AI Is Too Big to Fail

So the biggest achievement of this amazing new technology is to artificially prop up Wall Street?

For those who can read the tea leaves --- it's absolutely a bubble --- a financial bubble.

The real reason why China is ahead in many areas is because their leadership is a little more technologically savvy and progressive than ours.

If this really is a pre-war economy, we have invested heavily in unproven tech which in my opinion is a risky move that leaves the US highly vulnerable.

Haha okay. Have you met people? Have you seen what they’re using it for? The users of LLMs do not care if they have to pay some of their wages to avoid working and learning. Even if it means they will no longer receives wages (or even close to the same wages) in the long term.

LOL fuck this, the stock market deserves to burn to the ground.

   Where does all this leave us? For one, you better hope and pray that AI delivers a magical transformation, because if it doesn't, the whole economy will collapse into brutal serfdom. When I say magic here, I mean it; because of the ~38T national debt bomb, a big boost is not enough. If AI doesn't completely transform our economy, the massive capital misallocation combined with the national debt is going to cause our economy to implode.

If AI is an executioner's blow to your opponent by enabling you to dominate them in terms of hacking, economy, government, politics, etc. kinetic strikes are more than justified. You could destroy most of the US's ability to create AI for decades with Pearl Harbor-esque first strikes.

Do people think countries are just going to roll over and die?

In my book, prosperity and progress is measured in Terajoules. If you have free, clean and abundant energy, you have industry, jobs, every fucking thing a healthy economy should want or need to have.

And on the other side, I think the Chinese are deluding themselves on robotics.

Now invest in my Ai company, 100mil at 10bn valuation, can't fail, too big.

Dot com bust was 50% of S&P / 80% on Nasdaq... we survived it..

For Nvidia: all it will take is for one smart grad student to find a better training algorithm to destroy 75% of their value.

Why I think a better algorithm is out there:

Total installed GPU Tflops = 4 billion. Tflops of human brain = 1 million

But on the whole, I'm not too worried.

LLMs are as much of a feature of an existing technology as computers are features of electricity. ML and neural networks have been around for a long time and the transition to LLM usage for us feels like "yup, another feature, just a really good auto-complete".

For most users of LLMs, this is a magical feature that answers any questions and saves so much time and effort. I would even dare say that LLMs are a bigger leap in technology than the internet itself was. The internet connected people, "AI" made it so that we need less of each other!

What was the cause of the enlightenment and renaissance period in europe that led to a boom in science, technology and the industrial revolution which is responsible for computers to begin with? It was the discovery of the new world and the expansion of europe into asia and africa. Get gold and pearls from the new world and sell use it to buy things in the near and far east. This meant people can spend time studying science, but it also meant military R&D. Better ships, better guns,better cannons. You need better science for that. Not just for colonization but the competition between european powers.

What's my point? AI/LLMs, are a leap in that people can now do a lot less things they don't want to do. Even if it means social instability. There is a very active arms-race in military capability, disinformation, control of markets and influence of governments going on as we speak. and this in turn is going to result in better and better improvements in every sector.

The internet meant we had to learn new things, move to more efficient work. LLMs meant without learning as much we tell the computer to do things and all it needs is guidance and some correction.

We all see the fads and the hype all over. But there are very real and very dramatic advantages and values to be extracted from LLMs, which in the long run would be the equivalent of the industrial revolution.

The pessimism feels a lot like people were being pessimistic about the internet back in the 90s.

AI isn't just too big to fail, it isn't something that can fail. Can long distance communication "fail" , can electronic computing fail? can transportation on wheels fail?

All the grifters slapping AI on everything will fail, but the AI tech and all the value and change that comes with it, isn't something worth even consider as having a potential for failure.

(sorry for the long post)

But with AI the hope is that the value created will be proportional to wages being removed.

I.e. if AI creates more value, it means that the large majority of people will actually have less money, bar a few lucky ones. You have to remember that AI is being touted as the final solution to basically do all your administrative work for you, and all your software engineering.

So if it fails we all lose a lot of money because the stock market will drastically go down.

But I don't think humanity overall will be better off if it succeeds.

Internet boom does substantially decrease communication cost and bring more people together, making much more liquidity. AI, meanwhile, is not only not flawless (and sometimes fatal, see some horror stories of LLM here in HN doing an oopsie deleting production database and do nothing about recovery), but also a costy beast that only corporations or rich individuals could own, in other words, most people can "download" the "means of production", but not totally use and own it.

And the biggest problem for AI, still, that compared to Internet, is that AI does not make you that much gain in productivity. Back when we are in the office we use pen and paper, now we use Word or LibreOffice depending on where you are, and PC is therefore a must. Now I don't think AI is going to be a must, and they are still shoveling NPU that would end up being a waste in silicon space, if not vaporware.

1) Build more AI products and do everything imaginable to get AI to produce value - because otherwise, we're doomed.

2) Buy stocks of the tech companies that will most likely be nationalized eventually.

3) Boycott unethical tech companies.

But the companies in (3) are exactly the ones that you'll buy stocks of in (2) and whose services and/or infrastructure you'll build your product on in (1). So how are you supposed to boycott them?

Even one wasn't _that_ cynical about AI, but yeah, this is clearly one possible reading of the events. I'm in no hurry to live in the future that it entails, though.

> Where does all this leave us? For one, you better hope and pray that AI delivers a magical transformation, because if it doesn't, the whole economy will collapse into brutal serfdom

*anyone American who doesn't own stock

A key difference is of course, at least in the US, that the research is led by corporations as opposed to research institutes and government.