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Does anyone else feel like we're heading for a good old-fashioned, 2008-tier, financial crash? I recall people bringing up the possibility ever since Covid bucks started rolling out, but even though we were due for one, and even though the money printer was going brrrrr, the crash has so far failed to materialize.
At the time, I was of two minds about this. On one hand, all the libertarian theory I used to subscribe to said money-printing => boom, boom => bust. On the other hand, the problem for me was it never felt like a boom, and I think this is changing now. A key feature of the pre-crash boom is "malinvestment"; capital going into often downright deranged projects, that are later abandoned half-finished. Well, I feel like the datacenter craze qualifies, and with the wave of AI IPOs that are coming just as major indices are changing their rules, to allow for these companies' near-instantaneous inclusion (an investment so good, you can't pass up on it. Literally, if you're American), it seems like we're solidly in the "irrational exuberance" phase.
Add this to the list of things I hope I'm wrong about, because if we get a proper crash, the political fallout is going to be massive. The script writes itself: Trump / tech bros / capitalism bad, even more gay race communism now.
To whitepillers: is there an argument for why I'm wrong that doesn't boil down to "you don't get it, chud, it's the New Economy! The Singularity is just around the corner! All the rules are obsolete!"? This argument is verboten, because this is pretty much what people say with every bubble.
To fellow blackpillers: any ideas on how to brace for impact? Any IT guys here old enough to make it through the dotcom bubble? How did you do it? Any advice you would have given your past self?
For the first time in decades, in my entire life, the US seems to actually be excited about real huge scale projects. We lead the world undeniably in a new state of the art, we have energetic and ambitious figures fighting each other in a titanic race to innovate on projects at never before attempted scale. A site the size of Manhattan! that's small beans lets do it in space! It's just such an incredible bummer how cynical and bitter so many seem to be about it. Truly it could all go wrong, scaling could stop it's definitely within the distribution of possible future that tokens become a commodity in such a way that these investments don't pay off. But if you wanted to make America great again, if you wanted to actually build impressive physical things here at home and show the world what we're capable of, then this is our ticket. Were you under the impression regeneration was going to be a sure thing?
I feel like I'm watching people sabotage nuclear energy all over again over bullshit hallucinated fears of disaster or made up sour grapes about how huge amounts of energy from fission wouldn't even be that useful. We made computers talk like people and they've progressed in only a few years from barely coherent chat partners to genuinely useful junior programmers. I think there's a fair chance this whole thing ends up with all of us dead as well as a fair chance that progress peters out but how can you not be excited?
Are you really surprised why a technology where its proponents and developers are saying that it has a solid chance of killing everyone and/or consigning the median person into permanent unemployment at best, or creating a titanic financial bubble that's going to bring everyone's retirement with it if it doesn't pay off at worst, is extremely unpopular?
As a software engineer I enjoy using coding agents and I do think with demographics and fertility being what they are, the only real choice as a society is leaning into AI and automation as much as possible even with the commensurate risks, but frankly the median person has really not seen proportional consumer surplus from the trillions invested into post GPT-4 or so LLM development, and in return all they get is dealing with a tsunami of online slop, vibe-coded software that gets worse even as engineers boast about how productive they are, and higher prices for power and RAM.
At least in China they have the message discipline to tell people that AI is going to be used to improve people's quality of life, but all SF can do is jerk off about the AI-induced permanent underclass happening any month now and how dangerous AI is is going to be; it's obvious why the median person hates the AI build-out.
I have a snarky Freudian theory that the rise of the tech right and a lot of SV comms missteps have the same root cause - that the founder/VC elite are failing to contain their white-hot rage at having to pay upper-middle class salaries (and extend the respect the upper class traditionally extends to the upper-middle class) to mere codemonkeys who lack upper-middle class social graces.
In this model, the "permanent generational underclass" meme is founders, VCs, and people who see themselves as future founders and VCs expressing glee at the codemonkeys losing undeserved social status. From the point of view of someone who can afford a family-sized house in the Bay Area, nurses, plumbers etc. are already part of the underclass.
If that was the issue for them they’d have fired all the expensive American software engineers making $300k years ago and replaced them with French, British and Germans making a quarter or a third of that.
