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on Gopher (inofficial)
URI Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
URI Stargate Project: SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, MGX to build data centers
bgnn wrote 16 hours 10 min ago:
This here reminds me a bubble in the making. Like South Sea Bubble to
be precise.
nbzso wrote 23 hours 55 min ago:
How is my memecoin going? Several billions, sir. Hahahahahaha
looseyesterday wrote 1 day ago:
Didn't anyone involved in naming this 'Stargate' ever actually watch
the series? Not a good name if you're trying to create AGI
eichi wrote 1 day ago:
Elison is a only self-made man I prefer
noirchen wrote 1 day ago:
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?
almiron10 wrote 1 day ago:
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?
jl2718 wrote 1 day ago:
1. At this scale, weâre 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? Iâm
not asking because I donât think there is an answer; Iâm 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 âAI infrastructureâ 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 heâs just
going to keep following the âHERâ timeline and make a massive
playground for LLMs to talk to each other and leave humanity behind. I
donât 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. Weâre 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. Thatâs 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?
zhengiszen wrote 1 day ago:
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
awei wrote 1 day ago:
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?
awei wrote 1 day ago:
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.
whiplash451 wrote 1 day ago:
One of the key questions becomes: is this it for Europe?
Rebuff5007 wrote 1 day ago:
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.
pms wrote 15 hours 21 min ago:
Thank you for being the voice of reason.
seattle_spring wrote 1 day ago:
Why are we spending a half-trillion dollars on âAI infrastructureâ
when our actual infrastructure has been crumbling and underfunded for
decades?
PeakKS wrote 1 day ago:
They are clearly building GW from MGS2
65 wrote 1 day ago:
Can someone convince me Sam Altman is not evil? I have no proof he is
not evil.
Parfait__ wrote 1 day ago:
Couldn't we say the same about you?
65 wrote 1 day ago:
I am text on a screen. Sam Altman, as a story of a person, doesn't
indicate to me he is moral or ethical.
stronglikedan wrote 1 day ago:
I hope they build those little nuclear reactors into these datacenters.
lagrange77 wrote 1 day ago:
I hate having to rely on these drip-feed vague statements to gauge the
fate of the planet.
class3shock wrote 1 day ago:
Well it just got alot harder to check and see if/when a new Stargate tv
show or movie might be coming.
rchaud wrote 1 day ago:
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".
newsclues wrote 1 day ago:
Compared to China?
briandear wrote 1 day ago:
Tariffs are a negotiating tactic. Read Art of the Deal and that
outlines how Trump negotiates.
rchaud wrote 1 day ago:
So is being delinquent on debts apparently.
jncfhnb wrote 1 day ago:
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.
ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote 1 day ago:
Private capital. That detail seems to derail your whole comment.
hetoh wrote 1 day ago:
Bookmark this - This private capital will eventually backed by Govt
guarantees on the loan banks gives. Which will socialize the loss
and privatize profit...
JumpinJack_Cash wrote 1 day ago:
> > Private capital
Groupthink capital, directed by mostly 2 "thought leaders".
Economies don't like Groupthink Capital, regardless of it being
private, public or a combination of the 2
Of course the US economy as a whole is huge so even billions can be
absorbed, once you start talking about half a trillion though...
rchaud wrote 1 day ago:
Not to mention justifying further tax cuts for this tiny sliver
of billionnaires so they can continue to "take risks to
innovate".
rchaud wrote 1 day ago:
> âI think this will be the most important project of this
era,â Altman said on Tuesday. âWe wouldnât be able to do this
without you, Mr. President.â
Since when does "private capital" speak in such honeyed tones to
state powers?
URI [1]: https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/21/tech/openai-oracle-softbank...
amazingamazing wrote 1 day ago:
There's more to support than money.
groby_b wrote 1 day ago:
When you want to suck up, you want to suck up.
It's private money. CEOs will say whatever they need to say to
achieve goals (here, favorable conditions for AI work), look at
what the actual money flows say.
JumpCrisscross wrote 1 day ago:
Also the fact that two of the names in the headline are foreign
owned. (North Korea is an autark's wet dream.)
onlyrealcuzzo wrote 1 day ago:
Also the fact that they're not going to invest $500B, and this is
mostly a puff piece.
As Elon said, they don't the money.
Talk is cheap.
$500B is not.
HPsquared wrote 1 day ago:
$500B may be a lot, but at the national level it's not that
much if you spread over a few years. Even now, it's "only" 1
week worth of US GDP. It depends how much they expect to get
back.
onlyrealcuzzo wrote 1 day ago:
This isn't national funding.
$500B is a lot - no matter how you slice it.
It's a lot easier to talk pie in the sky than to actually get
$500B to spend.
aylmao wrote 1 day ago:
How so? Does this capital being private ensure "this time will be
different"?
ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote 1 day ago:
Capital owners allocate their capital to their "pet projects" all
day every day. That is how the whole thing works.
I'm not saying "this time will be different". I'm saying this is
business as usual.
rchaud wrote 1 day ago:
$500b is not business as usual for any corporation. Centralized
planning doesn't fail because of government bureaucrats, it
fails because there is too much spending to be decided on by
too few people.
Zuckerberg lost $30bn or more trying to create a VR amusement
park. Scale that up to $500bn and see how much waste and
dead-weight losses are created.
nfw2 wrote 1 day ago:
The VR investment was a calculated risk that may or may not
pay off in a longer time horizon. Meta is the leading VR
company and well-positioned to benefit the most from whatever
comes from the industry in the future.
The demand for more AI compute is already here and is less
risky of an investment.
"Centralized planning" was effective under Bell Labs
ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote 1 day ago:
Also I am not an economist but the VR failure was not
dead-weight loss. If you invested in something downstream of
that you profited off of Zuck's venture. Dead-weight loss is
more of a gov-driven malinvestment
ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote 1 day ago:
1. This isn't a single corp, it is multiple corps. For a
sense of scale, MSFT alone spent ~$55B in Capex last year.
Check out this[1] for a sense of how much different
industries spend each year. Note that this will cross several
industries including Power, Telecom, Software, electrical
equip, etc.
2. There is no commitment to spend in a single year
3. There is no actual contractual commit here, this is a
press release (i.e. Marketing)
4. There is not actually a $500B pile of gold being spent.
This is more of a "this is how big we think this industry
will be and how much we may spend to get exposure to that
industry"
URI [1]: https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/...
JumpCrisscross wrote 1 day ago:
> $500b is not business as usual for any corporation
"Up to $500bn" is business as usual for Silicon Valley
post-2021.
ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote 1 day ago:
This is the real answer. There isn't $500B.
JumpCrisscross wrote 1 day ago:
> Does this capital being private ensure "this time will be
different"?
South America didn't have a mix of domestic and foreign investors
deploying massive quantities of private money into capital assets
in the 60s and 70s. They had governments borrowing to fund their
citizens' consumption. Massive difference on multiple levels.
nfw2 wrote 1 day ago:
Moreover, if a government is funneling taxpayer money into the
projects of a few citizens, that is a clear red flag of
corruption. Whereas if private entities are deciding to invest
their own capital into infrastructure, it's unclear what the
complaint even is
aylmao wrote 1 day ago:
> They had governments borrowing to fund their citizens'
consumption.
The problem here being that it was money spent that was never
earned back, and money that eventually had to be paid back,
right?
This can also happen with private capital. 2008 was a bust
caused by private banks, for example. AI hasn't proven to be
profitable yet [1], and I'm not sure it'll makes a difference,
for the success of projects like this, wether the money is
coming from government or not.
In fact, if the 2008 bank bail-out, auto industry bail-out, the
Silicon Valley bank prop-up, and other such actions by the US
government are considered [2], if this turns out to be a bubble
it will be taxpayers who end up fronting the bill. [1]
URI [1]: https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/ai-generative-busines...
URI [2]: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/economics/08/gov...
abduhl wrote 1 day ago:
>> In fact, if the 2008 bank bail-out, auto industry
bail-out, the Silicon Valley bank prop-up, and other such
actions by the US government are considered [2], if this
turns out to be a bubble it will be taxpayers who end up
fronting the bill.
Havenât all three examples you note (2008 crash, auto
bailout, and SV prop up) resulted in a net return/gain for
the taxpayer?
JumpCrisscross wrote 1 day ago:
> problem here being that it was money spent that was never
earned back, and money that eventually had to be paid back,
right?
In part. It was money borrowed by the state. That means when
it can't be paid back, it's automatically a systemic issue.
And it was money borrowed to fund consumption. There was no
good reason to ever expect it to be paid back because it
wasn't funding productive activity.
> if this turns out to be a bubble it will be taxpayers who
end up fronting the bill
Very possibly, particularly if part of the package are e.g.
federally-subsidised loans. Before that, however, private
parties will almost certainly lose tens if not hundreds of
billions of dollars. That cushion, together with those
parties being spread between domestic and foreign sources, is
what makes this less risky to the United States than similar
relative-magnitude projects in South America. (Plus the fact
that this is a capital asset versus consumption.)
Parfait__ wrote 1 day ago:
They should be free to decide how to spend their money?
boringg wrote 1 day ago:
Apples to oranges comparison. The problem set is completely
different regarding your doom example of South America.
rchaud wrote 1 day ago:
How? the problem is the same: a need for rapid industrial
development to grow the economy. The solutions are the same:
government picks winners, which is how an upstart like OpenAI can
be paired with a dinosaur like Oracle. The latter's CEO of course
being a long time friend of Trump.
JumpCrisscross wrote 1 day ago:
> the problem is the same: a need for rapid industrial
development to grow the economy
This is first-mover industrial development being funded by
private actors looking out for a return on their investments.
South America saw nothing similar--it was duplicating others'
industrialisation with state capital (often borrowed from
overseas) while spending massively on handouts.
jeffy29 wrote 1 day ago:
And it never is.
stronglikedan wrote 1 day ago:
It will be different (and as another commentor pointed out, it
probably always has been), because the adults are back it charge,
thankfully.
knowaveragejoe wrote 1 day ago:
Tariffs, mass deportations, rescinding anything the predecessor did
because of your personal egotism. None of these are the behavior of
adults, and you know better.
whimsicalism wrote 1 day ago:
this is private capital. yes, we are in an era of big projects and
big capital deployment. is that synonymous with centralized autarky?
i donât agree
FrustratedMonky wrote 1 day ago:
Is this word being used correctly?
au·tar·ky
/ËôËtärkÄ/
noun
economic independence or self-sufficiency.
"rural community autarchy is a Utopian dream"
a country, state, or society which is economically independent.
plural noun: autarkies; plural noun: autarchies
boredhedgehog wrote 1 day ago:
But which word did he mean instead? It seems it should a synonym
for "coterie".
maxlin wrote 1 day ago:
that's what I thought
rchaud wrote 1 day ago:
And where do you think the socialists of the 60s got hard currency
to import machinery from? Borrowing from non-state lenders.
FrustratedMonky wrote 1 day ago:
Like every other country. You exchange good or services for
currencies from the other countries, and then you can use that
currency to buy things from anybody that would take that
currency.
