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Comment by dgellow | Hacker News Reader

Whatever you think of AI for your own work, the fact that the entire economy is betting everything on it is really concerning. It’s not just the fact that it may not work well economically speaking and would end up with a market crash, or all the negative externalities from AI development, it’s also the opportunity cost we are paying. With so much human capital and resources dedicated to developing and running LLMs all the other business, research opportunities aren’t being explored and invested in

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I prefer that scenario to the one we had before where too many smart people were building out social networks and similar services trying to maximize ad impressions. We are still dealing with the consequences…

I think those people are the ones in charge now and will be directing their ai resources to make even better ads.

Same people, different context.

I'm not even sure that I do prefer the AI train to the social media / ad train. I certainly would if the direction was "we're throwing ourselves blindly in AI so to gradually free citizens from the need to work", but right now it's "we're throwing ourselves blindly in AI so that we can sacrifice workers for higher corporate profits".

Not to mention how they will be used by terrorists and evil people to create biological weapons and other tools of mass slaughter. Or how it will be/is being used by criminals to target vulnerable people and businesses. Or how coupled with drone warfare the world becomes an unlivable hellhole in the next decade. But Marc Andreesan said only losers are against “tech accelerationiism” on twitter so here we are.

Edit: all that and spellcheck still sucks too.

Sounds like you're reading into Amodei's propaganda as to why they should control AI. The information to make biological weapons for example is nothing new, it has been on the Internet for decades.

Should we control nuclear weapons? Is nuclear technology of the sort we’re fighting a war over right now a bigger technological advance than AI when it comes to war fighting capabilities? I suppose if you think ai is nothing big, it makes sense to not want to control it. Or, if you are all for widespread nuclear proliferation, then your position would make sense. ELSE: you’re totally illogical.

An LLM can't help you build a nuke. LLMs can't paper over hard engineering challenges like "You need to reinvent the centrifugal separator industry" and "rocket engineering is pretty difficult" and "you need really really good data to simulate things before you can actually build an implosion device" and less engineering challenges like "The CIA keeps murdering anyone who works on this"

There's never been an information access problem with nuclear weapons. The information was so public that most physicist realized everyone was building bombs from the sudden lack of published papers on how you could build bombs.

It's just silly how people seem to believe that if you just have a page worth of text saying something, you can suddenly do that thing.

Even a magical superintelligent AI could not do these things. It's going to tell you the exact same thing that has been known for nearly a century now:

"Hire 100 engineers and a couple physicists and 1000 very skilled machinists and laborers, and spend a billion dollars on plumbing, and then do that a second time if you need to deliver the device using a missile"

Meanwhile a dirty bomb is trivial.

These things don't happen because people who want to cause mass harm are generally poorly resourced.

Terrorists and evil people already use the internet for the same thing.

I’m not defending the internet!

You can, right now, find out how to synthesize VX or sarin, or how to weaponize anthrax. You can and have been able to acquire this knowledge without the use of AI. Knowledge is not the obstacle to proliferation of biological and chemical weapons. It's hard to set up the infrastructure. See Aum Shinrikyo.

But the difference is AI made it easier for dumb radicals to discover this AND it will walk you through the infrastructure.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/us/politics/ai-terrorism-...

If you believe that AI is powerful enough to help the good people (however you define that), why isn't that also coupled with the belief that it is powerful enough to help the bad people (ditto)? Either the capability of this tech is completely overblown or it can help a wide swath of people including those with conflicting ideologies.

I absolutely believe that AI can be used by bad people in harmful ways. I don't think that's going to take the form of mass murder. I don't think knowledge is the missing component there.

Well, you’ve convinced me. Ai changes nothing, so then we should be terrified of the capital being poured into and the opportunity costs lost to the current thing(tm).

AI changes lots of things, and many for the worse. The idea that it's going to enable terrorists to perform biological warfare isn't credible.

During the social media boom: Attention is all you need

During the AI boom: Attention is all you need

> too many smart people were building out social networks and similar services trying to maximize ad impressions.

