Nobody is saying it's not luck... But people are comparing it to buying a lottery ticket. I am pretty sure the odds of this gamble are way better than the odds of winning this big in a lottery. Probably by more than an order of magnitude.
I have this weird thing whenever I have headphones and open the Dota2 settings on my Mac, then I not only get buzzing but the overall sound quality plummets!
10 years ago, Apple was the largest company in the world by market capitalization, its market cap was around $479.069 billion.
How have we gotten to a point in just a decade where multiple companies are dropping annual numbers that are in the realm of "the market cap of the worlds biggest companies" on these things?
Have we solved all (any of) the other problems out there already?
The 10x from 400 billion to 4 trillion in a decade didnt come from 2% inflation.
It didnt come from nowhwere, or from Silicon Valleys exceptionalism - It came from changing the value of money, labour and resources. It came from everyday people, deficits and borrowing from the next 10 generations of children.
The public discourse is weirdly unable to adress burning problems that had been formulated almost 150 years ago. Much like the climate change topic originating in the 1970s.
It is about LLMs because it's the trillions being sunk into this bubble instead of more important issues like climate crisis and a pressing need to address the transformation of the energy sector or tackling the wealth inequality gap. These are all causing real world osues that are much bigger than beating (or rather faking to beat) some LLM benchmarks to impress investor.
> instead of more important issues like climate crisis
It's kind of worse than that: this is actually exacerbating the climate crisis as mega tech corps like Microsoft, Google and Meta are scrambling to secure more energy to power their power-hungry LLMs.
What bubble? If anything it's 10x too small for the value it'll provide over the next century.
The same exact premise was proclaimed about the Internet circa 1999-2003 (boom and bust). Then the entire global economy and nearly all electronic communication was rebuilt on top of the Internet.
For the coming century AI is more important than the Internet.
That's a bold claim. Which AI? The current LLMs? Something else as yet undiscovered? It's not clear that "it's 10x too small for the value it'll provide over the next century" - there's no way to know that - the statement is an article of faith.
LLMs don't exist in a vacuum. Someone spends money to build LLMs, builds infrastructure that the LLMs run on, extracts training data to run the LLMs on, uses LLM for various use-cases, and makes revenue from specific LLM users.
they're all a bit immoral, like how Hollywood made it big by avoiding patents, how YouTube got its mammoth exit via widespread copyright infringement and now LLMs gather up the skills of people it pays nothing to and tries to sell.
However we could also argue that most things in human society are less moral than moral (e.g. cars, supermarkets, etc).
But we can also argue that dropping some hundreds of millions in VC capital is less immoral than other activities, such as holding that money in liquid assets.
however they do result in flows of capitals feeding into otherwise unfundable enterprise like R&D; science and engineering, or culture; writing, music, art. Where's the ROI if you invest millions into R&D and your competitor invests $0 and can then just reproduce your works with their logo ontop of yours? To sack off IP and copyright would significantly narrow innovation and result in many artists, scientists and engineers having their income severely suppressed if not eradicated. Instead that money would temporarily go to a bunch of hacks that do nothing but copy and chase the bottom, before vanishing into thin air as the works become entirely unprofitable.
I don't think its as simple as calling them immoral. Rather the immorality comes on them being poorly regulated. With regulated term limits on patents and copyright we create a world where an artist can create licensed product and protect themselves during the course of their career, and people are them able to riff on their works after some decades or after they pass on.
> I think if behavior needs to be regulated by government in order to be moral, then it's immoral behavior by default
Regulation is creating rules for businesses to run within. This goes back to rule of law. You can't tell a group of children to "behave" and walk away and expect good results and then call the children "bad" when they fail to behave.
Rather, you must give them systems to understand, to channel their energy, productively, in a way that matches the desires of the parent (government) and their strategies. Then you have to meaningfully punish those who intentionally break the rules in order to give those behaving the knowledge that they have chosen the good path and they'll be rewarded for it.
