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Whatever you think of AI for your own work, the fact that the entire economy is betting everything on it is really concerning. It’s not just the fact that it ma
by dgellow 4mo ago
Whatever you think of AI for your own work, the fact that the entire economy is betting everything on it is really concerning. It’s not just the fact that it may not work well economically speaking and would end up with a market crash, or all the negative externalities from AI development, it’s also the opportunity cost we are paying. With so much human capital and resources dedicated to developing and running LLMs all the other business, research opportunities aren’t being explored and invested in
- palmotea 4mo ago> Whatever you think of AI for your own work, the fact that the entire economy is betting everything on it is really concerning. It’s not just the fact that it may not work well economically speaking and would end up with a market crash, or all the negative externalities from AI development, it’s also the opportunity cost we are paying. It's worth pointing out that "entire economy is betting everything on [AI]" you're talking about here is in the economy in the "numbers go up sense" (e.g. the stock market). It's not the economy in the providing for the general well being sense (e.g. gives people jobs so they can get housing and food).
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- dgellow 4mo agoInvestment from VC and wealth funds is going pretty much only to AI projects. The massive capital expenditure we are currently seeing is going to AI infrastructure (HBM has pretty much no use case outside of LLMs and a few niche industries). It’s real money being allocated to a single bet
- randusername 4mo agoWell estimates claim AI may contribute 50-75% of US GDP growth. Which is confusing because we're spending 2% of US GDP on AI. I wasted like a half hour trying to find decent sources but I guess I don't know how to search the internet anymore. I think we're betting more than the stock market on AI, even if I can't say for sure how much.
- hvb2 4mo agoBut you do realize that the entire 2008 financial crisis was also just financial 'wizards' increasing leverage more an more. The real economy didn't change at all, but confidence was gone and so was lending.
- preisschild 4mo agoI also think this is a huge problem in government. A lot of government services could be digitized via simple CRUD API/UIs and instead politicians talk about AI...
- hvb2 4mo agoThat could be every tech exec/marketeer/sales person now... We've had text to speech for a while for example but everything is now AI. Does it use any AI features? Not at all ...
- harambae 4mo agoAI/ML can make the pauses, intonation, and context pronunciation (it is "bass" the fish or the guitar?) more natural/correct I'm sure. Now whether you actually WANT your AI voice to sound completely indistinguishable from a human voice is another story. I personally wish it would remain differentiable forever, but there's no real way to enforce that.
- florakel 4mo agoI prefer that scenario to the one we had before where too many smart people were building out social networks and similar services trying to maximize ad impressions. We are still dealing with the consequences…
- mnky9800n 4mo agoI think those people are the ones in charge now and will be directing their ai resources to make even better ads.
- q8zd3 4mo agoSame people, different context.
- williamdclt 4mo agoI'm not even sure that I do prefer the AI train to the social media / ad train. I certainly would if the direction was "we're throwing ourselves blindly in AI so to gradually free citizens from the need to work", but right now it's "we're throwing ourselves blindly in AI so that we can sacrifice workers for higher corporate profits".
- warshinder 4mo agoNot to mention how they will be used by terrorists and evil people to create biological weapons and other tools of mass slaughter. Or how it will be/is being used by criminals to target vulnerable people and businesses. Or how coupled with drone warfare the world becomes an unlivable hellhole in the next decade. But Marc Andreesan said only losers are against “tech accelerationiism” on twitter so here we are. Edit: all that and spellcheck still sucks too.
- satvikpendem 4mo agoSounds like you're reading into Amodei's propaganda as to why they should control AI. The information to make biological weapons for example is nothing new, it has been on the Internet for decades.
- Aurornis 4mo ago> With so much human capital and resources dedicated to developing and running LLMs all the other business, research opportunities aren’t being explored and invested in It probably feels this way if you only see headlines like this, but the LLM companies and even extending into their data center buildouts are still only a part of the economy. Investment dollars get spread around far and wide. Investors can’t even get allocations in these companies if they want to because they’re so oversubscribed. This headline and website are a good example. If you think being a YC founder is rare and reserved for the truly elite, you may not have seen the size of YC batches lately. The number of YC founders is in the tens of thousands. Showing a list of 100 of them who joined a couple big tech companies doesn’t mean anything by itself. It’s on the order of 1% of YC founders. YC startups don’t work out all the time and their employees and founders go work for other startups. Barely worth noting, if not for a website making it look like a big deal.
- OtomotO 4mo agoSunk cost fallacy is already too established for anything else.
- jrflo 4mo agoTech != the entire economy
- alentred 4mo agoI fear another related possibility. With *so* much money on the table, if this new industry shrinks or collapses, it is hard to believe that it will collapse same way dot-com did, and instead investors will seek to protect their capital who knows at what cost. Given the influence they have it is not hard to imagine the impact on policies, etc. I fear that tax payers are not the winners in either case, whether this industry grows or not.