There is nothing saying a socialist country can't produce goods
and services, and sell them.
whimsicalism wrote 1 day ago:
borrowing from non-state lenders is neither a necessary nor
sufficient condition for âautarkyâ and your reasoning seems
to just be since it happened in South America in the 60s it must
be part of the economic mismanagement that occurred there.
i agree that our protectionist policies are bad and autarkic in
nature
lenerdenator wrote 1 day ago:
This is an amount that would be a meaningful change to most US
states' gross annual economic output that we're talking about, and
a few people control it. Sounds pretty centralized to me.
The fact that a handful of individuals have half a trillion dollars
to throw at something that may or may not work while working people
can pay the price of a decent used car each year, every year to
their health insurance company only to have claims denied is
insane.
JumpCrisscross wrote 1 day ago:
> fact that a handful of individuals have half a trillion dollars
This is disputed [1]. In reality, a handful of individuals have
the capital to seed a half-a-trillion dollar megaproject, which
then entails the project to raise capital from more people.
URI [1]: https://www.wsj.com/tech/musk-pours-cold-water-on-trump-...
lenerdenator wrote 1 day ago:
It's disputed by the guy who has a business interest in making
sure his competition can't do as well, and this notice of
dispute is printed in a paper that is literally named after a
place where the vast majority of people have never had to do
any real labor in their lives.
Also the guy disputing it is trying to regain control of an
entity that he was too distracted to hold to its original
mission, is on record as agreeing with the statement that
Jewish people are the enemies of white people, takes copious
amounts of mind-altering substances daily, has lost billions of
dollars on purchasing a company that had a path to (modest)
profitability, and did what could easily be seen as a Roman
salute at an inauguration speech. Maybe he's not a great source
of statements on objective reality, even within the AI
industry.
With regard to the monetary amount, understand, once you reach
a certain point, the amount of capital held by the quantity of
individuals we're talking about is immaterial. Any capital they
raise is usually derived from the labor of others and they
operate a racket to prevent any real competition for how that
capital is distributed by the labor or the customers who are
the source of their actual wealth. The average Oracle employee
(I know a few), for example, probably has a few more immediate
things they want the surplus value of their labor to be spent
on than Larry's moonshot. However, he ultimately controls the
direction of that value through a shareholder system that he
can manipulate more-or-less at-will through splits, buybacks,
and other practices.
His customers would probably also like to pay less for what are
usually barely Web 2.0 database applications. Of course, he has
the capital to corner markets and shove competition out of the
space.
All of this is to say when you reach this amount of money in
the hands of one individual, they're more likely to regularly
harm people than beat the odds on their next bet in a way that
actually uplifts society, at least in a way that could beat the
way just disbursing that capital among those who created it
could.
blackeyeblitzar wrote 1 day ago:
Masa named who the partners are. You can search for financial
numbers relating to soft bank and other firms who are
involved and guess how much capital they can realistically
deploy this year. They are claiming they will put 100 billion
to work this year and all 500 billion before this
administration ends. I am skeptical.
Given that all of the capital and implementation is private
anyways, I am not even sure why this was announced with Trump
on stage. To me it seemed like a spectacle to help Trump in
return for maybe favorable regulation on things like
antitrust or copyright or AI regulation or whatever.
tanseydavid wrote 1 day ago:
>> takes copious amounts of mind-altering substances daily
Hyperbole much?
lenerdenator wrote 1 day ago:
Not hyperbole at all [0]
[0]:
URI [1]: https://www.yahoo.com/news/elon-musks-drug-becomin...
JumpCrisscross wrote 1 day ago:
> disputed by the guy who has a business interest in making
sure his competition can't do as well
This is a valid conflict of interest. That means we should
closely scrutinize his claims. From what I can tell, he's
added up correctly in respect of the named backers' wealth
and liquidity.
> a paper that is literally named after a place where the
vast majority of people have never had to do any real labor
in their lives
Yes, we should ignore bankers when it comes to questions
about money...
Do you have an actual claim? Or is it all ad hominem?
> capital they raise is usually derived from the labor of
others and they operate a racket to prevent any real
competition for how that capital is distributed by the labor
or the customers who are the source of their actual wealth
They're capitalists, herego they can raise unlimited wealth?
ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote 1 day ago:
Right as usual. This is more like a "promise" to invest a few
$B and then continue to invest more and more if things go well
fallingknife wrote 1 day ago:
It's a great thing that they can throw half a trillion at
something that may not work. Every great tech advancement came
from throwing money at something which might not work.
whimsicalism wrote 1 day ago:
Free movement of capital and the ability to identify promising
projects and allocate our resources there are why our society is
prosperous and why we are able to devote more resources towards
healthcare than any society that has ever come before us.
This money is managed by small amounts of people but it is
aggregated from millions of investors, most of these are public
companies. The US spends over 10x that amount on healthcare each
year.
bbqfog wrote 1 day ago:
Having to spend thousands for insurance every year (even if
youâre totally healthy) and not having it even be remotely
effective, is not my definition of âprosperousâ.
whimsicalism wrote 1 day ago:
Individual insurers pay out tens of billions of dollars in
claims every year, frequently have non-profitable years, and
are the counterparty on pretty risky contracts.
There are lots of problems with our current approach to
healthcare, but insurers arenât charging you way more than
the cost to counterparty on that contract should be.
willcipriano wrote 1 day ago:
The United States spends more per capita on socialized
medicine than any other nation on earth[0]. US socialized
medicine spending per capita is more than any other nation
spends total between both public and private in fact, it
just fails to provide it to anyone but the very poor, very
sick and elderly.
You'd think the healthy working population wouldn't be that
much of a burden to care for as well, but they have to go
out of pocket and get insurance to provide for themselves
after providing for everyone else.
There is a lot of graft going on for this to be the case.
It may not be the fault of insurance companies but someone
is stealing a great deal of money from the American people.
Now here's the million dollar question; are you aware of
this obvious fact? Have you ever heard someone frame the
socialized medicine debate in this way: "If we could be as
efficient as the UK we could give you free healthcare AND
cut your taxes!". If not, why not?
[0]
URI [1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/283221/per-cap...
whimsicalism wrote 1 day ago:
graft but also overutilization/misallocation, ie. we will
publicly spend massive portions of our GDP treating old
people who are slowly dying but little on younger people
who have some crippling illness, mostly because older
people vote and triage is an uncomfortable concept to
people
willcipriano wrote 1 day ago:
Every other nation on earth somehow finds a way to deal
with that. Given the US is 48th in life expectancy[0]
behind all these other nations that spend much less,
that explanation doesn't seem to hold much water.
[0]
URI [1]: https://www.worldometers.info/demographics/lif...
whimsicalism wrote 1 day ago:
> Every other nation on earth somehow finds a way to
deal with that.
well not every other nation, but i know what you
mean.
other nations are much better at managing
overutilization by denying care where it is not
needed. the US insurance system shields people from
cost and encourages overutilization due to a number
of stupid policy choices (aka refusal to have 'death
panels' like in Canada/UK but also refusal to do away
with massive publicly subsidy for health
expenditure).
for a personal story, my parents basically get free
MRIs from the state for little reason whereas people
I know have to pay an arm and a leg for MRIs because
their insurance is worse. at minimum, we could at
least also make my parents have to pay an arm and leg
for useless MRIs and doctors would stop encouraging
them or lose patients.
willcipriano wrote 1 day ago:
MRIs only cost that much in the US[0](2015 prices:
$1,145 in America and $138 in Switzerland),
everything is inexplicably ten fold more expensive
here. That more expensive care doesn't result in
ten fold better outcomes as all the health measures
you can find indicate. That's the root of the
problem and the thing is no politician[1] is really
willing to address it and they don't really cover
it clearly on the news[2], I wonder why?
[0] [1] [2]
URI [1]: https://www.vox.com/2014/9/4/6104533/the-1...
URI [2]: https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbyi...
URI [3]: https://www.fiercepharma.com/marketing/hey...
whimsicalism wrote 1 day ago:
the overutilization story is what explains this,
you cannot simply walk into Switzerland and say
"I want an MRI here is my $138", but that is
essentially what you can do (delta a bit of
doctor shopping) in the US. there also is a lot
of bad price transparency in the US so the listed
price is not the price ended up paying, again
this is due to the problem I identified above
about shielding costs.
mrguyorama wrote 1 day ago:
When's the last time you tried that here in the
US?
It's like when people claim that other
countries have worse medical systems because
they have to wait, as if my friend didn't just
wait 2 months for a simple injection recently,
and my mom isn't waiting 2 weeks for an MRI
after a stroke.
The vast majority of people who insist we have
the greatest healthcare don't even go to the
doctor's regularly. Because they were raised in
a system where going to the doctor is something
you have to weigh the cost of! We have worse
medical outcomes simply because people wait
until a cheap situation turns into a shitty and
painful and expensive situation.
whimsicalism wrote 1 day ago:
i don't think we disagree that much to be
honest. i just think that a lot of the issues
you are identifying (like long wait time for
critical care) are due to price insensitivity
due to insurance & overutilization. ie. every
MRI my parents have is one that contributes
to inflexibility in scheduling for truly
urgent cases and also raises the price for
those urgent cases.
human intensive things like medical care are
characterized by diseconomies to scale when
viewed from the whole industry perspective
and baumol cost disease. overutilization
makes the problem much worse
s1artibartfast wrote 1 day ago:
What country has more doctor visits?
Kbelicius wrote 1 day ago:
I went to check and apparently South
Koreans have the most visits and there are
20+ countries that have more than US.
s1artibartfast wrote 1 day ago:
Correct, you have identified the problem. Prices
are high because there is no agent in the US
system looking to allocate spending on the basis
of cost and health returns. The closest we come
is the much hated insurance denials.
willcipriano wrote 1 day ago:
Its likely true that more procedures are
performed and more prescriptions written, but
why are those procedures and prescriptions many
times more expensive?
Economies of scale should make them cheaper. An
MRI machine and technician that sits there
unused half the day has to charge more per
visit than one used all day long. Have too many
customers? Get more machines and techs, now the
MRI manufacturer is making more units, offering
volume discounts...
Rationing of care doesn't explain why the
individual units of care are themselves much
more expensive. Compare inhaler prices in
Canada vs the US, $10 in Canada $100 here[0],
that isn't because too many of them are given
out. It's theft.
Addendum: Further, the young and healthy ration
their care quite a bit under the current
system, they are taxed too heavily (to pay for
the care of the elderly) to afford it for
themselves so they go without.
[0]
URI [1]: https://www.usnews.com/news/healthiest...
whimsicalism wrote 1 day ago:
it is generally not true that more demand
causes things to be cheaper, economies of
scale generally doesn't function for a whole
industry but rather an individual firm
s1artibartfast wrote 1 day ago:
Why charge $138 when your customers will pay
$1,145 and keep coming back?
you need someone willing shop and pick the
cheaper options for competition to bring down
prices. You also need someone willing to say
"that's too expensive, I wont buy it" and
walk away. Same is true for the inhalers. If
someone will pay $100 before switching to the
generic, that is what they get charged. In
Canada, the state is only willing to pay $10,
so that is the price. This is the demand side
of the problem.
There is also a supply problem, where the
state provides medical company monopolies
through "certification of need". It is
basically illegal to open an MRI clinic that
would compete with an existing one in many
jurisdictions.
URI [1]: https://radiologybusiness.com/topics...
dboreham wrote 1 day ago:
Greatest country in the world though
amirite?
willcipriano wrote 1 day ago:
> you need someone willing shop and pick
the cheaper options for competition to
bring down prices
You think consumers wouldn't do that if
they were able to do so? You call the
facility and everyone says the price is "it
depends". They decide what they are going
to charge you after you have left. Is any
other industry allowed to do that? Hire
someone to paint your house and he comes up
with the price after he is done?