I think both sides of the culture war agree that the Valley did try to do this, but with Indians instead of Europeans. They disagree on whether or not it succeeded, and whether or not it would be a good thing if it did.
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They tried. Didn't work. The French, British, and Germans at home weren't good substitutes, and the ones who came to the US demanded the $300k.
But I would have pegged you (along with BC) as one of most likely to be experiencing that white-hot rage at the wrong people making the big bucks.
I think nobody deserves to make one cent less than the amount they can fairly negotiate. IQ and demographics do not indicate a great superiority for American tech workers. US companies achieved dominant global positions because of larger domestic markets, far more readily available capital, network effects and superior entrepreneurial culture. But none of these suggest US engineers are far better or smarter than their European peers. That would be unlikely.
The pay is likely load-bearing for the engineers just as it is for the founders. Pay a top engineer a normal middle class salary, and you'll get good, solid work out of them. Give them a chance to get rich and you'll likely get a lot more.
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What is the downside to just throwing all these people off a cliff again? I'm actually asking.
The right-wing misanthropic VCs, the no-longer-needed codemonkeys, or the plumbers? Tossing any of the three is a plausible sentiment for at least one Motteposter to hold.
But if, as I suspect, you mean why can't we throw Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen off a cliff, the answer is that Musk is too valuable to the work of society given that he can build space rockets 1-2 orders of magnitude cheaper than anyone else. Andreessen, on the other hand...
Why would anyone wanna throw the plumbers off a cliff? I’m not trying to be dense here that just seems like a weird group of people to be angry at.
Childhood trauma from Super Mario?
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In the UK, because too many of them are Polish.
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It's not that weird for committed shitlibs. Union plumbers are ultramaga republicans.
Granted we don't have a lot of people on the motte that want to clear out all the magats on the grounds that if they can do it we can do without it. But the bluesky crowd being horrified at the politics of the experts at keeping their lights on and their water running is a semi-regular occurrence.
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Marc Andressen was the first person to come to mind when I wrote my response to the OP. The guy was born to middle-class parents in Iowa and raised in Wisconsin. He was himself a computer programmer. He's not the kind of elitist described. (Also you can't throw him off a cliff because the man is huge.)
It's been a very long time since Andressen was checking in code. It is obvious from reading e.g. Paul Graham's essays that VCs and successful founders see themselves as a different kind of person to top technical talent (tl;dr - Altman said that James Bond was fundable but Q would not be) - and the things that Paul Graham is saying are conventional wisdom in the valley. My impression is that both founders/VCs and top technical talent see the gap between top technical talent and mid-tier technical talent as so large that the average FAANG Senior is closer to QA and HR than to themselves.
My take is that Andressen is one of the main people pushing the theory (which I think originated with Musk) that FAANG were roughly 2x overstaffed and that this was a bad thing because they were outbidding startups for talent. I remember him tweeting "Nature heals itself" in response to a post about tech layoffs and coming to the conclusion that he resented his (indirect via portfolio companies) employees.
I will admit to also disliking Andressen because a16z seems to be disproportionately likely to invest in ethically dubious startups like crypto scams, Adam Neumann's Flow and the AI "cheating" app Cluely.
I (a former FAANG engineer) would agree with him that founders are different sorts of people than top technical talent; at least most of them are. (Steve Wozniak is one obvious exception: it was Jobs who had the non-technical talent in spades). And that Google, at least, is ridiculously overstaffed. That's different than resenting "code monkeys" making a lot of money; wanting technical talent to be available to startups is valuing them highly, not considering them lower organisms of some sort. It might be better for the engineers to phone it in and collect a paycheck on the latest obviously-doomed FAANG project rather than bust their butt at a startup, but Andressen's desire for them to do the latter is based on greed, not resentment.
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Huge as in obese or jacked?
I’ve only seen pics or interviews of him sitting or from the waist up. From what I could tell he always came across as a pudgy short computer nerd type. With a head shaped exactly like an egg.
I think he's like 6-7.
Okay actually an in inch or two shorter but still a giant.
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Which people? There's a lot of groups mentioned there. The least valuable are probably "people who see themselves as future founders" (yeah, yeah, ideas are a dime a dozen)... and the people who have that rage. Who I don't think are actually SV founders and VCs; while some are traditional business types, and a few even have multi-generational money, most are noveau-riche just like the "code monkeys" they're paying. They may not like paying them, but that's pretty much for financial reasons. There are definitely those who hate that gauche technical people get paid big, but it's not that group.
