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Comment by zkmon | Hacker News Reader

This is getting out of control. Like a monster eating off all the things that are needed for normal people. Worse than nukes race, which at least did not affect common man. No one really gains anything. All gains are temporary competitive edge, that vanishes quickly while locking everyone into the vicious cycle.

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Worse than nukes race? I really much prefer being slightly inconvenienced when buying hard drives to risking being obliterated along with billions of other people and having all of civilisation wiped out with hundreds or thousands of years until recovery.

At least nuclear holocaust is easily quantifiable

Maybe the real paperclip maximizer was the irrational exuberance we made along the way :')

> Worse than nukes race, which at least did not affect common man At least not visibly, we were deprived of a clean source of surgical steel and many in the areas were uncompensated for sicknesses they experienced as a result of testing

Why would it matter for surgical steel?

I can find vague mentions of "medical" uses for low background steel, and one specific claim that it's used to shield some rooms or large devices for measuring how much radiation is coming off a person's body. That's pretty niche.

Looking into this point further, I'll agree. I shouldn't have acted on an anecdote without verifying first. The other fact though is one that I'm certain of.

Yeah, another hot take from some guy who has no clue what he's talking about.

To this day Kazakhstan pays out monthly monetary compensations to people whose health was negatively affected by the nuclear tests on the Semipalatinsk nuclear polygon. Several people I know personally receive these compensations.

https://egov.kz/cms/en/news/nuclear_tests

https://egov.kz/cms/en/services/family_support/pass035_mtszn

That didn't even come to mind. Call me Ameri-centric but my mind was on the Native Americans who to this day are the "most nuked" and have not been compensated

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2020/8/29/a-message-from-...

https://reimaginerpe.org/node/165

I just find it so odd that the oh so environmentally conscious tech sector is now building out some of the most resource intensive facilities on the planet. It's like environmentalism was just a con.

The tech sector "environmentalism" was obviously always just performative. They went along with the movement because it cost them virtually nothing, deflected pressure from the progressive political faction, and helped them get invited to fashionable parties. Now there are real costs so it's no longer convenient.

> No one really gains anything.

That's not true I've seen loads of amusing videos on Instagram.

>Worse than nukes race

That certainly is a take.

I don't know if I agree, but it's not a very extreme take.

Pretend every country with lots of nukes instead had no more than 100 warheads at a time. Would the world be much different? Would the average person be better off in a noticeable way?

Would it make a big difference if we never had hydrogen bombs? Note that we already had them in the early 50s. Everything since then was about increasing the quantity and refining designs, no meaningful size increases.

Maybe when the bubble bursts there will be lots of good used hardware at massive discounts?

But why? Training hardware maybe will appear, but everything that's running inference has real, paying customers on it, with current capabilities level. Even if the bubble bursts, why would that demand evaporate? People still would want to use chatgpt, claude code etc., even if they stop getting any better tomorrow.

But maybe not for the price it actually takes to run these models. Afaik atm they are all subsidized.

I'd expect at least API pricing for all major players to be margin-positive. Positive ROI if you include model training cost? Maybe not, but in a hypothetical scenario where all capital for new model training goes away, the latest frontier model weights still continue to exist.

Subscription prices for claude code et. al? No idea.

No, that's a rumor lots of people have been taking at face value. If you do the math, inferrence is very lucrative. Here someone deployed a big model, the costs are $0.20/1M token https://lmsys.org/blog/2025-05-05-large-scale-ep/

Yes, but how much do people want to pay to use this stuff? That is the real question.

It might be that more than $30 a month is too much and people stop using it. However, I suspect it would end up a fair bit higher than many would think. If you are a 'whale' (to use the gambling term) then there is a good chance that they could charge in the hundreds of dollars.

Maybe it become a wealth divide between those that can afford it and those who cannot. In equality yet again. Then the echos of Dune, the 'Butlerian jihad' and ‘Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man’s mind' will start to come up.

They're probably buying this equipment anticipating that the current demand will continue. If it stops, all the surplus will need to be sold.

If some large companies implode local models will fill the gaps soon enough. I can see a crash in data center construction and operation once the economics get too far out of whack.

Not if the paying customers aren't sustainable. Many of us have seen this before--2001.

Don’t worry, OpenAI is about to implode.

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