Author Topic: 500 freaking billions  (Read 2483 times)

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Online magic

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 7529
  • Country: pl
Re: 500 freaking billions
« Reply #25 on: January 23, 2025, 10:10:15 am »
You know, I could appreciate a skillful swindler for his "art", but these people are something else.

They are nutjobs who actually believe that they are here to revolutionize the world, that their technology will be the Next Big Thing, everyone will live happily ever after and they will get rich in the process, but that's OK because everyone will be rich. Not much different from Elizabeth Holmes or from Musk's Mars colonization program.

Silicon Valley is a cult, the whole place needs to be nuked from the orbit with no survivors.
 

Offline SiliconWizardTopic starter

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 15956
  • Country: fr
Re: 500 freaking billions
« Reply #26 on: January 23, 2025, 10:33:11 am »
They are nutjobs who actually believe that they are here to revolutionize the world, that their technology will be the Next Big Thing, everyone will live happily ever after and they will get rich in the process, but that's OK because everyone will be rich. Not much different from Elizabeth Holmes or from Musk's Mars colonization program.

Well, I see a small difference though: while most of these guys probably do believe that whatever they promote will benefit everyone, I don't think that's the case in particular for those in the "AI" field currently. Most of them have clearly stated, on the contrary, that AI was potentially very dangerous to humanity. So, no. They know it's not for the good of humanity. It's for something else.

Silicon Valley is a cult, the whole place needs to be nuked from the orbit with no survivors.

Given what's happening in California lately, you should probably refrain if you don't want to have the FBI at your doorstep.  :-X
 

Online magic

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 7529
  • Country: pl
Re: 500 freaking billions
« Reply #27 on: January 23, 2025, 10:41:29 am »
But they are creating ethical AI. It's created by top experts in the field and it's explicitly trained not to misgender people, so it's safe. That's why it's so important that America, and not someone else, wins the race to AGI. And since you are still reading this, please donate to our Patreon, I really can't stress enough how important it is.

There will be peace, there will be UBI, there will be jobs for Americans, there will be unicorns. OpenAI AGI will make all of it possible, and then much more you haven't even dreamed of yet.
« Last Edit: January 23, 2025, 10:44:53 am by magic »
 
The following users thanked this post: Siwastaja

Offline SiliconWizardTopic starter

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 15956
  • Country: fr
Re: 500 freaking billions
« Reply #28 on: January 23, 2025, 11:27:23 am »
There will mostly be $500 billions injected into a few companies, so ultimately into a few pockets. ;D
The unicorns are for the gullible who are ok with that much money (which doesn't grow on trees either, so ultimately much of it will come out of their pockets) being injected into this.

Even with the best intentions (which we know isn't the case), with $500 billions on the table, how ethical can you be? Heck, even the most detached buddhist monk would go bonkers with that much money on his monastery's table.
 

Online magic

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 7529
  • Country: pl
Re: 500 freaking billions
« Reply #29 on: January 23, 2025, 11:42:22 am »
Assuming that they will manage to raise those $500B.

But on second thought, maybe they are self-aware to some extent. I mean, this latest talk about "America first" is really hard to see as anything other than an opportunistic attempt at getting grants from Orange Mango administration. So maybe their talk about everybody slacking off on UBI and AI doing all work was the same, but for Obongo/Clinton era.

Either way, as I said, Vlad the Terrible and Winnie Pooh are the only people today with realistic means of solving the Silicon Valley problem >:D
 

Offline XxMandragoraxX

  • Contributor
  • Posts: 23
  • Country: pt
Re: 500 freaking billions
« Reply #30 on: January 24, 2025, 07:13:28 am »
absolutely xD :horse:
« Last Edit: January 24, 2025, 07:15:13 am by XxMandragoraxX »
 

Offline EEVblog

  • Administrator
  • *****
  • Posts: 39277
  • Country: au
    • EEVblog
Re: 500 freaking billions
« Reply #31 on: January 24, 2025, 07:33:10 am »
There will mostly be $500 billions injected into a few companies, so ultimately into a few pockets. ;D

 

Offline golden_labels

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 1507
  • Country: pl
Re: 500 freaking billions
« Reply #32 on: January 24, 2025, 08:41:55 am »
I wasn't posing a rhetorical question. Is AI really intelligence?
If so, I believe I answered it. If that post was your reply to what I wrote, then it seems my entire point was missed. Either that or I fail to see how my words are reflected in your response.