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The alternative is that we become Europe, a pathetic retirement home telling itself unending stories of its greatness or the populist have us tear ourselves apart on the pathway to becoming so. The chance of it killing us all is coming either way unless we can get yudd style international treaties to pause/slow down(which I do support but am not expecting to happen). And the likely results of trying it and it crashing don't look terribly different to me than the trajectory we're on if we don't take the swing. A bunch of retirement counts but especially silicone valley investor types get hosed and we all get ridiculously cheap cloud compute for a generation.
I mean of course they haven't because those dollars haven't even been meaningfully spent yet because we haven't built the datacenters. The models people are using are the results of more like the tens to low hundreds of billions of dollars and even that takes time to actually build into products people would like. It takes time for actual artisans to learn to use new tools to produce more than just slop.
The median person who hates AI thinks a literal bottle of water is obliterated from the universe every time you query chat gpt for anything. Almost all of the concerns raised by the median anti-ai person are retarded propaganda produced by slopulists who, correctly, think of them as cattle that they can lie to with impunity in order to gin enough outrage to propel them into office, keep them supporting their slop rage social media account or because they're genuinely foreign spooks trying to retard our progress.
Actually, this exact perspective is the thing that the median person hates about AI. The water usage isn't the issue, the slop isn't the issue, the fact that AI doesn't produce any value for the median person and instead makes much of their life notably worse isn't the issue - the issue is that pompous 'tech elites' think they're better than us.
I'm personally of the opinion that the AI ecology in its current instantiation is evil in almost every single way, but the biggest way it is evil is that it's a transparent attempt to destroy the lives of everyone who isn't a part of that ecology. It's a predatory economic model, and the prey is that median person that you have such derision for.
Maybe I'm not a "median person" but AI has definitely improved my life in many ways and has made it worse in roughly 0 ways.
Basically every social problem AI is claimed to cause was a massive issue pre-2022.
"Oh no the internet is full of retards, slop and advertising!!" is it 2005, 2015, or 2025?
I think that last sentence exactly shows why you're out of touch. I'm not complaining about the effects on internet culture. I'm talking about the extreme damage to our education system, where students use LLMs to complete the assignments that were created by LLMs and will be graded by the same LLMs, and the data shows massive loss in basic knowledge and critical thinking skills. I'm talking about the environmentally catastrophic data centers being erected over the protests of the people living there. Real harm to actual people in the Real World.
So your stance is that the US education system was doing fantastically in 2021? No pre-existing problems or awful trends?
This is so depressing. I agree with you here. I hate that this is happening.
I don't blame LLMs though. I use LLMs to teach myself new things all the time.
I blame the absolutely shit school system, which has been shit and wildly unable to adapt to anything my entire life.
How are they bad? Can you actually substantiate this? What makes them worse than giant suburban tracts of sprawl?
Of course education has been bad for a long time, but the fact that it's bad doesn't mean AI isn't making it worse.
As for the data centers, there's a lot of independent reporting on this from people living near them on immediate harms. There's damage to groundwater that makes the local tap water undrinkable, there's constant noise levels in residential areas.
On a larger scale, data centers are now responsible for 1% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and projected to rise. This paper estimates it at $25 billion in environmental damage per year.
There's also other more subtle impacts. For instance, the Utah data center project is expected to produce a heat island effect that would raise temperatures from 5 degrees during the day to up to 28 degrees at night, potentially preventing the dew point condensation effect and quite literally killing local ecologies.
All of these effects are being ignored in the name of progress, and the costs of these externalities are being paid by the people living in these areas who have no say in the matter.
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People caught up in slop anti-growth and anti-human ideologies are worse than people who aren't. You weren't born this way, you can stop being worse than people who are better than you instantly by coming to your senses. No one is forcing you to identify with a hateful dead end black pilled ideology who's arguments are soldiers because they have no actual arguments. In every way that matters you're no different to the communists who cope with their own failures and salve their egos by inventing conspiracies of the rich. And the most pathetic element of it is this pure bullshit demand to have your feelings coddled without there being any condescension. There is no way to be this careful about hurting your feelings without condescension, it's not possible.