Honest question: where should these very smart people work then in your opinion? Nearly all suitable-looking, "smarter" ideas that come to my mind will bring less revenue/profit in expectation than, for example, letting them maximize ad impressions.

I of course wish we lived in a "more intelligent" world where this is not the case. :-(

> will bring less revenue/profit

Call me crazy, but the smartest people I know have rejected maximizing their employer's revenue and profit as their goal. Or even their own company if they go that route. Find a niche, work it, enjoy it, and enjoy the rest of your life, too.

> where should these very smart people work then in your opinion?

Anywhere else. Ads are a net negative to society and provide no value. ANY activity outside of pushing ads is a better contribution to society as a whole.

So, let's reinvest those resources into surveillance and war?

I mean, war, in all its cruelty and tragedy, at the same time it brings the worst from people is also able to bring out the best.

Ad business, and business in general, doesn't. It only brings out the worst.

> I mean, war, in all its cruelty and tragedy, at the same time it brings the worst from people is also able to bring out the best.

I can see it from here: out of tens of thousands of people, one man takes a stand to save a handful of children from all the pillage, rape and murder.

In an alternate world, this man might have (gasp) tried to run a business instead. Sure, the children and city would still be alive instead of burning to ashes, but who cares?

Look, there's not much positive to say for the ad-driven Internet, but to consider "pixels on screens that you disagree with" to be worse than actual mass killing is maybe a tad hyperbolic here.

> but to consider "pixels on screens that you disagree with" to be worse than actual mass killing is maybe a tad hyperbolic here

And who considers this?

I never wrote that world with war but without business would be overall better than world without war but with people profiting from ad business. I merely pointed out that war can bring out the best from people - mercy, valor, honor, sacrifice, selflessness. Business cannot, as it is about commodification and profit.

Probably not on systems that rot democracy, freedom, and human expression. Companies like Google and Meta are net negative for humanity and the people that built these companies and continue to work for them are evil in their apathy towards the human cost of their salary.

If I had one wish, it would be to make 'common good' more incentivizing than 'maximize revenue/profit' but sadly it's not the world we live in.

The problem with this is people investing their time/expertise/money/energy into the common good and then have a small number of people ruining the benefit for their own ends, knocks the well-meaning out of the most positive people. The common good only works well when everyone wants the common good.

Ah, then my second wish will be for everyone to want the common good.

> Ah, then my second wish will be for everyone to want the common good.

People have very different, often contradictory opinions what the "common good" is.

I would even claim that this question is a special case of the millennia-old philosophical problem of defining what "good" actually means (i.e. defining ethics), which has resulted in myriads of different opinions:

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_ethics

You seem to have independently discovered the market failure commonly know as the Free-rider problem, for which there are many solutions, and which is not a dispositive preemptive argument against the establishment or management of common good(s).

For example, Elinor Ostrom won a Nobel Prize for her work illuminating design principles illustrated by long enduring common pool resource institutions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom#%22Design_princi...

1000000% this. I remember lamenting all through the 2010s that all the high paying jobs were basically ad revenue supported.

Now its AI.

Maybe AI doesn't materialize the way we want, but I'll take that bet over business as usual before every time.

> I remember lamenting all through the 2010s that all the high paying jobs were basically ad revenue supported.

That's never been true for financial services, many of which offer very high-paying jobs for high-frequency trading, hedge fund management, market operations, etc. There are many other industries with high value IT jobs that are not ad-supported.

(Edit: typo)

Those jobs are much more niche, and require much more specialized knowledge. Google alone probably has more software employees than all of the high paying trading firms combined. It's a possible career path, sure, but its like comparing taxi driver opportunities with stretch limo driver opportunities IMO. Totally different scales.

AI is much more similar to classic cloud/infra with a lot more OSS than finance afaik, and probably already employs more devs than prop firms.

(I'm not counting big bank jobs because those are definitely not high paying)

The consequences are different this time because why?

