this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2024
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[–] [email protected] 40 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (6 children)

Isn't it good that the money is being put back into circulation instead of being hoarded? I'm all in for the wealthy wasting their money.

[–] [email protected] 46 points 2 months ago (2 children)

The problem is the bulk of it is going to Nvidia.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 months ago

Don’t forget all the fuel burned for electricity to power it!

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Well probably not just Nvidia but the next likely beneficiaries are in the same range (Microsoft etc.)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

The money goes to Microsoft/Google/Amazon/etc, which they goes to Nvidia.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

They buy the hardware once then sell services based on it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

Sort of, they buy the hardware and sell services, and then buy upgraded hardware. Nvidia is a pretty big part of the sales cycle.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I’m willing to bet the vast majority of that money is changing hands among tech companies like Intel, AMD, nVidia, AWS, etc. Only a small percentage would go to salaries, etc. and I doubt those rates have changed much…

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

They typically use internal personnel and being parcimonious about it so you're right about that.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Kinda, but it’s like feeding a starving child nothing but candy until they die.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, the brightest minds instead of building useful tech to fight climate change, spend their life building vanity AI projects. Computational resources instead of folding proteins or whatever are wasted on some gradient descent of some useless model.

All while working class wages are stagnant. And so your best career advice is to go get a random tech degree so you could also work on vanity stuff and make money.

This is cryptocurrency equivalent. It's worse than CEOs buying yachts. The latter actually leads to some innovation.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Succesfully creating an actual AGI would be by far the biggest and most significant invention in the human history so I can't blame them for trying.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

A bunch of people fine-tuning an off-the-shelf model on a proprietary task only to fail horrendously will never lead to any progress, let alone AGI.

So, nobody is trying AGI.

If all those people would actually collectively work on a large-scale research project, we'd see humanity advance. But that's exactly my point.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

"Nobody is trying AGI" is simply just not true. If you think what they're doing will never lead to AGI, then that's an opinion you're free to have, but it's still just that; an opinion. Our current LLM's are by far the closest resemblance of AGI that we've ever seen. That route may very well be a dead end but it may also not be. You can't know that.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Oh gosh, look, an AI believer.

No, LLM will not lead to AGI. But even if they did, applying existing tech to a new problem only to fail cuz you're dumb at estimating the complexity does not, in fact, improve the underlying technology.

To paraphrase in a historical context: no matter how many people run around with shovels digging the ground for something, it will never lead to an invention of the excavator.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Ad hominem and circular reasoning isn't a valid counter-argument. You're not even attempting to convince me otherwise, you're just being a jerk.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

The larger issue that people always fail to remember is the energy consumption. We are see massive amounts of electricity.

One peer-reviewed study suggested A.I. could make up 0.5 percent of worldwide electricity use by 2027, or roughly what Argentina uses in a year. Analysts at Wells Fargo suggested that U.S. electricity demand could jump 20 percent by 2030, driven in part to A.I.

The wealthy are under sailing like always. Just like we did with cigarettes or burning fossil fuels. We should have learned but it by the time we do, it might be to late.

https://archive.ph/AqhHz

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Thats a "Parable of the Broken Window". They could be spending their money on something actually useful.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

But they probably wouldn't, they'd just throw it at gold, crypto, or something else that doesn't provide any real value.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

Even stuffing it under a mattress is better than wasting people's time.