- justinmarsan 4mo agoThis reminds me of the office rental leases during and after lockdowns where it seemed like the idea that owners might loose money was just not even on the table and we needed people to be back at the office otherwise the value of office buildings would fall and that'd be terrible...
- satvikpendem 4mo agoResearchers are increasingly using LLMs and other transformer based AI. My friend at a well known research institution asked Anthropic for access to their biology model (not sure if it's Mythos or some other sort of uncensored model) and recently made breakthroughs with it and other AI.
- twister2920 4mo agowhat a delightfully vague story!
- satvikpendem 4mo agoYes, I don't have their permission to dox them, so it will have to be vague for now. Still, there are many news articles outlining the same point I made, except with real examples.
- unsupp0rted 4mo agoMoonshots are concerning until you consider the alternative. AI is the one and only possibility for saving millions (likely billions) of lives from “old age”, cancers, Alzheimer’s, ALS… you name it. It’s a big bet. The alternative is we all die anyway: sadly after a gradual decline at best or horribly after long undignified suffering at worst. I’ll take the economic risk.
- rvba 4mo agoIf those billions were poured in research it could bring results too.
- unsupp0rted 4mo agoMedical progress basically stopped toward the end of the 20th century. We can now treat breast cancer and leukemia? What a low bar. We’ve got sci-fi cellphones and 1980s medicine.
- hack1312 4mo ago> AI is the one and only possibility for saving millions (likely billions) of lives from “old age”, cancers, Alzheimer’s, ALS… you name it. Says you and everyone else with a financial incentive to trick people into believing this.
- unsupp0rted 4mo agoMy financial incentive is surviving the next couple decades healthy enough to keep doing things
- ofjcihen 4mo agoI know Ed Zitron is a dirty word on HN most days but having recently read some of his (highly editorialized) work… it seems like he’s right and the numbers just aren’t making sense. Combine that with the fact that “good enough” is a real thing and cheap Chinese models are either there or close depending on your use case and it’s hard to see how this ends well.
- pianopatrick 4mo agoWell it could end well for the general public in the sense that we get cheap, good enough AI.
- ofjcihen 4mo agoOh definitely. Personally, I think it will get to the point where we have local good enough models. I’m just incredibly confused how these companies and investors don’t see the writing on the wall UNLESS the point is to just extract as much money as possible and not be left holding the bag.
- pianopatrick 4mo agoWell I think it's possible some of these American AI companies could still end up being a good business. It's like Apple vs Android. Globally Android is the most common, but Apple still has a good business as a premium brand for people who are willing to pay more for higher quality. Anthropic and OpenAI could end up as the Apple of the AI industry.
- therobots927 4mo agoZitron will be proven right. That’s why I’m investing in beaten down SaaS stocks. It’s a reasonable hedge against the AI insanity.
- vanuatu 4mo agoat the current pace, LLMs are the researchers the end goal isnt to serve a chatbot to replace google or a coding agent to build crud
- theptip 4mo agoI don’t really buy the opportunity cost argument. The bets we are placing look EV-positive to me. The 90th percentile upside is way, way higher than is priced into the current stocks, the 10th percentile looks to me like 2000 where a bunch of investors loose their shirts and then for the next few decades new companies boom on all the infrastructure that was built. The “failure mode” for this tech is that we don’t advance much beyond Sol/Fable and the existing models just get cheaper. If there is an AI bust in hindsight it likely will look like the dotcom bust did, which is a small blip on the decades-scale GDP curve.
- insane_dreamer 4mo agoNot only that but with so much human capital and resources devoted to AI’s explicit goal of replacing human labor there are two outcomes: 1) it succeeds and we have a serious social problem on our hands with large swaths of the population out or a job, or 2) it fails and we have a very large market and economic crisis as the AI bubble collapses. Maybe there’s a partial success future that isn’t those two, but I’m not hopeful. And I’d take the Ai bubble collapse over AI BigTech achieving its goals
- CamperBob2 4mo agoIt’s not just the fact that it may not work well economically speaking That's not going to happen. Everything is different now, and the only long-term losers will be those who continue to deny it. Even now we still see stupid analogies to parrots, calculators, toddlers, and so on, being advanced here of all places. and would end up with a market crash That might happen, because the first attempt a market makes to allocate funding and spending optimally is almost never on target. Great, it'll give the rest of us a chance to buy in.
- skybrian 4mo agoOpportunity cost arguments are more convincing when there’s some specific opportunity that you’re comparing against. Otherwise, it’s sort of like saying that people will find a job doing something else, without any thought to what that something else would be. The jobs don’t create themselves.
- throwpoaster 4mo ago> the fact that the entire economy is betting everything on it This is untrue. Spend is about 2% of GDP.
- inigyou 4mo agoThere are more economic indicators than spend and GDP. What percent of the money supply does it prop up? Of retirement accounts? Of the S&P 500?
- jgbuddy 4mo agoWhat metric are you using to say the entire economy is betting on it?