5 ms·

> Like do people think that these AI companies will create some superintelligence, suck up all the financial benefits of that, and then just decide to share it

by rayiner 5mo ago

> Like do people think that these AI companies will create some superintelligence, suck up all the financial benefits of that, and then just decide to share it with the rest of us out of kindness? I don’t get this. It’s like worrying in 1960 that the companies that invented computers will hoard the benefits of computing. It doesn’t make any sense. There is no secret formula to any of this. The math underlying the models is widely known, and there are tons of competitors, including foreign competitors.

singpolyma3 5mo ago
I mean. From a financial PoV that's exactly what happened
- ben_w 5mo ago
  Did they, though? Intel, IBM, DEC and Honeywell were big names, but they're not FAANG. Other than Nintendo, how many games companies today were around back then?
  - singpolyma3 5mo ago
    ... so your argument is "no actually the second generation did that"? End result for 100-16 % of Americans is the same
    - ben_w 5mo ago
      Other than Apple, FAANG is fourth or fifth generation at least. And my argument is straight assuming you're OK to say the financial PoV is a good PoV, I'm not arguing for or against that claim. > End result for 100-16 % of Americans is the same Yes, but FAANG got all the money without the hate AI has. Well, perhaps, I'm not sure when the public decided F had horns rather than a halo, so I can't be sure how much money they had at the time, but other than that the hate came long after the money.
  - bastardoperator 4mo ago
    Nintendo, Capcom, Activision, Konami, Sega, Bandai Namco, EA, Sunsoft, Atari, Taito, Bethesda, Tecmo and Naughty dog All found in the 80's or earlier and still pretty well known today. It could be argued these are different companies today, but they exist.
    - ben_w 4mo ago
      I'm replying to someone replying to "1960", not "the 80s". Half the ones I recognise from that list seem to be somewhat older than I realised though. But everything between and including Bethesda and Atari is more recent than the decade I was replying to. Strictly speaking everything more recent than Saga is more recent, but I did misread it initially as "the 1960s" not "1960".
wyre 5mo ago
The 60s were 60 years ago. There were regulations back then that protected the common folk and capitalism wasn't as ruthless and aligned with the will of the 0.1% as it is now. I want to be optimistic and agree with you, but I don't think the parallels are as strong as you say they are. We already have Anthropic withhold Mythos from the public, the governement now allowing the use of Fable, I don't think its farfetched to think that the US will start regulating access to Chinese/open-source models, pricing for compute isn't slowing down. The problem isn't AI, but who controls the compute that powers it.
- rayiner 5mo ago
  > The 60s were 60 years ago. There were regulations back then that protected the common folk and capitalism wasn't as ruthless and aligned with the will of the 0.1% as it is now. No company in the 1990s ever achieved as much market power as IBM did in the 1960s-1980s. IBM controlled 70% of the computer market at the time. Can you give me a concrete example that’s relevant to the deployment of computers?
  - layer8 5mo ago
    The computer market was also much smaller and society much more independent from it at the time.
  - dbspin 5mo ago
    > IBM controlled 70% of the computer market at the time. The computer market was microscopic at the time. > Can you give me a concrete example that’s relevant to the deployment of computers? Nvidia. 92% of domestic GPU market, 85% of AI datacenter market. The AI investment bubble is exploding the cost of everything that contains RAM or SSD storage. This is having and will have detrimental effects on the global economy, as supply shortages enormously increase the cost of consumer electronics, cars, anything which requires memory. Not because AI is making so much money, far from it - it's a money sink. Rather, it's because the global supply of money got so large and so unequal that it ran out of vehicles which would provide sufficient returns for the indolent investment class. So they jumped into speculation - first crypto, now AI and the tech that enables it. To the benefit of whom? Mass layoffs, tech industry consolidation, new products being cancelled left and right. Ironically there's no equivalent in the modern era. This is peak social inequality breaking the economy for everyone outside the .001%. And it didn't happen because of a shortage of a raw material, or physics breaking Moore's law. It happened because big tech centralised power into a handful of gigacorporations - creating a handful of ultra-billionaires - who are enormously incentivised to centralise technology itself.
boothby 5mo ago
> The math underlying the models is widely known, and there are tons of competitors, including foreign competitors. Foreign militaries investing in autonomous warfare does not assuage my concerns about my country investing in autonomous warfare. Also, have you been paying attention to median wages vs median CEO wages since the 1960s? The benefits of computing really have gone to the captains of industry.
- pydry 5mo ago
  Tech isn't special. The value of pretty much all productivity improvements since ~1979 have been captured either via the stock market (97% owned by the top 10% in wealth) or land rents.
  - boothby 5mo ago
    If tech isn't special, why are nine of the ten richest Americans in tech?
- rayiner 5mo ago
