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Comment by blitzar | Hacker News Reader

10 years ago, Apple was the largest company in the world by market capitalization, its market cap was around $479.069 billion.

How have we gotten to a point in just a decade where multiple companies are dropping annual numbers that are in the realm of "the market cap of the worlds biggest companies" on these things?

Have we solved all (any of) the other problems out there already?

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I'm still not seeing it. It's immoral because it's resources not spent on some particular problem you have in mind?

The 10x from 400 billion to 4 trillion in a decade didnt come from 2% inflation.

It didnt come from nowhwere, or from Silicon Valleys exceptionalism - It came from changing the value of money, labour and resources. It came from everyday people, deficits and borrowing from the next 10 generations of children.

Seems like this is about something other than LLMs?

LLMs don't exist in a vacuum. Someone spends money to build LLMs, builds infrastructure that the LLMs run on, extracts training data to run the LLMs on, uses LLM for various use-cases, and makes revenue from specific LLM users.

Of course it is, LLMSs are just the current manifestation.

You can swap "LLMs" with "pointless wars over books or dirt" if you want - same same, nothing is new.

It is about LLMs because it's the trillions being sunk into this bubble instead of more important issues like climate crisis and a pressing need to address the transformation of the energy sector or tackling the wealth inequality gap. These are all causing real world osues that are much bigger than beating (or rather faking to beat) some LLM benchmarks to impress investor.

What bubble? If anything it's 10x too small for the value it'll provide over the next century.

The same exact premise was proclaimed about the Internet circa 1999-2003 (boom and bust). Then the entire global economy and nearly all electronic communication was rebuilt on top of the Internet.

For the coming century AI is more important than the Internet.

> the value it'll provide over the next century.

The parent mentioned inequality and energy transition. But LLMs seem to be about crud apps and influence campaigns.

There's more to value than just quantity. Quantity of what?

That's a bold claim. Which AI? The current LLMs? Something else as yet undiscovered? It's not clear that "it's 10x too small for the value it'll provide over the next century" - there's no way to know that - the statement is an article of faith.

> instead of more important issues like climate crisis

It's kind of worse than that: this is actually exacerbating the climate crisis as mega tech corps like Microsoft, Google and Meta are scrambling to secure more energy to power their power-hungry LLMs.

Exploitation. Or cost externalization.

The public discourse is weirdly unable to adress burning problems that had been formulated almost 150 years ago. Much like the climate change topic originating in the 1970s.

> The 10x from 400 billion to 4 trillion in a decade didnt come from 2% inflation.

Money printing does not cause inflation equally especially if not distrubuted so.

That was before pandemic inflation and rampant money printing to bolster the fake numbers.

Apple market cap

Jan 2010: 174b

Jan 2020: 1400b (23% growth per year)

Today: 3200b (18% growth per year)

The S&P as a whole grew about 12% a year from 2010 to 2020, and 12.5% a year from 2020 to today

Meanwhile the median wage from 2010-2019 grew 3% a year, from 2019-2023 7% a year

Seems whatever happened in 2020 was good for workers, in that they aren't falling behind owners as much as they were.

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