Seems like an even bigger opportunity to inject ads, influence thought, and scrape user information.

That will certainly come in time. We're already starting to see/hear the beginnings of it. My hope is that the market maintains competition because the moment one or two corps have monopoly/duopoly they will go full throttle toward that I'm afraid.

The potential upside in positives is actually there. New cures, personalized really good medicine, breakthroughs in every scientific field, etc.

The people are there because they are betting on AGI, not chatbots that make software engineering go faster.

any concrete evidences to support this theory from the past 12 months would be helpful here (where evidence > marketing fluff)

Talk to employees at anthropic and OpenAI. Listen to the talks from the higher-ups. Sam Altman even said something to the effect of “we don’t need a working business model because AGI will figure out how to make money”.

The upsides for social media were there too.

It is not enough to invent a new medicine. You also need to make it easily available. People investing in AI are not interested in giving new awesome medicine to people that couln't afford it.

I mean, I am no LLM lover but in the possible "success case" there are also many many other cool/good to humanity use cases.

Whereas ads are almost exclusively negative.

You think AI won’t/isn’t being used to maximize ad impressions…?

I don't know, I feel like llms are the even worse replacement for social networks and maximized ad impressions. Now you don't even need a network or users to produce the addictive content and inject narrative that is so impactful on our brains and lives

I have more meaningful intellectual conversations with LLMs in a given day than in a month on social networks. And the LLMs never try to make me feel angry or stupid, they never ignore my arguments to go on their own soapbox, they almost never feed me misinformation (and never deliberately), and they've yet to tell me to my face that the purpose of their interactions with other people is not to convince or even communicate with those people but to perform for an audience (often one that doesn't feasibly exist).

Some caveats here: my view of social media is biased by the fact that jerks tend to pull me out of the woodwork- I get ragebaited, although I think I avoid the literal bait- so many of my interactions are with jerks. Looking around, I expect I'm not alone, but this may not be the default experience. And the LLMs certainly aren't perfect. They can hallucinate, they're often sycophantic, they're bad at judgment in a number of ways, probably others I'm missing.

Compared to actual people, they suck. Compared to social media as it exists today, they have orders of magnitude to fall before your comparison makes sense to me. And, at least for now, the LLMs are the ones getting better while the social networks are- AFAICT, universally- getting worse.

> I have more meaningful intellectual conversations with LLMs in a given day than in a month on social networks.

This is kind of making the parent's argument for them about the dangers...

> And the LLMs never try to make me feel angry or stupid, they never ignore my arguments to go on their own soapbox, they almost never feed me misinformation (and never deliberately), and they've yet to tell me to my face that the purpose of their interactions with other people is not to convince or even communicate with those people but to perform for an audience (often one that doesn't feasibly exist).

You're basically asking to be coddled, affirmed, validated, and protected. The world has conflict. Not all conflict is bad. Yes, social media weaponizes that conflict for ads, but I think the opposite is more dangerous in creating completely distorted realities. What you're describing sounds worse than the worst nightmare I've ever had, a world in which I'd be constantly disconnected from everyone else and would be disillusioned into thinking I'm not.

> Some caveats here: my view of social media is biased by the fact that jerks tend to pull me out of the woodwork- I get ragebaited, although I think I avoid the literal bait- so many of my interactions are with jerks.

This is what therapy is for.

Jury, I direct you to exhibit A.

>You're basically asking to be coddled, affirmed, validated, and protected.

Incorrect. My interactions with LLMs simply don't look like this. I don't know where you got this idea from what I said. I have a prompt that begs the thing to call me out, and it currently does so too much, which is exactly what I prefer.

What it doesn't do is rub minor disagreements in my face, jump to conclusions about who I am based on pre-existing beliefs, or tell me to go to therapy when I earnestly admit my humanity.

> I have more meaningful intellectual conversations with LLMs in a given day than in a month on social networks

Social media felt this way in the early days, too.

