You have to keep in mind Microsoft is planning on spending almost 100B in datacenter capex this year and they're not alone. This is basically OpenAI matching the major cloud provider's spending.
This could also be (at least partly) a reaction to Microsoft threatening to pull OpenAI's cloud credits last year. OpenAI wants to maintain independence and with compute accounting for 25–50% of their expenses (currently) [2], this strategy may actually be prudent.
Depends on your definition of profitability, They are not recovering R&D and training costs, but they (and MS) are recouping inference costs from user subscription and API revenue with a healthy operating margin.
Today they will not survive if they stop investing in R&D, but they do have to slow down at some point. It looks like they and other big players are betting on a moat they hope to build with the $100B DCs and ASICs that open weight models or others cannot compete with.
This will be either because training will be too expensive (few entities have the budget for $10B+ on training and no need to monetize it) and even those kind of models where available may be impossible to run inference with off the shelf GPUs, i.e. these models can only run on ASICS, which only large players will have access to[1].
In this scenario corporations will have to pay them the money for the best models, when that happens OpenAI can slow down R&D and become profitable with capex considered.
[1] This is natural progression in a compute bottle-necked sector, we saw a similar evolution from CPU to ASICS and GPU in the crypto few years ago. It is slightly distorted comparison due to the switch from PoW to PoS and intentional design for GPU for some coins, even then you needed DC scale operations in a cheap power location to be profitable.
They will have an endless wave of commoditization chasing behind them. NVIDIA will continue to market chips to anyone who will buy... Well anyone who is allowed to buy, considering the recent export restrictions. On that note, if OpenAI is in bed with the US government with this to some degree, I would expect tariffs, expert restrictions, and all of that to continue to conveniently align with their business objectives.
If the frontier models generate huge revenue from big government and intelligence and corporate contracts, then I can see a dynamo kicking off with the business model. The missing link is probably that there need to be continual breakthroughs that massively increase the power of AI rather than it tapering off with diminishing returns for bigger training/inference capital outlay. Obviously, openAI is leveraging against that view as well.
Maybe the most important part is that all of these huge names are involved in the project to some degree. Well, they're all cross-linked in the entire AI enterprise, really, like OpenAI Microsoft, so once all the players give preference to each other, it sort of creates a moat in and of itself, unless foreign sovereign wealth funds start spinning up massive stargate initiatives as well.
We'll see. Europe has been behind the ball in tech developments like this historically, and China, although this might be a bit of a stretch to claim, does seem to be held back by their need for control and censorship when it comes to what these models can do. They want them to be focused tools that help society, but the American companies want much more, and they want power in their own hands and power in their user's hands. So much like the first round where American big tech took over the world, maybe it's prime to happen again as the AI industry continues to scale.
Why would China censoring Tiananmen Square/whatever out of their LLMs be anymore harmful to the training process when the US controlled LLMs also censor certain topics, eg "how do I make meth?" or "how do I make a nuclear bomb?".
Because China censors very common words and phrases such as "harmonized", "shameless", "lifelong", "river crabbed", "me too". This is because Chinese citizens uses puns and common phrases initially to get around censors.
They are absolutely different flavors. OpenAI is not being told by the government to censor violence, sex or racism - they're being told that by their executives.
News flash: household-name businesses aren't going to repeat slurs if the media will use it to defame them. Nevermind the fact that people will (rightfully) hold you legally accountable and demand your testimony when ChatGPT starts offering unsupervised chemistry lessons - the threat of bad PR is all that is required to censor their models.
There's no agenda removing porn from ChatGPT any more than there's an agenda removing porn from the App Store or YouTube. It's about shrewd identity politics, not prudish shadow government conspiracies against you seeing sex and being bigoted.
I don't know why people care if they're being censored by government officials or private billionaires. What difference does it make at the end of the day? why is one worse than the other?
Because you aren't being "censored" by billionaires at all. They have made the business decision to reduce the usefulness of their AI to prevent their liability from being legally, or even socially, held accountable.
Again, consider my example about YouTube - it's not illegal for Google to put pornography on YouTube. They still moderate it out though, not because they want to "censor" their users but because amateur porn is a liability nightmare to moderate. Similarly, I don't think ChatGPT's limitations qualify as censorship.
Okay, i mean you can say censorship isn't censorship if you want? This is my point, why are you treating limits placed on your expression/sharing/information differently based on what type of person is doing it?
Because fundamentally it's the same type of censorship as someone deciding to not sell porn magazines, videos or the the Anarchist Cookbook in their newsstand/bookstore/etc. back in the day. They judged (probably quite rightly) that it's not good for business.
Of course the market being extremely concentrated and effectively an oligopoly even in the best case does shine a somewhat different light on it. Until/unless open models catch up both quality and accessibility wise.
Sigh. No. Censorship is censorship is censorship. That is true even if you happen to like and can generate a plausible defense of US version that happens to be business friendly ( as opposed to China's ruling party friendly ).
It is not a take. It is simple position of 'just because you call something as involuntary semen injection does not make it any less of a rape'. I like things that are clear and well defined. And so I repeat:
I am not sure if it will surprise you, but your affiliation or the size of your 'team' is largely irrelevant from my perspective. That said, I am mildly surprised you were able to accept the new self-image as willing censor though. Most people struggle with that ( edit: hence the 'this is not censorship' facade ).
They're accepting your definition of censorship to highlight how fucking stupid it is. Is Hacker News a censorship haven because I flagged the "How to have Sex with Cars" post uploaded yesterday? Am I a tyrant for trying to oppress that poor user's voice? No. I'm upholding the guidelines of a privately owned and moderated community.
"Censorship is censorship is censorship" is the sort of defense you'd rely on if you were caught selling guns and kiddie porn on the internet. It's not the sort of defense OpenAI needs to use though, because they have a semblance of self-preservation instinct and would rather not let ChatGPT say something capable of pissing off the IMF or ADL. Call that "censorship" all you want - it's like canvassing for your right to yell 'fire!' in a movie theater.
Friend, neither of those is a body that can say constitution in US is null and void. Nor to they get to pick and choose which speech is kosher. It is not up to those orgs to decide.
<< They're accepting your definition of censorship to highlight how fucking stupid it is.
They are accepting it, because there is no way it cannot not be accepted. Now.. just because there is some cognitive dissonance over what should logically follow is a separate issue entirely.
Yes, that's true. It's very rare for people to be able to value actual free speech. Most people think they do until they hear something they don't like
However private individuals or companies deciding not to offer certain products is an expression of free speech.
i.e. denying someone who is running an online platform/community or training an LLM model or whatever the right to remove or not provide specific content is a clearly limiting their right to freedom of expression.
Because when a small group of elites with permament term and no elections decides what is allowed and what isn't... and has full control of silencing what's not allowed and any meta discussion about the silencing itself... is different from when an elected government decides it, and then anyone is free to raise a stink on whatever is their version of twitter today without worrying about being disappeared tomorrow
It's not an elected government if you're talking about the US. These policies are also all decided by "elites with permanent term and no elections" you realize right?
I don't feel like this was a good faith interpretation of my comment. What i'm saying is that in the US and China, censorship is decided by unelected officials. In one case it's CPC in another case it's corporate executives
That makes even less sense as a comparison. Sure Instagram censored anti-Trump posts for a day but in case you didn't notice you are free to discuss that without fearing suppression or jail.
> Why would China censoring Tiananmen Square/whatever out of their LLMs be anymore harmful to the training process when the US controlled LLMs also censor certain topics, eg "how do I make meth?" or "how do I make a nuclear bomb?".
I was explaining why it is more harmful and thought you were arguing it is not harmful?
I was just making a very simple narrow claim: Censorship in the west and china are both done by unelected people. Note that i didn't say china was good, censorship was equivalent or anything else you're trying to argue. my literal only point was:
Censorship in the west and china are both done by unelected people
They want their LLMs explicitly approved to align with the values of the regime. Not necessarily a bad thing, or at least that avenue wasn't my point. It does get in the way of going fast and breaking things though, and on the other side there is an outright accelerationist pseudo-cult.
Ignoring the moral dimension for a second, I do wonder if it is harder to implement a rather cohesive, but far-reaching censorship in the chinese style, or the more outrage-driven type of "censorship" required of American companies. In the West we have the left pre-occupied with -isms and -phobias, and the right with blasphemy and perceived attacks on their politics.
With the hard shift to the right and Trump coming into office, especially the last bit will be interesting. There is a pretty substantial tension between factual reporting and not offending right-wing ideology: Should a model consider "both sides" about topics with with clear and broad scientific consensus if it might offend Trumpists? (Two examples that come to mind was the recent "The Nazis were actually left wing" and "There are only two genders".)
> they (and MS) are recouping inference costs from user subscription and API revenue with a healthy operating margin.
I tried to Google for more information. I tried this search: <<is openai inference profitable?>>
I didn't find any reliable sources about OpenAI. All sources that I could find state this is not true -- inference costs are far higher than subscription fees.
I hate to ask this on HN... but, can you provide a source? Or tell us how do you know?
I don't have any qualified source and this metric would be likely be quite confidential even internally.
It is just an educated guess factoring costs of running similar/comparable models to 4o or 4o-mini per token, and how azure commitments work with OpenAI models[2], also knowing that Plus subscriptions are probably more profitable[1] than API calls.
It would be hard for even OpenAI to know with any certainty because they are not paying for Azure credits like a normal company. The costs are deeply intertwined with Azure and would be hard to split given the nature of the MS relationship[3]
----
[1] This is from experience of running LibreChat using 4o versus ChatGPT Plus for ~200 users, subscriptions should quite profitable than raw API by a order of 3 to 4x, of course different types of users and adoption levels will be there my sample while not small is not likely representative of their typical user base.
[2] MS has less incentive to subsidize than say OpenAI themselves
[3] Azure is quite profitable in the aggregate, while possibly subsidizing OpenAI APIs, any such subsidy has not shown up meaningfully in Microsoft financial reports.
> but they (and MS) are recouping inference costs from user subscription and API revenue with a healthy operating margin.
As far as I am aware the only information from within OpenAI one way or another is from their financial documents circulated to investors:
> The fund-raising material also signaled that OpenAI would need to continue raising money over the next year because its expenses grew in tandem with the number of people using its products.
Subscriptions are the lions share of their revenue (73%). It's possible they are making money on the average Plus or Enterprise subscription but given the above claim they definitely aren't making enough to cover the cost of inference for free users.
So I do question if OpenAI is able to make a profit, even if you remove training and R&D. The $20 plan may be more profitable, but now it will need to cover the R&D and training, plus whatever they lose on Pro.
Not necessarily. DeepSeek will probably only threaten the API usage of OpenAI, which could also be banned in the US if it's too sucessful. API usage is not a main revenue for OpenAI (it is for Anthropic last time I checked). The main competitor for R1 is o1, which isn't gnerally available yet.
The one your laptop can run does not rival what OpenAI offers for money. Still, the issue is not whether third party can run it, it's just the OpenAI seems not putting API as their main product.
Not quite. In 2 years their revenue has ~20x from 200M ARR to 3.7B ARR. The inference costs I believe pay for themselves (in fact are quite profitable). So what they're putting on their investor's credit cards are the costs of employees & model training. Given it's projected to be a multi-trillion dollar industry and they're seen as a market leader, investors are more than happy to throw in interest free cash flow now in exchange for variable future interest in the form of stocks.
That's not quite the same thing at all as your credit card's revenue stream as you have a ~18%+ monthly interest rate on that revenue stream. If you recall AMZN (& all startups really) have this mode early in their business where they're over-spending on R&D to grow more quickly than their free cash flow otherwise allows to stay ahead of competition and dominate the market. Indeed if investors agree and your business is actually strong, this is a strong play because you're leveraging some future value into today's growth.
Platform economics "works" in theory only upto a point. Its super inefficient if you zoom out and look not at system level but ecosystem level. It hasn't lasted long enough to hit failure cases. Just wait a few years.
As to openai, given deepseek and the fact lot of use cases dont even need real time inference its not obvious this story will end well.
I also can't see it ending well for OpenAI. This seems like it's going to be a commodity market with a race to the bottom on pricing. I read that NVIDIA has a roughly 1000% (10x) profit margin on H100's, which means that someone like Google making their own TPUs has a massive cost advantage.
Moore's law seems to be against them too... hardware getting more powerful, small models getting more powerful... Not at all obvious that companies will need to rely on cloud models vs running locally (licencing models from whoever wants that market). Also, a lot of corporate use probably isn't that time critical, and can afford to run slower and cheaper.
Of course the US government could choose to wreck free-market economics by mandating powerful models to be run in "secure" cloud environments, but unless other countries did same that might put US at competitive price disadvantage.
They do get a lot of customers buying their stuff, but on top of that, a company with unique IP and mindshare can get investors to open their wallet easily enough; I keep thinking of AMD that was not or barely profitable for like 15 years in a row.
Meanwhile, Azure has failed to keep up with the last 2-3 generations of both Intel and AMD server processors. They’re available only in “preview” or in a very limited number of regions.
I wonder if this is a sign of the global economic downturn pausing cloud migrations or AI sucking the oxygen out of the room.
The comment is talking like Texas is a bastion of energy, when they've made the news multiple years in a row about how entire cities collapse over what most states would consider trivial amounts of snow. It is hard to be a world leader in energy and to also have a wiki on your recurring energy crisis issues.
My kneejerk response was to point to the incoming administration, but the fact Stargate has been in the works for more than a year now says to me it's because of tax credits.
Lots of back door deals. Just expect more government things put in TX just like the Army built that place in Austin, when we have plenty of dead bases that could be reused
because california is not a very permissive landscape and believes there should be a community-involved process with veto for essentially every large private action
Do you feel your prior comment was sincere and fully captured the reasons for which some firms and individuals have transitioned from California to Texas?
For less than this same price tag, we could’ve eliminated student loan debt for ~20 million Americans. It would in turn open a myriad number of opportunities, like owning a home and/or feeling more comfortable starting a family. It would stimulate the economy in predictable ways.
Instead we gave a small number of people all of this money for a moonshot in a state where they squabble over who’s allowed to use which bathroom and if I need an abortion I might die.
> we could’ve eliminated student loan debt for ~20 million Americans. It would in turn open a myriad number of opportunities, like owning a home
I'd give the money to folks starting in the trades before bailling out the college-educated class.
Also, wiping out numbers on a spreadsheet doesn't erect new homes. If we wiped out student debt, the portion of that value that went into new homeownership would principally flow to existing homeowners.
Finally, you're comparing a government hand-out to private investment into a capital asset. That's like comparing eating out at a nice restaurant to buying a bond. Different prerogatives.
A) this is a pledge by companies they may or may not even have the cash required to back it up. Certainly they aren’t spending it all at once, but to be completely honest it’s nothing more than a PR stunt right now that seems to be an exercise in courting favor
B) that so called private capital is going to get incentives from subsidies, like tax breaks, grants etc. It’s inevitable if this proceeds to an actual investment stage. What’s that about it being pure private capital again?
C) do to the aforementioned circumstances in A it seems whatever government support systems are stood up to support this - and if this isn’t ending in hot air, there will be - it still means it’s not pure private capital and worse yet, they’ll likely end up bilking tax payers and the initiative falls apart with companies spending far less then the pledge but keeping all the upside.
I’ll bet a years salary it plays out like this.
If this ends up being 100% private capital with no government subsidies of any kind, I’ll be shocked and elated. Look at anything like this in the last 40 years and you’ll find scant few examples that actually hold up under scrutiny that they didn’t play out this way.
Which brings me to my second part. So we are going to - in some form - end up handing out subsidies to these companies, either at the local state or federal level, but by the logic of not paying off student debt, why are we going to do this? It’s only propping up an unhealthy economic policy no?
Why is it so bad for us to cancel student debt but it’s fine to have the same cost equivalent as subsidies for businesses? Is it under the “creates jobs” smoke screen? Despite the fact the overwhelming majority of money made will not go to the workers but back to the wealthy and ultra wealthy.
There's no sense of equity here. If the government is truly unequivocally hands off - no subsidies, no incentives etc - than fine, the profits go where they go, and thats the end of it.
However, it won't be, and that opens up a perfectly legitimate ask about how this money is going to get used and who it benefits
I really really don't get it. You (US) all saw it coming. Everybody knew voting for the dark side would funnel money away from poor and middle class towards the rich. Is it a dementia outbreak? Can someone shed a spark of light on the mechanics of all this crazyness?
Americans are fine voting against their interests as long as someone else is hurt worse by it. These policies will hurt most Americans, but as long as trans folks and racial minorities get hurt worse it's fine. Nothing new about the southern strategy.
We have a saying here. "It's the economy, stupid." The orange one appealed straight to the people's economic situation. Our elections hinge on who turns out to vote. Anyone of modest means saw their cash bleed away and their life gets harder. The sitting president always gets punished for this. It's not complicated.
Also, there was lip service to relaxing regulations on building power plants (just for the data centers) and data centers, but it remains to be seen how much of this can be accomplished with just the federal government.
I think the idea of a "college-educated class" speaks to another fundamental problem with the American project - that a college education is now seen as some upper-class bauble. It is only seen as such a luxury because it is such a slog and expense. Y'all should fix that problem too!
Student loans are the only loan type which you cannot bankrupt out of. I'm sure that many students would accept bankruptcy rather than bailouts if that is preferable. It doesn't make sense to saddle 20 year olds with insurmountable debt.
That was a recent change in bankruptcy law. You could literally just revert it. It should reintroduce some caution into some of these institutions of "higher education."
I'd rather fix the law then try to decide who to hand out tax surpluses to.
This sort of folksy take always ignores that the same issue happens with the trades as does with the professional classes. No one class is immune to a crash due to unnatural promotion. You've let your moral view overcome that reality
It's a fair comparison. Stargate is fundamentally about two things - America's industry needs a cash injection, and we're choosing a completely hype-dominated vein to push the needle into.
Problem is, the parent comment is right. Even if you think student loan mitigation has washy economics behind it, the outcome is predictable and even desirable if you're playing the long-game in politics. If not that, spend $500,000,000,000 towards onshoring Apple and Microsoft's manufacturing jobs. Spend it re-invigorating America's mothballed motor industry and let Elon spec it out like a kid in a candy shop. Relative to AI, even student loan forgiveness and dumping money into trades looks attractive (not that Trump would consider either).
Nobody on HN should be confused by this. We know Sam Altman is a scammer (Worldcoin, anyone?) and we know OpenAI is a terrible business. This money is being deliberately wasted to keep OpenAI's lights on and preserve the Weekend At Bernie's-esque corpse that is America's "lead" in software technology. That's it. It's blatantly simple.
> completely hype-dominated vein to push the needle into
One, you’re not getting MGX and SoftBank to pay off student debt.
Two, if they do what they say they want to, they’ll be building new power generation, transmission infrastructures and data centres. Even if AI is a hype, that’s far from useless capital.
> money is being deliberately wasted to keep OpenAI's lights on
>One, you’re not getting MGX and SoftBank to pay off student debt.
I don't think that was the actual literal expectation, rather that the cost to the tax payer - and there will be a cost to the tax payer - should be best spent elsewhere.
>Two, if they do what they say they want to, they’ll be building new power generation, transmission infrastructures and data centres. Even if AI is a hype, that’s far from useless capital.
Nothing has proven this to be true yet
>OpenAI is spending their own money on this.
Not a single entity has spent any real money on this. So far, its a PR stunt. The general lack of roll out corresponding with the announcement is telling. When real money is spent than I'll believe they might go through with it all the way.
Whats more likely to happen is that these companies will spend at most a token amount of money, then lobby congress and the executive branch for subsidies in order to proceed more 'earnestly' and since this is a pledge, there's nothing in writing that binds a contractual commitment of these funds and their purpose, so they could just as well pocket what they can to offset the costs, use what infrastructure gets built as a result, but shut down the initiative. Bad press won't matter, if its reported on at all.
This has played out for decades like this. Big announcements, so called private money commitments, then come the asks from the government to offset the costs they supposedly pledged to pay anyway, and eventually if you're lucky 1 widget gets built in some economic development area and the companies pocket what they can manage to bilk before its all shut down.
> fun part is when OpenAI asks for more regulation on AI, congress will be receptive
OpenAI is the Jeb Bush of D.C. They’re spending a lot of money, but it ain’t going far. Last time Altman asked for regulation he had to “jk” backwards when Europe and California proposed actual rules.
The problem with allowing student debt to rack up to these levels and then cancelling it is that it would embolden universities to ask even higher tuition. A second problem is that not all students get the benefit, some already paid off their debts or a large part of it. It would be unfair to them.
> not all students get the benefit, some already paid off their debts or a large part of it.
I'm one of the people who paid off a large portion of debt and probably don't need this assistance. However, this argument is so offensive. People were encouraged to take out debt for a number of reasons, and by a number of institutions, without first being educated about the implications of that. This argument states that we shouldn't help people because other people didn't have help. Following this logic, we shouldn't seek to help anyone ever, unless everyone else has also received the exact same help.
- slaves shouldn't be freed because other slaves weren't freed
- we shouldn't give food to the starving, because those not starving aren't getting free food
- we shouldn't care about others because they don't care about me
These arguments are all the greedy option in game theory, and all contribute to the worst outcomes across the board, except for those who can scam others in this system.
The right way to think about programs that help others is to consider cooperating - some people don't get the maximum possible, but they do get some! And when the game is played over and over, all parties get the maximum benefit possible.
In the case of student debt, paying it off and fixing the broken system, by allowing bankruptcy or some other fix, would benefit far more people than it would hurt; it would also benefit some people who paid their loans off completely: parents of children who can't pay off their loans now.
In the end the argument that some already paid off their debts is inherently a selfish argument in the style of "I don't want them to get help because I didn't get help." Society would be better if we didn't think in such greedy terms.
All that said - there are real concerns about debt repayment. The point about emboldening universities to ask for higher tuition highlights the underlying issue with the student loan system. Why bring up the most selfish possible argument when there are valid, useful arguments for your position?
> I'm one of the people who paid off a large portion of debt and probably don't need this assistance. However, this argument is so offensive.
Please spend my tax dollars on curing disease, fixing homelessness, free addiction treatment, better mental health care, improving our justice system, or even cold fusion. All of these have better outcomes than does paying off student debt.
> These arguments are all the greedy option
You left out the best argument against: there are much better things to spend money on.
I could get behind fixing Bush's biggest mistake - his bankruptcy change that moved the pendulum to lifetime debt. I'd love to see people be able to discharge student loans that are impossible to pay off or where the debtor was put in debt by a fraudulent or failed education institution.
I don't like it, but how would you prevent everyone from getting expensive schooling and then immediately declaring bankruptcy?
Just better redistribution and georgism/UBI type stuff but also keeping the need based stuff (medicaid, social security disability etc.) I think would be more fair and not punish people who paid off their debt or worked a job during school. Expanding free public education to K-16 and maybe ?more heavily taxing elite universities that get most of their value from the prestige of their own high ranking students who then have to pay more for it and other things like prestigious journals and even startup funds like YC, top law firms, etc. that work largely as prestige money redirectors where the value comes from those capturing the prestige but is redirected almost entireoy to just whoever kicked off the prestige flywheel early..
> I don't like it, but how would you prevent everyone from getting expensive schooling and then immediately declaring bankruptcy?
You don't! If the government is backing the loan, as is true in almost all cases, you eagerly take the write-off on the public purse in the knowledge that you've just gained an enthusiastic taxpayer who can open a new business or take a flyer on a new career, instead of a debt slave that is terrified to do anything but brownnose their way up the ladder at their dead-end callcenter job that will disappear the minute someone figures out it can be done in Bangladesh or by AI for cents on the dollar.
Sure, it would be better and more efficient to do this directly by nationalizing the state schools and offering free tuition or something, but we have to work with what we have.
Bankruptcies are not a cure all. They are a way to force creditors to work with debtors to either get the debt to where it can be paid back, or git rid of debts the debtor will ever be able to pay. The idea is to prevent usury or debt servitude. It also has the effect of introducing a risk to a loan where the lender can lose their money, and has to consider if it is a good idea to write the loan. Student loans are risky, so the government guarantees them, but even so the default rate is high. Perhaps our focus should be on figuring out why so many loans default and working on bringing expenses and outcomes to an alignment where people don't default.
In America so many banks are hungry to loan money. You can build up your credit and save. I recovered from bankruptcy before the ink was dry. I was driving a new car and living in a new house in short order. It is now long gone from my credit file. Don't ever talk someone out of bankruptcy if they qualify for it.
If you own a home you can exclude it from the bankruptcy. You can also include it and continue to pay the payments and the contract must be honored!
> how would you prevent everyone from getting expensive schooling and then immediately declaring bankruptcy
If the expensive schooling works, then the person should be able to get a nice, well paying job and pay off the loan over the next 20 years. Many of the differal programs (i.e. "putting the loan on hold") programs and policies would prevent this. It's when the clock runs out, and the student can't get the high-paying job that we have issues...
Isn't most debt incurred by graduate students, especially those in med or law schools? Surely 4 years of higher education should be enough for someone to figure out basic maths?
Maybe, maybe not? This is hard to find via search, possibly due to graduate being inside the search term undergraduate. :)
This shows the average total owed by graduate students is much higher than undergraduates, about 3x.
https://www.usatoday.com/money/blueprint/student-loans/avera...
So just spitballing here, if there are more than 3x undergraduates than graduate students, and the same number have loans, the undergraduate debt is higher overall.
The long rise of for profit undergraduate institutions until quite recently says it was extremely profitable to get students into debt for questionable education value, it's almost like payday loan shops, just preying on different segment of population.
I don't think traditional public or private four year universities are blameless, either, raising tuition to match this endlessly rising loans guaranteed by Federal government with spiraling administrative system costs.
Even though the cost is high I thought in the USA the number of med school students is restricted to a very small number.
>People were encouraged to take out debt for a number of reasons, and by a number of institutions, without first being educated about the implications of that
18 year olds don't understand what a loan is? Zero accountability?
In the United States? For huge swaths of the population that answer is obviously no. Financial education and literacy in this country is a complete fucking joke. Very few people expected that they would be on a payment schedule that amounted to $200/mo for 30 years, and for a significant portion of them, there was really strong messaging implying that getting a college education was the only pathway to financial success, such that student loans were worth it. Two generations and counting have been massively duped.
Basically all college-bound 18-year olds understand what debt is — you’re infantilizing them to a ridiculous degree if you think otherwise. A lot of them choose to proceed with college due to career optimism and following the herd, not because “debt” is some magical concept that they don’t understand.
Basically all college-bound 18-year olds understand what debt is
not to sound snarky but seldom do I read here something more wrong... if they did they would NEVER take on the kind of debt they are taking on in droves to get that paper. "debt" is one thing, you probably understand "debt" when you are a kid... understanding loans however - is an entirely different thing from general concept of "debt"
I suppose we’ll have to agree to disagree. I know lots of liberal arts majors who still have a lot of student loan debt in their late 20s and 30s. They knew what they were doing when they enrolled in college and chose their major, it wasn’t like cost of tuition or what an “interest rate” is was somehow obscured from them or too difficult for them to comprehend. In some cases they regret the choices they made earlier but that’s a different matter, those choices were not made in ignorance of the basic situation they were entering into.
We definitely agree to disagree… I am trying to understand your point of view but failing - if they understood the loan and still took on it does that mean that they are just being irrational? or stupid (I don’t mean to sound mean here but lacking a more PC word here…)?
They absolutely understood the terms of the loan. I think they do it anyway because: (1) everyone else is doing it and they don’t have a good alternative (2) career optimism. If you end up becoming a lawyer/consultant/accountant or otherwise have a good corporate job, in the medium-term your student loan debt doesn’t really have a significant impact on your life.
It’s really only a problem if you (1) choose a private college and don’t stay in-state, (2) get a degree which doesn’t have a lot of practical value, and (3) then want to pursue a low-paying field or get a not-useful graduate degree. For example, a friend of mine did her undergrad in art history, master’s in museum studies, and works for a non-profit. She’s not rich but she’s able to survive reasonably comfortably. She’s not dumb or financially illiterate, and she knew what she was getting in for.
I'm just gonna mention that during the 2010s, Donald Trump had $287 million in loans forgiven after refusing to pay and suing the lender for "predatory lending practices."[1]
But yeah, let's make sure we squeeze every drop out of those college students, they should have understood their loan terms.
Consider that his position might be more profound than you considered it to be.
Mine is. It's about incentives.
Now you can take it from there, and at least in my interpretation the rest of your rebuttal falls apart.
There is absolutely no equivalency to slavery. That is simply dishonest. Slaves didn't choose to be slaves.
Do students who take on debt have no agency whatsoever to you?
Did the people who paid such debts had no agency when paying?
If you don't like the equivalence to slavery, pick a different example, there are three I posted and more you can probably think of on your own.
We know that the idea of a rational agent in economics is a myth, and as you mentioned, it is about incentives, as well as motives.
Students who take on debt that limits them in later life don't have all the information they need at the time they make the decision. Saying the information is available is not reasonable. These students are told they _most_ go to college to make a living.
They are not told they need to get an engineering, medical, or finance degree to make going to college worth it, economically.
They are shown all the loans they can get without an equivalent amount of effort put into educating them about the consequences those loans represent. For example, how much the loans will cost in the long run, along with estimated pay for various fields of study.
Furthermore, the loans are given for any degree program without restriction.
All the comments I made about game theory still stand, and we don't need to get into the myriad problems with our education and student loan systems. I agree they aren't perfect; I just think the argument 'I didn't get my loans paid off neither should you' is an extremely selfish one. Just because someone suffers doesn't mean everyone should. Also - in my experience people who are ready to make that selfish argument are very offended when it gets flipped on them. So they can understand intuitively the issue with the selfish position.
> They are not told they need to get an engineering, medical, or finance degree to make going to college worth it, economically.
This is a very well known fact. When I was in high school in the 2000s, it was a well known joke about how the arts / english majors won't land you a job. And even if you never heard about it, the data for average salary for graduates in the college, its dropout rates, and salary by majors is highly publicized. This isn't advanced research to do and in the age of internet, someone considering college should be able to do. I think the problem is no one believes they are the average case and instead are the exception who'll make it work.
Yes but every policy is unfair. It literally is choosing where to give a limited resource, it can never be fully fair.
And there could be a change in the law that allows people to forgive student debt in personal bankruptcy, and that could make sure higher tuition doesnt happen.
> Yes but every policy is unfair. It literally is choosing where to give a limited resource, it can never be fully fair.
I don't think that holds for a policy of non-intervention. People usually don't like that solution, especially when considering welfare programs, but it is fair to give no one assistance in the sense that everyone was treated equally/fairly.
Now its a totally different question whether its fair that some people are in this position today. The answer is almost certainly no, but that doesn't have a direct impact on whether an intervention today is fair or not.
I am a bit apathetic towards giving generally wealthier people who made a bad financial choice a break, when weighed against all the different ways you could spend that money, yes.
> People usually don't like that solution, especially when considering welfare programs, but it is fair to give no one assistance in the sense that everyone was treated equally/fairly.
If you're saying all the different ways you could spend that money, then you're saying non-intervention for the wealthier people how made a bad financial choice, and yes-intervention for other ways in which the money could be spent, which again, is a decision on where to give limited resources.
I'm not saying I agree or don't agree with whether it would be more helpful to give it to those who have college debt or those in the US who are without a home or frankly those here in Kenya (where I am now) who if don't have money, might starve to death.
Moreover that each decision can be judged.
> Now its a totally different question whether its fair that some people are in this position today. The answer is almost certainly no, but that doesn't have a direct impact on whether an intervention today is fair or not.
If we approach it from this side, I agree. Non-intervention, or not giving any limited resources to anyone, is the most fair approach and then we can evaluate whether it's fair the position in which those people are. Yet I don't know how realistic this is, to withhold all resources from everyone.
Maybe? That probably starts a definitional debate that isn't usually helpful. Is it apathetic to let nature, evolution, or markets do what they do best?
What is "fair" requires context. I could argue that nonintervention is fair or that a top-down, Marxist approach is fair depending on how "success" is defined.
I personally don't like the word "fair" very much because of how context-dependent it is. It's often used in "that's unfair" by a person who feels attacked or aggrieved in some way. It seems to have such a subjective quality to it, and yet can be claimed to be objective.
It actually reminds me of an essay I wrote years ago called "The Subjective Adjective" [0] (wow, I wrote it 10 years ago!) The premise is that we take how we subjectively feel and then transform it into an objective statement on reality, overlooking how subjective it really is.
Anyways, I agree some of these conversations seem to devolve into definitional debates that may not get at the real point.
I think I also replied to a different comment thinking it was you—identity and conversational continuation, an aspect of context so often hidden/lacking on HN.
In general, I agree with you that a policy could be equal/fair as in giving everyone an equal amount of X, and that the unfair part is where people are in life. I actually liked the idea of charging a flat tax across the US and then having people voluntarily pay the tax for those who couldn't pay it, because I agree, I would see the tax as fair but the wealth inequality as unfair and one way to rectify that is for people to voluntarily rebalance the wealth. But yeah, I'm sure tons of people would see that as unfair.
If we're considering tax changed, I'd love to see a government run like a kickstarter. Government departments' role should be designing programs, estimate costs, and pitching the program to the public.
For taxes, the government provides estimates or recommendations on what a household would owe but its voluntary. You throe your money into programs that you want to see funded.
It could go horribly wrong, but so can centralized planning. At least this way the people are responsible for it either way.
Have you lived in a country where the citizens believe that the government is overall apathetic to their situations? It often doesn't create a utopia, but rather a lot of cynicism and reliance on family support networks. I'm an American currently in East Africa and I imagine many if not most people here would say the government doesn't care about them and does very little for them. So what ends up happening is that since there is little government/social welfare programs, people rely on family welfare. And well, if you don't have a rich family, your life can be really really really hard, if you even survive.
Your family doesn't have money? No food. No service at the emergency room. Heck, even no water.
I think there's a balance and that people who want more apathy and inaction may not realize what it's like when that's actually the case.
Government is just a collection of people, collection of unknown neighbors. Action can lead to unintended consequences, but so can inaction. Someone is bleeding on the street, do you help? If you help, you might get HIV, if they were attacked the attacker might come after you, the person might even attack you. If you don't help, they might bleed out on the street, they might have permanent damage, or something else.
Do you act or do you not act?
Both have unintended, often unpredictable consequences.
> Government is just a collection of people, collection of unknown neighbors.
I don't think that's an accurate comparison. None of the politicians in Washington are my neighbors, the closes one lives about 300 miles away but he is never actually home. Those politicians have an extreme amount of control over my life, well beyond what seems reasonable given how disconnected we are.
> Do you act or do you not act?
That varies a lot, but context is everything. If I see someone bleeding out, yes I would help. I generally have basic first aid on me including a tourniquet and chest seals. If I have open cuts on my hands and no gloves I'd have to consider the risk of infection, but if someone is likely to die I think I would take the risk (you never know until you're in the situation though).
If someone is attacked on the street, again yes I'd likely act. Context still matters, if I'm 30 feet away and the person has a gun I'd be of no use unless I'm also armed, and even then I'd have to draw before they saw me. If someone is getting beat up, mugged, even stabbed, sure I'd jump in. I think of have a really hard time living with the knowledge that I watched someone get attacked or murdered and did nothing.
It would do more good in K12 or pre-K than it would paying off private debts held by white collar highly educated not rich yet due only to their young age university-bros.
It truly is astonishing. We have kids who cannot afford school lunches, people working multiple blue-collar jobs and yet the problems of people who are statistically better off than average constantly jump to the front. People complain about Effective Altruism because of one dude messing up big but it would behoove everyone to read up on the basic philosophy of it before suggesting how we best spent billions to help reduce suffering.
The problem with EA is in judging what is effective. Perhaps ridding the unforgivable student loans of parents actually helps the kids more than school lunches.
And frankly, some of the most effective altruism may be just to directly give cash to people, yet I don't know how many people in the EA community would trust people so much with unconditional cash.
there are many many problems with the EA movement, but they do generally support unconditional cash transfers.
cash transfers are seen as the "default" baseline. the bar for charity is that it must be better than cash transfers. they do find some such charities that they claim are even better than cash transfers, but they are totally comfortable with giving people unconditional cash.
ah ok, i appreciate the clarification and am grateful to hear that. I think I've worried that the EA movement often has an obsession with optimization, which can lead to getting the absolute best perfect solution and become really dehumanized in the process.
But as I said, I'm glad to hear that unconditional cash is gaining traction with those folks, as I think it not only gives someone financial resources but also trust.
> And this trust — another resource it’s difficult to measure — is the aspect of gifts that many have said they value most.
The above is an excerpt from MacKenzie Scott's essay, "No Dollar Signs This Time." [0] I really appreciate the approach she is taking, which seems to be especially embracing the uncertainty of it all and trusting people to do what they believe is best.
I'd say many of these university bros are actually parents to K12 and Pre-K and having parents not terribly in debt could help them focus more on being there for their kids and encouraging education.
With half a trillion dollars you can also open a lot of universities. Increased supply would lower prices for everyone. One could even open public universities and offer education at very reduced or no tuition.
There are very many universities with zero or no tax, most of them in socialist countries. Why don't you go there? Maybe because none of those matter when serious education is considered.
If we block on the basis that previous people didn't have something and that it would be unfair to them we would literally never make any progress in this world.
Instead of starting a new better world, we'll just stick with the old one that sucks because we don't want to be unfair. What an awful, awful way to look at the world.
When the bailout is for business the money always comes, but suggest even a fraction of that amount of money go towards regular people and all of a sudden there's hand wringing and talk of moral hazards.
> it would embolden universities to ask even higher tuition.
Then cap the amount you give out loans. Many of them are back by one level of the government or another.
> A second problem is that not all students get the benefit, some already paid off their debts or a large part of it. It would be unfair to them.
This is a very flimsy argument. Shall we get rid of the polio vaccine since it's unfair to those who already contracted it that our efforts with the vaccine don't benefit them?
> Instead we gave a small number of people all of this money for a moonshot in a state where they squabble over who’s allowed to use which bathroom and if I need an abortion I might die.
AFAICT from this article and others on the same subject, the 500 billion number does not appear to be public money. It sounds like it's 100 billion of private investment (probably mostly from Son), and FTA,
> could reach five times that sum
(5x 100 billion === 500 billion, the # everyone seems to be quoting)
we are vastly overspending and will either need to monetize the debt (disastrous) or massively cut spending and raise taxes in the future. already now, we need to massively raise taxes on the wealthy but even that will be insufficient with our current spend.
free college is just a giveaway to the wealthier third of our society and irresponsible with our current fiscal situation.
> free college is just a giveaway to the wealthier third of our society and irresponsible with our current fiscal situation.
How is free college a giveaway to the wealthier third of society? For starters, I can assure you the wealthy care a lot about the name of the institution issuing the diploma, and they can afford it. They'll happily front extra cash so their kids can network with people of similar economic status.
I didn't say "the wealthy", I said the wealthier third of our society. Only ~39% of people age 18-24 are in college, those are generally the wealthier people in our society, and free college (I'm assuming from your reply it's free public college) would mostly be a giveaway to those people.
Have you considered that perhaps you have causality mixed up here? Perhaps it's not that only the wealthier ~39% of people want to go to college, but rather that the bottom 61% don't want that economic burden.
I certainly agree that more people would be going to college if it were free. 80% of people? I'm skeptical, but the existing people sending their kids to college (who can afford foregoing that income) would certainly appreciate the giveaway
Good point. Then next best is limit the lending. If a uni wants to charge 50k a year then they need to find rich students who can pay cash. If they want the smartest students they need to find ways to be affordable. Only lend money for affordable universities basically. That will force efficiency, reduce admin etc.
The pretending to not understand how public services work shtick is so tiring.
Everyone understands that public services are free to use because they are funded by taxes. It's not the gotcha you think it is. People say that roads, K-12 education, etc are "free" when they mean there is not a direct fee to use them because they are paid for by the government using tax dollars. You don't have to pretend to not understand this
Who says roads or public education are free? Every gallon of fuel is taxed and, at least in any jurisdiction I've lived in, property taxes fund schools.
I'm not pretending to not understand here. Someone said it would be free and I'm asking how. The fact that "free" doesn't mean free is the problem, not an issue of me misunderstanding.
Your mind works in a very different way than mine.
Elsewhere, you worried that getting millions of people put of crippling debt due to a broken education finance system might tick up inflation.
Here, you worry that making society more educated via university training might decrease the economic value of a degree.
Where is the humanity? Of course some extreme of inflation is bad, and of course we want people to be employable. But artificial scarcity seems like a bad way to go about it.
(And I don't think we have a surplus of engineers in the country, judging by what I perceive to be the gap in talent between china and US, and the moaning by tech about the need for H1B).
> Elsewhere, you worried that getting millions of people put of crippling debt due to a broken education finance system might tick up inflation.
Well yes, I can talk to two different points when the context is different. A good conversation isn't just people shouting their personal opinions, its people playing off of the discussion at hand and considering different angles.
> Here, you worry that making society more educated via university training might decrease the economic value of a degree.
That's actually not what I was saying, I may have phrased it poorly. I did not mean that I worry about anyone getting educated. I was simply trying to point out that a degree has much less value when anyone can get it, like that's because it is free as is the topic here.
In the other thread I wasn't actually concerned about inflation personally, only pointing out that inflation will go up if a large amount of student debt is made to just disappear. I was raising that as a prediction with high likelihood, personally I have opinions on the underlying approach but I don't really have dog in the fight either.
>And I don't think we have a surplus of engineers in the country, judging by what I perceive to be the gap in talent between china and US, and the moaning by tech about the need for H1B
Why take that at face value? Its generally used for wage suppression[0][1] by big companies (not only in tech) and due to how its structured, creates an unhealthy power balance between employers and H1B employees
The MAGA ideals (this is not snark just applying logic) needs more skilled Americans so this would also be aligned with MAGA albeit one of those things that takes more than 4 years to come to fruition so politically harder to do.
> But artificial scarcity seems like a bad way to go about it.
What artificial scarcity are you talking about here?
I'm not trying to say we need artificial scarcity, university should be a market like any other product or service.
Personally I tend to go even further away from most when it comes to scarcity in the job market too - I'd rather have open borders than immigration systems that limit how many people can come here and compete for jobs.
Totally agree, we haven't really had capitalism for most of my life. It is possible though, and most of US history included at least mostly free markets.
I was a software consultant for many years. I'd put that on the list of truly competitive marketplaces. People were either willing to pay me to do a job or they weren't, and I would have to adjust my prices and terms to try to increase or decrease my workload.
For sure, I'd argue that's mainly because any industry that centralizes or grows big enough to really matter finds itself the subject of new government oversight and regulation. As soon as the government becomes involved, for better or worse, its no longer a free market.
I don't know the ins and outs of the UK education system, but I have to assume the facilities and employees are still paid for.
> Does food and water? Shelter?
If everyone had access to it for free? Absolutely! I wouldn't work as a farmer or build houses if no one had to pay for those products. Value, or price in this context, is only really feasible for scarce assets. If something is seemingly unlimited and freely available it will have no (financial) value.
Sure, but then the answer to my original question of who pays for it is the taxpayer. It isn't free, the cost is just subsidized by the public rather than paid by the student.
I'm not even saying that's a bad thing, if most people want it that way I don't see the problem. But it isn't free.
I'm not sure how, it seems really important to distinguish between free and not free. To me it seems disingenuous to call something free when its publicly funded.
But everyone knows that "free" in this context means publicly funded. Free as in beer never meant that the entire production of the beer somehow was accomplished without financial or material input.
That doesn't hold up even just in this comment thread. Higher up when I asked who pays for it the reply I got was "Not anyone". The person really didn't seem to get that " free" == publicly funded == taxpayers pay for it.
Right, but if our answer is taxes then someone pays for it and it is not free. There's nothing wrong with that, we just can't call it free.
> You can say who's gonna pay for it for everything. Defense and meddling in world affairs is a big cost too.
For sure, no disagreement here. My personal opinion is that defense is only necessary in times of war and meddling in world affairs is never necessary.
You think defense is only necessary in times of war? I think you should re-think that position. If you mean that, it is just a fundamental misunderstanding of ... everything.
Educated people get better paying jobs. More pay means more payed taxes as well. If you have a smart tax system with progressive tax, that's a real lever.
It sounds counter intuitive, but more taxes is more fair and better as a whole. To prove, it takes no more than to look up correlation of amounts of taxes with percentages of homelessness (and other such indicators) between western countries.
May be an unpopular opinion here, but education should be a market just like anything else and the government should put its thumb on the scales as infrequently as possible.
Health insurance is an entirely different animal. It has its own flaws and issues, as well as its own benefits. You can't easily compare a service product and an insurance product, they're just too different.
Though yes, financially health insurance also has no monetary value when anyone can get it for free. You can't assign a price to it and anyone in the health insurance business is entirely at the whims of what the government is willing to pay them to provide a service deemed essential enough to subsidize the entire cost of the product.
Free does not mean limitless. Where I live in EU its not uncommon to wait for over a year to see a doctor on „free” insurance and less than 24h when you pay out of your pocket.
People get free insurance but hospitals get fixed amounts of cash allowing them to admit fixed amount of patients
In this scenario the answer is yes, it loses some value. Still much better system than private care in US
There is a queuing theory thing here! People die in the queue.
However the US system. seems to create a lot if inefficiency. There is no free lunch. But a lunch where you don't throw out as much bread as you eat is more efficient.
Maybe so, but also then everyone has a Harvard degree, which is MUCH MUCH better for society than a Harvard degree losing value is bad.
Of course if you're an ignorant right wing anti-intellectual climate change and evolution denying religious fanatic, the idea of everyone having a Harvard degree is existentially terrifying for other reasons that it losing a little bit of value.
> Maybe so, but also then everyone has a Harvard degree, which is MUCH MUCH better for society than a Harvard degree losing value is bad.
Is it your opinion that Harvard could provide the same quality of education to an unlimited number of students?
This isn't a right/left scenario, its logistics and market dynamics. Expanding access to a scarce resource means value of that resource goes down. A supply glut doesn't mean the product is any less useful, just that there's more for it so people will get to pay less for it.
"we could’ve eliminated student loan debt for ~20 million Americans. "
Don't throw more money at schools. They will happily take the money and jack up tuition even more. There is no reason why tuition is going up at the pace it does.
> There is no reason why tuition is going up at the pace it does.
There is and it's explained by Baumol's cost disease. Basically you can't sustain paying professors the same wage while productivity increases in other parts of the economy. Even if the actual labor of "professing" hasn't gotten more productive. You have to retain them by keeping up with the broader wage increases. And that cost increase gets passed down to students.
Allowing student debts to be included in bankruptcy takes care of most of the issue. Those that were unable to find decent, paying jobs will have a path to relieve the stress of high student loan payments, while those that found high paying jobs will continue paying on the loans from which they received a benefit.
Eliminating debt has a lot of unintended consequences. Price inflation would almost certainly be a problem, for example.
It's also not clear to me what happens to all of the derivatives based on student debt, though there may very well be an answer there that I just haven't understood yet.
You are forgetting the fact that this is a private investment, whereas the student loans problem should be solved by the government. No private institutions will have any interests in paying off student loans.
History says almost all society was corrputed and previous 50 to 80 years are slight exception. People with power prefer to give power to selected people selected by their personal preference.
Repaying student loans makes a lot of people a little richer. The current initiative makes a few people a lot richer. If you ask some people, the former is a very communist/socialist way of thinking (bad), while the latter is pure, unadulterated capitalism (good).
That and a lot of people do not have the means to convince current power centers ( unless they were to organize, which they either don't, can't or are dissuaded from ) to do their bidding, while few rich ones do. And so the old saying 'rich become richer' becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
That was the implication indeed. Money is like gravity, the more you have the more you can pull in. This will give a person the power to do anything to make more money (change the laws as desired, or break them if needed) but also the perfect shield from any repercussions.
One of the more destructive situations in capitalism is the fact that (financially) helping the many will increase inflation and lead to more problems.
When a few people get really rich it kind of slips through the gaps, the broader system isn't impacted too much. When most people get a little rich they spend that money and prices go up. Said differently, wealth is all relative so when most people get a little more rich their comparative wealth didn't really change.
you can redistribute real resources - every person spending their life working on a rich persons yacht rather than helping educate the next generation due to the price system, for instance, is a real distribution of resources. this is why consumption taxes are modern and valuable
If we have to have taxes, I'm very much in favor of a consumption tax. It doesn't work for our current system though, capitalism kind of hits a wall when spending money is disincentivized (compared to saving money or simply not trying to earn more).
Redistribution of wealth is tricky and almost certainly runs into the same wall I mentioned in my last comment. When everyone competing with each other (financially) see a similar bump in income they didn't really change anything. Redistribution is more helpful when targeting the wealth gap and not very useful when considering how wealtht the majority of people "feel".
That said, I 100% agree people shouldn't be working their entire life on a rich person's boat. That's a much bigger, and more fundamental, problem though. That gets to the core of a debt-based society and the need for self reliance. The most effective way to get out from under someone else's boot (financially) is to work towards a spot where you aren't dependent on them or the job's income.
The most effective way to get out from under someone else's boot (financially) is to work towards a spot where you aren't dependent on them or the job's income.
100% this but entire system is setup to make sure this doesn't happen at scale. even here on HN if you post something along these lines but in real terms you will get downvoted like crazy and get even crazier comments.
the system is setup to make sure there are workers, w2 workers. this is why there is student loans and this is why schools do not teach you to be an entrepreneur, to be a salesman, to hustle for yourself and not for someone else. I see so many people here talking about leetcode and faang and I think to myself that is just modern day slavery. if you are LXXX at say Meta making say $750k/year, I think the same - you are a modern-day slave. if Meta is paying you $750k/year that really means that you are worth twice that, if not more. no company is going to pay you more than you are worth to them and they won't even break even with you so-to-speak so you can bank on this fact whoever you work for and whatever you bank. though there is a big difference between working on someone's yacht and making $750k the principles are the same but system is working hard and succeeding in making sure it stays as it is...
I am very sympathetic to your point about barriers. I feel like California has been waging war on 1099 contractors and small businesses for decades. Hell, they have a $600 minimum business tax on unprofitable businesses. They want stable W-2 union workers with state regulated compensation, not free wheeling contractors and businesses succeeding or failing on their own merits.
However, I think it is worth clarifying your following point.
>if Meta is paying you $750k/year that really means that you are worth twice that, if not more.
This is far from slavery. You are worth that to Meta. You might be worth significantly less without Meta. If you can make 1.5 mil/year alone and quit, meta wont send the slave patrol to bring you back in shackles. Instead, it is the golden shackles of greed that keep people making $750,000 instead of opting out.
> but entire system is setup to make sure this doesn't happen at scale
This has been getting less and less true since the Industrial Revolution. We’re not quite at the point where we don’t need menial labour. But we can sure see the through line to it. The alternate future to the despairingly unemployed is every person being something of an owner.
> if Meta is paying you $750k/year that really means that you are worth twice that, if not more
Whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Also, if you’re being paid $750k/year, you’d better be worth more than $1.5mm to your employer, because taxes and regulatory costs are typically estimated around 100% of base up to the low millions.
This has been getting less and less true since the Industrial Revolution.
how so? what do you think is the breakdown between say working people in the USA (excluding gig-jobs cause you know…) who are W2 vs. 1099 and/or business owners? 99.78% to 0.22% roughly?
Automation. Consider the number of jobs today that one can do singly today that didn't even exist then.
> W2 vs. 1099 and/or business owners? 99.78% to 0.22% roughly?
There are about 165 million workers in the American labour force [1]. There are 33 million small businesses [2]. Given 14% have no employees [3], we have a lower bound of 5 million business owners in America, or 3% of the labour force.
Add to that America's 65 million freelancers and you have 2 out of 5 Americans not working for a boss. (Keep in mind, we're ignoring every building, plumber or design shop that has even a single employee in these figures.)
there are lots of redistributions that are net beneficial even when you account for the incentive hit. marginal increases in the estate tax, for instance, almost certainly fall under this umbrella
Totally fair, by no means is that a settled issue. Debt is just my opinion of a likely root cause.
> there are lots of redistributions that are net beneficial even when you account for the incentive hit. marginal increases in the estate tax, for instance, almost certainly fall under this umbrella
That requires a lot more context to answer. The costs and benefits considered are important to lay out. Without that context I really can't say if it's a net benefit or not, I would assume that two average people would have a different list of factors they'd consider when saying whether its a net benefit or not.
Personally I don't see estate taxes as net beneficial. I don't agree with the principle that death is a taxable event, and I don't prefer the government to have in incentives to see people die (i.e. when someone with an estate dies the government makes money). Financially, to stick with just the numbers, I don't consider $66B in annual revenue worth the bureaucracy or legal complexity required to manage the estate tax program.
Transfers are taxable, either as gifts or income. Not sure why we would exempt inheritance flows. $66B seems like a pretty good haul, that could easily be much larger given the massive portion of wealth that is inherited, and is 5x the budget of the IRS.
And the disincentive effects are much smaller than taxing the equivalent in directly earned income.
I get that today's laws do allow for taxing estate transfers as a taxable event. The personal concern I was raising is that I don't thing it should be taxable, not whether today's laws allow for taxing it.
When my parents die, assuming they go before me, I don't see why the government should be involved. To be clear, my parents are well below estate tax thresholds, but the underlying premise is the same. Someone's relative dying and leaving them an estate shouldn't by a taxable event as far as um concerned.
$66B should be a lot of money, but our federal government doesn't know what it means to balance a budget. We could easily cut $66B in current spending if we cared.
i’m sorry but student debt payoffs are probably one of the lowest socially valuable uses of this money, rather than basic things like snap or housing vouchers. sorta shows how myopic HN is, student debt is a relatable concern so it gets prioritized
also just: “why invest it when we could spend it on consumption now” is a good argument against letting private wealth usage be socially determined if most people just always vote for consumption now
I know!! Also we could have given an IPhone to 500 million of people for the amount!! It’s such a waste to think they’re investing it in the future instead
This is the problem with capitalists / the billionaires currently hoarding the money and the US' policy, it's all for short term gain. But the conservatives that look back to the 50's or 80's or whatever decade their rose-tinted glasses are tuned to should also realise that the good parts of that came from families not being neck-deep in debt.
go to the uk. they have all the free abortions, genders, and education you could possibly want. apply for asylum since you're clearly afraid for your life.
I am surprised at the negativity from HN. Their clear goal is to build superintelligence. Listen to any of the interviews with Altman, Demis Hassabis, or Dario Amodei (Anthropic) on the purpose of this. They discuss the roadmaps to unlimited energy, curing disease, farming innovations to feed billions, permanent solutions to climate change, and more.
Does no one on HN believe in this anymore? Isn't this tech startup community meant to be the tip of the spear? We'll find out by 2030 either way.
All of those things would put them out of business if realized and are just a PR smokescreen.
Have we not seen enough of these people to know their character? They're predators who, from all accounts, sacrifice every potentially meaningful personal relationship for money, long after they have more than most people could ever dream of. If we legalized gladiatorial blood sport and it became a billion-dollar business, they'd be doing that. If monkey torture porn was a billion dollar business they'd be doing that.
Whatever the promise of actual AI (and not just performative LLM garbage), if created they will lock the IP down so hard that most of the population will not be able to afford it. Rich people get Ozempic, poor people get body positivity.
That's the crazy thing about this "super AI" business is that at some point no one would buy it because no one could afford because no one has a job (spare me the UBI magic money fantasy). I love the body positivity line. But if such a thing came to pass, I think something different would probably happen to the rich.
I continue to be amazed at how motivated some of us are to make such cruel, far-reaching and empty claims with regards to people of some popularity/notoriety.
Oh yes, Larry Ellison and Sam Altman are the real victims here!
I continue to be amazed at how desperate some of us are to live in Disney's Tomorrowland that we worship non-technical guys with lots of money who simply tell us that's what they're building, despite all actions to the contrary, sometimes baldfaced statements to the contrary (although always dressed up with faux-optimistic tones), and the negative anecdotes of pretty much anyone who gets close to them.
A lot of us became engineers because we were inspired by media, NASA, and the pretty pictures in Popular Science. And it sucks to realize that most if not all of that stuff isn't going to happen in our lifetimes, if at all. But you what guarantees it not to happen? Guys like Sam Altman and Larry Ellison at the helm, and blind faith that just because they have money and speak passionately that they somehow share your interests.
Or are you that guy who asks the car salesman for advice on which car he should buy? I could forgive that a little more, because the car salesman hasn't personally gone on the record about how he plans to use his business to fuck you.
Do you want a superintelligence ruling over all humanity until the stars burn out controlled by these people?
The lesson of everything that has happened in tech over the past 20 years is that what tech can do and what tech will do are miles apart. Yes, AGI could give everyone a free therapist to maximize their human well-being and guide us to the stars. Just like social media could have brought humanity closer together and been an unprecedented tool for communication, understanding, and democracy. How'd that work out?
At some point, optimism becomes willfully blinding yourself to the terrible danger humanity is in right now. Of course founders paint the rosy version of their product's future. That's how PR works. They're lying - maybe to themselves, and definitely to you.
Just my opinion/observation really but I believe its because people are implicitly entertaining the possibility that it is no longer about software or rather this announcement implicitly states that talent long term isn't the main advantage but instead hardware, compute, etc and most importantly the wealth and connections to gain access to large sums of capital. AI will enable capital/wealthy elite to have more of an advantage over human intelligence/ingenuity which I think is not typically what most hacker/tech forums are about.
For example it isn't what you can do tinkering in your home/garage anymore; or what algorithm you can crack with your intrinsic worth to create more use cases and possibilities - but capital, relationships, hardware and politics. A recent article that went around, and many others are believing capital and wealth will matter more and make "talent" obsolete in the world of AI - this large figure in this article just adds money to that hypothesis.
All this means the big get bigger. It isn't about startup's/grinding hard/working hard/being smarter/etc which means it isn't really meritocratic. This creates an uneven playing field that is quite different than previous software technology phases where the gains/access to the gains has been more distributed/democratized and mostly accessible to the talented/hard working (e.g. the risk taking startup entrepreneur with coding skills and a love of tech).
In some ways it is kind of the opposite of the indy hacker stereotype who ironically is probably one of the biggest losers in the new AI world. In the new world what matters is wealth/ownership of capital, relationships, politics, land, resources and other physical/social assets. In the new AI world scammers, PR people, salespeople, politicians, ultra wealthy with power etc thrive and nepotism/connections are the main advantage. You don't just see this in AI btw (e.g. recent meme coins seen as better path to wealth than working due to weak link to power figure), but AI like any tech amplifies the capability of people with power especially if by definition the powerful don't need to be smart/need other smart people to yield it unlike other tech in the past.
They needed smart people in the past; we may be approaching a world where the smart people make themselves as a whole redundant. I can understand why a place like this doesn't want that to succeed, even if the world's resources are being channeled to that end. Time will tell.
Exactly as you say. AI is imagined to be the wealthy nepotist's escape pod from an equal playing field and democratized access to information. Win at all cost soulless predators who find infinite sacrifice somehow righteous love games like the ones that macro-scale AI creates.
The average person's utility from AI is marginal. But to a psychopath like Elon Musk who is interested in deceiving the internet about Twitter engagement or juicing his crypto scam, it's a necessary tool to create seas of fake personas.
>> Does no one on HN believe in this anymore? Isn't this tech startup community meant to be the tip of the spear? We'll find out by 2030 either way.
I joined in 2012, and been reading since 2010 or so. The community definitely has changed since then, but the way I look at it is that it actually became more reasoned as the wide-eyed and naive teenagers/twenty-somethings of that era gained experience in life and work, learned how the world actually works, and perhaps even got burned a few times. As a result, today they approach these types of news with far more skepticism than their younger selves would. You might argue that the pendulum has swung too far towards the cynical end of the spectrum, but I think that's subjective.
I think (big assumption) most here are from that same period/time. Most are in their late 30s, 40s. Kids, busy life etc. Not the young hacker mindsets, but the responsible maybe a bit stressed person.
One time I bought a can of what I clearly thought was human food. Turns out it was just well dressed cat food.
> to unlimited energy, curing disease, farming innovations to feed billions,
Aw they missed their favorite hobby horse. "The children." Then again you might have to ask why even bother educating children if there is going to be "superintelligent" computers.
Anyways.. all this stuff will then be free.. right? Is someone going to "own" the superintelligent computer? That's an interesting proposition that gets entirely left out of our futurism fatansy.
I’m willing to believe. It’s probably the closest we’ve come to actually having a real life god. I’m going to get pushback on this but I’ve used o1 and it’s pretty mind blowing to me. I would say something 10x as intelligent with sensors to perceive the world and some sort of continuously running self optimization algorithm would essentially be a viable artificial intelligence.
> They discuss the roadmaps to unlimited energy, curing disease, farming innovations to feed billions, permanent solutions to climate change, and more.
Look at who is president, or who is in charge of the biggest companies today. It is extremely clear that intelligence is not a part of the reason why they are there. And with all their power and money, these people have essentially zero concern for any of the topics you listed.
There is absolutely no reason to believe that if artificial superintelligence is ever created, all of a sudden the capitalist structure of society will get thrown away. The AIs will be put to work enriching the megalomaniacs, just like many of the most intelligent humans are.
Unlimited energy? No, I don't believe in this. I thought people on HN generally accepted science and not nonsense. A "superintelligence" that would ... what? Destroy the middle, destroy the economy, cause riots and civil wars? If its even possible. Sounds great.
I mean, I had some faith in these things 15 years ago, when I was young and naive, and my heroes were too. But I've seen nearly all those heroes turn to the dark side. There's only so much faith you can have.
Not envious of multi-billionaire's companies gathering capital, IP, knowledge and infrastructure for huge scale modern day private Stasi apparatuses. Just bitter.
Once AGI is many times smarter than humans, the 'guiding' evaporates as foolish irrational thinking. There is no way around the fact when AGI acquires 10 times, 100, 1000 times human intelligence, we are suddenly completely powerless to change anything anymore.
AGI can go wrong in innumerable ways, most of which we cannot even imagine now, because we are limited by our 1 times human intelligence.
The liftoff conditions literally have to be near perfect.
