> Congress could fix this problem tomorrow. And in fact there is a bipartisan bill (BAAJA) that would go a long ways (although not all the way) towards fixing it. Now yes even if we fix these policies there would be a time lag on new generation being connected, but there is no reason to leave this problem in place.
There's plenty of reason to leave the problem in place. The current regime is corrupt, and energy scarcity benefits entrenched fossil fuel players who are cozy with the administration.
Congress has up until now given its endorsement to all of this. Will a new Congress care? Time will tell.
One of the reasons this behavior is problematic in general is the potential for blackmail. It's not even really a statement about morality, just an acknowledgement that somebody who wants to keep things hidden is going to be beholden to the people who know the secrets.
Jensen went to many high profile parties with this woman. I don't see where he's trying to even hide it. Even the kiss was made out in public, not like a hotel room.
Also, an affair is only blackmail material in a society of prudes. I recall the story about a president who was confronted with condemning photos of his activities by CIA agents, and he pretty much encouraged the agents to publish the photos.
> Also, an affair is only blackmail material in a society of prudes
No? All it requires is for Jensen to want to remain with his wife and for his wife to be willing to divorce him if she finds out he has an affair.
Or, even if we suppose he doesn’t care about his wife’s feelings at all, he might be very incentivised by losing half of his assets in a divorce. It’s worth many, many millions to him.
> Also, an affair is only blackmail material in a society of prudes.
You don’t have to be a prude to think cheating on a spouse is condemnable.
In general, it also doesn’t really matter what society thinks. You can just threaten to reveal the affair to the spouse. And even in the case the spouse doesn’t really care it’s fodder they can potentially use in a divorce to get a better deal.
One thing worth pointing out is that in this case in addition to the affair with the Chinese spy he was allegedly having an affair with a subordinate, which is always problematic.
Apparently the KGB tried to honeypot him - and they were flabbergasted when he asked for copies of the photos. Apparently photos of him with multiple Russian women would bolster his machismo image back home?
Although if you read his Wikipedia page, he had many, many wives, some concurrently, and the youngest was 19...so it's probably true, lol.
Then you read about a certain EV company CEO and his escapades and repopulating the planet, and you don't know what to think.
Or Charlie Sheen...
I guess politicians, celebrities and CEOs are another world from us mere mortals.....
> Hm. Weird. Never seen that before. Let's check the source, emilypost.com
This is taught to children in the United States. I didn't go to an especially good school and I remember it to this day. If you're not from the US the custom may be different.
Perhaps you will consider the advice from Grammarly [0] as a more acceptable source.
I have an earlier device from this category ("Viture Pro XR") and find them very handy.
These little wearable dumb displays can be a great alternative to lugging around a laptop. The only problem right now is that the software ecosystem on smartphones is decidedly half baked. Desktop mode on the Pixel series is OK, but it's still janky and a lot of apps don't scale correctly.
definitely I'm looking forward to Meta VR glasses because they will let me do what I'm doing right now on A Vision Pro. Typing this using a VM running Debian 13. I'm running a Picobot agent and chatting with it about Neuromancer. I can do this because I run Anjin Virtual Computer. There are two software issues in VR, breadth and depth. Running Linux at least gives a lot more software. In time people will fill in the deep experiences that full 3D UX needs but for now its been helpful to run mobile apps and other OS's. On Quest and GXR I can run Windows XP.
I feel like the mandate thing is silly though. Go "all in" in the sense that you enable employees who want to use these things, but let engineers adopt at their own pace.
The proof is in their work output and overall job satisfaction.
> everyone is assuming it's a winner take all market.
I guess this is the big gamble, the idea that if you just spend enough money as fast as you can you can become the gods of AI forever and can just charge whatever you want for your magic beans.
But what is the moat? If in reality these things become commodities and just compete with each other to spit out cheap tokens then there's no way the margins are there.
> everyone is assuming it's a winner take all market
I don't think anyone serious believes this any more. The tech is thoroughly commoditized. There are a lot of plays to be made, like OpenAI cornering memory, or spending heavily on unique data for RL, if you can stop distilling, but there is no proprietary core IP at all.
There is no way to monopolize a technology this big. It would be like monopolizing literacy.
It's not the AI technology itself that is being monopolized, it's the data necessary to train it.
More specifically: when everything you could previously have earned money with is subsumed by AI, the "frontier" of profitable knowledge exists solely with the highest concentration of capital. Because that's where the highest amount of compute and consequently valuable data is.
Already now the idea of the tech being "commoditized" is true only if you exclusively look at the bubble of rich countries. AI-worthy compute is prohibitively expensive otherwise for individuals.
Specifically with regards to the data necessary to train, the AI companies have allowed the earth to be scorched (to say scorched earth tactic is to attribute intent, which I wish to avoid for my point), making clean training data harder to obtain. Essentially, what I do see as intended is the enclosure of an intellectual commons.