I will repeat, just with more details, what I wrote above.

Word “intelligence” has no actual meaning, if used as a generic term. Just like to everybody, I myself not being excluded from the everybodies, to you it may seem you know what this “intelligence” is. But ask yourself: did you ever attach any precise properties to it? Properties that would either constrain it or be usable in discerning “intelligence” from other things? The same way you could do for a cat, for a house, for speech, for crying, for smell, even for such abstract and variable concepts as love, or things as ephemeral as “negation?” Did you? Can you?

There is an irony in the entire situation of talking about “intelligence” in machines, and in particular in generative LLMs. In majority of such debates and monologues, humans’ treatment of term “intelligence” is not different than what GPT networks do. Which, perhaps even more ironically, is a kind of the answer too. :)

Of course there are more strict uses of word “intelligence.” And if they are being referenced, the question is also much easier to answer. The problem is that it would likely not satisfy anybody.

Perhaps word “ignosticism” was the problem. I now see the Wikipedia article on it may be confusing to a reader, who didn’t know the concept earlier. There is a question about existence of god(s). The stance an ignosticist takes is: refusing to answer the question, until term “god” is properly defined. It isn’t an attempt to avoid dealing with it. Instead, it’s a reasonable reaction to how the statements about god(s) existence are made. It should also not be assumed to be an inherently atheistic view.

Well, I see a small difference though: while most of these guys probably do believe that whatever they promote will benefit everyone, I don't think that's the case in particular for those in the "AI" field currently. Most of them have clearly stated, on the contrary, that AI was potentially very dangerous to humanity. So, no. They know it's not for the good of humanity. It's for something else.
You missed one part of their statement. It’s dangerous to humanity. But they don’t say it has to be stopped, but that it has to be tightly controlled. And that “tight control” means preventing “the bad guys” from acquiring it. Which is achieved by keeping the technology in “trusted hands.”

Those are, what a surprise, their own hands. But that can’t be taken as doing so in bad faith. No, instead once again Hanlon’s razor does its job well. A common and simple human folly. The same thinking that makes dictators believe they’re doing good.
« Last Edit: January 24, 2025, 08:51:21 am by golden_labels »
People imagine AI as T1000. What we got so far is glorified T9.
 

Offline SiliconWizardTopic starter

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 15956
  • Country: fr
Re: 500 freaking billions
« Reply #33 on: January 24, 2025, 08:48:49 am »
There will mostly be $500 billions injected into a few companies, so ultimately into a few pockets. ;D



The club isn't that big. But yeah, I'm afraid I ain't in it.
Now I'm sure there will be crumbs of all that cash (so possibly still sizable crumbs) for many people working in the AI field in the coming years.
Not something I'm really interested in though. *Sigh*
 

Offline Marco

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 7085
  • Country: nl
Re: 500 freaking billions
« Reply #34 on: January 24, 2025, 06:32:02 pm »
There's already a ton of researchers, who are making way too much money to work particularly hard. There's already too much compute to begin with too, more compute doesn't help when company structure forces cowardice in how it's used. Yet more money is not going to propel the bloated AI companies to greatness, after Deepseek undoubtedly most private investors will wake up to that fact too. I'm going to agree with Elon, the private money simply isn't there.
« Last Edit: January 24, 2025, 06:34:39 pm by Marco »
 

Offline Analog Kid

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 1347
  • Country: us
Re: 500 freaking billions
« Reply #35 on: January 24, 2025, 09:48:08 pm »
And yet Musk is the one who's warning us about the dangers of AI taking over the human race.
Does that show how schizoid the guy is?
This was a thing for a long time between AI cultists like the OpenAI crowd. I don't even think Musk is the craziest of them. (I mean, he certainly is not, this title goes to Yudkowski et al, obviously).

I guess I'm not calling Musk crazy so much as schizoid (not quite the same thing), since on the one hand he's not only promoting AI but depending on it for one of his ventures (Tesla), and yet on the other hand he's warning us about the potential Robot Uprising or whatever. Apparently he's decided that the benefits outweigh the risks--for now, at least.

