Yeah, I don't think people are processing just how much money is being spent. AI is a useful tool, but the financial aspects of it are monstrous. In terms of comparison, the OpenAI deals announced this year is bigger than the US defense budget. Nuclear weapons, stealth bombers, nuclear submarines, F-35s, a million soldiers...more money than all of that.
Think what an aircraft carrier costs to build (approx 13 billion USD) and then run per year (approx 0.75-1 billion USD), and then think that Sam Altman has promised 100 times that to all his partners. A floating city of 5000 people that can launch a wing of fighter planes and support craft and turn any enemy city into rubble costs a tiny fraction of supporting a chat bot.
The thing is. Crypto was crap. It was never going to revolutionize the word and generate billions of dollars of value. It’s like a decentralized bank with the good and bad that comes along with that.
AI can actually revolutionize the world. The best outcome of all these bets are bonkers. If one company can land it and everyone else fails, it’s trillions. I’m less optimistic what happens if 10 companies all have AI models with roughly similar performance. How much can they charge?
No company will land it building attention based transformers. They simply don't do what people say they do. They are very powerful and I love using claude code every day at work. But they aren't going to become autonomous androids because they don't even respect what little we know about cognitive science. I think that what is more exciting across all of this work is that many of these models are a strong increment forward in predicting physical systems which means we can have more accurate and more complex control systems for manufacturing, transport, etc. You can use transformers to take a super computer scale weather model and run it on a desktop GPU. That is rather impressive imo.
1) Are some intelligent people with the power over hundreds of millions, billions even, that sure that AI will pay off?
2) Is it all a gamble by not-that-intelligent people that have power over those billions?
3) Is it intelligent people knowing this will never work, just pretending for the grift, ripping off 2)?
It's fascinating and I can't wait to see how it's ending, despite knowing there is no happy end possible anymore. Either most people are replaced by AI and society as we know it ends or there is a gigantic crash waiting.
It's 3, surely; Even if the companies crash, the people leading them won't - they will have extracted an absurd amount of cash, and when the crash comes they're like "oh we paid ourselves millions for our good work, we couldn't possibly see the crash coming. It's nobodies fault! Anyway let's get our bankruptcy proceedings over already, the company doesn't have remotely as much worth left anyway"
I believe there is lot of making money now or in next 3 to 12 months. Whatever it takes. Unless you go to really egregious level of fraud, you likely won't be punished. So optimal game is to skim your bonuses from the game. Same goes for fund management. Keep numbers looking good and stay on mostly legal side and you get to skim from top.
I wonder if the way we have to look at the A.I. race is as a form of cold war. During the cold war, military expenses made no economic sense but we had to do it anyway to come on top. At this point, it's "who can borrow the most without bankrupting itself or can survive until a government bailout".
Is it too much if I hope for Oracle to bankrupt itself?
You're not alone!
JPMorgan's strategy team also warned on Monday that the trillions in capital required for the AI boom will 'drain' every credit market.
These corporate bonds combined with the rises in consumer debt (and defaults) doesn't seem to bode well. Everyone is borrowing..
This isn't far out in the future either, they're likely to run out of cash by November 2026 and they are on watch to be downgraded to junk bonds.
Tony Blair's link to Oracle has been touted in the media recently. Coincidence?
Never occurred to me that oracle could go pop.
I wonder. They have powerful friends and lots of dependents still (despite their abusive practices), so god knows how this will go.
Yeah, I don't think people are processing just how much money is being spent. AI is a useful tool, but the financial aspects of it are monstrous. In terms of comparison, the OpenAI deals announced this year is bigger than the US defense budget. Nuclear weapons, stealth bombers, nuclear submarines, F-35s, a million soldiers...more money than all of that.
Think what an aircraft carrier costs to build (approx 13 billion USD) and then run per year (approx 0.75-1 billion USD), and then think that Sam Altman has promised 100 times that to all his partners. A floating city of 5000 people that can launch a wing of fighter planes and support craft and turn any enemy city into rubble costs a tiny fraction of supporting a chat bot.
The thing is. Crypto was crap. It was never going to revolutionize the word and generate billions of dollars of value. It’s like a decentralized bank with the good and bad that comes along with that.
AI can actually revolutionize the world. The best outcome of all these bets are bonkers. If one company can land it and everyone else fails, it’s trillions. I’m less optimistic what happens if 10 companies all have AI models with roughly similar performance. How much can they charge?
No company will land it building attention based transformers. They simply don't do what people say they do. They are very powerful and I love using claude code every day at work. But they aren't going to become autonomous androids because they don't even respect what little we know about cognitive science. I think that what is more exciting across all of this work is that many of these models are a strong increment forward in predicting physical systems which means we can have more accurate and more complex control systems for manufacturing, transport, etc. You can use transformers to take a super computer scale weather model and run it on a desktop GPU. That is rather impressive imo.
So OpenAI is clearly a military too :)
1) Are some intelligent people with the power over hundreds of millions, billions even, that sure that AI will pay off?
2) Is it all a gamble by not-that-intelligent people that have power over those billions?
3) Is it intelligent people knowing this will never work, just pretending for the grift, ripping off 2)?
It's fascinating and I can't wait to see how it's ending, despite knowing there is no happy end possible anymore. Either most people are replaced by AI and society as we know it ends or there is a gigantic crash waiting.
It's 3, surely; Even if the companies crash, the people leading them won't - they will have extracted an absurd amount of cash, and when the crash comes they're like "oh we paid ourselves millions for our good work, we couldn't possibly see the crash coming. It's nobodies fault! Anyway let's get our bankruptcy proceedings over already, the company doesn't have remotely as much worth left anyway"
I believe there is lot of making money now or in next 3 to 12 months. Whatever it takes. Unless you go to really egregious level of fraud, you likely won't be punished. So optimal game is to skim your bonuses from the game. Same goes for fund management. Keep numbers looking good and stay on mostly legal side and you get to skim from top.
Eventually this will then crash down.
This whole thing is so repulsive, makes me want to vomit.
I wonder if the way we have to look at the A.I. race is as a form of cold war. During the cold war, military expenses made no economic sense but we had to do it anyway to come on top. At this point, it's "who can borrow the most without bankrupting itself or can survive until a government bailout".
Sam Bankman-Fried isn't in jail right now because of a lack of IQ.
There are all these social dynamics at play that cause really smart people to do really stupid things sometimes.
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/big-techs-soaring-profits-have-a...
4) the whole system is rigged and the playbook is entering a new chapter
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/big-techs-soaring-profits-have-a...