  > Also, have you been paying attention to median wages vs median CEO wages since the 1960s CEO pay isn’t a good proxy for “captains of industry.” What you want to look at is the labor versus capital share of income. That’s been very stable since the 1960s: https://taxfoundation.org/blog/labor-share-net-income-within-historical-range https://taxfoundation.org/blog/labor-share-net-income-within....
  - foltik 5mo ago
    Clearly that's not a good proxy either then... even the article itself says: > Ultimately, concerns over inequality should focus on differences within labor compensation rather than the split between labor and capital. The main issues I can see are: - This "labor share" includes multi-million dollar executive pay packages, so it's heavily skewed towards the 1% - It also completely ignores unrealized capital gains and loans against them, which is how the ultra-wealthy actually fund their lifestyles tax-free, with a tiny income on paper
slg 5mo ago
>It’s like worrying in 1960 that the companies that invented computers will hoard the benefits of computing. Isn't that what happened? There was enough competition among computing companies that they weren't able to completely monopolize all the productivity improvements, but the financial benefits were mostly captured by the capital class in one way or another.[1] TVs might be cheaper today and we all like watching Netflix, but I'm skeptical of the idea that the financial wellbeing of the average American has been improved by computers. [1] - https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/a-guide-to-statistics-on-historical-trends-in-income-inequality https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/a-guide...
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- fluoridation 5mo ago
  >I'm skeptical of the idea that the financial wellbeing of the average American has been improved by computers. Really? Even with all the new avenues of education and communication that they opened up? You think the positives and negatives balance out to close to zero?
  - slg 5mo ago
    The stats I linked above show that those “new avenues of education and communication” didn’t actually benefit the average American financially in at least the relative sense. Do you have something to counter that evidence?
    - fluoridation 5mo ago
      Those are just time series of wealth over time, they don't purport to establish any causal links. You can't conclude that computers didn't "actually benefit the average American financially" from these numbers, because these are measuring the total wealth of the household with all factors combined. We can't say with any certainty what effect computers had on these values; maybe without them people would have been better off or worse off. It is interesting how the wealth concentration started in the '80s. It could be computers that caused it, though I would be more likely to blame it on Reagan's economic policies.
Barrin92 5mo ago
>It’s like worrying in 1960 that the companies that invented computers will hoard the benefits of computing. It doesn’t make any sense. Not only is that exactly what happened, they weren't satisfied with accumulating most of the wealth produced by it, they've also taken it upon themselves to take over democracy and media and act like a state within a state. You only need one statistic to understand America today, that working class Americans without college degrees have had their purchasing power stagnate since the 1970s(https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/ https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/) People who used to have good jobs can now drive for Doordash and what the last wave of digitalization did over 30 years the AI gurus now promise to do in 10 again, and not just to the working class. The only reason to be optimistic is that they're snake oil salesmen.
- rayiner 5mo ago
  > You only need one statistic to understand America today, that working class Americans without college degrees have had their purchasing power stagnate since the 1970s(https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/ https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/) Having a college degree was a much more selective measure in 1970 (about 10% of the population) than today (almost 40%). Consider a large law firm. In 1970, the only 4-year degree holders would have been the attorneys. A lot of work would have been done by well-compensated paralegals with high school diplomas. Today, everyone down to the receptionist will have a degree and the non-degree holders would basically be the maintenance and cafeteria staff. So using your math, the income of non-college workers at the law firm could be stagnant from 1970 to today, even if the income of each specific position had increased significantly.
  - foltik 5mo ago
    Look at the macro data. The overall median wage for all American workers combined has also drastically lagged behind economic productivity since the 70s.
    - rayiner 5mo ago
rurp 5mo ago
You could say that about any big tech product and yet we've all seen power and wealth become concentrated on an incredible scale since the 60s. The immense resources needed to train frontier models gives the few companies that can manage it more of a moat than most tech products. So empirically I expect that we'll see the current wealth hording keep going at at least the same rate.
danny_codes 4mo ago
Foreign competitors who are banned in this country. The current federal government is not interested in competition or customer protections. Existing interests will acquire-to-kill any competitors and will not be anti-trusted for it. This could of course change if we stop electing known criminals/con-men, but the supreme court seems intent on strangling democracy by legalizing unlimited bribery. All in all it doesn't look good