You don't need clean data to train, just "reasonable" data. General bulk data from the wider world isn't the difficult part. AFAIU task specific RL environments, custom annotated datasets, and access to the raw compute necessary to actually perform the training are the primary limiting factors. The latter in particular is no joke. Most companies won't be able to afford the pretraining for a frontier sized model. Even "small" models can run into the millions USD IIUC.
Power, natural gas, gasoline, water, mobile contracts, railways, internet access are probably better analogies. They have tendencies to (local) monopolies but also a lot of precedent and knowledge on how to regulate and break them, how to introduce competition.
I don't think so. You can't practically buy electricity from halfway across the planet but you can buy tokens. There's no local infrastructure to monopolise.
The breakup of AT&T was the proximal cause of Ronald Reagan and Robert Bork installing the CWS shackles onto the US antitrust apparatus.
Here's the thing: we could remove those shackles. US antitrust law had a good 50 year run, it could have another. Lina Khan was working on it, you probably saw the flak. This was on the ballot in 2024 and it will be again in 2028.
> I don't think anyone serious believes this any more. The tech is thoroughly commoditized.
The latter doesn't imply the former. In other words it doesn't matter what the reality is, it matters what the excuses for sinking money down the hole are.
> There is no way to monopolize a technology this big. It would be like monopolizing literacy.
Again, I don't know if literacy is monopolized or not, that's a separate and quite long conversation, but whatever the case is, it doesn't mean anything wrt AI because GPUs and RAM are already monopolized and successful market scalping requires monopolization.
The bubble is simply an extraction mechanism, the conditions for it are present now, as are the will and power available to those who can do it and benefit from it. How long it's going to continue is a question with many unknowns but the conditions for it can be maintained for at least another 3 to 7 years.
I think the big gamble is the bet on recursive self improvement (RSI) and getting there first is assumed to be the moat. At least I think what is being sold is this to justify the huge investment on future returns. I personally think that the probability of that happening is pretty low, but investors are swayed by the enormous returns it implies. I guess we will see how it plays out in a few years time. Until then it is important to keep a cool head, experiment with the new tools, and keep your reasoning skills sharp. As someone who can not personally invest on RSI, I feel my only play is to bet on AI becoming a commodity and ready for that future. If that happens, a lot of these datacenter bets will pay a fraction of the expected returns, but we will have cheap cloud compute and local models for inference, an age of personal AI that mirrors the advance of personal computing.
The moat was "AI", as in, self-improving Superintelligence (Nick Bostrom-style). They thought they were _just_ on the cusp of this happening, thus hundreds of billions of dollars was small fry. At that point either your AI figures out how to make money, or money doesn't even matter.
> and can just charge whatever you want for your magic beans.
'Winner take all' doesn't mean convincing others to buy your product. If others have something to buy your product with, you've not taken all, fundamentally.
'Winner take all' means having the most powerful army. The assumption is that once AI crosses a certain threshold then there won't be anything the rest of us can do to stop the machine of whomever gets there first, so they will truly be able to take all. Hence why the AI labs sometimes hint about the risk of human destruction.
The army interpretation exists, and might sadly be relevant here, but it's not the only one. Google, for instance, won a nonviolent winner-take-all competition for search.
Different setup. IIRC, Google had fundamentally better tech than its competitors and was also the first to figure out search monetization.
With AI, it looks to me like competition is much tighter, with no company having fundamentally superior technology or monetization plan. So a winner-take-all scenario is much less likely.
You're right that Google has been greatly helped by having what has been considered the most powerful army (the US army) backing them. They wouldn't have had a hope in hell of surpassing the "mom and pop" stage without that.
But I am not sure you are right that it is powerful enough to secure all. I search daily, but cannot remember the last time I used Google. The other AI companies do it better. And I'm not alone in that sentiment. Google's stock price recently took a nosedive because investors have grown quite worried about the competition. Without a sufficiently powerful army stopping them, there will always be someone else ready to try to outdo you.
Google has class leading AI in virtually every category, owns a chunk of Anthropic, and is a landlord to both Anthropic and OpenAI. Plus Google's search ad business is still doing well, even if you don't personally use it.
Google shares dipped because AI shares dipped, not because their core business at risk. Google is in a _very_ strong position to capitalize on AI. Better than almost any other Big Tech company.
Google is doing very well, in large part thanks to it having a strong army behind it, but that's not anywhere close to being the same as having taken all. They have not done that. Not by any stretch of the imagination. Not even if you try to constrain "all" to mean search alone.
If Anthropic or OpenAI will take all using the most powerful army why they would give anything back to their investors? If that's a possibility than investing into AI companies is just gifting money to whoever will control this army.
Anthropic/OpenAI and the investors are the same thing. A company name is just a title for the people who own it.
