alt Hacker NewsI know it has become a meme by now, but IIRC the market for all foods (agriculture, processed food, etc.) on earth is around $10 trillion.
So according to SpaceX, the market for AI is 2.5 larger than all the food sold on this planet.
They're also saying that the AI market is worth roughly 10% of all global real estate.
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> the market for AI is 2.5 larger than all the food sold on this planet.
It just shows how much the automation has impacted agriculture and the food industry. Sure, there're rural farms that apply 200 yo technology. But e.g. the grain production and farming are incredibly efficient at scale. So, it's not that costly for as a humanity to feed 8 billion people (at a varying level, of course).
What precisely is the moat surrounding AI that SpaceX is using to justify this kind of spending spree? I don't how SpaceX and other AI companies will be able to keep the weights of their AI models private in the face of interest by virtually everyone in the world. It would be absolutely trivial for a nation state to walk into a data center using a state issued security certificate to seize a few of the physical servers running the cloud services of OpenAI / Grok / Claude. Copying the weights is trivial. Infiltrating a company with spies as new hire coders to gain access to source code is also trivial.
This is really starting to feel like the pets.com era again.
To be fair, food is the smallest bucket of my monthly expenses. And there are many people here on hacker news who pay more for their AI tokens than for their food.
How does argrar industry and tech industry compare as share of gdp in the US?
I'm sure people laughed in 2023 if someone said AI will reach $100B in revenue in 3 years. Yet here we are
> They're also saying that the AI market is worth roughly 10% of all global real estate.
Why limit yourself to one planet? Space is infinite ;-)
Food is worth a lot more than that. If the alternative was starvation, we would pay approximately all the money for food. By that metric food is worth more than $100T. The difference between $100T and $10T is called the consumer surplus, one of the largest benefits of a free market economy.
AI might eventually provide $26T worth of value, but if it captures anywhere close to that amount of revenue that'll indicate a failure of the free market economy. Competition and open source will have failed and the oligarchy has won.
(Either that, or inflation will have made $26T a relatively smaller number).
I'm sure the finance market is much larger as well
This is true if you take the ai market as equal to the market for labor discounted to 5-10% penetration.
It’s not a totally unreasonable assertion, it’s the implication of the assertion that we are uncomfortable with. There is no reason for the models to stop their improvements in the near future.