> There is also a supply problem, where the
state provides medical company monopolies
through "certification of need"
I'm well aware of this. Isn't it
interesting that the people who give some
of the largest campaign contributions have
these sort of laws carved out for them?
Charge whatever you want, decide the price
in a opaque manner after the fact,
competitors aren't allowed to establish
themselves without their permission,
importing drugs from other countries is
forbidden. The list goes on and on.
Then you would think, if there is this much
rampant and obvious corruption the fourth
estate would step in right? Oh, they
receive billions a year to advertise
prescription drugs. Advertisement that
can't be that effective, sometimes for
pretty rare conditions, things your doctor
should be made aware of but really odd to
tell people about in a massive ad campaign.
The mainstream media and both parties are
paid handsomely to allow this to continue.
The problem isn't people are fat, or death
panels or any of the distractions. The
debate isn't about socialized medicine vs
private. It's not about "keeping your
doctor". There is just massive corruption
to the tune of trillions of dollars in the
past decade. There needs to be criminal
investigations.
s1artibartfast wrote 1 day ago:
It seems like we agree on the many
problems with the current system.
I agree that no matter if we go to a more
private or socialized system, a whole
system of broken regulation needs to be
removed, and this will be the main point
of resistance from those who benefit from
the status quo.
whimsicalism wrote 1 day ago:
yes, precisely my point
lenerdenator wrote 1 day ago:
"Frequently have non-profitable years"
A graph of the stocks for UnitedHealth, Elevance (formerly
Anthem) and Cigna shows that they're all on the growth
track for the last five years.
If a subscriber pays them what they do, and they don't have
money to pay a claim declared medically necessary by a
medical doctor, but do have the money to forward to a
retirement fund, they are charging too much.
Most of the rest of the industrialized world seems to grasp
this concept, and their people live longer.
whimsicalism wrote 1 day ago:
I was referring to insurance writ large, but yes it's
true recently health insurers have been profitable - but
not massively, more like 3-4% average margins. [0]
> If a subscriber pays them what they do, and they don't
have money to pay a claim declared medically necessary by
a medical doctor, but do have the money to forward to a
retirement fund, they are charging too much.
If it is only legal to lose money on providing insurance,
nobody would do it.
> Most of the rest of the industrialized world seems to
grasp this concept, and their people live longer.
I agree that there are problems with cost/performance in
our healthcare market. I think it is largely due to
overutilization & misallocation, combined with some poor
genetic/cultural luck around opioids and obesity.
0:
URI [1]: https://content.naic.org/sites/default/files/ind...
JumpCrisscross wrote 1 day ago:
> graph of the stocks for UnitedHealth, Elevance
(formerly Anthem) and Cigna shows that they're all on the
growth track for the last five years
Stock price ! profitability, but you're still correct.
UnitedHealth's operations have churned out cash each of
the last four years [1], as have Cigna [2] and Elevance
[3]. Underwriting gains across the industry have been
strong for years [4]. The only story I can think of where
American health insurers lost money was Aetna with its
underpriced ACA plans [5].
That said, whimsicalism is also partly right in that
insurers aren't the cause of the unaffordability of
American healthcare. They by and large pay out most of
their premiums. (With some variance.) [1] [2] [3] [4] [4]
[5]
URI [1]: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/UNH/cash-flow/
URI [2]: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/CI/cash-flow/
URI [3]: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ELV/cash-flow/
URI [4]: https://content.naic.org/sites/default/files/202...
URI [5]: https://spia.princeton.edu/news/why-private-heal...
whimsicalism wrote 1 day ago:
Yes, if we subset to health insurance over recent
years, they are profitable (not massive margins) -
agreed. I was overstating the case.
bbqfog wrote 1 day ago:
None of this suggests a prosperous society. More like a
corrupt and bureaucratic society.
lenerdenator wrote 1 day ago:
Is that why I, and a lot of other people my age, have a lower
standard of living than my parents did at the same point in
their lives?
The "free movement of capital" only ever seems to move the
capital one direction: up to the people who needed the labor of
others to reach such wealth.
nfw2 wrote 1 day ago:
The reason young people often have a lower standard of living
is because:
- there is a shortage of housing
- predatory loans for higher education
- chronic health crisis due to terrible government health
policy and guidelines
- globalization has led to an international labor market
The last point may be bad for many Americans but an
unequivocal good for the world. Global poverty has seen an
incredible drop in the past 70 years.
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty#/media...
s1artibartfast wrote 1 day ago:
Interesting that you put the chronic health crisis on a
failure of government.
I would put that more on a failure of culture to value
healthy living and activity. I wouldn't call that the
responsibility of the government. Perhaps lack of clarity
on ownership is related to the crisis itself.
nfw2 wrote 1 day ago:
It's not solely the fault of government, but heavy corn
subsidies and the food pyramid travesty didn't help.
whimsicalism wrote 1 day ago:
The large majority of people do not have a lower standard of
living than their parents at the same age. My dadâs family
could not even afford shoes for him and he lived in Europe.
I am sorry that you feel you are downwardly mobile, but you
should not assume your experience generalizes.
lenerdenator wrote 1 day ago:
Mine lived in America. Where the story in the article is
taking place.
This is, in fact, a generalized experience: [0]
[0]
URI [1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/02/...
whimsicalism wrote 1 day ago:
I donât feel like having the nth argument about whether
we are better off today than in 1980. Agree to disagree,
i feel that the facts are obvious, especially if you
subset to the population whose parents were in the US in
1980.
i think if you gave people a legitimate choice to go back
to 1980 (and take their friends letâs say), we would
see the revealed preference. certainly if you did it for
a year and then gave them the option to come back
nfw2 wrote 1 day ago:
case-in-point, my mom was effectively cured of a cancer
in 2024 that they wouldn't have even tried to treat in
1980
JumpCrisscross wrote 1 day ago:
> This is, in fact, a generalized experience
Your article is from 2019. We're now "wealthier than
previous generations were at [our] age" [1]
URI [1]: https://www.wsj.com/personal-finance/millennials...
mrguyorama wrote 1 day ago:
You keep posting articles from WSJ as if we should take
Bezo's literal mouthpiece as a reliable source.
edit: Bezos doesn't own the WSJ. I'm wrong.
magicalist wrote 1 day ago:
Rupert Murdoch (Bezos owns the Washington Post)
lenerdenator wrote 1 day ago:
WSJ? Might as well have not included it. It's
paywalled.
That being said, it seems to reference property owners.
Hell, if I'd had the money to buy a house prior to the
pandemic, I would have. I didn't because of constant
reorgs at my employer at the time, which resulted in
hiring freezes and reduced raises. The goal behind
these was to make the company attractive to buyers.
Eventually, they did find one: Oracle. They've since
gutted what was a major employer for my region.
Since the pandemic housing has skyrocketed and pay
hasn't kept up. It's been stagnant for 40 years while
economic output has risen, along with COL [0].
Where'd all of the value go?
(that's a rhetorical question)
[0]
URI [1]: https://www.consumeraffairs.com/finance/compar...
JumpCrisscross wrote 1 day ago:
> it seems to reference property owners.
Yes. Millenials own property at the highest rate, age
adjusted, in generations. (Anecdote: am Millenial.
Own a home. Most of my friends do, too. Yes, it's a
bubble, but it's a big one.)
> Where'd all of the value go?...(that's a rhetorical
question)
No, it's not. It went to the people who bought
houses. Including between 2019 and 2024.
Which generation's mode reached home-buying age in
that interval, an interval also generously sprinkled
with massive stimulus, a stock-market boom and forced
consumption-reduction through stay-at-home orders?
(That is a rhetorical question.)
lenerdenator wrote 1 day ago:
"Yes. Millenials own property at the highest rate,
age adjusted, in generations."
Age-adjusted?
So if you take out the fact that it took up more of
the one resource that matters more than anything
else to become property owners, then, yes,
Millennials have more of it.
Which is kind of proving my point.
JumpCrisscross wrote 1 day ago:
> Age-adjusted?...So if you take out the fact
that it took up more of the one resource that
matters more than anything else to become
property owners
Ask before assuming.
Age adjusted means taking each generation when
they were the same age, how wealthy were they? A
Boomer today is wealthier than a Millenial
because they've had more time to accumulate. But
when a Boomer was Millenial-aged, she had on
average less wealth than a Millenial today.
lenerdenator wrote 1 day ago:
Wealth is the preponderance of resources.
If you have more wealth, you can theoretically
purchase more goods and services than if you
had less.
The exception to this, of course, is if the
goods and services cost more, and for things
that you need to exist in American society
(healthcare, education, transportation,
housing, food), those things generally cost
several times more for younger people than they
did, "age-adjusted", when their parents were
the same age, often with a difference that is
more than that in wealth. That's why wages have
been flat.
There's also the question of how that wealth is
distributed among the generations and how it's
stored. If the property-owning Millennial owns
a few rental properties that their peers have
to pay to live in, the "average" properties
owned by the group can be the same (or even
higher) but the number of people those
properties are spread among is lower.
There's also the fact that lots of wealth is
held in the casin... er... stock markets as
people need to participate in those markets
with their 401(k)s to be able to retire some
day. You can't sleep in a stock certificate,
but if you want to have any savings, it's
easier to enter the equities market than it is
to get into real estate from a startup cost
perspective. People are having to compromise
the "stability" of their fundamental needs
(like housing) in order to grow more abstract
definitions of wealth.
JumpCrisscross wrote 1 day ago:
> exception to this, of course, is if the
goods and services cost more, and for things
that you need to exist in American society
Which is why these figures have been
inflation adjusted.
> lots of wealth is held in the casin...
er... stock markets
Pretty sure Boomers hold more stocks than
Millenials. This is an argument for
Millenials being even better off than the
statistics show.
> People are having to compromise the
"stability" of their fundamental needs (like
housing) in order to grow more abstract
definitions of wealth
Yes. But that doesn't broadly describe
Millenials, and it describes more people in
older generations when they were present
Millenials' ages.
You're trying to argue against facts with
philosophy.
lenerdenator wrote 1 day ago:
> You're trying to argue against facts with
philosophy.
It is a fact that wages have remained
stagnant for four decades.
It's also a fact that the wealth gap is
growing between rich and poor, and that's
what's distorting the figures you're
citing. That's the only way,
mathematically, you see wages remain flat
while seeing wealth rise.
Look deeper at your facts, instead of
letting them be tainted by your philosophy.
JumpCrisscross wrote 1 day ago:
> wages have remained stagnant for four
decadesâ¦It's also a fact that the
wealth gap is growing between rich and
poor
First is sort of correct for a very
specific slice of America, those just
above the welfare cut off. (For whom real
wages have been flat to negative,
assuming we scale up housing preferences
and add in costs that didnât make sense
before, e.g. internet and cell-phone
bills.) The secondâabout rising
inequalityâis true throughout.
Neither advances your argument,
howeverâone can better off while others
are much better off, and most in a
population can be better off while some
are worse off. (Observe the median
Millenial and the statistics stand.