"It's not any of the things I say it is, it's that you don't pretend to like the people saying ignorant bullshit trying to stop progress convincingly enough"
Give me a break.
Thanks for reinforcing my point! Somehow, in your view, it's impossible to disagree with your take on AI without being 'pathetic' 'anti-human' who can't 'cope with their own failures'.
I rest my case.
Certainly it's possible to disagree with my position. But you've not disagreed with it, you've explicitly said the problem isn't my position, it's the rhetoric used, it's your feelings. I have a number of takes on AI that I think have very reasonable foils, I've gone over them at length. If you want to engage with them then please do so. But if your demand is that I show respect for slopulist liars who have contempt for the truth then I refuse.
Sorry, no. If you just go back and look, I originally responded to your claim that
by arguing that the median person's position on AI is essentially rooted in the (correct) belief that AI and tech bros in general are contemptuous of them and their concerns. This is not a 'slop' view nor is it a 'demand to have your feelings coddled'. It plays out in all areas of the AI ecology, from billionaires paying off city councils to build data centers that almost every constituent opposes, to companies firing large parts of their workforce because of 'AI efficiencies' that don't actually exist, to the degradation of our public education system by replacing teachers with AI tools that don't work... shall I go on? AI boosters are deliberately and with malice aforethought trying to destroy the lives of the 'median person' and treating that as just an unfortunate externality of their race towards godhood. It's the very definition of evil.
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I generally agree, in the sense that "WW2 was inevitable as a result of complex geopolitical factors post-WW1", that "if the fate of human civilization is to create the Torment Nexus, then the Torment Nexus will inevitably end up being created", but obviously that didn't clear Hitler's name and being on the vanguard of potentially creating the Torment Nexus is simply not going to make AI labs popular.
I mean, is that supposed to make it a more appealing thesis for the average person? "You should give us a trillion dollars to build out datacentres that aren't being built, and maybe if you give us enough and we finally succeed you'll be lucky to get something out of it and avoid the permanent underclass or being drone striked by Skynet" is not exactly stirring rhetoric. I'm not saying that AI is useless or that it couldn't theoretically generate a lot of consumer surplus, but that's clearly not what the public messaging on the topic in the West is pushing.
While it's true that populist anti-AI arguments are not very good and mostly arguments-as-soldiers, that's distinct from not having good reasons to act that way in the first place. There's a dedicated core of people who hate phones, cars or fracking, but most people just enjoy the benefits to their lives from those technologies and move on with their lives; there isn't really such consumer surplus and many externalities from the current state of AI, so it's no wonder why people start turning to populists and arguments as soldiers.
Yeah, we should get on those bilateral international treaties that Yudd wants. Until then the alternative is unilateral ceasing where we lose all the upside and delay the problem by optimistically 6 months to two years. I don't really see that as a reasonable choice, especially because approximately zero of the people you're talking about are taking x-risk seriously anyways. This subject is more about me hedging my excitement and has nothing to do with what the opponents actually care about.
They are being built, just have not yet finished being built. and no one besides investors are being asked to give them anything. If people don't want to be personally invested in these projects then I have no real beef with those people. I haven't decided exactly what my own financial position will be in relationship to the IPOs.
You're conflating a number of different people and positions. none of the labs are pushing the "permanent underclass" line. That's an expressed anxiety of some people on social media who feel something big is coming and they don't know how to prepare for it. It's like when people get indignant at "tech bros" for the learn to code meme. It wasn't tech bros that proposed miners should learn to code, it was random journalists. Anthropic is currently in the process of getting blackballed by the department of war for taking a stand against their models being used for domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons. The labs and their staff have been unusually honest and forthright with their concerns about how we need to work out as a society what we're going to do if a singularity event happens. For the most part people like op have accused them of fear mongering to hype their product. No doubt if they downplayed the risks they'd be accused of lying about the potential downsides.
I don't know what to do here. Really. I have no idea what I'm supposed to do about people who make terrible and ignorant arguments as soldiers against fantom interlocutors. That's one of the most frustrating elements of this whole topic. There are civilizationally important conversations to be had. But all I'm presented with are people who somehow simultaneously believe that the whole industry is a scam that doesn't even work while also being an imminent threat to all jobs which it will somehow be able to remove without actually providing any value. And this incoherent position is expressed in the form of on their face ridiculous empirical claims. It's exhausting.
