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Comment by istjohn | Hacker News Reader

Your economic analysis is deeply flawed. If there was anything that valuable and that required that much manpower, it would already have driven up the cost of labor accordingly. The one property that could conceivably justify a substantially higher cost is secrecy. After all, you can't (legally) kill a human after your project ends to ensure total secrecy. But that takes us into thriller novel territory.

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I don't think that's right. Free societies don't tolerate total mobilization by their governments outside of war time, no matter how valuable the outcomes might be in the long term, in part because of the very economic impacts you describe. Human-level AI - even if it's very expensive - puts something that looks a lot like total mobilization within reach without the societal pushback. This is especially true when it comes to tasks that society as a whole may not sufficiently value, but that a state actor might value very much, and when paired with something like a co-located reactor and data center that does not impact the grid.

That said, this is all predicated on o3 or similar actually having achieved human level reasoning. That's yet to be fully proven. We'll see!

This is interesting to consider, but I think the flaw here is that you'd need a "total mobilization" level workforce in order to build this mega datacenter in the first place. You put one human-hour into making B200s and cooling systems and power plants, you get less than one human-hour-equivalent of thinking back out.

No you don’t. The US government has already completed projects at this scale without total economic mobilization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center Presumably peer and near-peer states are similarly capable.

A private company, xAI, was able to build a datacenter on a similar scale in less than 6 months, with integrated power supply via large batteries: https://www.tomshardware.com/desktops/servers/first-in-depth...

Datacenter construction is a one-time cost. The intelligence the datacenter (might) provide is ongoing. It’s not an equal one to one trade, and well within reach for many state and non-state actors if it is desired.

It’s potentially going to be a very interesting decade.

i disagree because the job market is not a true free market. I mean it mostly is, but there’s a LOT of politics and shady stuff that employers do to purposely drive wages down. Even in the tech sector.

Your secrecy comment is really intriguing actually. And morbid lol.

How many 99.9th percentile mathematicians do nation states normally have access to?

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