For perspective, global annual GDP is $105 trillion, which means Altman is asking the world to invest 6.7% or so of the entire world’s economic output for one year in his company.
That change has mostly br a bunch of empty promises. There is no AI yet, there is machine learning, which is just an ingredient. As impressive as they are, they’re mostly useless
Eh, not really in a positive way yet. I use it for quick code snippets but it’s not all that important compared to the fact that misuse of generative A.I. is making so much information on the Internet completely worthless. I don’t think the trade-offs have been worth anything we’ve seen yet.
I’m bullish about a lot of generative A.I. use cases long term but they haven’t accomplished much positive yet and there’s still major, major scaling issues that may not be solved soon. It could easily be like self driving cars where progress stagnates. A lot of times with software, the first 80% is easy and the last 20% takes a decade longer than people expect.
I use it for quick code snippets but it’s not all that important compared to the fact that misuse of generative A.I. is making so much information on the Internet completely worthless.
To be fair we have scare articles galore every day about how this is all ruining the world and killing artists, because fear sells. Meanwhile millions of people like you and me are quietly using this tool to improve our work.
When we compare the relative weight of the two, let’s take the media scare avalanche out of it and just use our personal experiences to judge. I am currently being measurably helped by genAI, and not measurably hurt by it. I just read articles daily about how I’m going to be killed in my sleep by in any second now…
It’s both. Basically, if he’s right that this is among the most important tech in world history and deserves $7 trillion in research, it’ll make OpenAI the du jour monopolist over said most important tech in world history if he gets it. Outright dystopian.
Yeah, AI’s been a whole field for many decades, machine learning and deep learning is a whole field that existed and was doing tons of interesting work across a variety of domains before transformers came out. Fully agreed that LLM’s are a party trick, but companies use party tricks to gin up interest and money for their real work all the time. None of this changes the fact that AI is important technology.
It’s also open source too. With faster chips and standard training sets, it will be trivial for anyone to train a basic AI to recognize fire hydrants or whatever. Just like with computers, the “revolution” will not be one giant company but every business using their own.
Your fridge only needs to recognize food items. It doesn’t need any more intelligent software. I want a food recognition AI and cameras in the fridge and cabinets so I know what food I need to buy. This doesn’t even need live cameras (for power consumption, privacy, and storage). It can just take a picture and analyze it when the door opens, then delete the picture.
Aside from the fact that OpenAI and Microsoft leak like a sieve, the scramble for investors would publicize the development, and also the fact that Altman is a braggadocious idiot who need everyone to think he’s smart or he’ll collapse in on himself. The world would know, there isn’t an argument to the contrary that holds any water given the scale of the breakthrough general AI would be and the actors involved here.
The breakthrough was the ability to do like 3rd grade math. Being able to reason is a big step to researchers but it’s still very much in the research phase.
Read the last paragraph of the OP at least. This is not asking for $5 trillion to be handed solely to OpenAI to go become a world monopoly on chip manufacture. What he’s really asking is for investors to direct funds to radically increasing world compute capacity, to the profit for the chip manufacturers and likely many others. OpenAI just gets to continue the track it’s on without this constraint. There is nothing here about them monopolistically controlling this entire investment and in fact the opposite is true: it’s framed as a broad partnership venture.
It may not be bonkers at all though. If we look at it as taking money and food out of people’s mouths for a year then yes it’s a lot. But how much free investment capital is there in the world at any given time? Wealth has been accumulating and accumulating in rich people’s investment portfolios for ever and ever. How many Trillions get allocated in any given year? All Altman is saying is that he wants 5 of those to be allocated here and not somewhere else. It’s not necessarily taking rice out of any children’s mouths.
And the world’s 5 biggest companies their total market cap is a bit over 8 trillion dollars, which is also mind boggling, that so much capital is concentrated in the hands of so few people or shall we say mega corporations.
Came here to say this. Does she know how much money there is in the world? He is asking for basically 1/20th of all the money in the world. Even if that was possible it would be dangerous for one company to hold that much.
But then you end up with inflation. So in the process of creating money you’ve reduced the value of the money. And banks working in cooperation with government create money. Private companies outside of the banking system can’t create their own money anymore. If any sizable portion of this is taken out as a loan. It creates a systemic risk for the world economy.
But this isn’t a bank. And making money doesn’t come without consequences. You’re not thinking about second and third order effects. This would basically be quantitative easing on a grand scale but for just one company. It would literally destroy the economy if the investment failed. And they aren’t the only player in the industry. The level of systemic risk is too large. And if it didn’t fail, it would basically be handing the world economy over to one player.
Cool. The materials are there. It’s sand. Few other things, sure, but we have fuckloads of sand.
