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Long time listener, first time caller.
The war on AI datacenters (and normal ones as a bit of collateral damage) has been going on for a little while now, with those opposed fiercely fighting a lot of these projects pretty much wherever, whenever. It seems to be one of the most bipartisan issues facing the country right now and those who are pro-datacenter have been effectively politically slaughtered. As of a few days ago though, there seems to have been a small little flash point in the thing. I haven't really seen a thread here about this (although definitely could have missed one), and I'm actually a little surprised at it since I do think this is probably one of the biggest culture wars in America of this year. Anyway, curious thoughts on this, etc
From what I can tell, the flashpoint was yesterday when Axios reported (and later posted) a letter from the Ohio RNC to AI companies effectively calling being pro-datacenter politically radioactive. It kinda exploded at this point over Twitter and later Greg Abbott put a thing out about it yesterday after enacting a pause earlier this month. Basically the only one who didn't respond in a politically obvious way was Trump in a presser who was quoted as saying "if I were the mayor of a town or the governor of a state, and I had a chance to get a big plant in, an AI plant or a data center." I think this quote right here might be the worst strategic blunder since the Iran War. If I were the DNC, the clip would be on every station in the country
The reaction to these things are incredibly understandable. Their argument effectively goes "they use our water and electricity, provide a service to enhance the surveillance state and the interests of Big Tech, their proponents openly admit that they're gonna take your job, they bully communities, and they don't even pay taxes either, all the while poisoning the communities they leech on with pollution and noise." Personally, I'm honestly quite surprised that political radioactivity is the biggest thing that has happened so far. This seems to be an issue that unites people regardless of political party or affiliation...
...probably because it's being correctly seen as a existential threat to people's lives and livelihoods. Polling against datacenter construction is incredibly poor, arguably being worse than coal or nuclear power plants (yeah I know, different surveys). I think this, if I were to pin a spark on this (there are many), it's the story of the Memphis xAI datacenter and also the lawsuits against Solon Township to effectively bully them into allowing the project. Communities, seeing what happened there and politically, have somewhat backtracked quite a bit where before they were much more open to it. Some of those that haven't are proactively enacting outright bans
If this culture war has one side, who is the other? Silicon Valley, billionaires, etc, seems to be the obvious answer here.
Both Altman and Amodei screwed up public perception big time, although I don't think it's 100% their fault. I imagine though this is basically because they're put in a double bind. If it isn't absolutely economy ending for every other company, the trillions pumped into their valuation will vaporize faster than you can say "AGI," but people tend to believe (correctly so) when someone threatens them (and have especially checkered pasts as both these guys do), that their threats are genuine, so when those PR puff pieces trickle down to the public at large.
The All In guys have tried to pin this on Amodei in particular, but I think some people just see that as them talking their book
They've tried to label the opposition as "China," but that clearly doesn't make much sense given that the problems are genuine. Cremieux has tried to take up the mantle on the issue, but I think people see his arguments are seen as specious and as relying on theoreticals that don't match observations on the ground, and this has I think backfired
Expect to see more bans and moratoriums happening across the country. Will be interesting to watch. Thoughts?
America is a big country, inhabited by few Americans (in most of its territory). Datacenters are, all told, pretty small things, these aren't wheat fields or even airports. The politics of early singularity is interesting: people refuse the maximalist AGI and human replacement framing for assorted cultural reasons, and instead latch on to any adjacent smear – from the inane water use stuff to semi-legitimate surveillance and energy costs concerns to "they don't create jobs". The outcome is overdetermined. AI is already the main engine of economic growth, and the success at AI development and broad diffusion (at this level of utility, just scaling inference capacity) is deemed a matter of national survival. The popular resistance will be overcome, persuaded to relent, bribed in select locales, or routed around. Maybe Anthropic will finetune a Mythos 2 version specifically for propaganda.
The biggest practical consequence may be the increase in returns to Musk's idea with orbital compute, and of course his ownership of SpaceX. There are no NIMBYs in space. Without all this, it'd have taken maybe 2-3 more years until viability; now, it starts working pretty much after they manage the first Starship land-and-reuse after an orbital insertion.
This is probably because you or they won't see AGI or human replacement in your lifetimes, but they will see higher water bills, a surveillance state, higher electricity bills, and job loss. I am not sure what makes you so blasé about predicting bizarre outcomes like «singularity», but it is really odd and out-there, especially given nobody has ever predicted anything properly in the AI space. The systems are too random. Nobody knew GPT 3 would come out and expand in 2022, particularly not you. Nobody knew Opus 5 would be doing what it's doing now in 2026, you have literally no idea what 2030 or 2034 will look like. None.
