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While it's all true, I think it's exciting that there's a country that's not afraid of betting when all the signs point to AI being accerelated.

USA already bet on software when it let China overtake manufacturing.

Now the only worse thing to betting on AI would be slowing it down inside USA.


> all the signs point to AI being accerelated

Feels like a feedback loop. It's exciting that we're all in on AI because we're all in on AI!

What is teamwork if not a feedback loop?
What signs point to any sort of acceleration besides in spending?

Most major companies have released new versions in the past year, but if people were asked to blindly determine whether they were using the newer or older version, I suspect the results would be close to random. It seems to me that the difference between versions is sharply decreasing in a way that seems to be asymptotic, similar to what happens in literally every other domain with neural networks.

I also think it's clear that the difference between the various choices is also diminishing. Aside from certain manually designed idiosyncrasies (like ChatGPT's obsequiousness), I think people assessing which model they're using would also be mostly random. Somewhat surprisingly, even in the 'LLM arena' [1], where you get to compare output side by side, the difference between models is approaching statistical 0!

[1] - https://huggingface.co/spaces/lmarena-ai/lmarena-leaderboard

Mainly growing energy demand of AI deployments leading to capacity increases becoming the bottleneck. The key challenge is going to be scaling up energy production in the US.
China's also betting on AI. There's massive domestic effort towards model parity and custom ICs.
Additionally, to my knowledge, China is also doing significantly better on energy production and clean energy at that versus the US.

In the US, we are terrified of nuclear and the administration is trying to make economically worse energy production the norm because they are stuck in the past.

If there is an AI race, I have zero doubt that China WILL win simply because of energy production and the government's willingness to pour money in. It's a foregone conclusion at this point in my opinion because the time to build new energy sources was yesterday. The only way I see China losing is: major debt crisis or getting into a war.

There is no chance, in my opinion, that the US federal government will get off their butts suddenly to fund AI or infrastructure because they are so busy worrying about less than 1% of the population who don't affect them but that they find 'icky'.

Woke isn't destroying the US, it's the people who are busy ' "judging their neighbors' porches" meanwhile the neighborhood is burning down.

> If there is an AI race, I have zero doubt that China WILL win.

A race to what? What does the winner get? What does the loser get? What does 'winning' even fucking mean? My statistical next token predictor is better than your statistical next token predictor?

Using AI in commercial applications to gain a strategic advantage over your competitors. China will use AI to do things that the USA will shudder at, they already have automated ports that are 10 times more efficient than ours, and we can’t even think about upgrading because our longshoremen unions are too strong.
As long as you realize a strong Chinese dollar is the worst thing that could happen to China right now, and as long as we just excuse away the whole “LLMs make more money than they cost” (which they absolutely do not) sure thing.
Strong Chinese yuan isn’t that much of a concern, only 15% of the economy is exports.
This is something I don’t get. The general cost of living is sky rocketing, largely due to this push and some of the population thinks there is prosperity for all on the otherside of the meat processing machine we’re pushing everyone toward.

Groceries are going to get more expensive. Every dollar we spend on over building AI infrastructure is a dollar we never get back.

We could use this money for other things such as healthcare and fixing our broken parts of our education system. Instead people are getting ancy to chat with a summarized version of all the garbage on the internet.

the idea is to use AI to build super productive farms and greenhouses, improve the capability to do that in urban areas, automated and super efficient transportation. but it's not just AI doing all that, it's someone who wants to start a business using AI himself to figure out how to best start up a greenhouse in his community and setup the tech infra needed including the API for people to be able to view available produce, estimates on availability, initiate trades, etc. (this greenhouse thing is just one example).

another example could be someone wants to build an ecosystem monitoring station to monitor the nearby ravine (pollution levels with rainfall and other events etc.) and air quality over time. this is just a small datapoint but if people all over the place build their own ecosystem/weather monitoring things using basic electronics ordered from the internet and all plug them in to a standard observability software system then that could provide some pretty awesome outcomes including figuring the best way to clean polluted water (because some of the places will surely have implemented varying methods of sanitizing their own water).

Okay this is even more pie-in-the-sky. You can build productive greenhouses today, we don’t need AI to summarize the internet to figure out how to do it. There are no secrets hidden in the generative token tea-leaves that reveals better greenhouses. Urban farming will never be profitable or sustainable in a dense urban center. It’s been done.

“Standard observability software” whatever that is also does not require AI to build. We need 10GW to calculate rainfall for who? What benefit over how we currently calculate rainfall? This rainfall is hallucinated through summarization?

i can't come up with all the examples. i'm not a farming or ecology expert. so thanks for the information. do some thinking
> the idea is to use AI to build super productive farms and greenhouses

How? What are the mechanisms in which AI will lead to farms and greenhouses being more productive? How will AI improve the existing automation that already exists for the farming sector, and has existed for a hundred years?

fully automated with robots. the AI designs thousands of experiments and deploys them at scale. idk, i'm not an agriculture expert. it was just one example. what other possibilities are there?

electronics recycling, disassembling old computers to get the raw materials into a form that can be used again. we'll need programs to automate the production and testing and analysis of the robots that will recycle the components.

> idk, i'm not an agriculture expert.

That much is obvious. The fact that you’re straining so hard to come up with these bongcloud “ideas” should clue you in that maybe this isn’t the revolutionary tech that the suits are selling it as

> The general cost of living is sky rocketing, largely due to this push

How are cost of living increases tied to AI investment?

There are only two ways it could: either power cost increases which only make up a small portion of cost of living or somehow believing it responsible for inflation. But the latter doesn't make any sense, especially as they believe the money spent to be 'lost'.
How does that not make sense? Inflation is lost money from a consumer viewpoint.
Money spent on AI is taking GPUs and software engineers off the market, as well as the energy needed to drive AI data centers. AI doesn’t need food, well, beyond the SWEs, it shouldn’t be inflating food at all. The only thing I could think of is AI investment drawing away agriculture investment or something. Or maybe AI data centers replacing farmland?
This is an intentionally disingenuous question right?

Where do you think the tax money being given away to these huge datacenters is going?

What downstream effects does major increase to limited consumer services and goods do across the board?

No, it was a genuine question. Sorry if I’m asking basic questions, but I actually don’t find your questions as responses help make things any clearer.
The collective west enjoyed a period of prosperity because it had massive technological advantage. The Spanish had guns, native Americans had sticks. The British had steam engines, the Indians had cows. The Americans had computers, the soviets had abascus. Now the Chinese have AI, we have if statements. Losing the AI race is an existential threat to our civilization.
Yet no one can detail how it’s an existential threat. No real usecases for larger society from AI models but we must make everyone’s life worse so we don’t lose the race to nowhere.
> The collective west enjoyed a period of prosperity because it had massive technological advantage. The Spanish had guns,

as it was said in 1898 by Hilaire Belloc: "Whatever happens, we have got. The Maxim gun, and they have not."

In that case it was the British who had just slaughtered a lot of Matabele in Africa.

> Losing the AI race is an existential threat to our civilization.

Lol. If winning it means a sea of hallucinated "factual" text and deepfake videos, then that death of truth is also a threat. Being rid of that is no threat at all.

> The general cost of living is sky rocketing

there is no evidence of this

What's not to get? Groceries, healthcare, and education aren't expensive for them to afford, why would they want to invest their money and time in making those things more affordable for poor people? Better to invest all their resources making a robot slave army. Then it doesn't matter how unaffordable anything is to the poors, they can just die. Win win.

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