Millenials are rich, in part because
weâre going to stick Gen Alpha with the
bill.)
whimsicalism wrote 1 day ago:
itâs also turbocharged by the number of people that
are descendants of immigrants
JumpCrisscross wrote 1 day ago:
> turbocharged by the number of people that are
descendants of immigrants
It's divided by whether you own real estate or
equities.
Immigrant homeownership is starkly lower than
native-born Americans' [1].
We're probably going to see a surge in that
disparity, now, given the immigrant workforce that
builds and renovates houses is in the process of
being gutted. That increases the value of existing
stock.
URI [1]: https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/sites/default/f...
whimsicalism wrote 1 day ago:
exactly my point - if you were to subset to people
whose parents were native-born US and compare their
wealth to that of their parents at same age, it
would be absolutely higher. it looks closer than it
is because of immigration and we arenât comparing
to the parents in their home country
s1artibartfast wrote 1 day ago:
What I find interesting is that children in of
immigrants greatly outperform children of
non-immigrants when compared by household income.
That is to say, the have higher economic mobility
intergenerational income growth.
whimsicalism wrote 1 day ago:
nothing about that is surprising and is exactly
what you would expect when people move to
places with more efficient talent markets,
especially from pseudo-feudal societies that
still existed in lots of the developing world
in the 20th century, and that's before you get
into the selection effect.
my dad was basically expected to work the farms
his entire life and school ended at the 3rd
grade where he grew up, he moved to the US and
became a chess master & went to one of the best
colleges in the country. impossible where he
was from and really shows how stupid and
zero-sum-minded old world elites are compared
to the US/anglo culture.
s1artibartfast wrote 1 day ago:
Expectations depend on your priors. You and I
might agree on those.
JumpCrisscross wrote 1 day ago:
> immigrants greatly outperform children of
non-immigrants when compared by household
income
Income, not wealth. Particularly not after
inheritances transfer.
s1artibartfast wrote 1 day ago:
The studies I am familiar with focus on the
lowest income quintiles, where inheritance
wealth transfer is less of a consideration.
That said, I wouldn't be surprised if wealth
transfer favored immigrants as well when
families are controlled and matched for
comparison.
i_love_retros wrote 1 day ago:
What does it have to do with Trump then? Why was he involved?
JumpCrisscross wrote 1 day ago:
> What does it have to do with Trump then? Why was he involved?
One of the broken parts of the American system is permitting.
Trump can sidestep that by letting this be built on federal land.
That, in turn, unlocks investment.
Beyond that, DoD and DoE are massive buyers of compute. Seeding
the venture with purchase agreements from them de-risks the
project further.
Finally, by Trump putting his name to it he assigns it his bully
pulpit's prestige. (Though that doesn't appear to have carried
over to Musk, who's already taking pot shots at it.)
rchaud wrote 1 day ago:
Because $500b is not a number anybody will commit to without
significant assurances regarding tax breaks, access to labour,
security etc which can only be provided by the state.
Musk cannot ban Chinese autos from the US market, but the
government can. Same goes for Tiktok, Zuck cannot force Americans
not to use it. AI is the next battlefield and further bans will
be coming down the line to make sure the investment is protected.
api wrote 1 day ago:
Musk could also work to make Tesla more competitive with BYD in
the mainstream American car market instead of making Tesla
double and then triple down on a weird niche product like the
Cybertruck that will never appeal to many people. Tesla had a
huge lead in EV tech that they seem to be squandering by not
addressing boring stuff like build quality, giving BYD plenty
of time to catch up. Their whole product line is starting to
look stagnant.
Keeping BYD out won't help if all the other car makers also
catch up. If BYD pulls far enough ahead they could just create
a US division and make cars here like Toyota and Nissan do.
Nissan is on the ropes, so maybe BYD could just buy them and
make that their US brand and get all their factories and supply
chains.
If Tesla kept iterating on the Model 3, released the Model E,
and Musk stayed out of divisive politics that alienate
customers, Tesla had a chance to own the mainstream of the US
auto market for the next 50 years. I'd say that's gone now.
ethbr1 wrote 1 day ago:
Person who was right a few times, despite others naysaying,
assumes they're right on new things, especially as they get
older...
That's certainly not a thing that's ever happened before. /s
api wrote 1 day ago:
Yeah, I am reminded of Linus Pauling thinking vitamin C
cured everything.
Success is dangerous.
ethbr1 wrote 1 day ago:
A combination of ego (luck had no part in my previous
success) and over reliance on a limited historical sample
(last time everyone said I was wrong too, and I was
right).
But even the smartest people still get it wrong on
occasion.
umeshunni wrote 1 day ago:
He love the publicity and most people won't realize that he
doesn't have anything to do with this.
FrustratedMonky wrote 1 day ago:
Funny how he said he did this, but then right during the press
conference they mention the data centers already under
construction from Biden time frame.
aylmao wrote 1 day ago:
AI very much has to do with the state. It's an arms race
between China and the USA, per many [4]. And China doesn't seem
to be behind any longer [1].
It's not only Trump. Before leaving Biden already ordered the
DoE and the DoD to lease sites for data centers and energy
generation. The only reason we don't see a "Department of AI"
or a "National AI Agency" is due to how the military industrial
complex works, and a lot of lobbying I'm sure. [1] [2] [3] [4]
URI [1]: https://www.scmp.com/tech/policy/article/3295662/beiji...
URI [2]: https://www.insideglobaltech.com/2025/01/20/biden-admi...
URI [3]: https://www.utilitydive.com/news/biden-doe-dod-lease-s...
URI [4]: https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/01/21/1110269/th...
nojvek wrote 1 day ago:
> 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.
jnsaff2 wrote 1 day ago:
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."
cruffle_duffle wrote 1 day ago:
> 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.
causal wrote 1 day ago:
Okay that's hilarious.
w00ps wrote 1 day ago:
O1 Pro's opinion on Stargate: Humans are hallucinating, again...
URI [1]: https://justpaste.it/631gx
smeeger wrote 1 day ago:
artificial intelligence must be stopped
1970-01-01 wrote 1 day ago:
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'
dpflan wrote 1 day ago:
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"?
"""
SoftBankâs 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, itâs 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.
"""
-
URI [1]: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/softbank-pledges-10...
biimugan wrote 2 days ago:
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.
Valakas_ wrote 1 day ago:
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.
biimugan wrote 1 day ago:
This type of comment is another thing I don't quite understand --
as if no one but AI proponents have heard of the Singularity.
"There's no point in investing in anything else" is a very
presumptive, fact-free idea. It's just begging the question. Many
promising false starts have occurred in this area. Predictions from
technologists such as Kurzweil have been wrong more than they've
been right.
loandbehold wrote 1 day ago:
Kurzweil's predictions were spot on and stood the test of time.
Sure you can nitpick some things that didn't happen but overall
he was spot on. He was one on the first people who understood
what became known as "scaling hypothesis".
azemetre wrote 1 day ago:
If you investigate the language of these individuals and where
these ideas come from, it's basically taking ideas from
Christianity while giving it a techno. Things like requiring data
to live "forever" is not that different than ideas of the
afterlife.
maxglute wrote 1 day ago:
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 â$125B
hole that needs to be filled for each year of CapEx at todayâs
levelsâ 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.
msoad wrote 1 day ago:
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
tim333 wrote 2 days ago:
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.
biimugan wrote 1 day ago:
Right, but $500 billion in data centers alone is not likely to get
you very far in the grand scheme of things. Endlessly scaling up
today's technology eventually hits some kind of limit. And if you
spend that money to discover some theoretical breakthrough that no
longer requires the $500 billion outlay, then like I said, China
will trivially be able to steal that breakthrough and spend much
less than $500 billion to reproduce it. Is "getting there first"
going to actually be worth it? That's what I'm questioning.
seydor wrote 2 days ago:
unless they have internally built models that are of much higher
intelligence than what we have today, this seems like premature
optimization
demizer wrote 2 days ago:
Hopefully they discover AGI and the AGI turns out to be a communist.
They will kill it SO fast.
x-007 wrote 2 days ago:
money smells good i think
victor106 wrote 2 days ago:
> All three credited Trump for helping to make the project possible,
even though building has already started and the project goes back to
2024.
Itâs sad to see the president of US being ass kissed so much by these
guys. I always assumed thereâs 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.
DrScientist wrote 2 days ago:
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.
realaleris149 wrote 2 days ago:
In America!
The intro paragraph in the original URL [1] mentions US/America for 5
times!
URI [1]: https://openai.com/index/announcing-the-stargate-project/
Deutschland314 wrote 2 days ago:
Why oracle?
Oracle wtf.
ravish0007 wrote 2 days ago:
AI surveillance on large scale
netfortius wrote 2 days ago:
They had me at "Oracle" ...
lachlanj wrote 2 days ago:
Is there any government investment or involvement in this company? It
seems like itâs all private investment so Iâm confused why this is
being announce by the President.
ensocode wrote 2 days ago:
Why now? Is this to compensate the campaign donors or to scare Putin?
bayeslaw wrote 2 days ago:
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!
deknos wrote 2 days ago:
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.
ashoeafoot wrote 7 hours 32 min ago:
cant bribe an exponential curve for peace through linear surplus
redistribution .
mgoetzke wrote 1 day ago:
Russia did not have a scarcity issue and still invaded its neighbor.
Aeolun wrote 1 day ago:
We flew to the moon several times for half that money xD
vtashkov wrote 1 day ago:
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?
malcolmgreaves wrote 1 day ago:
Learn the difference between socialism and communism before you
spout lies and propaganda.
vtashkov wrote 18 hours 4 min ago:
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.
cbeach wrote 1 day ago:
Thatâs 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 worldâs problems
is to advance society, as opposed to resting on the laurels of past
advancement, and dividing the diminishing spoils of those
achievements.
thelastgallon wrote 1 day ago:
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):
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project
LMYahooTFY wrote 18 hours 34 min ago:
> 3) Give money to all farmers to put solar.
...on their roofs? Over all their crops? What's the play here?
ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote 1 day ago:
(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.
XorNot wrote 1 day ago:
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!"
armaautomotive wrote 1 day ago:
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?
jstummbillig wrote 1 day ago:
It's an indirect attempt of tackling any first order problem. So is
all software engineering.
ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote 1 day ago:
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.
pizzathyme wrote 1 day ago:
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.
dinkumthinkum wrote 9 hours 21 min ago:
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.
rachofsunshine wrote 1 day ago:
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.
Tiktaalik wrote 1 day ago:
What if the AI doesn't want to do any of that stuff.
Ukv wrote 1 day ago:
Humans choose its loss function, then continue to guide it with
finetuning/RL/etc.
rambojohnson wrote 1 day ago:
that's the propaganda talking to you.
Aeolun wrote 1 day ago:
> 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.
timewizard wrote 1 day ago:
> 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.
stephen_g wrote 1 day ago:
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)
dyauspitr wrote 1 day ago:
Iâm willing to believe. Itâs probably the closest weâve
come to actually having a real life god. Iâm going to get
pushback on this but Iâve used o1 and itâs 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.
dinkumthinkum wrote 9 hours 13 min ago:
I think we're going to see a lot of people with this kind of
mental illness. It's really pretty sad to me.
andrepd wrote 1 day ago:
Poe's law
semi-extrinsic wrote 1 day ago:
> 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.
enraged_camel wrote 1 day ago:
>> 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.
holoduke wrote 1 day ago:
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.