Free markets are not about "morality"/"immortality", its about harnessing an existing energy to make a self-sustaining system. A system a state is less good/interested at keeping going or unable to act quickly enough to move in. But part of creating that system is putting in guard rails to prevent the worst sort of crashes.
The regulation is what makes it worth while for people to invent/write. Patents/copyrights have been a net benefit for society with a smaller negative downside.
The situation has changed quite a lot with digitalization. When copyright was developed, giving up the right to copy something had low cost - you needed to have a printing press. Now you can’t even read a book without making multiple copies, so the cost of giving up copy right is a lot higher. The benefits to society of securing an exclusive right to control copies is possibly unchanged, or perhaps less as the writings can no longer be retelling of common stories (e.g. Disney movies from Grimm brothers; Shakespeare mixing popular stories into brilliant plays). I suspect making the timelines of copy right protection be shorter (as culture speeds up) rather than longer as we have done, due to the weirdly long lifetime of corporations, would fix most of the issues. Invention would be rewarded without the creation of IP monopolies and the restriction of mixing existing stuff as a creative method, and the loss of the right to copy stuff you have paid for all lessened.
If I come up with an invention I don't have the capability/finances to bring it to market. Without patents, I have no incentive to show it to possible investors/manufacturers because they can just steal it and keep all the profits. So my idea that could have helped society dies with me. So it costs society nothing to give me protection, but society get's nothing without the protection versus efficiency, safer working conditions, better health, whatever benefit from my invention.
Without copyright it was hard to assemble high quality educational books/manuals, because they take a lot of effort with relatively little reward/return. In fact the first 'modern' copyright act in 1701ish was titled something about improving education.
Without copyright it is not worth it for authors to spend nights/weekends flushing out plot ideas for complete sharable works, so you end up with less/lower quality literature as no one can be a professional author. Which has better quality on average, published books or self published? Self published tend to be the 'passion projects' you would still have without copyright, published books tend to be what get's created when authors are compensated for their efforts. Society can't lose from copyright because without it the works would never have existed. If I say 'I'll bake a cake if you will buy a piece' and I bake a cake and sell a piece, society didn't 'lose'. If I don't bake a cake because no one would buy a piece than society was a little sadder, a little plainer that day. There is only upside, there is no downside. Anyone that would release if copyright didn't exist is still free to waive their copyright protection. So having it is the best of both worlds, those that want to release just to release can, and those that want to try and create something that can be sold can.
Without copyright there are no big budget movies, only passion projects because no one is injecting millions when the work will just be copied no sold/screened/rented.
Without copyright the world has less joy, less discussion, less contemplation, less entertainment, less education. Without patents the world has less productivity, less safety, worse health, less food, worse/much less clothing/housing, less free time. The systems in their current forms have been abused and are unfit for the original purpose but when kept to the original purpose with reasonable protection periods they are a HUGE net plus for society.
I think it's a little more nuanced than that. Certainly IP is regularly abused to try to suppress competition/innovation, own our shared culture, create artificial scarcity, etc. However, there's also a need to protect artists and other creatives from having their work scooped up and profited off of by mega corps.
What about compound interest? After all, inheritance is merely letting wealth continue to compound across generations. But at first glance, the same arguments against inheritance would apply against letting a single person earn interest.
How is inheritance bad? Imo, estate taxes are more immoral. Why should the state be allowed a cut of my private assets? Gift taxes are also immoral. Why should I have to pay taxes for giving away assets?
To me the giver paying taxes is wrong mindset. Maybe they should be collecting them. But paying taxes on earned money seems reasonable and has long history. It can be earned from work, or inheritance or gift. Actually maybe paying income tax on inheritance would be best.
The argument is that taxes were already paid when the relevant work was performed. Transfers of ownership that don't involve work (ie economic activity) shouldn't be subject to government interference.
The obvious issue is that if you don't tax gifts it becomes far too easy for people to dodge taxes (or at least much more convoluted to enforce payment).
Inheritance is much more complicated and controversial. There's an argument to be made that it results in social ills if left unchecked, an argument that estate taxes fail rather spectacularly to address those ills, and an argument that the ills tend to be self righting given how easy it is to lose money. And probably several others.