So the question is, can humanity trust the power hungry billionaire CEOs to understand the danger and choose a path for maximum safety? Looking at how it is going so far, I would say absolutely not.
> [...] 1000 times human intelligence, we are suddenly completely powerless [...] The liftoff conditions literally have to be near perfect.
I don't consider models suddenly lifting off and acquiring 1000 times human intelligence to be a realistic outcome. To my understanding, that belief is usually based around the idea that if you have a model that can refine its own architecture, say by 20%, then the next iteration can use that increased capacity to refine even further, say an additional 20%, leading to exponential growth. But that ignores diminishing returns; after obvious inefficiencies and low-hanging fruit are taken care of, squeezing out even an extra 10% is likely beyond what the slightly-better model is capable of.
I do think it's possible to fight against diminishing returns and chip away towards/past human-level intelligence, but it'll be through concerted effort (longer training runs of improved architectures with more data on larger clusters of better GPUs) and not an overnight explosion just from one researcher somewhere letting an LLM modify its own code.
> can humanity trust the power hungry billionaire CEOs to understand the danger and choose a path for maximum safety
Those power-hunger billionaire CEOs who shall remain nameless, such as Altman and Musk, are fear-mongering about such a doomsday. Goal seems to be regulatory capture and diverting attention away from the more realistic issues like use for employee surveillance[0].
That doesn't seem to be much of a thing these days. If you look at Russia/Ukraine or China/Taiwan there's not much scarcity. It's more bullying dictator wants to control the neighbours issues.
It will be, or, it's slowly happening already. Climate change is triggering water and food shortages, both abroad and on your doorstep (California wildfires), which in turn trigger mass migrations. If a richer and/or more militarily equipped country decides they want another country's resources to survive, we'll see wars erupt everywhere.
Then again, it's more of a logistics challenge, and if e.g. California were to invade Canada for its water supply, how are they going to get it all the way down there?
I can see it happening in Africa though, a long string of countries rely on the Nile, but large hydropower dams built in Sudan and Ethiopia are reducing the water flow, which Egypt is really not happy about as it's costing them water supply and irrigated land. I wouldn't be surprised if Egypt and its allies declares war on those countries and aims to have the dams broken. Then again, that's been going on for some years now and nothing has happened yet as far as I'm aware.
(the above is armchair theorycrafting from thousands of miles away based on superficial information and a lively imagination at best)
I was in Egypt a while and there's no talk of them invading Sudan or Ethiopia. A lot of Egypt's economy is overseas aid from the US and similar.
The main military thing going on there - I was in Dahab where there are endless military checkpoints - is Hamas like guys trying to come over and overthrow the fairly moderate Egyptian government and replace it with a hardline Hamas type islamic dictatorship for the glorification of Allah etc. Again it's not about reducing scarcity - more about increasing scarcity in return for political control. Dahab and Cairo are both a few hours drive from Gaza.
> A lot of Egypt's economy is overseas aid from the US and similar.
The rest is fees from the Panama (EDIT: Suez) Canal and tourism. Getting into a war, particularly with a country on the Red Sea, is suicide. (Also, the main flash point between Egypt and Ethipia has receded since the GERD finished filling.)
and a bureaucratic one as well. in Germany, they want to trim bureaucratic necessities while (not) expecting multiple millions of climate refugees.
lot's of undocumented STUFF (undocumented have nowhere to go so they don't get vaccines, proper help when sick, injured, mentally unstable, threatened, abused) incoming which means more disease, crime, theft, money for security firms and insurance companies, which means more smuggle, more fear-mongering via media, more polarization, more hard-coding of subservience into the young, more financial fascism overall, less art, zero authenticity, and a spawn of VR worlds where the old rules apply forever.
plus more STDs and micro-pandemics due to viral mutations because people will be even more careless when partying under second-semester light-shows in metropolitan city clubs and festivals and when selling out for an "adventurous" quick potent buck and bug, which of course means more money pouring into pharma who won't be able to test their drugs thoroughly (and won't have to, not requiring platforms to fact check will transfer somewhat into the pharma industry) because the population will be more diverse in terms of their bio-chemical reactions towards ingredients in context of their "fluid" habitats chemical and psycho-social make-ups.
but it's cool, let's not solve the biggest problems before pseudo-transcending into the AGI era. will make for a really great impression, especially those who had the means, brains, skills, (past) careers, opportunity and peace of mind.
Your first link says "With a score under 5, Russian Federation has a level of hunger that is low."
The current situation with Russia and China seems caused by them becoming prosperous. In the 1960s in China and 1990s in Russia they were broke. Now they have money they can afford to put it into their militaries and try to attack the neighbours.
Russia is a massive grain producer and exporter. One of their biggest health issues right now is obesity (from those cheap grains) with 60% of the adult population overweight, and growing. Furthermore, obesity has actually been an issue for their recruiting effort (there's a lot of running in war).
I would wager that states such as Russia and others misallocate resources, which in turn reduces productivity. Worse yet, some of the policy prescriptions stated above would further misallocate scarce resources and reduce productivity. Scarcity doom becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. This outcome is used to rationalize further economic intervention and the cycle compounds upon itself.
To be explicitly clear, the US granting largess to tech companies for datacenters also counts as a misallocation in my view.
Have you tried opening the links? They show Russia at developed country level in terms of food insecurity (score <5, they don't differentiate at those levels; this is a level mostly shown for EU countries); and a percentage of population below the international poverty line of 0.0% (vs, as an example, 1.8 % in Romania). This isn't great — being in the poverty briefs at all is not indicative of prosperity — but your terrification should probably come from elsewhere.
- They export a lot of natural resources but don’t have a strong manufacturing base. They don’t have high tech, they don’t export many manufactured items to developed countries. It’s a mob run country, resources are easy to extract.
Russia has quite large tech companies (compared to EU, which is dominated by US tech). For software think Yandex, VK, Playrix, Kaspersky, etc in addition to lots of software talent. With hardware, don't nuclear reactors, rockets, aircraft still count as high tech?
And they are out manufacturing the combined west on pretty complex stuff like missiles, air defense systems, drones, artillery. Plus, due to sanctions, their civilian industrial sector has grown so much that's theres a shortage of facilities (not to mention labor).
When I looked through their major exports it was mostly centered around natural resources. You are right there are some spots like developing reactors in other countries but in net not much is going well for Russia economically. Yeah they had to start making more things internally due to their invasion but they are not exporting those goods.
But again, I don’t see them out manufacturing the west on military equipment when some of that equipment is getting overrun easily by 40 year old western equipment. It’s still a poor nation being run by the mob with some shining spots.
That doesn't mean much on its own. Their per capita GDP is still low.
Also arguably their GDP figures are worth even less than Ireland's. A huge proportion of Russia's economy is tied in military production (and huge proportion of that is funded through debt).
If you make a rocket worth $1 million and then blow it up the next month that cost is obviously included in GDP but it's literally the equivalent of burning money/productivity.
Their debt to GDP ratio was 14.6% at the end of 2024, a decrease from 2023. US is 123.1% of GDP while Ireland is at 42.7%. And PPP is the number that matters - its one of the big factors which governs quality of life, at which price you can produce and sell widgets, bushels, etc. And btw, that guns/butter calculus also applies to the US, etc.
> Their debt to GDP ratio was 14.6% at the end of 2024, a decrease from 2023
Allegedly almost half of their defense budget since the war began was funded through private forced loans issues by banks directly to (effectively state owned?) military contractors. So that's not reflected in their military budget.
Also I doubt Russia could borrow a lot on the international markets even if they wanted to. Certainly not cheaply (like the US or especially Eurozone countries)
> And PPP is the number that matters - its one of the big factors which governs quality of life
Again... Russia's GDP per capita is still quite low (even if significantly higher than nominal).
Also if your nominal GDP is inflated by defence spending and energy exports and you multiply it with PPP (i.e. consumer price index) what exactly do you get?
Generally low prices indicate that the country is poor overall.
> its one of the big factors which governs quality of life,
PPP adjusted GDP per capita? Really? That's certainly not the best indicator of those things (even if there is strong correlation overall).
Do you think a median person in Ireland is 30% better off than the average Swiss or 2x better off than the average German?
Anyway, going back to Russia. If e.g. $100 comes in into the country through energy exports and is spent making bombs and other equipment what fraction do you think trickles down to the local economy?
No, no, just no. I don't care what the website says. People in Russia are quite economically depressed. You might want to visit and talk to real people instead of web pages. Visit the Far East.
Yes, and anyone saying Russia isn’t poor either has not done those things or is blind/deaf or unable to comprehend what those people are saying, or possibly not interested in the truth.
"Global warming may not have caused the Arab Spring, but it may have made it come earlier... In 2010, droughts in Russia, Ukraine, China and Argentina and torrential storms in Canada, Australia and Brazil considerably diminished global crops, driving commodity prices up. The region was already dealing with internal sociopolitical, economic and climatic tensions, and the 2010 global food crisis helped drive it over the edge."
Gaza seems mostly to be about who controls Israel/Palestine politically. Gaza was reasonably ok for food and housing and is now predictably trashed as a result of Hamas wanting to control Palestine from the river to the sea as they say.
South Sudan is some ridiculous thing where two rival generals are fighting for control. Are there any wars which are mostly about scarcity at the moment?
No, not really... the origin of Gaza conflict is in Zionists confiscating the most fertile land and water resources.
That's why Israelis gladly handed back the Sinai desert to Egypt, but have kept Golan Heights, East Jerusalem, Shaba Farms, and continuously confiscate Palestinian farmlands in the West Bank.
There is nothing arbitrary or religious about which lands Zionists are occupying and which they're leaving to arabs.
Completely false and simplifying a complicated history to present a very one sided view.
The most fertile lands are in the west bank. They were under Jordanian control and could have been turned into an independent Palestinian state, but weren't. Israel "accidentally" got them in the 6 days war, and were happy to give them to Jordan back to "take care" of the Palestinian problem, but they refused.
The places that Israel have the majority of the population in Petah Tiqwah, Tel Aviv and the region were swamp lands, filled with mosquitos, that were dried over many years and many deaths by Jewish farmers.
So you are saying Hamas would have same domestic support if Gaza was economically at the level of e.g. Slovenia? People who complained about "open air prison" caused by Israeli "occupation" even before Oct 7 would disagree with you I think.
Even in Europe extremists are propped up by promise of "cheap energies" from Russia.
I guess if you dont see the link this is not the place to explain it.
Also the "open air prison" effect was a result of trying to reduce attacks from Gaza. For example before the 2008 war there were more than 2000 rockets launched from Gaza into Israel.
Very zero-sum outlook on things which is factually untrue much of the time. When you invest money in something productive that value doesn't get automatically destroyed. The size of the pie isn't fixed.
More importantly, money, at global scale, doesn't solve scarcity issues. If there are 100 apples and 120 people making sure everyone has a lot of money doesn't magically create 20 more apples. It just raises the price of apples. Building an apple orchard creates apples. Stargate is people betting that they are building a phenomenal apple orchard. I'm not sure they will and an worried the apple orchard will poison us all but unlike me these people are putting their money where their mouth is and had thus larger inventive to figure out what they are doing.
On global scale if you have 100 people and 150 apples but apples are on the opposite side of the globe it is not like you can sustainably get those apples delivered all the time.
Getting 150 apples once is better than nothing but still doesn’t fix the problem.
1) Build fully autonomous cars so there are zero deaths from car accidents. This is ~45K deaths/year (just US!) and millions of injuries. Annual economic cost of crashes is $340 billion. Worldwide the toll is 10 - 100x?
You can't just compare things to the Manhattan project. The Manhattan project was large for it's time, but the thing they were doing was ultimately, simple. You can build a nuclear bomb with simply a large enough sphere of enriched U-235 and it'll explode. Which is what the Hiroshima bomb was - a gun type assembly. This is not a complex device.
The relative complexity of projects only ever increases, because if they were simpler we would already have done them. The modern LHC is far more complicated then the Manhattan project. So is ITER. Hell, the US military's logistics chain is more complicated then the Manhattan project.
The fundamental attribution error here is going "look the power to destroy a city was so much cheaper!"
(contingent on the money actually being spent, which....) This is basically an AI-manhattan project. It would employ vast numbers of construction, tradesmen, manufacturing, etc.
This isn't a handout, it is an investment with an expected return. Which is good, because it is less likely to be applied to bad ideas like forcing solar roadways and solar farmers.
Five-hundred billion dollars is nothing when you consider there's a new government agency that it is said will shave two trillion from government inefficiency.
By "solve problems" you mean "temporarily mitigate problems by throwing money at them", right? Or do you actually have specific examples of problems that can be permanently solved and aren't already being tackled?
Fusion research has had less than than tenth of this investment, but a viable fusion reactor would have far more impact than a tenth of what Stargate will likely deliver.
Not to mention efforts for mitigating climate change and ecological collapse. But of course those issues reside outside our economic system, so why would anyone invest in them.
That’s like complaining about investments in automated looms at the start of the Industrial Revolution and claiming that the money would be better spent if handed out to the slum dwelling population.
We have the benefit of hindsight now and we understand that technological revolutions improve living standards for everyone and drag whole populations out of grinding labour and poverty.
And it would be foolish to allow China and Russia to out-invest the West in AI and make us mere clients (or worse, victims) of their superior technology.
Industrialists understand that the way to fix the world’s problems is to advance society, as opposed to resting on the laurels of past advancement, and dividing the diminishing spoils of those achievements.
I disagree with you. I think the impact of AI on society in the long term is going to be massive, and such investments are necessary. If we look at the past century, technology has had (in my opinion) and incredibly positive impact on society. You have to invest in the future.
Won't an intelligent agent available to everyone be able to solve problems in the world? Isn't that why they (OpenAI) and others are doing what they do? To bring abundance?
We already tried fixing problems with throwing tax money at them. It didn't work out. You can see the result of socialism in Russia, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela and where not. Wars do not start because of scarcities. Wars start because of disbalance of power. And it is very important for the Western world to be ahead in the AI, because otherwise China may cause a real war and then a lot of Western people would die. Do you not care about them?
Socialism is communism in progress. I have actually lived in socialist country, what about you? And lies and propaganda is what Leftists like you do, not me. Funny, you never want to live in the countries where you rule.
I'm sorry but unless this $500B was being invested in equipping soldiers and building navies, air capabilities, artillery, etc it could not stop even an urban gang turf war.
well, it also starts a fair share of wars, or lets say, "brings freedom and democracy in exchange for resources and power" and sometimes even decides to topple leaders in foreign countries to then put puppets into place.
I'm confused and a bit disturbed; honestly having a very difficult time internalizing and processing this information. This announcement is making me wonder if I'm poorly calibrated on the current progress of AI development and the potential path forward. Is the key idea here that current AI development has figured out enough to brute force a path towards AGI? Or I guess the alternative is that they expect to figure it out in the next 4 years...
I don't know how to make sense of this level of investment. I feel that I lack the proper conceptual framework to make sense of the purchasing power of half a trillion USD in this context.
"There are maybe a few hundred people in the world who viscerally understand what's coming. Most are at DeepMind / OpenAI / Anthropic / X but some are on the outside. You have to be able to forecast the aggregate effect of rapid algorithmic improvement, aggressive investment in building RL environments for iterative self-improvement, and many tens of billions already committed to building data centers. Either we're all wrong, or everything is about to change." - Vedant Misra, Deepmind Researcher.
Maybe your calibration isn't poor. Maybe they really are all wrong but there's a tendency here to these these people behind the scenes are all charlatans, fueling hype without equal substance hoping to make a quick buck before it all comes crashing down, but i don't think that's true at all. I think these people really genuinely believe they're going to get there. And if you genuinely think that, them this kind of investment isn't so crazy.
The problem is, they are hugely incentivised to hype to raise funding. It’s not whether they are “wrong”, it’s whether they are being realistic.
The argument presented in the quote there is: “everyone in AI foundation companies are putting money into AI, therefore we must be near AGI.”
The best evaluation of progress is to use the tools we have. It doesn’t look like we are close to AGI. It looks like amazing NLP with an enormous amount of human labelling.
If you've taken a couple of lectures about AI, you've probably been taught not to anthropomorphize your own algorithms, especially given how the masses think of AI (in terms of Skynet, Cortana, "Her", Ex Machina, etc). It encourages people to mistake the capabilities of the models and ascribe to them all of the traits of AI they've seen in TV and movies.
Sam has ignored that advice, and exploited the hype that can be generated by doing so. He even tried to mimic the product in "Her", down to the voice [0]. The old board said his "outright lying" made it impossible to trust him [1]. That behavior raises eyebrows, even if he's got a legitimate product.
>The problem is, they are hugely incentivised to hype to raise funding.
Hype is extremely normal. Everyone with a business gets the chance to hype for the purpose of funding. That alone isn't going to get several of the biggest tech giants in the world to pour billions.
Satya just said, "he has his 80 billion ready". Is Microsoft an "AI foundation company" ? Is Google ? Is Meta ?
The point is the old saying - "Put your money where your mouth is". People can say all sorts of things but what they choose to spend their money on says a whole lot.
And I'm not saying this means the investment is guaranteed to be worth it.
> there's a tendency here to these these people behind the scenes are all charlatans, fueling hype without equal substance hoping to make a quick buck before it all comes crashing down, but i don't think that's true at all. I think these people really genuinely believe they're going to get there.
I don't immediately disagree with you but you just accidentally also described all crypto/NFT enthusiasts of a few years ago.
Worth pointing out; the Turing test is pretty much just a thought experiment. Turing never considered it a test of "intelligence", or any other human quality. Many people have criticized its use as a measure of such.
Yep - the "value" of a Turing-capable system has been questioned for a while now. We watched Markov chains and IRC bots clear the Turing test on a regular basis in the mid-2000s, and all we got out of that was better automated scamming.
Even now, as we have fully capable conversational models we don't really have any great immediate applications. Our efforts at making them "think" is yielding marginal returns.
I'm not so sure it passes the turing test since you can trivially determine that the conversation partner is a machine by asking it a trick question or offering it a "jailbreak" style prompt.
You're missing the point. The hype is the same, because the incentives are the same.
I agree with you that there is significantly more there there with AI, but I agree with the parent that the hype cycles are essentially indistinguishable.
I agree, AI is fucking spectacular and NFTs have no substance. But at the same time, neither AI nor NFTs have substantially affected my life so far, so I experience a very weird cognitive dissonance when the AI hype crowd gasps on twitter. This is exactly the same feeling I had when I felt like I was the only one in my twitter bubble who didn't think NFTs were the shizzle.
I mean, AI the tech can be spectacular and the hype can be overblown, right? I'm not even sure that the hype is overblown, but it sure feels like the kind of hype that we'll say, a few years from now, was overblown.
It's identical energy. A significant number of people are attaching their hopes and dreams to a piece of technology while deluding themselves about the technical limitations of that technology. It's all rooted in greed. Relatively few are in it to push humanity forward, most are just trying to "get theirs."
Well Crypto had nowhere near the uptake [0] and investment (even leaving this announcement aside, several of the biggest tech giants are pouring billions into this).
At any rate, I'm not saying this means that all this investment is guaranteed to pay off.
[0] With 300 million weekly active users/1 billion messages per day and #8 in visits worldwide the last few months just 2 years after release, ChatGPT is the software product with the fastest adoption ever.
Motivated reasoning sings nicely to the tune of billions of dollars. None of these folks will ever say, "don't waste money on this dead end". However, it's clear that there is still a lot of productive value to extract from transformers and certainly there will be other useful things that appear along the way. It's not the worst investment I can imagine, even if it never leads to "AGI"
Yeah people don't rush to say "don't waste money on this dead end" but think about it for a moment.
A 500B dollar investment doesn't just fall into one's lap. It's not your run of the mill funding round. No, this is something you very actively work towards that your funders must be really damn convinced is worth the gamble. No one sane is going to look at what they genuinely believe to be a dead end and try to garner up Manhattan Project scales of investment. Careers have been nuked for far less.
It would probably be more reasonable to adjust for US GDP. That would put $2 billion back then at around the same as $250 billion today. So only about 2x off.
I am not qualified to make any assumptions but I do wonder if a massive investment into computing infrastructure serves national security purposes beyond AI. Like building subway stations that also happen to serve as bomb shelters.
Are there computing and cryptography problems that the infrastructure could be (publicly or quietly) reallocated to address if the United States found itself in a conflict? Any cryptographers here have a thought on whether hundreds of thousands of GPUs turned on a single cryptographic key would yield any value?
I'm not a cryptographer, nor am I good with math (actually I suck badly; consider yourself warned...), but am I curious about how threatened password hashes should feel if the 'AI juggernauts' suddenly fancy themselves playing on the red team, so I quickly did some (likely poor) back-of-the-napkin calculations.
'Well known' password notwithstanding, let's use the following as a password:
correct-horse-battery-staple
This password is 28 characters long, and whilst it could be stronger with uppercase letters, numbers, and special characters, it still shirtfronts a respectable ~1,397,958,111 decillion (1.39 × 10^42) combinations for an unsuspecting AI-turned-hashcat cluster to crack. Let's say this password was protected by SHA2-256 (assuming no cryptographic weaknesses exist (I haven't checked, purely for academic purposes)), and that at least 50% of hashes would need to be tested before 'success' flourishes (lets try to make things a bit exciting...).
I looked up a random benchmark for hashcat, and found an average of 20 gigahashs/second (GH/s) for a single RTX 4090.
If we throw 100 RTX 4090s at this hashed password, assuming a uniform 20 GH/s (combined firepower of 2,000 GH/s) and absolutely perfect running conditions, it would take at least eleven-nonillion-fifty octillion (1.105 x 10^31) years to crack. Earth will be long gone by the time that rolls around.
Turning up the heat (perhaps literally) by throwing 1,000,000 RTX 4090s at this hashed password, assuming the same conditions, doesn't help much (in terms of Earth's lifespan): two-octillion-two-hundred-ten septillion (2.21 x 10^27) years.
Using some recommended password specifications from NIST - 15 characters comprised of upper and lower-case letters, numbers, and special characters - lets try:
dXIl5p*Vn6Gt#BH
Despite the higher complexity, this password only just eeks out a paltry ~ 41 sextillion (4.11 × 10^22) possible combinations. Throwing 100 RTX 4090s at this password would, rather worryingly, only take around three hundred twenty-six billion seven hundred thirteen million two hundred seventeen thousand (326,713,217,000) years to have a 50% chance of success. My calculator didn't even turn my answer into a scientific number!
More alarming still, is when 1,000,000 RTX 4090s get sic'ed on the shorter hashed password: around thirty-two million six hundred seventy-one thousand (32,671,000) years to knock down half of this hashed password's strength.
I read a report that suggested Microsoft aimed to have 1.8 million GPUs by the end of 2024. We'll probably be safe for at least the next six months or so. All bets are off after that.
All I dream about is the tital wave of cheap high-performance GPUs flooding the market when the AI bubble bursts, so I can finally run Farcry at 25 frames per second for less than a grand.
All? Quite a few of the best minds in the field, like Yann LeCun for example, have been adamant that 1) autoregressive LLMs are NOT the path to AGI and 2) that AGI is very likely NOT just a couple of years away.
You have hit on something that really bothers me about recent AGI discourse. It’s common to claim that “all” researchers agree that AGI is imminent, and yet when you dive into these claims “all” is a subset of researchers that excludes everyone in academia, people like Yann, and others.
So the statement becomes tautological “all researchers who believe that AGI is imminent believe that AGI is imminent”.
And of course, OpenAI and the other labs don’t perform actual science any longer (if science requires some sort of public sharing of information), so they win every disagreement by claiming that if you could only see what they have behind closed doors, you’d become a true believer.
>You have hit on something that really bothers me about recent AGI discourse. It’s common to claim that “all” researchers agree that AGI is imminent, and yet when you dive into these claims “all” is a subset of researchers that excludes everyone in academia, people like Yann, and others.
When the old gang at Open ai was together, Sutskever, not Sam was easily the most hypey of them all. And if you ask Norvig today, AGI is already here. 2 months ago, Lecun said he believes AGI could be here in 5 to 10 years and this is supposed to be the skeptic. This is the kind of thing i'm talking about. The idea that it's just the non academics caught in the hype is just blatantly false.
No, it doesn't have to be literally everybody to make the point.
Here's why I know that OpenAI is stuck in a hype cycle. For all of 2024, the cry from employees was "PhD level models are coming this year; just imagine what you can do when everyone has PhD level intelligence at their beck and call". And, indeed, PhD level models did arrive...if you consider GPQA to be a benchmark that is particularly meaningful in the real world. Why should I take this year's pronouncements seriously, given this?
OpenAI is what you get when you take Goodhart's Law to the extreme. They are so focused on benchmarks that they are completely blind to the rate of progress that actual matters (hint...it's not model capability in a vacuum).
Yann indeed does believe that AGI will arrive in a decade, but the important thing is that he is honest that this is an uncertain estimate and is based off of extrapolation.
I'm inclined to agree with Yann about true AGI, but he works at Meta and they seem to think current LLM's are sufficiently useful to be dumping preposterous amounts of money at them as well.
It may be a distinction thats not worth making if the current approach is good enough to completely transform society and make infinite money
Yeah, in my mind, the distinction worth making is where the inflection point from exponential growth to plateau in the s-curve of usefulness is. Have we already hit it? Are we going to hit it soon? Is it far in the future? Or is it exponential from here straight to "the singularity"?
Hard to predict!
If we've already hit it, this has already been a very short period of time during which we've seen incredibly valuable new technology commercialized, and that's nothing to sneeze at, and fortunes have and will be rightly made from it.
If it's in the near future, then a lot of people might be over-investing in the promise of future growth that won't materialize to the extent they hoped. Some people will lose their shirts, but we're still left with incredibly useful new technology.
But if we have a long (or infinite) way to go before hitting that inflection point, then the hype is justified.
It's obviously not taken to mean literally everybody.
Whatever LeCun says and really even he has said "AGI is possible in 5 to 10 years" as recently as 2 months ago (so if that's the 'skeptic' opinion, you can only imagine what a lot of people are thinking), Meta has and is pouring a whole lot of money into LLM development. "Put your money where your mouth is" as they say. People can say all sorts of things but what they choose to focus their money on tells a whole lot.
I think it will be in between, like most things end up being. I don't think they are charlatans at all, but I think they're probably a bit high on their own supply. I think it's true that "everything is about to change", but I think that change will look more like the status quo than the current hype cycle suggests. There are a lot of periods in history when "everything changed", and I believe we're already a number of years into one of those periods now, but in all those cases, despite "everything" changing, a perhaps surprising number of things remained the same. I think this will be no different than that. But it's hard, impossible really, to accurately predict where the chips will land.
My prediction is a Apple loses to Open AI who releases a H.E.R. (like the movie) like phone. She is seen on your lock screen a la a Facetime call UI/UX and she can be skinned to look like whoever; i.e. a deceased loved one.
She interfaces with AI Agents of companies, organizations, friends, family, etc to get things done for you (or to learn from..what's my friends bday his agent tells yours) automagically and she is like a friend. Always there for you at your beckon call like in the movie H.E.R.
Zuckerberg's glasses that can not take selfies will only be complimentary to our AI phones.
That's just my guess and desire as fervent GPT user, as well a Meta Ray Ban wearer (can't take selfies with glasses).
My take on this is that, despite an ever-increasingly connected world, you still need an assistant like this to remain available at all times your device is. If I can’t rely on it when my signal is weak, or the network/service is down/saturated, its way of working itself into people’s core routines is minimal. So either the model runs locally, in which case I’d argue OpenAI have no moat, or they uncover some secret sauce they’re able to keep contained to their research labs and data centres that’s simply that much better than the rest, in perpetuity, and is so good people are willing to undergo the massive switching costs and tolerate the situations in which the service they’ve come to be so dependent on isn’t available to them. Let’s also not discount the fact that Apple are one of the largest manufacturers globally of smartphones, and that getting up to speed in the myriad industries required to compete with them, even when contracting out much of that work, is hard.
Sure but Microsof has the expertise and they own 49 percent of Open AI if I'm not mistaken. Open AI uses their expertise and access to hardware to create a GPT branded AI phone.
I can see your point re: run locally but no reason Open AI can't release version 0.1 and how many times are u left without an internet connection on ur current phone?
Overall I hate Apple now it's so stale compared to GPT's iPhone app. I nerd rage at dumbass Siri.
Do you use chatGPT many times throughout your day (i do)? If so did you ever want it to find the best hotel and book it for you? With chatGPT you can not do this now as all the travel websites do not have their own AI Agents for GPT to communicate with. Once they do you can type to GPT back and forth or talk to it to get anything and everything you now use the web to do. Yet your human like friend (AI friend/agent) will do for you.. U dont have to talk to it but if it's just like a human why not talk to it to do everything for you & use it as a knowledgebase. If you aren't aware you can now have a full back n forth conversation with chatGPT(it's not dumbass Siri).
All technological advances that are adopted are ones that made life easier and for some cooler then what they were once using (cell phone to iPhone put the web in our pocket but using your iPhone while driving is dangerous but talking to your human like friend isnt). Check out the movie H.E.R. as what Im describing is mostly what i describe above.
Time will tell if any of what im saying comes to fruition, but Silicon Valley is all a buzz about AI Agents in the last month or two and going forward.
Sure but the AI genie is out of the bottle and the tech billionaires are barreling us towards AI friends/agents/assistants. If we stop the momentum China picks it up and American prosperity and security is at risk.
What i describe is much like the movie H.E.R. which Sam Altman chatGPT's CEO asked Scarlett Johansan (voice of the AI in that movie) to be the voice of GPT. GPT is now a little like H.E.R the movie as you can have a full conversation with it unlike Siri. Just atm you dont see how GPT looks .. it doesn't look like a FaceTime call with human AI friend/Assistant (how your AI Assistant/Friend looks.. could look and sound like a deceased loved one .. that's my own crazy idea not from the movie H.E.R). Yet maybe in the future it will.. I'm betting it will, but it's only a guess and time will tell.
Im awaiting your downvote :) but will revisit this thread in a few years or more. Well if im right ;)
The biggest new technology where America controls/drives it and all other countries follow along .. we are & continue to be number one in AI technology and all other countries come to and or follow us that brings America billions to trillions of dollars ... the more money we have the more secure & prosperous America is & continues to be. As well creating new AI tech and using it to further protect America from adversaries.
The genie is out of the bottle and America must keep it's momentum in AI up .. ahead of all other countries for it's continued prosperity and security!
Well I use GPT daily to get things done and use it as a knowlegebase. I text and talk to it throughout the day, as well I think it's called "chat"GPT for a reason because it will evolve to the point where you feel like you are talking to a human. Tho this human is your assistant and does everything for you and interfaces with other AI agents to book travel, learn your friends/family schedules and anything you now do on the web there will be AI agent for that your AI agent interfacing with.
Maybe you have not seen the 2013 movie "H.E.R.?" Scarlett Johansan starred in it (her voice was the AI) and Sam Altman asked her to be the voice of chatGPT.
Overall this is what I see happening and excited for some of it or possibly all of it to happen. Yet time will tell :-) and it sounds like your betting none of it will happen ... we'll see :)
I suppose most anybody talking about this topic has seen Her by now (and if they haven't, they should, it's both a good movie and very relevant). The problem is rather that not everybody shares your enthusiasm about the utopia it depicts.
This is because it's also a dystopia in disguise. It's a social criticism and a cautionary tale about the way fetishizing technology is emotionally crippling us as individuals in a society. It kind of amazes me that this aspect seems to go over some people's heads.
It's obviously true what Booker said: What one person considers an ideal dream might to another person seem a nightmare.
Indeed yet chatGPT is already like H.E.R. yet there's no human like face to it ATM.
Im just jumping ahead utilizing what was seen in H.E.R. to envision where we are headed (possibly) as well adding my own crazy ... your AI Assistant Friend seen on your lock screen via a Facetime UI/UX call looks and sounds like a deceased loved one. Mom still guiding you through life.
That sounds creepy as hell to me. Are you serious, or is that an idea for a horror movie?
Edit: aaaand right after posting I stumble across a documentary running on TV in this very moment, in which a dying guy trained an AI on himself to accompany his widow after his death. Seems you're not the only one to find that desirable...
Investors, mostly private - eg. SoftBank and all the other deep pockets funneling money into this - but also public, because lots of people are invested in Nvidia, Microsoft, and Google, who will be directly affected if the bubble bursts, and just everyone invested in the markets generally, as this bubble bursting would already probably be more broadly damaging than even the dot com bust was.
Personally, I do expect a big correction at some point, even if it never reaches the point of bubble bursting. But I have no idea when I expect it to happen, so this isn't, like, an investable thesis.
Not sure what you mean by "wasted"? Like a regular Ponzi scheme, there are many opportunities for the people at the top to extract value out into cash, while people who "got in" on the scheme later are left holding the bag when the bubble bursts.
Yes, usually people at the top extract the cash. Like Bernie Madoff just spent the money for his enjoyment. In this case the money goes to people building the data centers, providing resources and the engineers at OpenAI who are actually working for the money.
A lot of it does - and that's great! - but a lot of it accrues to the owners of the businesses involved.
If this is a bubble and it bursts in a few years, a lot of investors in specific companies, and in the market broadly, will lose a lot of money, but Sam Altman and Jensen Huang will remain very wealthy.
I'm a capitalist and I think there are good reasons for wealth to accrue to those who take risks and drive toward technological progress. But it just also is the case that they are incentivized to hype their companies, even if it risks getting out over their skis and leads to a bubble which eventually bursts. There are just have lots of ways to extract wealth prior to a bubble bursting, so the downsides of unwarranted hype are not as acute as they might otherwise be.
Not this specificay but this kinda thing. If I am getting billions like this, I wanna keep this gravy going. And it comes from shareholders ultimately.
Let me avoid the use of the word AGI here because the term is a little too loaded for me these days.
1) reasoning capabilities in latest models are rapidly approaching superhuman levels and continue to scale with compute.
2) intelligence at a certain level is easier to achieve algorithmically when the hardware improves. There's also a larger path to intelligence and often simpler mechanisms
3) most current generation reasoning AI models leverage test time compute and RL in training--both of which can make use of more compute readily. For example RL on coding against compilers proofs against verifiers.
All of this points to compute now being basically the only bottleneck to massively superhuman AIs in domains like math and coding--rest no comment (idk what superhuman is in a domain with no objective evals)
It is superhuman in a very specific domain. I didn't use AGI because its definitions are one of two flavors.
One, capable of replacing some large proportion of global gdp (this definition has a lot of obstructions: organizational, bureaucratic, robotic)...
two, difficult to find problems in which average human can solve but model cannot. The problem with this definition is that the distinct nature of intelligence of AI and the broadness of tasks is such that this metric is probably only achievable after AI is already in reality massively superhuman intelligence in aggregate. Compare this with Go AIs which were massively superhuman and often still failing to count ladders correctly--which was also fixed by more scaling.
All in all I avoid the term AGI because for me AGI is comparing average intelligence on broad tasks rel humans and I'm already not sure if it's achieved by current models whereas superhuman research math is clearly not achieved because humans are still making all of progress of new results.
> All of this points to compute now being basically the only bottleneck to massively superhuman AIs
This is true for brute force algorithms as well and has been known for decades. With infinite compute, you can achieve wonders. But the problem lies in diminishing returns[1][2], and it seems things do not scale linearly, at least for transformers.
Well, it's a huge jump, but it's still a jump from "it generates utter illogical nonsense when it tries to simulate reason" to "it makes some correct guesses that start to resemble reasoning if we squint at it really hard."
Which is - no doubt - an astonishing achievement, but absolutely not like the "AI" hype train people try to paint it.
The "rapidly approaching" part is true in terms of the velocity, but all of this are just baby steps while walking upright properly is way beyond the horizon.
I wouldn't mind being wrong about this, of course.
They plugged the hole for "how many 'r''s in 'strawberry'", but I just asked it how many "l"s in "lemolade" (spelling intentional) and it told me 1. If you make it close to, but not exactly a word it would be expecting it falls over.
I see it somewhat differently. It is not that technology has reached a level where we are close to AGI, we just need to throw in a few more coins to close the final gap.
It is probably the other way around. We can see and feel that human intelligence is being eroded by the widespread use of LLMs for tasks that used to be solved by brain work. Thus, General Human Intelligence is declining and is approaching the level of current Artificial Intelligence. If this process can be accelerated by a bit of funding, the point where Big Tech can overtake public opinion making will be reached earlier, which in turn will make many companies and individuals richer faster, also the return on investment will be closer.
> Is the key idea here that current AI development has figured out enough to brute force a path towards AGI?
My sense anecdotally from within the space is yes people are feeling like we most likely have a "straight shot" to AGI now. Progress has been insane over the last few years but there's been this lurking worry around signs that the pre-training scaling paradigm has diminishing returns.
What recent outputs like o1, o3, DeepSeek-R1 are showing is that that's fine, we now have a new paradigm around test-time compute. For various reasons people think this is going to be more scalable and not run into the kind of data issues you'd get with a pre-training paradigm.
You can definitely debate on whether that's true or not but this is the first time I've been really seeing people think we've cracked "it", and the rest is scaling, better training etc.
> My sense anecdotally from within the space is yes people are feeling like we most likely have a "straight shot" to AGI now
My problem with this is that people making this statement are unlikely to be objective. Major players are in fundraising mode, and safety folks are also incentivised to be subjective in their evaluation.
Yesterday I repeatedly used OpenAI’s API to summarise a document. The first result looked impressive. However, comparing repeated results revealed that it was missing major points each time, in a way a human would certainly not. In the surface the summary looked good, but careful evaluation indicated a lack of understanding or reasoning.
Don’t get me wrong, I think AI is already transformative, but I am not sure we are close to AGI. I hear a lot about it, but it doesn’t reflect my experience in a company using and building AI.
Yeah obviously motivations are murky and all over the place, no one's free of bias. I'm not taking a strong stance on whether they're right or not or how much of it is motivated reasoning, I just think at least quite a bit is genuine (I'm mainly basing this off researchers I know who have a track record of being very sober and "boring" rather than the flashy Altman types)
To your point, yeah the models still suck in some surprising ways, but again it's that thing of they're the worst they're ever going to be, and I think in particular on the reasoning issue a lot of people are quite excited that RL over CoT is looking really really promising for this.
I agree with your broader point though that I'm not sure how close we are and there's an awful lot of noise right now
“The worst they’re going
to be” line is a bit odd. I hear it a lot, but surely it’s true of all tech? So why are we hearing it more now? Perhaps that is a sign of hype?
Yeah that's a fair point! It's def a more general tech thing, but I think there are a couple specific reasons why it comes up more here though. Firstly, I think most tech does not improve at the insane rate that AI has been historically, so people's perception of capabilities become out of date just incredibly rapidly here (think about how long people we're banging on about "AI can't draw hands!" well after better models came out that could). If you think of the line as a way to say "don't anchor on what it can do today!" then it feels more appropriate to go on about this more for a more rapidly-changing field
Secondly, I think there's a tendency in AI for some ppl to look at failures of models and attribute it to some fundamental limitation of the approach, rather than something that future models will solve. So I think the line also gets used as short-hand for "Don't assume this limitation is inherent to the approach". I think in other areas of tech there's less of a tendency to try to write off entire areas because of present-day limitations, hence the line coming up more often
So you're right that the line is kind of universally applicable in tech, I guess I just think the kinds of bad arguments that warrant it as a rejoinder are more common around AI?
I agree with your take, and actually go a bit further. I think the idea of "diminishing returns" is a bit of a red herring, and it's instead a combination of saturated benchmarks (and testing in general) and expectations of "one llm to rule them all". This might not be the case.
We've seen with oAI and Anthropic, and rumoured with Google, that holding your "best" model and using it to generate datasets for smaller but almost as capable models is one way to go forward. I would say that this shows the "big models" are more capable than it would seem and that they also open up new avenues.
We know that Meta used L2 to filter and improve its training sets for L3. We are also seeing how "long form" content + filtering + RL leads to amazing things (what people call "reasoning" models). Semantics might be a bit ambitious, but this really opens up the path towards -> documentation + virtual environments + many rollouts + filtering by SotA models => new dataset for next gen models.
That, plus optimisations (early exit from meta, titans from google, distillation from everyone, etc) really makes me question the "we've hit a wall" rhetoric. I think there are enough tools on the table today to either jump the wall, or move around it.
Largest GPU cluster at the moment is X.ai's 100K H100's which is ~$2.5B worth of GPUs. So, something 10x bigger (1M GPUs) is $25B, and add $10B for 1GW nuclear reactor.
This sort of $100-500B budget doesn't sound like training cluster money, more like anticipating massive industry uptake and multiple datacenters running inference (with all of corporate America's data sitting in the cloud).
It seems you'd need to figure periodic updates into the operating cost of a large cluster, as well as replacing failed GPUs - they only last a few years if run continuously.
I've read that some datacenters run mixed generation GPUs - just updating some at a time, but not sure if they all do that.
It'd be interesting to read something about how updates are typically managed/scheduled.
There's the servers and data center infrastructure (cooling, electricity) as well as the GPUs of course, but if we're talking $10B+ of GPUs in a single datacenter, it seems that would dominate. Electricity generation is also a big expense, and it seems nuclear is the most viable option although multi-GW solar plants are possible too in some locations. The 1GW ~ $10B number I suggested is in the right ballpark.
>AI development has figured out enough to brute force a path towards AGI?
I think what's been going on is compute/$ has been exponentially rising for decades in a steady way and has recently passed the point that you can get human brain level compute for modest money. The tendency has been once the compute is there lots of bright PhDs get hired to figure algorithms to use it so that bit gets sorted in a few years. (as written about by Kurzweil, Wait But Why and similar).
So it's not so much brute forcing AGI so much that exponential growth makes it inevitable at some point and that point is probably quite soon. At least that seems to be what they are betting.
The annual global spend on human labour is ~$100tn so if you either replace that with AGI or just add $100tn AGI and double GDP output, it's quite a lot of money.
this is an announcement not a cut check. Who knows how much they'll actually spend, plenty of projects never get started let alone massive inter-company endeavors.
> I don't know how to make sense of this level of investment.
The thing about investments, specifically in the world of tech startups and VC money, is that speculation is not something you merely capitalize on as an investor, it's also something you capitalize on as a business. Investors desperately want to speculate (gamble) on AI to scratch that itch, to the tune of $500 billion, apparently.
So this says less about, 'Are we close to AGI?' or, 'Is it worth it?' and more about, 'Are people really willing to gamble this much?'. Collectively, yes, they are.
note that the $500 Billion number is bravado / aspirational. MSFT Nadella said he has $80B to contribute? It is a live auction horse race in some ways, it seems.
> Is the key idea here that current AI development has figured out enough to brute force a path towards AGI? Or I guess the alternative is that they expect to figure it out in the next 4 years...
Can't answer that question, but, if the only thing to change in the next four years was that generation got cheaper and cheaper, we haven't even begun to understand the transformative power of what we have available today. I think we've felt like 5-10% of the effects that integrating today's technology can bring, especially if generation costs come down to maybe 1% of what they currently are, and latency of the big models becomes close to instantaneous.
It's a typical Trump-style announcement -- IT'S GONNA BE HUUUGE!! -- without any real substance or solid commitments
Remember Trump's BIG WIN of Foxconn investing $10B to build a factory in Wisconsin, creating 13000 jobs?
That was in 2017. 7 years later, it's employing about 1000 people if that. Not really clear what, if anything, is being made at the partially-built factory. [0]
I think the only way you get to that kind of budget is by assuming that the models are like 5 or 10 times larger than most LLMs, and that you want to be able to do a lot of training runs simultaneously and quickly, AND build the power stations into the facilities at the same time. Maybe they are video or multimodal models that have text and image generation grounded in a ton of video data which eats a lot of VRAM.
> current AI development has figured out enough to brute force a path towards AGI? Or I guess the alternative is that they expect to figure it out in the next 4 years...
Or they think the odds are high enough that the gamble makes sense. Even if they think it's a 20% chance, their competitors are investing at this scale, their only real options are keep up or drop out.
This announcement is from the same office as the guy that xeeted:
“My NEW Official Trump Meme is HERE! It's time to celebrate everything we stand for: WINNING! Join my very special Trump Community. GET YOUR $TRUMP NOW.”
Your calibration is probably fine, stargate is not a means to achieve AGI, it’s a means to start construction on a few million square feet of datacenters thereby “reindustrializing America”
FWIW Altman sees it as a way to deploy AGI. He's increasingly comfortable with the idea they have achieved AGI and are moving toward Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI).
twitter hype is out of control again.
we are not gonna deploy AGI next month, nor have we built it.
we have some very cool stuff for you but pls chill and cut your expectations 100x!
I realize he wrote a fairly goofy blog a few weeks ago, but this tweet is unambiguous: they have not achieved AGI.
Do you think Sam Altman ever sits in front of a terminal trying to figure out just the right prompt incantation to get an answer that, unless you already know the answer, has to be verified? Serious question. I personally doubt he is using openai products day to day. Seems like all of this is very premature. But, if there are gains to be made from a 7T parameter model, or if there is huge adoption, maybe it will be worth it. I'm sure there will be use for increased compute in general, but that's a lot of capex to recover.
To me it looks like a strategic investment in data center capacity, which should drive domestic hardware production, improvements in electrical grid, etc. Putting it all under AI label just makes it look more exciting.
Yes that is exactly what the big Aha! moment was. It has now been shown that doing these $100MM+ model builds is what it takes to have a top-tier model. The big moat is not just the software, the math, or even the training data, it's the budget to do the giant runs. Of course having a team that is iterating on these 4 regularly is where the magic is.
~$125B per year would be 2-3% of all domestic investment. It's similar in scale to the GDP of a small middle income country.
If the electric grid — particularly the interconnection queue — is already the bottleneck to data center deployment, is something on this scale even close to possible? If it's a rationalized policy framework (big if!), I would guess there's some major permitting reform announcement coming soon.
They say this will include hundreds of thousands of jobs. I have little doubt that dedicated power generation and storage is included in their plans.
Also I have no doubt that the timing is deliberate and that this is not happening without government endorsement. If I had to guess the US military also is involved in this and sees this initiative as important for national security.
Is there really any government involvement here? I only see Softbank, Oracle, and OpenAI pledging to invest $500B (over some timescale), but no real support on the government end outside of moral support. This isn't some infrastructure investment package like the IRA, it's just a unilateral promise by a few companies to invest in data centers (which I'm sure they are doing anyway).
> but no real support on the government end outside of moral support
The venture was announced at the White House, by the President, who has committed to help it by using executive orders to speed things up.
It might not have been voted by congress or whatever, but just those things makes it pretty clear the government provides more than just "moral support".
I thought all the big corps had projects for the military already, if not DARPA directly, which is the org responsible for lots of university research (the counterpart to the NSF, which is the nice one that isn't funded by the military)?
Funding for DARPA and NSF ultimately comes from the same place. DARPA funds military research. NSF funds dual use[1] research. All of it is organized around long term research goals. I maintained some of the software involved in research funding decision making.
It’s light on details, but from The Guardian’s reporting:
> The president indicated he would use emergency declarations to expedite the project’s development, particularly regarding energy infrastructure.
> “We have to get this stuff built,” Trump said. “They have to produce a lot of electricity and we’ll make it possible for them to get that production done very easily at their own plants.
On the one hand the number is a political thumb-suck which sounds good. It's not based in any kind of actual reality.
Yes, the data center itself will create some permanent jobs (I have no real feel for this, but guessing less than 1000).
There'll be some work for construction folk of course. But again seems like a small number.
I presume though they're counting jobs related to the existence of a data center. As in, if I make use of it do I count that as a "job"?
What if we create a new post to leverage AI generally? Kinda like the way we have a marketing post, and a chunk of the daily work there is Adwords.
Once we start gustimamating the jobs created by the existence of an AI data center, we're in full speculation mode. Any number really can be justified.
Of course ultimately the number is meaningless. It won't create that many "local jobs" - indeed most of those jobs, to the degree they exist at all, will likely be outside the US.
So you don't need to wait for a post-mortem. The number is sucked out of thin air with no basis in reality for the point of making a good political sound bite.
> I presume though they're counting jobs related to the existence of a data center. As in, if I make use of it do I count that as a "job"?
Seeing how Elon deceives advertisers with false impressions, I could see him giving the same strategy a strong vote of confidence (with the bullshit metrics to back it!)
I'm sure this will easily be true if you count AI as entities capable of doing jobs. Actually, they don't really touch that (if AI develops too quickly, there will be a lot of unemployment to contend with!) but I get the national security aspect (China is full speed ahead on AI, and by some measurements, they are winning ATM).
Wow. What an idea you guys have there. Look - you maybe could sit homeless and mentally disabled on such power-generating bicycles, hmmm... what about convicts! Let them contribute to society, no free lunch! What an innovation!
Just as there is an AWS for the public, with something similar but only for Federal use, so it could be possible that there is AI cloud services available to the public and then a separate cloud service for Federal use. I am sure that military intelligence agencies etc. would like to buy such a service.
Gas turbines can be spun up really quickly through either portable systems (like xAI did for their cluster) [1] or actual builds [2] in an emergency. The biggest limitation is permits.
With a state like Texas and a Federal Government thats onboard these permits would be a much smaller issue. The press conference makes this seem more like, "drill baby drill" (drilling natural gas) and directly talking about them spinning up their own power plants.
> It's similar in scale to the GDP of a small middle income country
I’ve been advocating for a data centre analogue to the Heavy Press Programme for some years [1].
This isn’t quite it. But when I mapped out costs, $1tn over 10 years was very doable. (A lot of it would go to power generation and data transmission infrastructure.)
One-time capital costs that unlock a range of possibilities also tend to be good bets.
The Flood Control Act [0], TVA, Heavy Press, etc.
They all created generally useful infrastructure, that would be used for a variety of purposes over the subsequent decades.
The federal government creating data center capacity, at scale, with electrical, water, and network hookups, feels very similar. Or semiconductor manufacture. Or recapitalizing US shipyards.
It might be AI today, something else tomorrow. But there will always be a something else.
Honestly, the biggest missed opportunity was supporting the Blount Island nuclear reactor mass production facility [1]. That was a perfect opportunity for government investment to smooth out market demand spikes. Mass deployed US nuclear in 1980 would have been a game changer.
It is not the just queue that is the bottleneck. If the new power plants designed specifically for powering these new AI data centers are connected to the existing electric grid, the energy prices for regular customers will also get affected - most likely in an upwardly fashion. That means, the cost of the transmission upgrades required by these new datacenters will be socialized which is a big problem. There does not seem to be a solution in sight for this challenge.
They are trying. Microsoft wants to star the 3 Mile Island reactor. And other companies have been signing contracts for small modular reactors. SMRs are a perfect fit for modern data centers IF they can be made cheaply enough.
Wind, solar, and gas are all significantly cheaper in Texas, and can be brought online much quicker. Of course it wouldn't hurt to also build in some redundancy with nuclear, but I believe it when I see it, so far there's been lots of talk and little success in new reactors outside of China.
Notably it is significantly more than the revenue of either of AWS or Azure. It is very comparable to the sum of both, but consolidated into the continental US instead distributed globally.
just as likely to be natural gas or a combination of gas and solar. I don't know what supply chain looks like for solar panels, but I know gas can be done quickly [1], which is how this money has to be spent if they want to reach their target of 125 billion a year.
The companies said they will develop land controlled by Wise Asset to provide on-site natural gas power plant solutions that can be quickly deployed to meet demand in the ERCOT.
The two firms are currently working to develop more than 3,000 acres in the Dallas-Fort Worth region of Texas, with availability as soon as 2027
According to [1], the USA in January 2025 has almost 50GW/yr module manufacturing capacity. But to make modules you need polysilicon (25GW/yr manufacturing capacity in the US), ingots (0GW/yr), wafers (0GW/yr), and cells (0GW/yr). Hence the USA is seemingly entirely dependent on imports, probably from China which has 95%+ of the global wafer manufacturing capacity.
Even when accounting for announced capacity expansion, the USA is currently on target to remain a very small player in the global market with announced capacity of 33GW/yr polysilicon, 13GW/yr ingots, 24GW/yr wafers, 49GW/yr cells and 83GW/yr modules (13GW/yr sovereign supply chain limitation).
In 2024, China completed sovereign manufacturing of ~540GW of modules[2] including all precursor polysilicon, ingots, wafers and cells. China also produced and exported polysilicon, ingots, wagers and cells that were surplus to domestic demand. Many factories in China's production chain are operating at half their maximum production capacity due to global demand being less than half of global manufacturing capacity.[3]
> could something of this magnitude be powered by renewables only?
Perhaps.
For context see https://masdar.ae/en/news/newsroom/uae-president-witnesses-l... which is a bit further south than the bulk of Texas and has not yet been built; 5.2GW of panels, 19GWh of storage. I have seen suggestions on Linkedin that it will be insufficient to cover a portion of days over the winter, meaning backup power is required.
Datacenters can still achieve ROI, but in some cases, it may take longer than expected. This delay is primarily due to the increased complexity of managing operations with the variability introduced by intermittent energy sources. While batteries help mitigate this issue, their current costs make them less competitive compared to non-intermittent energy setups.
There have been literally 0 production SMR deployments to date so there’s no possibility they’re basing any of their plans on the availability of them.
Hasn't the US decided to prefer nuclear and fossil fuels (most expensive generation methods) over renewables (least expensive generation methods)?[1][2]
I doubt the US choice of energy generation is ideological as much a practicality. China absolutely dominates renewables with 80% of solar PV modules manufactured in China and 95% of wafers manufactured in China.[3] China installed a world record 277GW of new solar PV generation in 2024 which was a 45% year-on-year increase.[4] By contract, the US only installed ~1/10th this capacity in 2024 with only 14GW of solar PV generation installed in the first half of 2024.[5]
> Hasn't the US decided to prefer nuclear and fossil fuels (most expensive generation methods) over renewables (least expensive generation methods)?[1][2]
This completely ignores storage and the ability to control the output depending on needs. Instead of LCOE the LFSCOE number makes much more sense in practical terms.
Two Toshiba 4S reactors at the 50 MW version can cost about $3,000,000,000.
Two of those produces 100 MW.
They don't require refueling for around 30 years. $6,000,000,000 to power a 100 MW datacenter when we're talking about $500,000,000,000 is not too dramatic. Especially consider the amortized yearly cost.
Maybe they could build nuclear but they could just as easily build solar with battery backup or natural gas. Lots of industrial facilities have natural gas cogeneration with the grid as a backup. If you can't get a grid connection at all due to permitting, you could just forego the backup. The reliability wouldn't be as good, but in a distributed datacenter there are ways of building in fault tolerance.
If these guys really have $500 billion, they're going to find a way to get electricity.
That's not how you calculate these things. Check [1] for an overview, specifically Page 9. Note these metrics do not include costs to handle nuclear waste, passed over into the future (at least 1000y).
Small or modular reactors in the US are more than 10 years away, probably more like 15-20. These are facts and not made-up political or pipe-dreaming techno-snobes.
> Small or modular reactors in the US are more than 10 years away, probably more like 15-20
Could be 5 to 10 with $20+ bn/year in scale and research spend.
Trump is screwing over his China hawks. The anti-China and pro-nuclear lobbies have significant overlap; this could be how Trump keeps e.g. Peter Thiel from going thermonuclear on him.
I work in the sector and it's impossible to build a full-sized reactor in less than 10 years, and the usual over-run is 5 years. That's the time for tried and tested designs. The tech isn't there yet, and there are no working analogs in the US to use as an approved guide. The Department of Energy does not allow "off-the-cuff" designs for reactors. I think there is only two SMRs that have been built, one by the Russians and the other by China. I'm not sure they are fully functioning, or at least working as expected. I know there are going to be more small gas gens built in the near future and that SMRs in the US are way off.
Guessing SMRs are a ways off, any thoughts on the container-sized microreactors that would stand in for large diesel gens? My impression is that they’re still in the design phase, and the supply chain for the 20% U-235 HALEU fuel is in its infancy, but this is just based on some cursory research. I like the prospect of mass manufacturing and servicing those in a centralized location versus the challenges of building, staffing, and maintaining a series of one-off megaprojects, though.
> it's impossible to build a full-sized reactor in less than 10 years, and the usual over-run is 5 years
I'm curious why that is. If we know how to build it, it shouldn't take that long. It's not like we need to move a massive amount of earth or pour a humongous amount of concrete or anything like that, which would actually take time. Then why does it take 15 years to build a reactor with a design that is already tried and tested and approved?
Well, you do have to move a lot of earth and pour A LOT of concrete :) Many steps have to be x-rayed, and many other tests done before other steps can be started. Every weld is checked and, all internal and external concrete is cured, treated, and verified. If anything is wrong, it has to be fixed in place (if possible) or removed and redone. It's a slow process and should be for many steps.
One of the big issues that have occurred (in the US especially) is, that for 20+ years there were no new plants built. This caused a large void in the talent pool, inside and outside the industry. That fact, along with others has caused many problems with some projects of recent years in the US.
When you're the biggest fossil fuel producer in the world, it's vital that you stay laser-focused on regulating nuclear power to death in every imaginable detail while you ignore the vast problems with unchecked carbon emissions and gaslight anyone who points them out.
i don't and i honestly don't know much about it, but
> there are no working analogs in the US to use as an approved guide
small reactors have been installed on ships and submarines for over 70(!) years now. Reading up on the very first one, USS Nautilus, "the conceptual design of the first nuclear submarine began in March 1950" it took a couple of years? So why is it so unthinkably hard 70 years later, honest question? "Military doesn't care about cost" is not good enough, there are currently about >100 active ones with who knows how many hundreds in the past, so they must have cracked the cost formula at some point, besides by now we have hugely better tech than the 50's, so what gives?
Yeah, I wondered about seacraft reactors myself. I think there are many safety allowances for DOD vs. DOE. The DOD reactors are not publicly accessible (you hope anyway), and the data centers will be in and near the public. There are also major security measures that have to be taken for reactor sites. You have armed personnel before you even get to the reactors, and then the entrances are sometimes close to one mile away from the reactor. Once there, the number of guards and bang-bags goes up. The modern sites kind of look like they have small henges around them (back to the neolithic!) :)
If you didn't intend your comment to be a snarky one-liner, that didn't come across to me, and I'm pretty sure that would also be the case for many others.
Intent is a funny thing—people usually assume that good intent is sufficient because it's obvious to themselves, but the rest of us don't have access to that state, so has to be encoded somehow in your actual comment in order to get communicated. I sometimes put it this way: the burden is on the commenter to disambiguate. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I take your point at least halfway though, because it wasn't the worst violation of the guidelines. (Usually I say "this is not a borderline case" but this time it was!) I'm sensitive to regional flamewar because it's tedious and, unlike national flamewar or religious flamewar, it tends to sneak up on people (i.e. we don't realize we're doing it).
So you are sorry and take it back? Should probably delete your comments rather than striking them out, as the guidelines say.
I live, work, and posted this from Texas, BTW...
Also it takes up more than one line on my screen. So, not a "one-liner" either. If you think it is, please follow the rules consistently and enforce them by deleting all comments on the site containing one sentence or even paragraph. My comment was a pretty long sentence (136 chars) and wouldn't come close to fitting in the 50 characters of a Git "one-liner".
Otherwise, people will just assume all the comments are filtered through your unpredictable and unfairly biased eye. And like I said (and you didn't answer), this kind of thing is no longer in fashion, right?
None of this is "borderline". I did nothing wrong and you publicly shamed me. Think before you start flamewars on HN. Bad mod.
How much capacity does solar and wind add compared to nuclear, per square foot of land used? Also I thought the new administration was placing a ban on new renewable installations.
The ban is on offshore wind and for government loans for renewables. Won't really affect Texas much, it's Massachusetts that'll have to deal with more expensive energy.
Is the new rail you’re talking about the brightline?
It pretty much exclusively goes to and from tourist centers and is far too expensive ($40-$60 per seat each way) to deter most residents from just driving to Orlando. I wouldn’t really call it infrastructure (like the tri rail is.)
Not to mention that it’s the deadliest train in the US. People here barely follow traffic laws, but when you have it passing through major foot traffic areas every hour like on antlantic avenue in Delray Beach, people are going to get hit.
Grid is fine, snow is melting, everything is business as usual. CenterPoint had 99.9% deliverability for the past 24 hours, and ERCOT has 14,781 MW in reserve power available (https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards/gridconditions). Source: I live in Houston.
I know this was tongue in cheek, but c'mon, we can respect each other, right? :)
No, he didn't. Both links have zero mentions of solar or wind, and very specifically define their terms thus:
"a) The term “energy” or “energy resources” means crude oil, natural gas, lease condensates, natural gas liquids, refined petroleum products, uranium, coal, biofuels, geothermal heat, the kinetic movement of flowing water, and critical minerals, as defined by 30 U.S.C. 1606 (a)(3)."
This is Trump accepting bribes from the legacy and fossil fuel industries to keep those "nasty" new clean energy sources from competing with them.
It's unfair, because we are talking in the hindsight about everything but Project Stargate, and it's also just your list (and I don't know what others could add to it) but it got me thinking. Manhattan Project goal is to make a powerful bomb. Apollo is to get to the Moon before soviets do (so, because of hubris, but still there is a concrete goal). South-North Water Transfer is pretty much terraforming, and others are mostly roads. I mean, it's all kinda understandable.
And Stargate Project is... what exactly? What is the goal? To make Altman richer, or is there any more or less concrete goal to achieve?
Also, few items for comparison, that I googled while thinking about it:
AI race is arguably just as, and maybe even more important, than the space race.
From a national security PoV, surpassing other countries’ work in the field is paramount to maintaining US hegemony.
We know China performs a ton of corporate espionage, and likely research in this field is being copied, then extended, in other parts of the world. China has been more intentional in putting money towards AI over the last 4 years.
We had the chips act, which is tangentially related, but nothing as complete as this. For i think a couple years, the climate impact of data centers caused active political slowdown from the previous administration.
Part of this is selling the project politically, so my belief is much of the talk of AGI and super intelligence is more marketing speak aimed at a general audience vs a niche tech community.
I’d be willing to predict that we’ll get some ancillary benefits to this level of investment. Maybe more efficient power generation? Cheaper electricity via more investment in nuclear power? Just spitballing, but this is an incredible amount of money, with $100 billion “instantly” deployed.