Aeolun wrote 1 day ago:
I feel called out. But yeah, that seems to be on point.
akra wrote 1 day ago:
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.
gmd63 wrote 1 day ago:
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.
fallingknife wrote 1 day ago:
This place seems to have been overwhelmed by bitterness and envy
over the last 5 years or so.
megous wrote 1 day ago:
Not envious of multi-billionaire's companies gathering capital,
IP, knowledge and infrastructure for huge scale modern day
private Stasi apparatuses. Just bitter.
scottLobster wrote 1 day ago:
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.
dinkumthinkum wrote 9 hours 18 min ago:
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.
jstummbillig wrote 1 day ago:
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.
scottLobster wrote 13 hours 31 min ago:
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.
gilmore606 wrote 17 hours 51 min ago:
Damn you're right, we should give Larry Ellison the benefit of
the doubt.
bdangubic wrote 17 hours 44 min ago:
not just larry - everyone who is 9-figure rich⦠no wonder
they are better than all of us and hence demand that
benefit⦠:)
i_love_retros wrote 1 day ago:
The wars are how American tax payer money gets given to all these
companies. Why would they try to end them?
ActionHank wrote 1 day ago:
But then how could politicians and the wealthy steal all that money
if you just gave it away or helped the poors?
energy123 wrote 2 days ago:
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.
Nullabillity wrote 1 day ago:
> something productive
So... not this.
b3lvedere wrote 2 days ago:
Such mega investments are usually not for the sake of humankind. They
are usually for the sake of a very selected group of humans.
JKCalhoun wrote 2 days ago:
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.
1970-01-01 wrote 1 day ago:
Five-hundred billion is twenty-five percent of DOGE's pie in the
sky promise. It's something.
JKCalhoun wrote 1 day ago:
/s
farresito wrote 2 days ago:
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.
ozim wrote 2 days ago:
Money doesn't fix stuff. You need good will people and good will
people don't need that much money.
ajmurmann wrote 1 day ago:
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.
ozim wrote 1 day ago:
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
doesnât fix the problem.
mft_ wrote 2 days ago:
Money alone might not fix stuff... but an absence of money can
prevent stuff being fixed.
CSSer wrote 2 days ago:
For less than this same price tag, we couldâve 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 whoâs allowed to use
which bathroom and if I need an abortion I might die.
laurentiurad wrote 3 hours 13 min ago:
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.
cudgy wrote 20 hours 20 min ago:
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.
eichi wrote 1 day ago:
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.
rqtwteye wrote 1 day ago:
"we couldâve 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.
aimanbenbaha wrote 1 day ago:
> 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.
rqtwteye wrote 23 hours 34 min ago:
As far as I know the money doesn't go to professors but to ever
increasing administration and shiny buildings.
daryl_martis wrote 1 day ago:
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.
JumpCrisscross wrote 1 day ago:
> we couldâve 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.
tomlockwood wrote 1 day ago:
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!
JumpCrisscross wrote 1 day ago:
> college education is now seen as some upper-class bauble
Weâre well into the pendulum swinging back. The vanguard were
the dropout wunderkids. Now itâs salt-of-the-earth tradesmen
and the like.
tomlockwood wrote 1 day ago:
I don't really get what you're trying to say here.
no_wizard wrote 1 day ago:
Couple things that arenât 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 arenât spending
it all at once, but to be completely honest itâs 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. Itâs inevitable if this
proceeds to an actual investment stage. Whatâs 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 isnât ending in hot air, there will be - it still means
itâs not pure private capital and worse yet, theyâll likely
end up bilking tax payers and the initiative falls apart with
companies spending far less then the pledge but keeping all the
upside.
Iâll bet a years salary it plays out like this.
If this ends up being 100% private capital with no government
subsidies of any kind, Iâll be shocked and elated. Look at
anything like this in the last 40 years and youâll find scant
few examples that actually hold up under scrutiny that they
didnât 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? Itâs only
propping up an unhealthy economic policy no?
Why is it so bad for us to cancel student debt but itâs fine to
have the same cost equivalent as subsidies for businesses? Is it
under the âcreates jobsâ 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
stevenwoo wrote 16 hours 29 min ago:
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.
lumost wrote 1 day ago:
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.
ashoeafoot wrote 7 hours 29 min ago:
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 .
timewizard wrote 1 day ago:
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.
tsunamifury wrote 1 day ago:
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
talldayo wrote 1 day ago:
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.
piltdownman wrote 4 hours 18 min ago:
>>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.
epolanski wrote 1 day ago:
> America's industry needs a cash injection
Does it? Seems overflowing with it.
JumpCrisscross wrote 1 day ago:
> completely hype-dominated vein to push the needle into
One, youâre not getting MGX and SoftBank to pay off student
debt.
Two, if they do what they say they want to, theyâll be
building new power generation, transmission infrastructures and
data centres. Even if AI is a hype, thatâs far from useless
capital.
> money is being deliberately wasted to keep OpenAI's lights on
OpenAI is spending their own money on this.
no_wizard wrote 1 day ago:
>One, youâre 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, theyâll be
building new power generation, transmission infrastructures
and data centres. Even if AI is a hype, thatâs 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.
tomhallett wrote 1 day ago:
Gotcha. The fun part is when OpenAI asks for more regulation
on AI, congress will be receptive
JumpCrisscross wrote 1 day ago:
> fun part is when OpenAI asks for more regulation on AI,
congress will be receptive
OpenAI is the Jeb Bush of D.C. Theyâre spending a lot of
money, but it ainât going far. Last time Altman asked for
regulation he had to âjkâ backwards when Europe and
California proposed actual rules.
whimsicalism wrote 1 day ago:
iâm 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
whimsicalism wrote 1 day ago:
also just: âwhy invest it when we could spend it on consumption
nowâ is a good argument against letting private wealth usage be
socially determined if most people just always vote for
consumption now
_heimdall wrote 1 day ago:
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.
JohnPrine wrote 1 day ago:
I'm starting to think there's no difference between this website
and reddit
azemetre wrote 1 day ago:
This site is way way way more capital friendly than worker
friendly.
actualwitch wrote 1 day ago:
[1] Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into
Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
JohnPrine wrote 1 day ago:
lol you got me
ajmurmann wrote 1 day ago:
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.
Octoth0rpe wrote 2 days ago:
> Instead we gave a small number of people all of this money for a
moonshot in a state where they squabble over whoâs 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)
visarga wrote 2 days ago:
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.
_aavaa_ wrote 1 day ago:
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?
thfuran wrote 1 day ago:
Only the first of those is a real problem, but it really is a
problem.
bun_at_work wrote 1 day ago:
> 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?
qwytw wrote 19 hours 31 min ago:
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?
stevenwoo wrote 16 hours 11 min ago:
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. [1] 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 [2] 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. [3] 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.
URI [1]: https://www.usatoday.com/money/blueprint/student-loa...
URI [2]: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/09/18/f...
URI [3]: https://www.highereducationinquirer.org/2022/01/how-...
itsoktocry wrote 1 day ago:
>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?
DennisP wrote 1 day ago:
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.
URI [1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicholasreimann/2020/10...
bdangubic wrote 1 day ago:
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
neilc wrote 1 day ago:
Basically all college-bound 18-year olds understand what
debt is â youâre 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 âdebtâ is some magical concept
that they donât understand.
bdangubic wrote 23 hours 1 min ago:
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"
neilc wrote 19 hours 2 min ago:
I suppose weâll 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 wasnât like cost of tuition or
what an âinterest rateâ is was somehow obscured
from them or too difficult for them to comprehend. In
some cases they regret the choices they made earlier
but thatâs a different matter, those choices were not
made in ignorance of the basic situation they were
entering into.
bdangubic wrote 12 hours 3 min ago:
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 donât mean to sound mean here but lacking a more
PC word hereâ¦)?
p_j_w wrote 1 day ago:
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.
indymike wrote 1 day ago:
> 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.
anticensor wrote 1 day ago:
Student loans are not dischargeable but they are not
inheritable too.
indymike wrote 1 day ago:
Lifetime debt is not ok
cma wrote 1 day ago:
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..
mlazos wrote 1 day ago:
Going bankrupt isnât just some chill thing, your
credit score will get completely destroyed. Some people
will definitely continue to pay.
Fidelix wrote 1 day ago:
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?
bun_at_work wrote 1 day ago:
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.
sahila wrote 1 day ago:
> 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.
aylmao wrote 1 day ago:
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.
vtashkov wrote 1 day ago:
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.
aylmao wrote 20 hours 36 min ago:
The world keeps showing the USA things can be better, but
some of you really are entrenched deep in American hubris
vtashkov wrote 18 hours 6 min ago:
I am actually European :)
itsoktocry wrote 1 day ago:
Lack of supply is not the reason post secondary education is
expensive.
aylmao wrote 20 hours 29 min ago:
Source? If you're curious cost as it relates to supply and
demand of higher education, here's one [1]
URI [1]: https://www.stern.nyu.edu/sites/default/files/assets...
Twirrim wrote 1 day ago:
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.
jimkleiber wrote 2 days ago:
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.
_heimdall wrote 1 day ago:
> 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.
jimkleiber wrote 1 day ago:
Apathy is the only fair policy?
_heimdall wrote 1 day ago:
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.
jimkleiber wrote 1 day ago:
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 youâidentity 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]:
URI [1]: https://www.jimkleiber.com/the-subjective-adject...
_heimdall wrote 23 hours 13 min ago:
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.
golergka wrote 1 day ago:
Yes. For the government, apathy and inaction is always the
best possible policy.
jimkleiber wrote 1 day ago:
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.
_heimdall wrote 1 day ago:
I wish more people still held this view. When in doubt a
government should avoid acting for fear of unintended
consequences.
jimkleiber wrote 1 day ago:
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.
_heimdall wrote 23 hours 2 min ago:
> 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.
nwienert wrote 1 day ago:
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.
jimkleiber wrote 1 day ago:
> 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.
greentxt wrote 2 days ago:
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.
jimkleiber wrote 1 day ago:
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.
ajmurmann wrote 1 day ago:
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.
freejazz wrote 20 hours 46 min ago:
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.
jimkleiber wrote 1 day ago:
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.
currymj wrote 1 day ago:
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.
jimkleiber wrote 1 day ago:
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 â another resource itâs difficult
to measure â 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]:
URI [1]: https://yieldgiving.com/essays/no-dollar-signs...
bitlax wrote 2 days ago:
Let the schools pay back the people they scammed.
nejsjsjsbsb wrote 2 days ago:
Eliminating some student debt is a fish. Free university is the
fishing rod. Do that instead.
whimsicalism wrote 1 day ago:
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.
__MatrixMan__ wrote 1 day ago:
Or we could just spend less on weapons.
aylmao wrote 1 day ago:
> 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.
itsoktocry wrote 1 day ago:
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?
whimsicalism wrote 1 day ago:
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.
aylmao wrote 1 day ago:
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.
whimsicalism wrote 1 day ago:
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
aylmao wrote 20 hours 40 min ago:
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
nejsjsjsbsb wrote 1 day ago:
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.
whimsicalism wrote 1 day ago:
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.
JumpCrisscross wrote 1 day ago:
> 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.
_heimdall wrote 1 day ago:
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?
davidcbc wrote 1 day ago:
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
_heimdall wrote 1 day ago:
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.
DonHopkins wrote 1 day ago:
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?
