Comment by safety1st | Hacker News Reader

Comment by safety1st | Hacker News Reader

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Yes.

Over the last 20 years the economy has become dysfunctional. It no longer really resembles a free market; monopolies have established barriers to entry everywhere. And the biggest investors are awash with helicopter money that's been doled out for favors by the political class.

So those investors have tons of cash to burn and surprisingly few opportunities. Even within Silicon Valley/VC there are surprisingly few who seem to really understand the fundamental economics of software. Or perhaps those economics just aren't that important when you have billions of dollars on hand and cash is obviously not going to get you a return. Any whisper of possible exponential growth is worth throwing money at. Crypto? Why not. AI? Why not. Datacenters? Why not. Tulips? Why not.

This is by all definitions an empire in decline. Everything is broken or fake. Everyone is afraid to do what needs to be done. Power forbids it. So we're all just waiting for the other shoe to drop. Our secret police aren't as bad as the late stage USSR's yet, but hold Uncle Sam's beer...

(That's not a recommendation to try and time the nadir, by the way, as it could easily be 50 years away.)

I feel like my point is being over extrapolated a bit. All I was saying is that people in 2020 believed AI companies had much more of a moat then they actually do - that other companies would struggle to obtain enough data (y’know, downloading the internet to train models wasn’t legal back then) or resources to compete

It started way before the last 20 years, the past 40 years have created the conditions for this to happen.

Overfinancialisation of the economy while removing safeguards to keep markets functional, like anti-trust enforcement, are the main forces behind this erosion. Through finance the focus of companies is completely shifted away from producing good products and services, and into how to extract more paper wealth from existing structures to the detriment of products.

Not enforcing anti-trust and letting behemoths to form which cannot be competed against since with their amount of capital they can either buy their competition outright or just price dump for long enough to make competition non-viable.

It's the failure of neoliberalism, and that agenda has been pushed into Western countries since the 1980s-1990s, it made enormous wealth for the few at the top while eroding whole societies, economically and socially, it's all dysfunctional.

I feel like my point is being over extrapolated a bit. All I was saying is that people in 2020 believed AI companies had much more of a moat then they actually do - that other companies would struggle to obtain enough data (y’know, downloading the internet to train models wasn’t legal back then) or resources to compete

I replied to the extrapolation, not to your comment directly, I think your point might be more fitting under that comment than mine, I just drilled down from the points above mine.

Fair

Datacenters and AI obviously work and come with a credible value proposition and path to profitability.

Comparing this to crypto or turnips makes me doubt the merit of any other opinions your comment offers.

The initial growth of the internet was a boom bust cycle, and as you see the internet is still here. This is more about the economic paradigm that is being used to grow a technology versus the economic paradigm the technologies rate of growth can support over time.

Just to give some rough numbers in the past 5 years the amount of GPU compute installed in FLOPS is somewhere over 5 times all the CPU flops that have ever existed.

This has nothing to do with AI being good or bad or being able to produce things and economic value. It is by far the largest and fastest growth of any technology ever and we have zero clue about the economic stability of this grand experiment we're performing.

The internet is a much more appropriate comparison than crypto or tulips, which bring no or negligible value.

Some differences to the market at that time seems to be that during the dotcom bubble, many of the companies had little to no revenue.

Leading AI labs already generate enormous revenue. The investments into capacity are needed to address the current demand.

The situation seems somewhat less speculative.

That said, I cannot predict how AI capabilities will develop and how demand will respond.

Should capabilities plateau hard and soon, maybe the demand will not be there for the compute investments.

If it does not, and instead AI applications in robotics, science, and self driving expand, chances seem reasonably good that the demand will be there, no?

And as for the economic stability, much of the investment comes from existing giants like Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta, who have the necessary cash flow.

These companies are less likely to collapse than some of the ones during the dotcom bubble.

Eh, I'd say it's closer to something like internet + tulips.

It's the total amount of money in the economy that's been invested toward a potential outcome. AI represents the largest amount of money, and largest fractional part of the economy invested ever.