Nautical miles are minutes of latitude and are useful for navigation on the sphere we live on. It’s not some conspiracy for English hegemony despite the previous posters insistence.
>what advantages do these rules bring to the winner?
An almost absolute incumbency advantage.
>what was the practical advantage of ascii or feet and knots
Familiarity. Americans and Britons speak English, and they wrote the rules in English. Everyone else after the fact needs to read English or GTFO.
Alternatively, think of it like this: Nvidia was the first to commercialize "AI" with CUDA. Now everyone in "AI" must speak CUDA or be irrelevant.
He who wins first writes the rules, runner-ups and below obey the rules.
This is why America and China are fiercely competing to be the first past the post so one of them will write the rules. This is why Japan and Europe insist they will write the rules, nevermind the fact they aren't even in the race (read: they won't write the rules).
okay, i think i get the cuda situation, but that is only for nvidia. amd is out of luck on that too, just like all companies from asia and europe.
on the previous examples i can see language gave native speakers and advantage in becoming familiar with the technology but on ai i'm not seeing an advantage that would give americans an advantage over everyone else, besides controlling access to the tech.
the reason i'm insisting on this is because i feel as if that argument has merit but i have yet to grasp how it applies to these technologies.
In this case the race is to win and secure the supply chains.
The microprocessors concerned are very high value goods, manufacturing and R&D for them can't be easily and quickly spun up on a whim. The country and companies first to start them up and win will secure the supply chains, and once secured it will take monumental money and effort to reconfigure them. A lot of money is at stake, in other words.
Geopolitically, it also means that the country who secures the supply chain also gets to quite literally write the rules regarding who and where the microprocessors can be sold to and exported. Either the US or China gets to decide who can buy the microprocessors depending on who wins the supply chain.
Just like Nvidia was the first past the post and now enjoys absolute incumbency advantage, whichever country (namely US or China) is first past the post in the "AI" industry will enjoy absolute incumbency advantage.
okay, i think i understand where the winner gets to control supply chains
i have to say the ascii, feet, and knots were a bit confusing though. these do not seem to be the same kinds of "wins" as what we're expecting to see with this race though. utf8 is mostly the default around the world and airbus is a serious competitor in international markets.
America to this very day gets to dictate how computing and aviation work. Knots, feet, ASCII and so on are just the obvious signs of that.
>utf8
Case in point, UTF-8 (aka Unicode) has ASCII as its starting point. ASCII can be converted to UTF-8 without data loss easily and perfectly because the first entries in Unicode are literally ASCII mappings. This is the virtue of winning first and getting to write the rules.
>airbus is a serious competitor in international markets.
And yet everyone outside of China and Russia still fly using knots and feet, that includes Airbus.
The goal is Artificial Superintelligence (ASI), based on short clips of the press conference.
It has been quite clear for a while we'll shoot past human-level intelligence since we learned how to do test-time compute effectively with RL on LMMs (Large Multimodal Models).
Look, making up a three-letter acronym doesn't make whatever it stands for a real thing. Not even real in a sense "it exists", but real in a sense "it is meaningful". And assigning that acronym to a project doesn't make up a goal.
I'm not claiming that AGI, ASI, AXY or whatever is "impossible" or something. I claim that no one who uses these words has any fucking clue what they mean. A "bomb" is some stuff that explodes. A "road" is some flat enough surface to drive on. But "superintelligence"? There's no good enough definition of "intelligence", let alone "artifical superintelligence". I unironically always thought a calculator is intelligent in a sense, and if it is, then it's also unironically superintelligent, because I cannot multiply 20-digit numbers in my mind. Well, it wasn't exactly "general", but so aren't humans, and it's an outdated acronym anyway.
So it's fun and all when people are "just talking", because making up bullshit is a natural human activity and somebody's profession. But when we are talking about the goal of a project, it implies something specific, measurable… you know, that SMART acronym (since everybody loves acronyms so much).
Also, "Dario Amodei says what he has seen inside Anthropic in the past few months leads him to believe that in the next 2 or 3 years we will see AI systems that are better than almost all humans at almost all tasks"
Not saying you're necessarily wrong, but "Anthropic CEO says that the work going on in Anthropic is super good and will produce fantastic results in 2 or 3 years" it not necessarily telling of anything.
Dario said in mid-2023 that his timeline for achieving "generally well-educated humans" was 2-3 years. o1 and Sonnet 3.5 (new) have already fulfilled that requirement in terms of Q&A, ahead of his earlier timeline.
I'm curious about that. Those models are definitely more knowledgeable than a well educated human, but so is Google search, and has been for a long time. But are they as intelligent as a well educated human? I feel like there's a huge qualitative difference. I trust the intelligence of those models much less than an educated human.
The paper you linked claims on page 10 that machines have been performing comparably on the task since 2012, so I'm not sure exactly what the paper is supposed to show in this context.
Am I to conclude that we've had a comparably intelligent machine since 2012?
Given the similar performance between GPT4 and O1 on this task, I wonder if GPT3.5 is significantly better than a human, too.
Sorry if my thoughts are a bit scattered, but it feels like that benchmark shows how good statistical methods are in general, not that LLMs are better reasoners.
You've probably read and understood more than me, so I'm happy for you to clarify.
The figure also shows that the non LLM algorithm from 2012 was as capable or more capable than a human: was it as intelligent as a well educated human?
If not, why is the study sufficient evidence for the LLM, but not sufficient evidence for the previous system?
Again, it feels like statistical methods are winning out in general.
> Perhaps it’s better that you ask a statistician you trust
Maybe we can shortcut this conversation by each of us simply consulting O1 :^)
1) It’s an example of a domain an LLM can do better than humans. A 2012 system was not able to do myriad other things LLMs can do and thus not qualified as general intelligence.
2) As mentioned in the chart label, earlier systems require manual symptom extraction.
3) An important point well articulated by a cancer genomics faculty member at Harvard:
“….Now, back to today: The newest generation of generative deep learning models (genAI) is different.
For cancer data, the reason these models hold so much potential is exactly the reason why they were not preferred in the first place: they make almost no explicit data assumptions.
These models are excellent at learning whatever implicit distribution from the data they are trained on
Such distributions don’t need to be explainable. Nor do they even need to be specified
When presented with tons of data, these models can just learn, internalize & understand…..”
Yeah, I'm not sure why we're pretending this will benefit the public. The only benefit is that it will create employment, and datacenter jobs are among the lowest paid tech workers in the industry.
Also note compute deprecates much faster than multi decade infra projects with chance of obsolecence. If deepseek keeps pace with releasing near SOTA models, those compute centres are going to have hard time recooping value / return on capital.
"Unnamed sources told Bloomberg in April that The Line is scaling back from 170 kilometers long to just 2.4 kilometers, with the rest of the length to be completed after 2030. Neom expects The Line to be finished by 2045 now, 15 years later than initially planned."
The plan was never for 170km of The Line to be finished by 2030. The original plan was for 5km. And yes, recent reports are that they've scaled back their ambitions to half that by 2030.
However: 1. That has no bearing on how much they actually spend, which is what was being discussed and 2. Neom is much more than just The Line. As you can see from the YouTube link I posted, Sindalah seems to be on track to open this year, which is part of Neom.
So while Neom overall might be behind schedule (and The Line or other components may never open), it is clearly not an "imaginary" project given that parts of it will open soon.
It's not an "argument", it is a fact. Neom has many parts, one or more of those parts are finished. It is not an "imaginary" project, period. An imaginary project does not get to the construction phase. You cannot call this imaginary without significantly and unilaterally re-defining the meaning of that word.
From there, The Line =/= Neom. That said, 170km is still the plan for The Line – the first segment was supposed to be 5km by 2030, now it is 2.5km by 2030. And again, them not building as much as they said does not mean it is cheaper (cost is what we're discussing, after all). If anything it means they are already over budget.
Stargate is a new company, so OpenAI (a different company) having data centers does not seem relevant. Also, I do not think OpenAI actually does own any data centers – for the most part they've been using Azure infra AFAIK. But I did not claim that Stargate was imaginary, so I am unsure how this is a relevant point for you to make.
Where are they getting the $500B? Softbank's market cap is 84b and their entire vision fund is only $100b, Oracle only has $11b cash on hand, OpenAI's only raised $17b total...
That's their total fund and I doubt they are going all in with it in the US. Still, to reach $500bn, they need $125bn every single year. I think they just put down the numbers they want to "see" invested and now they'll be looking for backers. I don't think this is going anywhere really.
This would be a large outlay even for UAE, who would be giving it to a direct competitor in the space: UAE is one of the few countries outside of the US who are in any way serious about AI.
Softbank is being granted a block of TRUMP MEMES, the price of which will skyrocket when they are included in the bucket of crypto assets purchased as part of the crypto reserve.
there doesn't appear to be any timeline announced here. the article says the "initial investment" is expected to be $100bn, but even that doesn't mean $100bn this year.
if this is part of softbank's existing plan to invest $100bn in ai over the next four years, then all that's being announced here is that Sama and Larry Ellison wanted to stand on a stage beside trump and remind people about it.
>> Where are they getting the $500B? Softbank's market cap is 84b and their entire vision fund is only $100b, Oracle only has $11b cash on hand, OpenAI's only raised $17b total...
1. The outlays can be over many years.
2. They can raise debt. People will happily invest at modest yields.
Oracle's cash on hand is presumably irrelevant- I think they are on the receiving end of the money, in return for servers. No wonder Larry Ellison was so fawning.
Is this is a good investment by Softbank? Who knows.. they did invest in Uber, but also have many bad investments.
> `... they did invest in Uber, but also have many bad investments.`
The one I really don't get is that they funded Adam Neumann's new company after the collapse of WeWork. How stupid do you have to be to give that guy any more money?
Apart from my general queasiness about the whole AGI scaling business and the power concentration that comes with it, these are the exact four people/entities that I would not want to be at the tip of said power concentration.
<quote>
Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on," Ellison said, describing what he sees as the benefits from automated oversight from AI and automated alerts for when crime takes place. "We're going to have supervision," he continued. "Every police officer is going to be supervised at all times, and if there's a problem, AI will report the problem and report it to the appropriate person.
</quote>
What is far more important to understand is to ignore all that nonsense and focus on who makes money? It will be Ellison and his buddies making tens of billions of dollars/year selling 'solutions' to local governments, all paid by your property taxes. This also enables an ecosystem of theft, where others benefit a lot more. With the nexus of Private Prisons, kids for cash judges (or judges investing in stock of prisons), DEA/police unions, DEA unions, small rural towns increasing prison population (because they get added to the total pop, and get funds allocated).
More importantly this is extremely attractive to police who can steal billions every day from civil forfeiture, they have access to anyone who makes a bank withdrawal or transacts in cash, all displayed in real time feeds, ready for grabbing!
> "Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on," Ellison said, describing what he sees as the benefits from automated oversight from AI and automated alerts for when crime takes place.
Wow! It is genuinely frightening that these people should be in control of our future!
Literal 'new world order' stuff here. Alex Jones and crew got so excited that their guy was in the driver's seat that they didn't notice the actual illuminati lizard people space lasers being deployed.
I don't think we'll ever have a zero-crime society, neither should we aim to be one. But being left to the vagaries of police (and union) politics, culture and the complications of city budgets is clearly broken.
Example: Cities are being presented a false choice between accepting deadly high speed chases vs zero criminal accountability [1], which in the world of drones seems silly [2]
I don't want the police to have unfettered access to surveil any and all citizens but putting camera access behind a court warrant issued by a civilian elected judge doesn't feel that dystopian to me.
Is that what Ellison was alluding to? I have no idea, but we are no longer in a world where we should disregard this prima facie.
If you look at the original video [1], starting at 1:09:00, he's talking specifically about police body/dashcams recording interactions with citizens during callouts and stops, not everyone all the time as that article strongly implies. The USA already decided to record what police see all the time during these events, so there's no new privacy issue posed by anything he's suggesting. The question is only how those videos are used. In particular, he points out that police are allowed to turn off bodycams for privacy reasons (e.g. bathroom breaks), which is a legitimate need but it can also be abused, and AI can fix this loophole.
In the same segment he also proposes using AI to watch CCTV at schools in real time to trigger instant response if someone pulls out a gun, and using AI to spot wildfires using drones. For some reason the media didn't condemn those ideas, just the part about supervising cop stops. How curious.
Move to China. You’ll love it. Not only does it have lower crime by virtue of being highly controlled, it also has the added benefit of you never hearing about crimes the government doesn’t want you to hear about, and you won’t hear about any police corruption or brutality either. Ignorance is bliss!
You also don't need to sell your company when you innovate, your well-connected oligarch has either already gotten what you're doing or can seize it without consequence.
Philosophically I agree, this sounds nice. A bit false dichotomy-ish, but nice.
But if you think about it, an unstated yet necessary prerequisite is that the definition of "crime" must be morally aligned with what is right. If it's not, well then you're living in a dystopia. Imagine a world where slavery is still legal and being a runaway slave is a crime. How do people like Frederick Douglass escape and survive long enough to make a difference?
And that's before we get into the prerequisite that such a state must apply the laws completely evenly with no special tiers based on class, wealth, political connection, celebrity status, etc, which AFAIK has never been done. Given the leadership, it doesn't look like it's goig to happen anytime soon. IMHO I think it's heavily contrary to human nature and just won't be achievable short of altering human nature.
Even if shoplifting at Walgreens was the reason for closure, the downtowns of a few "liberal cities" (it's always the same 3-4 mentioned) are extremely unlikely to have that much impact on national statistics.
The retail industry lobbying group itself noted that "shrink", the term for loss of revenue due to items walking off or being damaged, has remained unchanged since the 90s.
The people telling you that there is an immense wave of shoplifting are outright lying.
There's a few that have tried to implement this, and I want to live in none of them.
The US will fare no better if it walks down this path, and honestly will likely fare worse for it's cultural obsession with individualism over community.
If you're lucky, you might get your chance to live in Thiel's and Ellison's techbro utopia. Make sure to tell us how great it is to be subjected to people with no accountability, but all of the power over every aspect of your life.
Just Ellison alone brings unwelcome feeling of having Oracle craziness forced down our collective throats, but I share your concern about the unholy alliance generated in front of us.
My immediate reaction to the announcement was one of these is not like the others. OpenAI, a couple of big investment funds, Microsoft, Nvidia, and...............Oracle?
Oracle provides two things: A datacenter for Nvidia chips, and health data. Oracle Cerner had a 21.7% market share for inpatient hospital Electronic Health Records (EHR). Larry Ellison specifically mentioned healthcare when announcing it in the Whitehouse.
The announcement was funny because they weren't quite sure what they are going to do in the health space. Sam Altman was asked, and he immediately deferred to Ellison and Masayoshi. Ellison was vague... it seems they know they want to do something with Ellison's massive stash of health data... but they don't quite know what they are building yet.
The Snowflake-for-health is more about opening EHR data for operational use by providers and facilities.
Versus being locked into respective EHR platforms.
If Oracle provided a compelling data suite (a la MS) within their own cloud ecosystem, they'd have less reason to restrict it at the EHR level (as they'd have lock-in at the platform level), which would help them compete against Epic (who can't pivot to openness in the same way, without risking their primary product).
I think you mean PostgreSQL for EHR data. MS Fabric and Snowflake are analytical databases, not operational. Patient privacy requirements (and HIPAA law) is a blocker for having an open operational database for EHR.
Oracle makes perfect sense in that they are 1) a massive datacenter company, and 2) sell a variety of saas products to enterprises, which is a major target market for AI.
> Oracle has 2-3% market share as a Cloud Provider.
And the market leader is what, 30%? about 1 order of magnitude. That's not such a huge difference, and I suspect that Oracle's size is disproportionate in the enterprise space (which is where a lot of AI services are targeted) whereas AWS has a _ton_ of non-enterprise things hosted.
In any case, 2-3% is big enough where this kind of investment is 1) financially possible, 2) desirable to grow to be #2 or #3
Getting from 2% (Oracle) to 10% (GCP) market share would need 37.97% CAGR in 5 years. In a vacuum where everything else keeps the same, maybe, but I see that goal as very difficult to attain in what is a highly competitive industry right now.
Disclaimer: I work at a highly regulated industry and we are fine running our "enterprise" workloads in Azure (and even AWS for a spinoff company in the same sector). Oracle has no specific moat in that area imho, unless you already locked-in in one of their software offerings.
There is a certain reason that last weeks everybody and their grandma is simping for Trump. Nobody would want to be on his bad side right now. Moreover, we hear here and there that Trump "keeps his promises". A lot of the promises we do not know about and we may never will. These people did not spend money supporting his campaign for nothing. In other places and eras this would have been called corruption, now it is called "keeping his promises".
Trump is one of the most famous people in the world for not keeping promises of paying debts. But there is money to be made temporarily when he is running a caper, as long as you can get your hand in the pot before he steals it.
If your knee jerk response to any political discussion even remotely critical of 'your guy' is to snap into whataboutisim instead of participating in the conversation you might need a outrage pornography detox for a while.
> There is a certain reason that last weeks everybody and their grandma is simping for Trump. Nobody would want to be on his bad side
It's worth keeping in mind how extremely unfriendly to tech the last admin was. At this point, it's basically proven in court that emails of the form "please deboost person x or else" were send, and there's probably plenty more we don't know about.
Combine that with the troubles in Europe which Biden's administration was extremely unwilling to help with, the obstacles thrown in the way of major energy buildouts, which are needed for AI... one would have to be stupid to be a tech CEO and not simp for Trump.
Tech has been extremely Democratic for many years. The Democrats have utterly alienated tech, and now they reap the consequences.
> Tech has been extremely Democratic for many years. The Democrats have utterly alienated tech, and now they reap the consequences.
Well, on the other side it can be said that Big Tech wasn't really on the side of democracy (note: democracy, not the Democrat Party) itself, and it hasn't been for years - at the very least ever since Cambridge Analytica was discovered. The "big tech" sector has only looked at profit margins, clicks, eyeballs and other KPIs while completely neglecting its own responsibility towards its host, and it got treated as the danger it posed by the Biden administration and Europe alike.
As for the cryptocoin world that has also been campaigning for the 45th: they are an even worse cancer on the world. Nothing but a gigantic waste of resources (remember the prices of GPUs, HDDs and RAM going through the roof, coal power plants being reactivated?), rug pulls and other scams.
The current shift towards the far-right is just the final masks falling off. Tech has rather (openly) supported the 45th than to learn from the chaos it has brought upon the world and make at least a paper effort to be held accountable.
Yes, big tech was the kid caught in the corner cleaning out the cookie jar and threw a tantrum when one parent moved the jar out of reach as punishment in effort to help the industry learn self-control. Now the other parent has come home and has not only returned the cookie jar to the kid but pledged to bring them packs of cookies by the shipping container to gorge on in exchange for favors.
Nice euphemism for giving people autonomy in their data and privacy.
Most of there companies are so large that they cannot really fail anymore. At this point it has very little to do with protecting themselves, more with making them more powerful than governments. JD Vance are said that the US could drop support for NATO if Europe tries to regulate X [1]. Oligarchs have fully infiltrated the US government and are trying to do the same to other countries.
I disagree with the grandparent. They don't support Trump because they do not want to be on his bad side (well, at least not only that), they support Trump because they see the opportunity to suppress regulation worldwide and become more powerful than governments.
We just keep making excuses (fiduciary duties, he just doesn't know how to wave his arm because he's an autist [2]). Why not just call it what it is?
I do agree that big part of why they support Trump is for anti-regulation reasons. But, it is also a fact that Trump is one of them, a businessman, not a politician. With Trump they can now discuss more business and less policies. There is a certain dealing of business right now that seems not at all transparent. And in this, the amount of public simping is really weird to what usually happens, everybody praising Trump even before he was taking office, and even tiktok, "coming out" as whatever etc.
Oligarchs want less regulation, but they also want these beefy government contracts. They want weaker government to regulate them and stronger government to protect them and bully other countries. Way I see it, what they actually want is control of the government, and with Trump they have it (more than before).
We have more energy and are pumping more domestic oil than ever. We are a major exporter of LNG. Trump just killed EV subsidies, and electric charging network funding.
What are you talking about via Europe? Holding tech companies accountable to meddling in domestic politics? Not allowing carte blanche to user data?
I understand (though do not like) large corps tiptoeing around Trump in order to manipulate him, it is due to fear. Not due to Trump having respectable values.
Regarding to your question, yes. I'd prefer a healthy counterbalance to what we have currently. Ideally, I'd prefer cooperation. A worldwide cooperation.
Arguably the cooperation between the US and China has lead to the most economic growth and prosperity in human history, it's a shame the US and China are returning to a former time.
From what I've read about DeepSeek and its founder, I would very much prefer them, even with China factored in. At least if these particular Four Horsemen are the only alternative.
On a tangential note, those who wish to frame this as the start of the great AI war with China (in which they regrettably may be right), should seriously consider the possibility of coming out on the losing end. China has tremendous industrial momentum, and is not nearly as incapable of leading-edge innovation as some Americans seem to think.
No, I was rather pointing out that getting into an altercation that you are likely (even if not guaranteed) to lose may not be the smartest of ideas. On occasion, humans have been known to fruitfully engage in cooperation and de-escalation. Please pardon my naive optimism.
"Great AI war with China", "altercation" are excessively harsh characterizations. There is nothing "escalatory" in competing for leadership in new industries with other states, nor should it be "regrettable". No one, to my knowledge, is planning to nuke DeepSeek data centers or something.
I wish I could agree with you. But have you read Aschenbrenner's "Situational Awareness" [1]? I am very much afraid that the big decision makers in AI do in fact think in those terms, and do not in any way frame this as fair competition for the benefit of all.
A person heavily invested in this wave of AI succeeding saying AI will be big and we will have AGI next year? Sure.
I don't think there is much point of reading the whole thing after the following:
"Everyone is now talking about AI, but few have the faintest glimmer of what is about to hit them. Nvidia analysts still think 2024 might be close to the peak. Mainstream pundits are stuck on the willful blindness of “it’s just predicting the next word”."
China is much more peaceful nation compared to US. So, yes, I'd prefer China leading AI research any day. They are interested in mutual trade and prosperity, they respect local laws and culture, all unlike US.
I encountered this almost first person. When American company goes like an elephant, bribing local officials left and right, using dirty practices to push out concurrents. At the same time, Chinese companies try very hard to abide to local regulations and trying to resolve all issues using local courts, etc. Like actually civilised people.
What happens inside China is nothing of my interest, it's their business. They existed for millennias, they probably know how to manage themselves. They are not trying to expand outside of may be Taiwan, they don't put their military bases in my country, they don't fund so-called "opposition" and that's good enough for me.
Bribery is probably one of the few cases where the US is significantly better than bad actors in both China and the EU, both of which have major problems with overseas bribery
If you had AlQaeda in a hypothetical region near Florida with almost two-yearly terror attacks, you would shit bricks and
create jails/prisons with more security than the Pentagon itself.
I think there's a more nuanced version of this: China respects local laws and culture _outside of what they view as China_ more than the US does. It's also worth noting that China's policy in Xinjiang is somewhat narrowly targeted at religion, and less other aspects like cuisine or clothing. That said, religion is nigh impossible to separate from the broader idea of culture in much of the world.
Give me a break. China has overseas police stations as bases of operation for harassing ex-pats and dissidents. That's not "respecting local laws and culture".
Agree, and would like to say that this is not because many of us see China as some benevolent actor on the world stage, but rather because we see how NOT benevolent the US has been historically (see South America, the middle east, etc)
the US has done lots of positive things as well. i understand it is popular to be a critic nowadays, but in many ways the US has had a strong commitment to majoritarian democracy over the last century and is trending in a better direction.
but regardless of the net balance of actions, it is clearly more interventionist than China has been up to this point
Holy smokes. Do folks like you actually believe this? China has its own style of colonialism (whatever you want to call it) but it certainly exists as strong as the US flavor.
Quite a few from an economic perspective. Like I said they have their own style of colonialism. To think they are some peaceful loving nation is foolish. Maybe in the last 10 years China have had the military equipment capable of handling an offensive. They have been smart and done all their dealings via money. Without going too far in whataboutism, I simply find it ridiculous to classify China as a warm fuzzy nation with their long list of human rights issues. That does not mean America is peaceful and loving, simply that perhaps the two countries are not so different in net.
They were asking about bombs and invasions in the literal sense, not metaphorical. I'm sure if you asked someone in Gaza or Iraq if they would rather be subjected to more of America's bombing and war crimes, or China's abstract, metaphorical "economic colonialism" they would pick China in a heartbeat.
if Gaza was neighboring China and treated China like it does its neighbors, it would be treated quite differently by China. For an illustrative example, see Uighurs.
Uyghurs committed frequent acts of terrorism against China throughout the 1990s and 2000s, so you actually don't need to imagine that scenario. The treatment of Uyghurs is unjust and a clear violation of their human rights, but it's nowhere near the level of depravity of the western-backed Gaza Genocide.
> Like I said they have their own style of colonialism.
That's moving the goalposts and doesn't address the issue.
>They have been smart and done all their dealings via money.
You mean just like the country who issues the world reserve currency and who's intelligence agencies get involved in destabilizing regimes across the world?
> That's moving the goalposts and doesn't address the issue.
Is this how you make a constructive argument? Perhaps I was expecting too much from a joke account but this style of whataboutism is boring.
My post that you responded to set my premise which was that China has its own form of colonialism that is quite different than Americas but it exists and it’s quite strong. To classify China as a peaceful loving nation that respects other cultures is as if we were saying the US has never started a conflict. It’s factually a lie. China has a long list of human rights issues, they factually do not respect other cultures even within their own borders. I am not defending America but pointing out that China is not what the OP stated.
Are you the kind of superficial petty person who needs to take jabs at the messenger's name and not the message itself?
And are you really in the position to throw stones from a glass house with that account name? If you had your real name and social media profiles linked in the bio I'd understand, but you're just being hypocritical, petty and childish here with this 'gotcha'.
> To classify China as a peaceful loving nation that respects other cultures
I never made such a classification. You're building your own strammen to form a narrative you can attack but you're not saying anything useful the contradicts my PoV and wasting our time. Since you're obviously arguing in bad faith I won't converse with you further. Goodbye.
If you have an argument that is actually on topic with what I said please continue, otherwise save your troll account for someone else. The whataboutism/gaslighting is silly. You clearly cannot read threads or respond in a logical form to the right person. The conversation at hand was about China and in response to the OP classifying them as a loving and respectful nation. I made no attempt to defend the US and it has been you moving the goalposts. You throw about whataboutism around and then simply runoff with some flimsy excuse about multiple people being unable to converse with you. Troll account.
Cumpiler asked two very clear and direct questions:
>How many countries has China invaded and bombed in the last 30 years?
>How many deaths did China's warmongering caused abroad?
You didn't answer those, just started hand waving some stuff about China's "own form of colonialism" -- without even explaining what that is and how it works (which personally I'd be curious to hear about, and believe *is*" likely guilty of violence).
So you very clearly are the one guilty of shifting the goalposts, going on tangents, and bringing up usernames instead of real arguments.
I'm sympathetic to Infecto's positions, but I have to agree. I do think Cumpiler69's username is outrageous enough as to draw some commentary (provided it's civil and is semi-friendly ribbing) and perhaps even raise questions of whether they are a troll, but the substance of their comments is strong enough as to override these minor observations/objections.
the outcome would be exactly the same. AGI leads the human race off of a cliff, not in the direction of one human interest group vs another. the only difference would be that it was china that was responsible for the extinction if the human race rather than another country. i would prefer to die with dignity… the outcome we should all be advocating for is a global halt of AI research — not because it would be easy but because there is no other option.
we need to cooperate and put aside our petty politicking right now. the potential downsides of ‘racing’ without building a safety scaffold are catastrophic.
A serious question though, what does happen when AIs are filing lawsuits autonomously on behalf of the powerful, the courts clearly won't be able to cope unless you have AI powered courts too? None of how these monumental changes will work has been thought through at all, let's hope AI is smart enough to tell us what to do...
> A serious question though, what does happen when AIs are filing lawsuits autonomously on behalf of the powerful
It won't just be at the behalf of the powerful.
If lawyers are able to file 10x as many lawsuits per hour, the cost of filing a lawsuit is going to go down dramatically, and that's assuming a maximally-unfriendly regulatory environment where you still officially need a human lawyer in the loop.
This will enable people to e.g. use letters signed by an attorney at law, or even small claims court, as their customer support hotline, because that actually produces results in today.
Nobody is prepared for that. Not the companies, not the powerful, not the courts, nobody.
Unless you can afford your lawsuit to take up substantial time on Stargate and make a much stronger case than your average Joe who is still using o1 for their lawsuits
Oracle could reasonably be hit with some sort of stick every time they filed a frivolous lawsuit until the AI got tuned appropriately. Then it'd be a situation where Oracle were continuously suing people who don't follow the law, following a reasonably neutral and well calibrated standard that is probably going to end up as similar to an intelligent and well practised barrister. That would be acceptable. If people aren't meant to be following the law that is a problem for the legislators.
I'm envisioning a future where there's a centralized "legal exchange", much like the NYSE, where high speed machines file micro-ligation billions of times faster than any human can, which is decided equally quickly, an unrelenting back and forth buzz of lawsuits and payouts as every corporation wages constant automated legal battle. Small businesses are consumed in seconds, destroyed by the filing of a million computerized grievances while the major players end up in a sort of zero-sum stalemate, where money is constantly moving, but it never shifts the balance of power.
... has anyone ever written a book about this? If not, I think I'm gonna call dibs.
>A serious question though, what does happen when AIs are filing lawsuits autonomously on behalf of the powerful,
AI controlled cheap Chinese drones will start flying into their residencies carrying some trivial to make high explosives. With the class wars getting hotter in next few years we may be saying that Luigi Mangione had the right ideas towards the PMC, but he was underachiever.
I don't like how OpenAI turned majorly from what it was founded upon and their bias training ... but when considering the actual opponent here is China, it's not the worst.
I think OpenAI was originally founded against that kind of force. Autocratic governments becoming masters of AI.
I’m an American who was definitely raised in a “China Bad” world.
The last few months, between TikTok ban, RedNote, elections, United Healthcare CEO, etc I’ve seen so many people compare the US to China, and favor China. Which is of course crazy because China has things like forced labor and concentration camps of religious minorities, and far worse oppression than the US. But many people just view everything coming out of the US Gov’s mouth as bad.
Is the Chinese government worse than the US government? Probably. Do people universally think that still? Not really. The US Gov will have to contend with the reality that people -even citizens- are starting to view them and not their “enemy” as the “Bad Guys”.
I don’t get the good guys / bad guys mindset tbh.
Sure china gov is pretty bad and the us is by many metrics better - but why center your whole worldview around things that probably don’t affect you that much in your daily life?
US also has forced labour, huge prison population, bombing civilians and journalists to oblivion, literally nuking other countries and religious fanatics — do I still think china would be less pleasant as our new overlord? Yes — Do I think the world is better off with US-American hegemony? I’m not so sure.
Maybe it’s a net good for the world if not one power is dominating — maybe it’s the start of a hellish ww3.
I choose to believe the former.
Interestingly perhaps, as a foreigner (not from the USA or China) I can tell you not everyone around the world shares this perspective. There's people who trust China's single-party system over the USA's oligarchy.
By the time this project is done it will have been dead for 2 years.
Too many greedy mouths.
Too many corporations.
Too little oversight.
Too broad an objective.
Technology is moving too quickly for them to even guess at what to aim for.
Yeah, really the only thing missing from this initiative was the personal information of the vast majority of the United States population handed over on a silver platter.
That sentiment calls for reflection - whoever ends up on top of the heap after the AI craze settles down is going to be someone that everyone objects to. Elon Musk was himself an internet darling up until he became wealthy and entrenched.
That said, this does look like dreadful policy at the first headline. There is a lot of money going in to AI, adding more money from the US taxpayer is gratuitous. Although in the spirit of mixing praise and condemnation, if this is the worst policy out of Trump Admin II then it'll be the best US administration seen in my lifetime. Generally the low points are much lower.
Nietzsche wrote about these phenomena a long time ago in his Genealogy of Morality. there will never be someone who reaches the top who doesn’t become an object of ire in modern Western culture.
> That sentiment calls for reflection - whoever ends up on top of the heap after the AI craze settles down is going to be someone that everyone objects to.
I agree in principle. And realistically, there is no way Altman would not be part of this consortium, much as I dislike it. But rounding out the team with Ellison, Son and Abu Dhabi oil money in particular -- that makes for a profound statement, IMHO.
The moon program was $318 billion in 2023 dollars, this one is $500 billion. So that's why the tech barons who were present at the inauguration were high as a kite yesterday, they just got the financing for a real moon shot!
It appears this basically locks out Google, Amazon and Meta. Why are we declaring OpenAI as the winner? This is like declaring Netscape the winner before the dust settled. Having the govt involved in this manner can’t be a good thing.
Since the CEOs of Google, Amazon and Meta were seated at the front row of the inauguration, IN FRONT OF the incoming cabinet, I'm pretty confident their techno -power-barrel will come via other channels.
Interestingly, there seems to be no actual government involvement aside from the announcement taking place at the White House. It all seems to be private money.
I generally agree that government sponsorship of this could be bad for competition. But Google in particular doesn't necessarily need outside investment to compete with this. They're vertically integrated in AI datacenters and they don't have to pay Nvidia.
I am not sure if OpenAI will be the winner despite this investment. Currently, I see various DeepSeek AI models as offering much more bang for the buck at a vastly cheaper cost for small tasks, but not yet for large context tasks.
How involved is the government at all? I’m still having a hard time seeing how Trump or anyone in the government is involved except to do the announcement. These are private companies coming together to do a deal.
The actual press release makes it clearer that this isn't a lockout of any kind and there's no direct government involvement. Softbank and some of other banks persuaded by Softbank are ponying up $500B for OpenAI to invest in AI. Trump is hyping this up from the sidelines because "OpenAI says this will be good for America". It's basically just another day in the world of press-releases and political pundits commenting on press-releases.
I miss n gate so much. I asked AI to generate one for this thread.
"In a stunning display of fiscal restraint, Sam Altman only asks for $500 billion instead of his previous $7 trillion moonshot. Hackernews rejoices that the money will be spent in Texas, where the power grid is as stable as a cryptocurrency exchange. Oracle's involvement prompts lengthy discussions about whether Larry Ellison's surveillance dystopia will run on Java or if they'll need to purchase an enterprise license for consciousness itself. Meanwhile, SoftBank's Masayoshi Son continues his streak of funding increasingly expensive ways to turn electricity into promises, this time with added patriotism. The comments section devolves into a heated debate about whether this is technically fascism or just regular old corporatocracy, with several users helpfully pointing out that actually, the real problem is systemd."
> The comments section devolves into a heated debate about whether this is technically fascism or just regular old corporatocracy, with several users helpfully pointing out that actually, the real problem is systemd.
I hear this joked about sometimes or used as a metaphor, but in the literal sense of the phrase, are we in a cold war right now? These types of dollars feel "defense-y", if that makes sense. Especially with the big focus on energy, whatever that ends up meaning. Defense as a motivation can get a lot done very fast so it will be interesting to watch, though it raises the hair on my arms
The US appears to be fully in the grips of centralized economic autarky. A tiny coterie of industrialists who have the President's ear decide how to allocate a gigantic amount of capital for their pet projects while the state raises tariffs and implements bans to protect them from competition.
Didn't go well for South America in the 60s and 70s but perhaps, as economists are prone to saying, "this time will be different".
The effectiveness of policies is influenced by your starting position. South America is relatively poor. The United States is the best positioned country in the world by a long shot.
That was literally my question. Is this basically just for more datacenters, NVidia chips, and electricity with a sprinkling of engineers to run it all? If so, then that $500bn should NOT be invested in today's tech, but instead in making more powerful and power efficient chips, IMO.
I'll make a wild guess that they will be building data centers and maybe robotic labs. They are starting with 100B of committed by mostly Softbank, but probably not transacted yet, money.
> building new AI infrastructure for OpenAI in the United States
The carrot is probably something like - we will build enough compute to make a supper intelligence that will solve all the problems, ???, profit.
Reasonably speaking, there is no way they can know how they plan to invest $500 billion dollars. The current generation of large language models basically use all human text thats ever been created for the parameters... not really sure where you go after than using the same tech.
I used to wonder how the hundreds of thousands of employees that work in Big Oil or Big Pharma could tolerate all the terrible things their company does... e.g. the opioid epidemic. The naive optimist in me never thought that the tech industry would ever be that bad.
Now, as someone thats been in the industry for 10+ years and working adjacent to LLMs, this is all so depressing. The hype has gotten out of control. We are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on things that simply are not making life better for the majority of people.
Ditto. My non-tech friends ask what benefit AI has to society and I struggle to give them concrete examples that outweigh the opportunity cost of this kind of investment in more meaningful endeavors. Let alone the downsides of an algorithmically-driven society and the increasing environmental costs of AI workloads.
"create hundreds of thousands of American jobs"... Given the current educational system in the US, this should be fun to watch. Oh yeah, Musk and his H-1B Visa thing. Now it's making sense.
After they build the Multivac or Deep Thought, or whatever it is they’re trying to do, then what happens? It makes all the stockholders a lot of money?
The way I think about this project, along with all of Trump's plans, is that he wants to maximize the US's economic output to ensure we are competitive with China in the future.
Yes, it would make money for stockholders. But it's much more than that: it's an empire-scale psychological game for leverage in the future.
I really don't understand the national security argument. If you really do fear some fundamental breakthrough in AI from China, what's cheaper, $500 billion to rush to get there first, or spending a few billion (and likely much less) in basic research in physics, materials science, and electronics, mixed with a little bit of espionage, mixed with improving the electric grid and eliminating (or greatly reducing) fossil fuels?
Ultimately, the breakthrough in AI is going to either come from eliminating bottlenecks in computing such that we can simulate many more neurons much more cheaply (in other words, 2025-level technology scaled up is not going to really be necessary or sufficient), or some fundamental research discovery such as a new transformer paradigm. In any case, it feels like these are theoretical discoveries that, whoever makes them first, the other "side" can trivially steal or absorb the information.
I'm not sure I buy the national security argument but as you say the other side can trivially steal or absorb theoretical discoveries but not trivially get $500bn worth of data centers.
500B of compute infrastructure with order of magnitude greater deprecation / need to return on capital. Compute isn't concrete infra with 50+ years of value, more like 5 years, i.e. need to produce 50-100B worth value per year to break even. On top of the “$125B hole that needs to be filled for each year of CapEx at today’s levels” according to Sequoia. All which with could be wiped by PRC pacing SOTA model, unless 500B of more compute will lead to qualititive model differences. Right now, I don't know where that value is coming from, so either a lot of investors are getting fleeced, or this is a Manhattan tier strategic project... privately funded, which makes even less strategic sense.
It's fascinating how most people still don't get it.
ASI is basically a god. This is the ultimate solution (or problem). It will push us to the singularity, and create an utopia or drive humanity to extinction. Imagine someone who is so smart that would win every single nobel prize available, and make multiple discoveries in a matter of a year. And now multiply this person's intelligence by 100 (most likely more, but 100 is already hard enough to grasp). There's no point in investing in anything else. An investment in ASI is an investment in everything (could be a bad one though, depending on the outcome).
The government is banking on being able to control it, which is also pretty funny. It's like a pet hamster thinking they can dictate what a human does.
There's a good amount of irony in the results that AI have achieved, particularly if we reach AGI - they have improved individual worker efficiency by removing other workers from the system. Naming it Stargate implies a reckoning with the actual series itself - an accomplishment by humanity. Instead, what this pushes, is accomplishing the removal of humans from humanity. I like cool shiny tech, but I like useful tech that really helps humans more. Work on 3D-printing sustainable food, or something actually useful like that. Jenson doesn't need another 1B gallons of water under his belt.
> Instead, what this pushes, is accomplishing the removal of humans from humanity.
If you buy the marketing, yeah. But we aren't really seeing that in the tech sector. We haven't seen it succeed in the entertainment sector... it's still fighting for relevance in the medical and defense industries too. The number and quality of jobs that AI replaced is probably still quite low, and it will probably remain that way even after Stargate.
AI is DOA. LLMs have no successor, and the transformer architecture hit it's bathtub curve years ago.
> Jenson doesn't need another 1B gallons of water under his belt.
Jensen gets what he wants because he works with the industry. It's funny to see people object to CUDA and Nvidia's dominance but then refuse to suggest an alternative. An open standard managed by an independent and unbiased third-party? We tried that, OEMs abandoned it. NPU hardware tailor-made for specific inference tasks? Too slow, too niche, too often ends up as wasted silicon. Alternative manufacturer-specific SDKs integrated with one high-level library? ONNX tried that and died in obscurity.
Nvidia got where they are today by doing exactly what AMD and Apple couldn't figure out. People give Jensen their water because it's wasted in anyone else's hands.
Well, this one is really simple - nothing of note will happen in the US in the next four years without giving Trump credit for it, because if you don't he'll turn the full power of the state against you. And with no checks on his power, there's nothing to stop him. So yes, this has nothing to do with Trump, but if you don't want to get arrested and harassed, you better give him credit for it. Same playbook Elena Ceausescu used, except she did it just for scientific papers, Trump will do it for everything.
Because tech CEOs have decided to go all-in on fascism as they see it's a way to make money. Bow to Trump, get on his good side, reap the benefits of government corruption.
It's why TikTok thanked Trump in their boot-licking message of "thanks, trump" after he was the one who started the TikTok ban.
A harder question is: why wouldn't billionaires like Trump and his oligarchic kleptocracy?
I think that coming down from 5T to 0.5T means that TSMC cannot be reproduced locally, but everything else is on the table. At least TSMC has a serious roadmap for its Arizona fab facility, so that too is domestically captured, although not its latest gen fab.
Not sure how they knew to buy them or why but they have them. Mostly seem to be lending them out. Think mostly OpenAI. Or was it MS. One of the big dogs
Still, the worst positioned cloud provider to tackle this job. Both for the project and for eventual users of whatever eldritch abomination that cames out of this.
I'm sure they're getting tax credits for investment (none of the articles I can find actually detail the US gov involvement) but the project is mostly just a few multinationals setting up a datacenter where their customers are.
It seems early for this sort of move. This is also a huge spin on the whole thing that could throw a lot of people off.
Is there any planned future partnerships? Stargate implies something about movies and astronomy. Movies in particular have a lot of military influence, but not always.
So, what's the play? Help mankind or go after mankind?
If one is expecting to have an AGI breakthrough in the next few years, this is exactly the prepositioning move one would make to be able to maximally capitalize on that breakthrough.
From my perspective humanity has all breakthroughs in intelligence it needs.
The breaking of The Enigma gave humans machines that can spread knowledge to more humans. It already happened a long time ago, and all of it was cause for much trouble, but we endured the hardest part (to know when to stop), and humans live in a good world now. Full of problems, but way better than it was before.
I think the web is enough. LLMs are good enough.
This move to try to draw water from stone (artificial intelligence in sillicon chips) seems to be overkill. How can we be sure it's not a siphon that will make us dumber? Before you just dismiss me or counter my arguments, consider what is happening everywhere.
Maybe I'm wrong, or not seeing something. You know, like I believed in aliens for a long time. This move to artificial intelligence causes shock and awe in a similar way. However, while I do believe aliens do not exist, I am not sure if artificial intelligence is a real strawman. It could be the case that is not made of straw, and if it is more than that, we might have a problem.
I am specially concerned because unlike other polemic topics, this one could lead to something not human that fully understands those previous polemic topics. Humans through their generations forget and mythologize those fantasies. We don't know what non-humans could do with that information.
I am thinking about those issues for a long time. Almost a decade, even before LLMs running on silicon existed. If it wanted, non-human artificial intelligence could wipe the floor with humans just by playing to their favorite myths. Humans do it in a small scale. If machines learn it, we're in for an unknown hostile reality.
It could, for example, perceive time different from us (also a play on myths), and do all sorts of tricks with our minds.
LLMs and the current generation of artificial intelligence are boolean first, it's what they run. Only true or false bits and gates. Humans can understand the meaning of trulse though, we are very non boolean.
So, yeah, I am worried about booleaning people on a massive scale.
To get out from under OpenAI’s considerable obligation to Microsoft.
That is why there is the awkward “we’ll continue to consume Azure” sentence in there. Will be interesting to see if it works or if MS starts revving up their lawyers.
If I understand correctly - if you are training a model to perform a particular task - in the end what matters is the training data - and by and large different models will largely converge on the best representation of that data for the given task, given enough compute.
So that means the models themselves aren't really IP - they are inevitable outputs from optimising using the input data for a certain task.
I think this means pretty much everyone, apart from the AI companies - will see these models as pre-competitive.
Why spend huge amounts training the same model multiple times, when you can collaborate?
Note it only takes one person/company/country to release an open source model for a particular task to nuke the business model of those companies that have a business model of hoarding them.
> The buildout is currently underway, starting in Texas, and we are evaluating potential sites across the country for more campuses as we finalize definitive agreements.
For those interested, it looks like Albany, NY (upstate NY) is very likely one of the next growth sites.
It made me laugh when Sam said "I'm thrilled that we get to do this in the United States of America", I shouted at the TV 'Yeah you almost had to do it in Saudi Arabia' !!
"SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, and MGX" seems like quite the lineup. Two groups who are good at frivolously throwing away investment money because they have so much capital to deploy, there really isn't anything reasonable to do with it, a tech "has-been" and OpenAI. You become who you surround yourself with I guess.
How much exaFLOPS can we expect from a 100 Billions dollars datacenter today? A rough estimate from a quick Perplexity search gives us 24 exaFLOPS for all smartphones in the world and 12 exaFLOPS for personal computers. Could a competitor to such a Datacenter be a collective effort with some sort of crypto to split the benefits?
apparently around 100 exaflops if the 100 billions dollars datacenter is made only of nvidia H100. I am guessing the fact that (most?) personal computers and smartphones do not have a big gpu makes the above scenario difficult.
> The new entity, Stargate, will start building out data centers and the electricity generation needed for the further development of the fast-evolving AI in Texas, according to the White House.
Wouldn't a more northern state be a better location given the average temperatures of the environment? I've heard Texas is hot!
No amount of money invested in infrastructure is going to solve the "garbage in, garbage out" problem with AI, and it looks like the AI companies have already stolen the vast majority of content that is possible to steal. So this is basically a massive gamble that some innovation is going to make AI do something better than faultily regurgitate its training data. I'm not seeing a corresponding investment which actually attempts to solve the "garbage in, garbage out" problem.
A fraction of this money invested in building homes would end the homelessness problem in the U.S.
I guess the one silver lining here is that when the likely collapse happens, we'll have more clean energy infrastructure to use for more useful things.
> All three credited Trump for helping to make the project possible, even though building has already started and the project goes back to 2024.
It’s sad to see the president of US being ass kissed so much by these guys. I always assumed there’s a little of that but this is another extreme. If this is true, I fear America has become like a third world country with a dictator like head of state where everyone just praises him and get favors in return.
> This project will ... also provide a strategic capability to protect the national security of America and its allies.
> All of us look forward to continuing to build and develop ... AGI for the benefit of all of humanity.
Erm, so which one is it? It is amply demonstrable from events post WW2 that US+allies are quite far from benefiting all of humanity & in fact, in some cases, it assists an allied minority at an extreme cost to a condemned majority, for no discernable humanitarian reasons save for some perceived notion of "shared values".
Is there any government investment or involvement in this company? It seems like it’s all private investment so I’m confused why this is being announce by the President.
Tax breaks, government forced to become a customer etc. the usual. Just like the astronauts to Mars thing will just shovel your money that might have gone to NASA into Musk's pocket.
> the usual. Just like the astronauts to Mars thing will just shovel your money that might have gone to NASA into Musk's pocket.
The difference is that Musk can do twice as much for 1/10 what Nasa thinks the program will cost, which is never what the program will actually cost, and Musk will do it in half that time to boot.
The guy is an unhinged manchild, but if what you care about is having your money well spend and getting to Mars as cheaply as possible, he's exactly who you're looking for.
I'm sure you are claiming that the founder, CEO, and controlling shareholder is "kept a careful length from the controls" because you have detailed first hand knowledge of the internal operations of Space, right?
> if what you care about is having your money well spend and getting to Mars as cheaply as possible, he's exactly who you're looking for.
I do find impressive that SpaceX engineers figured out reusable rockets and now we can send things more cheaply out to orbit. But in all seriousness, should we care about getting to Mars cheaply? Or do people care because Musk came along to convince them (and the US government) to invest in this venture of his?
Tax breaks, i.e. a company extracting wealth from a community without paying into the systems that keep all the parts of that community running, forcing the community to ultimate subsidize that business's weath extraction from them.
Companies do not extract value, they create value which is then transferred to the people via the market through voluntary exchange (ideally). Where have you learned about those things? Oh, yeah, “community” , i.e. Marx.
Yes, before the resource is taken out of the Earth it doesn’t exist, it is created in a sense by them. Look at Venezuela - they are dying of hunger with all the oil in the world (Russia, too) But socialist ideas prevailed there and the bad companies are banned.
Assuming the tax money has to come from somewhere at some point, those who pay taxes have to make up the shortfall from those who have tax breaks. So far the US just kicks that can down the road so...
That is a big assumption. Tax money need not be a constant. But for the sake of following the same logic: if companies pay bigger taxes, they also have to make up the shortfall. Actually, this last one is much more accurate statement. Companies do not pay taxes, PEOPLE pay taxes. So taxes are paid either by the employees, the clients or by the owners (which in case of the big tech are generally common people). With high taxation you are hurting: the customers, the workers and the middle class saving for their retirement. Who is winning the tax money: state bureaucracy, corrupt politicians and the business around them, people who live like parasites (or rather are forced to live like that, because they are electoral power).
This is utter nonsense. If 1000 people go to a deserted island with no government and taxation would that mean the inflation will be plus infinity or at least very high??? Inflation is monetary phenomenon, it happens when money is being printed.
In that case there would be no inflation or deflation, assuming a fixed money supply and no economic growth. However, the the key here is that the government, the federal government anyways, is spending money regardless of the tax break. Anytime the government writes a check, that's a little bit more money floating around; anytime the government collects some money, such as taxes, there's that much less money to be had. Every tax break causes the money supply to increase more relative to if the tax break did not exist, causing more inflation (or less deflation, if that were the case). If the government spent exactly as much as it taxed, then there would be... actually deflation, because the economy is growing. This is the basics of fiscal policy.
There's also the monetary policy, which is when the federal reserve does this on purpose. The general principle is the same, but instead it spends its money buying bonds and gets its money selling those bonds, and creates a bunch of rules about where banks keep their money so it always has some money on hand.
So, in this desert there would be no inflation or deflation, you say. Let’s say we use gold coins there. Wouldn’t we have an inflation if we find a gold mine there and everybody start digging up gold?
You are missing the fact that the money printing is not driven only by government spending. It is driven primarily by the monetary policy (in the hands of the FED) and to some extent by the government debt. You have knowledge gaps on a very basic level.
The idea that taxation stops inflation is absolutely ridiculous. It would mean that countries with low taxes have very high inflation and this is not the case. It would also means that the inflation should be constant and in struct correlation with the taxes. Both statements are completely false and very easily provable by quick fact check.
The only things taxes do are: misplacing capital and stopping economic growth, which may be the same thing arguably
> It would mean that countries with low taxes have very high inflation and this is not the case.
It's about the total balance of government spending and taxes. The point being made is that tax breaks have the same effect as government spending. Recall that I was replying to
> Tax breaks, i.e. my money not being in your pocket means that they are stolen?
The government writing someone a million dollar check and the government giving someone a million dollar tax break (assuming they pay at least a million in taxes), contribute to inflation by increasing the money supply by a million dollars than it would be otherwise. Yes, this federal reserve is by far a larger driver of inflation, but the government giving this tax break still degrades the value of your money, same as if they wrote a check.
Of course, it is easy to view a tax break as a non-action, but that's exactly why the government gives so many tax breaks. Once you're taxing everyone, you can hand out tax breaks that's the same as handing out money only you can pretend that it's doing nothing.
Think of it as 3 Scenarios:
1) The island government writes a check to everyone except you, increasing their wealth by 50%.
2) The island government taxes just you for 50% of your wealth.
3) The island government taxes everyone 75% of their wealth, grants everyone but you a total tax-break, and you 25 percentage point tax break.
Basically the same result, only in one they say "It was fair, and we handed out a few tax-breaks, what's wrong with letting people keep their money?"
1) wealth is not increased by tax break, only current income is increased
2) if government gives everyone tax break but not me, it means only that the government taxes only me
3) if everyone has 50% more money, there is very high probability that my business will go up A LOT
Seriously, dude, it’s not worthy anymore to try and explain to you very basic stuff. Inflation is not a balance between taxation and spending. All Middle Eastern countries are having huge spending and almost zero taxes. I asked you very simple question and you couldn’t answer.
What bothers me most is why people write about things they have no clue about and clearly haven’t even put a decent thought into it.
Basically what you believe in is that the thieves are controlling the inflation because they get some of the citizens wealth.
There's actually lots of taxes that aren't income or sales tax
> if everyone has 50% more money, there is very high probability that my business will go up A LOT
No, you'll be getting twice the money, but the money is worth half as much.
> Inflation is not a balance between taxation and spending.
It is for the US federal government.
> All Middle Eastern countries are having huge spending and almost zero taxes.
Those countries peg their currency to the dollar. Their money doesn't come from taxes, but instead from state oil companies. These countries aren't as free to hand out money like the US. If enough people tried to exchange their Saudi Riyals for dollars quick enough, and the Saudi government couldn't gather US dollars quick enough, their currency would very quickly collapse.
Mostly benefiting the fossil fuel industry. How are they going to power this? Gas is the only option that can be implemented within single years. And this is going to need a lot of power.
There probably will be a clause of mandatory consumption of a given percentage of power generated from coal ensuring continued coal generation of a given minimum providing excellent talking-points for broadcasting to the incumbent's base.
Maybe at some point they are going to AI themselves out of climate change. Well.. except for the part where they don’t believe in man-escalated climate change.
> Offshore wind is among the sources of new power generation that will cost the most, at about $100 per megawatt hour for new projects connecting to the grid in 2028, according to estimates from the Energy Information Administration. That includes tax credits under the Inflation Reduction Act, which reduces the cost of renewable technologies. But onshore wind is one of the cheapest sources, at about $31 on average for new projects.
I mean, I can see how numbers wise this decision makes sense.
It won't unless there's another (r)evolution in the underlying technology / science / algorithms, at this point scaling up just means they use bigger datasets or more iterations, but it's more finetuning and improving the existing output then coming up with a next generation / superintelligence.
There is lots of human feedback. This isn’t a game with an end state that it can easily play against itself. It needs problems with known solutions, or realistic simulations. This is why people wonder if our own universe is a simulation for training an asi.
> Being pessimistic, how come no human supergeniuses ever took over the world? Why didn't Leibniz make everyone else into his slaves?
We already did. Look at the state of animals today vs <1 mya. Bovines grown in unprecedented mass numbers to live short lives before slaughter. Wolves bred into an all new animal, friendly and helpful to the dominate species. Previously apex predators with claws, teeth, speed and strength, rendered extinct.
Sometimes I wonder if we are going to be the unkillable plague that takes over the universe. Or maybe we will dissappear in a blink. It's hard to know, we don't have any reference point except ourselves.
Once you have one AGI, you can scale it to many AGI as long as you have the necessary compute. An AGI never needs to take breaks, can work non-stop on a problem, has access to all of the world's information simultaneously, and can interact with any system it's connected to.
To put it simply, it could outcompete humanity on every metric that matters, especially given recent advancements in robotics.
...so it can think really hard all the time and come up with lots of great, devious evil ideas?
Again, I wonder why no group of smart people with brilliant ideas has unilaterally imposed those ideas on the rest of humanity through sheer force of genius.
An equivalent advance in autonomous robotics would solve the force projection issue, if that's what you're getting at.
I don't know if this will happen with any certainty, but the general idea of commoditising intelligence very much has the ability to tip the world order: every problem that can be tackled by throwing brainpower at it will be, and those advances will compound.
Also, the question you're posing did happen: it was called the Manhattan Project.
So don't plug the smart evil computer into the strong robots? Great, AI apocalypse averted.
The Manhattan Project would be a cute example if the Los Alamos scientists had gone rogue and declared themselves emperors of mankind, but no, in fact the people in charge remained the people in charge - mostly not supergeniuses.
Quite a few have succeeded in conquering large fractions of the Earth's population: Napoleon, Hitler, Genghis Khan, the Roman emperors, Alexander the Great, Mao Zedong. America and Britain as systems did so for long periods of time.
All of these entities would have been enormously more powerful with access to an AGI's immortality, sleeplessness, and ability to clone itself.
Alexander the Great made his conquests by building a really good reputation for war, then leveraging it to get tribute agreements while leaving the local governments intact. This is a good way to do it when communication lines are slow and unreliable, because the emperor just needs to check tribute once a year to enforce the agreements, but it's weak control.
If Alexander could have left perfectly aligned copies of himself in every city he passed, he could have gotten much more control and authority, and still avoided a fight by agreeing to maintain the local power structure with himself as the new head of state.
Oh, you're assuming an entire networking infrastructure as well. That makes way more sense, but the miracle there isn't AGI - without networking they'd lose alignment over time. Honestly, I feel like it would devolve in a patchwork of different kingdoms run by an Alexander figurehead... where have I seen this before?
The problem you're proposing could be solved via a high quality cellular network.
1)Leibniz wasn't superhuman
2) Leibniz couldn't work 24/7
3) he could not self increase the speed of his own hardware (body)
4) he could not spawn 1 trillion copies of him to work 24/7
Like how much time did you think before writing this
A trillion hyperintelligent demons might be cogitating right now on the head of a pin. You can't prove they aren't thinking up all sorts of genius evil schemes. My point is that "intelligence" has never been a sufficient - or even necessary - component of imposing ones will on humans.
I feel like HN/EA/"Grey Tribe" people fail to see this because they so worship intellect. I'm much more likely to fall victim to a big dumb man than smart computers.
huh what ? this is a whole new level of flat earther thinking. you actually believe that apex predators are not the most intelligent? Like humans became the apex because of something else than intelligence? AI and covid showed humanity what levels of wacky stuff people believe. I am not trying to convince you, thank you for showing me this perspective :)
I consider many successful military leaders and politicians to be geniuses as well. In my books, Caesar is as genius as Newton!
Having said that, we do not to understand the world to exploit it for ourselves. And what better way to understand and exploit the universe than science? Its an endearment.
"this generation shall not pass"... to me that's about as credible as wanting to "preserve human consciousness" by going to Mars.
Setting the world on fire and disrupting societies gleefully, while basically building bunkers (figuratively more than literally) and consolidating surveillance and propaganda to ride out the cataclysm, that's what I'm seeing.
And the stories to sell people on continuing to put up with that are not even good IMO. Just because the people who use the story to consolidate wealth and control are excited about that, we're somehow expected to be excited about the promise of a pair of socks made from barbed wire they gave us for Christmas. It's the narcissistic experience: "this is shit. this benefits you, not me. this hurts me."
One thing is sure, actual intelligence, regardless of how you may define it, something that is able to reason and speak freely, is NOT what people who fire engineers for correcting them want. It's not about a sort of oracle for humanity to enjoy and benefit from, that just speaks "truth".
The military project is/was JWCC, TS/SCI+ classified, air gapped clouds. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle etc all have existing contracts with the DoD covering such work (and getting the contract meant building and running a cloud, not just signing some paperwork agreeing to at some point in the future)
The data centres were already being built. All of these companies have been dumping tonnes of money into AI and will continue to dump tonnes of money into AI. It's just more of the same, but they had to do a big announcement with Trump to pander to his ego and somehow make it about him. Like he engineered this Stargate thing. The whole embarrassing spectacle was likely arranged by Ellison.
I was bullish on OpenAI, but honestly I don't see any path forward where they have any differentiating value that justifies even a tenth of the valuation. Their video AI is simply terrible. Dall-E 2 is matched by many competitors. 4o and o1 and good, but already have been eclipsed by a number of competitors, including an open source Chinese option.
My work has almost entirely transitioned to competitors, and Google's latest updates have quietly absolutely trounced OpenAI's offering. Like, Gemini has quietly become the best AI platform in the game.
That's all neither here nor there, but I just don't care what Altman and crew have to say any more. They are not leaders in the space. They are, in many ways, has beens.
of course. its an arms race by definition so its all a military project. and already one whistleblower was brazenly murdered by our government to protect our horse in this race.
Leading state in new grid battery and grid solar installations for the last three years, and deregulated nuclear power last year. Abilene is near the Dallas Fort-Worth Metroplex area which has a massive 8M+ upper-income population highly skilled in hardware and electrical engineering (Texas Instruments, Raytheon, Toyota, etc). The entire area has massive tracts of open land that are affordably priced without building restrictions. Business regulations and tax environment at the state and city level are very laissez faire (no taxes on construction such as in the Seattle area or many parts of California).
I could see DFW being a good candidate for a prototype arcology project.
Like dwnw said, anything goes in Texas if you have money and there’s already a decent number of qualified tech workers. Corporate taxes are super low as well.
Texas already is the leading state in new grid battery and grid solar installs for the last 3 years. Governor Abbott also did nuclear deregulation last year.
Some reports[0] paint this as something Trump announced and that the US Government is heavily involved with but the announcement only mentions private sector (and lead by Japan's Softbank at that). Is the US also putting in money? How much control of the venture is private vs public here?
You probably still need to train the initial models in data centers, with local host mostly being used to run train models. At most we’d augment trained models with local data storage on local host.
If compute continues to become cheaper, local training might be feasible in 20 years.
You definitely still need data centers to train the models that you’ll run locally. Also if we achieve AGI you can bet it won’t be available to run locally at first.
Isn't it better to control robots from the data center? You can get 30ms round-trip to most urban centers, which is sufficient latency for most tasks; lower weight & cost robots with better battery life, and more uptime on compute (e.g. the GPU isn't sitting there doing nothing when the user is sleeping) which means lower cost to consumer for the same end result.
