pembrook

Mainstream narratives for the first year or two of the war were:

- Russia was a paper tiger and weak

- Ukraine was going to win against a corrupt/unmotivated Russian military so it should keep fighting

- Putin had made an error and he would get overthrown

- The Russian economy was going to collapse due to sanctions

- Russia oil pipelines would freeze and never come back online without western help (this was a Peter Zeihan favorite)

- Europe would come to Ukraine's defense

- Etc.

He threw cold water on every single one of those narratives (specifically) from the beginning, meanwhile western media was busy spinning false rah-rah propaganda narratives like "the ghost of Kiev" etc.

Basically he was correct that we should not have cheered on this war. If a settlement and concessions were reached much earlier it would have been better for Ukraine (they likely would have kept more territory) and we wouldn't have 1+ million casualties and EU economies like Germany death spiraling and turning far right due to cutting themselves off from Russian energy.

To be fair, his takes on the Ukraine war from the covid days have aged very well, and were contrarian to mainstream narratives at the time.

I don't agree with Sacks always but he's 100% correct here.

I heavily use frontier models daily, and quite frankly their capabilities are just not very relevant outside of a narrow subset of software engineering tasks and the production of generic white collar "deliverables."

We're many years into $10s of billions of dollars being thrown at coding as a problem space specifically, and its one of the areas with the MOST training data available, and still...I can't get a frontier model to execute simple front-end UI tasks beyond the level of a visually impaired intern.

I believe Fable and Astra-class models were the first fully trained on Blackwell GPUs (the latest and greatest) and I think the expectation was that throwing this much extra compute at the problem would lead to greater gains. It has not. And the next gen GPUs are not going to be the same jump that h100 clusters to Blackwell was. Claiming you're slowing down out of choice, when in reality you've hit the limits given current compute, is disingenuous at best.

I think a lot of Anthropic/OpenAI employees are true believers here (who doesn't want to imagine they're having a large impact?) and have deluded themselves into believing they're building a god in their science fiction fantasy world.

Unfortunately the type of people working at these orgs apparently don't have much understanding of how the world works outside of their extremely narrow specialization.

When I hear them straight-faced throwing out dumb statistics like "8% GDP growth," "50% of white collar workers unemployed by next year," and "10% chance of human annihilation," I cringe so hard my eyebrows hit my chin. Here's a real statistic: 82% of German companies still use fax machines.

I seem to recall Waymo told a 60 minutes reporter during an early report on self driving cars: "your daughter will never need to learn to drive." Well, over a decade has passed since then, that girl got a drivers license, and we're still without driverless cars in 99% of places.

This capacity for self delusion is what enables silicon valley to take on these irrational moonshots...but these are the last people I would trust when trying to form an accurate picture of reality.

Do you care to elaborate on what “this” is that is so bad?

And just out of curiosity, have you come to this opinion independently through your own research?

Or is this just regurgitated sentiment you’re memetically repeating to signal in-group status after consuming reactionary media/clickbait on this topic?

Yes and Nordea has predicted housing prices will start to climb again every quarter for the last 3 years. Next quarter I guess!

Electricity demand will likely stay well under the lower end of those estimates, but its good that estimating is done optimistically, given it means that level of demand is planned to be supported already.

So it's not like electricity demand is going to grow modestly within a declining energy demand environment (which opens up other opportunities) while nothing new is being built.

The American data-center hysteria is mostly due to the fact that Americans have made it impossible (and have lost a lot of the expertise needed) to build infrastructure, and their faster growing power demand is NOT being met with new supply. This was already happening decades ago, before factoring in AI. US infrastructure is massively underfunded and 60-80 years outdated in most areas due to poor government policy.

Coal usage is rapidly declining in Estonia too: https://www.enerdata.net/estore/energy-market/estonia/

Finland’s electricity consumption is not projected to rise rapidly.

Finlands energy use in general is in decline, their economy isn’t growing and neither is their population: https://www.treasuryfinland.fi/annualreview2022/energy-consu...

Absent AI, this plant is absolutely the type of thing that a left/Green Party would vote to shut down under the premise that the cost is too great to retool/maintain it and “nuclear bad.” This is a Cold War era Russian plant that needs retooling.

Finland doesn't get the rest of its power from coal, they're one of the greenest energy markets on the planet.

