Take any stock index, remove AI stocks, what do you see? That's right! Nothing...
So where is all the productivity going? Where is the value? Where are the massive unemployment stats or the millions of new startups making big $$$?
That being said, AI seems kind of miraculous sometimes.
Similar to cars. So enticing that we make everything else in the world worse in order to maximize the profit, make it indispensable, subsidize it, and make the dependency on it irreversible.
And it's not even something to blame individual people for.
Driving away from all the other cars to spend a weekend feels like freedom.
Using AI to answer a question feels like a "bicycle for the mind".
But in fact it's more like a car. It requires massive resources and creates perverse incentives, and the result is ineffective and corrupt.
Both cars and AI are amazing technology and extremely useful, but using them is not an individual responsibility. It requires societal subsidy.
We got addicted to the convenience and overuse, and have started a mass extinction event because of it.
The perverse incentives will come for us all.
It feels depressing, but I think the same. When thinking about the larger world, it becomes increasingly hard to ignore. And of course it is not new.
There were "doomers" already in the midst of the 20th century, but it doesn't mean that they were wrong.
AI, Crypto, car-centric urban planning, cardboard suburbs in a barren field with bright green grass.
You tell someone that their selfish choice to drive a pickup truck only to haul something maybe one time a year, they shit their pants. They can't stand it, they start personal attacks and ask "what about you??". They seem to know it's wasteful, damaging, etc but they deserve it for some reason.
80% of generative AI queries wouldn't even exist as google searches.
I awe at the capabilites of generative AI.
I also enjoy sitting in or driving a car.
I did not want to make a moral argument, unless you consider each and every form of utilitarianism as moralism.
One claim of the parent comment was that AI is ineffective. For the purpose of finding answers to questions, it is more resource-efficient than the alternatives, and, to your point, capable of answering questions that were impossible to answer via other means before. In what way is that ineffective?
If we want to get really pedantic, every generated token is the answer to the query: what's the next most probable token in this sequence of tokens?
When I post this http request containing this reply, you could say my machine is querying the server to ask "what did you do with the message I just gave you", but then query stops having any useful semantic value to distinguish it from "request"
Regardless, this is tangential. I don't disagree that a lot of LLM use is not in pursuit of knowledge, but enough of it is for me to think that preferring LLMs not to exist is a hard position to defend, at least without making the case for existential doom.
Neither did I want to say that a car is always more wasteful than some alternative.
But defaulting to the behemoth is inefficient, unless everyone is driven to do it: then it's in some way reasonable.
By adding "corrupt" and "dependent", as well as the economic terms, I wanted to offer a broader critique and create an analogy, not just talk about energy usage on its own.
What I had in mind was: it's easier to go many places that are a mile or less from me, by car. Because everything is obstructed by cars. And I'm atrophied by lack of movement. Best would be to drive somewhere to move/walk.
People already do that in masses.
And doing shopping by car, because everything else seems unbearable, also takes away your time, apart from wasting energy compared to more, smaller shops that would be reachable by foot, bycicle etc.
I guess you know the argument.
Today, people's thinking atrophies because their LLM is probably right in their summarization of some Wikipedia article, plus 2-3 other random sources.
Or so.
Using the Wikipedia search function is not expensive.
But, I mostly had a bigger picture in mind than what is the cost of inference.
I am concerned about the environmental impacts that AI poses, but they don't seem to me to be so catastrophic. Solar and battery tech has made enormous leaps in the past couple decades, and we will need to pivot to clean energy future irrespective of AI.
*This said, I have become gradually more alarmed over the past decade at the lack of epistemological rigor in the general public, as made apparent through the rise of social media. I don't know that AI becoming a truth-seeking crutch for people wouldn't be more good than bad.
Oh my god, no. I also want the benefits of automobiles! They are strictly more capable than, say, trains. That's where I would derail the discussion completely when going into details, but no, I am not against cars as a technology.
Apart from all the ethical and social arguments (logistics, ambulances, the elderly, etc etc). But that's not where I wanted to go.
I was making a leap here simply because of the whole complex around prisoner's, dilemma, the commons, state economy, and so forth.
Since at least ~100yrs ago, I guess cars and streets as the primary mode of transportation have also "won the vote" / are what the majority wants, so it's also an interesting analogy for diminishing returns maybe.
Building out more car infrastructure is certainly not controversial where there is absolutely none but there are commercial or residential buildings.
Anyway, lots of associations are worth considering here IMO. The ultimate limiting capacity here, when disregarding all environmental or health concerns, is simply space and the positive externalities (cities etc) around existing infrastructure.
> Take any stock index, remove AI stocks, what do you see? That's right! Nothing...
> we make everything else in the world worse in order to maximize the profit
> destroying the planet for data centers
Hand wringing about AI datacenter's environmental impact is well and good. We should keep the data centers accountable for their consumption and waste.
I just wish the same people had been upset the last 20 years with poor water resource management in a lot of areas (the west US especially) with urban, ranching and farming development.
> That's true, and I am not anti-AI.
Me neither!