The limiting factor for chip production isn’t the raw materials, it’s that there’s only a handful of facilities in the world that can actually do it. Part of why there’s been such a push to build more facilities is that China really want to reincorporate Taiwan, where most of those facilities are based.
I’m not pretending AI isn’t useful. There is plenty of field where AI helps. But, AI has been the next scam after blockchain, crypto, NFT…
It’s the end of our civilization with falling capitalism. But, capitalism will try to find new ways to make short term profits. We moved from fordism to post-fordism with the enslavement of the cognitive abilities. We entered the next era with all these scams. And entshitification is a symptom of this.
Exactly, my job is easier now with chatGPT, not because it’s better at doing my job, it just drafts ideas faster than me. As far as resource usage goes I’m all for it
i guess the number they want to fundraise comes from an AI (maybe because they do not want to think by themselves any more)
as far as i am right with the “trillion” which is just a “billion” where i live and 1e12 (a 1 followed by 12 zeroes)
but according to wikipedia (in 2017) there are only:
14.000.000.000.000 USD existing in the world while they want to fundraise 7.000.000.000.000 USD
so basically they want half of the USD that had been printed in all history up until 2017.
maybe they just want to say that they want to push YOU into poverty, who knows.
may it by getting it from you or by letting some govs print money faster than ever, reducing your money to half or less of a fraction of its previous virtual value.
But the AI that came up with that number had “good luck” to not come up with the need of “more” money than ever has existed =D
i think i’ld prefer to use a dice when i really need a random “decision”.
update: Plz tell me if i am wrong with the numbers or what the current 2024 number of all “printed” (well physical AND digital) USD in the world is at the moment. thx
yeah, thats exactly what i am saying, most of the money ever printed sits in places it will never leave, so IMO there are no 5trillion available on the market and the cash flow does not allow to take out even a “little” bit (speaking in 1e12 terms) before things collapse for the majority.
oh yes, printing money works exactly like that, it was just printed in the past and nowadays they just increase numbers in databases: plopp and the value of that currency and especially everything that is bound to it decreases, ripping you of what you have saved without even touching your bank account.
Over 6 trillion USD alone gets exchanged everyday on the currency markets. Cash flow is not the only source of money either, its an interface when value needs to be exchanged.
Open cash flow worldwide is about 35 trillion.
This is just cash though, if you take all markets and derivitives, depending on how you measure it - if you want to be technical about represented value then that’s worth over a quadrillion USD.
When you talk about reallocation of assets you are playing in the pool of a quadrillion dollars, not in the pool of free cash flow (the interface to it)
yes, banksters like to create bubbles, inflate, trade with them until all value was extracted, let the bubble burst and then let all bus drivers and other low income people pay for the loss which is the gain of some parasites.
quadrillion… bubble->add some time->burst
if we have both two dollars, one for security and one for trading. we both “invest” in buying call orders from each other for a dollar and repeat it a billion times on the same day then we creates a “cash flow” of two billion dollars alone, yet the value behind it was less than 2 dollars.
that is what high performance traders do, they sell/buy thousands of times per second, creating the illusion of cash flow and worth, yet their actions have negative value, destabilize the market on the long run to create illusion of worth. but that illusion is very welcome as it blinds people and let them believe and invest which then can again be harvested until the bubble bursts…
lets remove two dollars from my above example… i have now only one dollar for trading so do you. but none for security. would you buy a call-option from someone without security? no. so wont i. thus remove 2 dollars (half of them) and 2 billion dollars of cash flow cease to exist on that day alone!! well, the next day looks the same then. lol. guess that would be called a collapse that 'nobody could have foreseen". lol.
7 trillion usd is roundabout half of the worldwide existing usd in 2017 (cash and database money, no debts, no could-be-printed, no needs-to-equaled-later) that is if wikipedia is correct and i did not miscalculate the ‘trillion’ which is just a sloppy ‘billion’ here. And further more the “worth” of the really ‘existing’ usd looks to me like a huge bubble by itself waiting to burst some day, but that is not the point or discussion here.
lets just hope that this “quadrillion bubble” you seem to be fond of does not burst too soon. there are still some resources to be ripped of from earth, some countries that could be enslavelaboured just to postpone the burst of that bubble, so the wave of destruction could carry that bubble for another generation maybe and we are sort of “safe”, but not sure. thus maybe lets hope it bursts rather sooner than later preserving some resources and preventing huge amount of hurt and damage from beeing done while leaving chance for a more stable bubble-free world without manmade intentionally created crisises just to let “others” pay for it.
intentionally created illusions are in total the most costly “realities” ;-)
Exactly right, no one is going to show up with a fleet of cargo planes full of cash lol. It’s a huge amount of money, but if you have several nations investing, plus private business, it could happen - long shot, but it isn’t limited by the amount of cash that exists. He’s basically talking about starting a massive industry in the US that only exists in Japan and Taiwan.
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