Maybe you mean that you could see the employees of those companies (although I imagine they also own it, so that's a wrinkle) staging a coup to seize the army for themselves? That's certainly possible. They'd be in a good position to do so. Predicting the future is impossible, but if you want to be on the "right side" of that future army, owning its foundation today is still a reasonable bet.
After the IPO Anthorpic will have many thousands of investors, most of them will have no say in how the company will use its power. A coup by a small group of employees is also a possibility.
They mightn't have direct say, but the army would still be beholden to them (being on the "right side") under the current legal understanding. Of course, when the AI army takes over what we know today isn't apt to hold much water. A coup, as we established, is very plausible. However, as you cannot predict the future it isn't unreasonable to try to place the bet given what you do know. That's all you can really do. If you end up on the losing side in the end you'd also still be on that side if you didn't act at all, so why not take the chance if you believe one of these companies will eventually take all? The AI army, once it starts seeking all, is going to come and take your resources anyway.
What suggests an incompatibility? Allowing private ownership of capital can absolutely support a winner-take-all situation. One private entity can own all the capital just fine, technically speaking. Many capitalism naysayers even use that situation as the canonical example of the peril of capitalism.
In reality the people would likely revolt by no longer recognizing private ownership of capital if that were to happen, but technically they don't have to. If they truly believe in capitalism — or, as it pertains to the discussion, there is an army forcing them to believe — they can continue to uphold the right for that private entity to own all the capital.
What is certain is that that we've never seen a free market in recorded human history. By the time the idea was invented we already had power structures in place that would never stand for a free market. Of course, the concept also has a number of unsolved practical problems which would prevent a free market from emerging in the real world even if everything else perfectly fell into place. Once markets were invented they were incorporated alongside existing systems, leaving the mixed economy we practice today the world over. An interesting thought experiment it is, but bold to think that private ownership of capital is dependent on that thought experiment. Especially given that most people seen here seem to believe that they actually can privately own capital despite the lack of a free market.
For the sake of discussion, if we entertain your thought, that means capitalism also doesn't exist beyond a thought experiment, which questions why it was brought into this discussion? Whether or not a winner-take-all-future is compatible with that thought experiment with no actual grounding doesn't mean anything, does it?
You can certainly redefine concepts to the point that they stop making sense!
> What is certain is that that we've never seen a free market in recorded human history.
You should really try working in cloud. We're constantly negotiating prices with vendors and customers, and I can tell you that free markets do exist. Our customers churn all the time because they have meaningful choice, and our margins reflect that, and whenever one of our vendors tries to gouge us, you better believe we piss right off!
> You can certainly redefine concepts to the point that they stop making sense!
Is this intended as a warning about the rest of the comment?
> You should really try working in cloud.
I don't do well with heights, I'm afraid. But more seriously, I do. I don't need to negotiate with a police force to protect it, so clearly there isn't a free market. But even if you want to pervert what a free market is by cherrypicking some things you like from it while ignoring everything else, I still don't see how you would ever consider the cloud to be free. It is marred by things like copyright and patents that make free exchange untenable.
> Our customers churn all the time because they have meaningful choice, and our margins reflect that
Is this humorous story intended to be an arbitrary tangent or something related to the rest of the discussion? The best interpretation I can come up with is that you are trying to use this story to explain that your cloud activities exist in a market, which is no doubt true — most economic activities have converged on markets in our modern world, but you haven't given anything to suggest it is within a free market. Even non-free markets have choice. So obviously that couldn't be your intention. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
If, and it is a big "if", someone were to become "the gods of AI", they get to perform a "pivotal act", i.e. take over the world. And if they do it wrong, end the world.
From the public statements, I get the impression that Zuckerberg is saying words solely to give positive vibes and does't actually believe any of that; that Musk might believe all of that but has only given as much cursory thought to it as one might get from reading a Wikipedia plot summary of Colossus: The Forbin Project, all The Culture novels, and an elevator pitch (~30 seconds or so) with Yudkowsky in 2013; others have certainly painted Altman in similar light; which leaves Amodei as a solid "C-" in the sense that while Anthropic still isn't taking this even close to seriously enough, he hasn't overtly said or done things that implicitly or explicitly show he thinks it's just fairy tales to get nerds interested in working for him.
It's a massive, gaudy symbol of unfathomable decadence, and every purchase was made to visibly support the passion project of the world's most influential white supremacist.
It's one thing for a vehicle to be "ugly," but this one stands for so much more.
Before checking the comments I read a couple of paragraphs, but ultimately just closed the tab without finishing it. This was not because I specifically suspected an LLM, but because it just wasn't "working" for me, for reasons I couldn't articulate.
Is this because it's slop? Or because it's a (possibly bad) translation? I can't really say, but regardless this piece was not resonating.
There's plenty of reason to leave the problem in place. The current regime is corrupt, and energy scarcity benefits entrenched fossil fuel players who are cozy with the administration.
Congress has up until now given its endorsement to all of this. Will a new Congress care? Time will tell.
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