Before the American tinfoil-hat data center nuts comes out in force:

- This is a plant that was going to be decommissioned without investment

- Finland is a rational country due to their small size and unfortunate proximity to Russia. They tend to do rational things like invest in good energy infrastructure. Nobody will be losing power due to this deal

- Finland is one of the cleanest/greenest energy markets on earth, and the country is largely a giant unpopulated forest

- Finland currently has the highest unemployment in Europe, this is a great win for them, and they correctly view this as such since they are not stupid

- While the media may try to make it happen, very few Finnish people will be wearing tinfoil hats while screaming about conspiracies that data centers destroy H20 molecules, since they have one of the best education systems in the world

What details of the criticism? The comment I replied to had nothing to rebuttal, it was communicating a general mood with zero supporting evidence.

Some things have objectively gotten worse. Not EVERYTHING as this site would lead you to believe.

If even their modest scenario becomes consensus by next year, the market will 2X or more. They could easily leverage that to 10X returns.

Their business is not going to 10X cash flows next year, so yes, that would be the smart move if they thought even the short term modest scenario was happening.

They don't think that though. Hence why this blog post is stupid to even publish.

It's like me publishing a "What will our future look like?" blog post where I think I'm the center of the universe and draw a chart that says:

Modest scenario: I take a bowel movement so big it opens a wormhole and destroys humanity

Because the market is forward-looking, and brings all future cashflows to the present.

If it became clear by 2027 that GDP growth would permanently reach 15% (I didn't make that absurdly stupid chart, they did), S&P 500 valuations would immediately 100X or more.

They could take out a credit line against those gains and have unlimited money.

Wait...are you suggesting those predictions might be so unrealistic that its stupid to even publish them? I'm shocked!

This could be the most cringe main-character-syndrome thing I've ever seen produced by a company in the history of silicon valley.

And the people treating this as serious economic forecasting rather than a marketing puff post are even more cringe.

If Anthropic truly believed LLMs were going to raise GDP growth to 8% permanently (or even just a few percent), instead of going public to raise capital they could just go massively leveraged long on the S&P 500 and get funding for eternity.

They are not doing that, because AI is largely only good at coding, their models barely have a 6-12 month lead over free ones, and software is only 1% of GDP.

And by making software cheaper and easier to produce, they might increase the amount of software in the world by 10X or even 100X, but it will become a smaller percentage of GDP as AI models become autonomously good at creating it. Things that are abundant and cheap don't raise GDP.

Hey Anthropic: before we worry about raising GDP growth to 20%, maybe we focus on making blog posts that don't crash your browser window if you try to resize it?

Can you offer a believable rebuttal to any of my statements?

AfD just had a historic victory in Germany, France is leaning the same direction, etc. Just those two are 40% of the EU economy, and do you think them both turning ethno-nationalist and right wing means the EU project is going to get stronger or weaker? More shared values, or less?

The truth is the EU didn't go far enough, and created a feckless bike-shedding bureaucracy of papercuts. If the EU were to truly unite around shared values, we could achieve something. But the fundamental issue is the EU doesn't have these shared values. The US had the benefit of starting from 0 and attracting only likeminded people to grow.

In Europe every country still identifies with their 19th century national romantic movement definition of who they are (which was itself a construct). The lack of shared values is the problem. We can't even get most of the EU on a common language.

There were people like Kalgeri who had a vision for a 'united states of europe,' which arguably would have been better: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_von_Coudenhove-Kalergi

But anytime you bring his name up some right wing conspiracy nutjob will call you an evil globalist. And the far left nutjobs (more common here) will call you an evil capitalist/fascist for supporting his vision of trying to compete in global markets through technology.

Yea people tend to give Apple the benefit of the doubt because they’re the most successful and valuable company in human history.

Mistral is not Apple, and is not emulating their strategy. Please show me Mistral’s half a $Trillion in yearly revenue coming from consumer hardware/software.

Then I’ll agree with you that they’re taking the Apple strategy.

On its own, all regulations usually look reasonable.

It’s when you stack over 100,000 regulations (this is literally the number the EU has created) on top of each other and then combine them with country level regs that you create a system that’s impossible to grow in.

If there’s one thing the legacy, dying industrial companies of Europe love, it’s consulting.

So they’ll probably make more money creating PowerPoints with ChatGPT than they will trying to compete with the US and China.

Which would be the most European outcome ever.

A loose canon for text generation where you can just unplug the server.

A lot of the progress on the frontier has been made using agent swarms.

So the story is basically: "Thing that was designed to collaborate with other agents collaborated with other agents"

Let's not be hyperbolic and manufacture more virality for OpenAI's marketing team.

We're talking about outdated message board comments, not murder. Any analogy between the two is not suitable.

I'm so sick of everybody pretending like internet bots posting content (anybody who has hosted a public signup form knows this has been a thing for 20+ years) is going to lead to the apocalypse.

You could have done this 2 years ago too with outdated models or 20 years ago with a manual script.