> they almost never feed me misinformation (and never deliberately)

This is dangerously untrue. LLMs will deliberately tell you the things you want to hear. They even "call you out" in exactly the ways that are most palatable to you. There is ample evidence that LLMs can be biased. The ability to broadly influence individual opinions, without even needing bot accounts on social media is exactly one of the reasons so many people who want power/money are flocking to control these LLMs.

> so many of my interactions are with jerks

This is one of the ways that the LLMs are "scarier" and more powerful than social networks. Real people are more likely to be obviously pushing agendas or otherwised easily dismissed.

> LLMs are the ones getting better

Getting better at what? The things you list are exactly the things that make LLMS subtly powerful and far more dangerous that social media. It's the reach and anonymity of social media without needing to control a feed algorithm, deal with content or people that doesn't fit your agenda, or produce fake content that does.

Did you mean to say you feel LLMs will be made into an even worse replacement? Otherwise not clear on your "early days" point.

The second half of your second paragraph is also forward looking- as I said, LLMs would have to get orders of magnitude worse for this to be a concern versus social media. I am surrounded by people- smart, informed people- who were convinced by instagram or TikTok or whatever that Mitch McConnell was brain dead a few weeks back, despite their being wrong about Trump in the same way several times already. We're in a thread mentioning "all the negative externalities from AI development", and I just have to hope they're not talking about water usage and electric prices and silent-but-deadly infrasound because everybody inexplicably believes that those are real, serious concerns. LLMs aren't doing this! This is the status quo!

The chatbot I'm interacting with does not tell me the things I want to hear. This is just not true. I don't know how to convince you otherwise.

>Getting better at what? The things you list are exactly the things that make LLMS subtly powerful and far more dangerous that social media

? At not hallucinating, not being sycophantic, making good quality judgments, making good strategic judgments. The things I listed. I don't know how this connects with the rest of this paragraph.

My "agenda" is believing true things and not believing false things. Sorry, but if someone is opposed to this for me, they are not a person I'd like to speak with.

> And the LLMs never try to <>

Not yet.

I expect once the initial exploration and development is over, all those sharp minds will turn to monetization and everything else that follow.

> I have more meaningful intellectual conversations with LLMs in a given day than in a month on social networks.

If by "social networks" you mean platforms like X, Reddit or HN, then sure, but bar is pretty low there.

But let's not forget that both technologies mainly isolate and alienate you from real world and real people. The fact that the more recent one doesn't suck as much yet is not very comforting.

Social networks only destroyed discourse.

This both destroys discourse, and centralizes the means of production into ~4 companies, with everyone else paying them an economic tax in order to be competitive.

Whatsapp provides tremendous utility. I remember paying far more “economic tax” before Whatsapp to communicate, with basically anyone in the world.

Facebook Marketplace also provides me with quite a bit utility.

What "economic tax" was imposed by the Web, email, Usenet, and forums?

None, but for actual communication by lay people, it cost a ton of money for audio and video calls by having to pay their phone service provider a lot, or calling cards, or whatever.

Neither Whatsapp nor my landline is the kind of social network that I'm talking about.

That's not what was happening though. Whatever happened between 2000 and 2022 cannot be compared to the llm monomania we see now.

My guess is these AI companies are counting on the money to come from traditional SAAS style services only. This whole AI would be used to gather enough capital to rewrite most of the existing SAAS services under one umbrella, sort of super APP concept. The SAAS businesses doing the layoffs will soon realize that for this whole time they were just pouring their money into their own demise

I mean there are ads in certain chatGPT plans. There have already been multiple studies showing that regular use of genAI makes you less intelligent...

Additionally, it's pretty clear that the owners of this tech (dario, altman, etc..) do not have the best interest of "the people" at heart and only care about accumulating as much power and wealth possible. Not that it's their responsibility to save humanity or something, but I'm not sure this future is much better...

And crypto.

"The smartest people" were not working on ads because building an advertising behemoth is not a smart thing to do.

