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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.
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.
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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