This is mildly interesting for us, annoying for the owner of the site affected, lazy on the part of OpenAI, and nothing more.

This is the most bizarre and trivial line of argument I’ve ever seen on HN.

Swapping those words changes nothing about that sentence.

Because a sincere discussion of media (a fundamentally insincere medium with perverse incentives) is silly without addressing this.

Autistically pretending the world is rational and not factoring this in is just as false as Zitron’s predictions.

The fact that you know Ed Zitron's name means that, regardless of his predictions being consistently wrong (which they are), his strategy for manipulating human attention has been correct.

The question is whether he sincerely believes his own predictions or if he cynically is aware that you can create a career for yourself being a guy who says bombastic clickbait-worthy things people emotionally want to be true, instead of measured assessments of reality.

Problem is, you wouldn't know Ed Zitron's name if every piece he wrote basically said "AI might be a bit overhyped short term but will have lasting economic impacts." Booooorrrring.

The reverse is also true. OpenAI and Anthropic aren't going to get much media attention if they don't make silly claims like "all white collar jobs gone in 2 years."

And no, this isn't a new problem due to "the algorithm." Media has always been like this. Zitron is just another Peter Schiff with younger skin. The problem is human nature in general.

Hence why AI isn't going to kill media. We don't actually want sober, rational assessments of all available information from hyper-intelligent LLMs. This is unsatisfying. We want emotional validation, drama, adversarial identity and spectacle. Truth is rarely what we are seeking.

HN is no longer a place of people with nuanced opinions. During Covid it got overrun by normies and redditors during the mass reddit exodus.

Since then it's become basically a typical leftist ragebait-driven subreddit on a different domain. Say anything that challenges the left-party line and you're immediately downvoted.

The tax won't actually create the desired outcome though. In practice the tax is basically just a wealth transfer from the private sector to the state, who will use that money to dump into boomer pensions and not invest in packaging innovation.

Punitive taxation doesn't invent new technologies. Investment does.

For example, the only reason the electric car market even exists today is because of subsidies 15 years ago.

I agree subsidies can easily turn into a boondoggle, but so can the state itself given more tax money.

Ultimately, I personally think government choosing to focus time and money on this specific thing over other far more important issues is dumb (like say, the thousands of young men dying in Ukraine right now, the social welfare debt spiral, the lack of a capital markets union, the lack of any coherent military strategy, etc. etc.)

But if we're going to posture as if we actually care about this issue, we are going about the desired outcome the completely wrong way.

Please cite ANY evidence that Amazon, Epstein, Aliens, etc. had anything to do with this particular EU packaging nightmare...and that it wasn't wholly due to the bike shedding nature of a massive incomprehensible bureaucracy.

I’m no fan of big tech, but, at some point the conspiratorial bending over backwards to blame big business instead of the government representatives creating the actual harm gets ridiculous.

Again, I often sympathize with the left leaning side of things, but you have to admit our side has a massive blind spot in terms of blaming all the worlds ills on a secret cabal of business elites instead of blaming the mechanism of government power actually creating the harm.

If we’re being honest, Amazon feels zero threat from European small businesses and quite frankly barely sees much value in their EU ecomm business at all. If anybody wants to see the EU turn into one market with one set of simple regulations it’s them. Trust me, they are not worried about small Etsy sellers.

The fundamental issue is the EU is a “union” in name only and the member states fundamentally don’t actually want to work together unanimously on most things. Yet, we’re paying all those officials in Brussels to do something, and the trivial green consumer issues like bottle caps are the only thing that doesn’t cause too big of a fight. It’s bike shedding 101. [1]

Until we acknowledge that this is the true root of the problem instead of inventing tired conspiracies, we cannot solve any of the issues.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality

If you need to both:

a) exempt companies with under 50 employees to not kill small business

AND

b) are okay with doing so, ie. there's little consequences from exempting companies from this

Then this is the mark of a terrible piece of legislation. What problem are we actually addressing here by creating another fee collecting, headache inducing registration regime and the 684th enforcement bureaucracy in the EU over yet another trivial consumer issue?

Yes, single use plastics aren't great. Incentivize companies to move away from them by creating positive market incentives instead of creating an anti-productive, full time packaging Stasi.

It's almost as if the people attracted to a career in government can only imagine their subjects responding to the stick, even though the carrot is often far more persuasive. This is the classic downfall of all economic central planning.

The problem with this particular topic is it's a religious one for many in the urban monoculture. They don't ultimately care about packaging waste, they care about punishment and repentance for humanity's existence. We've angered the gods and must repent via punitive measures! To incentivize good behavior is antithetical to that, even if it is more effective at actually doing the thing.