alt Hacker NewsI just hope when (if) the hype is over, we can repurpose the capacities for something useful (e.g. drug discovery etc.)
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Re hype: Why is it that so many people are completely obsessed with replacing all developers and any other white-collar job? They seem to be totally convinced that this will happen. 100%
To me, this all sounds like an “end-of-the-world” nihilistic wet dream, and I don’t buy the hype.
Is it’s just me?
The rest of the world has not caught up to current LLM capabilities. If it all stopped tomorrow and we couldn't build anything more intelligent than what we have now: there would be years of work automating away toil across various industries.
I'm always surprised by the number of people posting here that are dismissive of AI and the obvious unstoppable progress.
Just looking at what happened with chess, go, strategy games, protein folding etc, it's obvious that pretty much any field/problem that can be formalised and cheaply verified - e.g. mathematics, algorithms etc - will be solved, and that it's only a matter of time before we have domain-specific ASI.
I strongly encourage everyone to read about the bitter lesson [0] and verifier's law [1].
[0] http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html
[1] https://www.jasonwei.net/blog/asymmetry-of-verification-and-...
We won't. Well lay off engineers to balance the books and destroy unneeded capacity.
I live next to an abandoned building from the Spanish property boom. It's now occupied illegally. Hype's over yet the consequence is staring at me every day. I am sure it'll eventually be knocked down or repurposed yet it'd be better had the misallocation never happened.
Very cheap game consoles and VR headsets. Unironically that could really help world peace and QOL: less news and doomscrolling, and people would have an outlet for stress, anger, and boredom.
On the other hand, drug discovery sounds like it's a candidate for really benefitting from AI. To fuel AI model development, there maybe has to be all the garbage that comes with AI.
As the author says: this capex isn’t a railroad, it’s a very expensive immediately depreciating asset.
We should be so lucky
This implies that a human life is valuable but what they spend it doing is not.
Aren't advancements in AI actually helping drug discovery?
Cloud gaming 2.0
If you have a GPU which you've used for AI training, but that's no longer valuable, you could sell that GPU; but then you'd incur taxable revenue.
If you destroy the GPU, you can write it off as a loss, which reduces your taxable income.
Its possible you could come out ahead by selling everything off, but then you'd have to pay expensive people to manage the sell off, logistics, etc. What a mess. Easier to just destroy everything and take the write-off.
A competent government might rent these company’s GPUs to cure major diseases once they’re sitting idle.
During the 1990s dotcom boom we massively overbuilt fiber networks. It was indiscriminate and most of the fiber was never lit.
After the dotcom crash, much of this infrastructure became distressed assets that could be picked up for peanuts. This fueled a large number of new startups in the aftermath that built business models figuring out how to effectively leverage all of this dead fiber when you don't have to pay the huge capital costs of building it out yourself. At the time, you could essentially build a nationwide fiber network for a few million dollars if you were clever, and people did.
These new data centers will find a use, even if it ends up being by some startup who picks it up for nothing after a crash. This has been a pattern in US tech for a long time. The carcass of the previous boom's whale becomes cheap fuel for the next generation of companies.