I do think that the belief in the "singularity" that the AI fanbois imagine is truly meshuggah (crazy). They want to see the whole technology as omnipotent and omniscient. "All hail our AI masters!"
 

Offline Marco

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 7085
  • Country: nl
Re: 500 freaking billions
« Reply #36 on: January 25, 2025, 01:41:59 pm »
I do think that the belief in the "singularity" that the AI fanbois imagine is truly meshuggah (crazy). They want to see the whole technology as omnipotent and omniscient. "All hail our AI masters!"

That's more the trans/post-humanists, which are really not that mainstream. Sam and his fans somehow believe they can just let AI do all the work, while for the rest nothing much changes in society.
 

Online magic

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 7529
  • Country: pl
Re: 500 freaking billions
« Reply #37 on: January 25, 2025, 03:19:22 pm »
Hardcore AI doomsdayers are scared of AI becoming "smarter" than humans and tricking humans relying on it for decision making into ultimately destroying humans for some nefarious purposes of the super AI.

This is obviously not a concern when "AI" is used for handwriting or speech recognition or even for driving cars, although the latter brings us to more real and immediate dangers such as half-assed AI vehicles causing road accidents.

A cynic could speculate that AI vendors tell those sci-fi stories to detract from the real damage caused by their products.
 

Offline Stray Electron

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 2265
Re: 500 freaking billions
« Reply #38 on: January 25, 2025, 07:39:37 pm »


But all trump cares about is doing it before the Chinese, which harkens back to beating the Russians in the 1960's. At least back then it felt like a real achievement.

  I agree. But the space race did cause some amazing technology to be developed.  I just hope that this boondoggle will also create some useful developments as well.

   Texas is already rather short of their power needs so locating this in Texas is going to REQUIRE that they create additional new and massive power sources in Texas.   My guess is that they will be nuclear.   Does anyone care to bet against that?

  FYI Trump claims that private investment is going to pay for all of this. :-DD Elon clearly thinks otherwise!
 

Offline Stray Electron

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 2265
Re: 500 freaking billions
« Reply #39 on: January 25, 2025, 07:53:37 pm »
You know, I could appreciate a skillful swindler for his "art", but these people are something else.

They are nutjobs who actually believe that they are here to revolutionize the world, that their technology will be the Next Big Thing, everyone will live happily ever after and they will get rich in the process, but that's OK because everyone will be rich. Not much different from Elizabeth Holmes or from Musk's Mars colonization program.

Silicon Valley is a cult, the whole place needs to be nuked from the orbit with no survivors.


   Not Silicon Valley, but Washington, DC!  SV is just a reflection of the nuttiness and irrational thinking and irresponsible behavior of the political elitists that rule the country.  And NOT just the current administration but most of them over the last 100 years or so.  They think that they're TinkerBell and that that can just wave their magic Congressional wands and everything will turn into their imagined Perfect world.   Does anyone remember LBJ's Great Society Program?  How's that coming? 

   For the ones of you that weren't even alive when that fisaco was started, here is a brief description from the internet.  Can anyone say that ANY these goals have been accomplished in the past 60 years, despite massive government spending? 

The Great Society was a series of domestic programs launched by President Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1960s aimed at eliminating poverty and racial injustice. Key initiatives included reforms in education, healthcare, and civil rights, significantly expanding the role of the federal government in social welfare.
 

Offline Analog Kid

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 1347
  • Country: us
Re: 500 freaking billions
« Reply #40 on: January 25, 2025, 08:21:32 pm »
Yes, I well remember the Great Society, including such subprograms as Model Cities.
In fairness, it may have been an unachievable goal, but at least it was an honest one, sincerely undertaken to improve people's lives.
Can't say the same for "AI" at all.

And where's my backyard nuclear power plant?
 

Offline golden_labels

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 1507
  • Country: pl
Re: 500 freaking billions
« Reply #41 on: January 25, 2025, 08:41:48 pm »
I guess I'm not calling Musk crazy so much as schizoid (not quite the same thing), since on the one hand he's not only promoting AI but depending on it for one of his ventures (Tesla), and yet on the other hand he's warning us about the potential Robot Uprising or whatever. Apparently he's decided that the benefits outweigh the risks--for now, at least.
As I mentioned above, what they (he’s not alone) worry about is not the technology, but the technology being misused. And believe that this will never happen, as long as it stays completely under their control. A normal and widespread feature of Homo Sapiens. A mistake even easier to ignore, where strong financial, status, and power incentives are present.