For self-driving you need edge compute because a few milliseconds of latency is a safety risk, but for many applications I don't see why you'd want that.
Why are corporations announcing business deals from the White House? There doesn’t seem to be any public ownership/benefit here, aside from potential job creation. Which could be significant. But the American public doesn’t seem to gain anything from this new company.
Can you please not perpetuate flamewars or use HN for political battle? Your account has unfortunately been doing this repeatedly lately. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
Then you need to ban me again, because I have no idea how I violated the guidelines any more than the OP submission did. My comment was a digression along relevant, imperative and inoffensive lines that were introduced by the source. I am not the only person raising this point, I am not inviting extremist interpretations, and I'm not misrepresenting the consequences presented in the article. For years, Hacker News has tolerated pugilist insults being hurled at the EU with the sole purpose of starting ideological flamewars. Now that someone steps up to accuse America of a double-standard, it's offensive and insensitive? I really don't get it. What culture are you even trying to foster, at this point? Certainly not one that gratifies an audience's curiosity.
If you want to threaten people with the guidelines, then they have to be interpretable. The current "politics is bad except when it's not" rationale is not going to age with grace - it's going to create a series of unsustainable and conflicting precedents that only get worse as America's political landscape further deteriorates. Take a stance on it and stand your ground, people will not listen if your guidelines "maybe" enforce something or provide "probably" off-topic criteria.
Your GP comment, like the one you were replying to, was just ideological flamebait, without substance or information. We want thoughtful conversation here, not people taking swipes at enemies.
> For years, Hacker News has tolerated pugilist insults being hurled at
Other people breaking the site guidelines doesn't make it ok for you to do it (I don't mean you personally, of course, but anyone who comments here). Otherwise we just end up in a downward spiral (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).
If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). You can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.
This isn't an overseas trip though. It's a private partnership announced by the sitting president in the Roosevelt room, literally across the hall from the oval office. I don't know how unprecedented that truly is, but it certainly feels unusual.
It will. The short-term sale is that it will create thousands of temporary jobs, and long-term reduce hundreds of thousands of jobs, while handing the savings to stock holdings and moving wealth to the stockholders.
Looks on pace to eliminate every human job over 10 years.
What is the hard limiting factor constraining software and robots from replacing any human job in that time span? Lots of limitations of current technology, but all seem likely to be solved within that timeframe.
>> Ingka says it has trained 8,500 call centre workers as interior design advisers since 2021, while Billie - launched the same year with a name inspired by IKEA's Billy bookcase range - has handled 47% of customers' queries to call centres over the past two years.
Do you expect all companies to retrain? Do you expect CEOs to be wrong? Do you expect AI to stay the same, get better, or get worse? I never made the claim that new jobs will NOT be made, that is yet to be seen, but jobs will be lost to AI.
>> “For a company like BT there is a huge opportunity to use AI to be more efficient,” he said. “There is a sort of 10,000 reduction from that sort of automated digitisation, we will be a huge beneficiary of AI. I believe generative AI is a huge leap forward; yes, we have to be careful, but it is a massive change.”
I do not have any hard data from 10 years from now.
My speculation is based on not seeing any constraints that will block progress of machine intelligence from reaching those capabilities within 10 years.
Also, Kurzweil's predictions from early 2000s have been eerily prescience and this is the time frame he predicted for the Singularity.
The US is now officially a full on oiligarchy. It always was one, it's just that the powers that be don't care to hide it anymore and are flaunting that they have the power.
This is my question too, but I haven't seen a journalist ask it yet. My baseless theory: Trump has promised them some kind of antitrust protections in the form of legislation to be written & passed at a later date.
An announcement of a public AI infrastructure program joined by multiple companies could have been a monumental announcement. This one just looks like three big companies getting permission to make one big one.
Easier: Trump likely committed that the federal agencies wouldn't slow roll regulatory approval (for power, for EIS, etc.).
Ellison stated explicitly that this would be "impossible" without Trump.
Masa stated that this (new investment level?) wouldn't be happening had Trump not won, and that the new investment level was decided yesterday.
I know everyone wants to see something nefarious here, but simplest explanation is that the federal government for next four years is expected to be significantly less hostile to private investment, and - shocker - that yields increased private investment.
That is a better one. I don't know why three rich guys investing in a new company would result in a slowness that Trump could fix, though, and a promise to rush or sidestep regulatory approval still sounds nefarious.
If the announced spending target is true, this will be a strategic project for the US exceeding Biden's stimulus acts in scale. I think it would be pretty normal in any country to have highest-level involvement for projects like this. For example, Tesla has a much smaller revenue than this and Chancellor Olaf Scholz was still present when they opened their Gigafactory near Berlin.
I'm also curious how a global leader in multimodal generative AI chose this particular image. Did they prompt a generator for a super messy impressionist painting of red construction cranes with visible brush strokes, distorted to the point of barely being able to discern what the image represents?
Considering Stargate's introduction and plan seems to be a super messy concept of impressions of ideas and very lacking in details, the picture makes a lot of sense. Let AI evangelists see the future in the fuzz; let AI pessimists see failure in the abstract; let investors see $$$ in their pockets.
For me it's watching a gay man grovel at the feet of one of the most anti-LGBT politicians, a day after Trump signed multiple executive orders that dehumanized Altman and the LGBT community. Every token thinks they're special until they're spent.
What is he so anti about? He is against adding other official genders than the biological ones we have at birth. But he isn't against people wanting to be called whatever they want in informal situations. And he is against trans surgery at young ages when children aren't fully grown and adult enough to make such drastic interventions. But he is not against adult people wanting to be whatever they want.
>For me it's watching a gay man grovel at the feet of one of the most anti-LGBT politicians
Besides what ImJamal said, as a wealthy playboy man-about-town hanging out at Studio 54 in the '70s and '80s, I guarantee Trump has known and been friends with more gays than 95% of Americans. Certainly there has been no shortage of gay people among his top-level appointees in either his first or second administrations.
Trump was the first president to come into office supporting gay marriage. Trump only has a problem with the "t" part of the community and only in bathrooms and sports, not in general.
Here is what I think is going on in this announcement. Take the 4 major commodity cloud companies (Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle) and determine: do they have big data centers and do they have their own AI product organization?
- Google has a massive data center division (Google Cloud / GCP) and a massive AI product division (Deep Mind / Gemini).
- Microsoft has a massive data center division (Azure) but no significant AI product division; for the most part, they build their "Copilot" functionality atop their partner version of the OpenAI APIs.
- Amazon has a massive data center division (Amazon Web Services / AWS) but no significant AI product division; for the most part, they are hedging their bets here with an investment in Anthropic and support for running models inside AWS (e.g. Bedrock).
- Oracle has a massive data center division (Oracle Cloud / OCI) but no significant AI product division.
Now look at OpenAI by comparison. OpenAI has no data center division, as the whole company is basically the AI product division and related R&D. But, at the moment, their data centers come exclusively from their partnership with Microsoft.
This announcement is OpenAI succeeding in a multi-party negotiation with Microsoft, Oracle, and the new administration of the US Gov't. Oracle will build the new data centers, which it knows how to do. OpenAI will use the compute in these new data centers, which it knows how to do. Microsoft granted OpenAI an exception to their exclusive cloud compute licensing arrangement, due to this special circumstance. Masa helps raise the money for the joint venture, which he knows how to do. US Gov't puts its seal on it to make it a more valuable joint venture and to clear regulatory roadblocks for big parallel data center build-outs. The current administration gets to take credit as "doing something in the AI space," while also framing it in national industrial policy terms ("data centers built in the USA").
The clear winner in all of this is OpenAI, which has politically and economically navigated its way to a multi-cloud arrangement, while still outsourcing physical data center management to Microsoft and Oracle. Probably their deal with Oracle will end up looking like their deal with Microsoft, where the trade is compute capacity for API credits that Oracle can use in its higher level database products.
OpenAI probably only needs two well-capitalized hardware providers competing for their CPU+GPU business in order to have a "good enough" commodity market to carry them to the next level of scaling, and now they have it.
Google increasingly has a strategic reason not to sell OpenAI any of its cloud compute, and Amazon could be headed in that direction too. So this was more strategically (and existentially) important to OpenAI than one might have imagined.
AI is good if you use it wisely. There were reports years ago about using AI in SoCal to detect wild fires, but in the end we see insurance companies using AI to withdraw from areas of high fire risk. Quite competent AI, isn't it?
> building new AI infrastructure for OpenAI in the United States
That's nice, but if I were spending $500bn on datacenters I'd probably try to put a few in places that serve other users. Centralised compute can only get you so far in terms of serving users.
This could potentially trigger an AI arms race between the US and China. The standard has been set, lets see what China responds with. Either way, it will accelerate the arrival of ASI, which in my opinion is probably a good thing.
It will be similar to the space race between Soviet Union and US. And just like Soviet Union going broke and collapsing, China too will go even more broke and collapse.
The Silicon-Valley bubble universe continues to introduce entropy that it feeds off of itself... Naming this Stargate when some of the largest effects AI has had is removing humans from processes to make other, fewer humans more efficient is emblematic of this hollow naming ethos - continuing to use the portal to shunt more and more humans out of the process that is humanity, with fairly reckless abandon. Who is Ra, and who is sending the nuke where, in this naming scheme? You decide.
How have they already selected who gets this money? Usually the government announces a program and tries to be fair when allocating funds. Here they are just bankrolling an existing project. Interesting
1. At this scale, we’re not just talking about buying GPUs. It requires semiconductor fabs, assembly factories, power plants, batteries/lithium, cooling, water, hazardous waste disposal. These data centers are going to have to be massively geo-engineered arcologies.
2. What are they doing? AGI/ASI is a neat trick, but then what? I’m not asking because I don’t think there is an answer; I’m asking because I want the REAL answer. Larry Ellison was talking about RNA cancer vaccines. Well, I was the one that made the neural network model for the company with the US patent on this technique, and that pitch makes little sense. As the problem is understood today, the computational problems are 99% solved with laptop-class hardware. There are some remaining problems that are not solved by neural networks, but by molecular dynamics, which are done in FP64. Even if FP8 neural structure approximation speeds it up 100x, FP64 will be 99% of the computation. So what we today call “AI infrastructure” is not appropriate for the task they talk about. What is it appropriate for? Well, I know that Sam is a bit uncreative, so I assume he’s just going to keep following the “HER” timeline and make a massive playground for LLMs to talk to each other and leave humanity behind. I don’t think that is necessarily unworthy of our Apollo-scale commitment, but there are serious questions about the honest of the project, and what we should demand for transparency. We’re obviously headed toward a symbiotic merger where LLMs and GenAI are completely in control of our understanding of the world. There is a difference between watching a high-production movie for two hours, and then going back to reality, versus a never-ending stream of false sensory information engineered individually to specifically control your behavior. The only question is whether we will be able to see behind the curtain of the great Oz. That’s what I mean by transparency. Not financial or organizational, but actual code, data, model, and prompt transparency. Is this a fundamental right worth fighting for?
I hope the Japanese government demands seismic isolation for Softbank, otherwise it will be the Japanese citizens who have to foot the bill when this hype hits the ground and shakes hard the Japanese economy :/
Softbank should not be allowed to invest more than ARM Holdings sold at a loss.
Softbank doesn't have enough cash reserves for such a huge inversion. There are no details of how will they do, but one can guess that loans will be taken from Japanese banks and companies around the country, which -depending on how ambitious they are- will be scrambling to stay in business when the debt isn't repaid on time, a highly contagious chain reaction will arise, what will invite the government to use public money, even turning on the printer (on such cases citizens lose). Softbank alone has more than 65k employees.
If the Softbank's inversion is limited to their available assets, or the exposition of each lending is limited to a portion of their real reserves, I think such event will not happen (more than burned money by a bad inversion).
I think it would be quite similar to what has already happened on a global scale with the public money of each country in 2008 (due to the banking pyramid scam), or since 2011 with public loans to TEPCO, an event that could have been prevented if the central plant had been built were originally planned.
It will be interesting to see how AWS responds. Jump on board, or offer up a competing vision otherwise their cloud risks being perceived as being left behind in terms of computing power.
Personally I wish they invested in optical photonic computing, taking it out of the research labs. It can be so much more energy efficient and faster to run than GPUs and TPUs.
You know, I expected that they'd find or synthesize some naquadah to build an actual stargate and maybe even defeat the Goa'uld. The exciting stuff, not AI.
$500 billion is a lot of money even by US government standards. It's about the size of all the new spending in the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure bill.
The political will is trying to balance a large existing debt at increasing interest rates, a significant primary deficit even in a good economy, rising military threats from China, a strong Republican desire for tax cuts, extremely popular entitlement programs that no one wants to touch, and an aging population with a declining birthrate
Modern monetary systems function through two main channels: government spending and bank lending. Every dollar in circulation originates from one of these sources - either government fiscal operations (deficit spending) or bank credit creation through loans. This means all money is fundamentally based on debt, though "debt" has very different implications for a currency-issuing government versus private borrowers.
Government debt operates fundamentally differently from household debt since the government controls its own currency. As former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan noted to Congress, the U.S. can always meet any obligation denominated in dollars since it can create them. The real constraints aren't financial but economic - inflation risk and the efficient allocation of real resources.
The key question then becomes one of political priorities and public understanding. If public opposition to beneficial government spending stems from misunderstanding how modern monetary systems work, then better education about these mechanisms could help advance important policy goals. The focus should be on managing real economic constraints rather than imaginary financial ones.
Yes, people hate inflation, because inflation creates a demand for more money! Inflation means there is not enough money for people. So why did prices go up, is it just because of fiscal spending?
The relationship between inflation and monetary policy is more complex than often portrayed. While recent inflation has created financial strain for many Americans, its root causes extend beyond simple money supply issues.
Recent data shows that corporate profit margins reached historic highs during the inflationary period of 2021-2022. For example, in Q2 2022, corporate profits as a percentage of GDP hit 15.5%, the highest level since the 1950s. This surge in corporate profits coincided with the aftermath of Trump's 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which reduced the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%. This tax reduction increased after-tax profits and may have given companies more flexibility to pursue aggressive pricing strategies.
Multiple factors contributed to inflation:
Supply chain disruptions created genuine scarcity in many sectors, particularly semiconductors, shipping, and raw materials
Demand surged as economies reopened post-pandemic
Many companies used these market conditions to implement price increases that exceeded their cost increases
The corporate tax environment created incentives for profit maximization over price stability
For instance, many large retailers reported both higher prices and expanded profit margins during this period. The Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City found that roughly 40% of inflation in 2021 could be attributed to expanded profit margins rather than increased costs.
This pattern suggests that market concentration, pricing power, and tax policy played significant roles in inflation, alongside traditional monetary and supply-chain factors. Policy solutions should therefore address market structure, tax policy, and monetary policy to effectively manage inflation.
Texas is the leading state in new grid batteries and grid solar for three years now. Also Governor Abbott deregulated nuclear last year. Sure there will be some new natural gas too, which is the least scary fossil fuel. They call it the "all of the above" approach to energy.
I put the word "some" in front of "crypto" for a reason.
There is some crypto that we know how to break with a sufficiently large quantum computer [0]. There is some we don't know how to do that to. I might be behind the state of the art here, but when I wasn't we specifically really only knew how to use it to break cryptography that Shor's algorithm breaks.
Nope. Any crypto you can break with a real, physical, non-imaginary quantum computer, you can break faster with classical. Get over it. Shor's don't run yet and probably never will.
You are misdirecting and you know it. I don't even need to discredit that paper. Other people have done it for me already.
This is like asking whether $500 billion to fund warp drives would yield better returns.
Money can't buy fundamental breakthroughs: money buys you parallel experimental volume - i.e. more people working from the same knowledge base, and presumably an increase in the chance that one of them does advance the field. But at any given time point, everyone is working from the same baseline (money also can improve this - by funding things you can ensure knowledge is distributed more evenly so everyone is working at the state of the art, rather then playing catch up in proprietary silos).
True quantum computing in the sense that most people would imagine it, using individual qubits in an analogous (ish) way to classical computers, has not reached a useful scale. To date only “toy problems” to demonstrate theoretical results have been solved.
It was rumoured in early 2024 that "Stargate" was planned to require 5GW data centre capacity[1][2] which in early 2024 was the entire data centre capacity Microsoft had already built[3]. Data centre capacity costs between USD$9-15m/MW[6] so 5GW of new data centre capacity would cost USD$45b-$75b but let's pick a more median cost of USD12m/MW[6] to arrive at USD$60b for 5GW of new data centre capacity.
This 5GW data centre capacity very roughly equates to 350000x NVIDIA DGX B200 (with 14.3kW maximum power consumption[4] and USD$500k price tag[5]) which if NVIDIA were selected would result in a very approximate total procurement of USD$175b from NVIDIA.
On top of the empty data centres and DGX B200's and in the remaining (potential) USD$265b we have to add:
* Networking equipment / fibre network builds between data centres.
* Engineering / software development / research and development across 4 years to design, build and be able to use the newly built infrastructure. This was estimated in mid 2024 to cost OpenAI US$1.5b/yr for retaining 1500 employees, or USD$1m/yr/employee[7]. Obviously this is a fraction of the total workforce needed to design and build out all the additional infrastructure that Microsoft, Oracle, etc would have to deliver.
* Electricity supply costs for current/initial operation. As an aside, these costs seemingly not be competitive with other global competitors if the USA decides to avoid the cheapest method of generation (renewables) and instead prefer the more expensive generation methods (nuclear, fossil fuels). It is however worth noting that China currently has ~80% of solar PV module manufacturing capacity and ~95% of wafer manufacturing capacity.[10]
* Costs for obtaining training data.
* Obsolescence management (4 years is a long time after which equipment will likely need to be completely replaced due to obsolescence).
* Any other current and ongoing costs of Microsoft, Oracle and OpenAI that they'll likely roll into the total announced amount to make it sound more impressive. As an example this could include R&D and sustainment costs in corporate ICT infrastructure and shared services such as authentication and security monitoring systems.
The question we can then turn to is whether this rate of spend can actually be achieved in 4 years?
Microsoft is planning to spend USD$80bn building data centres in 2025[7] with 1.5GW of new capacity to be added in the first six months of 2025[3]. This USD$80bn planned spend is for more than "Stargate" and would include all their other business units that require data centres to be built, so the total required spend of USD$45b-$75b to add 5GW data centre capacity is unlikely to be achieved quickly by Microsoft alone, hence the apparent reason for Oracle's involvement. However, Oracle are only planning a US$10b capital expenditure in 2025 equating to ~0.8GW capacity expansion[9]. The data centre builds will be schedule critical for the "Stargate" project because equipment can't be installed and turned on and large models trained (a lengthy activity) until data centres exist. And data centre builds are heavily dependent on electricity generation and transmission expansion which is slow to expand.
You'd really think that arguably the leader in generative AI could come up with a unique project name instead of ripping off something extant and irrelevant.
But then again that's their entire business, so I shouldn't be too surprised.
I mean the entire AI thing is built atop mass plagiarism and stealing things others have created indiscriminately. I doubt Mr Worldcoin could come up with an original thought for anything, seeing how his models behave.
ChatGPT may be better than Google Search in content but at end of day, you have to make money and last report I saw, ChatGPT is burning through money at prestigious rate.
> Technology advancing more quickly year over year?
> That’s a crazy notion and I’ll be sure everyone knows.
The version I heard from an economist was something akin to a second industrial revolution, where the pace of technological development increases permanently. Imagine a transition from Moore's law-style doubling every year and a half, to doubling every week and a half. That wouldn't be a true "singularity" (nothing would be infinite), but it would be a radical change to our lives.
> The pace of technological development has always been permanently increasing.
Not in the same way though. The pace of technological development post-industrial-revolution increased a lot faster - technological development was exponential both before and after, but it went from exponential with a doubling time of maybe a century, to a Moore's law style regime where the doubling time is a couple of years. Arguably the development of agriculture was a similar phase change. So the point is to imagine another phase change on the same scale.
You keep mentioning moore’s law, but that specifically applied to the amount of transistors on a die, not the rate of general technological advancement.
Regardless, I don’t see any change in this pattern. We’re advancing faster than ever before, just like always.
We’ve been doing statistical analysis and prediction for years now. It’s just getting better faster, like always.
I don’t see this big change in the rate of advancement. There’s just a lot more media buzz around it right now causing a bubble.
There was a big visible jump in text generation capabilities a few years ago (which was preceded by about 6 years of incremental NLP advances) and since then we’ve seen paced, year over year advances in that field.
As a medical layman, I imagine that alpha fold may really push the rate of pharmaceutical advances.
But I see no indication for a general jump in the rate of rate of technological advancement.
> that specifically applied to the amount of transistors on a die, not the rate of general technological advancement.
Sure. But you can look at things like GDP growth rates and see the same thing.
> I don’t see this big change in the rate of advancement. There’s just a lot more media buzz around it right now causing a bubble.
Maybe. I'm just trying to give a sense of what the concept of a "weak singularity" is. I don't have a view on whether we're actually going to have one or not.
I watched the announcement live, I could have sworn that the softbank guy said "initial investment of 100 MILLION, we hope to EARN 500 BILLION by the end of your (Trumps) term"
Gave me a real "this is just smoke and mirrors hiding the fact that the white house is now a glory hole for Trump to enjoy" feel.
In context Pelosi has been pro nuclear for at least 16 years having spoken for nuclear and nuclear investment in 2008 as reported by the American Enterprise Institute.
Last time, in 2016, SoftBank announced a $50B investment in the US...what were the results of that? Granted, SB announced an up-selled $100B investment earlier, is this not similar in "announcement"?
"""
SoftBank’s CEO Masayoshi Son has previously made large-scale investment commitments in the US off the back of Trump winning a presidential election. In 2016, Son announced a $50 billion SoftBank investment in the US, alongside a similar pledge to create 50,000 jobs in the country.
...
However, as reported by Reuters, it’s unclear if the new jobs pledged back in 2016 ever came to fruition and questions have been raised about how SoftBank, which had $29 billion in cash on its balance sheet according to its September earnings report, might fund the investment.
"""
Altman said we will be amazed at the rate AI will CURE diseases. Not diagnose, not triage or help doctors but cure, ie understand at a deep fundamental, mechanistic level then devise therapies, ie drugs, combination of drugs and care practices that work. WOW.
Despite the fact that this is THE thing I'd be the happiest to see in the real world (having spent a considerable amount of my career in companies working towards this vision), we are so far from it (as anyone who actually worked on these problems will attest) that Altman's comment here isn't just overselling, it's a blatant lie about this tech's capabilities.
I guess the pitch was something like: "hey o3 can already do PhD level maths so you know in 5 years it will be able to do drugs too, and cure shit, Mr President".
Trouble is o3 can't do advanced math (or at least definitely not at the level openai claimed.. it was a lie, it turns out openai funds the dataset that measures this - ouch). And the bigger problem is, going from "ai can do maths" to "invent cures" is about a 10-100 X jump. If it wasn't, don't we think the pharma companies would have solved this by hiring lots of "really smart math guys"?
As anyone in biotech will tell you, the hard bit is not the first third of the drug discovery pipeline (where 99% of ai driven biotechs focus). It's the later parts where the rubber meets the road.. i.e. where your precious little molecule is out in the real world with real people where the incredible variability of real biological hosts makes most drugs fail spectacularly. You can't GPT your way out of this. The answers for this is not in science papers that you can just read and regurgitate a version that "solves biology and cures diseases".
To solve this you need AI but most of all you have to do science. Real science. In the lab, in vitro and in Vivo, not just in silico, doing ablation studies, overfitting famous benchmark datasets and other pseudo science shit the ML community is used to doing.
That is all to say, I'd bet we won't see a single purely AI designed novel drug in the clinic in this decade. All parts of that sentence are important. Purely AI designed. Novel. But that's for another post..
Now, back to Altman. If you watch the clip, he almost did the smart thing at first when Trump put him on the spot and said "I have no idea about healthcare, biotech (or AI beyond board room drama)" but then could not resist coming up with this outlandish insane answer.
Famously (in tech circles anyway) Paul Graham wrote more than a decade ago about Altman that he's the most strong willed individual he's ever met, who can just bend the universe to his will. That's his super skill. And clearly.. convincing SoftBank and Oracle to do this 500 billion investment for OpenAI (a non profit turned for profit) is an unbelievable achievement. I have no idea what Altman can say (or do) in board rooms that unlocks these possibilities for him.. Any ideas? Let me know!
> This project will not only support the re-industrialization of the United States but also provide a strategic capability to protect the national security of America and its allies.
> The initial equity funders in Stargate are SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, and MGX. SoftBank and OpenAI are the lead partners for Stargate, with SoftBank having financial responsibility and OpenAI having operational responsibility. Masayoshi Son will be the chairman.
I'm sorry, has SoftBank suddenly become an American company? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills reading this.
Japan companies were a threat just a couple weeks ago.
There is credible evidence that leads me to believe that (1) Nippon Steel Corporation, a corporation organized under the laws of Japan . . . might take action that threatens to impair the national security of the United States;
> Other partners in the project include Microsoft, investor MGX and the chipmakers Arm and NVIDIA, according to separate statements by Oracle and OpenAI.
Sometimes the person writing the copy is writing it because they talk good, not because they are the biggest proponent of the idea.
Give a clever, articulate person a task to write about something they don't believe in and they will include the subtlest of barbs, weak praise, or both.
I thought this meant it was $500 billion in government money.
Some of these companies do have huge cash reserves they don't know what to do with so if it is $500 billion of private money, I am not going to complain.
I will believe it when I see it though and that this isn't a 100 billion in private money with a 400 billion dollar free US government put option for the "private" investors if things don't go perfect.
Texas has a .... unique energy market (literally! They don't connect to the national grid so they can avoid US Government regulations- that way it's not interstate commerce). Because of that spot prices fluctuate very wildly up and down, depending on the weather, demand, and their large quantity of renewables (Texas is good for solar and wind energy). When the weather is good for renewables they have very cheap electricity (lots of production and can't sell to anyone outside the state), when the weather is bad they can have incredibly expensive electricity (less production, can't buy from anyone outside the state). Larger markets, able to pull from larger pools of producers and consumers, just fluctuate less.
I know some bitcoin miners liked to be in Texas and basically worked as energy speculators: when electricity was cheap they would mine bitcoin, when it was expensive they shut down their plant- sometimes they even got paid by producers to shut-down their plant! I would bet that you could do a lot of that with AI training as well, given good checkpointing.
You wouldn't want to do inference there (which needs to be responsive and doesn't like 'oh this plant is going to shut down in one minute because a storm just came up') but for training it should be fine?
No state income tax, fewer regulations (zoning, environmental regulations) than other parts of the country, relatively cheap power, large existing industrial base. For skilled labor that last bit is important. Also one of the cheapest states wrt minimum wage (same as federal, nothing added), which is important for unskilled labor.
Depending on the part of the state, relatively low costs of living which is helpful if you don't like paying people much. Large areas that are relatively undeveloped or underdeveloped which can mean cheaper land.
Unfortunately that figure wouldn’t get everyone healthcare in the US. I agree though, it could be deployed for better use but someone needs to think of those poor desperate shareholders.
AGI is the magic bullet to all of humanity's problems for some people. There is no explanation of how AGI will accomplish such things, just a belief that it will.
It'll do this one, certainly. Maybe not the most cost-effective jobs program, but I expect there will be many construction and data centre jobs in the next few years.
Health care can’t be solved by just throwing a shitload of money at it. I’m skeptical about food production as well.
Now quality transportation (trains and metros that work), cheap & accessible housing, and cheap energy might be a good idea because IIUC those are just super large price tags
God forbid anyone would invest $500,000,000,000 to create jobs. No no no. 500 billion to destroy them for "more efficiency" so the owner class can get richer.
We changed the URL from https://openai.com/index/announcing-the-stargate-project/ to a third-party report. Readers may want to read both. If there's a better URL, we can change it again.
You have to keep in mind Microsoft is planning on spending almost 100B in datacenter capex this year and they're not alone. This is basically OpenAI matching the major cloud provider's spending.
This could also be (at least partly) a reaction to Microsoft threatening to pull OpenAI's cloud credits last year. OpenAI wants to maintain independence and with compute accounting for 25–50% of their expenses (currently) [2], this strategy may actually be prudent.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/03/microsoft-expects-to-spend-8...
[2] https://youtu.be/7EH0VjM3dTk?si=hZe0Og6BjqLxbVav&t=1077
Microsoft has lots of revenue streams tied to that capex outlay. Does OpenAI have similar revenue numbers to Microsoft?
OpenAI has a very healthy revenue stream in the form of other companies throwing money at them.
But to answer your question, no they aren’t even profitable by themselves.
> they aren’t even profitable
Depends on your definition of profitability, They are not recovering R&D and training costs, but they (and MS) are recouping inference costs from user subscription and API revenue with a healthy operating margin.
Today they will not survive if they stop investing in R&D, but they do have to slow down at some point. It looks like they and other big players are betting on a moat they hope to build with the $100B DCs and ASICs that open weight models or others cannot compete with.
This will be either because training will be too expensive (few entities have the budget for $10B+ on training and no need to monetize it) and even those kind of models where available may be impossible to run inference with off the shelf GPUs, i.e. these models can only run on ASICS, which only large players will have access to[1].
In this scenario corporations will have to pay them the money for the best models, when that happens OpenAI can slow down R&D and become profitable with capex considered.
[1] This is natural progression in a compute bottle-necked sector, we saw a similar evolution from CPU to ASICS and GPU in the crypto few years ago. It is slightly distorted comparison due to the switch from PoW to PoS and intentional design for GPU for some coins, even then you needed DC scale operations in a cheap power location to be profitable.
They will have an endless wave of commoditization chasing behind them. NVIDIA will continue to market chips to anyone who will buy... Well anyone who is allowed to buy, considering the recent export restrictions. On that note, if OpenAI is in bed with the US government with this to some degree, I would expect tariffs, expert restrictions, and all of that to continue to conveniently align with their business objectives.
If the frontier models generate huge revenue from big government and intelligence and corporate contracts, then I can see a dynamo kicking off with the business model. The missing link is probably that there need to be continual breakthroughs that massively increase the power of AI rather than it tapering off with diminishing returns for bigger training/inference capital outlay. Obviously, openAI is leveraging against that view as well.
Maybe the most important part is that all of these huge names are involved in the project to some degree. Well, they're all cross-linked in the entire AI enterprise, really, like OpenAI Microsoft, so once all the players give preference to each other, it sort of creates a moat in and of itself, unless foreign sovereign wealth funds start spinning up massive stargate initiatives as well.
We'll see. Europe has been behind the ball in tech developments like this historically, and China, although this might be a bit of a stretch to claim, does seem to be held back by their need for control and censorship when it comes to what these models can do. They want them to be focused tools that help society, but the American companies want much more, and they want power in their own hands and power in their user's hands. So much like the first round where American big tech took over the world, maybe it's prime to happen again as the AI industry continues to scale.
Why would China censoring Tiananmen Square/whatever out of their LLMs be anymore harmful to the training process when the US controlled LLMs also censor certain topics, eg "how do I make meth?" or "how do I make a nuclear bomb?".
Because China censors very common words and phrases such as "harmonized", "shameless", "lifelong", "river crabbed", "me too". This is because Chinese citizens uses puns and common phrases initially to get around censors.
Don't forget "Winnie the Pooh"!
OpenAI models refuse to translate subtitles because they contain violence, sex, or racism.
That’s just a different flavour of enforced right-think.
They are absolutely different flavors. OpenAI is not being told by the government to censor violence, sex or racism - they're being told that by their executives.
News flash: household-name businesses aren't going to repeat slurs if the media will use it to defame them. Nevermind the fact that people will (rightfully) hold you legally accountable and demand your testimony when ChatGPT starts offering unsupervised chemistry lessons - the threat of bad PR is all that is required to censor their models.
There's no agenda removing porn from ChatGPT any more than there's an agenda removing porn from the App Store or YouTube. It's about shrewd identity politics, not prudish shadow government conspiracies against you seeing sex and being bigoted.
I don't know why people care if they're being censored by government officials or private billionaires. What difference does it make at the end of the day? why is one worse than the other?
Because you aren't being "censored" by billionaires at all. They have made the business decision to reduce the usefulness of their AI to prevent their liability from being legally, or even socially, held accountable.
Again, consider my example about YouTube - it's not illegal for Google to put pornography on YouTube. They still moderate it out though, not because they want to "censor" their users but because amateur porn is a liability nightmare to moderate. Similarly, I don't think ChatGPT's limitations qualify as censorship.
Okay, i mean you can say censorship isn't censorship if you want? This is my point, why are you treating limits placed on your expression/sharing/information differently based on what type of person is doing it?
Because fundamentally it's the same type of censorship as someone deciding to not sell porn magazines, videos or the the Anarchist Cookbook in their newsstand/bookstore/etc. back in the day. They judged (probably quite rightly) that it's not good for business.
Of course the market being extremely concentrated and effectively an oligopoly even in the best case does shine a somewhat different light on it. Until/unless open models catch up both quality and accessibility wise.
Sigh. No. Censorship is censorship is censorship. That is true even if you happen to like and can generate a plausible defense of US version that happens to be business friendly ( as opposed to China's ruling party friendly ).
> Censorship is censorship is censorship
"if your company doesn't present hardcore fisting pornography to five year olds you're a tyrant" is a heck of a take, even for hacker news.
It is not a take. It is simple position of 'just because you call something as involuntary semen injection does not make it any less of a rape'. I like things that are clear and well defined. And so I repeat:
Censorship is censorship is censorship.
Ok, I guess I'm #TeamProCensorship, then. So is almost everyone.
I am not sure if it will surprise you, but your affiliation or the size of your 'team' is largely irrelevant from my perspective. That said, I am mildly surprised you were able to accept the new self-image as willing censor though. Most people struggle with that ( edit: hence the 'this is not censorship' facade ).
They're accepting your definition of censorship to highlight how fucking stupid it is. Is Hacker News a censorship haven because I flagged the "How to have Sex with Cars" post uploaded yesterday? Am I a tyrant for trying to oppress that poor user's voice? No. I'm upholding the guidelines of a privately owned and moderated community.
"Censorship is censorship is censorship" is the sort of defense you'd rely on if you were caught selling guns and kiddie porn on the internet. It's not the sort of defense OpenAI needs to use though, because they have a semblance of self-preservation instinct and would rather not let ChatGPT say something capable of pissing off the IMF or ADL. Call that "censorship" all you want - it's like canvassing for your right to yell 'fire!' in a movie theater.
<< IMF or ADL.
Friend, neither of those is a body that can say constitution in US is null and void. Nor to they get to pick and choose which speech is kosher. It is not up to those orgs to decide.
<< They're accepting your definition of censorship to highlight how fucking stupid it is.
They are accepting it, because there is no way it cannot not be accepted. Now.. just because there is some cognitive dissonance over what should logically follow is a separate issue entirely.
Best I can do is spread some seeds..
Yes, that's true. It's very rare for people to be able to value actual free speech. Most people think they do until they hear something they don't like
However private individuals or companies deciding not to offer certain products is an expression of free speech.
i.e. denying someone who is running an online platform/community or training an LLM model or whatever the right to remove or not provide specific content is a clearly limiting their right to freedom of expression.
Usually a sign of great discussion when someone responds with "sigh" to a reasonably presented argument.
Is "Pooh" also censored?
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Winnie-the-Pooh_...
Because falsifying history seems worse than restricting meth production, at least to me.
Though I see no reason whatsoever why LLM should be blocked from answering "how do I make a nuclear bomb?" query.
Because when a small group of elites with permament term and no elections decides what is allowed and what isn't... and has full control of silencing what's not allowed and any meta discussion about the silencing itself... is different from when an elected government decides it, and then anyone is free to raise a stink on whatever is their version of twitter today without worrying about being disappeared tomorrow
It's not an elected government if you're talking about the US. These policies are also all decided by "elites with permanent term and no elections" you realize right?
> It's not an elected government if you're talking about the US
If you don't believe US has elections then straighten up your tinfoil hat:)
Maybe you'll say next the earth is flat, if you think people have nothing better to do but to find ways to lie to you.
I don't feel like this was a good faith interpretation of my comment. What i'm saying is that in the US and China, censorship is decided by unelected officials. In one case it's CPC in another case it's corporate executives
That makes even less sense as a comparison. Sure Instagram censored anti-Trump posts for a day but in case you didn't notice you are free to discuss that without fearing suppression or jail.
Come on man why are you doing this? I didn't say censorship was the same in america or china you're just trying to find something to disagree with
> Why would China censoring Tiananmen Square/whatever out of their LLMs be anymore harmful to the training process when the US controlled LLMs also censor certain topics, eg "how do I make meth?" or "how do I make a nuclear bomb?".
I was explaining why it is more harmful and thought you were arguing it is not harmful?
I was just making a very simple narrow claim: Censorship in the west and china are both done by unelected people. Note that i didn't say china was good, censorship was equivalent or anything else you're trying to argue. my literal only point was:
Censorship in the west and china are both done by unelected people
OK you are technically correct. We can talk how "appointed by elected people" makes a difference...
They want their LLMs explicitly approved to align with the values of the regime. Not necessarily a bad thing, or at least that avenue wasn't my point. It does get in the way of going fast and breaking things though, and on the other side there is an outright accelerationist pseudo-cult.
Ignoring the moral dimension for a second, I do wonder if it is harder to implement a rather cohesive, but far-reaching censorship in the chinese style, or the more outrage-driven type of "censorship" required of American companies. In the West we have the left pre-occupied with -isms and -phobias, and the right with blasphemy and perceived attacks on their politics.
With the hard shift to the right and Trump coming into office, especially the last bit will be interesting. There is a pretty substantial tension between factual reporting and not offending right-wing ideology: Should a model consider "both sides" about topics with with clear and broad scientific consensus if it might offend Trumpists? (Two examples that come to mind was the recent "The Nazis were actually left wing" and "There are only two genders".)
I didn't find any reliable sources about OpenAI. All sources that I could find state this is not true -- inference costs are far higher than subscription fees.
I hate to ask this on HN... but, can you provide a source? Or tell us how do you know?
I don't have any qualified source and this metric would be likely be quite confidential even internally.
It is just an educated guess factoring costs of running similar/comparable models to 4o or 4o-mini per token, and how azure commitments work with OpenAI models[2], also knowing that Plus subscriptions are probably more profitable[1] than API calls.
It would be hard for even OpenAI to know with any certainty because they are not paying for Azure credits like a normal company. The costs are deeply intertwined with Azure and would be hard to split given the nature of the MS relationship[3]
----
[1] This is from experience of running LibreChat using 4o versus ChatGPT Plus for ~200 users, subscriptions should quite profitable than raw API by a order of 3 to 4x, of course different types of users and adoption levels will be there my sample while not small is not likely representative of their typical user base.
[2] MS has less incentive to subsidize than say OpenAI themselves
[3] Azure is quite profitable in the aggregate, while possibly subsidizing OpenAI APIs, any such subsidy has not shown up meaningfully in Microsoft financial reports.
Sam Altman posted to Twitter:
Ref: https://techstartups.com/2025/01/06/openai-is-losing-money-o...Next he will tell us how open OpenAI is
> but they (and MS) are recouping inference costs from user subscription and API revenue with a healthy operating margin.
As far as I am aware the only information from within OpenAI one way or another is from their financial documents circulated to investors:
> The fund-raising material also signaled that OpenAI would need to continue raising money over the next year because its expenses grew in tandem with the number of people using its products.
Subscriptions are the lions share of their revenue (73%). It's possible they are making money on the average Plus or Enterprise subscription but given the above claim they definitely aren't making enough to cover the cost of inference for free users.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/27/technology/openai-chatgpt...
It was my impression that OpenAI was struggling to make money on their $200 pro subscription, because they've underestimate how much people would use it (https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/06/altman_gpt_profits/).
So I do question if OpenAI is able to make a profit, even if you remove training and R&D. The $20 plan may be more profitable, but now it will need to cover the R&D and training, plus whatever they lose on Pro.
Didn’t it just come out they are losing money on the pro subscriptions?
I am paying for o1 Pro but since Deepseek R1 came out I stopped using it. So there goes $200/mo of their revenue ;)
Thanks for the detailed breakdown. This is an important nuance to my short reply.
Are they spending $10B/year on training?
Given the release of the new DeepSeek R1 model [0], OpenAI’s future revenue stream is probably more at risk than it was a week ago.
[0] - https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/01/china-is-catching-up-with...
OpenAI will not exist in 5 years, I'm calling it now. First movers to market dont always win, and they will surely lose.
Google was first mover.
In what way? They weren't the first search engine, or advertising on the web?
In terms of ai and OpenAI leapfrogged them
The question is what's going to be OpenAI's Adwords.
Yahoo, AOL, Alta Vista (others too) all were search engines on the web before Google's Sept 1998 existence.
Lycos, Metacrawler, Dogpile. The list goes on
Sure, but we are talking ai and the fact that google was first in this space.
The first in what? Not in search nor Generative AI.
Why would you think search. Google wasn't first for search. They were first for page rank
Google researchers invented the transformer
Who if not Google was the first in generative ai? They invented transformers and diffusion, the cornerstones of text and image generati, respectively.
They weren't the first to meaningfully commercialise either, though. That remains with OpenAI for both (GPT-3/ChatGPT and DALL-E 2).
if your birth year starts with 2, I can see why you might think that
Not necessarily. DeepSeek will probably only threaten the API usage of OpenAI, which could also be banned in the US if it's too sucessful. API usage is not a main revenue for OpenAI (it is for Anthropic last time I checked). The main competitor for R1 is o1, which isn't gnerally available yet.
DeepSeek is an open source model. You can download it and run it locally on your laptop already.
So any OpenAI user ( or competitor even) could take it and run a hosted model. You can even tweak the weights if you wanted to.
Why pay for OpenAI access when you can just run your own and save the money?
The one your laptop can run does not rival what OpenAI offers for money. Still, the issue is not whether third party can run it, it's just the OpenAI seems not putting API as their main product.
LM Studio version is here: https://lmstudio.ai/model/deepseek-r1-llama-8b
That's like saying I have a healthy revenue stream from my credit card.
Not quite. In 2 years their revenue has ~20x from 200M ARR to 3.7B ARR. The inference costs I believe pay for themselves (in fact are quite profitable). So what they're putting on their investor's credit cards are the costs of employees & model training. Given it's projected to be a multi-trillion dollar industry and they're seen as a market leader, investors are more than happy to throw in interest free cash flow now in exchange for variable future interest in the form of stocks.
That's not quite the same thing at all as your credit card's revenue stream as you have a ~18%+ monthly interest rate on that revenue stream. If you recall AMZN (& all startups really) have this mode early in their business where they're over-spending on R&D to grow more quickly than their free cash flow otherwise allows to stay ahead of competition and dominate the market. Indeed if investors agree and your business is actually strong, this is a strong play because you're leveraging some future value into today's growth.
All well and good, but how well will it work if the pattern continues that the best open models are less than a year behind what OpenAI is doing?
How long can they maintain their position at the top without the insane cashflow?
One system will be god like and then it doesn't matter
These types of responses always strike me as dogmatic.
Reminds me of the crypto craze where people were claiming that Bitcoin was going to replace all world currencies.
Only the usa Is running a Manhattan project. Nothing to see here really. Go back to bed
Platform economics "works" in theory only upto a point. Its super inefficient if you zoom out and look not at system level but ecosystem level. It hasn't lasted long enough to hit failure cases. Just wait a few years.
As to openai, given deepseek and the fact lot of use cases dont even need real time inference its not obvious this story will end well.
I also can't see it ending well for OpenAI. This seems like it's going to be a commodity market with a race to the bottom on pricing. I read that NVIDIA has a roughly 1000% (10x) profit margin on H100's, which means that someone like Google making their own TPUs has a massive cost advantage.
Moore's law seems to be against them too... hardware getting more powerful, small models getting more powerful... Not at all obvious that companies will need to rely on cloud models vs running locally (licencing models from whoever wants that market). Also, a lot of corporate use probably isn't that time critical, and can afford to run slower and cheaper.
Of course the US government could choose to wreck free-market economics by mandating powerful models to be run in "secure" cloud environments, but unless other countries did same that might put US at competitive price disadvantage.
Have they built their own ASICs for inference like Google and Microsoft have? Or are they using NVIDIA chips exclusively for inference as well?
The rumors I've heard are that they have a hardware team targeting a 2026 release, but no productions ASICs at the moment.
They do get a lot of customers buying their stuff, but on top of that, a company with unique IP and mindshare can get investors to open their wallet easily enough; I keep thinking of AMD that was not or barely profitable for like 15 years in a row.
Meanwhile, Azure has failed to keep up with the last 2-3 generations of both Intel and AMD server processors. They’re available only in “preview” or in a very limited number of regions.
I wonder if this is a sign of the global economic downturn pausing cloud migrations or AI sucking the oxygen out of the room.
global economic downturn? what?
it’s absolutely the second one, this is a commonality across many orgs i’ve talked to who cannot get their CPU request met bc of GPU spend
Serious question - why Texas???
Texas is a world leader in renewable energy. Easy permitting, lots of space, lots of existing grid infrastructure from the o&g industry.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis
What's the relevance of this article to the comment?
The comment is talking like Texas is a bastion of energy, when they've made the news multiple years in a row about how entire cities collapse over what most states would consider trivial amounts of snow. It is hard to be a world leader in energy and to also have a wiki on your recurring energy crisis issues.
Why do you think datacenters have actually been built in Oregon?
What about hurricanes? Extreme weather events which spew a lot of water, wind and debris around might potentially do a lot of damage to a data center.
Any downsides?
Texas.
[flagged]
My kneejerk response was to point to the incoming administration, but the fact Stargate has been in the works for more than a year now says to me it's because of tax credits.
Lots of back door deals. Just expect more government things put in TX just like the Army built that place in Austin, when we have plenty of dead bases that could be reused
:/
Natural gas to power the turbines while the nuclear plant are built, I guess. Also is Texas more open to large-scale development than elsewhere?
Any downsides?
Existing underinvestment in infrastructure and its maintenance, extreme weather, water resource limitations, some human rights issues.
It's where the energy is for this project.
This is unfortunately paywalled but a good writeup on how the datacenter came to be: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/why-openai-and-oracl...
I'm not a subscriber so I can't read it, which startup are they referring to in the headline?
They're referring to Crusoe (crusoe.ai)
A company that will surely still exist in 4 years time.
Probably for the same reason that Silcon Valley has been moving there slowly and quietly for a while now.
Because rich people inevitably don't like taxes? And maybe forest fires?
because california is not a very permissive landscape and believes there should be a community-involved process with veto for essentially every large private action
This was a very long winded way to spell money
i’m curious, do you feel that you are contributing to the discussion?
Do you feel your prior comment was sincere and fully captured the reasons for which some firms and individuals have transitioned from California to Texas?
How is compute only 50% of their expenses?
I'd guess salaries and such for all the devs and researchers make up a significant portion of the other half
That seems almost impossible.
Isn't it more likely a reaction to xAI now having the most training compute?
.
I'm not sure that's how capitalism works.
Who is "we"?
This isn't your money
It is not. But this kind of money does have impact for society in any field. So, this a proper concern.
This is so much money with which we could actually solve problems in the world. maybe even stop wars which break out because of scarcity issues.
maybe i am getting to old or to friendly to humans, but it's staggering to me how the priorities are for such things.
For less than this same price tag, we could’ve eliminated student loan debt for ~20 million Americans. It would in turn open a myriad number of opportunities, like owning a home and/or feeling more comfortable starting a family. It would stimulate the economy in predictable ways.
Instead we gave a small number of people all of this money for a moonshot in a state where they squabble over who’s allowed to use which bathroom and if I need an abortion I might die.
> we could’ve eliminated student loan debt for ~20 million Americans. It would in turn open a myriad number of opportunities, like owning a home
I'd give the money to folks starting in the trades before bailling out the college-educated class.
Also, wiping out numbers on a spreadsheet doesn't erect new homes. If we wiped out student debt, the portion of that value that went into new homeownership would principally flow to existing homeowners.
Finally, you're comparing a government hand-out to private investment into a capital asset. That's like comparing eating out at a nice restaurant to buying a bond. Different prerogatives.
Couple things that aren’t accounted for:
A) this is a pledge by companies they may or may not even have the cash required to back it up. Certainly they aren’t spending it all at once, but to be completely honest it’s nothing more than a PR stunt right now that seems to be an exercise in courting favor
B) that so called private capital is going to get incentives from subsidies, like tax breaks, grants etc. It’s inevitable if this proceeds to an actual investment stage. What’s that about it being pure private capital again?
C) do to the aforementioned circumstances in A it seems whatever government support systems are stood up to support this - and if this isn’t ending in hot air, there will be - it still means it’s not pure private capital and worse yet, they’ll likely end up bilking tax payers and the initiative falls apart with companies spending far less then the pledge but keeping all the upside.
I’ll bet a years salary it plays out like this.
If this ends up being 100% private capital with no government subsidies of any kind, I’ll be shocked and elated. Look at anything like this in the last 40 years and you’ll find scant few examples that actually hold up under scrutiny that they didn’t play out this way.
Which brings me to my second part. So we are going to - in some form - end up handing out subsidies to these companies, either at the local state or federal level, but by the logic of not paying off student debt, why are we going to do this? It’s only propping up an unhealthy economic policy no?
Why is it so bad for us to cancel student debt but it’s fine to have the same cost equivalent as subsidies for businesses? Is it under the “creates jobs” smoke screen? Despite the fact the overwhelming majority of money made will not go to the workers but back to the wealthy and ultra wealthy.
There's no sense of equity here. If the government is truly unequivocally hands off - no subsidies, no incentives etc - than fine, the profits go where they go, and thats the end of it.
However, it won't be, and that opens up a perfectly legitimate ask about how this money is going to get used and who it benefits
I really really don't get it. You (US) all saw it coming. Everybody knew voting for the dark side would funnel money away from poor and middle class towards the rich. Is it a dementia outbreak? Can someone shed a spark of light on the mechanics of all this crazyness?
Americans are fine voting against their interests as long as someone else is hurt worse by it. These policies will hurt most Americans, but as long as trans folks and racial minorities get hurt worse it's fine. Nothing new about the southern strategy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy?wprov=sfti1
We have a saying here. "It's the economy, stupid." The orange one appealed straight to the people's economic situation. Our elections hinge on who turns out to vote. Anyone of modest means saw their cash bleed away and their life gets harder. The sitting president always gets punished for this. It's not complicated.
Also, there was lip service to relaxing regulations on building power plants (just for the data centers) and data centers, but it remains to be seen how much of this can be accomplished with just the federal government.
I think the idea of a "college-educated class" speaks to another fundamental problem with the American project - that a college education is now seen as some upper-class bauble. It is only seen as such a luxury because it is such a slog and expense. Y'all should fix that problem too!
> college education is now seen as some upper-class bauble
We’re well into the pendulum swinging back. The vanguard were the dropout wunderkids. Now it’s salt-of-the-earth tradesmen and the like.
I don't really get what you're trying to say here.
Student loans are the only loan type which you cannot bankrupt out of. I'm sure that many students would accept bankruptcy rather than bailouts if that is preferable. It doesn't make sense to saddle 20 year olds with insurmountable debt.
That was a recent change in bankruptcy law. You could literally just revert it. It should reintroduce some caution into some of these institutions of "higher education."
I'd rather fix the law then try to decide who to hand out tax surpluses to.
For now. If trump wages the culture war to completion and decides to ruin the universities with a cut of future income and a haircut .
This sort of folksy take always ignores that the same issue happens with the trades as does with the professional classes. No one class is immune to a crash due to unnatural promotion. You've let your moral view overcome that reality
It's a fair comparison. Stargate is fundamentally about two things - America's industry needs a cash injection, and we're choosing a completely hype-dominated vein to push the needle into.
Problem is, the parent comment is right. Even if you think student loan mitigation has washy economics behind it, the outcome is predictable and even desirable if you're playing the long-game in politics. If not that, spend $500,000,000,000 towards onshoring Apple and Microsoft's manufacturing jobs. Spend it re-invigorating America's mothballed motor industry and let Elon spec it out like a kid in a candy shop. Relative to AI, even student loan forgiveness and dumping money into trades looks attractive (not that Trump would consider either).
Nobody on HN should be confused by this. We know Sam Altman is a scammer (Worldcoin, anyone?) and we know OpenAI is a terrible business. This money is being deliberately wasted to keep OpenAI's lights on and preserve the Weekend At Bernie's-esque corpse that is America's "lead" in software technology. That's it. It's blatantly simple.
> America's industry needs a cash injection
Does it? Seems overflowing with it.
>>the Weekend At Bernie's-esque corpse that is America's "lead" in software technology
Compared with who exactly? Certainly not EMEA. Korea is mainly hardware and China has run out of IP to copy.
> completely hype-dominated vein to push the needle into
One, you’re not getting MGX and SoftBank to pay off student debt.
Two, if they do what they say they want to, they’ll be building new power generation, transmission infrastructures and data centres. Even if AI is a hype, that’s far from useless capital.
> money is being deliberately wasted to keep OpenAI's lights on
OpenAI is spending their own money on this.
>One, you’re not getting MGX and SoftBank to pay off student debt.
I don't think that was the actual literal expectation, rather that the cost to the tax payer - and there will be a cost to the tax payer - should be best spent elsewhere.
>Two, if they do what they say they want to, they’ll be building new power generation, transmission infrastructures and data centres. Even if AI is a hype, that’s far from useless capital.
Nothing has proven this to be true yet
>OpenAI is spending their own money on this.
Not a single entity has spent any real money on this. So far, its a PR stunt. The general lack of roll out corresponding with the announcement is telling. When real money is spent than I'll believe they might go through with it all the way.
Whats more likely to happen is that these companies will spend at most a token amount of money, then lobby congress and the executive branch for subsidies in order to proceed more 'earnestly' and since this is a pledge, there's nothing in writing that binds a contractual commitment of these funds and their purpose, so they could just as well pocket what they can to offset the costs, use what infrastructure gets built as a result, but shut down the initiative. Bad press won't matter, if its reported on at all.
This has played out for decades like this. Big announcements, so called private money commitments, then come the asks from the government to offset the costs they supposedly pledged to pay anyway, and eventually if you're lucky 1 widget gets built in some economic development area and the companies pocket what they can manage to bilk before its all shut down.
Gotcha. The fun part is when OpenAI asks for more regulation on AI, congress will be receptive
> fun part is when OpenAI asks for more regulation on AI, congress will be receptive
OpenAI is the Jeb Bush of D.C. They’re spending a lot of money, but it ain’t going far. Last time Altman asked for regulation he had to “jk” backwards when Europe and California proposed actual rules.
The problem with allowing student debt to rack up to these levels and then cancelling it is that it would embolden universities to ask even higher tuition. A second problem is that not all students get the benefit, some already paid off their debts or a large part of it. It would be unfair to them.
> not all students get the benefit, some already paid off their debts or a large part of it.
I'm one of the people who paid off a large portion of debt and probably don't need this assistance. However, this argument is so offensive. People were encouraged to take out debt for a number of reasons, and by a number of institutions, without first being educated about the implications of that. This argument states that we shouldn't help people because other people didn't have help. Following this logic, we shouldn't seek to help anyone ever, unless everyone else has also received the exact same help.
- slaves shouldn't be freed because other slaves weren't freed - we shouldn't give food to the starving, because those not starving aren't getting free food - we shouldn't care about others because they don't care about me
These arguments are all the greedy option in game theory, and all contribute to the worst outcomes across the board, except for those who can scam others in this system.
The right way to think about programs that help others is to consider cooperating - some people don't get the maximum possible, but they do get some! And when the game is played over and over, all parties get the maximum benefit possible.
In the case of student debt, paying it off and fixing the broken system, by allowing bankruptcy or some other fix, would benefit far more people than it would hurt; it would also benefit some people who paid their loans off completely: parents of children who can't pay off their loans now.
In the end the argument that some already paid off their debts is inherently a selfish argument in the style of "I don't want them to get help because I didn't get help." Society would be better if we didn't think in such greedy terms.
All that said - there are real concerns about debt repayment. The point about emboldening universities to ask for higher tuition highlights the underlying issue with the student loan system. Why bring up the most selfish possible argument when there are valid, useful arguments for your position?
> I'm one of the people who paid off a large portion of debt and probably don't need this assistance. However, this argument is so offensive.
Please spend my tax dollars on curing disease, fixing homelessness, free addiction treatment, better mental health care, improving our justice system, or even cold fusion. All of these have better outcomes than does paying off student debt.
> These arguments are all the greedy option
You left out the best argument against: there are much better things to spend money on.
I could get behind fixing Bush's biggest mistake - his bankruptcy change that moved the pendulum to lifetime debt. I'd love to see people be able to discharge student loans that are impossible to pay off or where the debtor was put in debt by a fraudulent or failed education institution.
Student loans are not dischargeable but they are not inheritable too.
Lifetime debt is not ok
I don't like it, but how would you prevent everyone from getting expensive schooling and then immediately declaring bankruptcy?
Just better redistribution and georgism/UBI type stuff but also keeping the need based stuff (medicaid, social security disability etc.) I think would be more fair and not punish people who paid off their debt or worked a job during school. Expanding free public education to K-16 and maybe ?more heavily taxing elite universities that get most of their value from the prestige of their own high ranking students who then have to pay more for it and other things like prestigious journals and even startup funds like YC, top law firms, etc. that work largely as prestige money redirectors where the value comes from those capturing the prestige but is redirected almost entireoy to just whoever kicked off the prestige flywheel early..
> I don't like it, but how would you prevent everyone from getting expensive schooling and then immediately declaring bankruptcy?
You don't! If the government is backing the loan, as is true in almost all cases, you eagerly take the write-off on the public purse in the knowledge that you've just gained an enthusiastic taxpayer who can open a new business or take a flyer on a new career, instead of a debt slave that is terrified to do anything but brownnose their way up the ladder at their dead-end callcenter job that will disappear the minute someone figures out it can be done in Bangladesh or by AI for cents on the dollar.
Sure, it would be better and more efficient to do this directly by nationalizing the state schools and offering free tuition or something, but we have to work with what we have.
Going bankrupt isn’t just some chill thing, your credit score will get completely destroyed. Some people will definitely continue to pay.
Bankruptcies are not a cure all. They are a way to force creditors to work with debtors to either get the debt to where it can be paid back, or git rid of debts the debtor will ever be able to pay. The idea is to prevent usury or debt servitude. It also has the effect of introducing a risk to a loan where the lender can lose their money, and has to consider if it is a good idea to write the loan. Student loans are risky, so the government guarantees them, but even so the default rate is high. Perhaps our focus should be on figuring out why so many loans default and working on bringing expenses and outcomes to an alignment where people don't default.
In America so many banks are hungry to loan money. You can build up your credit and save. I recovered from bankruptcy before the ink was dry. I was driving a new car and living in a new house in short order. It is now long gone from my credit file. Don't ever talk someone out of bankruptcy if they qualify for it.
If you own a home you can exclude it from the bankruptcy. You can also include it and continue to pay the payments and the contract must be honored!
> how would you prevent everyone from getting expensive schooling and then immediately declaring bankruptcy
If the expensive schooling works, then the person should be able to get a nice, well paying job and pay off the loan over the next 20 years. Many of the differal programs (i.e. "putting the loan on hold") programs and policies would prevent this. It's when the clock runs out, and the student can't get the high-paying job that we have issues...
Isn't most debt incurred by graduate students, especially those in med or law schools? Surely 4 years of higher education should be enough for someone to figure out basic maths?
Maybe, maybe not? This is hard to find via search, possibly due to graduate being inside the search term undergraduate. :)
This shows the average total owed by graduate students is much higher than undergraduates, about 3x. https://www.usatoday.com/money/blueprint/student-loans/avera... So just spitballing here, if there are more than 3x undergraduates than graduate students, and the same number have loans, the undergraduate debt is higher overall.
But then there's this showing the median being closer to only 2x different https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/09/18/facts-abo...
The long rise of for profit undergraduate institutions until quite recently says it was extremely profitable to get students into debt for questionable education value, it's almost like payday loan shops, just preying on different segment of population.
https://www.highereducationinquirer.org/2022/01/how-universi...
I don't think traditional public or private four year universities are blameless, either, raising tuition to match this endlessly rising loans guaranteed by Federal government with spiraling administrative system costs.
Even though the cost is high I thought in the USA the number of med school students is restricted to a very small number.
My mom has a master's degree and couldn't plan her finances or retirement if her life depended on it.
>People were encouraged to take out debt for a number of reasons, and by a number of institutions, without first being educated about the implications of that
18 year olds don't understand what a loan is? Zero accountability?
In the United States? For huge swaths of the population that answer is obviously no. Financial education and literacy in this country is a complete fucking joke. Very few people expected that they would be on a payment schedule that amounted to $200/mo for 30 years, and for a significant portion of them, there was really strong messaging implying that getting a college education was the only pathway to financial success, such that student loans were worth it. Two generations and counting have been massively duped.
99.65% of 18-year olds 100% do not. or compound interest. the system is rigged against them to not be taught any of basic finacial literacy
Basically all college-bound 18-year olds understand what debt is — you’re infantilizing them to a ridiculous degree if you think otherwise. A lot of them choose to proceed with college due to career optimism and following the herd, not because “debt” is some magical concept that they don’t understand.
Basically all college-bound 18-year olds understand what debt is
not to sound snarky but seldom do I read here something more wrong... if they did they would NEVER take on the kind of debt they are taking on in droves to get that paper. "debt" is one thing, you probably understand "debt" when you are a kid... understanding loans however - is an entirely different thing from general concept of "debt"
I suppose we’ll have to agree to disagree. I know lots of liberal arts majors who still have a lot of student loan debt in their late 20s and 30s. They knew what they were doing when they enrolled in college and chose their major, it wasn’t like cost of tuition or what an “interest rate” is was somehow obscured from them or too difficult for them to comprehend. In some cases they regret the choices they made earlier but that’s a different matter, those choices were not made in ignorance of the basic situation they were entering into.