I suppose because we're wired this way. Can't think of any group or society that didn't have some notion of private property that wasn't just a huge (and brief) humanitarian tragedy.
Yes, private property enables human civilization, all the good and the bad. Before the agricultural revolution led to protected and exploited stores of grain, we were far smaller tribes of hunters and gatherers with far less technology
Those smaller tribes were continuously at war over resources... It's exactly the behavior we observe in nature whenever resource scarcity presents.
A world without private property leads to a world of pure lawlessness. Sure... We could do that, but it would quickly devolve into forever warfare where only might wins, and even that for only fleetingly small timeslices.
History's progression has proven that exploited workers still prefer to exist in that system vs one of continual peril.
My life, yes, but my genetic lifeline exists up to and including eternity if luck and good decision making are on the side of my generations of offspring.
Let's consider the most basic form of ownership: that over one's body. By your logic, my life is a spec on the eternal timeline, so why make it a crime to harm or murder my physically?
> Imo, estate taxes are more immoral. Why should the state be allowed a cut of my private assets?
To prevent family dynasties from building more and more economic power over time and threatening the state in the future due to the forces of compound interest. To be fair, most family dynasties don't do this, but others can wreck exceptional havoc just by wanting to, due to the generational power they've amassed. The damage they can do is further accelarated by them lacking understanding of how people without generational wealth live.
We already see this happening in our society as most media organisations are run by billionaires or multi-millionaires. News organisations are run less and less by journalists or normal people and the headlines are set more and more by people with very keen and niche vested interests.
This specific issue is being played out in real-time in the Murdoch succession as he attempts to leave the propaganda firm in the hands of his most idelogically similar successor. Yet the majority of his children see the world differently from their father and are challenging this. On one side we have natural break up and change occuring due to generational shifts, and on the other the strong desire of the ancestor wanting their legacy to remain unspoilt after their death.
> But we can also argue that dropping some hundreds of millions in VC capital is less immoral than other activities, such as holding that money in liquid assets.
It really depends a lot on how those liquid assets are deployed.
I agree that Apple should have probably done something with their cash hoard like maybe buying or bolstering Intel so that they could have a domestic supply of chips, but apparently Apple has decided that there's just not much else to do with that money right now that would give them a better return? We might not agree with that assessment, but it's hard to call it immoral.
I learned this in elementary school. When 10 kids join forces to bully one kid, that is immoral. Same with companies and VC money trying to corner a market.
Isn’t that the point of having a government with laws and regulation… to allow the majority to bully specific undesirable minority groups into submission?
For some things it’s even a worldwide consensus, e.g. any groups with a desire to acquire large amounts of plutonium (who don’t belong to a preapproved list).
There’s even a strong consistent push to make it ever more inescapable, comprehensive, resistant to any possible deviation, etc…
No, you've got that backwards. In a functioning democracy respecting the rule of law, the government with its laws and regulation are the school teachers who are putting the bullies into detention.
Frequently, the bullies are on the student council, and because they get more face time with the administration and are seen as part of the establishment by the same, admins are reluctant to do more than a slap of the hand, but appearances must be kept up with.
Just writing your opinion down doesn’t seem relevant to real life government organization.
I don’t see how there could be “school teachers” above the majority of congressman or regulatory decision makers. The very existence of pork filled bills thousands of pages long and byzantine regulations suggest that couldn’t possibly be true.
If your government is corrupt then it doesn't make sense to say that the concept of having a government is dead and that corporations are the solution.
People are also sick and tired of rules in the AppStore. Or the fact that when their Apple/Google/whatever account is unilaterally blocked they have no recourse. At least with a government there are some checks and balances.
Yes, some governments are more trustworthy than others. Doesn't mean the concept is bad.
Most people want to live in a society that maximizes positive freedom, or some balance of freedom and prosperity. In those societies, it is considered legitimate for the government to use force to stop people whose actions prevent members of society from having positive freedom/prosperity.
