zlacker

>>tedsan+(OP)
I'm confused and a bit disturbed; honestly having a very difficult time internalizing and processing this information. This announcement is making me wonder if I'm poorly calibrated on the current progress of AI development and the potential path forward. Is the key idea here that current AI development has figured out enough to brute force a path towards AGI? Or I guess the alternative is that they expect to figure it out in the next 4 years...

I don't know how to make sense of this level of investment. I feel that I lack the proper conceptual framework to make sense of the purchasing power of half a trillion USD in this context.

>>TheAce+9g
"There are maybe a few hundred people in the world who viscerally understand what's coming. Most are at DeepMind / OpenAI / Anthropic / X but some are on the outside. You have to be able to forecast the aggregate effect of rapid algorithmic improvement, aggressive investment in building RL environments for iterative self-improvement, and many tens of billions already committed to building data centers. Either we're all wrong, or everything is about to change." - Vedant Misra, Deepmind Researcher.

Maybe your calibration isn't poor. Maybe they really are all wrong but there's a tendency here to these these people behind the scenes are all charlatans, fueling hype without equal substance hoping to make a quick buck before it all comes crashing down, but i don't think that's true at all. I think these people really genuinely believe they're going to get there. And if you genuinely think that, them this kind of investment isn't so crazy.

>>famous+Qv
I am hoping it is just the usual ponzi thing.

>>nejsjs+Ry1
How would this be a Ponzi scheme? Who are the leaf nodes ending up holding the bag?

>>ajmurm+A62
Investors, mostly private - eg. SoftBank and all the other deep pockets funneling money into this - but also public, because lots of people are invested in Nvidia, Microsoft, and Google, who will be directly affected if the bubble bursts, and just everyone invested in the markets generally, as this bubble bursting would already probably be more broadly damaging than even the dot com bust was.

Personally, I do expect a big correction at some point, even if it never reaches the point of bubble bursting. But I have no idea when I expect it to happen, so this isn't, like, an investable thesis.

>>sander+ba2
So unlike with a regular Ponzi scheme most of the money just is wasted?

>>ajmurm+hc2
Not sure what you mean by "wasted"? Like a regular Ponzi scheme, there are many opportunities for the people at the top to extract value out into cash, while people who "got in" on the scheme later are left holding the bag when the bubble bursts.

>>sander+Xm2
Yes, usually people at the top extract the cash. Like Bernie Madoff just spent the money for his enjoyment. In this case the money goes to people building the data centers, providing resources and the engineers at OpenAI who are actually working for the money.

>>ajmurm+Ux2
A lot of it does - and that's great! - but a lot of it accrues to the owners of the businesses involved.

If this is a bubble and it bursts in a few years, a lot of investors in specific companies, and in the market broadly, will lose a lot of money, but Sam Altman and Jensen Huang will remain very wealthy.

I'm a capitalist and I think there are good reasons for wealth to accrue to those who take risks and drive toward technological progress. But it just also is the case that they are incentivized to hype their companies, even if it risks getting out over their skis and leads to a bubble which eventually bursts. There are just have lots of ways to extract wealth prior to a bubble bursting, so the downsides of unwarranted hype are not as acute as they might otherwise be.