We definitely agree to disagree… I am trying to understand your point of view but failing - if they understood the loan and still took on it does that mean that they are just being irrational? or stupid (I don’t mean to sound mean here but lacking a more PC word here…)?
They absolutely understood the terms of the loan. I think they do it anyway because: (1) everyone else is doing it and they don’t have a good alternative (2) career optimism. If you end up becoming a lawyer/consultant/accountant or otherwise have a good corporate job, in the medium-term your student loan debt doesn’t really have a significant impact on your life.
It’s really only a problem if you (1) choose a private college and don’t stay in-state, (2) get a degree which doesn’t have a lot of practical value, and (3) then want to pursue a low-paying field or get a not-useful graduate degree. For example, a friend of mine did her undergrad in art history, master’s in museum studies, and works for a non-profit. She’s not rich but she’s able to survive reasonably comfortably. She’s not dumb or financially illiterate, and she knew what she was getting in for.
I'm just gonna mention that during the 2010s, Donald Trump had $287 million in loans forgiven after refusing to pay and suing the lender for "predatory lending practices."[1]
But yeah, let's make sure we squeeze every drop out of those college students, they should have understood their loan terms.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicholasreimann/2020/10/27/repo...
Consider that his position might be more profound than you considered it to be.
Mine is. It's about incentives. Now you can take it from there, and at least in my interpretation the rest of your rebuttal falls apart.
There is absolutely no equivalency to slavery. That is simply dishonest. Slaves didn't choose to be slaves. Do students who take on debt have no agency whatsoever to you? Did the people who paid such debts had no agency when paying?
If you don't like the equivalence to slavery, pick a different example, there are three I posted and more you can probably think of on your own.
We know that the idea of a rational agent in economics is a myth, and as you mentioned, it is about incentives, as well as motives.
Students who take on debt that limits them in later life don't have all the information they need at the time they make the decision. Saying the information is available is not reasonable. These students are told they _most_ go to college to make a living.
They are not told they need to get an engineering, medical, or finance degree to make going to college worth it, economically.
They are shown all the loans they can get without an equivalent amount of effort put into educating them about the consequences those loans represent. For example, how much the loans will cost in the long run, along with estimated pay for various fields of study.
Furthermore, the loans are given for any degree program without restriction.
All the comments I made about game theory still stand, and we don't need to get into the myriad problems with our education and student loan systems. I agree they aren't perfect; I just think the argument 'I didn't get my loans paid off neither should you' is an extremely selfish one. Just because someone suffers doesn't mean everyone should. Also - in my experience people who are ready to make that selfish argument are very offended when it gets flipped on them. So they can understand intuitively the issue with the selfish position.
> They are not told they need to get an engineering, medical, or finance degree to make going to college worth it, economically.
This is a very well known fact. When I was in high school in the 2000s, it was a well known joke about how the arts / english majors won't land you a job. And even if you never heard about it, the data for average salary for graduates in the college, its dropout rates, and salary by majors is highly publicized. This isn't advanced research to do and in the age of internet, someone considering college should be able to do. I think the problem is no one believes they are the average case and instead are the exception who'll make it work.
Yes but every policy is unfair. It literally is choosing where to give a limited resource, it can never be fully fair.
And there could be a change in the law that allows people to forgive student debt in personal bankruptcy, and that could make sure higher tuition doesnt happen.
> Yes but every policy is unfair. It literally is choosing where to give a limited resource, it can never be fully fair.
I don't think that holds for a policy of non-intervention. People usually don't like that solution, especially when considering welfare programs, but it is fair to give no one assistance in the sense that everyone was treated equally/fairly.
Now its a totally different question whether its fair that some people are in this position today. The answer is almost certainly no, but that doesn't have a direct impact on whether an intervention today is fair or not.
Apathy is the only fair policy?
I am a bit apathetic towards giving generally wealthier people who made a bad financial choice a break, when weighed against all the different ways you could spend that money, yes.
> People usually don't like that solution, especially when considering welfare programs, but it is fair to give no one assistance in the sense that everyone was treated equally/fairly.
If you're saying all the different ways you could spend that money, then you're saying non-intervention for the wealthier people how made a bad financial choice, and yes-intervention for other ways in which the money could be spent, which again, is a decision on where to give limited resources.
I'm not saying I agree or don't agree with whether it would be more helpful to give it to those who have college debt or those in the US who are without a home or frankly those here in Kenya (where I am now) who if don't have money, might starve to death.
Moreover that each decision can be judged.
> Now its a totally different question whether its fair that some people are in this position today. The answer is almost certainly no, but that doesn't have a direct impact on whether an intervention today is fair or not.
If we approach it from this side, I agree. Non-intervention, or not giving any limited resources to anyone, is the most fair approach and then we can evaluate whether it's fair the position in which those people are. Yet I don't know how realistic this is, to withhold all resources from everyone.
Maybe? That probably starts a definitional debate that isn't usually helpful. Is it apathetic to let nature, evolution, or markets do what they do best?
What is "fair" requires context. I could argue that nonintervention is fair or that a top-down, Marxist approach is fair depending on how "success" is defined.
I personally don't like the word "fair" very much because of how context-dependent it is. It's often used in "that's unfair" by a person who feels attacked or aggrieved in some way. It seems to have such a subjective quality to it, and yet can be claimed to be objective.
It actually reminds me of an essay I wrote years ago called "The Subjective Adjective" [0] (wow, I wrote it 10 years ago!) The premise is that we take how we subjectively feel and then transform it into an objective statement on reality, overlooking how subjective it really is.
Anyways, I agree some of these conversations seem to devolve into definitional debates that may not get at the real point.
I think I also replied to a different comment thinking it was you—identity and conversational continuation, an aspect of context so often hidden/lacking on HN.
In general, I agree with you that a policy could be equal/fair as in giving everyone an equal amount of X, and that the unfair part is where people are in life. I actually liked the idea of charging a flat tax across the US and then having people voluntarily pay the tax for those who couldn't pay it, because I agree, I would see the tax as fair but the wealth inequality as unfair and one way to rectify that is for people to voluntarily rebalance the wealth. But yeah, I'm sure tons of people would see that as unfair.
I really don't know lol.
[0]: https://www.jimkleiber.com/the-subjective-adjective/
If we're considering tax changed, I'd love to see a government run like a kickstarter. Government departments' role should be designing programs, estimate costs, and pitching the program to the public.
For taxes, the government provides estimates or recommendations on what a household would owe but its voluntary. You throe your money into programs that you want to see funded.
It could go horribly wrong, but so can centralized planning. At least this way the people are responsible for it either way.
Yes. For the government, apathy and inaction is always the best possible policy.
Have you lived in a country where the citizens believe that the government is overall apathetic to their situations? It often doesn't create a utopia, but rather a lot of cynicism and reliance on family support networks. I'm an American currently in East Africa and I imagine many if not most people here would say the government doesn't care about them and does very little for them. So what ends up happening is that since there is little government/social welfare programs, people rely on family welfare. And well, if you don't have a rich family, your life can be really really really hard, if you even survive.
Your family doesn't have money? No food. No service at the emergency room. Heck, even no water.
I think there's a balance and that people who want more apathy and inaction may not realize what it's like when that's actually the case.
I wish more people still held this view. When in doubt a government should avoid acting for fear of unintended consequences.
Government is just a collection of people, collection of unknown neighbors. Action can lead to unintended consequences, but so can inaction. Someone is bleeding on the street, do you help? If you help, you might get HIV, if they were attacked the attacker might come after you, the person might even attack you. If you don't help, they might bleed out on the street, they might have permanent damage, or something else.
Do you act or do you not act?
Both have unintended, often unpredictable consequences.
> Government is just a collection of people, collection of unknown neighbors.
I don't think that's an accurate comparison. None of the politicians in Washington are my neighbors, the closes one lives about 300 miles away but he is never actually home. Those politicians have an extreme amount of control over my life, well beyond what seems reasonable given how disconnected we are.
> Do you act or do you not act?
That varies a lot, but context is everything. If I see someone bleeding out, yes I would help. I generally have basic first aid on me including a tourniquet and chest seals. If I have open cuts on my hands and no gloves I'd have to consider the risk of infection, but if someone is likely to die I think I would take the risk (you never know until you're in the situation though).
If someone is attacked on the street, again yes I'd likely act. Context still matters, if I'm 30 feet away and the person has a gun I'd be of no use unless I'm also armed, and even then I'd have to draw before they saw me. If someone is getting beat up, mugged, even stabbed, sure I'd jump in. I think of have a really hard time living with the knowledge that I watched someone get attacked or murdered and did nothing.
It would do more good in K12 or pre-K than it would paying off private debts held by white collar highly educated not rich yet due only to their young age university-bros.
It truly is astonishing. We have kids who cannot afford school lunches, people working multiple blue-collar jobs and yet the problems of people who are statistically better off than average constantly jump to the front. People complain about Effective Altruism because of one dude messing up big but it would behoove everyone to read up on the basic philosophy of it before suggesting how we best spent billions to help reduce suffering.
People complain about effective altruism because they just talk about mosquito nets instead of anything like this.
Also, who is the person that "screwed up big"? I'm guessing you mean SBF but my view is that MacAskill is an outright shuckster.
The problem with EA is in judging what is effective. Perhaps ridding the unforgivable student loans of parents actually helps the kids more than school lunches.
And frankly, some of the most effective altruism may be just to directly give cash to people, yet I don't know how many people in the EA community would trust people so much with unconditional cash.
there are many many problems with the EA movement, but they do generally support unconditional cash transfers.
cash transfers are seen as the "default" baseline. the bar for charity is that it must be better than cash transfers. they do find some such charities that they claim are even better than cash transfers, but they are totally comfortable with giving people unconditional cash.
ah ok, i appreciate the clarification and am grateful to hear that. I think I've worried that the EA movement often has an obsession with optimization, which can lead to getting the absolute best perfect solution and become really dehumanized in the process.
But as I said, I'm glad to hear that unconditional cash is gaining traction with those folks, as I think it not only gives someone financial resources but also trust.
> And this trust — another resource it’s difficult to measure — is the aspect of gifts that many have said they value most.
The above is an excerpt from MacKenzie Scott's essay, "No Dollar Signs This Time." [0] I really appreciate the approach she is taking, which seems to be especially embracing the uncertainty of it all and trusting people to do what they believe is best.
[0]: https://yieldgiving.com/essays/no-dollar-signs-this-time
I'd say many of these university bros are actually parents to K12 and Pre-K and having parents not terribly in debt could help them focus more on being there for their kids and encouraging education.
With half a trillion dollars you can also open a lot of universities. Increased supply would lower prices for everyone. One could even open public universities and offer education at very reduced or no tuition.
Lack of supply is not the reason post secondary education is expensive.
Source? If you're curious cost as it relates to supply and demand of higher education, here's one [1].
[1] https://www.stern.nyu.edu/sites/default/files/assets/documen...
There are very many universities with zero or no tax, most of them in socialist countries. Why don't you go there? Maybe because none of those matter when serious education is considered.
The world keeps showing the USA things can be better, but some of you really are entrenched deep in American hubris
I am actually European :)
If we block on the basis that previous people didn't have something and that it would be unfair to them we would literally never make any progress in this world.
Instead of starting a new better world, we'll just stick with the old one that sucks because we don't want to be unfair. What an awful, awful way to look at the world.
Only the first of those is a real problem, but it really is a problem.
Simple ten years of tax deductions for paid student loans. Fixed it.
When the bailout is for business the money always comes, but suggest even a fraction of that amount of money go towards regular people and all of a sudden there's hand wringing and talk of moral hazards.
> it would embolden universities to ask even higher tuition.
Then cap the amount you give out loans. Many of them are back by one level of the government or another.
> A second problem is that not all students get the benefit, some already paid off their debts or a large part of it. It would be unfair to them.
This is a very flimsy argument. Shall we get rid of the polio vaccine since it's unfair to those who already contracted it that our efforts with the vaccine don't benefit them?
> Instead we gave a small number of people all of this money for a moonshot in a state where they squabble over who’s allowed to use which bathroom and if I need an abortion I might die.
AFAICT from this article and others on the same subject, the 500 billion number does not appear to be public money. It sounds like it's 100 billion of private investment (probably mostly from Son), and FTA,
> could reach five times that sum
(5x 100 billion === 500 billion, the # everyone seems to be quoting)
Eliminating some student debt is a fish. Free university is the fishing rod. Do that instead.
we are vastly overspending and will either need to monetize the debt (disastrous) or massively cut spending and raise taxes in the future. already now, we need to massively raise taxes on the wealthy but even that will be insufficient with our current spend.
free college is just a giveaway to the wealthier third of our society and irresponsible with our current fiscal situation.
> free college is just a giveaway to the wealthier third of our society and irresponsible with our current fiscal situation.
How is free college a giveaway to the wealthier third of society? For starters, I can assure you the wealthy care a lot about the name of the institution issuing the diploma, and they can afford it. They'll happily front extra cash so their kids can network with people of similar economic status.
Half of the student loan crisis is because there's an over abundance of kids with degrees that can't get basic jobs. How does more degrees solve that?
I didn't say "the wealthy", I said the wealthier third of our society. Only ~39% of people age 18-24 are in college, those are generally the wealthier people in our society, and free college (I'm assuming from your reply it's free public college) would mostly be a giveaway to those people.
Have you considered that perhaps you have causality mixed up here? Perhaps it's not that only the wealthier ~39% of people want to go to college, but rather that the bottom 61% don't want that economic burden.
I certainly agree that more people would be going to college if it were free. 80% of people? I'm skeptical, but the existing people sending their kids to college (who can afford foregoing that income) would certainly appreciate the giveaway
Those who can afford it as easily as you say are the kind that will go to private schools in a heartbeat
Those who are struggling to afford it are the ones who will appreciate the help
Good point. Then next best is limit the lending. If a uni wants to charge 50k a year then they need to find rich students who can pay cash. If they want the smartest students they need to find ways to be affordable. Only lend money for affordable universities basically. That will force efficiency, reduce admin etc.
So end subsidized student loans? Yes that would be a good policy. Not sure how you can ban people from taking out loans writ large though.
> Not sure how you can ban people from taking out loans writ large though
Let them be discharged in bankruptcy. The system will fix itself around that.
Or we could just spend less on weapons.
Free to the student sounds nice, but who pays for it in the end? And does an education lose a bit of its value when anyone can get it for free?
The pretending to not understand how public services work shtick is so tiring.
Everyone understands that public services are free to use because they are funded by taxes. It's not the gotcha you think it is. People say that roads, K-12 education, etc are "free" when they mean there is not a direct fee to use them because they are paid for by the government using tax dollars. You don't have to pretend to not understand this
Who says roads or public education are free? Every gallon of fuel is taxed and, at least in any jurisdiction I've lived in, property taxes fund schools.
I'm not pretending to not understand here. Someone said it would be free and I'm asking how. The fact that "free" doesn't mean free is the problem, not an issue of me misunderstanding.
Your mind works in a very different way than mine.
Elsewhere, you worried that getting millions of people put of crippling debt due to a broken education finance system might tick up inflation.
Here, you worry that making society more educated via university training might decrease the economic value of a degree.
Where is the humanity? Of course some extreme of inflation is bad, and of course we want people to be employable. But artificial scarcity seems like a bad way to go about it.
(And I don't think we have a surplus of engineers in the country, judging by what I perceive to be the gap in talent between china and US, and the moaning by tech about the need for H1B).
> Elsewhere, you worried that getting millions of people put of crippling debt due to a broken education finance system might tick up inflation.
Well yes, I can talk to two different points when the context is different. A good conversation isn't just people shouting their personal opinions, its people playing off of the discussion at hand and considering different angles.
> Here, you worry that making society more educated via university training might decrease the economic value of a degree.
That's actually not what I was saying, I may have phrased it poorly. I did not mean that I worry about anyone getting educated. I was simply trying to point out that a degree has much less value when anyone can get it, like that's because it is free as is the topic here.
In the other thread I wasn't actually concerned about inflation personally, only pointing out that inflation will go up if a large amount of student debt is made to just disappear. I was raising that as a prediction with high likelihood, personally I have opinions on the underlying approach but I don't really have dog in the fight either.
>And I don't think we have a surplus of engineers in the country, judging by what I perceive to be the gap in talent between china and US, and the moaning by tech about the need for H1B
Why take that at face value? Its generally used for wage suppression[0][1] by big companies (not only in tech) and due to how its structured, creates an unhealthy power balance between employers and H1B employees
[0]: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10551-024-05823-8
[1]: https://www.paularnesen.com/blog/the-h-1b-visa-corporate-ame...
The MAGA ideals (this is not snark just applying logic) needs more skilled Americans so this would also be aligned with MAGA albeit one of those things that takes more than 4 years to come to fruition so politically harder to do.
(Follow-up from my other reply)
> But artificial scarcity seems like a bad way to go about it.
What artificial scarcity are you talking about here?
I'm not trying to say we need artificial scarcity, university should be a market like any other product or service.
Personally I tend to go even further away from most when it comes to scarcity in the job market too - I'd rather have open borders than immigration systems that limit how many people can come here and compete for jobs.
>I'm not trying to say we need artificial scarcity, university should be a market like any other product or service.
Whats a truly competitive market place where all competitors, broadly speaking, are playing on the same playing field and the best business wins?
There's been nothing but waves of consolidation across nearly all industries for the last 40 years. Competition is scarce, it seems.
Totally agree, we haven't really had capitalism for most of my life. It is possible though, and most of US history included at least mostly free markets.
I was a software consultant for many years. I'd put that on the list of truly competitive marketplaces. People were either willing to pay me to do a job or they weren't, and I would have to adjust my prices and terms to try to increase or decrease my workload.
That’s one, and I suppose marketing firms to some extent also fit.
But these are small niches that don’t make a whole sector, and arguably it’s on the fringes comparatively to everything else
Broadly speaking the so called free market is only in its name
For sure, I'd argue that's mainly because any industry that centralizes or grows big enough to really matter finds itself the subject of new government oversight and regulation. As soon as the government becomes involved, for better or worse, its no longer a free market.
Not anyone. Some kind of test is required for admission. I am thinking like the UK system.
Also if you are being $ focused then offer it where there is ROI: STEM, medicine (allow more doctors too).
Education doesn't lose its value if it is free. Does food and water? Shelter?
Unless people are just tuning out of their degree and it is just a social thing. In which deal with that specific problem.
How does no one pay for it, though?
I don't know the ins and outs of the UK education system, but I have to assume the facilities and employees are still paid for.
> Does food and water? Shelter?
If everyone had access to it for free? Absolutely! I wouldn't work as a farmer or build houses if no one had to pay for those products. Value, or price in this context, is only really feasible for scarce assets. If something is seemingly unlimited and freely available it will have no (financial) value.
It's publicly funded, not built and staffed by slaves.
Sure, but then the answer to my original question of who pays for it is the taxpayer. It isn't free, the cost is just subsidized by the public rather than paid by the student.
I'm not even saying that's a bad thing, if most people want it that way I don't see the problem. But it isn't free.
Sorry, but you're just being a bit pedantic about this and it's not helping any conversation.
I'm not sure how, it seems really important to distinguish between free and not free. To me it seems disingenuous to call something free when its publicly funded.
But everyone knows that "free" in this context means publicly funded. Free as in beer never meant that the entire production of the beer somehow was accomplished without financial or material input.
That doesn't hold up even just in this comment thread. Higher up when I asked who pays for it the reply I got was "Not anyone". The person really didn't seem to get that " free" == publicly funded == taxpayers pay for it.
No, they said that not just anyone can get in for free; there's an admission test.
Tax. The missing link is those educated people pay it back with their tax. And/or contributions to the economy.
Also part of this is making education better bang for buck.
You can say who's gonna pay for it for everything. Defense and meddling in world affairs is a big cost too.
Right, but if our answer is taxes then someone pays for it and it is not free. There's nothing wrong with that, we just can't call it free.
> You can say who's gonna pay for it for everything. Defense and meddling in world affairs is a big cost too.
For sure, no disagreement here. My personal opinion is that defense is only necessary in times of war and meddling in world affairs is never necessary.
You think defense is only necessary in times of war? I think you should re-think that position. If you mean that, it is just a fundamental misunderstanding of ... everything.
Educated people get better paying jobs. More pay means more payed taxes as well. If you have a smart tax system with progressive tax, that's a real lever.
It sounds counter intuitive, but more taxes is more fair and better as a whole. To prove, it takes no more than to look up correlation of amounts of taxes with percentages of homelessness (and other such indicators) between western countries.
Free to US citizens would be a better policy, the state investing in its own people.
Granted! Now US universities consist of 99% immigrants/people on student visas.
As long as you let universities act like for-profit businesses, their profits will be the only thing they optimize for.
Has that happened in countries with similar policies?
No. It's a disaster. The poor pay for the richest to go to public universities. See Brazil.
There are more low-income people in private universities (with private or private/public loans) than in public universities.
This is really not a big thing nowadays in Brazil because if "quotas" in public university.
This WAS a thing without the quotas, though.
Source?
May be an unpopular opinion here, but education should be a market just like anything else and the government should put its thumb on the scales as infrequently as possible.
That's one of the most uneducated ignorant things I've heard anyone say in this entire discussion.
Does health insurance also lose its value when anyone can get it for free?
Health insurance is an entirely different animal. It has its own flaws and issues, as well as its own benefits. You can't easily compare a service product and an insurance product, they're just too different.
Though yes, financially health insurance also has no monetary value when anyone can get it for free. You can't assign a price to it and anyone in the health insurance business is entirely at the whims of what the government is willing to pay them to provide a service deemed essential enough to subsidize the entire cost of the product.
Free does not mean limitless. Where I live in EU its not uncommon to wait for over a year to see a doctor on „free” insurance and less than 24h when you pay out of your pocket.
People get free insurance but hospitals get fixed amounts of cash allowing them to admit fixed amount of patients
In this scenario the answer is yes, it loses some value. Still much better system than private care in US
There is a queuing theory thing here! People die in the queue.
However the US system. seems to create a lot if inefficiency. There is no free lunch. But a lunch where you don't throw out as much bread as you eat is more efficient.
If everyone has a Harvard degree, the value of a Harvard degree loses value, yes.
Compare to: If everybody can read, reading loses value.
If everyone has sanitised water it loses value.
Value is the overloaded word. We don't need to scarcity things so dollar number goes up for some elite group.
A good test is forget money and think of human collaboration. People doing things. Does it makes sense from that perspective.
Best way to scale Harvard is easy: make all the other places better (or if they are make people realise that)
Maybe so, but also then everyone has a Harvard degree, which is MUCH MUCH better for society than a Harvard degree losing value is bad.
Of course if you're an ignorant right wing anti-intellectual climate change and evolution denying religious fanatic, the idea of everyone having a Harvard degree is existentially terrifying for other reasons that it losing a little bit of value.
> Maybe so, but also then everyone has a Harvard degree, which is MUCH MUCH better for society than a Harvard degree losing value is bad.
Is it your opinion that Harvard could provide the same quality of education to an unlimited number of students?
This isn't a right/left scenario, its logistics and market dynamics. Expanding access to a scarce resource means value of that resource goes down. A supply glut doesn't mean the product is any less useful, just that there's more for it so people will get to pay less for it.
"we could’ve eliminated student loan debt for ~20 million Americans. "
Don't throw more money at schools. They will happily take the money and jack up tuition even more. There is no reason why tuition is going up at the pace it does.
> There is no reason why tuition is going up at the pace it does.
There is and it's explained by Baumol's cost disease. Basically you can't sustain paying professors the same wage while productivity increases in other parts of the economy. Even if the actual labor of "professing" hasn't gotten more productive. You have to retain them by keeping up with the broader wage increases. And that cost increase gets passed down to students.
As far as I know the money doesn't go to professors but to ever increasing administration and shiny buildings.
Allowing student debts to be included in bankruptcy takes care of most of the issue. Those that were unable to find decent, paying jobs will have a path to relieve the stress of high student loan payments, while those that found high paying jobs will continue paying on the loans from which they received a benefit.
Let the schools pay back the people they scammed.
Or, prices of houses would go up even more because we still aren't allowing supply to increase and people having more money doesn't change that.
Eliminating debt has a lot of unintended consequences. Price inflation would almost certainly be a problem, for example.
It's also not clear to me what happens to all of the derivatives based on student debt, though there may very well be an answer there that I just haven't understood yet.
You are forgetting the fact that this is a private investment, whereas the student loans problem should be solved by the government. No private institutions will have any interests in paying off student loans.
History says almost all society was corrputed and previous 50 to 80 years are slight exception. People with power prefer to give power to selected people selected by their personal preference.
Repaying student loans makes a lot of people a little richer. The current initiative makes a few people a lot richer. If you ask some people, the former is a very communist/socialist way of thinking (bad), while the latter is pure, unadulterated capitalism (good).
That and a lot of people do not have the means to convince current power centers ( unless they were to organize, which they either don't, can't or are dissuaded from ) to do their bidding, while few rich ones do. And so the old saying 'rich become richer' becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
That was the implication indeed. Money is like gravity, the more you have the more you can pull in. This will give a person the power to do anything to make more money (change the laws as desired, or break them if needed) but also the perfect shield from any repercussions.
You can make the same argument about going to the moon. Why bother when so many problems could be solved on earth.
One of the more destructive situations in capitalism is the fact that (financially) helping the many will increase inflation and lead to more problems.
When a few people get really rich it kind of slips through the gaps, the broader system isn't impacted too much. When most people get a little rich they spend that money and prices go up. Said differently, wealth is all relative so when most people get a little more rich their comparative wealth didn't really change.
you can redistribute real resources - every person spending their life working on a rich persons yacht rather than helping educate the next generation due to the price system, for instance, is a real distribution of resources. this is why consumption taxes are modern and valuable
If we have to have taxes, I'm very much in favor of a consumption tax. It doesn't work for our current system though, capitalism kind of hits a wall when spending money is disincentivized (compared to saving money or simply not trying to earn more).
Redistribution of wealth is tricky and almost certainly runs into the same wall I mentioned in my last comment. When everyone competing with each other (financially) see a similar bump in income they didn't really change anything. Redistribution is more helpful when targeting the wealth gap and not very useful when considering how wealtht the majority of people "feel".
That said, I 100% agree people shouldn't be working their entire life on a rich person's boat. That's a much bigger, and more fundamental, problem though. That gets to the core of a debt-based society and the need for self reliance. The most effective way to get out from under someone else's boot (financially) is to work towards a spot where you aren't dependent on them or the job's income.
The most effective way to get out from under someone else's boot (financially) is to work towards a spot where you aren't dependent on them or the job's income.
100% this but entire system is setup to make sure this doesn't happen at scale. even here on HN if you post something along these lines but in real terms you will get downvoted like crazy and get even crazier comments.
the system is setup to make sure there are workers, w2 workers. this is why there is student loans and this is why schools do not teach you to be an entrepreneur, to be a salesman, to hustle for yourself and not for someone else. I see so many people here talking about leetcode and faang and I think to myself that is just modern day slavery. if you are LXXX at say Meta making say $750k/year, I think the same - you are a modern-day slave. if Meta is paying you $750k/year that really means that you are worth twice that, if not more. no company is going to pay you more than you are worth to them and they won't even break even with you so-to-speak so you can bank on this fact whoever you work for and whatever you bank. though there is a big difference between working on someone's yacht and making $750k the principles are the same but system is working hard and succeeding in making sure it stays as it is...
I am very sympathetic to your point about barriers. I feel like California has been waging war on 1099 contractors and small businesses for decades. Hell, they have a $600 minimum business tax on unprofitable businesses. They want stable W-2 union workers with state regulated compensation, not free wheeling contractors and businesses succeeding or failing on their own merits.
However, I think it is worth clarifying your following point.
>if Meta is paying you $750k/year that really means that you are worth twice that, if not more.
This is far from slavery. You are worth that to Meta. You might be worth significantly less without Meta. If you can make 1.5 mil/year alone and quit, meta wont send the slave patrol to bring you back in shackles. Instead, it is the golden shackles of greed that keep people making $750,000 instead of opting out.
> but entire system is setup to make sure this doesn't happen at scale
This has been getting less and less true since the Industrial Revolution. We’re not quite at the point where we don’t need menial labour. But we can sure see the through line to it. The alternate future to the despairingly unemployed is every person being something of an owner.
> if Meta is paying you $750k/year that really means that you are worth twice that, if not more
Whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Also, if you’re being paid $750k/year, you’d better be worth more than $1.5mm to your employer, because taxes and regulatory costs are typically estimated around 100% of base up to the low millions.
This has been getting less and less true since the Industrial Revolution.
how so? what do you think is the breakdown between say working people in the USA (excluding gig-jobs cause you know…) who are W2 vs. 1099 and/or business owners? 99.78% to 0.22% roughly?
> how so?
Automation. Consider the number of jobs today that one can do singly today that didn't even exist then.
> W2 vs. 1099 and/or business owners? 99.78% to 0.22% roughly?
There are about 165 million workers in the American labour force [1]. There are 33 million small businesses [2]. Given 14% have no employees [3], we have a lower bound of 5 million business owners in America, or 3% of the labour force.
Add to that America's 65 million freelancers and you have 2 out of 5 Americans not working for a boss. (Keep in mind, we're ignoring every building, plumber or design shop that has even a single employee in these figures.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_force_in_the_United_Stat...
[2] https://www.uschamber.com/small-business/state-of-small-busi...
[3] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/22/a-look-at...
I don't follow your logic for the small businesses. Why is the lower bound 5 million opposed to 33 million owners?
Are you trying to estimate only those without employees?
> Are you trying to estimate only those without employees?
Was using this as a proxy for business owners who probably don’t have a filing cabinet of SBA and Census small businesses.
There are marketing schools so they teach you to be a marketeer&sales person, a bad one at the latter.
so in order to be taught how to capitalism hard one has to go to a specialised school like kids with special needs need special teachers?
Yes, it's a specialised degree track: marketing is a full on 4 year degree with a possibility of continuing to postgraduate programs, including leading to Doctor of Marketing: https://www.hbs.edu/doctoral/phd-programs/marketing/Pages/de...
there are lots of redistributions that are net beneficial even when you account for the incentive hit. marginal increases in the estate tax, for instance, almost certainly fall under this umbrella
i don't agree that debt is the problem
> i don't agree that debt is the problem
Totally fair, by no means is that a settled issue. Debt is just my opinion of a likely root cause.
> there are lots of redistributions that are net beneficial even when you account for the incentive hit. marginal increases in the estate tax, for instance, almost certainly fall under this umbrella
That requires a lot more context to answer. The costs and benefits considered are important to lay out. Without that context I really can't say if it's a net benefit or not, I would assume that two average people would have a different list of factors they'd consider when saying whether its a net benefit or not.
Personally I don't see estate taxes as net beneficial. I don't agree with the principle that death is a taxable event, and I don't prefer the government to have in incentives to see people die (i.e. when someone with an estate dies the government makes money). Financially, to stick with just the numbers, I don't consider $66B in annual revenue worth the bureaucracy or legal complexity required to manage the estate tax program.
Transfers are taxable, either as gifts or income. Not sure why we would exempt inheritance flows. $66B seems like a pretty good haul, that could easily be much larger given the massive portion of wealth that is inherited, and is 5x the budget of the IRS.
And the disincentive effects are much smaller than taxing the equivalent in directly earned income.
I get that today's laws do allow for taxing estate transfers as a taxable event. The personal concern I was raising is that I don't thing it should be taxable, not whether today's laws allow for taxing it.
When my parents die, assuming they go before me, I don't see why the government should be involved. To be clear, my parents are well below estate tax thresholds, but the underlying premise is the same. Someone's relative dying and leaving them an estate shouldn't by a taxable event as far as um concerned.
$66B should be a lot of money, but our federal government doesn't know what it means to balance a budget. We could easily cut $66B in current spending if we cared.
i’m sorry but student debt payoffs are probably one of the lowest socially valuable uses of this money, rather than basic things like snap or housing vouchers. sorta shows how myopic HN is, student debt is a relatable concern so it gets prioritized
also just: “why invest it when we could spend it on consumption now” is a good argument against letting private wealth usage be socially determined if most people just always vote for consumption now
I know!! Also we could have given an IPhone to 500 million of people for the amount!! It’s such a waste to think they’re investing it in the future instead
This is the problem with capitalists / the billionaires currently hoarding the money and the US' policy, it's all for short term gain. But the conservatives that look back to the 50's or 80's or whatever decade their rose-tinted glasses are tuned to should also realise that the good parts of that came from families not being neck-deep in debt.
Yes you don't want to destroy your food chain. If everyone is poor except you then you are now poor.
[dead]
go to the uk. they have all the free abortions, genders, and education you could possibly want. apply for asylum since you're clearly afraid for your life.
I'm starting to think there's no difference between this website and reddit
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
lol you got me
This site is way way way more capital friendly than worker friendly.
I am surprised at the negativity from HN. Their clear goal is to build superintelligence. Listen to any of the interviews with Altman, Demis Hassabis, or Dario Amodei (Anthropic) on the purpose of this. They discuss the roadmaps to unlimited energy, curing disease, farming innovations to feed billions, permanent solutions to climate change, and more.
Does no one on HN believe in this anymore? Isn't this tech startup community meant to be the tip of the spear? We'll find out by 2030 either way.
All of those things would put them out of business if realized and are just a PR smokescreen.
Have we not seen enough of these people to know their character? They're predators who, from all accounts, sacrifice every potentially meaningful personal relationship for money, long after they have more than most people could ever dream of. If we legalized gladiatorial blood sport and it became a billion-dollar business, they'd be doing that. If monkey torture porn was a billion dollar business they'd be doing that.
Whatever the promise of actual AI (and not just performative LLM garbage), if created they will lock the IP down so hard that most of the population will not be able to afford it. Rich people get Ozempic, poor people get body positivity.
That's the crazy thing about this "super AI" business is that at some point no one would buy it because no one could afford because no one has a job (spare me the UBI magic money fantasy). I love the body positivity line. But if such a thing came to pass, I think something different would probably happen to the rich.
I continue to be amazed at how motivated some of us are to make such cruel, far-reaching and empty claims with regards to people of some popularity/notoriety.
Oh yes, Larry Ellison and Sam Altman are the real victims here!
I continue to be amazed at how desperate some of us are to live in Disney's Tomorrowland that we worship non-technical guys with lots of money who simply tell us that's what they're building, despite all actions to the contrary, sometimes baldfaced statements to the contrary (although always dressed up with faux-optimistic tones), and the negative anecdotes of pretty much anyone who gets close to them.
A lot of us became engineers because we were inspired by media, NASA, and the pretty pictures in Popular Science. And it sucks to realize that most if not all of that stuff isn't going to happen in our lifetimes, if at all. But you what guarantees it not to happen? Guys like Sam Altman and Larry Ellison at the helm, and blind faith that just because they have money and speak passionately that they somehow share your interests.
Or are you that guy who asks the car salesman for advice on which car he should buy? I could forgive that a little more, because the car salesman hasn't personally gone on the record about how he plans to use his business to fuck you.
Damn you're right, we should give Larry Ellison the benefit of the doubt.
not just larry - everyone who is 9-figure rich… no wonder they are better than all of us and hence demand that benefit… :)
Do you want a superintelligence ruling over all humanity until the stars burn out controlled by these people?
The lesson of everything that has happened in tech over the past 20 years is that what tech can do and what tech will do are miles apart. Yes, AGI could give everyone a free therapist to maximize their human well-being and guide us to the stars. Just like social media could have brought humanity closer together and been an unprecedented tool for communication, understanding, and democracy. How'd that work out?
At some point, optimism becomes willfully blinding yourself to the terrible danger humanity is in right now. Of course founders paint the rosy version of their product's future. That's how PR works. They're lying - maybe to themselves, and definitely to you.
Just my opinion/observation really but I believe its because people are implicitly entertaining the possibility that it is no longer about software or rather this announcement implicitly states that talent long term isn't the main advantage but instead hardware, compute, etc and most importantly the wealth and connections to gain access to large sums of capital. AI will enable capital/wealthy elite to have more of an advantage over human intelligence/ingenuity which I think is not typically what most hacker/tech forums are about.
For example it isn't what you can do tinkering in your home/garage anymore; or what algorithm you can crack with your intrinsic worth to create more use cases and possibilities - but capital, relationships, hardware and politics. A recent article that went around, and many others are believing capital and wealth will matter more and make "talent" obsolete in the world of AI - this large figure in this article just adds money to that hypothesis.
All this means the big get bigger. It isn't about startup's/grinding hard/working hard/being smarter/etc which means it isn't really meritocratic. This creates an uneven playing field that is quite different than previous software technology phases where the gains/access to the gains has been more distributed/democratized and mostly accessible to the talented/hard working (e.g. the risk taking startup entrepreneur with coding skills and a love of tech).
In some ways it is kind of the opposite of the indy hacker stereotype who ironically is probably one of the biggest losers in the new AI world. In the new world what matters is wealth/ownership of capital, relationships, politics, land, resources and other physical/social assets. In the new AI world scammers, PR people, salespeople, politicians, ultra wealthy with power etc thrive and nepotism/connections are the main advantage. You don't just see this in AI btw (e.g. recent meme coins seen as better path to wealth than working due to weak link to power figure), but AI like any tech amplifies the capability of people with power especially if by definition the powerful don't need to be smart/need other smart people to yield it unlike other tech in the past.
They needed smart people in the past; we may be approaching a world where the smart people make themselves as a whole redundant. I can understand why a place like this doesn't want that to succeed, even if the world's resources are being channeled to that end. Time will tell.
Exactly as you say. AI is imagined to be the wealthy nepotist's escape pod from an equal playing field and democratized access to information. Win at all cost soulless predators who find infinite sacrifice somehow righteous love games like the ones that macro-scale AI creates.
The average person's utility from AI is marginal. But to a psychopath like Elon Musk who is interested in deceiving the internet about Twitter engagement or juicing his crypto scam, it's a necessary tool to create seas of fake personas.
>> Does no one on HN believe in this anymore? Isn't this tech startup community meant to be the tip of the spear? We'll find out by 2030 either way.
I joined in 2012, and been reading since 2010 or so. The community definitely has changed since then, but the way I look at it is that it actually became more reasoned as the wide-eyed and naive teenagers/twenty-somethings of that era gained experience in life and work, learned how the world actually works, and perhaps even got burned a few times. As a result, today they approach these types of news with far more skepticism than their younger selves would. You might argue that the pendulum has swung too far towards the cynical end of the spectrum, but I think that's subjective.
I think (big assumption) most here are from that same period/time. Most are in their late 30s, 40s. Kids, busy life etc. Not the young hacker mindsets, but the responsible maybe a bit stressed person.
I feel called out. But yeah, that seems to be on point.
> Their clear goal is to build superintelligence
One time I bought a can of what I clearly thought was human food. Turns out it was just well dressed cat food.
> to unlimited energy, curing disease, farming innovations to feed billions,
Aw they missed their favorite hobby horse. "The children." Then again you might have to ask why even bother educating children if there is going to be "superintelligent" computers.
Anyways.. all this stuff will then be free.. right? Is someone going to "own" the superintelligent computer? That's an interesting proposition that gets entirely left out of our futurism fatansy.
I'm sure some do, but understand what they're basically saying is "we will build an AI God, and it will save us from all our problems"
At that point, it's not technology, that's religion (or even bordering on cult-like thinking)
I’m willing to believe. It’s probably the closest we’ve come to actually having a real life god. I’m going to get pushback on this but I’ve used o1 and it’s pretty mind blowing to me. I would say something 10x as intelligent with sensors to perceive the world and some sort of continuously running self optimization algorithm would essentially be a viable artificial intelligence.
I think we're going to see a lot of people with this kind of mental illness. It's really pretty sad to me.
What part of the above is irrational or illogical?
Poe's law
> They discuss the roadmaps to unlimited energy, curing disease, farming innovations to feed billions, permanent solutions to climate change, and more.
Look at who is president, or who is in charge of the biggest companies today. It is extremely clear that intelligence is not a part of the reason why they are there. And with all their power and money, these people have essentially zero concern for any of the topics you listed.
There is absolutely no reason to believe that if artificial superintelligence is ever created, all of a sudden the capitalist structure of society will get thrown away. The AIs will be put to work enriching the megalomaniacs, just like many of the most intelligent humans are.
Unlimited energy? No, I don't believe in this. I thought people on HN generally accepted science and not nonsense. A "superintelligence" that would ... what? Destroy the middle, destroy the economy, cause riots and civil wars? If its even possible. Sounds great.
> Does no one on HN believe in this anymore?
No.
I mean, I had some faith in these things 15 years ago, when I was young and naive, and my heroes were too. But I've seen nearly all those heroes turn to the dark side. There's only so much faith you can have.
This place seems to have been overwhelmed by bitterness and envy over the last 5 years or so.
Not envious of multi-billionaire's companies gathering capital, IP, knowledge and infrastructure for huge scale modern day private Stasi apparatuses. Just bitter.
What if the AI doesn't want to do any of that stuff.
Humans choose its loss function, then continue to guide it with finetuning/RL/etc.
Once AGI is many times smarter than humans, the 'guiding' evaporates as foolish irrational thinking. There is no way around the fact when AGI acquires 10 times, 100, 1000 times human intelligence, we are suddenly completely powerless to change anything anymore.
AGI can go wrong in innumerable ways, most of which we cannot even imagine now, because we are limited by our 1 times human intelligence.
The liftoff conditions literally have to be near perfect.
So the question is, can humanity trust the power hungry billionaire CEOs to understand the danger and choose a path for maximum safety? Looking at how it is going so far, I would say absolutely not.
> [...] 1000 times human intelligence, we are suddenly completely powerless [...] The liftoff conditions literally have to be near perfect.
I don't consider models suddenly lifting off and acquiring 1000 times human intelligence to be a realistic outcome. To my understanding, that belief is usually based around the idea that if you have a model that can refine its own architecture, say by 20%, then the next iteration can use that increased capacity to refine even further, say an additional 20%, leading to exponential growth. But that ignores diminishing returns; after obvious inefficiencies and low-hanging fruit are taken care of, squeezing out even an extra 10% is likely beyond what the slightly-better model is capable of.
I do think it's possible to fight against diminishing returns and chip away towards/past human-level intelligence, but it'll be through concerted effort (longer training runs of improved architectures with more data on larger clusters of better GPUs) and not an overnight explosion just from one researcher somewhere letting an LLM modify its own code.
> can humanity trust the power hungry billionaire CEOs to understand the danger and choose a path for maximum safety
Those power-hunger billionaire CEOs who shall remain nameless, such as Altman and Musk, are fear-mongering about such a doomsday. Goal seems to be regulatory capture and diverting attention away from the more realistic issues like use for employee surveillance[0].
[0]: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-55938494
that's the propaganda talking to you.
>wars which break out because of scarcity issues
That doesn't seem to be much of a thing these days. If you look at Russia/Ukraine or China/Taiwan there's not much scarcity. It's more bullying dictator wants to control the neighbours issues.
It will be, or, it's slowly happening already. Climate change is triggering water and food shortages, both abroad and on your doorstep (California wildfires), which in turn trigger mass migrations. If a richer and/or more militarily equipped country decides they want another country's resources to survive, we'll see wars erupt everywhere.
Then again, it's more of a logistics challenge, and if e.g. California were to invade Canada for its water supply, how are they going to get it all the way down there?
I can see it happening in Africa though, a long string of countries rely on the Nile, but large hydropower dams built in Sudan and Ethiopia are reducing the water flow, which Egypt is really not happy about as it's costing them water supply and irrigated land. I wouldn't be surprised if Egypt and its allies declares war on those countries and aims to have the dams broken. Then again, that's been going on for some years now and nothing has happened yet as far as I'm aware.
(the above is armchair theorycrafting from thousands of miles away based on superficial information and a lively imagination at best)
I was in Egypt a while and there's no talk of them invading Sudan or Ethiopia. A lot of Egypt's economy is overseas aid from the US and similar.
The main military thing going on there - I was in Dahab where there are endless military checkpoints - is Hamas like guys trying to come over and overthrow the fairly moderate Egyptian government and replace it with a hardline Hamas type islamic dictatorship for the glorification of Allah etc. Again it's not about reducing scarcity - more about increasing scarcity in return for political control. Dahab and Cairo are both a few hours drive from Gaza.
> A lot of Egypt's economy is overseas aid from the US and similar.
The rest is fees from the Panama (EDIT: Suez) Canal and tourism. Getting into a war, particularly with a country on the Red Sea, is suicide. (Also, the main flash point between Egypt and Ethipia has receded since the GERD finished filling.)
Surely you mean the Suez Canal
Ha! Yes.
California moves water the long way with aqueducts, pipes and pumps. It's an understood problem, but expensive.
> it's more of a logistics challenge
and a bureaucratic one as well. in Germany, they want to trim bureaucratic necessities while (not) expecting multiple millions of climate refugees.
lot's of undocumented STUFF (undocumented have nowhere to go so they don't get vaccines, proper help when sick, injured, mentally unstable, threatened, abused) incoming which means more disease, crime, theft, money for security firms and insurance companies, which means more smuggle, more fear-mongering via media, more polarization, more hard-coding of subservience into the young, more financial fascism overall, less art, zero authenticity, and a spawn of VR worlds where the old rules apply forever.
plus more STDs and micro-pandemics due to viral mutations because people will be even more careless when partying under second-semester light-shows in metropolitan city clubs and festivals and when selling out for an "adventurous" quick potent buck and bug, which of course means more money pouring into pharma who won't be able to test their drugs thoroughly (and won't have to, not requiring platforms to fact check will transfer somewhat into the pharma industry) because the population will be more diverse in terms of their bio-chemical reactions towards ingredients in context of their "fluid" habitats chemical and psycho-social make-ups.
but it's cool, let's not solve the biggest problems before pseudo-transcending into the AGI era. will make for a really great impression, especially those who had the means, brains, skills, (past) careers, opportunity and peace of mind.
There's a terrifying amount of food insecurity and poverty in Russia - https://www.globalhungerindex.org/russia.html - https://databankfiles.worldbank.org/public/ddpext_download/p...
Your first link says "With a score under 5, Russian Federation has a level of hunger that is low."
The current situation with Russia and China seems caused by them becoming prosperous. In the 1960s in China and 1990s in Russia they were broke. Now they have money they can afford to put it into their militaries and try to attack the neighbours.
I'm reminded of the KAL cartoon on Russia https://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1424,quality=8... That was from 2014. Already Russia is heading to the next panel in the cycle.
> Already Russia is heading to the next panel in the cycle. Curious if you could share some links, or readings, blog posts, etc. in relation to this
I don't have special information but there is general stuff in the headlines like
Putin growing concerned by Russia’s economy, as Trump pushes for Ukraine deal https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/putin-growing-concerned...
Also basically the whole western world are progressively sanctioning them eg. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-imposes-new-wave-of-sa... and https://kyivindependent.com/us-likely-to-sanction-russia-if-...
Plus the war is expensive. Plus Ukraine's main strategy at the moment seems to be to take out their oil and related industries using drones https://www.newsweek.com/russia-map-shows-critical-infrastru...
I'm not sure it's going to change unless there is some sort of deal or Putin goes.
Russia is a massive grain producer and exporter. One of their biggest health issues right now is obesity (from those cheap grains) with 60% of the adult population overweight, and growing. Furthermore, obesity has actually been an issue for their recruiting effort (there's a lot of running in war).
I would wager that states such as Russia and others misallocate resources, which in turn reduces productivity. Worse yet, some of the policy prescriptions stated above would further misallocate scarce resources and reduce productivity. Scarcity doom becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. This outcome is used to rationalize further economic intervention and the cycle compounds upon itself.
To be explicitly clear, the US granting largess to tech companies for datacenters also counts as a misallocation in my view.
Have you tried opening the links? They show Russia at developed country level in terms of food insecurity (score <5, they don't differentiate at those levels; this is a level mostly shown for EU countries); and a percentage of population below the international poverty line of 0.0% (vs, as an example, 1.8 % in Romania). This isn't great — being in the poverty briefs at all is not indicative of prosperity — but your terrification should probably come from elsewhere.
Russia is run by the mob. The country has no real dominant industry beyond its natural resources. Are they really a good example?
Not according to the World Bank:
https://thedocs.worldbank.org/en/doc/d5f32ef28464d01f195827b...
Furthermore, they became #4 GDP PPP last year and and were reclassified as a high income country.
https://www.intellinews.com/russia-s-economy-is-booming-3289...
The poorer regions are actually benefiting from high contract salaries. How sustainable that is, guess we'll see.
What in there contradicts what I said?
- They are run by the mob
- They export a lot of natural resources but don’t have a strong manufacturing base. They don’t have high tech, they don’t export many manufactured items to developed countries. It’s a mob run country, resources are easy to extract.
Russia has quite large tech companies (compared to EU, which is dominated by US tech). For software think Yandex, VK, Playrix, Kaspersky, etc in addition to lots of software talent. With hardware, don't nuclear reactors, rockets, aircraft still count as high tech?
And they are out manufacturing the combined west on pretty complex stuff like missiles, air defense systems, drones, artillery. Plus, due to sanctions, their civilian industrial sector has grown so much that's theres a shortage of facilities (not to mention labor).
When I looked through their major exports it was mostly centered around natural resources. You are right there are some spots like developing reactors in other countries but in net not much is going well for Russia economically. Yeah they had to start making more things internally due to their invasion but they are not exporting those goods.
But again, I don’t see them out manufacturing the west on military equipment when some of that equipment is getting overrun easily by 40 year old western equipment. It’s still a poor nation being run by the mob with some shining spots.
> they became #4 GDP PPP
That doesn't mean much on its own. Their per capita GDP is still low.
Also arguably their GDP figures are worth even less than Ireland's. A huge proportion of Russia's economy is tied in military production (and huge proportion of that is funded through debt).
If you make a rocket worth $1 million and then blow it up the next month that cost is obviously included in GDP but it's literally the equivalent of burning money/productivity.
Their debt to GDP ratio was 14.6% at the end of 2024, a decrease from 2023. US is 123.1% of GDP while Ireland is at 42.7%. And PPP is the number that matters - its one of the big factors which governs quality of life, at which price you can produce and sell widgets, bushels, etc. And btw, that guns/butter calculus also applies to the US, etc.
> Their debt to GDP ratio was 14.6% at the end of 2024, a decrease from 2023
Allegedly almost half of their defense budget since the war began was funded through private forced loans issues by banks directly to (effectively state owned?) military contractors. So that's not reflected in their military budget.
Also I doubt Russia could borrow a lot on the international markets even if they wanted to. Certainly not cheaply (like the US or especially Eurozone countries)
> And PPP is the number that matters - its one of the big factors which governs quality of life
Again... Russia's GDP per capita is still quite low (even if significantly higher than nominal).
Also if your nominal GDP is inflated by defence spending and energy exports and you multiply it with PPP (i.e. consumer price index) what exactly do you get?
> PPP is the number
Metrics adjusted by PPP might. What do you mean by PPP as such? The multiplier itself? https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/PA.NUS.PPPC.RF?most_rec...
Generally low prices indicate that the country is poor overall.
> its one of the big factors which governs quality of life,
PPP adjusted GDP per capita? Really? That's certainly not the best indicator of those things (even if there is strong correlation overall).
Do you think a median person in Ireland is 30% better off than the average Swiss or 2x better off than the average German?
Anyway, going back to Russia. If e.g. $100 comes in into the country through energy exports and is spent making bombs and other equipment what fraction do you think trickles down to the local economy?
Goes to show how much GDP is a good measure (or target) to aim for.
No, no, just no. I don't care what the website says. People in Russia are quite economically depressed. You might want to visit and talk to real people instead of web pages. Visit the Far East.
What makes you assume I haven't? Have you?
Yes, and anyone saying Russia isn’t poor either has not done those things or is blind/deaf or unable to comprehend what those people are saying, or possibly not interested in the truth.
Related https://www.ft.com/content/19ac2cb1-8cb4-464d-9683-18c632146...
At any given time approximately 1 in 10 humans are facing starvation or severe food insecurity.
I don't doubt that, but it's harder to connect that fact to a specific international conflict.
"Global warming may not have caused the Arab Spring, but it may have made it come earlier... In 2010, droughts in Russia, Ukraine, China and Argentina and torrential storms in Canada, Australia and Brazil considerably diminished global crops, driving commodity prices up. The region was already dealing with internal sociopolitical, economic and climatic tensions, and the 2010 global food crisis helped drive it over the edge."
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-change-an...
Or religious fanatics wants to murder other religious groups.
> That doesn't seem to be much of a thing these days.
If you ignore Gaza and whole of Africa, maybe.
Gaza seems mostly to be about who controls Israel/Palestine politically. Gaza was reasonably ok for food and housing and is now predictably trashed as a result of Hamas wanting to control Palestine from the river to the sea as they say.
South Sudan is some ridiculous thing where two rival generals are fighting for control. Are there any wars which are mostly about scarcity at the moment?
No, not really... the origin of Gaza conflict is in Zionists confiscating the most fertile land and water resources.
That's why Israelis gladly handed back the Sinai desert to Egypt, but have kept Golan Heights, East Jerusalem, Shaba Farms, and continuously confiscate Palestinian farmlands in the West Bank.
There is nothing arbitrary or religious about which lands Zionists are occupying and which they're leaving to arabs.
Completely false and simplifying a complicated history to present a very one sided view. The most fertile lands are in the west bank. They were under Jordanian control and could have been turned into an independent Palestinian state, but weren't. Israel "accidentally" got them in the 6 days war, and were happy to give them to Jordan back to "take care" of the Palestinian problem, but they refused. The places that Israel have the majority of the population in Petah Tiqwah, Tel Aviv and the region were swamp lands, filled with mosquitos, that were dried over many years and many deaths by Jewish farmers.
So you are saying Hamas would have same domestic support if Gaza was economically at the level of e.g. Slovenia? People who complained about "open air prison" caused by Israeli "occupation" even before Oct 7 would disagree with you I think.
Even in Europe extremists are propped up by promise of "cheap energies" from Russia.
I guess if you dont see the link this is not the place to explain it.
Have you videos of Gaza before the war? There are places in Syria and Iraq, hell even India or the Phillipines that look alot worse.
Also the "open air prison" effect was a result of trying to reduce attacks from Gaza. For example before the 2008 war there were more than 2000 rockets launched from Gaza into Israel.
> Are there any wars which are mostly about scarcity at the moment?
The class war
Like the glib summary of Palestinian history there. In other news some terrorists stole land from the Brits in 1776.
Very zero-sum outlook on things which is factually untrue much of the time. When you invest money in something productive that value doesn't get automatically destroyed. The size of the pie isn't fixed.
> something productive
So... not this.
It's an indirect attempt of tackling any first order problem. So is all software engineering.
Money doesn't fix stuff. You need good will people and good will people don't need that much money.
More importantly, money, at global scale, doesn't solve scarcity issues. If there are 100 apples and 120 people making sure everyone has a lot of money doesn't magically create 20 more apples. It just raises the price of apples. Building an apple orchard creates apples. Stargate is people betting that they are building a phenomenal apple orchard. I'm not sure they will and an worried the apple orchard will poison us all but unlike me these people are putting their money where their mouth is and had thus larger inventive to figure out what they are doing.
On global scale if you have 100 people and 150 apples but apples are on the opposite side of the globe it is not like you can sustainably get those apples delivered all the time.
Getting 150 apples once is better than nothing but still doesn’t fix the problem.
Money alone might not fix stuff... but an absence of money can prevent stuff being fixed.
Such mega investments are usually not for the sake of humankind. They are usually for the sake of a very selected group of humans.
We could do 20 Manhattan projects with it[1].
1) Build fully autonomous cars so there are zero deaths from car accidents. This is ~45K deaths/year (just US!) and millions of injuries. Annual economic cost of crashes is $340 billion. Worldwide the toll is 10 - 100x?
2) Put solar on top of all highways.
3) Give money to all farmers to put solar.
4) Build transmission.
And many more ...
The Manhattan Project employed nearly 130,000 people at its peak and cost nearly US$2 billion (equivalent to about $27 billion in 2023): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project
You can't just compare things to the Manhattan project. The Manhattan project was large for it's time, but the thing they were doing was ultimately, simple. You can build a nuclear bomb with simply a large enough sphere of enriched U-235 and it'll explode. Which is what the Hiroshima bomb was - a gun type assembly. This is not a complex device.
The relative complexity of projects only ever increases, because if they were simpler we would already have done them. The modern LHC is far more complicated then the Manhattan project. So is ITER. Hell, the US military's logistics chain is more complicated then the Manhattan project.
The fundamental attribution error here is going "look the power to destroy a city was so much cheaper!"
(contingent on the money actually being spent, which....) This is basically an AI-manhattan project. It would employ vast numbers of construction, tradesmen, manufacturing, etc.
This isn't a handout, it is an investment with an expected return. Which is good, because it is less likely to be applied to bad ideas like forcing solar roadways and solar farmers.
> 3) Give money to all farmers to put solar.
...on their roofs? Over all their crops? What's the play here?
Five-hundred billion dollars is nothing when you consider there's a new government agency that it is said will shave two trillion from government inefficiency.
Five-hundred billion is twenty-five percent of DOGE's pie in the sky promise. It's something.
/s
"actually solve problems in the world."
By "solve problems" you mean "temporarily mitigate problems by throwing money at them", right? Or do you actually have specific examples of problems that can be permanently solved and aren't already being tackled?
Fusion research has had less than than tenth of this investment, but a viable fusion reactor would have far more impact than a tenth of what Stargate will likely deliver.
Not to mention efforts for mitigating climate change and ecological collapse. But of course those issues reside outside our economic system, so why would anyone invest in them.
That’s like complaining about investments in automated looms at the start of the Industrial Revolution and claiming that the money would be better spent if handed out to the slum dwelling population.
We have the benefit of hindsight now and we understand that technological revolutions improve living standards for everyone and drag whole populations out of grinding labour and poverty.
And it would be foolish to allow China and Russia to out-invest the West in AI and make us mere clients (or worse, victims) of their superior technology.
Industrialists understand that the way to fix the world’s problems is to advance society, as opposed to resting on the laurels of past advancement, and dividing the diminishing spoils of those achievements.
> maybe even stop wars which break out because of scarcity issues.
Like which wars in this century?
The wars are how American tax payer money gets given to all these companies. Why would they try to end them?
I disagree with you. I think the impact of AI on society in the long term is going to be massive, and such investments are necessary. If we look at the past century, technology has had (in my opinion) and incredibly positive impact on society. You have to invest in the future.
Russia did not have a scarcity issue and still invaded its neighbor.
Won't an intelligent agent available to everyone be able to solve problems in the world? Isn't that why they (OpenAI) and others are doing what they do? To bring abundance?
We flew to the moon several times for half that money xD
We already tried fixing problems with throwing tax money at them. It didn't work out. You can see the result of socialism in Russia, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela and where not. Wars do not start because of scarcities. Wars start because of disbalance of power. And it is very important for the Western world to be ahead in the AI, because otherwise China may cause a real war and then a lot of Western people would die. Do you not care about them?
Learn the difference between socialism and communism before you spout lies and propaganda.
Socialism is communism in progress. I have actually lived in socialist country, what about you? And lies and propaganda is what Leftists like you do, not me. Funny, you never want to live in the countries where you rule.
> And lies and propaganda is what Leftists like you do
This sounds ridiculous to anybody who pays attention to what Trump/MAGA and the modern Republican party say.
cant bribe an exponential curve for peace through linear surplus redistribution .
I'm sorry but unless this $500B was being invested in equipping soldiers and building navies, air capabilities, artillery, etc it could not stop even an urban gang turf war.
But then how could politicians and the wealthy steal all that money if you just gave it away or helped the poors?
[dead]
It actually isn't alot, about $100 spread out over a few years for every person on earth isnt enough to do these things..
IF money was equally distributed then maybe. But that has never happened. Same with drinking water, food and shelter.
The US can't stop the wars it wants others to fight for them even if it means population collapse like in Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.
well, it also starts a fair share of wars, or lets say, "brings freedom and democracy in exchange for resources and power" and sometimes even decides to topple leaders in foreign countries to then put puppets into place.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
I'm confused and a bit disturbed; honestly having a very difficult time internalizing and processing this information. This announcement is making me wonder if I'm poorly calibrated on the current progress of AI development and the potential path forward. Is the key idea here that current AI development has figured out enough to brute force a path towards AGI? Or I guess the alternative is that they expect to figure it out in the next 4 years...
I don't know how to make sense of this level of investment. I feel that I lack the proper conceptual framework to make sense of the purchasing power of half a trillion USD in this context.
"There are maybe a few hundred people in the world who viscerally understand what's coming. Most are at DeepMind / OpenAI / Anthropic / X but some are on the outside. You have to be able to forecast the aggregate effect of rapid algorithmic improvement, aggressive investment in building RL environments for iterative self-improvement, and many tens of billions already committed to building data centers. Either we're all wrong, or everything is about to change." - Vedant Misra, Deepmind Researcher.
Maybe your calibration isn't poor. Maybe they really are all wrong but there's a tendency here to these these people behind the scenes are all charlatans, fueling hype without equal substance hoping to make a quick buck before it all comes crashing down, but i don't think that's true at all. I think these people really genuinely believe they're going to get there. And if you genuinely think that, them this kind of investment isn't so crazy.
The problem is, they are hugely incentivised to hype to raise funding. It’s not whether they are “wrong”, it’s whether they are being realistic.
The argument presented in the quote there is: “everyone in AI foundation companies are putting money into AI, therefore we must be near AGI.”
The best evaluation of progress is to use the tools we have. It doesn’t look like we are close to AGI. It looks like amazing NLP with an enormous amount of human labelling.
Absolutely. Look at how Sam Altman speaks.
If you've taken a couple of lectures about AI, you've probably been taught not to anthropomorphize your own algorithms, especially given how the masses think of AI (in terms of Skynet, Cortana, "Her", Ex Machina, etc). It encourages people to mistake the capabilities of the models and ascribe to them all of the traits of AI they've seen in TV and movies.
Sam has ignored that advice, and exploited the hype that can be generated by doing so. He even tried to mimic the product in "Her", down to the voice [0]. The old board said his "outright lying" made it impossible to trust him [1]. That behavior raises eyebrows, even if he's got a legitimate product.