Of course that is a very simplified description. In practice, most societies promote a balance between positive and negative freedom, recognize some limits on the government's ability to use force, recognize some degree to which people can choose to act in ways that don't promote positive freedom/prosperity, etc.
Just from the environmental perspective is pretty immoral, the energy being consumed it's ridiculous and now every company is in an arms race making it all worse.
I guess the good thing is that many workers are also consumers. If they don't have money to consume anymore, who will buy all the shiny things that AI will produce so efficiently?
I agree AI can change the balance of power but I think it's more nuanced.
When expertise is commoditized, it becomes cheap; that reduces payroll and operational costs - which reduces the value of VC investment and thus the power of pre-existing wealth.
If AI means I can compete with fewer resources, then that's an equalizing dynamic isn't it?
That assumes you (the human element) are still required to a significant degree. Right now those with assets are compelled to transfer them to those without because they have a need for the labor. If that need evaporates then why should they give you anything?
> My point is that the assets themselves mean less when the average person can use AI to design anything
I’m not sure which assets you think that devalues; it certainly increases the value of the assets needed to run AI, and also of the assets needed to realize the things that people can design with AI.
> In a world where production is cheap, the money required to produce has relative less value.
In a world where your labor isn't required for production, the assets that are required for production have a much greater value relative to your labor than they do in one in which your labor is required to produce something.
“Cheap” is only a thing relative to some other thing.
To clarify, I'm focusing on the costs of ramping up a startup.
Currently VC has a great deal of power because up-front investment is required to hire staff and other expenses until the startup can become cash-flow positive. When a lone individual can start a venture using AI then the payroll costs go down. The investment requirements go down.
Yes, automation means that people with assets don't have to pay other people for their labor.
But it also means that people starting new ventures have less need of significant up-front capital.
I agree that lower up front expenses means less need for investment. I'll also note that it opens up the playing field to more people which increases competition. So it might or might not make your life easier.
However the technology that is expected to reduce labor requirements (and thus expenses) has an uncertain endpoint. It seems plausible that at some point a threshold could be crossed beyond which the human labor that you are able to add on top becomes essentially irrelevant. It is this second occurrence, or rather how society might react to it, that should be cause for at least some concern.
In general, modern English uses “this is immoral” to mean “I don’t like this”. It’s a language quirk. It’s good that you’re asking the whys to get somewhere but I might as well just get to it.
“Immoral”, “should not exist”, “late-stage capitalism” are tribal affiliation chants intended to mark one’s identity.
E.g. I go to the Emirates and sing “We’re Arrrrrsenal! We’re by far the greatest time the world has ever seen”. And the point is to signal that I’m an Arsenal fan, a gooner. If someone were to ask “why are you the greatest team?” I wouldn’t be able to answer except with another chant (just like these users) because I’m just chanting for my team. The words aren’t really meaningful on their own.
As a more substantial take, being cynical about the language a group uses to speak of their realities and wants is necessarily against dialogue, understanding or seeing the members of that group as equals.
If "their" political views have the same value as ones affiliation to a sports team, but your political views are well researched and valid, could you be overlooking something?
Edit0: and more importantly, what are they to you? Do they not have the same mental faculties as you? How they able to live and thrive while in total abhorrence to natural law? Or are they all naive children who don't know better?
And yes, in any group you'll find loud idiots. Those are in your group too - you just ignore them and focus on the other group's idiots, while disregarding the valid views that are behind.
Especially in the age of algorithmic social media, it's hard to parse what's actually being said.
Likewise. It's fine for transient balances but I wouldn't hold anything in USDT for longer than a few minutes. If I was going to pick one thing that would be the next major scandal, Tether would be it.
>What many people don't know: The current boom in "Generative AI" using artificial neural networks has its roots in the early nineties at the Technical University of Munich, especially the "G" and the "P" and the "T" in "ChatGPT." At that time, we published "Artificial Curiosity" through what's now called "Generative Adversarial Networks" (1990, now widely used),