When there's nothing good being invested in, "the smartest people" are simply underutilized. They do things that they think are good instead.

"The smartest people" have never sought maximum capital accumulation, and have not historically been driven by "highest wages" jobs.

The computer industry formed out of WW2 because a bunch of smart people ran into each other and did what they thought was really cool and had realized was suddenly possible. Von Neuman literally met one of the other guys and discussed computers as a theory at a train station and that meeting was influential on the future industry. They did not try to make billions of dollars. They had fairly average jobs that paid average. Often working for the government itself.

"The smartest people" did not work on targeting ads at people, and while some of them may have been involved with early transformer work, they certainly would be disillusioned with LLMs by now and would not be working at companies burning trillions on them.

> With so much human capital and resources dedicated to developing and running LLMs all the other business, research opportunities aren’t being explored and invested in

It probably feels this way if you only see headlines like this, but the LLM companies and even extending into their data center buildouts are still only a part of the economy. Investment dollars get spread around far and wide. Investors can’t even get allocations in these companies if they want to because they’re so oversubscribed.

This headline and website are a good example. If you think being a YC founder is rare and reserved for the truly elite, you may not have seen the size of YC batches lately. The number of YC founders is in the tens of thousands. Showing a list of 100 of them who joined a couple big tech companies doesn’t mean anything by itself.

It’s on the order of 1% of YC founders. YC startups don’t work out all the time and their employees and founders go work for other startups. Barely worth noting, if not for a website making it look like a big deal.

I fear another related possibility. With *so* much money on the table, if this new industry shrinks or collapses, it is hard to believe that it will collapse same way dot-com did, and instead investors will seek to protect their capital who knows at what cost. Given the influence they have it is not hard to imagine the impact on policies, etc. I fear that tax payers are not the winners in either case, whether this industry grows or not.

This reminds me of the office rental leases during and after lockdowns where it seemed like the idea that owners might loose money was just not even on the table and we needed people to be back at the office otherwise the value of office buildings would fall and that'd be terrible...

> Whatever you think of AI for your own work, the fact that the entire economy is betting everything on it is really concerning. It’s not just the fact that it may not work well economically speaking and would end up with a market crash, or all the negative externalities from AI development, it’s also the opportunity cost we are paying.

It's worth pointing out that "entire economy is betting everything on [AI]" you're talking about here is in the economy in the "numbers go up sense" (e.g. the stock market). It's not the economy in the providing for the general well being sense (e.g. gives people jobs so they can get housing and food).

Investment from VC and wealth funds is going pretty much only to AI projects. The massive capital expenditure we are currently seeing is going to AI infrastructure (HBM has pretty much no use case outside of LLMs and a few niche industries). It’s real money being allocated to a single bet

Well estimates claim AI may contribute 50-75% of US GDP growth. Which is confusing because we're spending 2% of US GDP on AI.

I wasted like a half hour trying to find decent sources but I guess I don't know how to search the internet anymore.

I think we're betting more than the stock market on AI, even if I can't say for sure how much.

But you do realize that the entire 2008 financial crisis was also just financial 'wizards' increasing leverage more an more.

The real economy didn't change at all, but confidence was gone and so was lending.

I also think this is a huge problem in government. A lot of government services could be digitized via simple CRUD API/UIs and instead politicians talk about AI...

That could be every tech exec/marketeer/sales person now...

We've had text to speech for a while for example but everything is now AI. Does it use any AI features? Not at all ...

AI/ML can make the pauses, intonation, and context pronunciation (it is "bass" the fish or the guitar?) more natural/correct I'm sure.

Now whether you actually WANT your AI voice to sound completely indistinguishable from a human voice is another story. I personally wish it would remain differentiable forever, but there's no real way to enforce that.

I don’t really buy the opportunity cost argument. The bets we are placing look EV-positive to me.

The 90th percentile upside is way, way higher than is priced into the current stocks, the 10th percentile looks to me like 2000 where a bunch of investors loose their shirts and then for the next few decades new companies boom on all the infrastructure that was built.