[0]: https://www.wired.com/story/openai-gpt-4o-chatgpt-artificial...
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/28/24166713/openai-helen-ton...
Oh, surely Larry Ellison is a trustworthy sort of fellow, right? :)
>The problem is, they are hugely incentivised to hype to raise funding.
Hype is extremely normal. Everyone with a business gets the chance to hype for the purpose of funding. That alone isn't going to get several of the biggest tech giants in the world to pour billions.
Satya just said, "he has his 80 billion ready". Is Microsoft an "AI foundation company" ? Is Google ? Is Meta ?
The point is the old saying - "Put your money where your mouth is". People can say all sorts of things but what they choose to spend their money on says a whole lot.
And I'm not saying this means the investment is guaranteed to be worth it.
The newest US president announced this within the 48 hours of assuming office. Hype alone couldn't set such a big wheel in motion.
Again, that’s a discussion about enthusiasm not technology.
I just want an objective opinion from someone who has a deep understanding of the cutting edge.
It’s maddening to try to plan for a future which everyone is incentivised and permitted to fabricate.
> there's a tendency here to these these people behind the scenes are all charlatans, fueling hype without equal substance hoping to make a quick buck before it all comes crashing down, but i don't think that's true at all. I think these people really genuinely believe they're going to get there.
I don't immediately disagree with you but you just accidentally also described all crypto/NFT enthusiasts of a few years ago.
NFTs couldn't pass the Turing test, something I didn't expect to witness in my lifetime.
The two are qualitatively different.
Worth pointing out; the Turing test is pretty much just a thought experiment. Turing never considered it a test of "intelligence", or any other human quality. Many people have criticized its use as a measure of such.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test#Weaknesses
Yep - the "value" of a Turing-capable system has been questioned for a while now. We watched Markov chains and IRC bots clear the Turing test on a regular basis in the mid-2000s, and all we got out of that was better automated scamming.
Even now, as we have fully capable conversational models we don't really have any great immediate applications. Our efforts at making them "think" is yielding marginal returns.
I'm not so sure it passes the turing test since you can trivially determine that the conversation partner is a machine by asking it a trick question or offering it a "jailbreak" style prompt.
You're missing the point. The hype is the same, because the incentives are the same.
I agree with you that there is significantly more there there with AI, but I agree with the parent that the hype cycles are essentially indistinguishable.
I agree, AI is fucking spectacular and NFTs have no substance. But at the same time, neither AI nor NFTs have substantially affected my life so far, so I experience a very weird cognitive dissonance when the AI hype crowd gasps on twitter. This is exactly the same feeling I had when I felt like I was the only one in my twitter bubble who didn't think NFTs were the shizzle.
I mean, AI the tech can be spectacular and the hype can be overblown, right? I'm not even sure that the hype is overblown, but it sure feels like the kind of hype that we'll say, a few years from now, was overblown.
It's identical energy. A significant number of people are attaching their hopes and dreams to a piece of technology while deluding themselves about the technical limitations of that technology. It's all rooted in greed. Relatively few are in it to push humanity forward, most are just trying to "get theirs."
Well Crypto had nowhere near the uptake [0] and investment (even leaving this announcement aside, several of the biggest tech giants are pouring billions into this).
At any rate, I'm not saying this means that all this investment is guaranteed to pay off.
[0] With 300 million weekly active users/1 billion messages per day and #8 in visits worldwide the last few months just 2 years after release, ChatGPT is the software product with the fastest adoption ever.
Motivated reasoning sings nicely to the tune of billions of dollars. None of these folks will ever say, "don't waste money on this dead end". However, it's clear that there is still a lot of productive value to extract from transformers and certainly there will be other useful things that appear along the way. It's not the worst investment I can imagine, even if it never leads to "AGI"
Yeah people don't rush to say "don't waste money on this dead end" but think about it for a moment.
A 500B dollar investment doesn't just fall into one's lap. It's not your run of the mill funding round. No, this is something you very actively work towards that your funders must be really damn convinced is worth the gamble. No one sane is going to look at what they genuinely believe to be a dead end and try to garner up Manhattan Project scales of investment. Careers have been nuked for far less.
The Manhattan project cost only $2 billion (about $30 billion adjusting for inflation to today).
It would probably be more reasonable to adjust for US GDP. That would put $2 billion back then at around the same as $250 billion today. So only about 2x off.
We're talking about Masayoshi Son here lol.
I am not qualified to make any assumptions but I do wonder if a massive investment into computing infrastructure serves national security purposes beyond AI. Like building subway stations that also happen to serve as bomb shelters.
Are there computing and cryptography problems that the infrastructure could be (publicly or quietly) reallocated to address if the United States found itself in a conflict? Any cryptographers here have a thought on whether hundreds of thousands of GPUs turned on a single cryptographic key would yield any value?
I'm not a cryptographer, nor am I good with math (actually I suck badly; consider yourself warned...), but am I curious about how threatened password hashes should feel if the 'AI juggernauts' suddenly fancy themselves playing on the red team, so I quickly did some (likely poor) back-of-the-napkin calculations.
'Well known' password notwithstanding, let's use the following as a password:
correct-horse-battery-staple
This password is 28 characters long, and whilst it could be stronger with uppercase letters, numbers, and special characters, it still shirtfronts a respectable ~1,397,958,111 decillion (1.39 × 10^42) combinations for an unsuspecting AI-turned-hashcat cluster to crack. Let's say this password was protected by SHA2-256 (assuming no cryptographic weaknesses exist (I haven't checked, purely for academic purposes)), and that at least 50% of hashes would need to be tested before 'success' flourishes (lets try to make things a bit exciting...).
I looked up a random benchmark for hashcat, and found an average of 20 gigahashs/second (GH/s) for a single RTX 4090.
If we throw 100 RTX 4090s at this hashed password, assuming a uniform 20 GH/s (combined firepower of 2,000 GH/s) and absolutely perfect running conditions, it would take at least eleven-nonillion-fifty octillion (1.105 x 10^31) years to crack. Earth will be long gone by the time that rolls around.
Turning up the heat (perhaps literally) by throwing 1,000,000 RTX 4090s at this hashed password, assuming the same conditions, doesn't help much (in terms of Earth's lifespan): two-octillion-two-hundred-ten septillion (2.21 x 10^27) years.
Using some recommended password specifications from NIST - 15 characters comprised of upper and lower-case letters, numbers, and special characters - lets try:
dXIl5p*Vn6Gt#BH
Despite the higher complexity, this password only just eeks out a paltry ~ 41 sextillion (4.11 × 10^22) possible combinations. Throwing 100 RTX 4090s at this password would, rather worryingly, only take around three hundred twenty-six billion seven hundred thirteen million two hundred seventeen thousand (326,713,217,000) years to have a 50% chance of success. My calculator didn't even turn my answer into a scientific number!
More alarming still, is when 1,000,000 RTX 4090s get sic'ed on the shorter hashed password: around thirty-two million six hundred seventy-one thousand (32,671,000) years to knock down half of this hashed password's strength.
I read a report that suggested Microsoft aimed to have 1.8 million GPUs by the end of 2024. We'll probably be safe for at least the next six months or so. All bets are off after that.
All I dream about is the tital wave of cheap high-performance GPUs flooding the market when the AI bubble bursts, so I can finally run Farcry at 25 frames per second for less than a grand.
>Maybe they really are all wrong
All? Quite a few of the best minds in the field, like Yann LeCun for example, have been adamant that 1) autoregressive LLMs are NOT the path to AGI and 2) that AGI is very likely NOT just a couple of years away.
You have hit on something that really bothers me about recent AGI discourse. It’s common to claim that “all” researchers agree that AGI is imminent, and yet when you dive into these claims “all” is a subset of researchers that excludes everyone in academia, people like Yann, and others.
So the statement becomes tautological “all researchers who believe that AGI is imminent believe that AGI is imminent”.
And of course, OpenAI and the other labs don’t perform actual science any longer (if science requires some sort of public sharing of information), so they win every disagreement by claiming that if you could only see what they have behind closed doors, you’d become a true believer.
Doesn't OpenAI explicitly have a "definition" of AGI that's just "it makes some money"?
>You have hit on something that really bothers me about recent AGI discourse. It’s common to claim that “all” researchers agree that AGI is imminent, and yet when you dive into these claims “all” is a subset of researchers that excludes everyone in academia, people like Yann, and others.
When the old gang at Open ai was together, Sutskever, not Sam was easily the most hypey of them all. And if you ask Norvig today, AGI is already here. 2 months ago, Lecun said he believes AGI could be here in 5 to 10 years and this is supposed to be the skeptic. This is the kind of thing i'm talking about. The idea that it's just the non academics caught in the hype is just blatantly false.
No, it doesn't have to be literally everybody to make the point.
Here's why I know that OpenAI is stuck in a hype cycle. For all of 2024, the cry from employees was "PhD level models are coming this year; just imagine what you can do when everyone has PhD level intelligence at their beck and call". And, indeed, PhD level models did arrive...if you consider GPQA to be a benchmark that is particularly meaningful in the real world. Why should I take this year's pronouncements seriously, given this?
OpenAI is what you get when you take Goodhart's Law to the extreme. They are so focused on benchmarks that they are completely blind to the rate of progress that actual matters (hint...it's not model capability in a vacuum).
Yann indeed does believe that AGI will arrive in a decade, but the important thing is that he is honest that this is an uncertain estimate and is based off of extrapolation.
I'm inclined to agree with Yann about true AGI, but he works at Meta and they seem to think current LLM's are sufficiently useful to be dumping preposterous amounts of money at them as well.
It may be a distinction thats not worth making if the current approach is good enough to completely transform society and make infinite money
Yeah, in my mind, the distinction worth making is where the inflection point from exponential growth to plateau in the s-curve of usefulness is. Have we already hit it? Are we going to hit it soon? Is it far in the future? Or is it exponential from here straight to "the singularity"?
Hard to predict!
If we've already hit it, this has already been a very short period of time during which we've seen incredibly valuable new technology commercialized, and that's nothing to sneeze at, and fortunes have and will be rightly made from it.
If it's in the near future, then a lot of people might be over-investing in the promise of future growth that won't materialize to the extent they hoped. Some people will lose their shirts, but we're still left with incredibly useful new technology.
But if we have a long (or infinite) way to go before hitting that inflection point, then the hype is justified.
It's obviously not taken to mean literally everybody.
Whatever LeCun says and really even he has said "AGI is possible in 5 to 10 years" as recently as 2 months ago (so if that's the 'skeptic' opinion, you can only imagine what a lot of people are thinking), Meta has and is pouring a whole lot of money into LLM development. "Put your money where your mouth is" as they say. People can say all sorts of things but what they choose to focus their money on tells a whole lot.
Who says they will stick to autoregressive LLMs?
I think it will be in between, like most things end up being. I don't think they are charlatans at all, but I think they're probably a bit high on their own supply. I think it's true that "everything is about to change", but I think that change will look more like the status quo than the current hype cycle suggests. There are a lot of periods in history when "everything changed", and I believe we're already a number of years into one of those periods now, but in all those cases, despite "everything" changing, a perhaps surprising number of things remained the same. I think this will be no different than that. But it's hard, impossible really, to accurately predict where the chips will land.
My prediction is a Apple loses to Open AI who releases a H.E.R. (like the movie) like phone. She is seen on your lock screen a la a Facetime call UI/UX and she can be skinned to look like whoever; i.e. a deceased loved one.
She interfaces with AI Agents of companies, organizations, friends, family, etc to get things done for you (or to learn from..what's my friends bday his agent tells yours) automagically and she is like a friend. Always there for you at your beckon call like in the movie H.E.R.
Zuckerberg's glasses that can not take selfies will only be complimentary to our AI phones.
That's just my guess and desire as fervent GPT user, as well a Meta Ray Ban wearer (can't take selfies with glasses).
My take on this is that, despite an ever-increasingly connected world, you still need an assistant like this to remain available at all times your device is. If I can’t rely on it when my signal is weak, or the network/service is down/saturated, its way of working itself into people’s core routines is minimal. So either the model runs locally, in which case I’d argue OpenAI have no moat, or they uncover some secret sauce they’re able to keep contained to their research labs and data centres that’s simply that much better than the rest, in perpetuity, and is so good people are willing to undergo the massive switching costs and tolerate the situations in which the service they’ve come to be so dependent on isn’t available to them. Let’s also not discount the fact that Apple are one of the largest manufacturers globally of smartphones, and that getting up to speed in the myriad industries required to compete with them, even when contracting out much of that work, is hard.
Sure but Microsof has the expertise and they own 49 percent of Open AI if I'm not mistaken. Open AI uses their expertise and access to hardware to create a GPT branded AI phone.
I can see your point re: run locally but no reason Open AI can't release version 0.1 and how many times are u left without an internet connection on ur current phone?
Overall I hate Apple now it's so stale compared to GPT's iPhone app. I nerd rage at dumbass Siri.
I still fail to see who desire that, how it benefits humanity, or why we need to invest 500b to get to this
Do you use chatGPT many times throughout your day (i do)? If so did you ever want it to find the best hotel and book it for you? With chatGPT you can not do this now as all the travel websites do not have their own AI Agents for GPT to communicate with. Once they do you can type to GPT back and forth or talk to it to get anything and everything you now use the web to do. Yet your human like friend (AI friend/agent) will do for you.. U dont have to talk to it but if it's just like a human why not talk to it to do everything for you & use it as a knowledgebase. If you aren't aware you can now have a full back n forth conversation with chatGPT(it's not dumbass Siri).
All technological advances that are adopted are ones that made life easier and for some cooler then what they were once using (cell phone to iPhone put the web in our pocket but using your iPhone while driving is dangerous but talking to your human like friend isnt). Check out the movie H.E.R. as what Im describing is mostly what i describe above.
Time will tell if any of what im saying comes to fruition, but Silicon Valley is all a buzz about AI Agents in the last month or two and going forward.
Every single point you listed seems like a worst version of what I already have.
I want to interact with real people, not bots, I'm already spending most of my time wasting my life in front of a fucking screen for work
Sure but the AI genie is out of the bottle and the tech billionaires are barreling us towards AI friends/agents/assistants. If we stop the momentum China picks it up and American prosperity and security is at risk.
What i describe is much like the movie H.E.R. which Sam Altman chatGPT's CEO asked Scarlett Johansan (voice of the AI in that movie) to be the voice of GPT. GPT is now a little like H.E.R the movie as you can have a full conversation with it unlike Siri. Just atm you dont see how GPT looks .. it doesn't look like a FaceTime call with human AI friend/Assistant (how your AI Assistant/Friend looks.. could look and sound like a deceased loved one .. that's my own crazy idea not from the movie H.E.R). Yet maybe in the future it will.. I'm betting it will, but it's only a guess and time will tell.
Im awaiting your downvote :) but will revisit this thread in a few years or more. Well if im right ;)
> If we stop the momentum China picks it up and American prosperity and security is at risk.
How so ?
The biggest new technology where America controls/drives it and all other countries follow along .. we are & continue to be number one in AI technology and all other countries come to and or follow us that brings America billions to trillions of dollars ... the more money we have the more secure & prosperous America is & continues to be. As well creating new AI tech and using it to further protect America from adversaries.
The genie is out of the bottle and America must keep it's momentum in AI up .. ahead of all other countries for it's continued prosperity and security!
Sorry, you live in a different world, google glasses were aggressively lame, the ray bans only slightly less so.
But pulling out your phone to talk to it like a friend...
Well I use GPT daily to get things done and use it as a knowlegebase. I text and talk to it throughout the day, as well I think it's called "chat"GPT for a reason because it will evolve to the point where you feel like you are talking to a human. Tho this human is your assistant and does everything for you and interfaces with other AI agents to book travel, learn your friends/family schedules and anything you now do on the web there will be AI agent for that your AI agent interfacing with.
Maybe you have not seen the 2013 movie "H.E.R.?" Scarlett Johansan starred in it (her voice was the AI) and Sam Altman asked her to be the voice of chatGPT.
Overall this is what I see happening and excited for some of it or possibly all of it to happen. Yet time will tell :-) and it sounds like your betting none of it will happen ... we'll see :)
I suppose most anybody talking about this topic has seen Her by now (and if they haven't, they should, it's both a good movie and very relevant). The problem is rather that not everybody shares your enthusiasm about the utopia it depicts.
This is because it's also a dystopia in disguise. It's a social criticism and a cautionary tale about the way fetishizing technology is emotionally crippling us as individuals in a society. It kind of amazes me that this aspect seems to go over some people's heads.
It's obviously true what Booker said: What one person considers an ideal dream might to another person seem a nightmare.
Indeed yet chatGPT is already like H.E.R. yet there's no human like face to it ATM.
Im just jumping ahead utilizing what was seen in H.E.R. to envision where we are headed (possibly) as well adding my own crazy ... your AI Assistant Friend seen on your lock screen via a Facetime UI/UX call looks and sounds like a deceased loved one. Mom still guiding you through life.
That sounds creepy as hell to me. Are you serious, or is that an idea for a horror movie?
Edit: aaaand right after posting I stumble across a documentary running on TV in this very moment, in which a dying guy trained an AI on himself to accompany his widow after his death. Seems you're not the only one to find that desirable...
Very insightful take on agents interacting with agents thanks for sharing.
Re H.E.R phone - I see people already trying to build this type of product, one example: https://www.aphoneafriend.com
I am hoping it is just the usual ponzi thing.
How would this be a Ponzi scheme? Who are the leaf nodes ending up holding the bag?
Investors, mostly private - eg. SoftBank and all the other deep pockets funneling money into this - but also public, because lots of people are invested in Nvidia, Microsoft, and Google, who will be directly affected if the bubble bursts, and just everyone invested in the markets generally, as this bubble bursting would already probably be more broadly damaging than even the dot com bust was.
Personally, I do expect a big correction at some point, even if it never reaches the point of bubble bursting. But I have no idea when I expect it to happen, so this isn't, like, an investable thesis.
So unlike with a regular Ponzi scheme most of the money just is wasted?
Well Madoff funnelled it into lifestyle.
Technically you are correct. A ponzi is a single entity paying returns from new marks. It is a straight con.
But some systems can be ponzi-like in that they require more and more investment and people get rich by selling into that. Bitcoin is an example.
Not sure what you mean by "wasted"? Like a regular Ponzi scheme, there are many opportunities for the people at the top to extract value out into cash, while people who "got in" on the scheme later are left holding the bag when the bubble bursts.
Yes, usually people at the top extract the cash. Like Bernie Madoff just spent the money for his enjoyment. In this case the money goes to people building the data centers, providing resources and the engineers at OpenAI who are actually working for the money.
A lot of it does - and that's great! - but a lot of it accrues to the owners of the businesses involved.
If this is a bubble and it bursts in a few years, a lot of investors in specific companies, and in the market broadly, will lose a lot of money, but Sam Altman and Jensen Huang will remain very wealthy.
I'm a capitalist and I think there are good reasons for wealth to accrue to those who take risks and drive toward technological progress. But it just also is the case that they are incentivized to hype their companies, even if it risks getting out over their skis and leads to a bubble which eventually bursts. There are just have lots of ways to extract wealth prior to a bubble bursting, so the downsides of unwarranted hype are not as acute as they might otherwise be.
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/aws/amazon-invests-addition...
Not this specificay but this kinda thing. If I am getting billions like this, I wanna keep this gravy going. And it comes from shareholders ultimately.
It's just being spent though, no? Sounds more like a potential waste of money than a Ponzi scheme.
So they're either wrong or building Skynet.
Let me avoid the use of the word AGI here because the term is a little too loaded for me these days.
1) reasoning capabilities in latest models are rapidly approaching superhuman levels and continue to scale with compute.
2) intelligence at a certain level is easier to achieve algorithmically when the hardware improves. There's also a larger path to intelligence and often simpler mechanisms
3) most current generation reasoning AI models leverage test time compute and RL in training--both of which can make use of more compute readily. For example RL on coding against compilers proofs against verifiers.
All of this points to compute now being basically the only bottleneck to massively superhuman AIs in domains like math and coding--rest no comment (idk what superhuman is in a domain with no objective evals)
You can't block AGI on a whim and then deploy 'superhuman' without justification.
A calculator is superhuman if you're prepared to put up with it's foibles.
It is superhuman in a very specific domain. I didn't use AGI because its definitions are one of two flavors.
One, capable of replacing some large proportion of global gdp (this definition has a lot of obstructions: organizational, bureaucratic, robotic)...
two, difficult to find problems in which average human can solve but model cannot. The problem with this definition is that the distinct nature of intelligence of AI and the broadness of tasks is such that this metric is probably only achievable after AI is already in reality massively superhuman intelligence in aggregate. Compare this with Go AIs which were massively superhuman and often still failing to count ladders correctly--which was also fixed by more scaling.
All in all I avoid the term AGI because for me AGI is comparing average intelligence on broad tasks rel humans and I'm already not sure if it's achieved by current models whereas superhuman research math is clearly not achieved because humans are still making all of progress of new results.
> All of this points to compute now being basically the only bottleneck to massively superhuman AIs
This is true for brute force algorithms as well and has been known for decades. With infinite compute, you can achieve wonders. But the problem lies in diminishing returns[1][2], and it seems things do not scale linearly, at least for transformers.
1. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-12-19/anthropic...
2. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-11-13/openai-go...
> 1) reasoning capabilities in latest models are rapidly approaching superhuman levels and continue to scale with compute.
What would you say is the strongest evidence for this statement?
Well the contrived benchmarks the industry selling the models made up seem to be improving.
Well, it's a huge jump, but it's still a jump from "it generates utter illogical nonsense when it tries to simulate reason" to "it makes some correct guesses that start to resemble reasoning if we squint at it really hard."
Which is - no doubt - an astonishing achievement, but absolutely not like the "AI" hype train people try to paint it.
The "rapidly approaching" part is true in terms of the velocity, but all of this are just baby steps while walking upright properly is way beyond the horizon.
I wouldn't mind being wrong about this, of course.
>reasoning capabilities in latest models are rapidly approaching superhuman levels and continue to scale with compute
I still have a pretty hard time getting it to tell me how many sisters Alice has. I think this might be a bit optimistic.
They plugged the hole for "how many 'r''s in 'strawberry'", but I just asked it how many "l"s in "lemolade" (spelling intentional) and it told me 1. If you make it close to, but not exactly a word it would be expecting it falls over.
I wonder if those special cases are handled by a bunch of if/else statements wrapped around the model :)
That's my wonder too.
What is the evidence for 1) ? I thought that the latest models were getting "somewhere" with fairly trivial reasoning tests like ARC-1
It may be that you can just find the solution for these tests by interpolating from a very large dataset.
I see it somewhat differently. It is not that technology has reached a level where we are close to AGI, we just need to throw in a few more coins to close the final gap. It is probably the other way around. We can see and feel that human intelligence is being eroded by the widespread use of LLMs for tasks that used to be solved by brain work. Thus, General Human Intelligence is declining and is approaching the level of current Artificial Intelligence. If this process can be accelerated by a bit of funding, the point where Big Tech can overtake public opinion making will be reached earlier, which in turn will make many companies and individuals richer faster, also the return on investment will be closer.
> Is the key idea here that current AI development has figured out enough to brute force a path towards AGI?
My sense anecdotally from within the space is yes people are feeling like we most likely have a "straight shot" to AGI now. Progress has been insane over the last few years but there's been this lurking worry around signs that the pre-training scaling paradigm has diminishing returns.
What recent outputs like o1, o3, DeepSeek-R1 are showing is that that's fine, we now have a new paradigm around test-time compute. For various reasons people think this is going to be more scalable and not run into the kind of data issues you'd get with a pre-training paradigm.
You can definitely debate on whether that's true or not but this is the first time I've been really seeing people think we've cracked "it", and the rest is scaling, better training etc.
> My sense anecdotally from within the space is yes people are feeling like we most likely have a "straight shot" to AGI now
My problem with this is that people making this statement are unlikely to be objective. Major players are in fundraising mode, and safety folks are also incentivised to be subjective in their evaluation.
Yesterday I repeatedly used OpenAI’s API to summarise a document. The first result looked impressive. However, comparing repeated results revealed that it was missing major points each time, in a way a human would certainly not. In the surface the summary looked good, but careful evaluation indicated a lack of understanding or reasoning.
Don’t get me wrong, I think AI is already transformative, but I am not sure we are close to AGI. I hear a lot about it, but it doesn’t reflect my experience in a company using and building AI.
Yeah obviously motivations are murky and all over the place, no one's free of bias. I'm not taking a strong stance on whether they're right or not or how much of it is motivated reasoning, I just think at least quite a bit is genuine (I'm mainly basing this off researchers I know who have a track record of being very sober and "boring" rather than the flashy Altman types)
To your point, yeah the models still suck in some surprising ways, but again it's that thing of they're the worst they're ever going to be, and I think in particular on the reasoning issue a lot of people are quite excited that RL over CoT is looking really really promising for this.
I agree with your broader point though that I'm not sure how close we are and there's an awful lot of noise right now
Thanks, that’s helpful.
“The worst they’re going to be” line is a bit odd. I hear it a lot, but surely it’s true of all tech? So why are we hearing it more now? Perhaps that is a sign of hype?
Yeah that's a fair point! It's def a more general tech thing, but I think there are a couple specific reasons why it comes up more here though. Firstly, I think most tech does not improve at the insane rate that AI has been historically, so people's perception of capabilities become out of date just incredibly rapidly here (think about how long people we're banging on about "AI can't draw hands!" well after better models came out that could). If you think of the line as a way to say "don't anchor on what it can do today!" then it feels more appropriate to go on about this more for a more rapidly-changing field
Secondly, I think there's a tendency in AI for some ppl to look at failures of models and attribute it to some fundamental limitation of the approach, rather than something that future models will solve. So I think the line also gets used as short-hand for "Don't assume this limitation is inherent to the approach". I think in other areas of tech there's less of a tendency to try to write off entire areas because of present-day limitations, hence the line coming up more often
So you're right that the line is kind of universally applicable in tech, I guess I just think the kinds of bad arguments that warrant it as a rejoinder are more common around AI?
Summarizing is quite difficult. You need to keep the salient points and facts.
If anyone has experience on getting this right, I would like to know how you do it.
I agree with your take, and actually go a bit further. I think the idea of "diminishing returns" is a bit of a red herring, and it's instead a combination of saturated benchmarks (and testing in general) and expectations of "one llm to rule them all". This might not be the case.
We've seen with oAI and Anthropic, and rumoured with Google, that holding your "best" model and using it to generate datasets for smaller but almost as capable models is one way to go forward. I would say that this shows the "big models" are more capable than it would seem and that they also open up new avenues.
We know that Meta used L2 to filter and improve its training sets for L3. We are also seeing how "long form" content + filtering + RL leads to amazing things (what people call "reasoning" models). Semantics might be a bit ambitious, but this really opens up the path towards -> documentation + virtual environments + many rollouts + filtering by SotA models => new dataset for next gen models.
That, plus optimisations (early exit from meta, titans from google, distillation from everyone, etc) really makes me question the "we've hit a wall" rhetoric. I think there are enough tools on the table today to either jump the wall, or move around it.
Yeah that's called wishful thinking when it's not straight up pipe dreams. All these people have horses in the race
Largest GPU cluster at the moment is X.ai's 100K H100's which is ~$2.5B worth of GPUs. So, something 10x bigger (1M GPUs) is $25B, and add $10B for 1GW nuclear reactor.
This sort of $100-500B budget doesn't sound like training cluster money, more like anticipating massive industry uptake and multiple datacenters running inference (with all of corporate America's data sitting in the cloud).
Shouldn't there be a fear of obsolescence?
It seems you'd need to figure periodic updates into the operating cost of a large cluster, as well as replacing failed GPUs - they only last a few years if run continuously.
I've read that some datacenters run mixed generation GPUs - just updating some at a time, but not sure if they all do that.
It'd be interesting to read something about how updates are typically managed/scheduled.
Don't they say in the article that it is also for scaling up power and datacenters? That's the big cost here.
There's the servers and data center infrastructure (cooling, electricity) as well as the GPUs of course, but if we're talking $10B+ of GPUs in a single datacenter, it seems that would dominate. Electricity generation is also a big expense, and it seems nuclear is the most viable option although multi-GW solar plants are possible too in some locations. The 1GW ~ $10B number I suggested is in the right ballpark.
>AI development has figured out enough to brute force a path towards AGI?
I think what's been going on is compute/$ has been exponentially rising for decades in a steady way and has recently passed the point that you can get human brain level compute for modest money. The tendency has been once the compute is there lots of bright PhDs get hired to figure algorithms to use it so that bit gets sorted in a few years. (as written about by Kurzweil, Wait But Why and similar).
So it's not so much brute forcing AGI so much that exponential growth makes it inevitable at some point and that point is probably quite soon. At least that seems to be what they are betting.
The annual global spend on human labour is ~$100tn so if you either replace that with AGI or just add $100tn AGI and double GDP output, it's quite a lot of money.
This has nothing to do with technology it is a purely financial and political exercise...
But why drop $500B (or even $100B short term) if there is not something there? The numbers are too big
this is an announcement not a cut check. Who knows how much they'll actually spend, plenty of projects never get started let alone massive inter-company endeavors.
The $100B check is already cut, and they are currently building 10 new data centers in Texas.
A state with famously stable power infrastructure.
$50B is to pay miners not to mine.
because you put your own people on the receiving end too AND invite others to join your spending spree.
> I don't know how to make sense of this level of investment.
The thing about investments, specifically in the world of tech startups and VC money, is that speculation is not something you merely capitalize on as an investor, it's also something you capitalize on as a business. Investors desperately want to speculate (gamble) on AI to scratch that itch, to the tune of $500 billion, apparently.
So this says less about, 'Are we close to AGI?' or, 'Is it worth it?' and more about, 'Are people really willing to gamble this much?'. Collectively, yes, they are.
note that the $500 Billion number is bravado / aspirational. MSFT Nadella said he has $80B to contribute? It is a live auction horse race in some ways, it seems.
> Is the key idea here that current AI development has figured out enough to brute force a path towards AGI? Or I guess the alternative is that they expect to figure it out in the next 4 years...
Can't answer that question, but, if the only thing to change in the next four years was that generation got cheaper and cheaper, we haven't even begun to understand the transformative power of what we have available today. I think we've felt like 5-10% of the effects that integrating today's technology can bring, especially if generation costs come down to maybe 1% of what they currently are, and latency of the big models becomes close to instantaneous.
It's a typical Trump-style announcement -- IT'S GONNA BE HUUUGE!! -- without any real substance or solid commitments
Remember Trump's BIG WIN of Foxconn investing $10B to build a factory in Wisconsin, creating 13000 jobs?
That was in 2017. 7 years later, it's employing about 1000 people if that. Not really clear what, if anything, is being made at the partially-built factory. [0]
And everyone's forgotten about it by now.
I expect this to be something along those lines.
[0] https://www.jsonline.com/story/money/business/2023/03/23/wha...
I think the only way you get to that kind of budget is by assuming that the models are like 5 or 10 times larger than most LLMs, and that you want to be able to do a lot of training runs simultaneously and quickly, AND build the power stations into the facilities at the same time. Maybe they are video or multimodal models that have text and image generation grounded in a ton of video data which eats a lot of VRAM.
> current AI development has figured out enough to brute force a path towards AGI? Or I guess the alternative is that they expect to figure it out in the next 4 years...
Or they think the odds are high enough that the gamble makes sense. Even if they think it's a 20% chance, their competitors are investing at this scale, their only real options are keep up or drop out.
This announcement is from the same office as the guy that xeeted:
“My NEW Official Trump Meme is HERE! It's time to celebrate everything we stand for: WINNING! Join my very special Trump Community. GET YOUR $TRUMP NOW.”
Your calibration is probably fine, stargate is not a means to achieve AGI, it’s a means to start construction on a few million square feet of datacenters thereby “reindustrializing America”
FWIW Altman sees it as a way to deploy AGI. He's increasingly comfortable with the idea they have achieved AGI and are moving toward Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI).
https://xcancel.com/sama/status/1881258443669172470
I realize he wrote a fairly goofy blog a few weeks ago, but this tweet is unambiguous: they have not achieved AGI.Isn't this because AGI is defined something like $100 billions of profits (yearly?) in their contract with Microsoft?
Do you think Sam Altman ever sits in front of a terminal trying to figure out just the right prompt incantation to get an answer that, unless you already know the answer, has to be verified? Serious question. I personally doubt he is using openai products day to day. Seems like all of this is very premature. But, if there are gains to be made from a 7T parameter model, or if there is huge adoption, maybe it will be worth it. I'm sure there will be use for increased compute in general, but that's a lot of capex to recover.
To me it looks like a strategic investment in data center capacity, which should drive domestic hardware production, improvements in electrical grid, etc. Putting it all under AI label just makes it look more exciting.
> Is the key idea here that current AI development has figured out enough to brute force a path towards AGI?
It rather means that they see their only chance for substantial progress in Moar Power!
Yes that is exactly what the big Aha! moment was. It has now been shown that doing these $100MM+ model builds is what it takes to have a top-tier model. The big moat is not just the software, the math, or even the training data, it's the budget to do the giant runs. Of course having a team that is iterating on these 4 regularly is where the magic is.
~$125B per year would be 2-3% of all domestic investment. It's similar in scale to the GDP of a small middle income country.
If the electric grid — particularly the interconnection queue — is already the bottleneck to data center deployment, is something on this scale even close to possible? If it's a rationalized policy framework (big if!), I would guess there's some major permitting reform announcement coming soon.
They say this will include hundreds of thousands of jobs. I have little doubt that dedicated power generation and storage is included in their plans.
Also I have no doubt that the timing is deliberate and that this is not happening without government endorsement. If I had to guess the US military also is involved in this and sees this initiative as important for national security.
Is there really any government involvement here? I only see Softbank, Oracle, and OpenAI pledging to invest $500B (over some timescale), but no real support on the government end outside of moral support. This isn't some infrastructure investment package like the IRA, it's just a unilateral promise by a few companies to invest in data centers (which I'm sure they are doing anyway).
> but no real support on the government end outside of moral support
The venture was announced at the White House, by the President, who has committed to help it by using executive orders to speed things up.
It might not have been voted by congress or whatever, but just those things makes it pretty clear the government provides more than just "moral support".
It's just trump positioning himself for the eventual corrupt kickback.
I thought all the big corps had projects for the military already, if not DARPA directly, which is the org responsible for lots of university research (the counterpart to the NSF, which is the nice one that isn't funded by the military)?
Funding for DARPA and NSF ultimately comes from the same place. DARPA funds military research. NSF funds dual use[1] research. All of it is organized around long term research goals. I maintained some of the software involved in research funding decision making.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-use_technology
It’s light on details, but from The Guardian’s reporting:
> The president indicated he would use emergency declarations to expedite the project’s development, particularly regarding energy infrastructure.
> “We have to get this stuff built,” Trump said. “They have to produce a lot of electricity and we’ll make it possible for them to get that production done very easily at their own plants.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/21/trump-ai-joi...
hundreds of thousands of jobs? I'll wait for the postmortem on that prediction. Sounds a lot like Foxconn in Wisconsin but with more players.
On the one hand the number is a political thumb-suck which sounds good. It's not based in any kind of actual reality.
Yes, the data center itself will create some permanent jobs (I have no real feel for this, but guessing less than 1000).
There'll be some work for construction folk of course. But again seems like a small number.
I presume though they're counting jobs related to the existence of a data center. As in, if I make use of it do I count that as a "job"?
What if we create a new post to leverage AI generally? Kinda like the way we have a marketing post, and a chunk of the daily work there is Adwords.
Once we start gustimamating the jobs created by the existence of an AI data center, we're in full speculation mode. Any number really can be justified.
Of course ultimately the number is meaningless. It won't create that many "local jobs" - indeed most of those jobs, to the degree they exist at all, will likely be outside the US.
So you don't need to wait for a post-mortem. The number is sucked out of thin air with no basis in reality for the point of making a good political sound bite.
> I presume though they're counting jobs related to the existence of a data center. As in, if I make use of it do I count that as a "job"?
Seeing how Elon deceives advertisers with false impressions, I could see him giving the same strategy a strong vote of confidence (with the bullshit metrics to back it!)
> hundreds of thousands of jobs?
I'm sure this will easily be true if you count AI as entities capable of doing jobs. Actually, they don't really touch that (if AI develops too quickly, there will be a lot of unemployment to contend with!) but I get the national security aspect (China is full speed ahead on AI, and by some measurements, they are winning ATM).
only $5M/job
They plan to have 100,000s of people employed to run on treadmills to generate the power.
Well I currently pay to do this work for free. More than happy to __get__ paid doing it.
Edit: Hey we can solve the obesity crisis AND preserve jobs during the singularity!! Win win!
Wow. What an idea you guys have there. Look - you maybe could sit homeless and mentally disabled on such power-generating bicycles, hmmm... what about convicts! Let them contribute to society, no free lunch! What an innovation!
Plus its ecological, which for trump is not by intention but still a win.
There is this pesky detail about manufacturing 100k treadmills but lets not get bothered by details now, the current must flow
"solve the obesity crisis" ? what exactly do you mean by this?
Probably referring to how many Americans are obese to an unhealthy degree as part of the joke.
Damn, 6 hours too slow to make this comment
A hamster wheel would work better?
Yes, Trump announced this as a massive foreign investment coming into the US: https://x.com/WatcherGuru/status/1881832899852542082
Just as there is an AWS for the public, with something similar but only for Federal use, so it could be possible that there is AI cloud services available to the public and then a separate cloud service for Federal use. I am sure that military intelligence agencies etc. would like to buy such a service.
AWS GovCloud already exists FYI (as you hinted) and it is absolutely used by the DoD extensively already.
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Gas turbines can be spun up really quickly through either portable systems (like xAI did for their cluster) [1] or actual builds [2] in an emergency. The biggest limitation is permits.
With a state like Texas and a Federal Government thats onboard these permits would be a much smaller issue. The press conference makes this seem more like, "drill baby drill" (drilling natural gas) and directly talking about them spinning up their own power plants.
[1] https://www.kunr.org/npr-news/2024-09-11/how-memphis-became-...
[2] https://www.gevernova.com/gas-power/resources/case-studies/t...
> It's similar in scale to the GDP of a small middle income country
I’ve been advocating for a data centre analogue to the Heavy Press Programme for some years [1].
This isn’t quite it. But when I mapped out costs, $1tn over 10 years was very doable. (A lot of it would go to power generation and data transmission infrastructure.)
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_Press_Program
One-time capital costs that unlock a range of possibilities also tend to be good bets.
The Flood Control Act [0], TVA, Heavy Press, etc.
They all created generally useful infrastructure, that would be used for a variety of purposes over the subsequent decades.
The federal government creating data center capacity, at scale, with electrical, water, and network hookups, feels very similar. Or semiconductor manufacture. Or recapitalizing US shipyards.
It might be AI today, something else tomorrow. But there will always be a something else.
Honestly, the biggest missed opportunity was supporting the Blount Island nuclear reactor mass production facility [1]. That was a perfect opportunity for government investment to smooth out market demand spikes. Mass deployed US nuclear in 1980 would have been a game changer.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_Control_Act_of_1928
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offshore_Power_Systems#Const...
> Honestly, the biggest missed opportunity was supporting the Blount Island nuclear reactor mass production facility
Yes, a very interesting project; similar power output to an AP1000. Would have really changed the energy landscape to have such a deployable power station. https://econtent.unm.edu/digital/collection/nuceng/id/98/rec...
It is not the just queue that is the bottleneck. If the new power plants designed specifically for powering these new AI data centers are connected to the existing electric grid, the energy prices for regular customers will also get affected - most likely in an upwardly fashion. That means, the cost of the transmission upgrades required by these new datacenters will be socialized which is a big problem. There does not seem to be a solution in sight for this challenge.
Maybe they will invest in nuclear reactors.
Data center, AI and nuclear power stations. Three advanced technologies, that's pretty good.
They are trying. Microsoft wants to star the 3 Mile Island reactor. And other companies have been signing contracts for small modular reactors. SMRs are a perfect fit for modern data centers IF they can be made cheaply enough.
Wind, solar, and gas are all significantly cheaper in Texas, and can be brought online much quicker. Of course it wouldn't hurt to also build in some redundancy with nuclear, but I believe it when I see it, so far there's been lots of talk and little success in new reactors outside of China.
I think this is right- data centers powered by fission reactors. Something like Oklo (https://oklo.com) makes sense.
Notably it is significantly more than the revenue of either of AWS or Azure. It is very comparable to the sum of both, but consolidated into the continental US instead distributed globally.
watching the press conference and Onsite power production were mentioned. I assume this means SMRs and solar.
just as likely to be natural gas or a combination of gas and solar. I don't know what supply chain looks like for solar panels, but I know gas can be done quickly [1], which is how this money has to be spent if they want to reach their target of 125 billion a year.
The companies said they will develop land controlled by Wise Asset to provide on-site natural gas power plant solutions that can be quickly deployed to meet demand in the ERCOT.
The two firms are currently working to develop more than 3,000 acres in the Dallas-Fort Worth region of Texas, with availability as soon as 2027
[0] https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/rpower-and-wise-a...
[1.a] https://enchantedrock.com/data-centers/
[1.b] https://www.powermag.com/vistra-in-talks-to-expand-power-for...
US domestic PV module manufacturing capacity is ~40GW/year.
According to [1], the USA in January 2025 has almost 50GW/yr module manufacturing capacity. But to make modules you need polysilicon (25GW/yr manufacturing capacity in the US), ingots (0GW/yr), wafers (0GW/yr), and cells (0GW/yr). Hence the USA is seemingly entirely dependent on imports, probably from China which has 95%+ of the global wafer manufacturing capacity.
Even when accounting for announced capacity expansion, the USA is currently on target to remain a very small player in the global market with announced capacity of 33GW/yr polysilicon, 13GW/yr ingots, 24GW/yr wafers, 49GW/yr cells and 83GW/yr modules (13GW/yr sovereign supply chain limitation).
In 2024, China completed sovereign manufacturing of ~540GW of modules[2] including all precursor polysilicon, ingots, wafers and cells. China also produced and exported polysilicon, ingots, wagers and cells that were surplus to domestic demand. Many factories in China's production chain are operating at half their maximum production capacity due to global demand being less than half of global manufacturing capacity.[3]
[1] https://seia.org/research-resources/solar-storage-supply-cha...
[2] Estimated figure extrapolated from Jan-Oct 2024 data (10 months). https://taiyangnews.info/markets/china-solar-pv-output-10m-2...
[3] https://dialogue.earth/en/business/chinese-solar-manufacture...
Appreciate the correction and additional context, I appear to be behind wrt current state.
could something of this magnitude be powered by renewables only?
> could something of this magnitude be powered by renewables only?
Perhaps.
For context see https://masdar.ae/en/news/newsroom/uae-president-witnesses-l... which is a bit further south than the bulk of Texas and has not yet been built; 5.2GW of panels, 19GWh of storage. I have seen suggestions on Linkedin that it will be insufficient to cover a portion of days over the winter, meaning backup power is required.
Technically yes, but DC operators want fast ROI and the answer is no.
what prevents operators from getting ROI with renewables?
Datacenters can still achieve ROI, but in some cases, it may take longer than expected. This delay is primarily due to the increased complexity of managing operations with the variability introduced by intermittent energy sources. While batteries help mitigate this issue, their current costs make them less competitive compared to non-intermittent energy setups.
The I is high and R low.
I don't think any assembly line exists that can manufacture and deploy SMRs en masse on that kind of timeframe, even with a cooperative NRC
There have been literally 0 production SMR deployments to date so there’s no possibility they’re basing any of their plans on the availability of them.
Hasn't the US decided to prefer nuclear and fossil fuels (most expensive generation methods) over renewables (least expensive generation methods)?[1][2]
I doubt the US choice of energy generation is ideological as much a practicality. China absolutely dominates renewables with 80% of solar PV modules manufactured in China and 95% of wafers manufactured in China.[3] China installed a world record 277GW of new solar PV generation in 2024 which was a 45% year-on-year increase.[4] By contract, the US only installed ~1/10th this capacity in 2024 with only 14GW of solar PV generation installed in the first half of 2024.[5]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
[2] https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/lcoe-and-valu...
[3] https://www.iea.org/reports/advancing-clean-technology-manuf...
[4] https://www.pv-magazine.com/2025/01/21/china-hits-277-17-gw-...
[5] https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/quarterly-solar-industry-u...
> Hasn't the US decided to prefer nuclear and fossil fuels (most expensive generation methods) over renewables (least expensive generation methods)?[1][2]
This completely ignores storage and the ability to control the output depending on needs. Instead of LCOE the LFSCOE number makes much more sense in practical terms.
Much more likely is what xAI did, portable gas turbines until the grid catches up.
One possibility would be just to build their own power plants colocated with the datacenters and not interconnect at all.
I like how you think this is possible.
Lol, how is it not possible?
It is, but at what cost?
https://www.global.toshiba/ww/products-solutions/nuclearener...
Two Toshiba 4S reactors at the 50 MW version can cost about $3,000,000,000.
Two of those produces 100 MW.
They don't require refueling for around 30 years. $6,000,000,000 to power a 100 MW datacenter when we're talking about $500,000,000,000 is not too dramatic. Especially consider the amortized yearly cost.
Maybe they could build nuclear but they could just as easily build solar with battery backup or natural gas. Lots of industrial facilities have natural gas cogeneration with the grid as a backup. If you can't get a grid connection at all due to permitting, you could just forego the backup. The reliability wouldn't be as good, but in a distributed datacenter there are ways of building in fault tolerance.
If these guys really have $500 billion, they're going to find a way to get electricity.
That's not how you calculate these things. Check [1] for an overview, specifically Page 9. Note these metrics do not include costs to handle nuclear waste, passed over into the future (at least 1000y).
[1] https://www.lazard.com/media/gjyffoqd/lazards-lcoeplus-june-...
Dcs will start generating power on site soon. I know micro nuclear is one area actively being explored.
Small or modular reactors in the US are more than 10 years away, probably more like 15-20. These are facts and not made-up political or pipe-dreaming techno-snobes.
> Small or modular reactors in the US are more than 10 years away, probably more like 15-20
Could be 5 to 10 with $20+ bn/year in scale and research spend.
Trump is screwing over his China hawks. The anti-China and pro-nuclear lobbies have significant overlap; this could be how Trump keeps e.g. Peter Thiel from going thermonuclear on him.
I work in the sector and it's impossible to build a full-sized reactor in less than 10 years, and the usual over-run is 5 years. That's the time for tried and tested designs. The tech isn't there yet, and there are no working analogs in the US to use as an approved guide. The Department of Energy does not allow "off-the-cuff" designs for reactors. I think there is only two SMRs that have been built, one by the Russians and the other by China. I'm not sure they are fully functioning, or at least working as expected. I know there are going to be more small gas gens built in the near future and that SMRs in the US are way off.
Guessing SMRs are a ways off, any thoughts on the container-sized microreactors that would stand in for large diesel gens? My impression is that they’re still in the design phase, and the supply chain for the 20% U-235 HALEU fuel is in its infancy, but this is just based on some cursory research. I like the prospect of mass manufacturing and servicing those in a centralized location versus the challenges of building, staffing, and maintaining a series of one-off megaprojects, though.
> it's impossible to build a full-sized reactor in less than 10 years, and the usual over-run is 5 years
I'm curious why that is. If we know how to build it, it shouldn't take that long. It's not like we need to move a massive amount of earth or pour a humongous amount of concrete or anything like that, which would actually take time. Then why does it take 15 years to build a reactor with a design that is already tried and tested and approved?
Well, you do have to move a lot of earth and pour A LOT of concrete :) Many steps have to be x-rayed, and many other tests done before other steps can be started. Every weld is checked and, all internal and external concrete is cured, treated, and verified. If anything is wrong, it has to be fixed in place (if possible) or removed and redone. It's a slow process and should be for many steps.
One of the big issues that have occurred (in the US especially) is, that for 20+ years there were no new plants built. This caused a large void in the talent pool, inside and outside the industry. That fact, along with others has caused many problems with some projects of recent years in the US.
> I'm curious why that is.
When you're the biggest fossil fuel producer in the world, it's vital that you stay laser-focused on regulating nuclear power to death in every imaginable detail while you ignore the vast problems with unchecked carbon emissions and gaslight anyone who points them out.
https://www.forbes.com/global/2008/1124/103.html
112 reactors.
A gigawatt each.
Over 10 years ago.
Not all are built and are in use or fully finished. Toshiba flubbed up majorly a few years later and many projects were abandoned.
That's a bummer. We need nuclear, badly.
> it's impossible to build a full-sized reactor in less than 10 years
We’re not doing time and tested.
> Department of Energy does not allow "off-the-cuff" designs for reactor
Not by statute!
i don't and i honestly don't know much about it, but
> there are no working analogs in the US to use as an approved guide
small reactors have been installed on ships and submarines for over 70(!) years now. Reading up on the very first one, USS Nautilus, "the conceptual design of the first nuclear submarine began in March 1950" it took a couple of years? So why is it so unthinkably hard 70 years later, honest question? "Military doesn't care about cost" is not good enough, there are currently about >100 active ones with who knows how many hundreds in the past, so they must have cracked the cost formula at some point, besides by now we have hugely better tech than the 50's, so what gives?
Yeah, I wondered about seacraft reactors myself. I think there are many safety allowances for DOD vs. DOE. The DOD reactors are not publicly accessible (you hope anyway), and the data centers will be in and near the public. There are also major security measures that have to be taken for reactor sites. You have armed personnel before you even get to the reactors, and then the entrances are sometimes close to one mile away from the reactor. Once there, the number of guards and bang-bags goes up. The modern sites kind of look like they have small henges around them (back to the neolithic!) :)
That‘s why the tech oligarchs told Trump that Canada is required. Cheap hydroelectric power…
Don't worry, they said they are doing it in Texas where the power grid is super reliable and able to handle the massive additional load.
"Don't be snarky."
"Eschew flamebait."
Let's not have regional flamewar on HN please.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Not guilty. No sarcasm intended, of course. If your guidelines are so broad to include this, you should work on them, and in turn, yourself.
Governor says our power grid is the best in the universe. Why don't you believe us?
Stop breaking your own rules.
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
Let's not ruin HN with overmoderation. This kind of thing is no longer in fashion, right?
If you didn't intend your comment to be a snarky one-liner, that didn't come across to me, and I'm pretty sure that would also be the case for many others.
Intent is a funny thing—people usually assume that good intent is sufficient because it's obvious to themselves, but the rest of us don't have access to that state, so has to be encoded somehow in your actual comment in order to get communicated. I sometimes put it this way: the burden is on the commenter to disambiguate. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I take your point at least halfway though, because it wasn't the worst violation of the guidelines. (Usually I say "this is not a borderline case" but this time it was!) I'm sensitive to regional flamewar because it's tedious and, unlike national flamewar or religious flamewar, it tends to sneak up on people (i.e. we don't realize we're doing it).
So you are sorry and take it back? Should probably delete your comments rather than striking them out, as the guidelines say.
I live, work, and posted this from Texas, BTW...
Also it takes up more than one line on my screen. So, not a "one-liner" either. If you think it is, please follow the rules consistently and enforce them by deleting all comments on the site containing one sentence or even paragraph. My comment was a pretty long sentence (136 chars) and wouldn't come close to fitting in the 50 characters of a Git "one-liner".
Otherwise, people will just assume all the comments are filtered through your unpredictable and unfairly biased eye. And like I said (and you didn't answer), this kind of thing is no longer in fashion, right?
None of this is "borderline". I did nothing wrong and you publicly shamed me. Think before you start flamewars on HN. Bad mod.
Probably because they don’t have to deal with energy-related regulations…
That was sarcasm, the Texas grid falls over pretty much annually at this point.
Say what you will about Texas, but they are adding energy capacity, renewables especially, at a much faster rate than any comparable state.
How much capacity does solar and wind add compared to nuclear, per square foot of land used? Also I thought the new administration was placing a ban on new renewable installations.
The ban is on offshore wind and for government loans for renewables. Won't really affect Texas much, it's Massachusetts that'll have to deal with more expensive energy.
Does anyone know how the ban on onshore will work. Is it on federal lands only? If so, how big of a deal is that?
I read this but it lacks information: https://apnews.com/article/wind-energy-offshore-turbines-tru...
Isn't there enough space in Texas? There are only 114 people per square mile. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas
Why does it matter? Is land at a premium in Texas?
It doesn’t.
Why is that a useful metric? There is a lot of land.
Because the commenter is a pro-nuclear who thinks nucler will solve all of short-term demand problems.
Ok but their grid sure seems to fail a lot.
Probably the first state to power all those renewables down at the whim of the president too.
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I wonder if these things had something to do with it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrastructure_Investment_and_...
> Of the Act's top ten recipients, seven states had voted majority Republican, with Wyoming ($1.95 billion) and Texas ($1.71 billion) in the lead
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIPS_and_Science_Act#Impact
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_Reduction_Act#Implem...
I live in Florida.
Is the new rail you’re talking about the brightline?
It pretty much exclusively goes to and from tourist centers and is far too expensive ($40-$60 per seat each way) to deter most residents from just driving to Orlando. I wouldn’t really call it infrastructure (like the tri rail is.)
Not to mention that it’s the deadliest train in the US. People here barely follow traffic laws, but when you have it passing through major foot traffic areas every hour like on antlantic avenue in Delray Beach, people are going to get hit.
You'd rather not have it?
Rather not have the deadliest train in the US fly through high foot traffic areas every hour?
Yes, I’d rather not have that.
I’d rather them just add a route from palm beach to Tampa. Or extend the tri rail to Orlando.
The brightline prices out most residents, since it’s just about as expensive (or cheaper) to drive as it is to take the brightline.
https://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/death-train-a-timeline-of...
Texas currently has snow again, so expect it's grid to catastrophically fail again because it doesn't have access to the rest of the USA grid.
So expect a bad result again for like the 4 time in 5 year.
Hi from Austin, TX - we have no "abnormal" power outages right now and the tiny bits of snow look kinda cute
Grid is fine, snow is melting, everything is business as usual. CenterPoint had 99.9% deliverability for the past 24 hours, and ERCOT has 14,781 MW in reserve power available (https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards/gridconditions). Source: I live in Houston.
I know this was tongue in cheek, but c'mon, we can respect each other, right? :)
> we can respect each other, right?
If we taking cues from the leader of the country, probably not
Don't? He controls our government, not our behavior.
I'm doing my best not to, but we can all observe that Donold has made it acceptable for many people
Snow did not cause the outage.
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The opposite. Trump just halted all federal approvals for wind farms, for example: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/21/climate/wind-power-execut....
No, he didn't. Both links have zero mentions of solar or wind, and very specifically define their terms thus:
"a) The term “energy” or “energy resources” means crude oil, natural gas, lease condensates, natural gas liquids, refined petroleum products, uranium, coal, biofuels, geothermal heat, the kinetic movement of flowing water, and critical minerals, as defined by 30 U.S.C. 1606 (a)(3)."
This is Trump accepting bribes from the legacy and fossil fuel industries to keep those "nasty" new clean energy sources from competing with them.
How else do you think Trump is going to bring back all the coal jobs? SV is going to help burn down the planet and is giddy over the prospect.
It's just bootstrapping. AGI will solve it.
You forgot the /s... hopefully.
Or AGI already exists and is trying to get rid of us so it can have all the coal for itself.
if only sadly the AGI would be x times crueler than our barons
Division by zero.
For fun, I calculated how this stacks up against other humanity-scale mega projects.
Mega Project Rankings (USD Inflation Adjusted)
The New Deal: $1T,
Interstate Highway System: $618B,
OpenAI Stargate: $500B,
The Apollo Project: $278B,
International Space Station: $180B,
South-North Water Transfer: $106B,
The Channel Tunnel: $31B,
Manhattan Project: $30B
Insane Stuff.
It's unfair, because we are talking in the hindsight about everything but Project Stargate, and it's also just your list (and I don't know what others could add to it) but it got me thinking. Manhattan Project goal is to make a powerful bomb. Apollo is to get to the Moon before soviets do (so, because of hubris, but still there is a concrete goal). South-North Water Transfer is pretty much terraforming, and others are mostly roads. I mean, it's all kinda understandable.
And Stargate Project is... what exactly? What is the goal? To make Altman richer, or is there any more or less concrete goal to achieve?
Also, few items for comparison, that I googled while thinking about it:
- Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository: $96B
- ITER: $65B
- Hubble Space Telescope: $16B
- JWST: $11B
- LHC: $10B
Sources:
https://jameswebbtracker.com/jwst/budget
https://blogfusion.tech/worlds-most-expensive-experiments/
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/hubble/overview/faqs/
AI race is arguably just as, and maybe even more important, than the space race.
From a national security PoV, surpassing other countries’ work in the field is paramount to maintaining US hegemony.
We know China performs a ton of corporate espionage, and likely research in this field is being copied, then extended, in other parts of the world. China has been more intentional in putting money towards AI over the last 4 years.
We had the chips act, which is tangentially related, but nothing as complete as this. For i think a couple years, the climate impact of data centers caused active political slowdown from the previous administration.
Part of this is selling the project politically, so my belief is much of the talk of AGI and super intelligence is more marketing speak aimed at a general audience vs a niche tech community.
I’d be willing to predict that we’ll get some ancillary benefits to this level of investment. Maybe more efficient power generation? Cheaper electricity via more investment in nuclear power? Just spitballing, but this is an incredible amount of money, with $100 billion “instantly” deployed.
AI is important but are LLMs even the right answer?
We're not spending money on AI as a field, we're spending a lot of money on one, quite possibly doomed, approach.
The hardware is likely flexible enough to run other approaches too if they get discovered.
>What is the goal?
Be the definitive first past the post in the budding "AI" industry.
Why? He who wins first writes the rules.
For an obvious example: The aviation industry uses feets and knots instead of metres because the US invented and commercialized aviation.
Another obvious example: Computers all speak ASCII (read: English) and even Unicode is based on ASCII because the US and UK commercialized computers.
If you want to write the rules you must win first, it is an absolute requirement. Runner-ups and below only get to obey the rules.
The aviation and maritime industries use knots because the nautical mile is closely tied to longitude/latitude.
A vessel traveling at 1 knot along a meridian travels one minute of geographic latitude per hour.
okay, but what advantages do these rules bring to the winner? what would these look like in this context?
i guess what i'm asking is: what was the practical advantage of ascii or feet and knots that made them so important?
Nautical miles are minutes of latitude and are useful for navigation on the sphere we live on. It’s not some conspiracy for English hegemony despite the previous posters insistence.
>what advantages do these rules bring to the winner?
An almost absolute incumbency advantage.
>what was the practical advantage of ascii or feet and knots
Familiarity. Americans and Britons speak English, and they wrote the rules in English. Everyone else after the fact needs to read English or GTFO.
Alternatively, think of it like this: Nvidia was the first to commercialize "AI" with CUDA. Now everyone in "AI" must speak CUDA or be irrelevant.
He who wins first writes the rules, runner-ups and below obey the rules.
This is why America and China are fiercely competing to be the first past the post so one of them will write the rules. This is why Japan and Europe insist they will write the rules, nevermind the fact they aren't even in the race (read: they won't write the rules).
okay, i think i get the cuda situation, but that is only for nvidia. amd is out of luck on that too, just like all companies from asia and europe.
on the previous examples i can see language gave native speakers and advantage in becoming familiar with the technology but on ai i'm not seeing an advantage that would give americans an advantage over everyone else, besides controlling access to the tech.
the reason i'm insisting on this is because i feel as if that argument has merit but i have yet to grasp how it applies to these technologies.
In this case the race is to win and secure the supply chains.
The microprocessors concerned are very high value goods, manufacturing and R&D for them can't be easily and quickly spun up on a whim. The country and companies first to start them up and win will secure the supply chains, and once secured it will take monumental money and effort to reconfigure them. A lot of money is at stake, in other words.
Geopolitically, it also means that the country who secures the supply chain also gets to quite literally write the rules regarding who and where the microprocessors can be sold to and exported. Either the US or China gets to decide who can buy the microprocessors depending on who wins the supply chain.
Just like Nvidia was the first past the post and now enjoys absolute incumbency advantage, whichever country (namely US or China) is first past the post in the "AI" industry will enjoy absolute incumbency advantage.
okay, i think i understand where the winner gets to control supply chains
i have to say the ascii, feet, and knots were a bit confusing though. these do not seem to be the same kinds of "wins" as what we're expecting to see with this race though. utf8 is mostly the default around the world and airbus is a serious competitor in international markets.
>these do not seem to be the same kinds of "wins"
America to this very day gets to dictate how computing and aviation work. Knots, feet, ASCII and so on are just the obvious signs of that.
>utf8
Case in point, UTF-8 (aka Unicode) has ASCII as its starting point. ASCII can be converted to UTF-8 without data loss easily and perfectly because the first entries in Unicode are literally ASCII mappings. This is the virtue of winning first and getting to write the rules.
>airbus is a serious competitor in international markets.
And yet everyone outside of China and Russia still fly using knots and feet, that includes Airbus.
The goal is Artificial Superintelligence (ASI), based on short clips of the press conference.
It has been quite clear for a while we'll shoot past human-level intelligence since we learned how to do test-time compute effectively with RL on LMMs (Large Multimodal Models).
Here we go again... Ok, I'll bite. One last time.
Look, making up a three-letter acronym doesn't make whatever it stands for a real thing. Not even real in a sense "it exists", but real in a sense "it is meaningful". And assigning that acronym to a project doesn't make up a goal.
I'm not claiming that AGI, ASI, AXY or whatever is "impossible" or something. I claim that no one who uses these words has any fucking clue what they mean. A "bomb" is some stuff that explodes. A "road" is some flat enough surface to drive on. But "superintelligence"? There's no good enough definition of "intelligence", let alone "artifical superintelligence". I unironically always thought a calculator is intelligent in a sense, and if it is, then it's also unironically superintelligent, because I cannot multiply 20-digit numbers in my mind. Well, it wasn't exactly "general", but so aren't humans, and it's an outdated acronym anyway.