Sam and his fans somehow believe they can just let AI do all the work, while for the rest nothing much changes in society.
And that is no different than any other major technological change, is it? Pasting an element in a picture one is used to, failing to notice the entire picture changes. The bane of all policymaking: adjusting one piece without realizing it triggers change in the entire intricate network of feedbacks and dependencies.

Hardcore AI doomsdayers are scared of AI becoming "smarter" than humans and tricking humans relying on it for decision making into ultimately destroying humans for some nefarious purposes of the super AI.
It matches the patterns set by fairytales we all hear as kids and how world is conveyed to us by adults. It has to be some malicious people, secret or not, the extraterrestials, the demons, or some uncontrollable technology. It’s critical that it is an entity, can have attached negative traits to it, and you don’t need much mental capabilities to understand the problem. Something a simple monkey brain may quickly swallow.

But there is a story even more frightening than any tangible monsters. Worse than any malevolent entity taking over control. It’s the story in which nobody and nothing has control. Guess which of the options is more likely. I got my first teaching on that matter over 20 years ago. Long before smortnets became a thing and indeed they’re nothing more than one more brick in this.

A cynic could speculate that AI vendors tell those sci-fi stories to detract from the real damage caused by their products.
Not a cynic, but an ignorant. The stories are much, much older. So is the associated fear. Vendors don’t have to do anything: it all arrived on a fertile ground, which was ready for harvest. No need to put effort in distraction either. People are doing this very well of their own accord.

(I assumed the common meaning of word “cynic,” not the proper philosophy)
« Last Edit: January 25, 2025, 08:44:45 pm by golden_labels »
People imagine AI as T1000. What we got so far is glorified T9.
 

Offline Stray Electron

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 2265
Re: 500 freaking billions
« Reply #42 on: January 25, 2025, 09:43:45 pm »
Yes, I well remember the Great Society, including such subprograms as Model Cities.
In fairness, it may have been an unachievable goal, but at least it was an honest one, sincerely undertaken to improve people's lives.
Can't say the same for "AI" at all.

And where's my backyard nuclear power plant?

   Coming soon to a backyard near yours. But don't worry it will be owned by some big energy consortium that will charge you a small fortune for your power needs. 
 

Offline Analog Kid

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 1347
  • Country: us
Re: 500 freaking billions
« Reply #43 on: January 25, 2025, 09:58:22 pm »
Yes, I well remember the Great Society, including such subprograms as Model Cities.
In fairness, it may have been an unachievable goal, but at least it was an honest one, sincerely undertaken to improve people's lives.
Can't say the same for "AI" at all.

And where's my backyard nuclear power plant?

   Coming soon to a backyard near yours. But don't worry it will be owned by some big energy consortium that will charge you a small fortune for your power needs.

B-b-b-bbutt they told me it would be "too cheap to meter"?!?!?
 

Offline TimFox

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 9118
  • Country: us
  • Retired, now restoring antique test equipment
Re: 500 freaking billions
« Reply #44 on: January 26, 2025, 04:33:15 pm »
Yes, I well remember the Great Society, including such subprograms as Model Cities.
In fairness, it may have been an unachievable goal, but at least it was an honest one, sincerely undertaken to improve people's lives.
Can't say the same for "AI" at all.

And where's my backyard nuclear power plant?

   Coming soon to a backyard near yours. But don't worry it will be owned by some big energy consortium that will charge you a small fortune for your power needs.

B-b-b-bbutt they told me it would be "too cheap to meter"?!?!?