_heimdall wrote 1 day ago:
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.
itsoktocry wrote 1 day ago:
If everyone has a Harvard degree, the value of a Harvard
degree loses value, yes.
nejsjsjsbsb wrote 1 day ago:
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)
DonHopkins wrote 1 day ago:
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.
_heimdall wrote 1 day ago:
> 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.
shoo_pl wrote 1 day ago:
Free does not mean limitless. Where I live in EU its not
uncommon to wait for over a year to see a doctor on
âfreeâ 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
nejsjsjsbsb wrote 1 day ago:
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.
nejsjsjsbsb wrote 1 day ago:
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.
_heimdall wrote 1 day ago:
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.
nejsjsjsbsb wrote 1 day ago:
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.
_heimdall wrote 1 day ago:
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.
dinkumthinkum wrote 9 hours 29 min ago:
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.
thfuran wrote 1 day ago:
It's publicly funded, not built and staffed by slaves.
_heimdall wrote 1 day ago:
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.
olyjohn wrote 18 hours 30 min ago:
Sorry, but you're just being a bit pedantic about this
and it's not helping any conversation.
_heimdall wrote 13 hours 11 min ago:
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.
thfuran wrote 12 hours 8 min ago:
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.
_heimdall wrote 10 hours 50 min ago:
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.
thfuran wrote 10 hours 11 min ago:
No, they said that not just anyone can get in
for free; there's an admission test.
unethical_ban wrote 1 day ago:
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).
no_wizard wrote 1 day ago:
>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]: [1]:
URI [1]: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10551-024...
URI [2]: https://www.paularnesen.com/blog/the-h-1b-visa-corpo...
_heimdall wrote 1 day ago:
(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.
no_wizard wrote 1 day ago:
>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.
_heimdall wrote 1 day ago:
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.
no_wizard wrote 1 day ago:
Thatâs one, and I suppose marketing firms to some
extent also fit.
But these are small niches that donât make a whole
sector, and arguably itâs on the fringes
comparatively to everything else
Broadly speaking the so called free market is only in
its name
_heimdall wrote 23 hours 16 min ago:
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.
_heimdall wrote 1 day ago:
> 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.
nejsjsjsbsb wrote 1 day ago:
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.
was_a_dev wrote 1 day ago:
Free to US citizens would be a better policy, the state
investing in its own people.
_heimdall wrote 1 day ago:
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.
diggan wrote 1 day ago:
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.
weakfish wrote 1 day ago:
Has that happened in countries with similar policies?
Fidelix wrote 1 day ago:
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.
vitorgrs wrote 1 day ago:
This is really not a big thing nowadays in Brazil
because if "quotas" in public university.
This WAS a thing without the quotas, though.
weakfish wrote 1 day ago:
Source?
hcks wrote 2 days ago:
I know!! Also we could have given an IPhone to 500 million of
people for the amount!! Itâs such a waste to think theyâre
investing it in the future instead
buran77 wrote 2 days ago:
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).
refurb wrote 1 day ago:
You can make the same argument about going to the moon. Why
bother when so many problems could be solved on earth.
_heimdall wrote 1 day ago:
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.
whimsicalism wrote 1 day ago:
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
_heimdall wrote 1 day ago:
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.
whimsicalism wrote 1 day ago:
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
_heimdall wrote 1 day ago:
> 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.
whimsicalism wrote 1 day ago:
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.
_heimdall wrote 1 day ago:
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.
bdangubic wrote 1 day ago:
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...
s1artibartfast wrote 1 day ago:
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.
JumpCrisscross wrote 1 day ago:
> 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. Weâre not quite at the point
where we donât 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
youâre being paid $750k/year, youâd 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.
bdangubic wrote 1 day ago:
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
knowâ¦) who are W2 vs. 1099 and/or business owners?
99.78% to 0.22% roughly?
JumpCrisscross wrote 1 day ago:
> 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] [2]
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_force_in...
URI [2]: https://www.uschamber.com/small-business/sta...
URI [3]: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024...
s1artibartfast wrote 1 day ago:
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?
JumpCrisscross wrote 1 day ago:
> Are you trying to estimate only those without
employees?
Was using this as a proxy for business owners who
probably donât have a filing cabinet of SBA and
Census small businesses.
anticensor wrote 1 day ago:
There are marketing schools so they teach you to be a
marketeer&sales person, a bad one at the latter.
bdangubic wrote 1 day ago:
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?
anticensor wrote 18 hours 37 min ago:
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:
URI [1]: https://www.hbs.edu/doctoral/phd-programs/ma...
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote 2 days ago:
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.
buran77 wrote 2 days ago:
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.
Cthulhu_ wrote 2 days ago:
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.
nejsjsjsbsb wrote 2 days ago:
Yes you don't want to destroy your food chain. If everyone is
poor except you then you are now poor.
rapsey wrote 2 days ago:
> maybe even stop wars which break out because of scarcity issues.
Like which wars in this century?
neximo64 wrote 2 days ago:
It actually isn't alot, about $100 spread out over a few years for
every person on earth isnt enough to do these things..
b3lvedere wrote 2 days ago:
IF money was equally distributed then maybe. But that has never
happened.
Same with drinking water, food and shelter.
tim333 wrote 2 days ago:
>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.
rainingmonkey wrote 1 day ago:
"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."
URI [1]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-change-...
HeatrayEnjoyer wrote 2 days ago:
At any given time approximately 1 in 10 humans are facing
starvation or severe food insecurity.
Octoth0rpe wrote 2 days ago:
I don't doubt that, but it's harder to connect that fact to a
specific international conflict.
dbspin wrote 2 days ago:
There's a terrifying amount of food insecurity and poverty in
Russia
- [1] -
URI [1]: https://www.globalhungerindex.org/russia.html
URI [2]: https://databankfiles.worldbank.org/public/ddpext_download...
cpursley wrote 1 day ago:
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).
akho wrote 2 days ago:
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 â being in the poverty briefs at all
is not indicative of prosperity â but your terrification should
probably come from elsewhere.
infecto wrote 2 days ago:
Russia is run by the mob. The country has no real dominant
industry beyond its natural resources. Are they really a good
example?
rUsHeYaFuBu wrote 1 day ago:
Related
URI [1]: https://www.ft.com/content/19ac2cb1-8cb4-464d-9683-18c...
cpursley wrote 1 day ago:
Not according to the World Bank: [1] Furthermore, they became
#4 GDP PPP last year and and were reclassified as a high income
country. [2] The poorer regions are actually benefiting from
high contract salaries. How sustainable that is, guess we'll
see.
URI [1]: https://thedocs.worldbank.org/en/doc/d5f32ef28464d01f1...
URI [2]: https://www.intellinews.com/russia-s-economy-is-boomin...
dinkumthinkum wrote 9 hours 5 min ago:
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.
cpursley wrote 2 hours 45 min ago:
What makes you assume I haven't? Have you?
infecto wrote 18 hours 26 min ago:
What in there contradicts what I said?
- They are run by the mob
- They export a lot of natural resources but donât have a
strong manufacturing base. They donât have high tech, they
donât export many manufactured items to developed
countries. Itâs a mob run country, resources are easy to
extract.
cpursley wrote 17 hours 24 min ago:
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).
infecto wrote 1 hour 4 min ago:
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 donât see them out manufacturing the west
on military equipment when some of that equipment is
getting overrun easily by 40 year old western equipment.
Itâs still a poor nation being run by the mob with some
shining spots.
qwytw wrote 19 hours 14 min ago:
> 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.
cpursley wrote 17 hours 20 min ago:
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.
andrepd wrote 23 hours 55 min ago:
Goes to show how much GDP is a good measure (or target) to
aim for.
tim333 wrote 2 days ago:
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 [1] That was from 2014.
Already Russia is heading to the next panel in the cycle.
URI [1]: https://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1424,quali...
jeffreyq wrote 1 day ago:
> 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
tim333 wrote 1 day ago:
I don't have special information but there is general stuff
in the headlines like
Putin growing concerned by Russiaâs economy, as Trump
pushes for Ukraine deal [1] Also basically the whole western
world are progressively sanctioning them eg. [2] and [3] 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 [4] I'm not sure it's going to change
unless there is some sort of deal or Putin goes.
URI [1]: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/putin-growing-c...
URI [2]: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-imposes-new-wa...
URI [3]: https://kyivindependent.com/us-likely-to-sanction-ru...
URI [4]: https://www.newsweek.com/russia-map-shows-critical-i...
palmfacehn wrote 2 days ago:
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.
Cthulhu_ wrote 2 days ago:
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)
bagels wrote 1 day ago:
California moves water the long way with aqueducts, pipes and
pumps. It's an understood problem, but expensive.
qrsjutsu wrote 2 days ago:
> 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.
tim333 wrote 2 days ago:
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.
JumpCrisscross wrote 1 day ago:
> 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.)
kasey_junk wrote 1 day ago:
Surely you mean the Suez Canal
JumpCrisscross wrote 1 day ago:
Ha! Yes.
_Tev wrote 2 days ago:
> That doesn't seem to be much of a thing these days.
If you ignore Gaza and whole of Africa, maybe.
tim333 wrote 2 days ago:
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?
nejsjsjsbsb wrote 2 days ago:
Like the glib summary of Palestinian history there. In other
news some terrorists stole land from the Brits in 1776.
FilosofumRex wrote 2 days ago:
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.
dbdoskey wrote 2 days ago:
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.
Arkhaine_kupo wrote 2 days ago:
> Are there any wars which are mostly about scarcity at the
moment?
The class war
_Tev wrote 2 days ago:
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.
corimaith wrote 2 days ago:
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.
tim333 wrote 2 days ago:
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.
boxed wrote 2 days ago:
Or religious fanatics wants to murder other religious groups.
dragonelite wrote 2 days ago:
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.
4ggr0 wrote 2 days ago:
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.
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in...
chrishare wrote 2 days ago:
Looking forward to transparency about where this capital flows /s
chickenbig wrote 2 days ago:
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.
anonzzzies wrote 2 days ago:
Is this Ellison's attempt to become #1 richest again?
gmueckl wrote 2 days ago:
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.
energy123 wrote 2 days ago:
Unlike California, Texas is easy to build in. True for both renewable
energy and housing.
Giorgi wrote 2 days ago:
Oh so that's why Pelosi invested in Micro nuke electricity plants.
defrost wrote 2 days ago:
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.
ukuina wrote 2 days ago:
Leopold Aschenbrenner predicted it last June.
URI [1]: https://situational-awareness.ai/racing-to-the-trillion-dollar...
Philpax wrote 2 days ago:
Given [1] , his impact on the causal chain of events may go beyond
mere prediction.
URI [1]: https://x.com/IvankaTrump/status/1839002887600370145
mppm wrote 2 days ago:
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.
maxlin wrote 1 day ago:
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.
vineyardmike wrote 1 day ago:
Iâm an American who was definitely raised in a âChina Badâ
world.
The last few months, between TikTok ban, RedNote, elections, United
Healthcare CEO, etc Iâve 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 Govâs 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 âenemyâ as the âBad
Guysâ.
portaouflop wrote 1 day ago:
I donât 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
donât 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 â do I still think china
would be less pleasant as our new overlord? Yes â Do I think
the world is better off with US-American hegemony? Iâm not so
sure.
Maybe itâs a net good for the world if not one power is
dominating â maybe itâs the start of a hellish ww3.
