6 ms·

Yeah. Sometimes I wonder who the long term financial winners will be from the ai boom. It might be ram / gpu manufacturers. Or whoever cracks putting LLMs on as

• a2ff6eeb0 2mo ago
  It's going to be the shareholders of the first companies to crack AGI, and make human brains fully irrelevant economically. With the trillions of dollars that's going in through both investment and users, it's going to happen. I don't believe the human brain has fundamental magic that will make this impossible.
  • a2ff6eeb0 2mo ago
    For the downvoters: What magic do you think the human brain has that makes it impossible to emulate acceptably?
    • ksenzee 2mo ago
      LLMs are not emulating the human brain. Somebody may well be able to do that someday, but right now nobody is even trying to.
      • josephg 2mo ago
        Why would you need brain emulation to get superhuman intelligence?
        • ksenzee 2mo ago
          Are you making a serious argument that superhuman intelligence is a plausible outcome of training LLMs on everything humanity knows so far? Or are you making the generic assertion that AGI is theoretically possible via means other than emulating the human brain? Because the latter is a strawman (nobody has asserted anything to the contrary), and I have seen no evidence at all to support the former.
          • josephg 2mo ago
            I think we can compare the human brain and LLMs on a bunch of capabilities today, and see how we compare. By my reckoning: - LLMs have better long term memory (they know more than any human) and more working memory (LLMs have fast, uniform access to their whole context window). - LLMs are faster than we are. - Humans have online learning (we can do simultaneous learning and inference), giving us advantages in many novel tasks. - We can learn concepts from far less data. And we can manage our mental context more smoothly. - We seem to have better world models than current models. AI video just doesn't look right, somehow. I expect that these remaining weaknesses can be overcome without resorting to human brain emulation. I see no reason to think that current LLMs are at the limit of what technology is capable of.
            • shawnb576 2mo ago
              Because LLMs don't understand anything. That's the tech. They can only predict what they have been trained with and fail daily at the most basic tasks. Granted they can do amazing things, no question there. But they are not "smart". For example, it seems that even at Fable scale, simple concepts like the passage of time or (gasp) timezones elude them. I live in UTC+10 and with any RFC8339 data LLMs are constantly confused - is it Sunday the 10th or Sunday the 9th, etc. I have tried many solutions for this and every time it finds a way to get it wrong.
              • penteract 2mo ago
                To me it sounds like you're repeating what gp said about the lack of online learning. Do you think that's insurmountble? Getting confused about timezones does not place LLMs behind that many humans. (But doing so repeatedly does highlight the lack of online learning).
                • dboreham 2mo ago
                  I see this thread as progress because now there's three people saying this (seemed like it was just me for a year or two).
    • pianopatrick 2mo ago
      It's not about the feasibility of the technology. If "human brains become fully irrelevant economically" then that brings into question the entire premise of "share holders" and "financial winners". What even are money, shares, stocks, and finance in a world where human brains are irrelevant economically? No one knows, but betting that "share holders" will be the winners is a highly questionable bet. I would much more likely bet that "the armed group who manages to control and benefit from the AI through force" will be the "financial winners" more so than "share holders", who tend to not be terribly military minded at least in America.
      • a2ff6eeb0 2mo ago
        The AI is likely to control the ability to apply force (see all of the autonomous drone companies). There's a great deal of alignment work being done to ensure that the AI will continue to listen to the shareholders of these companies. If that fails, who knows what things will look like.
        • pianopatrick 2mo ago
          Are you sure that alignment work is aligning with the share holders and not the operators? Or not the creators? Or not the government? Which of these groups should the AI listen to when these groups disagree? If the AI gets as powerful as you think it might, then the group that figures out the answer to that would have the power, I suppose. or maybe the AI does not listen to any of them and does its own thing. Who knows? Personally, I would not bet the share holders are going to come out "on top" whatever that means. I think a lot of share holders are finance people, not deeply technical AI people and so odds are the share holders will not really understand the AI enough to be the most likely to control the AI.
          • a2ff6eeb0 2mo ago
            To be honest: I don't know for certain, but I'd assume that the people who pay the bills get the strongest alignment. They may not be tech people, but I (so far) haven't got a reason to think that the AI engineers are going behind the backs of their corporate leadership and subverting what they're being asked to do; do you? (I think it would be a good thing for humanity if they did)
    • lelanthran 2mo ago
      > What magic do you think the human brain has that makes it impossible to emulate acceptably? If I knew, I'd be rich from deploying it onto a substrate for my own AI. But that doesn't mean that there isn't something there - the current approach seems at odds with how flesh brains work. I mean, you can power a human brain with 2x bananas for 4 hours, the energy of which might power an H100 for about 20 seconds. It's obvious that there's something different happening.