by rayiner 5mo ago

singpolyma3 5mo ago

I mean. From a financial PoV that's exactly what happened

ben_w 5mo ago
Did they, though? Intel, IBM, DEC and Honeywell were big names, but they're not FAANG. Other than Nintendo, how many games companies today were around back then?
- singpolyma3 5mo ago
  ... so your argument is "no actually the second generation did that"? End result for 100-16 % of Americans is the same
  - ben_w 5mo ago
    Other than Apple, FAANG is fourth or fifth generation at least. And my argument is straight assuming you're OK to say the financial PoV is a good PoV, I'm not arguing for or against that claim. > End result for 100-16 % of Americans is the same Yes, but FAANG got all the money without the hate AI has. Well, perhaps, I'm not sure when the public decided F had horns rather than a halo, so I can't be sure how much money they had at the time, but other than that the hate came long after the money.
- bastardoperator 4mo ago
  Nintendo, Capcom, Activision, Konami, Sega, Bandai Namco, EA, Sunsoft, Atari, Taito, Bethesda, Tecmo and Naughty dog All found in the 80's or earlier and still pretty well known today. It could be argued these are different companies today, but they exist.
  - ben_w 4mo ago
    I'm replying to someone replying to "1960", not "the 80s". Half the ones I recognise from that list seem to be somewhat older than I realised though. But everything between and including Bethesda and Atari is more recent than the decade I was replying to. Strictly speaking everything more recent than Saga is more recent, but I did misread it initially as "the 1960s" not "1960".

wyre 5mo ago

The 60s were 60 years ago. There were regulations back then that protected the common folk and capitalism wasn't as ruthless and aligned with the will of the 0.1% as it is now. I want to be optimistic and agree with you, but I don't think the parallels are as strong as you say they are. We already have Anthropic withhold Mythos from the public, the governement now allowing the use of Fable, I don't think its farfetched to think that the US will start regulating access to Chinese/open-source models, pricing for compute isn't slowing down. The problem isn't AI, but who controls the compute that powers it.

rayiner 5mo ago
> The 60s were 60 years ago. There were regulations back then that protected the common folk and capitalism wasn't as ruthless and aligned with the will of the 0.1% as it is now. No company in the 1990s ever achieved as much market power as IBM did in the 1960s-1980s. IBM controlled 70% of the computer market at the time. Can you give me a concrete example that’s relevant to the deployment of computers?
- layer8 5mo ago
  The computer market was also much smaller and society much more independent from it at the time.
- dbspin 5mo ago
  > IBM controlled 70% of the computer market at the time. The computer market was microscopic at the time. > Can you give me a concrete example that’s relevant to the deployment of computers? Nvidia. 92% of domestic GPU market, 85% of AI datacenter market. The AI investment bubble is exploding the cost of everything that contains RAM or SSD storage. This is having and will have detrimental effects on the global economy, as supply shortages enormously increase the cost of consumer electronics, cars, anything which requires memory. Not because AI is making so much money, far from it - it's a money sink. Rather, it's because the global supply of money got so large and so unequal that it ran out of vehicles which would provide sufficient returns for the indolent investment class. So they jumped into speculation - first crypto, now AI and the tech that enables it. To the benefit of whom? Mass layoffs, tech industry consolidation, new products being cancelled left and right. Ironically there's no equivalent in the modern era. This is peak social inequality breaking the economy for everyone outside the .001%. And it didn't happen because of a shortage of a raw material, or physics breaking Moore's law. It happened because big tech centralised power into a handful of gigacorporations - creating a handful of ultra-billionaires - who are enormously incentivised to centralise technology itself.

boothby 5mo ago

> The math underlying the models is widely known, and there are tons of competitors, including foreign competitors. Foreign militaries investing in autonomous warfare does not assuage my concerns about my country investing in autonomous warfare. Also, have you been paying attention to median wages vs median CEO wages since the 1960s? The benefits of computing really have gone to the captains of industry.