More than anything what I feel about these people is that they just want to be mad, half of them have been whining for years about American decline and incapacity. This is a field where we are excelling, if America is going to right itself and bring about a new age of American prosperity this is it, this is the chance. Should we squander it? Certainly one should be cautious and prudent but that isn't what these people are. They have already written us off and want things to get worse to validate their black pilled priors. They'd rather this all fall apart so they can smugly say "I told you so" in the ruins. I fear some might even, if they could, sabotage us to this end. I want to wake them up.
Money is fungible. To a first approximation, if a trillion dollars is going into trying to build data centers (and failing, in many respects) that's a enormous chunk of resources that isn't going into fusion research, hiring, fixing bridges, what have you - things that could directly and meaningfully improve people's lives.
FWIW I'm optimistic about AI as a normal productivity-improving technology for improving people's lives, but this is explicitly not what the frontier American labs are aiming for, and it seems extremely difficult to justify the trillion dollar investments in a AI-as-normal-technology world where tokens are inevitably commoditized and primarily inferenced locally.
I guess I'm just feeling a disconnect from your posts. If you want to be a hard-nosed historical realist, OK: in the same way that the Treaty of Versailles and the Great Depression made WW2 inevitable and Hitler was merely in the right place at the right time, I agree that race dynamics ensure in no realistic world does a bilateral pause happen, and that as soon as Attention Is All You Need was published realistically no force on the planet could have stopped the AI race from accelerating - Altman and Amodei were merely in the right places at the right times to ride the wave.
But then you go on about "how can you not be excited" and "[bringing] about a new age of American prosperity" and I'm just confused about how you can think we're being forced into a world where if anyone builds it everyone (probably) dies and think this is a good thing. At best, if by some miracle alignment is inherent, you're under the heel of God-Emperor AI Frontier Lab Leader or God-Emperor Democratic/Republican President (adjust for your outgroup party) for all time and at worst all America's done is won the "created the Torment Nexus first" award.
At the end of the day "American" and "Chinese" are merely constructs of society as we know it and not immutable laws of reality - I fail to see how "superhuman general intelligence" and "liberal democratic All-American values as we know them" or "superhuman general intelligence" and "socialist values with Chinese characteristics as we know them" could meaningfully co-exist, so what benefit does the median person really get from ultimate, unaccountable power being instantiated 2000 vs 6000 miles away from them?
Their money is not fungible with our money or the state's money. much of it is debt that can only be created because of the promise of a return. If you want to be more sophisticated you could say the labor being used to build these things was bid up and would otherwise be able to be allocated more cheaply to other projects but even then what you're arguing for is that trades people get paid less which seems kind of counter to the rest of your position. Trillions are spent on much less worthy consumption than building durable data infrastructure.
Yes, the question of whether the tokens get commoditized is a major factor on whether these investments will pay off for the labs. But why is that your problem? So in one potential future a bunch of investors who aren't you get soaked and you get to enjoy the fruits of incredibly discounted inference capex. This is a gift directly from frontier lab investors to you, you should cheer on their generosity.
Unless many breakthroughs happen this will not be the case any time soon. Batched queries are several orders of magnitude more efficient than single thread inference.
There's some difficulty of keeping multiple potential futures in your head at once. It goes something like:
Essentially across all of these worlds and acutely in some these data centers are pure upside epsilon the handful of upset caused by any construction project that should be easily sorted out locally.
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No, production is not zero-sum and in any case money is not the limit of these things. God could come down from Heaven and declare a halt to data center development, and we would not get one step closer to fusion (might actually slow things down), and not one more bridge would be fixed (possibly fewer, in that the data center people might need a bridge fixed).
Money is an abstraction over resource allocation in this context - I agree that production is not zero-sum, but many of the inputs to production are obviously rivalrous; land, power, raw resources, construction workers and chip fab allocation are all finite and rivalrous to name a few.
If you're just trying to be edgy about lack of state capacity being why shit doesn't get built then I agree, in many cases resource allocation is not the limiting factor as to why no progress is made, but it's farcial to claim that resource allocation isn't the limiting factor for anything that might directly improve people's lives.
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I mean this in all sincerity and good faith, and not as a rhetorical question: are you hearing yourself talk right now? You do understand why many reasonable people would find this rhetoric offputting, right?
