zlacker

Why are corporations announcing business deals from the White House? There doesn’t seem to be any public ownership/benefit here, aside from potential job creation. Which could be significant. But the American public doesn’t seem to gain anything from this new company.

>>skepti+(OP)
This is my question too, but I haven't seen a journalist ask it yet. My baseless theory: Trump has promised them some kind of antitrust protections in the form of legislation to be written & passed at a later date.

An announcement of a public AI infrastructure program joined by multiple companies could have been a monumental announcement. This one just looks like three big companies getting permission to make one big one.

>>skepti+(OP)
It's foreign investment money into the US. Softbank and MGX are foreign and presumably stumping up much of the cash.

>>skepti+(OP)
I thought the business prop for AI was that it eliminates jobs?

>>skepti+(OP)
We are currently witnessing the merging of government and corporations. It was bad before but the process is accelerating now.

>>skepti+(OP)
Weird question. Business deals are announced by politicians all the time, especially on overseas trips. Just an example:

https://boeing.mediaroom.com/2015-04-10-Presidents-Varela-Ob...

>>rqtwte+74
there's some pretty good quotes about that by Mussolini. Things are getting bleak at an incredible pace.

>>skepti+(OP)
For profit? I don't understand what's complicated about this.

>>skepti+(OP)
> Why are corporations announcing business deals from the White House?

You're answering your own question:

> potential job creation. Which could be significant

>>dwnw+N3
It will. The short-term sale is that it will create thousands of temporary jobs, and long-term reduce hundreds of thousands of jobs, while handing the savings to stock holdings and moving wealth to the stockholders.

>>rqtwte+74
[flagged]

>>adamre+X4
Looks on pace to eliminate every human job over 10 years.

What is the hard limiting factor constraining software and robots from replacing any human job in that time span? Lots of limitations of current technology, but all seem likely to be solved within that timeframe.

>>skepti+(OP)
Lots of politicians announce major investments in their area.

>>signat+m4
This isn't an overseas trip though. It's a private partnership announced by the sitting president in the Roosevelt room, literally across the hall from the oval office. I don't know how unprecedented that truly is, but it certainly feels unusual.

>>jimbok+J5
What data to you have to support such a claim?

>>goatlo+A6
From Zuckerberg, for example:

>> "a lot of the code in our apps and including the AI that we generate, is actually going to be built by AI engineers instead of people engineers."

https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/meta-developing-a...

Ikea's been doing this for a while:

>> Ingka says it has trained 8,500 call centre workers as interior design advisers since 2021, while Billie - launched the same year with a name inspired by IKEA's Billy bookcase range - has handled 47% of customers' queries to call centres over the past two years.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/ikea-bets-remote-interior...

>>jfacto+43
Easier: Trump likely committed that the federal agencies wouldn't slow roll regulatory approval (for power, for EIS, etc.).

Ellison stated explicitly that this would be "impossible" without Trump.

Masa stated that this (new investment level?) wouldn't be happening had Trump not won, and that the new investment level was decided yesterday.

I know everyone wants to see something nefarious here, but simplest explanation is that the federal government for next four years is expected to be significantly less hostile to private investment, and - shocker - that yields increased private investment.

>>adamre+Mb
By your own admission, Ikea eliminated 0 jobs and you gave no number for Meta.

>>aksss+Ce
That is a better one. I don't know why three rich guys investing in a new company would result in a slowness that Trump could fix, though, and a promise to rush or sidestep regulatory approval still sounds nefarious.

>>dwnw+Af
Do you expect all companies to retrain? Do you expect CEOs to be wrong? Do you expect AI to stay the same, get better, or get worse? I never made the claim that new jobs will NOT be made, that is yet to be seen, but jobs will be lost to AI.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/may/18/bt-cut-jobs...

>> “For a company like BT there is a huge opportunity to use AI to be more efficient,” he said. “There is a sort of 10,000 reduction from that sort of automated digitisation, we will be a huge beneficiary of AI. I believe generative AI is a huge leap forward; yes, we have to be careful, but it is a massive change.”

Goldman Sacs:

https://www.gspublishing.com/content/research/en/reports/202...

>> Extrapolating our estimates globally suggests that generative AI could expose the equivalent of 300mn full-time jobs to automation.

>>skepti+(OP)
If the announced spending target is true, this will be a strategic project for the US exceeding Biden's stimulus acts in scale. I think it would be pretty normal in any country to have highest-level involvement for projects like this. For example, Tesla has a much smaller revenue than this and Chancellor Olaf Scholz was still present when they opened their Gigafactory near Berlin.

>>skepti+(OP)
The US is now officially a full on oiligarchy. It always was one, it's just that the powers that be don't care to hide it anymore and are flaunting that they have the power.

>>adamre+Cm
I'm on your side, but there's two readings of these reports:

1) "We are serious, this is going to happen."

2) "AI is big right now so if we hype it we might get some money!"

>>redeux+e5
Can you please not perpetuate flamewars or use HN for political battle? Your account has unfortunately been doing this repeatedly lately. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

>>dang+Vl2
Absolutely dang. I’m sorry for causing you any grief.

>>redeux+uo2
Appreciated!

>>luckyd+t4
Judging by the reactions it seems fascism has become very popular around here too lately.

The original quote I was referring to:

Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power. - Benito Mussolini

>>goatlo+A6
I do not have any hard data from 10 years from now.

My speculation is based on not seeing any constraints that will block progress of machine intelligence from reaching those capabilities within 10 years.

Also, Kurzweil's predictions from early 2000s have been eerily prescience and this is the time frame he predicted for the Singularity.