I don't know why you assume "particularly not you" would have predicted GPT-3. GPT-3 follows from GPT-2 follows from Vaswani et al. Why do you think plenty of intelligent people, including Dario Amodei and Ilya Sutskever, got so agitated when that paper came out and started scrambling for commercialization? Do you believe they were that into machine translation as a business? Of course folks like Hinton, Sutskever's teacher, were running multi-decade research programs premised on connectionism being enough for intelligence in general, not just for some particular capability demo. I was pretty AGI-pilled all of my conscious life, admittedly mostly for shallow sci-fi reasons, and got convinced of inevitable singularity once I saw (and later launched) DeepDream. That degree of quasi-creative flexibility was an unambiguous proof, for me, that we have really grasped the sufficient basic primitive of universal learning. That's the biggest piece that biological life needed to go from insects to humans, and hardware&software cycles are inherently absurdly faster plus capital can grow exponentially, so what exactly could the counterargument even be?
In my opinion, this is "out there" on purely rhetorical grounds – skepticism is a product of incomplete information available in the popular discourse, and skeptics who profess to have some principled objections are continuously humbled and forced into retreat (like Chollet or LeCun, the French are annoying in this way; or hey, remember when Hlynka tried to burst my/others bubble here with some prose about mathematical Truth versus wordcel nonsense? I wonder how he feels about the recent math results from OAI/Ant). The coarse-grained logic is settled since Samuel Butler, the timelines and mechanisms were getting constantly refined, now we have a good idea of the necessary mechanisms and a thicket of more or less cheap ways to compensate for any particular – and still temporary – technological block.
Vernor Vinge, 1993:
Shane Legg, 2009:
Shane Legg, 2011:
Kurzweil, according to Google's AI, “predicts that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) will arrive by 2029. He first made this prediction in his 1999 book The Age of Spiritual Machines, and has maintained it through subsequent books like The Singularity Is Near and The Singularity Is Nearer.”
and in 1988, “pioneering Carnegie Mellon University roboticist Hans Moravec predicted that hardware matching the computing power of the human brain would arrive by the late 2020s, enabling human-level artificial intelligence. He argued that processing capacity, driven by hardware scaling, would naturally unlock general machine intelligence.’’
While nowhere close to these giants, largely on account of my age, I believe I have a pretty decent prediction track record in this field (I have plenty of receipts here, such as talking about DeepSeek when their V1 Coder and LLM came out in late 2023; since then their architecture and much else became the default paradigm in the industry).
What about Opus 5? It's been programmed since o1-preview at least. Of course the specific product name, timing, costs, benchmark numbers and downstream capability priorities are all unpredictable but trivial. Anthropic surviving and remaining well-resourced enough to compete was very likely, the substance of the rest follows necessarily.
That's fair, that's the predictable part, as Vinge has predicted. But then again, as Yud said, you don't know how specifically a superhuman AI will beat you in chess; you can just safely bet on it doing so. I have a pretty clear idea that at this rate we will have AI doing wildly superhuman knowledge work by 2030. This is the most salient and important part, unlike the specious water use trolling. And thus the real problem people should have with AI, I believe, is still the same I outlined 3 years ago.
I strongly believe there are no remaining valid objections to this big picture. You're welcome to make some.
You used to post on an engaging variety of important topics with AI in the background. Now it seems AI, specifically, for some reason, Chinese AI, is to you the only important topic. Not even on frontier labs which still don't have chatbots that can do, e.g., decent philosophy or social criticism, but DeepSeek, which is still quite bad. I see you have moved on to GLM and Kimi which are at least like 2nd gen models. I still haven't done anything useful with DeepSeek though. But frontier models even are reddit bots that have a swarm of hackernews user coding brain lobes hooked into each other with wires, they are not even high human level unitary intelligences.
When exactly do you think we're getting UBI? Then when am we're getting radical life extension? And complete freedom? Because you write on Chinese AI models like Deepseek 2028 will be granting these things. I am more pessimistic. I think we could be dead before it happens. I think LLM technologies are pseudo-intelligent and could stall for decades just like the early internet. I'm out there too when it comes to popular discourse. When I said you are out there I mean it's not adding up even for me. For every 20th century prolog pseudogenius you mention in your writing there's several who think LLMs aren't the answer. Why are the latter stupid but the former are «giants»?