But with AI what is the exact price? My understanding is that R&D is extremely expensive, but running non-SOTA models is not that bad. We are getting pretty close to models which can be useful locally in many applications.
Or do you mean that at scale running them locally is not possible and hence the infrastructure price is in data centers, which will be expensive to maintain and scale for demand?
First, because I initially failed to answer your more closed questions (this paragraph is edited in):
> We are getting pretty close to models which can be useful locally in many applications. Or do you mean that at scale running them locally is not possible and hence the infrastructure price is in data centers, which will be expensive to maintain and scale for demand?
I don't think there's a way around making the best of AI capabilities with minimum price and maximum control, and I'd agree this is met by on-prem data centers, just not in a rationally targeted way.
Back to my original comment:
Because it (my conclusion) was not so clear, and maybe I just wanted to highlight some observations without delivering a real argument for or against things [, I thank you for your open question].
The utility/leverage aspect for AI seems more esoteric than the one for cars because, apart from Chatbots, it's more hidden.
And also, similar to cars (or many other phenomena of industrialization), yes, my first vague point was the subsidization of infrastructure. But also, the power gap: that's something not only associated with AI or cars, but with a lot of technologies we all hold dear: sewage, powerline, logistics, etc etc.
What reminds me of cars in the current AI frenzy is the fixation on cementing infrastructure. And also, I think, a lot more people agree on, for example, some kind of universal right to, for example, clean water.
But all of industrialization confronts people with questions of efficiency, inequality, and collective support.
Most people would, for example, support a right to get a minimum amount of clean water when you are living and working in a tradionally inhabited space (if you're on the social-darwinist side) or at least not harming society (if you're more of a social democrat).
And, similar to the buildup of car infrastructure, and the procurement of resources, space etc for maximum building, giant data centers can obstruct people in buying drinking water. Or walking outside (AI obstructs traditional methods of online collaboration).
Where did all the stock gains go before AI?
FAANG / MAG-7.
Was everything from 2012-2020 fake, too?
Infrastructure doesn't produce value overnight. How long did it take the Interstate System to provide measurable value? I asked Gemini. Supposedly increased national productivity by 25% over 39 years[1]. But if you drove on a newly finished interstate in 1959, you saw the same cars just moving a lot faster.
That's what we're seeing right now. People can produce an incredible amount of stuff really quickly with AI. Is it directly connected to measurable productivity across the entire economy? No, because, realizing a mass productivity increase from infrastructure takes time.
[1] - https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/econ_focus...
The question is, is AI leading to massive productivity gains in companies that implement it? AI productivity gains take time to diffuse, but so far companies in the S&P 500 are seeing very high growth. YOY earnings growth rate for the S&P 500 is 21.7% https://advantage.factset.com/hubfs/Website/Resources%20Sect...
Now remove the companies selling the AI shovels: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HIAjbZxacAARHwD.png
> Not sure what your point is.
My point is that they're selling us Skynet and the end of employment as we now it, things that we shouldn't even have to measure to perceive the results of, yet no one is able to measure any of it
Pointing a finger at nvidia, google, and the other few companies stuck in circular investment schemes that shouldn't even be legal and saying "OOGA BOOGA line go UP, UP GOOD!" doesn't count in my book
https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/this-is-how-the-ai-bu...
> AI-related stocks have accounted for 75% of S&P 500 returns, 80% of earnings growth and 90% of capital spending growth since ChatGPT launched in November 2022.
If all these false practices can pull revenue out of nothing, why doesn’t every company do it? How come AI companies seem to be able to pull off financial magic that no other company can match?
All your analyses still ignore the revenue point.
Then why can't anyone point at actual numbers? The best we get is "look: line go up" while pointing at either the companies selling the AI shovels or the companies selling $1 of tokens for 50ct.
When cars replaced horses we didn't have to twist the numbers to understand the benefits. When emails replaced mails we didn't have to do 6 hours of mental gymnastics to see the increased productivity. Heck my grandma could tell the benefits of computers when the town hall she worked for finally discontinued typewriters
They're spending hundreds of billions if not trillions, and have nothing to show for it besides like 5 stocks pumping like shit coins. On top of the the drawbacks are massive and very visible...
> Take any stock index, remove AI stocks, what do you see? That's right! Nothing...
Parent comment:
> Now remove the companies selling the AI shovels: https://pbs.twimg....
From your linked image, "excluding AI stocks" is "+16%" (the figure with AI stocks is far higher).
Your sole source says +16% excluding AI - in what kind of market is +16% “nothing”?
It's nothing because it happens all the time, it's not statically relevant, like not at all: https://www.macrotrends.net/2526/sp-500-historical-annual-re...
This forum is full of techies with very strong opinions about their toys but 0 economical, political or historical education, and it shows
And even more so since inflation was 2-3%, not considered high, during most of that period.
I mean, do you know what the value of those stocks would be if AI didn't exist. Maybe they would be much more negative. Maybe we would be in a recession. Without a control this type of analysis is meaningless.
And that is even assuming that AI productivity gains are happening now instead of 5-10 years from now.