AI. There are no growth opportunities in any other industry (except healthcare due to disastrous demographics), where else are people going to invest?
- jackyinger 4mo agoThis is an insane take. Of course there are other areas that are growing or could grow if there was investment. The problem is an absolute lack of vision on the part of those holding the capital. Meeting the challenges of climate change could hold huge opportunities. Look at China’s massive expansion in renewables, look at the expansion of renewables in the US despite political headwinds. Have some imagination, break out of your echo chamber. AI ain’t the only game to be played.
- mekdoonggi 4mo agoIt's not lack of vision. It's that capital demands gambling. Everyone knows you could plough money into big projects in the US and double your money reliably. But the powers that be do not want that. They want to gamble, and try to become trillionaire #2.
- jackyinger 4mo ago
- lumost 4mo agoThis is true if you take the ai market as equal to the market for labor discounted to 5-10% penetration. It’s not a totally unreasonable assertion, it’s the implication of the assertion that we are uncomfortable with. There is no reason for the models to stop their improvements in the near future.
- ben_w 4mo ago> There is no reason for the models to stop their improvements in the near future. Sure there is. 1. The cost of each new generation of training runs appears to be rapidly rising 2. The Trump admin just told the leading model to stop making it available to non-Americans, which in practice meant stop providing it at all 3. The factories to make the hardware are hitting bottlenecks, and while they've currently been navigated around, there's never a guarantee the next one will be Currently I'm wondering at what point the direct impact on the US energy supply gives the US a taste of Baumol's cost disease as AI companies continue to outbid everyone else for electricity.
- pixl97 4mo agoThere are some counters to this, especially in electricity. We'll see massive expansions of wind and solar in the US because of this. Both the speed of install and low costs will guarantee it.
- ben_w 4mo ago> We'll see massive expansions of wind and solar in the US because of this. Both the speed of install and low costs will guarantee it. Implausible while Trump remains in office. He hates renewables, shuts them down even when doing so actively costs money. Between AI hallucinated content and the politicisation of the numbers, I'm not sure how much AI compute capacity is being planned right now; would you accept a claim of 300 GW? It's a number I heard recently. Given the capacity factor of PV, even China would have to think carefully before supplying that much PV over the next few years (300 GW avg ~= 3TW nameplate). (Not sure about wind, wind's CF seems to vary between years).
- ai-x 4mo agoI'm sure people laughed in 2023 if someone said AI will reach $100B in revenue in 3 years. Yet here we are
- sph 4mo agoPast performance is not guarantee of future returns.
- Alive-in-2025 4mo agoWe'll figure out how to make it much much cheaper to produce the compute needs we have today with tokens. The question is will how many new use cases arise that need much more - clearly we aren't meeting needs (price stays high) but how much more do we need, 100x, 10x, 10^6 x? Look at electricity, the world of 1900 could not create enough electricity or even conceive of how to add enough to meet 1950s needs. But we made it incredibly cheaper to produce, but also created a lot more, and boy do we have so much more use of electricity now. And it's not that expensive for a human to pay for their needs (not free, its not cheap for poor people but it's still gotten cheaper).
- nobody_r_knows 4mo ago[dead]
- noncoml 4mo ago“ai-x”? Elon? You know that you are not allowed to in this forum. It’s only for adults. Go back to Twitter and play with the other kids.
- marcosdumay 4mo agoOh, that puts it 0.3% of the way there! And all it cost was increasing prices until every customer started talking about cutting it.
- ralfd 4mo agoTo be fair, food is the smallest bucket of my monthly expenses. And there are many people here on hacker news who pay more for their AI tokens than for their food. How does argrar industry and tech industry compare as share of gdp in the US?
- fckgw 4mo agoYou are not in any way the average person. Food is the 3rd largest expenditure in most households, after housing and transportation.