I have been having this conversation more and more with friends. As a research topic, modern AI is a miracle, and I absolutely love learning about it. As an economic endeavor, it just feels insane. How many hospitals, roads, houses, machine shops, biomanufacturing facilities, parks, forests, laboratories, etc. could we build with the money we’re spending on pretraining models that we throw away next quarter?

Remember the good old days of complaining about Bitcoin taking the energy output of a whole town.

I'm a simple man, I just want these companies to pay taxes where they make money.

Haters will say Sora wasn't worth it.

Inflation adjusted?

Not really your point but I think the skills to create these things are much slower to train than producing chips and data centres.

So they couldn't really build any of these projects weekly since the cost of construction materials / design engineers / construction workers would inflate rapidly.

Worth keeping in mind when people say "we could have built 52 hospitals instead!" or similar. Yes, but not really... since the other constraints would quickly reveal themselves

It's incredibly sad and depressing. We could be building green energy, parks, public transit, education, healthcare.

So, now you understand you can’t compare things with how much they cost

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