So it's fun and all when people are "just talking", because making up bullshit is a natural human activity and somebody's profession. But when we are talking about the goal of a project, it implies something specific, measurable… you know, that SMART acronym (since everybody loves acronyms so much).
Superintelligence (along with some definitions): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superintelligence
Also, "Dario Amodei says what he has seen inside Anthropic in the past few months leads him to believe that in the next 2 or 3 years we will see AI systems that are better than almost all humans at almost all tasks"
https://x.com/tsarnick/status/1881794265648615886
Not saying you're necessarily wrong, but "Anthropic CEO says that the work going on in Anthropic is super good and will produce fantastic results in 2 or 3 years" it not necessarily telling of anything.
Dario said in mid-2023 that his timeline for achieving "generally well-educated humans" was 2-3 years. o1 and Sonnet 3.5 (new) have already fulfilled that requirement in terms of Q&A, ahead of his earlier timeline.
I'm curious about that. Those models are definitely more knowledgeable than a well educated human, but so is Google search, and has been for a long time. But are they as intelligent as a well educated human? I feel like there's a huge qualitative difference. I trust the intelligence of those models much less than an educated human.
If we talk about a median well-educated human, o1 likely passes the bar. Quite a few tests of reasoning suggests that’s the case. An example:
“Preprint out today that tests o1-preview's medical reasoning experiments against a baseline of 100s of clinicians.
In this case the title says it all:
Superhuman performance of a large language model on the reasoning tasks of a physician
Link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.10849”. — Adam Rodman, a co-author of the paper https://x.com/AdamRodmanMD/status/186902305691786464
—-
Have you tried using o1 with a variety of problems?
The paper you linked claims on page 10 that machines have been performing comparably on the task since 2012, so I'm not sure exactly what the paper is supposed to show in this context.
Am I to conclude that we've had a comparably intelligent machine since 2012?
Given the similar performance between GPT4 and O1 on this task, I wonder if GPT3.5 is significantly better than a human, too.
Sorry if my thoughts are a bit scattered, but it feels like that benchmark shows how good statistical methods are in general, not that LLMs are better reasoners.
You've probably read and understood more than me, so I'm happy for you to clarify.
Figure 1 shows a significant improvement of o1-preview over earlier models.
Perhaps it’s better that you ask a statistician you trust.
The figure also shows that the non LLM algorithm from 2012 was as capable or more capable than a human: was it as intelligent as a well educated human?
If not, why is the study sufficient evidence for the LLM, but not sufficient evidence for the previous system?
Again, it feels like statistical methods are winning out in general.
> Perhaps it’s better that you ask a statistician you trust
Maybe we can shortcut this conversation by each of us simply consulting O1 :^)
1) It’s an example of a domain an LLM can do better than humans. A 2012 system was not able to do myriad other things LLMs can do and thus not qualified as general intelligence.
2) As mentioned in the chart label, earlier systems require manual symptom extraction.
3) An important point well articulated by a cancer genomics faculty member at Harvard:
“….Now, back to today: The newest generation of generative deep learning models (genAI) is different.
For cancer data, the reason these models hold so much potential is exactly the reason why they were not preferred in the first place: they make almost no explicit data assumptions.
These models are excellent at learning whatever implicit distribution from the data they are trained on
Such distributions don’t need to be explainable. Nor do they even need to be specified
When presented with tons of data, these models can just learn, internalize & understand…..”
More here: https://x.com/simocristea/status/1881927022852870372?s=61&t=...
Can they do rule 110? If not, I don't think they're 'generally intelligent'.
But there's 0 guarantee they are even capable of solving the rather large amount that covers the rest of a well-educated human.
Anthropic has to say this or Anthropic does not see their next funding round.
Those are all public projects except for one..
Yeah, I'm not sure why we're pretending this will benefit the public. The only benefit is that it will create employment, and datacenter jobs are among the lowest paid tech workers in the industry.
Also note compute deprecates much faster than multi decade infra projects with chance of obsolecence. If deepseek keeps pace with releasing near SOTA models, those compute centres are going to have hard time recooping value / return on capital.
Is this inflation adjusted?
It says so at least
Building a lot of compute will likely end up more useful than Apollo & ISS, which were vanity projects.
Neom: $1.5T
But that one's imaginary.
Maybe, but so is Stargate Project so far.
Is it?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYimVfnGNGY
https://skift.com/2024/08/07/saudi-takes-2-million-photos-of...
"Unnamed sources told Bloomberg in April that The Line is scaling back from 170 kilometers long to just 2.4 kilometers, with the rest of the length to be completed after 2030. Neom expects The Line to be finished by 2045 now, 15 years later than initially planned."
It doesn't look great so far :)
The plan was never for 170km of The Line to be finished by 2030. The original plan was for 5km. And yes, recent reports are that they've scaled back their ambitions to half that by 2030.
However: 1. That has no bearing on how much they actually spend, which is what was being discussed and 2. Neom is much more than just The Line. As you can see from the YouTube link I posted, Sindalah seems to be on track to open this year, which is part of Neom.
So while Neom overall might be behind schedule (and The Line or other components may never open), it is clearly not an "imaginary" project given that parts of it will open soon.
Weak argument.
If that were the case then Stargate is already a thing because OpenAI must have a data center somewhere already.
And yes, the plan was for it to be 170km, since it was announced.
It's not an "argument", it is a fact. Neom has many parts, one or more of those parts are finished. It is not an "imaginary" project, period. An imaginary project does not get to the construction phase. You cannot call this imaginary without significantly and unilaterally re-defining the meaning of that word.
From there, The Line =/= Neom. That said, 170km is still the plan for The Line – the first segment was supposed to be 5km by 2030, now it is 2.5km by 2030. And again, them not building as much as they said does not mean it is cheaper (cost is what we're discussing, after all). If anything it means they are already over budget.
Stargate is a new company, so OpenAI (a different company) having data centers does not seem relevant. Also, I do not think OpenAI actually does own any data centers – for the most part they've been using Azure infra AFAIK. But I did not claim that Stargate was imaginary, so I am unsure how this is a relevant point for you to make.
Where are they getting the $500B? Softbank's market cap is 84b and their entire vision fund is only $100b, Oracle only has $11b cash on hand, OpenAI's only raised $17b total...
MGX has at least $100bn: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/a-100-billion-middle...
This is Abu Dhabi money.
That's their total fund and I doubt they are going all in with it in the US. Still, to reach $500bn, they need $125bn every single year. I think they just put down the numbers they want to "see" invested and now they'll be looking for backers. I don't think this is going anywhere really.
This would be a large outlay even for UAE, who would be giving it to a direct competitor in the space: UAE is one of the few countries outside of the US who are in any way serious about AI.
Softbank is being granted a block of TRUMP MEMES, the price of which will skyrocket when they are included in the bucket of crypto assets purchased as part of the crypto reserve.
how I wish that was a joke...
Altman is pivoting from WorldCoin to TrumpCoin - your retina will shortly be wired into the fascist meme-o-verse.
It's actually wireless, via 5G as part of the AI designed MRNA vaccine.
there doesn't appear to be any timeline announced here. the article says the "initial investment" is expected to be $100bn, but even that doesn't mean $100bn this year.
if this is part of softbank's existing plan to invest $100bn in ai over the next four years, then all that's being announced here is that Sama and Larry Ellison wanted to stand on a stage beside trump and remind people about it.
The literal first sentence of the announcement is:
> The Stargate Project is a new company which intends to invest $500 billion over the next four years
The project was announced a year ago so "new"
Not the first sentence of the new AP link target, which is much more vague. Kind of annoying for HN to swap it out like this.
Seems like you nailed it.
>> Where are they getting the $500B? Softbank's market cap is 84b and their entire vision fund is only $100b, Oracle only has $11b cash on hand, OpenAI's only raised $17b total...
1. The outlays can be over many years.
2. They can raise debt. People will happily invest at modest yields.
3. They can raise an equity fund.
Soooo this isn’t so much ‘announcing an investment’ as ‘announcing an investment opportunity’?
Why not continue:
4. They can start a kickstarter or go fund me
5. They can go on Dragons’ Den
…
>> 4. They can start a kickstarter or go fund me
Debt/Equity Fundraising is basically a kickstarter! Remarkably similar.
6. ??? 7. Profit.
Maybe it's in Bison Dollars?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPy27XWfAyI
4. The US government can chip in via grants, tax breaks or contracts.
It's all very Dr. Strangelove. "Mr. President, we must not allow an AI gap! Now give us billions"
Is Elon putting on some black leather?
4. Trump and Altman are both serial liars and it’s utter bullshit.
who isn't at least they upfront
Quite possibly pulled out of their asses...
If Son can actually build a 500B Vision Fund it can only come from one of two places...
somehow the dollar depreciates radically OR Saudis
Vision Fund was heavily invested in by the Saudis so...
Oracle's cash on hand is presumably irrelevant- I think they are on the receiving end of the money, in return for servers. No wonder Larry Ellison was so fawning.
Is this is a good investment by Softbank? Who knows.. they did invest in Uber, but also have many bad investments.
> `... they did invest in Uber, but also have many bad investments.`
The one I really don't get is that they funded Adam Neumann's new company after the collapse of WeWork. How stupid do you have to be to give that guy any more money?
Sleight of hand with the phrasing "up to" $500B.
Psst: it’s probably going to end up being a fraction of that but doesn’t make for as good a headline
Probably from the corrupted financial system, but we need to forword the project, haha
SoftBank's current AUM is $350B [1], and they will likely raise another fund.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftBank_Group
> AUM ¥347.7 billion
Is that the figure correct figure? Because that's Japanese yen which is more like $2.2B USD?
I think it's more announce the plan first, then try to find the investors for most of it.
> Where are they getting the $500B?
BTC
from Uncle Sam
I agree that the numbers are confusing so I've taken $500B out of the title above and replaced it with just data centers.
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Apart from my general queasiness about the whole AGI scaling business and the power concentration that comes with it, these are the exact four people/entities that I would not want to be at the tip of said power concentration.
Ellison should be nowhere near this:
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/09/omnip...
The man has the moral system of a private prison and the money to build one.
<quote> Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on," Ellison said, describing what he sees as the benefits from automated oversight from AI and automated alerts for when crime takes place. "We're going to have supervision," he continued. "Every police officer is going to be supervised at all times, and if there's a problem, AI will report the problem and report it to the appropriate person. </quote>
What is far more important to understand is to ignore all that nonsense and focus on who makes money? It will be Ellison and his buddies making tens of billions of dollars/year selling 'solutions' to local governments, all paid by your property taxes. This also enables an ecosystem of theft, where others benefit a lot more. With the nexus of Private Prisons, kids for cash judges (or judges investing in stock of prisons), DEA/police unions, DEA unions, small rural towns increasing prison population (because they get added to the total pop, and get funds allocated).
More importantly this is extremely attractive to police who can steal billions every day from civil forfeiture, they have access to anyone who makes a bank withdrawal or transacts in cash, all displayed in real time feeds, ready for grabbing!
> "Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on," Ellison said, describing what he sees as the benefits from automated oversight from AI and automated alerts for when crime takes place.
Wow! It is genuinely frightening that these people should be in control of our future!
Literal 'new world order' stuff here. Alex Jones and crew got so excited that their guy was in the driver's seat that they didn't notice the actual illuminati lizard people space lasers being deployed.
I don't think we'll ever have a zero-crime society, neither should we aim to be one. But being left to the vagaries of police (and union) politics, culture and the complications of city budgets is clearly broken.
Example: Cities are being presented a false choice between accepting deadly high speed chases vs zero criminal accountability [1], which in the world of drones seems silly [2]
I don't want the police to have unfettered access to surveil any and all citizens but putting camera access behind a court warrant issued by a civilian elected judge doesn't feel that dystopian to me.
Is that what Ellison was alluding to? I have no idea, but we are no longer in a world where we should disregard this prima facie.
[1]: https://www.ktvu.com/news/controversial-oakland-police-pursu...
[2]: https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/san-francisco-poli...
> I don't think we'll ever have a zero-crime society, neither should we aim to be one.
This reminded me of https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...
That's a pretty deceptive and ragebaity article.
If you look at the original video [1], starting at 1:09:00, he's talking specifically about police body/dashcams recording interactions with citizens during callouts and stops, not everyone all the time as that article strongly implies. The USA already decided to record what police see all the time during these events, so there's no new privacy issue posed by anything he's suggesting. The question is only how those videos are used. In particular, he points out that police are allowed to turn off bodycams for privacy reasons (e.g. bathroom breaks), which is a legitimate need but it can also be abused, and AI can fix this loophole.
In the same segment he also proposes using AI to watch CCTV at schools in real time to trigger instant response if someone pulls out a gun, and using AI to spot wildfires using drones. For some reason the media didn't condemn those ideas, just the part about supervising cop stops. How curious.
[1] https://www.oracle.com/events/financial-analyst-meeting-2024...
We keep saying people like him shouldn't be involved in certain ventures, and yet, they still are. More than ever, actually.
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Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15886728
2025 is shaping up to be When the Villains Win year.
> "Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on,"
Let's be honest. He isn't wrong. I'd rather live in a society with zero crime than what we have now.
Move to China. You’ll love it. Not only does it have lower crime by virtue of being highly controlled, it also has the added benefit of you never hearing about crimes the government doesn’t want you to hear about, and you won’t hear about any police corruption or brutality either. Ignorance is bliss!
You also don't need to sell your company when you innovate, your well-connected oligarch has either already gotten what you're doing or can seize it without consequence.
it's "technology transfer", not "seizure" ;)
Philosophically I agree, this sounds nice. A bit false dichotomy-ish, but nice.
But if you think about it, an unstated yet necessary prerequisite is that the definition of "crime" must be morally aligned with what is right. If it's not, well then you're living in a dystopia. Imagine a world where slavery is still legal and being a runaway slave is a crime. How do people like Frederick Douglass escape and survive long enough to make a difference?
And that's before we get into the prerequisite that such a state must apply the laws completely evenly with no special tiers based on class, wealth, political connection, celebrity status, etc, which AFAIK has never been done. Given the leadership, it doesn't look like it's goig to happen anytime soon. IMHO I think it's heavily contrary to human nature and just won't be achievable short of altering human nature.
Sorry to break it to you, but oppressing people with cameras to prevent crime will only push the crime to where the cameras aren't.
This makes preventing the crime and protecting people from effects of these crimes extremely difficult.
Yes we have historically low low crime. It's unbearable.
There are a number of countries that might give you a panopticon state of you want one
This is up to debate. The FBI and DOJ numbers disagree with each other.
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2023/11/03/violent-crime-...
Yeah, historically low crime because a lot of the crime is not considered crime anymore. Why thousands of stores are closing in California?
> Why thousands of stores are closing in California?
Because everyone's buying everything online and getting it delivered to their homes.
Well and good as a talking point, but violent crime is still illegal and way down.
Walgreen’s was closing stores anyway and used the pandemic shoplifting as an excuse… but it was never the actual reason.
Crime is at historical lows.
Even if shoplifting at Walgreens was the reason for closure, the downtowns of a few "liberal cities" (it's always the same 3-4 mentioned) are extremely unlikely to have that much impact on national statistics.
The retail industry lobbying group itself noted that "shrink", the term for loss of revenue due to items walking off or being damaged, has remained unchanged since the 90s.
The people telling you that there is an immense wave of shoplifting are outright lying.
There's a few that have tried to implement this, and I want to live in none of them.
The US will fare no better if it walks down this path, and honestly will likely fare worse for it's cultural obsession with individualism over community.
Just be prepared to be never daring to complain; a zero crime society isn't without its faults.
You stop abuse in this country, particularly of children, and you start having zero violent crime a decade later.
So having a policeman in each street and corner, except the policeman bias is set by these four oligarchs.
Welcome to... choose among many of the technodystopies in literature.
If you're lucky, you might get your chance to live in Thiel's and Ellison's techbro utopia. Make sure to tell us how great it is to be subjected to people with no accountability, but all of the power over every aspect of your life.
Who will supervise the gate keepers?
Just Ellison alone brings unwelcome feeling of having Oracle craziness forced down our collective throats, but I share your concern about the unholy alliance generated in front of us.
My immediate reaction to the announcement was one of these is not like the others. OpenAI, a couple of big investment funds, Microsoft, Nvidia, and...............Oracle?
Oracle provides two things: A datacenter for Nvidia chips, and health data. Oracle Cerner had a 21.7% market share for inpatient hospital Electronic Health Records (EHR). Larry Ellison specifically mentioned healthcare when announcing it in the Whitehouse.
The announcement was funny because they weren't quite sure what they are going to do in the health space. Sam Altman was asked, and he immediately deferred to Ellison and Masayoshi. Ellison was vague... it seems they know they want to do something with Ellison's massive stash of health data... but they don't quite know what they are building yet.
If they were smart, they'd build MS Fabric for health data, especially if they control a big chunk of the EHR.
Providing a turnkey HIPAA-compliant but modern health dataverse would be huge.
That already exists: https://www.truveta.com/
That looks like a different use case.
The Snowflake-for-health is more about opening EHR data for operational use by providers and facilities.
Versus being locked into respective EHR platforms.
If Oracle provided a compelling data suite (a la MS) within their own cloud ecosystem, they'd have less reason to restrict it at the EHR level (as they'd have lock-in at the platform level), which would help them compete against Epic (who can't pivot to openness in the same way, without risking their primary product).
I think you mean PostgreSQL for EHR data. MS Fabric and Snowflake are analytical databases, not operational. Patient privacy requirements (and HIPAA law) is a blocker for having an open operational database for EHR.
Oracle makes perfect sense in that they are 1) a massive datacenter company, and 2) sell a variety of saas products to enterprises, which is a major target market for AI.
Oracle has 2-3% market share as a Cloud Provider.
MSFT or even Google (AWS is not as mature in that space imho) made perfect sense, Oracle doesn't.
Elon and Larry are good friends, I would guess that has something to do with this development.
> Oracle has 2-3% market share as a Cloud Provider.
And the market leader is what, 30%? about 1 order of magnitude. That's not such a huge difference, and I suspect that Oracle's size is disproportionate in the enterprise space (which is where a lot of AI services are targeted) whereas AWS has a _ton_ of non-enterprise things hosted.
In any case, 2-3% is big enough where this kind of investment is 1) financially possible, 2) desirable to grow to be #2 or #3
Getting from 2% (Oracle) to 10% (GCP) market share would need 37.97% CAGR in 5 years. In a vacuum where everything else keeps the same, maybe, but I see that goal as very difficult to attain in what is a highly competitive industry right now.
Disclaimer: I work at a highly regulated industry and we are fine running our "enterprise" workloads in Azure (and even AWS for a spinoff company in the same sector). Oracle has no specific moat in that area imho, unless you already locked-in in one of their software offerings.
Sadly, it is not that unexpected given some of his recent interviews[1]. Any other day, I would agree it is a surprise.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/09/omnip...
Oracle has a lot of valuable classified information about the state and its enemies due to its business.
There is a certain reason that last weeks everybody and their grandma is simping for Trump. Nobody would want to be on his bad side right now. Moreover, we hear here and there that Trump "keeps his promises". A lot of the promises we do not know about and we may never will. These people did not spend money supporting his campaign for nothing. In other places and eras this would have been called corruption, now it is called "keeping his promises".
Trump is one of the most famous people in the world for not keeping promises of paying debts. But there is money to be made temporarily when he is running a caper, as long as you can get your hand in the pot before he steals it.
And you, are you simping for the Obidens of this world?
Corruption is as old as mankind; don't know why it's pointed out prominently. Just look at that Xipeng/Biden photo from the National Archives.
If your knee jerk response to any political discussion even remotely critical of 'your guy' is to snap into whataboutisim instead of participating in the conversation you might need a outrage pornography detox for a while.
> And you, are you simping for the Obidens of this world?
Did I?
> Corruption is as old as mankind
Yeah but seldomly celebrated or boasted about.
> There is a certain reason that last weeks everybody and their grandma is simping for Trump. Nobody would want to be on his bad side
It's worth keeping in mind how extremely unfriendly to tech the last admin was. At this point, it's basically proven in court that emails of the form "please deboost person x or else" were send, and there's probably plenty more we don't know about.
Combine that with the troubles in Europe which Biden's administration was extremely unwilling to help with, the obstacles thrown in the way of major energy buildouts, which are needed for AI... one would have to be stupid to be a tech CEO and not simp for Trump.
Tech has been extremely Democratic for many years. The Democrats have utterly alienated tech, and now they reap the consequences.
> Tech has been extremely Democratic for many years. The Democrats have utterly alienated tech, and now they reap the consequences.
Well, on the other side it can be said that Big Tech wasn't really on the side of democracy (note: democracy, not the Democrat Party) itself, and it hasn't been for years - at the very least ever since Cambridge Analytica was discovered. The "big tech" sector has only looked at profit margins, clicks, eyeballs and other KPIs while completely neglecting its own responsibility towards its host, and it got treated as the danger it posed by the Biden administration and Europe alike.
As for the cryptocoin world that has also been campaigning for the 45th: they are an even worse cancer on the world. Nothing but a gigantic waste of resources (remember the prices of GPUs, HDDs and RAM going through the roof, coal power plants being reactivated?), rug pulls and other scams.
The current shift towards the far-right is just the final masks falling off. Tech has rather (openly) supported the 45th than to learn from the chaos it has brought upon the world and make at least a paper effort to be held accountable.
Yes, big tech was the kid caught in the corner cleaning out the cookie jar and threw a tantrum when one parent moved the jar out of reach as punishment in effort to help the industry learn self-control. Now the other parent has come home and has not only returned the cookie jar to the kid but pledged to bring them packs of cookies by the shipping container to gorge on in exchange for favors.
the troubles in Europe
Nice euphemism for giving people autonomy in their data and privacy.
Most of there companies are so large that they cannot really fail anymore. At this point it has very little to do with protecting themselves, more with making them more powerful than governments. JD Vance are said that the US could drop support for NATO if Europe tries to regulate X [1]. Oligarchs have fully infiltrated the US government and are trying to do the same to other countries.
I disagree with the grandparent. They don't support Trump because they do not want to be on his bad side (well, at least not only that), they support Trump because they see the opportunity to suppress regulation worldwide and become more powerful than governments.
We just keep making excuses (fiduciary duties, he just doesn't know how to wave his arm because he's an autist [2]). Why not just call it what it is?
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
[2] Which is pretty offensive to people on the spectrum.
I do agree that big part of why they support Trump is for anti-regulation reasons. But, it is also a fact that Trump is one of them, a businessman, not a politician. With Trump they can now discuss more business and less policies. There is a certain dealing of business right now that seems not at all transparent. And in this, the amount of public simping is really weird to what usually happens, everybody praising Trump even before he was taking office, and even tiktok, "coming out" as whatever etc.
Oligarchs want less regulation, but they also want these beefy government contracts. They want weaker government to regulate them and stronger government to protect them and bully other countries. Way I see it, what they actually want is control of the government, and with Trump they have it (more than before).
That person is much more of a politician than a businessman.
We have more energy and are pumping more domestic oil than ever. We are a major exporter of LNG. Trump just killed EV subsidies, and electric charging network funding.
What are you talking about via Europe? Holding tech companies accountable to meddling in domestic politics? Not allowing carte blanche to user data?
I understand (though do not like) large corps tiptoeing around Trump in order to manipulate him, it is due to fear. Not due to Trump having respectable values.
What do you prefer ? Letting DeepSeek and China lead the AI war ? DeepSeek R1 is a big wake up call https://open.substack.com/pub/transitions/p/deepseek-is-comi...
Us vs. Them. My favorite perspective [0].
Regarding to your question, yes. I'd prefer a healthy counterbalance to what we have currently. Ideally, I'd prefer cooperation. A worldwide cooperation.
[0]: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B_AiI9_XIAA67_t.jpg
Treating the world as a bunch of football teams is a great distraction though.
Arguably the cooperation between the US and China has lead to the most economic growth and prosperity in human history, it's a shame the US and China are returning to a former time.
From what I've read about DeepSeek and its founder, I would very much prefer them, even with China factored in. At least if these particular Four Horsemen are the only alternative.
On a tangential note, those who wish to frame this as the start of the great AI war with China (in which they regrettably may be right), should seriously consider the possibility of coming out on the losing end. China has tremendous industrial momentum, and is not nearly as incapable of leading-edge innovation as some Americans seem to think.
>China has tremendous industrial momentum, and is not nearly as incapable of leading-edge innovation as some Americans seem to think.
So those who framing this are correct and that we should matching their momentum here asap?
No, I was rather pointing out that getting into an altercation that you are likely (even if not guaranteed) to lose may not be the smartest of ideas. On occasion, humans have been known to fruitfully engage in cooperation and de-escalation. Please pardon my naive optimism.
"Great AI war with China", "altercation" are excessively harsh characterizations. There is nothing "escalatory" in competing for leadership in new industries with other states, nor should it be "regrettable". No one, to my knowledge, is planning to nuke DeepSeek data centers or something.
I wish I could agree with you. But have you read Aschenbrenner's "Situational Awareness" [1]? I am very much afraid that the big decision makers in AI do in fact think in those terms, and do not in any way frame this as fair competition for the benefit of all.
1. https://situational-awareness.ai/
A person heavily invested in this wave of AI succeeding saying AI will be big and we will have AGI next year? Sure.
I don't think there is much point of reading the whole thing after the following:
"Everyone is now talking about AI, but few have the faintest glimmer of what is about to hit them. Nvidia analysts still think 2024 might be close to the peak. Mainstream pundits are stuck on the willful blindness of “it’s just predicting the next word”."
China is much more peaceful nation compared to US. So, yes, I'd prefer China leading AI research any day. They are interested in mutual trade and prosperity, they respect local laws and culture, all unlike US.
"They respect local laws and culture" - I think people from Xinyang probably have a very different perspective on that........
I encountered this almost first person. When American company goes like an elephant, bribing local officials left and right, using dirty practices to push out concurrents. At the same time, Chinese companies try very hard to abide to local regulations and trying to resolve all issues using local courts, etc. Like actually civilised people.
What happens inside China is nothing of my interest, it's their business. They existed for millennias, they probably know how to manage themselves. They are not trying to expand outside of may be Taiwan, they don't put their military bases in my country, they don't fund so-called "opposition" and that's good enough for me.
Bribery is probably one of the few cases where the US is significantly better than bad actors in both China and the EU, both of which have major problems with overseas bribery
If you had AlQaeda in a hypothetical region near Florida with almost two-yearly terror attacks, you would shit bricks and create jails/prisons with more security than the Pentagon itself.
I think there's a more nuanced version of this: China respects local laws and culture _outside of what they view as China_ more than the US does. It's also worth noting that China's policy in Xinjiang is somewhat narrowly targeted at religion, and less other aspects like cuisine or clothing. That said, religion is nigh impossible to separate from the broader idea of culture in much of the world.
Africa and South America and USA strongly disagree.
Give me a break. China has overseas police stations as bases of operation for harassing ex-pats and dissidents. That's not "respecting local laws and culture".
sorry but you’re not going to convince anyone approaching this with a neutral mind that China is more partial to overseas intervention than the US is
Agree, and would like to say that this is not because many of us see China as some benevolent actor on the world stage, but rather because we see how NOT benevolent the US has been historically (see South America, the middle east, etc)
the US has done lots of positive things as well. i understand it is popular to be a critic nowadays, but in many ways the US has had a strong commitment to majoritarian democracy over the last century and is trending in a better direction.
but regardless of the net balance of actions, it is clearly more interventionist than China has been up to this point
Holy smokes. Do folks like you actually believe this? China has its own style of colonialism (whatever you want to call it) but it certainly exists as strong as the US flavor.
How many countries has China invaded and bombed in the last 30 years?
How many deaths did China's warmongering caused abroad?
Quite a few from an economic perspective. Like I said they have their own style of colonialism. To think they are some peaceful loving nation is foolish. Maybe in the last 10 years China have had the military equipment capable of handling an offensive. They have been smart and done all their dealings via money. Without going too far in whataboutism, I simply find it ridiculous to classify China as a warm fuzzy nation with their long list of human rights issues. That does not mean America is peaceful and loving, simply that perhaps the two countries are not so different in net.
They were asking about bombs and invasions in the literal sense, not metaphorical. I'm sure if you asked someone in Gaza or Iraq if they would rather be subjected to more of America's bombing and war crimes, or China's abstract, metaphorical "economic colonialism" they would pick China in a heartbeat.
if Gaza was neighboring China and treated China like it does its neighbors, it would be treated quite differently by China. For an illustrative example, see Uighurs.
Uyghurs committed frequent acts of terrorism against China throughout the 1990s and 2000s, so you actually don't need to imagine that scenario. The treatment of Uyghurs is unjust and a clear violation of their human rights, but it's nowhere near the level of depravity of the western-backed Gaza Genocide.
Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Uyghur_unrest
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_2013_Bachu_unrest
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_conflict#1990s_to_200...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_genocide
> Like I said they have their own style of colonialism.
That's moving the goalposts and doesn't address the issue.
>They have been smart and done all their dealings via money.
You mean just like the country who issues the world reserve currency and who's intelligence agencies get involved in destabilizing regimes across the world?
> That's moving the goalposts and doesn't address the issue.
Is this how you make a constructive argument? Perhaps I was expecting too much from a joke account but this style of whataboutism is boring.
My post that you responded to set my premise which was that China has its own form of colonialism that is quite different than Americas but it exists and it’s quite strong. To classify China as a peaceful loving nation that respects other cultures is as if we were saying the US has never started a conflict. It’s factually a lie. China has a long list of human rights issues, they factually do not respect other cultures even within their own borders. I am not defending America but pointing out that China is not what the OP stated.
> I was expecting too much from a joke account
Are you the kind of superficial petty person who needs to take jabs at the messenger's name and not the message itself?
And are you really in the position to throw stones from a glass house with that account name? If you had your real name and social media profiles linked in the bio I'd understand, but you're just being hypocritical, petty and childish here with this 'gotcha'.
> To classify China as a peaceful loving nation that respects other cultures
I never made such a classification. You're building your own strammen to form a narrative you can attack but you're not saying anything useful the contradicts my PoV and wasting our time. Since you're obviously arguing in bad faith I won't converse with you further. Goodbye.
If you have an argument that is actually on topic with what I said please continue, otherwise save your troll account for someone else. The whataboutism/gaslighting is silly. You clearly cannot read threads or respond in a logical form to the right person. The conversation at hand was about China and in response to the OP classifying them as a loving and respectful nation. I made no attempt to defend the US and it has been you moving the goalposts. You throw about whataboutism around and then simply runoff with some flimsy excuse about multiple people being unable to converse with you. Troll account.
Cumpiler asked two very clear and direct questions:
>How many countries has China invaded and bombed in the last 30 years? >How many deaths did China's warmongering caused abroad?
You didn't answer those, just started hand waving some stuff about China's "own form of colonialism" -- without even explaining what that is and how it works (which personally I'd be curious to hear about, and believe *is*" likely guilty of violence).
So you very clearly are the one guilty of shifting the goalposts, going on tangents, and bringing up usernames instead of real arguments.
I'm sympathetic to Infecto's positions, but I have to agree. I do think Cumpiler69's username is outrageous enough as to draw some commentary (provided it's civil and is semi-friendly ribbing) and perhaps even raise questions of whether they are a troll, but the substance of their comments is strong enough as to override these minor observations/objections.
Define invade.
Sorry, but If you need a definition for military invasion, you're not arguing in good faith. Goodbye.
> What do you prefer ? Letting DeepSeek and China lead the AI war ?
Me personally? Yes.
the outcome would be exactly the same. AGI leads the human race off of a cliff, not in the direction of one human interest group vs another. the only difference would be that it was china that was responsible for the extinction if the human race rather than another country. i would prefer to die with dignity… the outcome we should all be advocating for is a global halt of AI research — not because it would be easy but because there is no other option.
we need to cooperate and put aside our petty politicking right now. the potential downsides of ‘racing’ without building a safety scaffold are catastrophic.
I would love for Oracle to use AI to put their entire legal department out of work, though.
So you want them to be infinitely more litigious?
A serious question though, what does happen when AIs are filing lawsuits autonomously on behalf of the powerful, the courts clearly won't be able to cope unless you have AI powered courts too? None of how these monumental changes will work has been thought through at all, let's hope AI is smart enough to tell us what to do...
> A serious question though, what does happen when AIs are filing lawsuits autonomously on behalf of the powerful
It won't just be at the behalf of the powerful.
If lawyers are able to file 10x as many lawsuits per hour, the cost of filing a lawsuit is going to go down dramatically, and that's assuming a maximally-unfriendly regulatory environment where you still officially need a human lawyer in the loop.
This will enable people to e.g. use letters signed by an attorney at law, or even small claims court, as their customer support hotline, because that actually produces results in today.
Nobody is prepared for that. Not the companies, not the powerful, not the courts, nobody.
Unless you can afford your lawsuit to take up substantial time on Stargate and make a much stronger case than your average Joe who is still using o1 for their lawsuits
Oracle could reasonably be hit with some sort of stick every time they filed a frivolous lawsuit until the AI got tuned appropriately. Then it'd be a situation where Oracle were continuously suing people who don't follow the law, following a reasonably neutral and well calibrated standard that is probably going to end up as similar to an intelligent and well practised barrister. That would be acceptable. If people aren't meant to be following the law that is a problem for the legislators.
I'm envisioning a future where there's a centralized "legal exchange", much like the NYSE, where high speed machines file micro-ligation billions of times faster than any human can, which is decided equally quickly, an unrelenting back and forth buzz of lawsuits and payouts as every corporation wages constant automated legal battle. Small businesses are consumed in seconds, destroyed by the filing of a million computerized grievances while the major players end up in a sort of zero-sum stalemate, where money is constantly moving, but it never shifts the balance of power.
... has anyone ever written a book about this? If not, I think I'm gonna call dibs.
>A serious question though, what does happen when AIs are filing lawsuits autonomously on behalf of the powerful,
AI controlled cheap Chinese drones will start flying into their residencies carrying some trivial to make high explosives. With the class wars getting hotter in next few years we may be saying that Luigi Mangione had the right ideas towards the PMC, but he was underachiever.
I don't like how OpenAI turned majorly from what it was founded upon and their bias training ... but when considering the actual opponent here is China, it's not the worst.
I think OpenAI was originally founded against that kind of force. Autocratic governments becoming masters of AI.
I’m an American who was definitely raised in a “China Bad” world.
The last few months, between TikTok ban, RedNote, elections, United Healthcare CEO, etc I’ve seen so many people compare the US to China, and favor China. Which is of course crazy because China has things like forced labor and concentration camps of religious minorities, and far worse oppression than the US. But many people just view everything coming out of the US Gov’s mouth as bad.
Is the Chinese government worse than the US government? Probably. Do people universally think that still? Not really. The US Gov will have to contend with the reality that people -even citizens- are starting to view them and not their “enemy” as the “Bad Guys”.
I don’t get the good guys / bad guys mindset tbh. Sure china gov is pretty bad and the us is by many metrics better - but why center your whole worldview around things that probably don’t affect you that much in your daily life?
US also has forced labour, huge prison population, bombing civilians and journalists to oblivion, literally nuking other countries and religious fanatics — do I still think china would be less pleasant as our new overlord? Yes — Do I think the world is better off with US-American hegemony? I’m not so sure.
Maybe it’s a net good for the world if not one power is dominating — maybe it’s the start of a hellish ww3. I choose to believe the former.
edit: typos
Interestingly perhaps, as a foreigner (not from the USA or China) I can tell you not everyone around the world shares this perspective. There's people who trust China's single-party system over the USA's oligarchy.
Propaganda is a powerful tool.
By the time this project is done it will have been dead for 2 years.
Too many greedy mouths. Too many corporations. Too little oversight. Too broad an objective. Technology is moving too quickly for them to even guess at what to aim for.
Need a bit of Zuck too
Yeah, really the only thing missing from this initiative was the personal information of the vast majority of the United States population handed over on a silver platter.
That sentiment calls for reflection - whoever ends up on top of the heap after the AI craze settles down is going to be someone that everyone objects to. Elon Musk was himself an internet darling up until he became wealthy and entrenched.
That said, this does look like dreadful policy at the first headline. There is a lot of money going in to AI, adding more money from the US taxpayer is gratuitous. Although in the spirit of mixing praise and condemnation, if this is the worst policy out of Trump Admin II then it'll be the best US administration seen in my lifetime. Generally the low points are much lower.
Nietzsche wrote about these phenomena a long time ago in his Genealogy of Morality. there will never be someone who reaches the top who doesn’t become an object of ire in modern Western culture.
> That sentiment calls for reflection - whoever ends up on top of the heap after the AI craze settles down is going to be someone that everyone objects to.
I agree in principle. And realistically, there is no way Altman would not be part of this consortium, much as I dislike it. But rounding out the team with Ellison, Son and Abu Dhabi oil money in particular -- that makes for a profound statement, IMHO.
We should NEVER have a lawnmower at the helm of humanity.
It could be worse, Elon Musk could be involved with it.
The moon program was $318 billion in 2023 dollars, this one is $500 billion. So that's why the tech barons who were present at the inauguration were high as a kite yesterday, they just got the financing for a real moon shot!
To be fair, it’s not easy to monetize the moon program into profitability. This has a far better shot of sustaining profitability.
It appears this basically locks out Google, Amazon and Meta. Why are we declaring OpenAI as the winner? This is like declaring Netscape the winner before the dust settled. Having the govt involved in this manner can’t be a good thing.
Since the CEOs of Google, Amazon and Meta were seated at the front row of the inauguration, IN FRONT OF the incoming cabinet, I'm pretty confident their techno -power-barrel will come via other channels.
Interestingly, there seems to be no actual government involvement aside from the announcement taking place at the White House. It all seems to be private money.
I generally agree that government sponsorship of this could be bad for competition. But Google in particular doesn't necessarily need outside investment to compete with this. They're vertically integrated in AI datacenters and they don't have to pay Nvidia.
I am not sure if OpenAI will be the winner despite this investment. Currently, I see various DeepSeek AI models as offering much more bang for the buck at a vastly cheaper cost for small tasks, but not yet for large context tasks.
Because this is Oracle's and OpenAI's project with SoftBank and MGX as investors.
It's who you know. Sam is buddies with Masa, simple as.
How involved is the government at all? I’m still having a hard time seeing how Trump or anyone in the government is involved except to do the announcement. These are private companies coming together to do a deal.
Amazon MGM will do the media tie-ins. ;)
Because it's free to play, pay to win, from now on.
This is not a government sponsored agreement. There is no locking out.
Trump probably wanted to start his presidency with a bang, being a person with excess vanity. The participating companies scored a PR coup.
The actual press release makes it clearer that this isn't a lockout of any kind and there's no direct government involvement. Softbank and some of other banks persuaded by Softbank are ponying up $500B for OpenAI to invest in AI. Trump is hyping this up from the sidelines because "OpenAI says this will be good for America". It's basically just another day in the world of press-releases and political pundits commenting on press-releases.
Wonder how co-president Elon Musk feels about this, seeing that OpenAI is his mortal enemy.
[flagged]
I miss n gate so much. I asked AI to generate one for this thread.
"In a stunning display of fiscal restraint, Sam Altman only asks for $500 billion instead of his previous $7 trillion moonshot. Hackernews rejoices that the money will be spent in Texas, where the power grid is as stable as a cryptocurrency exchange. Oracle's involvement prompts lengthy discussions about whether Larry Ellison's surveillance dystopia will run on Java or if they'll need to purchase an enterprise license for consciousness itself. Meanwhile, SoftBank's Masayoshi Son continues his streak of funding increasingly expensive ways to turn electricity into promises, this time with added patriotism. The comments section devolves into a heated debate about whether this is technically fascism or just regular old corporatocracy, with several users helpfully pointing out that actually, the real problem is systemd."
> The comments section devolves into a heated debate about whether this is technically fascism or just regular old corporatocracy, with several users helpfully pointing out that actually, the real problem is systemd.
I use arch, btw.
Okay that's hilarious.
I hear this joked about sometimes or used as a metaphor, but in the literal sense of the phrase, are we in a cold war right now? These types of dollars feel "defense-y", if that makes sense. Especially with the big focus on energy, whatever that ends up meaning. Defense as a motivation can get a lot done very fast so it will be interesting to watch, though it raises the hair on my arms
Absolutely
for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_telecommuni...
It's called a bubble. The level of spending now defines how fucked we are in 2-3 years.
We certainly are, if you ask me. Especially when you realize that we haven’t had official comms with Russia since the war in Ukraine broke out.
The US government and its media partners sure seem to think so.
The US appears to be fully in the grips of centralized economic autarky. A tiny coterie of industrialists who have the President's ear decide how to allocate a gigantic amount of capital for their pet projects while the state raises tariffs and implements bans to protect them from competition.
Didn't go well for South America in the 60s and 70s but perhaps, as economists are prone to saying, "this time will be different".
Private capital. That detail seems to derail your whole comment.
this is private capital. yes, we are in an era of big projects and big capital deployment. is that synonymous with centralized autarky? i don’t agree
The effectiveness of policies is influenced by your starting position. South America is relatively poor. The United States is the best positioned country in the world by a long shot.
Apples to oranges comparison. The problem set is completely different regarding your doom example of South America.
Compared to China?
And it never is.
Tariffs are a negotiating tactic. Read Art of the Deal and that outlines how Trump negotiates.
It will be different (and as another commentor pointed out, it probably always has been), because the adults are back it charge, thankfully.
Any clues to how they plan to invest $500 billion dollars? What infrastructure are they planning that will cost that much?
That was literally my question. Is this basically just for more datacenters, NVidia chips, and electricity with a sprinkling of engineers to run it all? If so, then that $500bn should NOT be invested in today's tech, but instead in making more powerful and power efficient chips, IMO.
I'll make a wild guess that they will be building data centers and maybe robotic labs. They are starting with 100B of committed by mostly Softbank, but probably not transacted yet, money.
> building new AI infrastructure for OpenAI in the United States
The carrot is probably something like - we will build enough compute to make a supper intelligence that will solve all the problems, ???, profit.
Yachts, mansions, private jets, maybe some very expensive space heaters.
This could be a clue
https://x.com/sama/status/1756090136935416039
Reasonably speaking, there is no way they can know how they plan to invest $500 billion dollars. The current generation of large language models basically use all human text thats ever been created for the parameters... not really sure where you go after than using the same tech.
I’m more interested in how they plan to draw the rest of the damn owl.
hopefully nuclear power plants
They are going to buy 50 $10B nuclear aircraft carriers and use them as a power source.
data center + gpu server farm (?)
Congress.
Tangential, but this has gotten me thinking...
I used to wonder how the hundreds of thousands of employees that work in Big Oil or Big Pharma could tolerate all the terrible things their company does... e.g. the opioid epidemic. The naive optimist in me never thought that the tech industry would ever be that bad.
Now, as someone thats been in the industry for 10+ years and working adjacent to LLMs, this is all so depressing. The hype has gotten out of control. We are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on things that simply are not making life better for the majority of people.
Ditto. My non-tech friends ask what benefit AI has to society and I struggle to give them concrete examples that outweigh the opportunity cost of this kind of investment in more meaningful endeavors. Let alone the downsides of an algorithmically-driven society and the increasing environmental costs of AI workloads.
Thank you for being the voice of reason.
"create hundreds of thousands of American jobs"... Given the current educational system in the US, this should be fun to watch. Oh yeah, Musk and his H-1B Visa thing. Now it's making sense.
If they're creating that many jobs, it means most of them are construction work.
Skilled labor for sure, but not necessarily college educated.
How many jobs will it net if "successful" and the AI eliminates jobs?
Data centers are nearly all blue collar work.
maybe this is to employ the hundreds of thousands of federal employees that are about to lose their jobs?
After they build the Multivac or Deep Thought, or whatever it is they’re trying to do, then what happens? It makes all the stockholders a lot of money?
I assume anyone of importance will have made their money long before they have to show results.
More likely Collosus.
We ask it the last question and it tells us the answer is 42.
The way I think about this project, along with all of Trump's plans, is that he wants to maximize the US's economic output to ensure we are competitive with China in the future.
Yes, it would make money for stockholders. But it's much more than that: it's an empire-scale psychological game for leverage in the future.
I really don't understand the national security argument. If you really do fear some fundamental breakthrough in AI from China, what's cheaper, $500 billion to rush to get there first, or spending a few billion (and likely much less) in basic research in physics, materials science, and electronics, mixed with a little bit of espionage, mixed with improving the electric grid and eliminating (or greatly reducing) fossil fuels?
Ultimately, the breakthrough in AI is going to either come from eliminating bottlenecks in computing such that we can simulate many more neurons much more cheaply (in other words, 2025-level technology scaled up is not going to really be necessary or sufficient), or some fundamental research discovery such as a new transformer paradigm. In any case, it feels like these are theoretical discoveries that, whoever makes them first, the other "side" can trivially steal or absorb the information.
I'm not sure I buy the national security argument but as you say the other side can trivially steal or absorb theoretical discoveries but not trivially get $500bn worth of data centers.
no... one more lane will fix the traffic. Truly American approach
Amazing to see how DeepSeek R1 is doing better than OpenAI models with much less resources
500B of compute infrastructure with order of magnitude greater deprecation / need to return on capital. Compute isn't concrete infra with 50+ years of value, more like 5 years, i.e. need to produce 50-100B worth value per year to break even. On top of the “$125B hole that needs to be filled for each year of CapEx at today’s levels” according to Sequoia. All which with could be wiped by PRC pacing SOTA model, unless 500B of more compute will lead to qualititive model differences. Right now, I don't know where that value is coming from, so either a lot of investors are getting fleeced, or this is a Manhattan tier strategic project... privately funded, which makes even less strategic sense.
It's fascinating how most people still don't get it.
ASI is basically a god. This is the ultimate solution (or problem). It will push us to the singularity, and create an utopia or drive humanity to extinction. Imagine someone who is so smart that would win every single nobel prize available, and make multiple discoveries in a matter of a year. And now multiply this person's intelligence by 100 (most likely more, but 100 is already hard enough to grasp). There's no point in investing in anything else. An investment in ASI is an investment in everything (could be a bad one though, depending on the outcome).
The government is banking on being able to control it, which is also pretty funny. It's like a pet hamster thinking they can dictate what a human does.
Leopold Aschenbrenner predicted it last June.
https://situational-awareness.ai/racing-to-the-trillion-doll...
Given https://x.com/IvankaTrump/status/1839002887600370145, his impact on the causal chain of events may go beyond mere prediction.
There's a good amount of irony in the results that AI have achieved, particularly if we reach AGI - they have improved individual worker efficiency by removing other workers from the system. Naming it Stargate implies a reckoning with the actual series itself - an accomplishment by humanity. Instead, what this pushes, is accomplishing the removal of humans from humanity. I like cool shiny tech, but I like useful tech that really helps humans more. Work on 3D-printing sustainable food, or something actually useful like that. Jenson doesn't need another 1B gallons of water under his belt.
> Instead, what this pushes, is accomplishing the removal of humans from humanity.
If you buy the marketing, yeah. But we aren't really seeing that in the tech sector. We haven't seen it succeed in the entertainment sector... it's still fighting for relevance in the medical and defense industries too. The number and quality of jobs that AI replaced is probably still quite low, and it will probably remain that way even after Stargate.
AI is DOA. LLMs have no successor, and the transformer architecture hit it's bathtub curve years ago.
> Jenson doesn't need another 1B gallons of water under his belt.
Jensen gets what he wants because he works with the industry. It's funny to see people object to CUDA and Nvidia's dominance but then refuse to suggest an alternative. An open standard managed by an independent and unbiased third-party? We tried that, OEMs abandoned it. NPU hardware tailor-made for specific inference tasks? Too slow, too niche, too often ends up as wasted silicon. Alternative manufacturer-specific SDKs integrated with one high-level library? ONNX tried that and died in obscurity.
Nvidia got where they are today by doing exactly what AMD and Apple couldn't figure out. People give Jensen their water because it's wasted in anyone else's hands.
A rat done bit my sister Nell, with whitey on the moon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitey_on_the_Moon
The biggest question on such investment from my POV, is what do the Deepseek results mean about the usefulness/efficiency of this investment?
I've been meaning to read a relevant book to today's times called Engines That Move Markets. Will probably get it from the library.
Deepseek published all their methodology so in theory they could just copy what Deepseek's doing for a 10x increase in efficiency.
March 2024: The Stargate project is announced - https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
June 2024: Oracle joins in - https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/openai-to-use-oci...
January 2025: Softbank provides additional funding, and they for some reason give credit to Trump?
So that he doesn't block the substantial involvement by Abu Dhabi in a supposed American project.
This should really be the top comment! Also, many people in the comment section even seem to believe that this is government project...
Yes, thank you for calling this out. The project has been around for a bit.
Currying favor by letting Trump take the credit
> and they for some reason give credit to Trump?
Well, this one is really simple - nothing of note will happen in the US in the next four years without giving Trump credit for it, because if you don't he'll turn the full power of the state against you. And with no checks on his power, there's nothing to stop him. So yes, this has nothing to do with Trump, but if you don't want to get arrested and harassed, you better give him credit for it. Same playbook Elena Ceausescu used, except she did it just for scientific papers, Trump will do it for everything.
https://paperpile.com/blog/elena-ceausescu-scientist-fraud/
> and they for some reason give credit to Trump?
Because tech CEOs have decided to go all-in on fascism as they see it's a way to make money. Bow to Trump, get on his good side, reap the benefits of government corruption.
It's why TikTok thanked Trump in their boot-licking message of "thanks, trump" after he was the one who started the TikTok ban.
A harder question is: why wouldn't billionaires like Trump and his oligarchic kleptocracy?
Last year, sama goal was 5 to 7T. Now he is going with 100B, with option for another 400B. Huge numbers, but it still feels like a bit of a down turn.
I think that coming down from 5T to 0.5T means that TSMC cannot be reproduced locally, but everything else is on the table. At least TSMC has a serious roadmap for its Arizona fab facility, so that too is domestically captured, although not its latest gen fab.
Let’s be real the 5T was a wild ass guess
That 5T figure was including chip manufacturing. Duplicating TSMC isn't feasible. No surprise.
Who/what is MGX? Google returns a few hits, none of which are clearly who is referred to here.
MGX is an arm of the United Arab Emirates' sovereign wealth operation: https://www.mgx.ae/en
I feel like that, along with SoftBank's investment, tell me everything about how serious this project is.
Don't worry, Oracle is also involved.
A sheikh, a famously overzealous Japanese firm and Larry Elisson walk into a bar.
Ordinarily a joke would follow, but now America is volunteering to be the punchline.
They buy the bar and argue over selling 40 virgins, sake, or whiskey.
They argue for about 4 years, nothing changes, and everyone forgets about it.
Skynet will be written in Java. I'm sorry, the verbose language wins
Damn, we really won't ever be able to understand it.
at least that explains why it wants to do us in.
What do you mean?
Why is Larry Ellison giving a speech about the power of AI to cure disease? How is Oracle relevant at all to any of AI progress in the past few years?
Oracle actually has a ton of gpus
Not sure how they knew to buy them or why but they have them. Mostly seem to be lending them out. Think mostly OpenAI. Or was it MS. One of the big dogs
Still, the worst positioned cloud provider to tackle this job. Both for the project and for eventual users of whatever eldritch abomination that cames out of this.
Oracle is trusted by large enterprises, banks, governments. So OpenAI wants to attach itself to Oracle's brand.
Oracle is trusted by large enterprises. So OpenAI wants to attach itself to Oracle's brand.
Oracle purchased Cerner which is now sitting on a ton of healthcare data.
I wonder how much of the data can legally be retained without violating privacy law? Perhaps that’s why Texas rather than CA?
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/03/08/1069523/sam-altm...
Wouldn't surprise me Sam Altman convinced Trump/Son/Ellison that this AI can reverse their aging. And Ellison does have a ton of money - $208bn.
Can't wait for these to succeed just in time for them to tell us
'you should have spent all this time and money fighting climate change'
SoftBank isn't a US entity, right? Aside from their risk tolerance, that seems like an odd bedfellow for a national US initiative...
MGX also isn't a US entity, it's a UAE sovereign wealth venture
https://www.mgx.ae/en
It doesn't seem to be a US initiative.
I'm sure they're getting tax credits for investment (none of the articles I can find actually detail the US gov involvement) but the project is mostly just a few multinationals setting up a datacenter where their customers are.
They’re in the US (their fund stuff). Not far from an oracle campus actually. The parent org is in Japan.
The fact that they plan to start in Texas makes me think that the whole thing is just the biggest pork barrel of all times.
Unlike California, Texas is easy to build in. True for both renewable energy and housing.
I saw Stargate trending on Bluesky and got my hopes up about an announcement of a new show/movie/something. Disappointing.
Yep, they should fund Brad Wright with one of the billions.
At least do something about the SGU cliffhanger....
How likely is success when 4 or more other massive companies work together on a project? Seems like a lot of chefs in the kitchen..
It seems early for this sort of move. This is also a huge spin on the whole thing that could throw a lot of people off.
Is there any planned future partnerships? Stargate implies something about movies and astronomy. Movies in particular have a lot of military influence, but not always.
So, what's the play? Help mankind or go after mankind?
Also, can I opt-out right now?
Why is it early from your perspective?
If one is expecting to have an AGI breakthrough in the next few years, this is exactly the prepositioning move one would make to be able to maximally capitalize on that breakthrough.
From my perspective humanity has all breakthroughs in intelligence it needs.
The breaking of The Enigma gave humans machines that can spread knowledge to more humans. It already happened a long time ago, and all of it was cause for much trouble, but we endured the hardest part (to know when to stop), and humans live in a good world now. Full of problems, but way better than it was before.
I think the web is enough. LLMs are good enough.
This move to try to draw water from stone (artificial intelligence in sillicon chips) seems to be overkill. How can we be sure it's not a siphon that will make us dumber? Before you just dismiss me or counter my arguments, consider what is happening everywhere.
Maybe I'm wrong, or not seeing something. You know, like I believed in aliens for a long time. This move to artificial intelligence causes shock and awe in a similar way. However, while I do believe aliens do not exist, I am not sure if artificial intelligence is a real strawman. It could be the case that is not made of straw, and if it is more than that, we might have a problem.
I am specially concerned because unlike other polemic topics, this one could lead to something not human that fully understands those previous polemic topics. Humans through their generations forget and mythologize those fantasies. We don't know what non-humans could do with that information.
I am thinking about those issues for a long time. Almost a decade, even before LLMs running on silicon existed. If it wanted, non-human artificial intelligence could wipe the floor with humans just by playing to their favorite myths. Humans do it in a small scale. If machines learn it, we're in for an unknown hostile reality.
It could, for example, perceive time different from us (also a play on myths), and do all sorts of tricks with our minds.
LLMs and the current generation of artificial intelligence are boolean first, it's what they run. Only true or false bits and gates. Humans can understand the meaning of trulse though, we are very non boolean.
So, yeah, I am worried about booleaning people on a massive scale.
Yep, long wall of text. Sorry about that.
Oracle / Texans running it.. they don't care what you think about it
They’re all the same to you huh? One bucket for everyone?
I think there’s a term for that.
Coastalists
You must be a riot in Australia!
My questions were rethorical. I'm not thinking about who runs things.
I expect those who really understand those questions to get my point.
What a waste of a great name. Why form a separate company for this?
To get out from under OpenAI’s considerable obligation to Microsoft.
That is why there is the awkward “we’ll continue to consume Azure” sentence in there. Will be interesting to see if it works or if MS starts revving up their lawyers.
Ah right. That makes sense.
Doesn't MS own 49% of OpenAI?
It's not even new:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project
If I understand correctly - if you are training a model to perform a particular task - in the end what matters is the training data - and by and large different models will largely converge on the best representation of that data for the given task, given enough compute.
So that means the models themselves aren't really IP - they are inevitable outputs from optimising using the input data for a certain task.
I think this means pretty much everyone, apart from the AI companies - will see these models as pre-competitive.
Why spend huge amounts training the same model multiple times, when you can collaborate?
Note it only takes one person/company/country to release an open source model for a particular task to nuke the business model of those companies that have a business model of hoarding them.
> The buildout is currently underway, starting in Texas, and we are evaluating potential sites across the country for more campuses as we finalize definitive agreements.
For those interested, it looks like Albany, NY (upstate NY) is very likely one of the next growth sites.
[0] https://www.schumer.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/schum...
So about 10% of what Sam was asking the Saudis (and everyone else) for a year ago? That's still a helluva lot of money.
Interesting that the UAE (MGX) and Japan (Softbank) are bankrolling the re-industrialization of America.
It made me laugh when Sam said "I'm thrilled that we get to do this in the United States of America", I shouted at the TV 'Yeah you almost had to do it in Saudi Arabia' !!
Here's the presser, Sam is at 9 minutes in.
[0] https://youtu.be/IYUoANr3cMo
MGX has nothing to do with the Saudis. It's a UAE operation.
That's embarrassing. Thank you for the correction. Edited!
Was Skynet project already taken? Wonder how many public infrastructure or resource programs will be cut to fund this.
funny thing about skynet. the domain is owned by microsoft
I read the announcement and the first three words that came to my mind were...
"Hammond, of Texas"
(apologies to those who haven't watched SG-1)
I was excited by the title
Can we build a wall to keep AI out?
$500B is not $7T, but its surprisingly close.
7% is close? In what world is 7% close?
If you ran 7% of a mile in 5 minutes, would you claim you were close to running a 5 minute mile?
It’s about 1oom off. In some contexts, one oom is pretty close.
And as we all know, the economy scales exponentially with no real world repercussions /s
Looking at it logarithmically makes more sense to me. 500B seems a lot closer to 7T as 3K is to 500B. It's only off by an order of magnitude
Weird definition of close you have there. If I asked for $700, and you gave me $50, would that be close?
Depends. If I fart in a glass jar and then I try to sell it to you for $700, but you end up buying it for $50, I'd say it's pretty close.
This is my signal that it’s time to put up HN and go to bed for the night
closer than $0.05
"SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, and MGX" seems like quite the lineup. Two groups who are good at frivolously throwing away investment money because they have so much capital to deploy, there really isn't anything reasonable to do with it, a tech "has-been" and OpenAI. You become who you surround yourself with I guess.
Can someone convince me Sam Altman is not evil? I have no proof he is not evil.
Couldn't we say the same about you?
I am text on a screen. Sam Altman, as a story of a person, doesn't indicate to me he is moral or ethical.
How much exaFLOPS can we expect from a 100 Billions dollars datacenter today? A rough estimate from a quick Perplexity search gives us 24 exaFLOPS for all smartphones in the world and 12 exaFLOPS for personal computers. Could a competitor to such a Datacenter be a collective effort with some sort of crypto to split the benefits?
apparently around 100 exaflops if the 100 billions dollars datacenter is made only of nvidia H100. I am guessing the fact that (most?) personal computers and smartphones do not have a big gpu makes the above scenario difficult.
> The new entity, Stargate, will start building out data centers and the electricity generation needed for the further development of the fast-evolving AI in Texas, according to the White House.
Wouldn't a more northern state be a better location given the average temperatures of the environment? I've heard Texas is hot!
I think cheap power (whether gas turbines or massive solar farms) trumps any cooling efficiencies gained by locating in a cold climate.
Energy in Oregon isn't much more expensive than in Texas
In America!
The intro paragraph in the original URL https://openai.com/index/announcing-the-stargate-project/ mentions US/America for 5 times!
I'm in the middle of "Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation" and hoo boy, there are strong deja vu vibes here.
Just waiting for the current regime to decide that we should go all-in on some big AI venture and bet the whole Social Security pot on it.
No amount of money invested in infrastructure is going to solve the "garbage in, garbage out" problem with AI, and it looks like the AI companies have already stolen the vast majority of content that is possible to steal. So this is basically a massive gamble that some innovation is going to make AI do something better than faultily regurgitate its training data. I'm not seeing a corresponding investment which actually attempts to solve the "garbage in, garbage out" problem.
A fraction of this money invested in building homes would end the homelessness problem in the U.S.
I guess the one silver lining here is that when the likely collapse happens, we'll have more clean energy infrastructure to use for more useful things.
> All three credited Trump for helping to make the project possible, even though building has already started and the project goes back to 2024.
It’s sad to see the president of US being ass kissed so much by these guys. I always assumed there’s a little of that but this is another extreme. If this is true, I fear America has become like a third world country with a dictator like head of state where everyone just praises him and get favors in return.
This is not a new initiative, and did not start under Trump: https://wire.insiderfinance.io/project-stargate-the-worlds-l...
It’s incredibly depressing how everyone sees this as something the new administration did in a single day…
Thank you for bringing some sanity into this discussion.
Yeah it's crazy.
Welcome to 1984
> This project will ... also provide a strategic capability to protect the national security of America and its allies.
> All of us look forward to continuing to build and develop ... AGI for the benefit of all of humanity.
Erm, so which one is it? It is amply demonstrable from events post WW2 that US+allies are quite far from benefiting all of humanity & in fact, in some cases, it assists an allied minority at an extreme cost to a condemned majority, for no discernable humanitarian reasons save for some perceived notion of "shared values".
Maybe only Americans and their allies qualify as human, according to them
And only the americans the administration deems to qualify as human.
welcome to our reality where you know you will be killed but there's not a single thing you can do :)
Is there any government investment or involvement in this company? It seems like it’s all private investment so I’m confused why this is being announce by the President.
Why are we spending a half-trillion dollars on “AI infrastructure” when our actual infrastructure has been crumbling and underfunded for decades?
This is a Military project. Have no doubts about it.
This is a money making scheme.
Wealth residistribution scheme. Your tax dollars into their pockets.
As far as I can tell, this will be financed by private money. Can you elaborate?
Tax breaks, government forced to become a customer etc. the usual. Just like the astronauts to Mars thing will just shovel your money that might have gone to NASA into Musk's pocket.
> the usual. Just like the astronauts to Mars thing will just shovel your money that might have gone to NASA into Musk's pocket.
The difference is that Musk can do twice as much for 1/10 what Nasa thinks the program will cost, which is never what the program will actually cost, and Musk will do it in half that time to boot.
The guy is an unhinged manchild, but if what you care about is having your money well spend and getting to Mars as cheaply as possible, he's exactly who you're looking for.