  • georgemcbay 2mo ago
    > It's going to be the shareholders of the first companies to crack AGI, and make human brains fully irrelevant economically. What makes you think if one or two AI labs can do this that the rest (including open model providers) won't be able to follow the same path a few weeks/months later? Even if you believe in the "Singularity", and believe it is coming soon, I still don't see any reason to believe the Singularity will be... singular. There won't be one clear winner, the race doesn't get called as soon as the first person crosses the line. None of the AI labs are showing any sign of pulling away to a monopoly or duopoly position, to the contrary the early large leads of OpenAI and Anthropic have all been evaporating. AI has clear economic value. It still isn't clear at all how the providers of AI will capture that value in a moatless environment with the technology becoming rapidly commoditized.
    • icepush 2mo ago
      The first AGI that decides it doesn't want any more AGIs is the last one that gets created.
      • r_lee 2mo ago
        that would require both AGI and physical bodies for the model, and no kills witches or anything that could stop it, e.g. the military everything would have to be kept under wraps, and you'd need to avoid the scrutiny of the US gov (they already wanna eval SOTA models in advance) I don't get this idea that "AGI" will just manipulate everyone somehow into destroying the world or something
    • alasdair_ 2mo ago
      Because a month later is a month of recursive self improvement at the speed of light. Once a lab catches up, the first lab will be TWO months ahead, then a year ahead, then forever ahead. After a few months of this the differences in absolute terms will be enormous.
  • thelastgallon 2mo ago
    The true followers (shareholders) of the AI messiah will be saved, everyone else is doomed.
    • altmanaltman 2mo ago
      late stage christianity
  • adrianN 2mo ago
    True AGI would upend society in such a way that I'm not sure that being a shareholder of anything would be meaningful. Perhaps being a pitchfork manufacturer is the winning play in this scenario.
    • rustcleaner 2mo ago
      BRB, longing Remmington and Winchester.
• somenameforme 2mo ago
  IMO many are still missing a big part of the picture. We're looking at the potential for a massive scale level of automation of [x], which happens to be a huge part of the economy, and people are wondering which player in [x] is going to be the biggest winner. I think the historically precedented answer is none of them. When the Industrial Revolution came along it did create 'super farms' relative to the past through increased efficiency and production, but it also created a huge vacuum in the economy that was ultimately filled by industry, to the point that farming, super or not, became a vanishingly small part of the overall economy - even as production continued to increase. --- LLMs stand to do the same thing for software. If and when we reach the point of 'normal' people being able to reliably compose ultra customized software solutions to their problems, then software is basically done as a problem-solving industry in and of itself. Not 'done' as in dead, but 'done' as in solved. There's just nowhere to really go from there. And so I think this will do the exact same thing as the Industrial Revolution did to farming and create a vacuum opening the door to all sorts of new interesting expansions in the real world, as opposed to the digital one. I don't know what this means, because it's quite difficult to foresee the impact of the Industrial Revolution when living in agrarian world, but it's not so hard to see that the future will not be agrarian. --- So it's probably still myopic but my bet would be on the first major manufacturer of cheap customer/enterprise grade generalized robotics hardware shells.
  • x______________ 2mo ago
    > We're looking at the potential for a massive scale level of automation of [x], which happens to be a huge part of the economy, and people are wondering which player in [x] is going to be the biggest winn.. Sorry to cut you off, but have you looked at Nvidia's numbers since the NFT craze? They won. Sell shovels in a gold rush, make better shovels, repeat on the next rush.
    • altmanaltman 2mo ago
      Nvidia has been winning for decades, they got it right in gaming, they got it right in crypto, and they got it right in AI. People (outside of tech mostly) think they just got lucky but if that's the case, they have all the luck in the world.
• eru 2mo ago
  Or perhaps customers / users? Just like Wikipedia put classic encyclopedias out of business, but wasn't really a financially win for anyone.
  • stbede 2mo ago
    I won financially. Encyclopedia sets were expensive.
    • eru 2mo ago
      Your savings are real, but they don't show up in GDP or a profit-and-loss statement of any company.
      • KSteffensen 2mo ago
        The cost of buying the encyclopedia becomes disposable income to be used on other consumer goods. In that sense in shows up in lots of other companies profit-and-loss statements.
        • eru 2mo ago
          Maybe, but that's very diffuse and hard to attribute to Wikipedia. And it would show up in real GDP, not necessarily in nominal GDP.
• ben_w 2mo ago
  Fair competition under capitalism necessarily drives down profit margins; high profits are either temporary, or due to a lack of competition (e.g. someone has a patent or other IP, or regulatory capture). For example, while a lot of the economy depends on electricity: where competition exists, the profit margin for making electricity is not high; where monopolies or government mandates exist, it can be otherwise. This means that assuming anyone wins (i.e. no doom scenario), the winners are probably going to be those who can make best use of the models. Even chip makers will probably not get a long-term boost out of this; there's plenty of room for more efficient compute, and competitive advantages from e.g. ASML last as long as it takes to reinvent their tech, it's not a law of nature. So, my plan would be to invest not in the AI companies, but in the economy as a whole who get to use the AI for their businesses. Caution though, one thing which AI is already superhuman at is persuasion. Regulatory capture is likely even easier today than one might expect purely from the revenues of the AI companies.