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Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 18, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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How are you changing your investment/savings strategy as AI timelines get shorter? I’m still in my boring ol’ index funds but have decreased my savings rate down by 5-10%.

I know very little economics, but the popular sentiment seems to be that interest rates will get very high and raw capital will be incredibly important in a post-AGI world. Does this matter for the average person like me who just wants to be financially independent in his 40s?

I don't understand, if you believe in shortening AI timelines, why are you in index funds and not tech? Why aren't you on the NVIDIA train with me? Surely an AGI world means that AI related companies are swimming in rivers of gold? NVIDIA, ARM, Microsoft, TSMC, Facebook, AMD, whoever makes memory, whoever makes robots...

Index funds means boring stuff like Walmart and Coca Cola, unless you mean tech index funds.

Because being ‘in tech’ doesn’t really mean being ‘in tech’. Google and Meta are ad businesses reliant on the rest of the economy being in good shape; Microsoft is reliant on the same thing for both its enterprise and consumer businesses. There is no world in which a ton of labor is automated and many businesses disrupted but tech stocks inexplicably stay at super high valuations.

Surely the companies with the largest and most powerful AI models will make profits from the development of AGI, since they'll be the ones doing it? Non-tech companies don't have the compute, they'll be the ones being automated. Microsoft, Facebook and so on will be the ones automating.

Omdia estimates the biggest H100 customers for the past quarter were Meta and Microsoft, each purchasing 150,000 GPUs. Those two companies were responsible for 300,000 units, with the other 200,000 going to Oracle, Tencent, Google, and Amazon, which reportedly bought 50,000 each.