Yes, but when matters. We'll have robots and AI eventually. And humans will certainly be supplanted or entirely die out eventually. Is it in the next decade or after my natural life time? What about that of my grand children? You have no idea but you act like it's in the next decade or could be. I'm not seeing it.
So by 2023. Wrong. It appears he sadly died 1 year after his failed prediction, after a career of assuming the 20th century would continue indefinitely under advanced technology:
Under true singularity there will be no US or governments at all, no high schools, and no less-than-super humans. They will look down on these people as laughing stocks, as those people look down on apes today.
As for Kurzweil:
I hope he's right, but like I said I'm just not seeing it.
I am talking about timing and capability, not name or company provenance. What will the frontier model be capable of in 2030? We don't know. We don't know if there will be JS devs left then. Or in 2040. Or even 2050. Much less if we will have blue collar work robots.
Great, like automating all of labor and relieving me from all labor by 2032?
Big picture is too easy. If I don't get radical life extension then none of it mattered enough to consume all of your posting effort. The problem remained other people and technology was not a savior. I mainly post about how evil other people are and how they lie about this and why. I would love for technology to free good people from their grasp in 10 years but 3 years ago GPT 4 was helping me code. They still help me code but I have to fill in less. They aren't very good at anything other than code and shell commands. You can't write with them, for instance. And they still have made no direct contribution to science. I can see that only beginning to change in 5 years. I can see 70% of the current programming job market still existing in 10; again I would love for it to go faster because working is a waste of my time.
Because it is the most important topic if you accept the premise of AGI soon. Let's put it very simply. No Chinese AI = American AI = American AGI way ahead of any other nation's, utilized by the Department of War and other state agencies = quasi-Fukuyamian end of history on American terms in a few years, with very high probability. It's not an interesting future to speculate about: Americans (some subset of them) will build the means of assuming permanent hegemony and decide what to use it for. And for now – they only have to think about ensuring the conditions for building those means. There's pretty much nothing to discuss for me. Were I American, I'd probably be invested in debating post-AGI politics, allocation of spoils, civilian influence on federal institutions, Rapture, or whatever. Americans may still agonize on whether to inflict Lusotropical fascism, gay race communism, turbo-consumerism, Noahide laws, or some other homegrown cult on us, from their God-like unassailable hegemonic position. Those are all very valid topics for Americans to discuss. But the first order effect of turning the rest of the world into de facto NPCs dominates in my thinking, rendering me ill-equipped to pay any mind to relevant factors of culture war, and so I'll humbly leave it to Americans to have a fertile and rigorous discourse on what they'll do in that scenario.
If Chinese AI keeps pace to such an extent that Americans can't just squash it or negotiate the freeze of its progress from a position of strength, as intended by eg Dario Amodei (I would have taken non-Chinese AI too but that doesn't appear to be forthcoming), this creates at least two centers of agency; and given Chinese insistence on open sourcing their strongest models, which started with DeepSeek, became the norm for Chinese AI companies, and is generally supported by the State, it may also maintain the relevance of smaller actors outside the two poles. Thus the medium term future has a chance of containing some interesting dynamics, non-Americans with agency, and history and culture as such.
This seems to me like a sufficient reason to mostly not bother with other topics, though man is weak and I regularly indulge in distractions.
A few years ago, I didn't think that this will be the shape of the near future, admittedly mostly because I wasn't thinking clearly enough about AI; this configuration falls out naturally from material factors. I also was biased by emotional investment in Russia and parochial ethnic sentimentality. Still, as early as in October 2020, I was saying that scaled-up Transformers may automate white-collar work. Yes, I'm no Sutskever, I didn't know for certain that we won't need another large paradigm change.
I was also drastically underrating China, saying they don't have domestic chip industry and won't have one in time, so won't pose a challenge to the US in AI. To be honest it wasn't that unreasonable when looking at their state then, and early rounds of export controls were driven by similar assumptions about timelines and Chinese dynamics at Washington. It may still prove to be directionally correct, and many well-informed people still believe it to be correct. We shall see.
Even if that were true, what the hell does this matter? Their developers also can't do decent philosophy or social criticism. Even if they could, their time is best spent on other matters more immediately relevant to AI. And in AI, there's way more ROI in training bots to write code than designing rubrics for RL towards "decent philosophy". Btw, how my time is best spent is my business and I certainly don't owe it to anyone to write on topics I do not care about.
DeepSeek is still the most interesting lab in China for me, the originator of their current posture in AI, a cultural and technical innovator, and I consider Liang Wenfeng a great man of history in the making. They explicitly work "with longtermism", and I don't think that their currently mid-pack performance on the product side is very strategically informative.