pydry 5mo ago
Tech isn't special. The value of pretty much all productivity improvements since ~1979 have been captured either via the stock market (97% owned by the top 10% in wealth) or land rents.
- boothby 5mo ago
  If tech isn't special, why are nine of the ten richest Americans in tech?
rayiner 5mo ago
> Also, have you been paying attention to median wages vs median CEO wages since the 1960s CEO pay isn’t a good proxy for “captains of industry.” What you want to look at is the labor versus capital share of income. That’s been very stable since the 1960s: https://taxfoundation.org/blog/labor-share-net-income-within-historical-range https://taxfoundation.org/blog/labor-share-net-income-within....
- foltik 5mo ago
  Clearly that's not a good proxy either then... even the article itself says: > Ultimately, concerns over inequality should focus on differences within labor compensation rather than the split between labor and capital. The main issues I can see are: - This "labor share" includes multi-million dollar executive pay packages, so it's heavily skewed towards the 1% - It also completely ignores unrealized capital gains and loans against them, which is how the ultra-wealthy actually fund their lifestyles tax-free, with a tiny income on paper

slg 5mo ago

>It’s like worrying in 1960 that the companies that invented computers will hoard the benefits of computing. Isn't that what happened? There was enough competition among computing companies that they weren't able to completely monopolize all the productivity improvements, but the financial benefits were mostly captured by the capital class in one way or another.[1] TVs might be cheaper today and we all like watching Netflix, but I'm skeptical of the idea that the financial wellbeing of the average American has been improved by computers. [1] - https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/a-guide-to-statistics-on-historical-trends-in-income-inequality https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/a-guide...

deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
fluoridation 5mo ago
>I'm skeptical of the idea that the financial wellbeing of the average American has been improved by computers. Really? Even with all the new avenues of education and communication that they opened up? You think the positives and negatives balance out to close to zero?
- slg 5mo ago
  The stats I linked above show that those “new avenues of education and communication” didn’t actually benefit the average American financially in at least the relative sense. Do you have something to counter that evidence?
  - fluoridation 5mo ago
    Those are just time series of wealth over time, they don't purport to establish any causal links. You can't conclude that computers didn't "actually benefit the average American financially" from these numbers, because these are measuring the total wealth of the household with all factors combined. We can't say with any certainty what effect computers had on these values; maybe without them people would have been better off or worse off. It is interesting how the wealth concentration started in the '80s. It could be computers that caused it, though I would be more likely to blame it on Reagan's economic policies.

Barrin92 5mo ago

>It’s like worrying in 1960 that the companies that invented computers will hoard the benefits of computing. It doesn’t make any sense. Not only is that exactly what happened, they weren't satisfied with accumulating most of the wealth produced by it, they've also taken it upon themselves to take over democracy and media and act like a state within a state. You only need one statistic to understand America today, that working class Americans without college degrees have had their purchasing power stagnate since the 1970s(https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/ https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/) People who used to have good jobs can now drive for Doordash and what the last wave of digitalization did over 30 years the AI gurus now promise to do in 10 again, and not just to the working class. The only reason to be optimistic is that they're snake oil salesmen.

rayiner 5mo ago
> You only need one statistic to understand America today, that working class Americans without college degrees have had their purchasing power stagnate since the 1970s(https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/ https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/) Having a college degree was a much more selective measure in 1970 (about 10% of the population) than today (almost 40%). Consider a large law firm. In 1970, the only 4-year degree holders would have been the attorneys. A lot of work would have been done by well-compensated paralegals with high school diplomas. Today, everyone down to the receptionist will have a degree and the non-degree holders would basically be the maintenance and cafeteria staff. So using your math, the income of non-college workers at the law firm could be stagnant from 1970 to today, even if the income of each specific position had increased significantly.
- foltik 5mo ago
  Look at the macro data. The overall median wage for all American workers combined has also drastically lagged behind economic productivity since the 70s.
  - rayiner 5mo ago

rurp 5mo ago

You could say that about any big tech product and yet we've all seen power and wealth become concentrated on an incredible scale since the 60s. The immense resources needed to train frontier models gives the few companies that can manage it more of a moat than most tech products. So empirically I expect that we'll see the current wealth hording keep going at at least the same rate.

danny_codes 4mo ago

Foreign competitors who are banned in this country. The current federal government is not interested in competition or customer protections. Existing interests will acquire-to-kill any competitors and will not be anti-trusted for it. This could of course change if we stop electing known criminals/con-men, but the supreme court seems intent on strangling democracy by legalizing unlimited bribery. All in all it doesn't look good