I choose to believe the former.
edit: typos
aylmao wrote 1 day ago:
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.
Gasp0de wrote 1 day ago:
It could be worse, Elon Musk could be involved with it.
worthless-trash wrote 1 day ago:
We should NEVER have a lawnmower at the helm of humanity.
ActionHank wrote 1 day ago:
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.
mattlutze wrote 2 days ago:
Ellison should be nowhere near this: [1] The man has the moral system
of a private prison and the money to build one.
URI [1]: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/09/omnip...
mike_hearn wrote 1 day ago:
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.
URI [1]: https://www.oracle.com/events/financial-analyst-meeting-20...
throw-the-towel wrote 1 day ago:
Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison.
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15886728
thelastgallon wrote 1 day ago:
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.
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!
aswanson wrote 1 day ago:
2025 is shaping up to be When the Villains
Win year.
pj_mukh wrote 1 day ago:
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]
URI [1]: https://www.ktvu.com/news/controversial-oakland-police-pur...
URI [2]: https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/san-francisco-po...
lenerdenator wrote 1 day ago:
We keep saying people like him shouldn't be involved in certain
ventures, and yet, they still are. More than ever, actually.
spacechild1 wrote 2 days ago:
> "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!
idiotsecant wrote 1 day ago:
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.
siva7 wrote 2 days ago:
> "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.
laurentiurad wrote 3 hours 11 min ago:
Who will supervise the gate keepers?
freedomben wrote 1 day ago:
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.
insane_dreamer wrote 1 day ago:
Move to China. Youâll 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
doesnât want you to hear about, and you wonât hear about any
police corruption or brutality either. Ignorance is bliss!
JumpCrisscross wrote 1 day ago:
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.
insane_dreamer wrote 1 day ago:
it's "technology transfer", not "seizure" ;)
javcasas wrote 1 day ago:
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.
bayindirh wrote 1 day ago:
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.
YinglingHeavy wrote 1 day ago:
You stop abuse in this country, particularly of children, and you
start having zero violent crime a decade later.
mattlutze wrote 1 day ago:
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.
wadim wrote 1 day ago:
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.
ajmurmann wrote 1 day ago:
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
ImJamal wrote 1 day ago:
This is up to debate. The FBI and DOJ numbers disagree with
each other.
URI [1]: https://www.themarshallproject.org/2023/11/03/violent-...
vtashkov wrote 1 day ago:
Yeah, historically low crime because a lot of the crime is not
considered crime anymore. Why thousands of stores are closing
in California?
mrguyorama wrote 1 day ago:
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.
moogly wrote 1 day ago:
> Why thousands of stores are closing in California?
Because everyone's buying everything online and getting it
delivered to their homes.
ryandamm wrote 1 day ago:
Walgreenâs was closing stores anyway and used the pandemic
shoplifting as an excuse⦠but it was never the actual
reason.
Crime is at historical lows.
ajmurmann wrote 1 day ago:
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.
RajT88 wrote 1 day ago:
Well and good as a talking point, but violent crime is still
illegal and way down.
noisy_boy wrote 2 days ago:
Just be prepared to be never daring to complain; a zero crime
society isn't without its faults.
nejsjsjsbsb wrote 2 days ago:
Need a bit of Zuck too
blantonl wrote 1 day ago:
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.
amelius wrote 2 days ago:
I would love for Oracle to use AI to put their entire legal
department out of work, though.
andy_ppp wrote 2 days ago:
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...
SketchySeaBeast wrote 1 day ago:
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.
miki123211 wrote 2 days ago:
> 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.
ajmurmann wrote 1 day ago:
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
ReptileMan wrote 2 days ago:
>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.
roenxi wrote 2 days ago:
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.
roenxi wrote 2 days ago:
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.
ghostzilla wrote 22 hours 53 min ago:
This seems more like a move designed to frighten China -- or force
them to spend money making LLMs -- then an actual threat. The clues
are that Trump ceremonially blessed the deal but did not promise
money (SoftBank et al will, supposedly), and then Musk said that's
all fake because SoftBank doesn't have the money, and Altman
countered that Musk should not be butthurt and should put America
first. Who does that? I'm thinking, no one who has something real
on his hands.
unethical_ban wrote 1 day ago:
Elon Musk was an internet darling when his top character trait was
"space! EVs!". Then he went Kanye/alt-right and weaponized twitter.
It didn't have to do with the fact he has a lot of money.
Many people dislike all billionaires, but some have escaped
criticism more than others by successfully appearing to have some
humanity left in them, like Gates and Cuban.
whimsicalism wrote 1 day ago:
Nietzsche wrote about these phenomena a long time ago in his
Genealogy of Morality. there will never be someone who reaches the
top who doesnât become an object of ire in modern Western
culture.
infecto wrote 2 days ago:
> 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.
Trying to process this but doesnât his fall from grace have more
to him increasing his real personality to the world? Sometime
around calling that guy a pedo. Not much bothers me but at the very
least his apparent lack of decision making calls into question many
things.
anon84873628 wrote 1 day ago:
Of all the sentiments that call for reflection, the parent's
belief about why people don't like Elon is the one that needs it
the most.
JKCalhoun wrote 2 days ago:
> 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.
Did we see the same fallout from the space-race from a couple
generations ago?
I don't think so â certainly not in the way you're framing it. So
I guess I don't accept your proposition as a guarantee of what will
happen.
roenxi wrote 2 days ago:
A couple of generations ago we didn't have the internet and the
only things people heard about were being managed. The big
question was whether the media editors wanted to build someone up
or tear them down.
The spoils of the space race would have gone to someone a lot
like Musk. Or Ellison. Or Masayoshi Son. Or Sam Altman. Or the
much worse old-moneyed types. The US space program was, famously,
literally employing ex-Nazis. I doubt the beneficiaries of the
money had particularly clean hands either
mppm wrote 2 days ago:
> 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.
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote 2 days ago:
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.
DebtDeflation wrote 2 days ago:
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?
breadwinner wrote 1 day ago:
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.
ethbr1 wrote 1 day ago:
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.
breadwinner wrote 1 day ago:
That already exists:
URI [1]: https://www.truveta.com/
ethbr1 wrote 1 day ago:
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).
breadwinner wrote 1 day ago:
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.
rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote 1 day ago:
Oracle has a lot of valuable classified information about the
state and its enemies due to its business.
Octoth0rpe wrote 2 days ago:
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.
mrbungie wrote 1 day ago:
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.
Octoth0rpe wrote 1 day ago:
> 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
mrbungie wrote 1 day ago:
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.
freehorse wrote 2 days ago:
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".
fbfactchecker wrote 1 day ago:
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.
idiotsecant wrote 1 day ago:
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.
freehorse wrote 1 day ago:
> 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.
miki123211 wrote 2 days ago:
> 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.
unethical_ban wrote 1 day ago:
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.
danieldk wrote 1 day ago:
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]
[2] Which is pretty offensive to people on the spectrum.
URI [1]: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us...
freehorse wrote 1 day ago:
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).
dboreham wrote 1 day ago:
That person is much more of a politician than a
businessman.
mschuster91 wrote 2 days ago:
> 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.
cosmic_cheese wrote 1 day ago:
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.
lupire wrote 2 days ago:
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.
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote 2 days ago:
Sadly, it is not that unexpected given some of his recent
interviews[1]. Any other day, I would agree it is a surprise.
URI [1]: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/09/o...
fsndz wrote 2 days ago:
What do you prefer ? Letting DeepSeek and China lead the AI war ?
DeepSeek R1 is a big wake up call
URI [1]: https://open.substack.com/pub/transitions/p/deepseek-is-comi...
whimsicalism wrote 1 day ago:
we need to cooperate and put aside our petty politicking right now.
the potential downsides of âracingâ without building a safety
scaffold are catastrophic.
smeeger wrote 1 day ago:
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 â
not because it would be easy but because there is no other option.
vbezhenar wrote 2 days ago:
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.
infecto wrote 2 days ago:
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.
Cumpiler69 wrote 2 days ago:
How many countries has China invaded and bombed in the last 30
years?
How many deaths did China's warmongering caused abroad?
greentxt wrote 2 days ago:
Define invade.
Cumpiler69 wrote 2 days ago:
Sorry, but If you need a definition for military invasion,
you're not arguing in good faith. Goodbye.
infecto wrote 2 days ago:
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.
segasaturn wrote 1 day ago:
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.
Cumpiler69 wrote 2 days ago:
> 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?
infecto wrote 2 days ago:
> 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 itâs 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. Itâs 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.
Cumpiler69 wrote 2 days ago:
> 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.
infecto wrote 2 days ago:
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.
anon84873628 wrote 1 day ago:
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.
freedomben wrote 1 day ago:
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.
jbaiter wrote 2 days ago:
"They respect local laws and culture" - I think people from
Xinyang probably have a very different perspective on
that........
vbezhenar wrote 2 days ago:
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.
whimsicalism wrote 1 day ago:
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
Octoth0rpe wrote 2 days ago:
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.
Analemma_ wrote 1 day ago:
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".
whimsicalism wrote 1 day ago:
sorry but youâre not going to convince anyone approaching
this with a neutral mind that China is more partial to
overseas intervention than the US is
Octoth0rpe wrote 1 day ago:
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)
whimsicalism wrote 1 day ago:
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
lupire wrote 2 days ago:
Africa and South America and USA strongly disagree.
anthk wrote 2 days ago:
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.
bayindirh wrote 2 days ago:
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]:
URI [1]: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B_AiI9_XIAA67_t.jpg
rpastuszak wrote 2 days ago:
Treating the world as a bunch of football teams is a great
distraction though.
andy_ppp wrote 2 days ago:
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.
mppm wrote 2 days ago:
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.
corimaith wrote 2 days ago:
>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?
mppm wrote 2 days ago:
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.
lII1lIlI11ll wrote 2 days ago:
"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.
mppm wrote 2 days ago:
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.
URI [1]: https://situational-awareness.ai/
lII1lIlI11ll wrote 2 days ago:
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
âitâs just predicting the next wordâ."
otabdeveloper4 wrote 2 days ago:
> What do you prefer ? Letting DeepSeek and China lead the AI war ?
Me personally? Yes.
belter wrote 2 days ago:
This is a Military project. Have no doubts about it.
Twirrim wrote 1 day ago:
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)
llm_nerd wrote 1 day ago:
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.
smeeger wrote 1 day ago:
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.
whimsicalism wrote 1 day ago:
no whistleblower was murdered, ridiculous conspiracy theory
smeeger wrote 1 day ago:
motive and means is a basis for conviction according to the law
dgoldstein0 wrote 2 days ago:
... If they build it under Cheyenne mountain you are definitely
correct
Gud wrote 2 days ago:
This is a money making scheme.
jwr wrote 2 days ago:
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.
sebazzz wrote 1 day ago:
> 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 donât
believe in man-escalated climate change.
noisy_boy wrote 1 day ago:
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.
secondcoming wrote 2 days ago:
For $500bn they can build a nuclear power plant dedicated to
these data centres
notTooFarGone wrote 1 day ago:
Ah so it's commissioned in 2040 and renewables already made
it obsolete.
ReptileMan wrote 2 days ago:
They can build a couple. With nuclear money is rarely the
issue. It is that it takes forever because reasons.