Because of this AI could be the biggest economic boon ever, yet still not recover the full amount invested. This will have deep economic impacts that affect everyone and everything. At this point AI must achieve all its stated economic impacts or there will still be a huge economic crash that kills off any company that is over invested and cannot make a profit.

Worse, the many of the perceived economic impacts of AI are not for humans like you or I, but the huge companies you listed. Even if they economically win, everyone else made out of meat could still lose.

They say history doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme. This, at least to me, sounds like a mixtape of "internet" + "tulips" + "1920s financial world leading to global political instability".

Every potential outcome I see occurring pushes us closer to further instability, even if the economics on it work out on paper.

> At this point AI must achieve all its stated economic impacts or there will still be a huge economic crash

I had a look at the numbers.

The investment into data centers is estimated around $800B/year currently.

OpenAI + Anthropic combined had ARR of >$100B in July.

Global labor income is around $65T/year, the US GDP $32T, the global one $126T.

Global software spending: $1.4T/year.

I am no financial analyst, but I don't think all the stated AI impacts have to be met just to recover the investments.

A 1% productivity gain on global labor income represents $660B/year. At 5% we would look at $3.3T/year.

They don't need to cure cancer to justify the investment, even though Amodei hopes to cure most major disease in the next 5-10 years.

Lets take this number for example

>Global software spending: $1.4T/year.

Out of this number how much of this goes to payroll that goes to humans versus how much of this goes to non-human infrastructure costs. The numbers suggest this is anywhere from 60 to 90%, with 70% being a reasonable average figure. Just under a trillion dollars paid directly to humans would disappear if AI somehow captured all of this market.

Moreso the AI industry needs to capture these gains very fast or they will be crushed by interest payments on the massive debts they've accrued.

>ven though Amodei hopes to cure most major disease in the next 5-10 years

The average development time for medicine is 10 to 15 years before a single dollar is earned from said medicine. AI will shave very little off that as human testing and our stupidly complex bodies introduce all kinds of problems. Furthermore running head long into blindly using AI medicine is how you produce X risks from super intelligence AI.

The speed at which AI has to develop in which to get profitability is the biggest risk, a potentially catastrophic risk at that.

You can theorize all you like, and many people like yourself are expecting to see GDP growth pick up as a result of AI, maybe if only because of the boom in datacenter construction etc (regardless of whether AI ends up actually boosting the economy), BUT ...

The reality is that so far there has been no sign of GDP growth picking up. It is basically flat at 2.5% +/- over the last few years.

In a similar vein one might have expected that the internet (think of all the e-commerce and efficiencies!) might have shifted GDP growth into a higher gear, but it did not, although in that case there was at least a significant boost in the 1996-2000 "dot com" era when the build out was happening (then to be followed by the crash and all the unused dark fiber etc).

So, maybe the hoped-for AI boom will be just as much of a dud (as it appears to be so far) as the internet boom. New day, different tools, same growth.

It's perhaps odd that we're not even seeing datacenter/etc build out register on GDP, but perhaps the scale of it is not as large as the internet build out?

It's not really odd when you look at the numbers in my comment, where the datacenter investments are 0.8T vs 126T GDP.

That's 0.6%. Subtract last year's investment and then we're talking yearly growth.

Turns out it's not the earth shattering capital investment the comment before mine was making it out to be.

And about productivity gains, AI became good at software development in spring this year.

I'm not sure what productivity miracles reflecting in GDP growth you already expect to see by now.

>but perhaps the scale of it is not as large as the internet build out?

In the past 5 years 5 times as much GPU compute capacity has been installed as total CPU capacity that has ever existed. When it comes to capital intensity the growth of AI has been one of, if not the largest capital expenditure for a class of project in this short of time frame. Things like the Manhattan project which was absolutely monstrous expense at the time is dwarfed by this.

Of course measuring GDP growth is difficult when you have an idiot in chief trying to destroy the global economy with the dumbest set of actions contrived by a human ever. Disentangling this factors will take a lot of work on someones part.

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