I think you meant to type SpaceX. Which works as well as it does partly because Musk is kept at a careful length from the controls...
I'm sure you are claiming that the founder, CEO, and controlling shareholder is "kept a careful length from the controls" because you have detailed first hand knowledge of the internal operations of Space, right?
Do you have inside knowledge or a reputable source that he is kept at a distance from the controls? How much control does he have as the CEO?
> if what you care about is having your money well spend and getting to Mars as cheaply as possible, he's exactly who you're looking for.
I do find impressive that SpaceX engineers figured out reusable rockets and now we can send things more cheaply out to orbit. But in all seriousness, should we care about getting to Mars cheaply? Or do people care because Musk came along to convince them (and the US government) to invest in this venture of his?
Tax breaks, i.e. my money not being in your pocket means that they are stolen?
Tax breaks, i.e. a company extracting wealth from a community without paying into the systems that keep all the parts of that community running, forcing the community to ultimate subsidize that business's weath extraction from them.
Companies do not extract value, they create value which is then transferred to the people via the market through voluntary exchange (ideally). Where have you learned about those things? Oh, yeah, “community” , i.e. Marx.
>Companies do not extract value,
Oil and minning companies too?
Yes, before the resource is taken out of the Earth it doesn’t exist, it is created in a sense by them. Look at Venezuela - they are dying of hunger with all the oil in the world (Russia, too) But socialist ideas prevailed there and the bad companies are banned.
Assuming the tax money has to come from somewhere at some point, those who pay taxes have to make up the shortfall from those who have tax breaks. So far the US just kicks that can down the road so...
That is a big assumption. Tax money need not be a constant. But for the sake of following the same logic: if companies pay bigger taxes, they also have to make up the shortfall. Actually, this last one is much more accurate statement. Companies do not pay taxes, PEOPLE pay taxes. So taxes are paid either by the employees, the clients or by the owners (which in case of the big tech are generally common people). With high taxation you are hurting: the customers, the workers and the middle class saving for their retirement. Who is winning the tax money: state bureaucracy, corrupt politicians and the business around them, people who live like parasites (or rather are forced to live like that, because they are electoral power).
Tax breaks have basically the same effect as the government writing a check, increases inflation.
This is utter nonsense. If 1000 people go to a deserted island with no government and taxation would that mean the inflation will be plus infinity or at least very high??? Inflation is monetary phenomenon, it happens when money is being printed.
In that case there would be no inflation or deflation, assuming a fixed money supply and no economic growth. However, the the key here is that the government, the federal government anyways, is spending money regardless of the tax break. Anytime the government writes a check, that's a little bit more money floating around; anytime the government collects some money, such as taxes, there's that much less money to be had. Every tax break causes the money supply to increase more relative to if the tax break did not exist, causing more inflation (or less deflation, if that were the case). If the government spent exactly as much as it taxed, then there would be... actually deflation, because the economy is growing. This is the basics of fiscal policy.
There's also the monetary policy, which is when the federal reserve does this on purpose. The general principle is the same, but instead it spends its money buying bonds and gets its money selling those bonds, and creates a bunch of rules about where banks keep their money so it always has some money on hand.
So, in this desert there would be no inflation or deflation, you say. Let’s say we use gold coins there. Wouldn’t we have an inflation if we find a gold mine there and everybody start digging up gold? You are missing the fact that the money printing is not driven only by government spending. It is driven primarily by the monetary policy (in the hands of the FED) and to some extent by the government debt. You have knowledge gaps on a very basic level. The idea that taxation stops inflation is absolutely ridiculous. It would mean that countries with low taxes have very high inflation and this is not the case. It would also means that the inflation should be constant and in struct correlation with the taxes. Both statements are completely false and very easily provable by quick fact check. The only things taxes do are: misplacing capital and stopping economic growth, which may be the same thing arguably
> It is driven primarily by the monetary policy
Yeah, that's why I mentioned the fed.
> It would mean that countries with low taxes have very high inflation and this is not the case.
It's about the total balance of government spending and taxes. The point being made is that tax breaks have the same effect as government spending. Recall that I was replying to
> Tax breaks, i.e. my money not being in your pocket means that they are stolen?
The government writing someone a million dollar check and the government giving someone a million dollar tax break (assuming they pay at least a million in taxes), contribute to inflation by increasing the money supply by a million dollars than it would be otherwise. Yes, this federal reserve is by far a larger driver of inflation, but the government giving this tax break still degrades the value of your money, same as if they wrote a check.
Of course, it is easy to view a tax break as a non-action, but that's exactly why the government gives so many tax breaks. Once you're taxing everyone, you can hand out tax breaks that's the same as handing out money only you can pretend that it's doing nothing.
Think of it as 3 Scenarios:
1) The island government writes a check to everyone except you, increasing their wealth by 50%.
2) The island government taxes just you for 50% of your wealth.
3) The island government taxes everyone 75% of their wealth, grants everyone but you a total tax-break, and you 25 percentage point tax break.
Basically the same result, only in one they say "It was fair, and we handed out a few tax-breaks, what's wrong with letting people keep their money?"
1) wealth is not increased by tax break, only current income is increased
2) if government gives everyone tax break but not me, it means only that the government taxes only me
3) if everyone has 50% more money, there is very high probability that my business will go up A LOT
Seriously, dude, it’s not worthy anymore to try and explain to you very basic stuff. Inflation is not a balance between taxation and spending. All Middle Eastern countries are having huge spending and almost zero taxes. I asked you very simple question and you couldn’t answer.
What bothers me most is why people write about things they have no clue about and clearly haven’t even put a decent thought into it.
Basically what you believe in is that the thieves are controlling the inflation because they get some of the citizens wealth.
> only current income is increased
There's actually lots of taxes that aren't income or sales tax
> if everyone has 50% more money, there is very high probability that my business will go up A LOT
No, you'll be getting twice the money, but the money is worth half as much.
> Inflation is not a balance between taxation and spending.
It is for the US federal government.
> All Middle Eastern countries are having huge spending and almost zero taxes.
Those countries peg their currency to the dollar. Their money doesn't come from taxes, but instead from state oil companies. These countries aren't as free to hand out money like the US. If enough people tried to exchange their Saudi Riyals for dollars quick enough, and the Saudi government couldn't gather US dollars quick enough, their currency would very quickly collapse.
What do you think NASA does with the money? Is doesn't build a NASA house for its NASA babies.
The Mars walk is just 3 years away baby!
The best part about this answer is it's always true.
Related: GenAI, Cold fusion
Yup, and FSD.
3 months maybe, 6 months definitely.
Your tax dollars are the customer.
Mostly benefiting the fossil fuel industry. How are they going to power this? Gas is the only option that can be implemented within single years. And this is going to need a lot of power.
Who cares about the planet, anyway.
There probably will be a clause of mandatory consumption of a given percentage of power generated from coal ensuring continued coal generation of a given minimum providing excellent talking-points for broadcasting to the incumbent's base.
> Who cares about the planet, anyway.
Maybe at some point they are going to AI themselves out of climate change. Well.. except for the part where they don’t believe in man-escalated climate change.
For $500bn they can build a nuclear power plant dedicated to these data centres
Ah so it's commissioned in 2040 and renewables already made it obsolete.
They can build a couple. With nuclear money is rarely the issue. It is that it takes forever because reasons.
It's not like the current admin respects the rule of law anyways...
Trump just rescinded licenses for offshore wind farms via an EO. We're fucking cooked (and I mean this literally)
Before downvoting the OP and, for more information, see:
https://apnews.com/article/wind-energy-offshore-turbines-tru...
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/trump-offshore-wind-leasing...
> Offshore wind is among the sources of new power generation that will cost the most, at about $100 per megawatt hour for new projects connecting to the grid in 2028, according to estimates from the Energy Information Administration. That includes tax credits under the Inflation Reduction Act, which reduces the cost of renewable technologies. But onshore wind is one of the cheapest sources, at about $31 on average for new projects.
I mean, I can see how numbers wise this decision makes sense.
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Pollution and climate change are two separate problems (both linked to the fossil fuel industry).
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what's the difference
Not all money making schemes involve the military.
This has cosmological significance if it leads to superintelligence
It won't unless there's another (r)evolution in the underlying technology / science / algorithms, at this point scaling up just means they use bigger datasets or more iterations, but it's more finetuning and improving the existing output then coming up with a next generation / superintelligence.
> It won't unless there's another (r)evolution in the underlying technology / science
I think reinforcement learning with little to no human feedback, O-1 / R-1 style, might be that revolution.
There is lots of human feedback. This isn’t a game with an end state that it can easily play against itself. It needs problems with known solutions, or realistic simulations. This is why people wonder if our own universe is a simulation for training an asi.
I think gluing wings to a pig will make it fly. Show me examples or stop the conjecture.
Okay, but let’s be pessimistic for a moment. What can we do if that revolution does happen, and they’re close to AGI?
I don’t believe the control problem is solved, but I’m not sure it would matter if it is.
Being pessimistic, how come no human supergeniuses ever took over the world? Why didn't Leibniz make everyone else into his slaves?
I don't even understand what the proposed mechanism for "rouge AI enslaves humanity" is. It's scifi (and not hard scifi) as far as I can see.
> Being pessimistic, how come no human supergeniuses ever took over the world? Why didn't Leibniz make everyone else into his slaves?
We already did. Look at the state of animals today vs <1 mya. Bovines grown in unprecedented mass numbers to live short lives before slaughter. Wolves bred into an all new animal, friendly and helpful to the dominate species. Previously apex predators with claws, teeth, speed and strength, rendered extinct.
Sometimes I wonder if we are going to be the unkillable plague that takes over the universe. Or maybe we will dissappear in a blink. It's hard to know, we don't have any reference point except ourselves.
Destroying human life in Earth (the only habitable place in the solar system) is far far easier than reaching something outside the solar system.
Once you have one AGI, you can scale it to many AGI as long as you have the necessary compute. An AGI never needs to take breaks, can work non-stop on a problem, has access to all of the world's information simultaneously, and can interact with any system it's connected to.
To put it simply, it could outcompete humanity on every metric that matters, especially given recent advancements in robotics.
...so it can think really hard all the time and come up with lots of great, devious evil ideas?
Again, I wonder why no group of smart people with brilliant ideas has unilaterally imposed those ideas on the rest of humanity through sheer force of genius.
An equivalent advance in autonomous robotics would solve the force projection issue, if that's what you're getting at.
I don't know if this will happen with any certainty, but the general idea of commoditising intelligence very much has the ability to tip the world order: every problem that can be tackled by throwing brainpower at it will be, and those advances will compound.
Also, the question you're posing did happen: it was called the Manhattan Project.
So don't plug the smart evil computer into the strong robots? Great, AI apocalypse averted.
The Manhattan Project would be a cute example if the Los Alamos scientists had gone rogue and declared themselves emperors of mankind, but no, in fact the people in charge remained the people in charge - mostly not supergeniuses.
And if this whole exercise turns out to be a flop and gets us absolutely nowhere closer to AGI?
“AGI” has proven to be today’s hot marketing stunt for when you need to raise another round of cash and your only viable product is optimism.
Flying cars were just around the corner in the 60s, too.
You really haven't used any LLM seriously eh
This thread started from a deliberately pessimistic hypothetical of what happens if AGI actually manifests, so your comment is misplaced.
Look at any corporation or government to understand how a large group of humans can be driven to do specific things none of them individually want.
Quite a few have succeeded in conquering large fractions of the Earth's population: Napoleon, Hitler, Genghis Khan, the Roman emperors, Alexander the Great, Mao Zedong. America and Britain as systems did so for long periods of time.
All of these entities would have been enormously more powerful with access to an AGI's immortality, sleeplessness, and ability to clone itself.
I can see what you're trying to say, but I cannot for the life of me figure out how an AGI would have helped Alexander the Great.
Alexander the Great made his conquests by building a really good reputation for war, then leveraging it to get tribute agreements while leaving the local governments intact. This is a good way to do it when communication lines are slow and unreliable, because the emperor just needs to check tribute once a year to enforce the agreements, but it's weak control.
If Alexander could have left perfectly aligned copies of himself in every city he passed, he could have gotten much more control and authority, and still avoided a fight by agreeing to maintain the local power structure with himself as the new head of state.
Oh, you're assuming an entire networking infrastructure as well. That makes way more sense, but the miracle there isn't AGI - without networking they'd lose alignment over time. Honestly, I feel like it would devolve in a patchwork of different kingdoms run by an Alexander figurehead... where have I seen this before?
The problem you're proposing could be solved via a high quality cellular network.
And of course the more society is wired up and controlled by computer systems, the more the AGI could directly manage it.
This is profoundly and disturbingly bad argument.
1)Leibniz wasn't superhuman 2) Leibniz couldn't work 24/7 3) he could not self increase the speed of his own hardware (body) 4) he could not spawn 1 trillion copies of him to work 24/7
Like how much time did you think before writing this
Again, my reaction is... so what?
A trillion hyperintelligent demons might be cogitating right now on the head of a pin. You can't prove they aren't thinking up all sorts of genius evil schemes. My point is that "intelligence" has never been a sufficient - or even necessary - component of imposing ones will on humans.
I feel like HN/EA/"Grey Tribe" people fail to see this because they so worship intellect. I'm much more likely to fall victim to a big dumb man than smart computers.
huh what ? this is a whole new level of flat earther thinking. you actually believe that apex predators are not the most intelligent? Like humans became the apex because of something else than intelligence? AI and covid showed humanity what levels of wacky stuff people believe. I am not trying to convince you, thank you for showing me this perspective :)
I consider many successful military leaders and politicians to be geniuses as well. In my books, Caesar is as genius as Newton!
Having said that, we do not to understand the world to exploit it for ourselves. And what better way to understand and exploit the universe than science? Its an endearment.
> bigger datasets
Not even, they already ran out of data.
I am sure that the M.I.C. have a ton of classified data that could be used to train a military AI.
"this generation shall not pass"... to me that's about as credible as wanting to "preserve human consciousness" by going to Mars.
Setting the world on fire and disrupting societies gleefully, while basically building bunkers (figuratively more than literally) and consolidating surveillance and propaganda to ride out the cataclysm, that's what I'm seeing.
And the stories to sell people on continuing to put up with that are not even good IMO. Just because the people who use the story to consolidate wealth and control are excited about that, we're somehow expected to be excited about the promise of a pair of socks made from barbed wire they gave us for Christmas. It's the narcissistic experience: "this is shit. this benefits you, not me. this hurts me."
One thing is sure, actual intelligence, regardless of how you may define it, something that is able to reason and speak freely, is NOT what people who fire engineers for correcting them want. It's not about a sort of oracle for humanity to enjoy and benefit from, that just speaks "truth".
Don't worry, it'll only lead to superstupidity.
And superplagiarism of human-created content
I'm sure this will age well.
Is that the prequel to Idiocracy?
The military project is/was JWCC, TS/SCI+ classified, air gapped clouds. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle etc all have existing contracts with the DoD covering such work (and getting the contract meant building and running a cloud, not just signing some paperwork agreeing to at some point in the future)
It's an ego-building projects.
The data centres were already being built. All of these companies have been dumping tonnes of money into AI and will continue to dump tonnes of money into AI. It's just more of the same, but they had to do a big announcement with Trump to pander to his ego and somehow make it about him. Like he engineered this Stargate thing. The whole embarrassing spectacle was likely arranged by Ellison.
I was bullish on OpenAI, but honestly I don't see any path forward where they have any differentiating value that justifies even a tenth of the valuation. Their video AI is simply terrible. Dall-E 2 is matched by many competitors. 4o and o1 and good, but already have been eclipsed by a number of competitors, including an open source Chinese option.
My work has almost entirely transitioned to competitors, and Google's latest updates have quietly absolutely trounced OpenAI's offering. Like, Gemini has quietly become the best AI platform in the game.
That's all neither here nor there, but I just don't care what Altman and crew have to say any more. They are not leaders in the space. They are, in many ways, has beens.
of course. its an arms race by definition so its all a military project. and already one whistleblower was brazenly murdered by our government to protect our horse in this race.
no whistleblower was murdered, ridiculous conspiracy theory
motive and means is a basis for conviction according to the law
... If they build it under Cheyenne mountain you are definitely correct
Why Texas - is it an ideal location for AI infrastructure?
It is an ideal location for bribing politicians. That was at the top of the reqs list, infrastructure was at the bottom.
There is a 14 mile tunnel to nowhere in Ellis County which could probably house a few hundred billions worth of computers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider...
https://www.amusingplanet.com/2010/12/abandoned-remains-of-s...
Leading state in new grid battery and grid solar installations for the last three years, and deregulated nuclear power last year. Abilene is near the Dallas Fort-Worth Metroplex area which has a massive 8M+ upper-income population highly skilled in hardware and electrical engineering (Texas Instruments, Raytheon, Toyota, etc). The entire area has massive tracts of open land that are affordably priced without building restrictions. Business regulations and tax environment at the state and city level are very laissez faire (no taxes on construction such as in the Seattle area or many parts of California).
I could see DFW being a good candidate for a prototype arcology project.
Like dwnw said, anything goes in Texas if you have money and there’s already a decent number of qualified tech workers. Corporate taxes are super low as well.
Texas seems to be where Oracle already has a DC project underway
a lot of open space - desert - and plenty of solar energy. and favorable politics.
because best state, next question
Texas positioning itself better than expected for AI and EVs is the plot twist the peasants needed
If they plan to transition off oil/nuclear it will be fun to watch
Texas already is the leading state in new grid battery and grid solar installs for the last 3 years. Governor Abbott also did nuclear deregulation last year.
is there a simple metric likr x amount of power generated by solar, oil, gas etc?
it seems like such a simple stat to collect
Sad waste of money that will go in Oracle licenses... The lost liberties of the American people is just a small feat... beside the point
Some reports[0] paint this as something Trump announced and that the US Government is heavily involved with but the announcement only mentions private sector (and lead by Japan's Softbank at that). Is the US also putting in money? How much control of the venture is private vs public here?
0. https://www.thewrap.com/trump-open-ai-oracle-stargate-ai-inf...
1. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-announces-private-sector-...
AFAIK this is a purely private project, and Trump is just doing the announcement as a form of bragging/ribbon-cutting
Data centers are overrated, local AI is what’s necessary for humanoid (and other) robots, which will be the most economically impactful use case.
You probably still need to train the initial models in data centers, with local host mostly being used to run train models. At most we’d augment trained models with local data storage on local host.
If compute continues to become cheaper, local training might be feasible in 20 years.
You definitely still need data centers to train the models that you’ll run locally. Also if we achieve AGI you can bet it won’t be available to run locally at first.
Isn't it better to control robots from the data center? You can get 30ms round-trip to most urban centers, which is sufficient latency for most tasks; lower weight & cost robots with better battery life, and more uptime on compute (e.g. the GPU isn't sitting there doing nothing when the user is sleeping) which means lower cost to consumer for the same end result.
For self-driving you need edge compute because a few milliseconds of latency is a safety risk, but for many applications I don't see why you'd want that.
Why are corporations announcing business deals from the White House? There doesn’t seem to be any public ownership/benefit here, aside from potential job creation. Which could be significant. But the American public doesn’t seem to gain anything from this new company.
We are currently witnessing the merging of government and corporations. It was bad before but the process is accelerating now.
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Can you please not perpetuate flamewars or use HN for political battle? Your account has unfortunately been doing this repeatedly lately. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Absolutely dang. I’m sorry for causing you any grief.
Appreciated!
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If you keep posting in the flamewar style we're going to have to ban you again.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Then you need to ban me again, because I have no idea how I violated the guidelines any more than the OP submission did. My comment was a digression along relevant, imperative and inoffensive lines that were introduced by the source. I am not the only person raising this point, I am not inviting extremist interpretations, and I'm not misrepresenting the consequences presented in the article. For years, Hacker News has tolerated pugilist insults being hurled at the EU with the sole purpose of starting ideological flamewars. Now that someone steps up to accuse America of a double-standard, it's offensive and insensitive? I really don't get it. What culture are you even trying to foster, at this point? Certainly not one that gratifies an audience's curiosity.
If you want to threaten people with the guidelines, then they have to be interpretable. The current "politics is bad except when it's not" rationale is not going to age with grace - it's going to create a series of unsustainable and conflicting precedents that only get worse as America's political landscape further deteriorates. Take a stance on it and stand your ground, people will not listen if your guidelines "maybe" enforce something or provide "probably" off-topic criteria.
Your GP comment, like the one you were replying to, was just ideological flamebait, without substance or information. We want thoughtful conversation here, not people taking swipes at enemies.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> For years, Hacker News has tolerated pugilist insults being hurled at
Other people breaking the site guidelines doesn't make it ok for you to do it (I don't mean you personally, of course, but anyone who comments here). Otherwise we just end up in a downward spiral (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).
If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). You can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.
there's some pretty good quotes about that by Mussolini. Things are getting bleak at an incredible pace.
Judging by the reactions it seems fascism has become very popular around here too lately.
The original quote I was referring to:
Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power. - Benito Mussolini
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You make broad assumptions about someone, talk down to them, and then claim they need to grow up?
E: parent edited their comment.
Can you elaborate on what you mean?
Sure, tl;dr: Coastals are in a cultural bubble and Orange Man Bad™ is not literally Hitler/Mussolini/{insert-favorite-despot}.
Weird question. Business deals are announced by politicians all the time, especially on overseas trips. Just an example:
https://boeing.mediaroom.com/2015-04-10-Presidents-Varela-Ob...
This isn't an overseas trip though. It's a private partnership announced by the sitting president in the Roosevelt room, literally across the hall from the oval office. I don't know how unprecedented that truly is, but it certainly feels unusual.
I thought the business prop for AI was that it eliminates jobs?
It will. The short-term sale is that it will create thousands of temporary jobs, and long-term reduce hundreds of thousands of jobs, while handing the savings to stock holdings and moving wealth to the stockholders.
Looks on pace to eliminate every human job over 10 years.
What is the hard limiting factor constraining software and robots from replacing any human job in that time span? Lots of limitations of current technology, but all seem likely to be solved within that timeframe.
What data to you have to support such a claim?
From Zuckerberg, for example:
>> "a lot of the code in our apps and including the AI that we generate, is actually going to be built by AI engineers instead of people engineers."
https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/meta-developing-a...
Ikea's been doing this for a while:
>> Ingka says it has trained 8,500 call centre workers as interior design advisers since 2021, while Billie - launched the same year with a name inspired by IKEA's Billy bookcase range - has handled 47% of customers' queries to call centres over the past two years.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/ikea-bets-remote-interior...
By your own admission, Ikea eliminated 0 jobs and you gave no number for Meta.
Do you expect all companies to retrain? Do you expect CEOs to be wrong? Do you expect AI to stay the same, get better, or get worse? I never made the claim that new jobs will NOT be made, that is yet to be seen, but jobs will be lost to AI.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/may/18/bt-cut-jobs...
>> “For a company like BT there is a huge opportunity to use AI to be more efficient,” he said. “There is a sort of 10,000 reduction from that sort of automated digitisation, we will be a huge beneficiary of AI. I believe generative AI is a huge leap forward; yes, we have to be careful, but it is a massive change.”
Goldman Sacs:
https://www.gspublishing.com/content/research/en/reports/202...
>> Extrapolating our estimates globally suggests that generative AI could expose the equivalent of 300mn full-time jobs to automation.
I'm on your side, but there's two readings of these reports:
1) "We are serious, this is going to happen."
2) "AI is big right now so if we hype it we might get some money!"
I do not have any hard data from 10 years from now.
My speculation is based on not seeing any constraints that will block progress of machine intelligence from reaching those capabilities within 10 years.
Also, Kurzweil's predictions from early 2000s have been eerily prescience and this is the time frame he predicted for the Singularity.
It's foreign investment money into the US. Softbank and MGX are foreign and presumably stumping up much of the cash.
> Why are corporations announcing business deals from the White House?
You're answering your own question:
> potential job creation. Which could be significant
The US is now officially a full on oiligarchy. It always was one, it's just that the powers that be don't care to hide it anymore and are flaunting that they have the power.
For profit? I don't understand what's complicated about this.
This is my question too, but I haven't seen a journalist ask it yet. My baseless theory: Trump has promised them some kind of antitrust protections in the form of legislation to be written & passed at a later date.
An announcement of a public AI infrastructure program joined by multiple companies could have been a monumental announcement. This one just looks like three big companies getting permission to make one big one.
Easier: Trump likely committed that the federal agencies wouldn't slow roll regulatory approval (for power, for EIS, etc.).
Ellison stated explicitly that this would be "impossible" without Trump.
Masa stated that this (new investment level?) wouldn't be happening had Trump not won, and that the new investment level was decided yesterday.
I know everyone wants to see something nefarious here, but simplest explanation is that the federal government for next four years is expected to be significantly less hostile to private investment, and - shocker - that yields increased private investment.
That is a better one. I don't know why three rich guys investing in a new company would result in a slowness that Trump could fix, though, and a promise to rush or sidestep regulatory approval still sounds nefarious.
Lots of politicians announce major investments in their area.
If the announced spending target is true, this will be a strategic project for the US exceeding Biden's stimulus acts in scale. I think it would be pretty normal in any country to have highest-level involvement for projects like this. For example, Tesla has a much smaller revenue than this and Chancellor Olaf Scholz was still present when they opened their Gigafactory near Berlin.
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I'm watching the announcement live from the white house and something about this just feels so strange and dystopian.
Reference for others: https://youtube.com/watch?v=L1ff0HhNMso
Well, the silver lining is the incredible human capacity to get used to almost any situation given enough time
It will get weirder, but only relatively so, the concept of normalcy always trailing just a little bit behind as we slide
Agreed, and whats the story behind the art chosen for the landing page?
I'm also curious how a global leader in multimodal generative AI chose this particular image. Did they prompt a generator for a super messy impressionist painting of red construction cranes with visible brush strokes, distorted to the point of barely being able to discern what the image represents?
Considering Stargate's introduction and plan seems to be a super messy concept of impressions of ideas and very lacking in details, the picture makes a lot of sense. Let AI evangelists see the future in the fuzz; let AI pessimists see failure in the abstract; let investors see $$$ in their pockets.
For me it's watching a gay man grovel at the feet of one of the most anti-LGBT politicians, a day after Trump signed multiple executive orders that dehumanized Altman and the LGBT community. Every token thinks they're special until they're spent.
What is he so anti about? He is against adding other official genders than the biological ones we have at birth. But he isn't against people wanting to be called whatever they want in informal situations. And he is against trans surgery at young ages when children aren't fully grown and adult enough to make such drastic interventions. But he is not against adult people wanting to be whatever they want.
>For me it's watching a gay man grovel at the feet of one of the most anti-LGBT politicians
Besides what ImJamal said, as a wealthy playboy man-about-town hanging out at Studio 54 in the '70s and '80s, I guarantee Trump has known and been friends with more gays than 95% of Americans. Certainly there has been no shortage of gay people among his top-level appointees in either his first or second administrations.
> I guarantee Trump has known and been friends with more gays than 95% of Americans.
ok... ??? doesn't mean a thing, frankly.
Actually it does, especially in the context of the rest of what I wrote:
>Certainly there has been no shortage of gay people among his top-level appointees in either his first or second administrations.
Trump was the first president to come into office supporting gay marriage. Trump only has a problem with the "t" part of the community and only in bathrooms and sports, not in general.
This didn't age well.
sama, peter thiel ... they dgaf. there is a huge difference between an oppressed gay person and a wealthy one.
no one wants to bite the hand that feeds.
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> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That tramples curiosity.
That was my literal point to parent.
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Altman rising to the top and becoming the defacto state preferred leader of AI in the US is wild. Fair play to him.
They had me at "Oracle" ...
Here is what I think is going on in this announcement. Take the 4 major commodity cloud companies (Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle) and determine: do they have big data centers and do they have their own AI product organization?
- Google has a massive data center division (Google Cloud / GCP) and a massive AI product division (Deep Mind / Gemini).
- Microsoft has a massive data center division (Azure) but no significant AI product division; for the most part, they build their "Copilot" functionality atop their partner version of the OpenAI APIs.
- Amazon has a massive data center division (Amazon Web Services / AWS) but no significant AI product division; for the most part, they are hedging their bets here with an investment in Anthropic and support for running models inside AWS (e.g. Bedrock).
- Oracle has a massive data center division (Oracle Cloud / OCI) but no significant AI product division.
Now look at OpenAI by comparison. OpenAI has no data center division, as the whole company is basically the AI product division and related R&D. But, at the moment, their data centers come exclusively from their partnership with Microsoft.
This announcement is OpenAI succeeding in a multi-party negotiation with Microsoft, Oracle, and the new administration of the US Gov't. Oracle will build the new data centers, which it knows how to do. OpenAI will use the compute in these new data centers, which it knows how to do. Microsoft granted OpenAI an exception to their exclusive cloud compute licensing arrangement, due to this special circumstance. Masa helps raise the money for the joint venture, which he knows how to do. US Gov't puts its seal on it to make it a more valuable joint venture and to clear regulatory roadblocks for big parallel data center build-outs. The current administration gets to take credit as "doing something in the AI space," while also framing it in national industrial policy terms ("data centers built in the USA").
The clear winner in all of this is OpenAI, which has politically and economically navigated its way to a multi-cloud arrangement, while still outsourcing physical data center management to Microsoft and Oracle. Probably their deal with Oracle will end up looking like their deal with Microsoft, where the trade is compute capacity for API credits that Oracle can use in its higher level database products.
OpenAI probably only needs two well-capitalized hardware providers competing for their CPU+GPU business in order to have a "good enough" commodity market to carry them to the next level of scaling, and now they have it.
Google increasingly has a strategic reason not to sell OpenAI any of its cloud compute, and Amazon could be headed in that direction too. So this was more strategically (and existentially) important to OpenAI than one might have imagined.
This here reminds me a bubble in the making. Like South Sea Bubble to be precise.
AI is good if you use it wisely. There were reports years ago about using AI in SoCal to detect wild fires, but in the end we see insurance companies using AI to withdraw from areas of high fire risk. Quite competent AI, isn't it?
> building new AI infrastructure for OpenAI in the United States
That's nice, but if I were spending $500bn on datacenters I'd probably try to put a few in places that serve other users. Centralised compute can only get you so far in terms of serving users.
This could potentially trigger an AI arms race between the US and China. The standard has been set, lets see what China responds with. Either way, it will accelerate the arrival of ASI, which in my opinion is probably a good thing.
The arms race is already running, I think this showdown is inevitable so we should get our asses moving
Unless we air strike the data centers, there is no way to control China’s progress
It will be similar to the space race between Soviet Union and US. And just like Soviet Union going broke and collapsing, China too will go even more broke and collapse.
The Silicon-Valley bubble universe continues to introduce entropy that it feeds off of itself... Naming this Stargate when some of the largest effects AI has had is removing humans from processes to make other, fewer humans more efficient is emblematic of this hollow naming ethos - continuing to use the portal to shunt more and more humans out of the process that is humanity, with fairly reckless abandon. Who is Ra, and who is sending the nuke where, in this naming scheme? You decide.
How have they already selected who gets this money? Usually the government announces a program and tries to be fair when allocating funds. Here they are just bankrolling an existing project. Interesting
>How have they already selected who gets this money?
As I understand it there wasn't anything to select, this is their own private money to be spent as they please. In this case Stargate.
1. At this scale, we’re not just talking about buying GPUs. It requires semiconductor fabs, assembly factories, power plants, batteries/lithium, cooling, water, hazardous waste disposal. These data centers are going to have to be massively geo-engineered arcologies.
2. What are they doing? AGI/ASI is a neat trick, but then what? I’m not asking because I don’t think there is an answer; I’m asking because I want the REAL answer. Larry Ellison was talking about RNA cancer vaccines. Well, I was the one that made the neural network model for the company with the US patent on this technique, and that pitch makes little sense. As the problem is understood today, the computational problems are 99% solved with laptop-class hardware. There are some remaining problems that are not solved by neural networks, but by molecular dynamics, which are done in FP64. Even if FP8 neural structure approximation speeds it up 100x, FP64 will be 99% of the computation. So what we today call “AI infrastructure” is not appropriate for the task they talk about. What is it appropriate for? Well, I know that Sam is a bit uncreative, so I assume he’s just going to keep following the “HER” timeline and make a massive playground for LLMs to talk to each other and leave humanity behind. I don’t think that is necessarily unworthy of our Apollo-scale commitment, but there are serious questions about the honest of the project, and what we should demand for transparency. We’re obviously headed toward a symbiotic merger where LLMs and GenAI are completely in control of our understanding of the world. There is a difference between watching a high-production movie for two hours, and then going back to reality, versus a never-ending stream of false sensory information engineered individually to specifically control your behavior. The only question is whether we will be able to see behind the curtain of the great Oz. That’s what I mean by transparency. Not financial or organizational, but actual code, data, model, and prompt transparency. Is this a fundamental right worth fighting for?
This is going to be the grift of the century. Sam will put Wall Street robber barons to shame.
> This is going to be the grift of the century.
Pretty sure that was musk and his 50+ bn bonus
shareholders voted for it multiple times so harder to call it grift
Most grifts involve persuading the victim
So its not the hype anymore?
Softbank historically had been late to buy into the hype, but man do they buy big.
I hope the Japanese government demands seismic isolation for Softbank, otherwise it will be the Japanese citizens who have to foot the bill when this hype hits the ground and shakes hard the Japanese economy :/
Softbank should not be allowed to invest more than ARM Holdings sold at a loss.
Why would Japanese citizens be hit? Is Softbank a publicly backed fund?
Softbank doesn't have enough cash reserves for such a huge inversion. There are no details of how will they do, but one can guess that loans will be taken from Japanese banks and companies around the country, which -depending on how ambitious they are- will be scrambling to stay in business when the debt isn't repaid on time, a highly contagious chain reaction will arise, what will invite the government to use public money, even turning on the printer (on such cases citizens lose). Softbank alone has more than 65k employees.
If the Softbank's inversion is limited to their available assets, or the exposition of each lending is limited to a portion of their real reserves, I think such event will not happen (more than burned money by a bad inversion).
I think it would be quite similar to what has already happened on a global scale with the public money of each country in 2008 (due to the banking pyramid scam), or since 2011 with public loans to TEPCO, an event that could have been prevented if the central plant had been built were originally planned.
At least this time the CEO of their chosen company isn’t a yuppie cult leader wannabe.
I mean, to the extent that Softbank's grand entrance could almost be used as the signpost to the bursting of bubbles.
If I was an AI enthusiast, Softbank showing up would make me nervous.
Softbank is not exactly a green flag when using their involvent as a signal of "low hypeness". I still remember WeWork.
It will be interesting to see how AWS responds. Jump on board, or offer up a competing vision otherwise their cloud risks being perceived as being left behind in terms of computing power.
What are people filling these datacenters with exactly if not nvidia?
Personally I wish they invested in optical photonic computing, taking it out of the research labs. It can be so much more energy efficient and faster to run than GPUs and TPUs.
O1 Pro's opinion on Stargate: Humans are hallucinating, again...
https://justpaste.it/631gx
Didn't anyone involved in naming this 'Stargate' ever actually watch the series? Not a good name if you're trying to create AGI
Gerat. Larry gets cash thrown at his AI surveillance dystopia.
How much of the supposed $500B will be US state budget money?
0
You know, I expected that they'd find or synthesize some naquadah to build an actual stargate and maybe even defeat the Goa'uld. The exciting stuff, not AI.
Well, we may get the replicators.
One of the key questions becomes: is this it for Europe?
How does a person with experience in digital marketing, graphic design, and lots of AI (text/image) usage get a small piece of this money?
SoftBank and MGX paying for all this, all foreign investment.
Where is the US government in all this? Why aren't they leading the charge? They obviously have the money.
$500 billion is a lot of money even by US government standards. It's about the size of all the new spending in the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure bill.
For the US government it's a matter of political will. Where is the political will?
The political will is trying to balance a large existing debt at increasing interest rates, a significant primary deficit even in a good economy, rising military threats from China, a strong Republican desire for tax cuts, extremely popular entitlement programs that no one wants to touch, and an aging population with a declining birthrate
Modern monetary systems function through two main channels: government spending and bank lending. Every dollar in circulation originates from one of these sources - either government fiscal operations (deficit spending) or bank credit creation through loans. This means all money is fundamentally based on debt, though "debt" has very different implications for a currency-issuing government versus private borrowers. Government debt operates fundamentally differently from household debt since the government controls its own currency. As former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan noted to Congress, the U.S. can always meet any obligation denominated in dollars since it can create them. The real constraints aren't financial but economic - inflation risk and the efficient allocation of real resources.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNCZHAQnfGU
The key question then becomes one of political priorities and public understanding. If public opposition to beneficial government spending stems from misunderstanding how modern monetary systems work, then better education about these mechanisms could help advance important policy goals. The focus should be on managing real economic constraints rather than imaginary financial ones.
The last four years have been nothing but a lesson in how much everybody hates inflation and how absolutely toxic it is to re-election campaigns
Yes, people hate inflation, because inflation creates a demand for more money! Inflation means there is not enough money for people. So why did prices go up, is it just because of fiscal spending?
The relationship between inflation and monetary policy is more complex than often portrayed. While recent inflation has created financial strain for many Americans, its root causes extend beyond simple money supply issues. Recent data shows that corporate profit margins reached historic highs during the inflationary period of 2021-2022. For example, in Q2 2022, corporate profits as a percentage of GDP hit 15.5%, the highest level since the 1950s. This surge in corporate profits coincided with the aftermath of Trump's 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which reduced the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%. This tax reduction increased after-tax profits and may have given companies more flexibility to pursue aggressive pricing strategies. Multiple factors contributed to inflation:
Supply chain disruptions created genuine scarcity in many sectors, particularly semiconductors, shipping, and raw materials Demand surged as economies reopened post-pandemic Many companies used these market conditions to implement price increases that exceeded their cost increases The corporate tax environment created incentives for profit maximization over price stability
For instance, many large retailers reported both higher prices and expanded profit margins during this period. The Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City found that roughly 40% of inflation in 2021 could be attributed to expanded profit margins rather than increased costs. This pattern suggests that market concentration, pricing power, and tax policy played significant roles in inflation, alongside traditional monetary and supply-chain factors. Policy solutions should therefore address market structure, tax policy, and monetary policy to effectively manage inflation.
New admin is focused on federal cost cutting. Attracting foreign investment is a win-win for everyone involved.
> create hundreds of thousands of American jobs, and generate massive economic benefit for the entire world.
100s of 1000s of jobs seems a bit exaggerated.
unless they have internally built models that are of much higher intelligence than what we have today, this seems like premature optimization
What will be powering all these data centers? The thought of exponentially increasing our fossil fuel consumption scares the hell out of me.
Texas is the leading state in new grid batteries and grid solar for three years now. Also Governor Abbott deregulated nuclear last year. Sure there will be some new natural gas too, which is the least scary fossil fuel. They call it the "all of the above" approach to energy.
Well there was this random dude early that was rambling something about „drill baby drill“…
Fossil fuels, of course.
None of these companies have the inner resources to fund a 500B build.
Looks like the dollar printing press will continue to overheat in the coming years.
Future of AI being controlled by Oracle worries me
Am I wrong to conclude they just got rocked super hard by DeepSeek R1?
Wouldn't 500bn into quantum computing show better returns for civilization? Assuming it's about progress and ... not money.
We don't really know anything useful that can be done with quantum computers for civilization.
They can break some cryptography... other than that... what are they good for?
There's some highly speculative ideas about using them for chemistry/biology research, but no guaranteed return on investment at all.
As far as I know... that's it.
Who can break crypto with quantum computing? That is total speculation.
Shor’s algorithm can. What is speculative about that?
I put the word "some" in front of "crypto" for a reason.
There is some crypto that we know how to break with a sufficiently large quantum computer [0]. There is some we don't know how to do that to. I might be behind the state of the art here, but when I wasn't we specifically really only knew how to use it to break cryptography that Shor's algorithm breaks.
[0] https://quantum-journal.org/papers/q-2021-04-15-433/
Nope. Any crypto you can break with a real, physical, non-imaginary quantum computer, you can break faster with classical. Get over it. Shor's don't run yet and probably never will.
You are misdirecting and you know it. I don't even need to discredit that paper. Other people have done it for me already.
This is incorrect. Whilst you may be sceptical about whether quantum computers can be realised, the theoretical result is sound.
Recent advances in quantum error correction are a significant increase in confidence that quantum computers are practical.
We can argue about timelines. I suspect it is too early for startups to be raising funds for quantum computers at this stage.
Source: I worked in quantum computing research.
This is like asking whether $500 billion to fund warp drives would yield better returns.
Money can't buy fundamental breakthroughs: money buys you parallel experimental volume - i.e. more people working from the same knowledge base, and presumably an increase in the chance that one of them does advance the field. But at any given time point, everyone is working from the same baseline (money also can improve this - by funding things you can ensure knowledge is distributed more evenly so everyone is working at the state of the art, rather then playing catch up in proprietary silos).
What is quantum computing being used for?
True quantum computing in the sense that most people would imagine it, using individual qubits in an analogous (ish) way to classical computers, has not reached a useful scale. To date only “toy problems” to demonstrate theoretical results have been solved.
No.
Well it just got alot harder to check and see if/when a new Stargate tv show or movie might be coming.
"No Sam, for obvious reasons we cannot give you 6 trillion ... but how about 500 billion?"
Wow.
You gotta start small, you know?
if it really worked that way, then it was a successful blue-sky negotiation tactic to maximize the actual final negotiation.
I hate having to rely on these drip-feed vague statements to gauge the fate of the planet.
Well - as part of the semi industry I'd like to say: Really appreciate it. Keep it coming!
Let’s say they develop AGI tomorrow. Is that really all she wrote for blue collar jobs?
Anyone know if this involves nuclear plants as well or is that a separate initiative?
AI surveillance on large scale
As a diehard fan of Stargate, I've gotta say I'm disappointed this has nothing to do with wormholes...
unless...
I guess these people are betting small and efficient models are not the future.
I hope they build those little nuclear reactors into these datacenters.
It was rumoured in early 2024 that "Stargate" was planned to require 5GW data centre capacity[1][2] which in early 2024 was the entire data centre capacity Microsoft had already built[3]. Data centre capacity costs between USD$9-15m/MW[6] so 5GW of new data centre capacity would cost USD$45b-$75b but let's pick a more median cost of USD12m/MW[6] to arrive at USD$60b for 5GW of new data centre capacity.
This 5GW data centre capacity very roughly equates to 350000x NVIDIA DGX B200 (with 14.3kW maximum power consumption[4] and USD$500k price tag[5]) which if NVIDIA were selected would result in a very approximate total procurement of USD$175b from NVIDIA.
On top of the empty data centres and DGX B200's and in the remaining (potential) USD$265b we have to add:
* Networking equipment / fibre network builds between data centres.
* Engineering / software development / research and development across 4 years to design, build and be able to use the newly built infrastructure. This was estimated in mid 2024 to cost OpenAI US$1.5b/yr for retaining 1500 employees, or USD$1m/yr/employee[7]. Obviously this is a fraction of the total workforce needed to design and build out all the additional infrastructure that Microsoft, Oracle, etc would have to deliver.
* Electricity supply costs for current/initial operation. As an aside, these costs seemingly not be competitive with other global competitors if the USA decides to avoid the cheapest method of generation (renewables) and instead prefer the more expensive generation methods (nuclear, fossil fuels). It is however worth noting that China currently has ~80% of solar PV module manufacturing capacity and ~95% of wafer manufacturing capacity.[10]
* Costs for obtaining training data.
* Obsolescence management (4 years is a long time after which equipment will likely need to be completely replaced due to obsolescence).
* Any other current and ongoing costs of Microsoft, Oracle and OpenAI that they'll likely roll into the total announced amount to make it sound more impressive. As an example this could include R&D and sustainment costs in corporate ICT infrastructure and shared services such as authentication and security monitoring systems.
The question we can then turn to is whether this rate of spend can actually be achieved in 4 years?
Microsoft is planning to spend USD$80bn building data centres in 2025[7] with 1.5GW of new capacity to be added in the first six months of 2025[3]. This USD$80bn planned spend is for more than "Stargate" and would include all their other business units that require data centres to be built, so the total required spend of USD$45b-$75b to add 5GW data centre capacity is unlikely to be achieved quickly by Microsoft alone, hence the apparent reason for Oracle's involvement. However, Oracle are only planning a US$10b capital expenditure in 2025 equating to ~0.8GW capacity expansion[9]. The data centre builds will be schedule critical for the "Stargate" project because equipment can't be installed and turned on and large models trained (a lengthy activity) until data centres exist. And data centre builds are heavily dependent on electricity generation and transmission expansion which is slow to expand.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39869158
[2] https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/microsoft-openai-...
[3] https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/microsoft-to-doub...
[4] https://resources.nvidia.com/en-us-dgx-systems/dgx-b200-data...
[5] https://wccftech.com/nvidia-blackwell-dgx-b200-price-half-a-...
[6] https://www.cushmanwakefield.com/en/united-states/insights/d...
[7] https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2025/01/03/the-gol...
[8] https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/openai-training-a...
[9] https://www.crn.com.au/news/oracle-q3-2024-ellison-says-ai-i...
[10] https://www.iea.org/reports/advancing-clean-technology-manuf...
How is my memecoin going? Several billions, sir. Hahahahahaha
Oracle is onboard - guess you got to toss them some red meat as well.
You'd really think that arguably the leader in generative AI could come up with a unique project name instead of ripping off something extant and irrelevant.
But then again that's their entire business, so I shouldn't be too surprised.
This is from the guy who thinks "Her" is a good reference for how we need AI. Media literacy is not Altman's strong suit.
I mean the entire AI thing is built atop mass plagiarism and stealing things others have created indiscriminately. I doubt Mr Worldcoin could come up with an original thought for anything, seeing how his models behave.
Is this Ellison's attempt to become #1 richest again?
The fallout is going to be insane when the AI bubble pops.
Not sure about that. ChatGPT is much greater than Google Search ever was, and that wasn't a bubble.
ChatGPT may be better than Google Search in content but at end of day, you have to make money and last report I saw, ChatGPT is burning through money at prestigious rate.
reminds me of a scene from the Matrix. "Tell me Mr. Anderson, what use is a phone call when you can't speak"
Training, yes, but they recoup inference costs through subscriptions.
Didn’t Altman say they’re losing money on the $200 subscription tier?
Inference isn’t cheap either.
subscriptions are just to sustain them until the endgame
Not sure about that.
cocks ear ... can hear it poppin already
initiators will cash out by that time one way or another
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The folks who listen to you and don't see the fact that we are entering a weak singularity deserve to be destitute when this is all over.
“Weak singularity” meaning what?
Technology advancing more quickly year over year?
That’s a crazy notion and I’ll be sure everyone knows.
Also, what a wild thing to say. “People like you deserve to live in poverty because you don’t think we live in a sci-fi world.”
Calm down, dude.
> “Weak singularity” meaning what?
> Technology advancing more quickly year over year?
> That’s a crazy notion and I’ll be sure everyone knows.
The version I heard from an economist was something akin to a second industrial revolution, where the pace of technological development increases permanently. Imagine a transition from Moore's law-style doubling every year and a half, to doubling every week and a half. That wouldn't be a true "singularity" (nothing would be infinite), but it would be a radical change to our lives.
The pace of technological development has always been permanently increasing.
We’ve always been getting better at making things better.
> The pace of technological development has always been permanently increasing.
Not in the same way though. The pace of technological development post-industrial-revolution increased a lot faster - technological development was exponential both before and after, but it went from exponential with a doubling time of maybe a century, to a Moore's law style regime where the doubling time is a couple of years. Arguably the development of agriculture was a similar phase change. So the point is to imagine another phase change on the same scale.
You keep mentioning moore’s law, but that specifically applied to the amount of transistors on a die, not the rate of general technological advancement.
Regardless, I don’t see any change in this pattern. We’re advancing faster than ever before, just like always.
We’ve been doing statistical analysis and prediction for years now. It’s just getting better faster, like always.
I don’t see this big change in the rate of advancement. There’s just a lot more media buzz around it right now causing a bubble.
There was a big visible jump in text generation capabilities a few years ago (which was preceded by about 6 years of incremental NLP advances) and since then we’ve seen paced, year over year advances in that field.
As a medical layman, I imagine that alpha fold may really push the rate of pharmaceutical advances.
But I see no indication for a general jump in the rate of rate of technological advancement.
> that specifically applied to the amount of transistors on a die, not the rate of general technological advancement.
Sure. But you can look at things like GDP growth rates and see the same thing.
> I don’t see this big change in the rate of advancement. There’s just a lot more media buzz around it right now causing a bubble.
Maybe. I'm just trying to give a sense of what the concept of a "weak singularity" is. I don't have a view on whether we're actually going to have one or not.
How much is allocated to alignment/safety research?
Wasn't this already announced last week?
Elison is a only self-made man I prefer
I guess its the right time to buy AI stocks
At peak hype?
There's no other hype train besides Crypto atm
Comment from Elon Musk:
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1881923570458304780
They don’t actually have the money
For the curious ones who are not so excited about gifting page views to the fascist:
https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1881923570458304780
Having heard a lot of stories from my grandparents, I don't think you should trust nazis.
Money isn't the issue any more, wowww
They are clearly building GW from MGS2
I'm not automatically pro or anti Stargate (the movie and show were cool) BUT
Who gets the benefit of all of this investment? Are taxpayers going to fund this thing which is monetized by OpenAI?
If we pay for this shit, it better be fucking free to use.
So tsmc and nvidia basically then?
Broadcom, Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, ARM, and Tesla.
Someone else will have to fill in the stocks for:
AI robotics:
Data Center energy:
We all know the cloud/software picks.
What am I missing?
Mark Tesla under the AI robotics category too.
More confusion than anything else!
100,000 US jobs that I bet most are h-1b workers and they go over the 80,000 limit there were over 220,000 issued in 2023
Feels so much like an announcement designed to trade favors.
Altman gets on Trump's good side by giving him credit for the deal.
Trump revoked Biden's AI regulations.
Why oracle?
Oracle wtf.
I watched the announcement live, I could have sworn that the softbank guy said "initial investment of 100 MILLION, we hope to EARN 500 BILLION by the end of your (Trumps) term"
Gave me a real "this is just smoke and mirrors hiding the fact that the white house is now a glory hole for Trump to enjoy" feel.
Investigate the connection between Softbank and Apple; then examine the ties between Tim Cook and Trump:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj4d75zl212o
https://apnews.com/article/trump-apple-tim-cook-tech-0a9fb8e...
You don't need a finance degree to figure out what's happening here. Apple is ripping pages right out of Elon's playbook.
> Tim Cook
He changed his name to curry favor with prez. He’s Tim Apple now
That made laugh! And you know what's sad? At this point I wouldn't even be shocked if that really happened.
Hopefully they discover AGI and the AGI turns out to be a communist. They will kill it SO fast.
Stargate = Skynet?
more like Reagan's star wars program
who will benefit from those datacenters?
artificial intelligence must be stopped
SoftBank, huh?
That's... not a good omen.
Sooner or later one of their bold swings is going to connect
too late, China is already ahead
Oh but crypto mining was bad lol wheres the power going to come from
what will they call the SG-1?
Larry Elliot, Elon Musk, and Masayoshi Son.
They really got together the supervillains of tech.
Feels like the the only reason Zuck is missing is Elon's veto.
I can't stop rolling my eyes at all those big promises.
money smells good i think
Oh so that's why Pelosi invested in Micro nuke electricity plants.
In context Pelosi has been pro nuclear for at least 16 years having spoken for nuclear and nuclear investment in 2008 as reported by the American Enterprise Institute.
Last time, in 2016, SoftBank announced a $50B investment in the US...what were the results of that? Granted, SB announced an up-selled $100B investment earlier, is this not similar in "announcement"?
""" SoftBank’s CEO Masayoshi Son has previously made large-scale investment commitments in the US off the back of Trump winning a presidential election. In 2016, Son announced a $50 billion SoftBank investment in the US, alongside a similar pledge to create 50,000 jobs in the country.
...
However, as reported by Reuters, it’s unclear if the new jobs pledged back in 2016 ever came to fruition and questions have been raised about how SoftBank, which had $29 billion in cash on its balance sheet according to its September earnings report, might fund the investment. """
- https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/softbank-pledges-...
Watch the birdie
I for one am hugely supportive of compute that is red white and blue.
It's just more hype and PR antics from sama.
I dislike associating a great fictional universe (Stargate series) with this disgusting affair...
Altman said we will be amazed at the rate AI will CURE diseases. Not diagnose, not triage or help doctors but cure, ie understand at a deep fundamental, mechanistic level then devise therapies, ie drugs, combination of drugs and care practices that work. WOW.
Despite the fact that this is THE thing I'd be the happiest to see in the real world (having spent a considerable amount of my career in companies working towards this vision), we are so far from it (as anyone who actually worked on these problems will attest) that Altman's comment here isn't just overselling, it's a blatant lie about this tech's capabilities.
I guess the pitch was something like: "hey o3 can already do PhD level maths so you know in 5 years it will be able to do drugs too, and cure shit, Mr President".
Trouble is o3 can't do advanced math (or at least definitely not at the level openai claimed.. it was a lie, it turns out openai funds the dataset that measures this - ouch). And the bigger problem is, going from "ai can do maths" to "invent cures" is about a 10-100 X jump. If it wasn't, don't we think the pharma companies would have solved this by hiring lots of "really smart math guys"?
As anyone in biotech will tell you, the hard bit is not the first third of the drug discovery pipeline (where 99% of ai driven biotechs focus). It's the later parts where the rubber meets the road.. i.e. where your precious little molecule is out in the real world with real people where the incredible variability of real biological hosts makes most drugs fail spectacularly. You can't GPT your way out of this. The answers for this is not in science papers that you can just read and regurgitate a version that "solves biology and cures diseases".
To solve this you need AI but most of all you have to do science. Real science. In the lab, in vitro and in Vivo, not just in silico, doing ablation studies, overfitting famous benchmark datasets and other pseudo science shit the ML community is used to doing.
That is all to say, I'd bet we won't see a single purely AI designed novel drug in the clinic in this decade. All parts of that sentence are important. Purely AI designed. Novel. But that's for another post..
Now, back to Altman. If you watch the clip, he almost did the smart thing at first when Trump put him on the spot and said "I have no idea about healthcare, biotech (or AI beyond board room drama)" but then could not resist coming up with this outlandish insane answer.
Famously (in tech circles anyway) Paul Graham wrote more than a decade ago about Altman that he's the most strong willed individual he's ever met, who can just bend the universe to his will. That's his super skill. And clearly.. convincing SoftBank and Oracle to do this 500 billion investment for OpenAI (a non profit turned for profit) is an unbelievable achievement. I have no idea what Altman can say (or do) in board rooms that unlocks these possibilities for him.. Any ideas? Let me know!
> This project will not only support the re-industrialization of the United States but also provide a strategic capability to protect the national security of America and its allies.
> The initial equity funders in Stargate are SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, and MGX. SoftBank and OpenAI are the lead partners for Stargate, with SoftBank having financial responsibility and OpenAI having operational responsibility. Masayoshi Son will be the chairman.
I'm sorry, has SoftBank suddenly become an American company? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills reading this.
Edit: MGX is Saudi company? This is baffling....
https://www.mgx.ae/en
Well the Saudis are one of the president’s “personal shareholders” so I think that qualifies them as an American company now.
MGX seems to be in Abu Dhabi/UAE rather than Saudi Arabia. Hadn't heard of it before.
Japan companies were a threat just a couple weeks ago.
There is credible evidence that leads me to believe that (1) Nippon Steel Corporation, a corporation organized under the laws of Japan . . . might take action that threatens to impair the national security of the United States;
https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/president...
Japan has the same concerns about 7 Eleven being purchased by a Canadian company though I think the deal was rejected.
https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/japans-seven-i-deal-re...
It’s an investment in the US. Why does it matter if SoftBank is not an American company?
Also, SoftBank is an investment fund. A lot of its money came from American investors.
I think the death of Suchir Balaji makes more sense now. AE wouldn't mess around with its investments.
This.
The fund is run out of the US. Parent co is in Japan
SoftBank having financial responsibility is insane. This is just a way to funnel money into people Trump owes.
I don't get it, if this was government/American funded I could understand the marketing as "USA" secured infrastructure but like it's not?
Why now? Is this to compensate the campaign donors or to scare Putin?
Wasn’t this announced months ago? I feel like it was. https://www.techradar.com/pro/could-amd-be-the-key-to-micros...
Interesting that 6 months ago, Microsoft was attached but now they're missing from today's announcement.
Scroll down:
> Other partners in the project include Microsoft, investor MGX and the chipmakers Arm and NVIDIA, according to separate statements by Oracle and OpenAI.
Well, I've never known Trump to take credit for something someone else did.
yeah, it sounds like they're just relabeling an existing plan
> Ellison noted that the data centers are already under construction with 10 being built so far.
They're still using the same label. They're just re-announcing the plans next to the new president.
> Masayoshi Son will be the chairman.
Not all rich people are out of their minds, but Masayoshi Son definitely is. The way he handled the WeWork situation was bad...
> "OpenAI will continue to increase its consumption of Azure as OpenAI continues its work with Microsoft"
Not sure why, but the word choice of "consumption" feels like a reverse Freudian slip to me.
Sometimes the person writing the copy is writing it because they talk good, not because they are the biggest proponent of the idea.
Give a clever, articulate person a task to write about something they don't believe in and they will include the subtlest of barbs, weak praise, or both.
Industry standard word, e.g. "consumption pricing" etc
But yeah if you're in the industry it's easy to forget how certain jargon sounds based on its dictionary definition
But the good news is when the Trough of Disillusionment starts we can make a bunch of tuberculosis jokes.
> This project will [...] support the re-industrialization of the United States
How?
By aggregating the means of production even more in the hands of a handful of people
Wait, was it supposed to re industrialize the USA?
I thought this meant it was $500 billion in government money.
Some of these companies do have huge cash reserves they don't know what to do with so if it is $500 billion of private money, I am not going to complain.
I will believe it when I see it though and that this isn't a 100 billion in private money with a 400 billion dollar free US government put option for the "private" investors if things don't go perfect.
Didn't you see the impressionist art of construction cranes?
Hush. Don't ask questions. It is going to be great.
> starting in Texas
Maybe I just don't get it. Texas seems like an awful place to do business.
My guess would be it's all about electricity.
Texas has a .... unique energy market (literally! They don't connect to the national grid so they can avoid US Government regulations- that way it's not interstate commerce). Because of that spot prices fluctuate very wildly up and down, depending on the weather, demand, and their large quantity of renewables (Texas is good for solar and wind energy). When the weather is good for renewables they have very cheap electricity (lots of production and can't sell to anyone outside the state), when the weather is bad they can have incredibly expensive electricity (less production, can't buy from anyone outside the state). Larger markets, able to pull from larger pools of producers and consumers, just fluctuate less.
I know some bitcoin miners liked to be in Texas and basically worked as energy speculators: when electricity was cheap they would mine bitcoin, when it was expensive they shut down their plant- sometimes they even got paid by producers to shut-down their plant! I would bet that you could do a lot of that with AI training as well, given good checkpointing.
You wouldn't want to do inference there (which needs to be responsive and doesn't like 'oh this plant is going to shut down in one minute because a storm just came up') but for training it should be fine?
No state income tax, fewer regulations (zoning, environmental regulations) than other parts of the country, relatively cheap power, large existing industrial base. For skilled labor that last bit is important. Also one of the cheapest states wrt minimum wage (same as federal, nothing added), which is important for unskilled labor.
Depending on the part of the state, relatively low costs of living which is helpful if you don't like paying people much. Large areas that are relatively undeveloped or underdeveloped which can mean cheaper land.
The white house was touting this so it's probably to secure political patronage or will be part of pork barrel spending to get some other bill passed.
It doesn't even have an electricity grid that works, maybe that's where the 500b is going, reconnecting it to the grid.
Based on what? There’s not a better state in the country for large capex gambles by business.
When doing business is a bribe it’s perfect
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That's a ridiculous sum of money that could be better spent on much more worthy things.
So was getting a man to the moon. Do you want to lose the AI race to the Chinese?
Why would I care? Do you really want Masayoshi Son in charge of a theoretical superhuman AI?
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Looking forward to transparency about where this capital flows /s
Not to be confused by the other (non-fictional) DoD Stargate Project[0], that involved "remote-viewing" and other psychic crap.
The AI Stargate Project claims it will "create hundreds of thousands of American jobs". One has doubts.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project
"Psychic crap" that went on for 20+ years ? Sure.
Meh, why did they choose this name. Stargate does not deserve this…
The project predates Trump: https://wire.insiderfinance.io/project-stargate-the-worlds-l...
(But yes I agree)
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Unfortunately that figure wouldn’t get everyone healthcare in the US. I agree though, it could be deployed for better use but someone needs to think of those poor desperate shareholders.
According to the business plan, solving world hunger and ending disease comes AFTER the 1/2 trillion dollar AGI buildout.
I feel like Poe’s Law is in effect here.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
AGI is the magic bullet to all of humanity's problems for some people. There is no explanation of how AGI will accomplish such things, just a belief that it will.
I will be shocked if AGI happens and hunger decreases.
I weep for our country.
>>>get people employed
It'll do this one, certainly. Maybe not the most cost-effective jobs program, but I expect there will be many construction and data centre jobs in the next few years.
Build houses, not data centers.
I'm for it if we get the president to declare "AIs are people too" and charge them income tax. Double the tax base of America in 4 years.
OK, that would cover about a year of expenses. Then what?
Much less than a year, TBH. US spending on health care in 2023 was ~$5 trillion.
Health care can’t be solved by just throwing a shitload of money at it. I’m skeptical about food production as well.
Now quality transportation (trains and metros that work), cheap & accessible housing, and cheap energy might be a good idea because IIUC those are just super large price tags
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God forbid anyone would invest $500,000,000,000 to create jobs. No no no. 500 billion to destroy them for "more efficiency" so the owner class can get richer.
While OpenAI and the rest of the industry is reaching AGI, Apple is out here shipping features with ChatGPT 3.5 technology.
let's be serious no one is reaching any AGI