"Yeah there's something big coming. You'll lose your job. Everyone will lose their job, there will be no more jobs. Deal with it, crybaby. Adapt. Not my problem if you can't prepare. Move fast and break things."
Losing your job is generally a traumatic and unpleasant experience for people. It means they stop making money, and they need money to buy things. Everyone losing their job at the same time because there are no more jobs sounds even worse.
Now, if you want to simply take a hardline Darwinian stance and say that the fittest will win out and life has always been permanent flux and that's simply that, then I wouldn't really have any problems with that. You would at least be internally consistent. But you're both a) saying things that have extremely offputting implications, and b) you're confused about why anyone would oppose your position, so you deduce that they must all be brainwashed cattle. Do you see the issue here?
But how do we determine how that value gets distributed, and to whom? How do people accumulate resources if they're unable to sell their labor? These are reasonable questions to ask, no?
I'm at a disadvantage because I have to defend a complicated process that must exist in the real world from people in the peanut gallery and I'm not willing to lie about my own worries. There are problems and things we are going to have to address in the near future around this rapidly changing technology. I've got my eyes wide open and probably take existential risk more seriously than any of the detractors here. I advocate for getting UBI set up as basic civic infrastructure for if this job loss things starts coming at us fast. The critics here are making no such concessions to reality. They aren't expected to actually have an answer to the "what about the fact that china is going to build this anyways just a few year later?" question. All they do is throw peanuts and moan about problems that those of us who see the potential in this industry have been talking about for years and have produced volumes of discourse on that they refuse to read or engage with.
Literally who the fuck is saying this? Every lab that thinks job displacement is coming has produced documents and spoken at length about how we must prepare for this and create a future where everyone can benefit from the abundance. There is a great deal of pressure to lie about this. What is your solution exactly? Can you please come down from the peanut gallery and actually talk about what we're going to do productively instead of engaging in this exhaustive discourse about the feelings of people who are acting like toddlers. I'll be honest, I've completely lost my patience with this discourse.
Yes, these are indeed good questions to ask. I don't object to people asking these questions. In fact I think they're very important things we should politically work out, the labs seem to broadly agree that this is the kind of discussion we should be having. I object to people lying about projects. Lying about projects and talking about what we're going to do if things go well and no one has to work anymore are very different types of behaviors.
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We have spent trillions of dollars on AI tech, not turned a profit, and not been able to build even a modest moat around the technology.
What if we had spent those trillions of dollars on literally anything else? We could have the best automated manufacturing in the world, or advanced medical technology, or any of a dozen other things that would bring actual prosperity to the nation as a whole.
You seem to be conflating 'we spent a ton of money on this' with 'we are excelling'. The whole point is that AI is a bad investment!
It takes more than a couple years to see the fruits of spending trillions of dollars. Building data centers takes actual years itself, and those data centers are used to do research which itself takes time. I would definitely argue that we're already seeing returns for previous investments and that the perspective that they haven't paid off is hopelessly short sighted. If we want to be great we have to be willing to make investments that take more than a quarter to pay off. I'm reminded of people who doubted amazon or uber because they invested aggressively rather than trying to immediately turn a profit.
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China, whose one ruling party can have a plan spanning many decades, has the advantage in long term developments. Like when they decided 40 years ago to corner the rare earths market.
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Aren't there, like, more practical ways for America to right itself? Like, I dunno, kicking out criminal illegal immigrants and purging the commies?
Would those actually result in America "righting itself", even ignoring the expected self-harm from the backlash due to the large number of Americans against those two things? Criminal illegal immigrants don't really seem like a problem that is big enough except psychologically, unless the illegal immigration itself is considered a sufficient crime, in which case kicking them out would probably kick the bottom out of agriculture and other menial labour heavy areas; purging the commies might entail destroying much of the tech industry and university research, because a lot of the most productive people there are about the most proudly self-identifying commies around.
"Sure, destroying the things I hate will cause a lot of disruption at first, but what will grow back afterwards will be so much better because it will not be encumbered by the things I hate" is a line of argumentation that has a bad enough track record (including, in particular, from assorted commies!) that one should not just accept it on faith.
Are you not expecting self-harm from the backlash due to the AI revolution?
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