Andrex wrote 2 days ago:
It's not like the current admin respects the rule of law
anyways...
andrepd wrote 2 days ago:
Trump just rescinded licenses for offshore wind farms via an
EO. We're fucking cooked (and I mean this literally)
cko wrote 1 day ago:
> 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.
bayindirh wrote 2 days ago:
Before downvoting the OP and, for more information, see: [1]
URI [1]: https://apnews.com/article/wind-energy-offshore-turb...
URI [2]: https://www.utilitydive.com/news/trump-offshore-wind...
admissionsguy wrote 2 days ago:
You need to stop this nonsense. Pollution is a long term
problem, but it does not mean it is productive to do what
Germany has done and cease development.
insane_dreamer wrote 1 day ago:
Pollution and climate change are two separate problems (both
linked to the fossil fuel industry).
unethical_ban wrote 1 day ago:
You need to stop this nonsense. The path we were on, that
Trump has already overthrown, was nothing like Germany's.
vargr616 wrote 2 days ago:
what's the difference
Gud wrote 2 days ago:
Not all money making schemes involve the military.
4ndrewl wrote 2 days ago:
Wealth residistribution scheme. Your tax dollars into their
pockets.
Palmik wrote 2 days ago:
As far as I can tell, this will be financed by private money.
Can you elaborate?
4ndrewl wrote 2 days ago:
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.
miki123211 wrote 2 days ago:
> 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.
aylmao wrote 1 day ago:
> 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?
Filligree wrote 1 day ago:
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...
fallingknife wrote 1 day ago:
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?
terrabiped wrote 1 day ago:
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?
lupire wrote 2 days ago:
What do you think NASA does with the money? Is doesn't
build a NASA house for its NASA babies.
vtashkov wrote 2 days ago:
Tax breaks, i.e. my money not being in your pocket means
that they are stolen?
shoxidizer wrote 1 day ago:
Tax breaks have basically the same effect as the
government writing a check, increases inflation.
vtashkov wrote 1 day ago:
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.
shoxidizer wrote 1 day ago:
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.
vtashkov wrote 1 day ago:
So, in this desert there would be no inflation or
deflation, you say. Letâs say we use gold coins
there. Wouldnât 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
shoxidizer wrote 1 day ago:
> 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?"
vtashkov wrote 1 day ago:
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, itâs 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
couldnât answer.
What bothers me most is why people write about
things they have no clue about and clearly
havenât 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.
shoxidizer wrote 1 day ago:
> 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.
mattlutze wrote 2 days ago:
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.
vtashkov wrote 1 day ago:
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, âcommunityâ ,
i.e. Marx.
high_na_euv wrote 1 day ago:
>Companies do not extract value,
Oil and minning companies too?
vtashkov wrote 1 day ago:
Yes, before the resource is taken out of the Earth
it doesnât 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.
matwood wrote 2 days ago:
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...
vtashkov wrote 1 day ago:
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).
beezlewax wrote 2 days ago:
The Mars walk is just 3 years away baby!
fbfactchecker wrote 1 day ago:
3 months maybe, 6 months definitely.
SketchySeaBeast wrote 2 days ago:
The best part about this answer is it's always true.
4ndrewl wrote 1 day ago:
Related: GenAI, Cold fusion
SketchySeaBeast wrote 1 day ago:
Yup, and FSD.
belter wrote 2 days ago:
Your tax dollars are the customer.
arisAlexis wrote 2 days ago:
This has cosmological significance if it leads to
superintelligence
computerthings wrote 2 days ago:
"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".
Cthulhu_ wrote 2 days ago:
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.
miki123211 wrote 2 days ago:
> 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.
talldayo wrote 1 day ago:
I think gluing wings to a pig will make it fly. Show me
examples or stop the conjecture.
nkingsy wrote 1 day ago:
There is lots of human feedback. This isnât 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.
Filligree wrote 2 days ago:
Okay, but letâs be pessimistic for a moment. What can we do
if that revolution does happen, and theyâre close to AGI?
I donât believe the control problem is solved, but Iâm
not sure it would matter if it is.
ForHackernews wrote 2 days ago:
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.
arisAlexis wrote 1 day ago:
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
ForHackernews wrote 3 hours 44 min ago:
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.
HeatrayEnjoyer wrote 2 days ago:
> 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.
adalacelove wrote 2 days ago:
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.
lupire wrote 2 days ago:
Destroying human life in Earth (the only habitable
place in the solar system) is far far easier than
reaching something outside the solar system.
z3phyr wrote 2 days ago:
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.
Philpax wrote 2 days ago:
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.
ForHackernews wrote 2 days ago:
...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.
jprete wrote 1 day ago:
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.
anon84873628 wrote 1 day ago:
And of course the more society is wired up and
controlled by computer systems, the more the AGI
could directly manage it.
SketchySeaBeast wrote 1 day ago:
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.
jprete wrote 1 day ago:
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.
SketchySeaBeast wrote 1 day ago:
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.
lupire wrote 2 days ago:
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.
Philpax wrote 2 days ago:
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.
ForHackernews wrote 3 hours 41 min ago:
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.
redserk wrote 2 days ago:
And if this whole exercise turns out to be a flop
and gets us absolutely nowhere closer to AGI?
âAGIâ has proven to be todayâs 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.
arisAlexis wrote 1 day ago:
You really haven't used any LLM seriously eh
anon84873628 wrote 1 day ago:
This thread started from a deliberately
pessimistic hypothetical of what happens if AGI
actually manifests, so your comment is misplaced.
iLoveOncall wrote 2 days ago:
> bigger datasets
Not even, they already ran out of data.
nick__m wrote 2 days ago:
I am sure that the M.I.C. have a ton of classified data
that could be used to train a military AI.
iLoveOncall wrote 2 days ago:
Don't worry, it'll only lead to superstupidity.
_heimdall wrote 2 days ago:
Is that the prequel to Idiocracy?
bluescrn wrote 2 days ago:
And superplagiarism of human-created content
XenophileJKO wrote 2 days ago:
I'm sure this will age well.
baobun wrote 2 days ago:
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.
slt2021 wrote 2 days ago:
too late, China is already ahead
pixelmonkey wrote 2 days ago:
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.
listic wrote 2 days ago:
How much of the supposed $500B will be US state budget money?
loandbehold wrote 1 day ago:
0
aurareturn wrote 2 days ago:
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.
chvid wrote 2 days ago:
Comment from Elon Musk: [1] They donât actually have the money
URI [1]: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1881923570458304780
JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B wrote 1 day ago:
Having heard a lot of stories from my grandparents, I don't think you
should trust nazis.
gr__or wrote 2 days ago:
For the curious ones who are not so excited about gifting page views
to the fascist:
URI [1]: https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1881923570458304780
astrea wrote 2 days ago:
Letâs say they develop AGI tomorrow. Is that really all she wrote for
blue collar jobs?
petre wrote 2 days ago:
Gerat. Larry gets cash thrown at his AI surveillance dystopia.
bfrog wrote 2 days ago:
What are people filling these datacenters with exactly if not nvidia?
gibbitz wrote 2 days ago:
Can we build a wall to keep AI out?
ulfw wrote 2 days ago:
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.
heyitssim wrote 2 days ago:
who will benefit from those datacenters?
b3ing wrote 2 days ago:
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
wujerry2000 wrote 2 days ago:
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.
maxglute wrote 1 day ago:
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.
gizmondo wrote 1 day ago:
Building a lot of compute will likely end up more useful than Apollo
& ISS, which were vanity projects.
krick wrote 2 days ago:
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: [1] [2]
URI [1]: https://jameswebbtracker.com/jwst/budget
URI [2]: https://blogfusion.tech/worlds-most-expensive-experiments/
URI [3]: https://science.nasa.gov/mission/hubble/overview/faqs/
spacephysics wrote 2 days ago:
AI race is arguably just as, and maybe even more important, than
the space race.
From a national security PoV, surpassing other countriesâ 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.
Iâd be willing to predict that weâll 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 âinstantlyâ deployed.
philipwhiuk wrote 2 days ago:
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.
0x000xca0xfe wrote 2 days ago:
The hardware is likely flexible enough to run other approaches
too if they get discovered.
nopinsight wrote 2 days ago:
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).
krick wrote 2 days ago:
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).
nopinsight wrote 2 days ago:
Superintelligence (along with some definitions): [1] 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"
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superintelligence
URI [2]: https://x.com/tsarnick/status/1881794265648615886
whiplash451 wrote 1 day ago:
Anthropic has to say this or Anthropic does not see their
next funding round.
hatefulmoron wrote 2 days ago:
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.
nopinsight wrote 2 days ago:
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.
philipwhiuk wrote 2 days ago:
But there's 0 guarantee they are even capable of solving
the rather large amount that covers the rest of a
well-educated human.
emaro wrote 2 days ago:
Can they do rule 110? If not, I don't think they're
'generally intelligent'.
hatefulmoron wrote 2 days ago:
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.
nopinsight wrote 2 days ago:
If we talk about a median well-educated human, o1
likely passes the bar. Quite a few tests of reasoning
suggests thatâs the case. An example:
âPreprint 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: [1] . â Adam Rodman, a co-author of the paper
[2] â-
Have you tried using o1 with a variety of problems?
URI [1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.10849â
URI [2]: https://x.com/AdamRodmanMD/status/186902305691...
hatefulmoron wrote 2 days ago:
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.
nopinsight wrote 2 days ago:
Figure 1 shows a significant improvement of
o1-preview over earlier models.
Perhaps itâs better that you ask a statistician
you trust.
hatefulmoron wrote 2 days ago:
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 itâs better that you ask a
statistician you trust
Maybe we can shortcut this conversation by each
of us simply consulting O1 :^)
nopinsight wrote 1 day ago:
1) Itâs 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:
ââ¦.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 donât need to be
explainable. Nor do they even need to be
specified
When presented with tons of data, these models
can just learn, internalize &
understandâ¦..â
More here:
URI [1]: https://x.com/simocristea/status/18819...
Dalewyn wrote 2 days ago:
>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.
trillic wrote 1 day ago:
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.
frontalier wrote 2 days ago:
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?
trillic wrote 1 day ago:
Nautical miles are minutes of latitude and are useful for
navigation on the sphere we live on. Itâs not some conspiracy
for English hegemony despite the previous posters insistence.
Dalewyn wrote 1 day ago:
>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).
frontalier wrote 1 day ago:
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.
Dalewyn wrote 1 day ago:
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.
frontalier wrote 1 day ago:
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.
Dalewyn wrote 1 day ago:
>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.
fooker wrote 2 days ago:
Is this inflation adjusted?
boxed wrote 2 days ago:
It says so at least
pinot wrote 2 days ago:
Those are all public projects except for one..
alpb wrote 2 days ago:
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.
fastball wrote 2 days ago:
Neom: $1.5T
moralestapia wrote 2 days ago:
But that one's imaginary.
krick wrote 2 days ago:
Maybe, but so is Stargate Project so far.
fastball wrote 2 days ago:
Is it? [1]
URI [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYimVfnGNGY
URI [2]: https://skift.com/2024/08/07/saudi-takes-2-million-photo...
SeanAnderson wrote 2 days ago:
"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 :)
fastball wrote 1 day ago:
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.
moralestapia wrote 19 hours 46 min ago:
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.
fastball wrote 12 hours 5 min ago:
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 â 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 â 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.
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