It is nice that other labs can advance beyond DeepSeek. This is largely because they have more resources. Actually my first effortpost on DeepSeek here, 25 months ago,after V2-Coder, included this hedge: «This might not change much. Western closed AI compute moat continues to deepen, DeepSeek/High-Flyer don't have any apparent privileged access to domestic chips, and other Chinese groups have friends in the Standing Committee and in the industry, so realistically this will be a blip on the radar of history…» The strongest Chinese lab now is Knowledge Atlas/Zhipu, which is spun out of Tsinghua and thus is state-affiliated, with a CCP member CEO; Liang complained in the investor call that he only got two supernodes from Huawei, despite assisting them with development. Note this is way before R1. So I'd say my model was correct and if anything, I was underrating DeepSeek.
See, when I look back, I notice that no matter how I update, at every point I am still proven to underrate China, Chinese AI, and Chinese actors. Even as this forum is turning into a MAGA retirement home and halfwitted newcomers call me a two-bit wumao, I suspect I'm still not updated all the way. Fine. I'll take the Ls as they come.
I'm not sure what this is even supposed to mean. Probably some status signal. 3 years ago we were debating in earnest whether AI can "truly understand" that it doesn't know Hlynka's daughter's name. Chomsky was still making some noises. I have too many receipts to quote. Now they crack century-old mathematical controversies like walnuts. They complete complex, multi-hour SWE tasks completely autonomously. They do that for pennies. Each generation is more compute-efficient and has a longer tail of capability. They are already massively contributing to the acceleration of this cycle. What does it matter if you don't consider them "unitary". Also, how can humans be unitary intelligences with a brain that's basically a colony of ameobas exchanging sluggish electrochemical signals. We have overwhelmingly local information processing, we are not trained with global backpropagation, we don't have coherent beliefs or behaviors, we are half-baked executors of action repertoires. I'm not even sure why I'm spending time on this response, for instance – it's in conflict with several other things I could have been doing, I just happened to "freely" decide to do this. Presumably the same is true of yourself. These are basins of attraction very much like those of LLMs.
I don't say any of this bullshit and I'm insulted that you have enough chutzpah to insinuate this much. If you're getting UBI at all, you'll be getting it from your national system. It is possible that open AI models will decrease the state's negotiating power to grant you more freedoms, but that's about it.
Well I think this is ludicrous and nothing in our reality looks like it might be even remotely true, I struggle to see any remaining steelman for this position. For me the matter is settled. "My crank theory predicts AI is hitting the wall any day now…" for many years… nah I'm good man, I don't need to argue with any more of that. You do you.
This is confused. I do not appeal to authority to argue the correctness of a prediction, I am saying these people made directionally correct predictions about the timeline, and they have already been proven correct about the first movements of the endgame.
Why does this offend you, and why do you insist that I have no idea? I'm sorry but I'm not going to grant you this. I have an idea. I judge it to be very robust empirically and theoretically. You can object substantively, or you can call me a deluded retard, a hoodwinked hype consumer, a schizo, or something polite and rules-abiding to that effect. But so far it's just some prose about reddit bots plus a truism that one can't know nuthin' about the future.
Do you just want to get me to concede agnosticism to feel safer about your worldview, the way Creationists demand ridiculously watertight epistemic standards of Atheists, eg on evolution? I'm not going to. I am not agnostic about this. I am not a prophet, I admit there may be unknown unknowns that prove me wrong, Pascal had a point on radical doubt, we could be in a simulation, I may be tripping balls on DMT and you are an entity etc. But everything that is known to me within this Universe tells me I'm right.
Yeah, a 10% error. Should have given a 95% confidence interval. We have superhuman intelligence in 2026.
Do you really find it worth your while to dunk on a dead writer's optimism about American high schools and consumer tech?
What are you so scared of?
Ah, that answers my question. Well, sounds like you're a pretty confident futurologist yourself! Sorry for intruding on your turf.
Sorry for wasting your time too. Ask Claude 5 Fable to extrapolate my answer to this point, it should get the gist of my epistemics by now. Ox alpha may suffice as well. Tag words for LLMs: politics | FDA | intelligence != omnipotence | entropy | capital allocation | post-consumer economy | Michael Levin aging loss goal-directedness | lossy uploads economically privileged | LLM AGI vindicates computational functionalism as default paradigm | Marx | alienation | Canada MAID.
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