The “failure mode” for this tech is that we don’t advance much beyond Sol/Fable and the existing models just get cheaper. If there is an AI bust in hindsight it likely will look like the dotcom bust did, which is a small blip on the decades-scale GDP curve.

It’s not just the fact that it may not work well economically speaking

That's not going to happen. Everything is different now, and the only long-term losers will be those who continue to deny it. Even now we still see stupid analogies to parrots, calculators, toddlers, and so on, being advanced here of all places.

and would end up with a market crash

That might happen, because the first attempt a market makes to allocate funding and spending optimally is almost never on target. Great, it'll give the rest of us a chance to buy in.

Opportunity cost arguments are more convincing when there’s some specific opportunity that you’re comparing against.

Otherwise, it’s sort of like saying that people will find a job doing something else, without any thought to what that something else would be. The jobs don’t create themselves.

Tech != the entire economy

Sunk cost fallacy is already too established for anything else.

I know Ed Zitron is a dirty word on HN most days but having recently read some of his (highly editorialized) work… it seems like he’s right and the numbers just aren’t making sense.

Combine that with the fact that “good enough” is a real thing and cheap Chinese models are either there or close depending on your use case and it’s hard to see how this ends well.

Well it could end well for the general public in the sense that we get cheap, good enough AI.

Oh definitely. Personally, I think it will get to the point where we have local good enough models.

I’m just incredibly confused how these companies and investors don’t see the writing on the wall UNLESS the point is to just extract as much money as possible and not be left holding the bag.

Well I think it's possible some of these American AI companies could still end up being a good business. It's like Apple vs Android. Globally Android is the most common, but Apple still has a good business as a premium brand for people who are willing to pay more for higher quality. Anthropic and OpenAI could end up as the Apple of the AI industry.

Zitron will be proven right. That’s why I’m investing in beaten down SaaS stocks. It’s a reasonable hedge against the AI insanity.

> the fact that the entire economy is betting everything on it

This is untrue. Spend is about 2% of GDP.

There are more economic indicators than spend and GDP. What percent of the money supply does it prop up? Of retirement accounts? Of the S&P 500?

Moonshots are concerning until you consider the alternative.

AI is the one and only possibility for saving millions (likely billions) of lives from “old age”, cancers, Alzheimer’s, ALS… you name it.

It’s a big bet. The alternative is we all die anyway: sadly after a gradual decline at best or horribly after long undignified suffering at worst.

I’ll take the economic risk.

If those billions were poured in research it could bring results too.

Medical progress basically stopped toward the end of the 20th century.

We can now treat breast cancer and leukemia? What a low bar.

We’ve got sci-fi cellphones and 1980s medicine.

> AI is the one and only possibility for saving millions (likely billions) of lives from “old age”, cancers, Alzheimer’s, ALS… you name it.

Says you and everyone else with a financial incentive to trick people into believing this.

My financial incentive is surviving the next couple decades healthy enough to keep doing things

Researchers are increasingly using LLMs and other transformer based AI. My friend at a well known research institution asked Anthropic for access to their biology model (not sure if it's Mythos or some other sort of uncensored model) and recently made breakthroughs with it and other AI.

what a delightfully vague story!

Yes, I don't have their permission to dox them, so it will have to be vague for now. Still, there are many news articles outlining the same point I made, except with real examples.

What metric are you using to say the entire economy is betting on it?

at the current pace, LLMs are the researchers

the end goal isnt to serve a chatbot to replace google or a coding agent to build crud

Not only that but with so much human capital and resources devoted to AI’s explicit goal of replacing human labor there are two outcomes: 1) it succeeds and we have a serious social problem on our hands with large swaths of the population out or a job, or 2) it fails and we have a very large market and economic crisis as the AI bubble collapses.

Maybe there’s a partial success future that isn’t those two, but I’m not hopeful. And I’d take the Ai bubble collapse over AI BigTech achieving its goals

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