If I remember correctly, the original meaning of that phrase for commercial nuclear power systems was the assumption that the marginal cost of production for electrical power was negligible compared with the capital and maintenance costs of the reactors and distribution grid.  Therefore, the sensible pricing model would concentrate on peak demand (influencing the cost of the copper to connect you) rather than on actual consumption.
This contrasts with conventional power, where the cost of coal or gas to fuel the boilers correlated to the consumption of electrical power.
Historically, when Edison first went to capitalists to fund his new-fangled system, their first question was how to charge each consumer, whereupon he invented a suitable watt-hour meter.
« Last Edit: January 26, 2025, 04:34:47 pm by TimFox »
 

Online coppice

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 10177
  • Country: gb
Re: 500 freaking billions
« Reply #45 on: January 26, 2025, 04:38:15 pm »
If I remember correctly, the original meaning of that phrase for commercial nuclear power systems was the assumption that the marginal cost of production for electrical power was negligible compared with the capital and maintenance costs of the reactors and distribution grid.  Therefore, the sensible pricing model would concentrate on peak demand (influencing the cost of the copper to connect you) rather than on actual consumption.
This contrasts with conventional power, where the cost of coal or gas to fuel the boilers correlated to the consumption of electrical power.
Historically, when Edison first went to capitalists to fund his new-fangled system, their first question was how to charge each consumer, whereupon he invented a suitable watt-hour meter.
I think the quote was contracted from "it will be too cheap to meter,  but it will be $10k a month subscription to pay the capital costs."  :)
 

Offline TimFox

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 9118
  • Country: us
  • Retired, now restoring antique test equipment
Re: 500 freaking billions
« Reply #46 on: January 26, 2025, 04:42:24 pm »
See  https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/basic-ref/students/history-101/too-cheap-to-meter.html
Strauss was suggesting an analogy to city water systems, that often charged a fixed monthly fee rather than charge by the gallon.
(My house's account with the Chicago Water Department is fixed-rate:  I had seen too many stories about billing snafus associated with switching to actual water meters, which is now available as an option.)
« Last Edit: January 26, 2025, 04:44:52 pm by TimFox »
 

Online coppice

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 10177
  • Country: gb
Re: 500 freaking billions
« Reply #47 on: January 26, 2025, 04:48:17 pm »
See  https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/basic-ref/students/history-101/too-cheap-to-meter.html
Strauss was suggesting an analogy to city water systems, that often charged a fixed monthly fee rather than charge by the gallon.
(My house's account with the Chicago Water Department is fixed-rate:  I had seen too many stories about billing snafus associated with switching to actual water meters, which is now available as an option.)
Interestingly, the too cheap to meter approach for water has turned out to be a huge problem over much of the planet, and water meters are a growth industry.
 

Offline TimFox

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 9118
  • Country: us
  • Retired, now restoring antique test equipment
Re: 500 freaking billions
« Reply #48 on: January 26, 2025, 05:00:00 pm »
That's an important point:  I was objecting to misunderstanding of the original statement for a cheap laugh.
Our situation in Chicago, next to a huge body of fresh water, is quite different from other parts of the world.
Related questions include pricing of agricultural irrigation water versus industrial customers and domestic customers, as well as praciticability of desalinization or other technical solutions.
 

Online coppice

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 10177
  • Country: gb
Re: 500 freaking billions
« Reply #49 on: January 26, 2025, 05:15:29 pm »
That's an important point:  I was objecting to misunderstanding of the original statement for a cheap laugh.
Our situation in Chicago, next to a huge body of fresh water, is quite different from other parts of the world.
Related questions include pricing of agricultural irrigation water versus industrial customers and domestic customers, as well as praciticability of desalinization or other technical solutions.
There are lots of interesting questions about charging for utilities, and what the bulk of people will find fair and reasonable. Researching this you get to ask interesting questions, which most people have never thought about. If you ask most people why they buy a book they answer something to the effect that "I wanted to read it". However, you don't need to buy a book to read it in most developed places. We have libraries that either have the book, or will get it for you if you wait a couple of weeks. Access to the contents of the book does not have to cost you anything. Buying a book is something more to do with convenient access to the contents, not buying the contents themselves. If you are at college its usually that demand for the book at the libraries available to you swamps the number of copies in the library system. If its a dictionary you may want it always at hand, for convenience. Questions like this run through most of the issues of pricing utilities, and can get quite complex in areas where there is strong competition encouraging people to experiment.
 


Share me

Digg  Facebook  SlashDot  Delicious  Technorati  Twitter  Google  Yahoo
Smf