Counterpoint: those engineers who get paid millions to work on AI.

Like any gold rush, there will be gold, but there will also be folks who take huge bets and end up with a pan of dirt. And of course, there will be grifters.

Apparently a lot of money is flowing into AI.

Looking around, can find curious things current AI can't do but likely can find important things it can do. Uh, there's "a lot of money", can't be sure AI won't make big progress, and even on a national scale no one wants to fall behind. Looking around, it's scary about the growth -- Page and Brin in a garage, Bezos in a garage, Zuckerberg in school and "Hot or Not", Huang and graphics cards, .... One or two guys, ... and in a few years change the world and $trillions in company value??? Smoking funny stuff?

Yes, AI can be better than a library card catalog subject index and/or a dictionary/encyclopedia. But a step or two forward and, remembering 100s of soldiers going "over the top" in WWI, asking why some AI robots won't be able to do the same?

Within 10 years, what work can we be sure AI won't be able to do?

So people will keep trying with ASML, TSMC, AMD, Intel, etc. -- for a yacht bigger than the one Bezos got or for national security, etc.

While waiting for AI to do everything, starting now it can do SOME things and is improving.

Hmm, a SciFi movie about Junior fooling around with electronics in the basement, first doing his little sister Mary's 4th grade homework, then in the 10th grade a published Web site book on the rise and fall of the Eastern Empire, Valedictorian, new frontiers in mRNA vaccines, ...?

And what do people want? How 'bout food, clothing, shelter, transportation, health, accomplishment, belonging, security, love, home, family? So, with a capable robot (funded by a16z?), it builds two more like itself, each of those ..., and presto-bingo everyone gets what they want?

"Robby, does P = NP?"

"Is Schrödinger's equation correct?"

"How and when can we travel faster than the speed of light?"

"Where is everybody?"

AI by nature is kind of like a black hole of value. Necessarily, a very small fraction will capture the vast majority of value. Luckily, you can just invest wisely to hedge some of the risk of missing out.

A few issues:

1. The tech revolutions of the past were helped by the winds of global context. There were many factors that propelled those successful technologies on the trajectories. The article seems to ignore the contextual forces completely.

2. There were many failed tech revolutions as well. Success rate was varied from very low to very high. Again the overall context (social, political, economic, global) decides the matters, not technology itself.

3. In overall context, any success is a zero-sum game. You maybe just ignoring what you lost and highlighting your gains as success.

4. A reverse trend might pickup, against technology, globalization, liberalism, energy consumption etc

Obviously the maker. Just look at how and who.

It is interesting that the early shipping containerization boom resulted in a bubble in 1975 and had a new low around 1990.

1990 is when the real outsourcing mania started, which led to the destruction of most Western manufacturing. Apart from cheap Chinese trinkets the quality of life and real incomes have gotten worse in the West while the rich became richer.

So this is an excellent analogy for "AI": Finding a new and malicious application can revive the mania after an initial bubble pop while making societies worse. If we allow it, which does not have to be the case.

[As usual, under the assumption that "AI" works, of which there is little sign apart from summarizing scraped web pages.]

The problem with viewing AI through the lens of capitalism is the fact that you can't make it artificially scarce.

AI is largely capable of running on-device. In a few years, it's likely that most tasks that most people want AI for will be possible from a tiny model living in their phone. Open source models are plentiful, functional, and only becoming moreso.

But you can't monetize that. We're currently dumping billions of dollars into datacenter moats that are just gonna evaporate inside the decade.

For the average user doing their daily "who was that actor in that movie" query, no, you absolutely cannot monetize AI because all of your local devices can run the model for free with enough quality that no one will know or care that there's a difference.

For enterprise scale building a trillion dollar datacenter and 15 nuclear reactors to replace a hundred developers... also no. LLMs are not capable of that, and likely won't be in the foreseeable future. It's also extremely unclear that one could ever get an ROI on in-house AI like this. It might be more plausible if it were a commodity technology you can just buy, but then you can't make a moat.

The only hypothetical fortune to be found is by whoever is selling AI to people who think they need to buy AI. Just like bitcoin or NFTs.

The good news is that this has two possible outcomes: capitalist AI vendors will want to remove AI from individual access so they can sell it to you: everyone gets less AI. Capitalists realize they can never monetize AI when it's free and open source, and give up: everyone gets less AI. Win-win-win, in my book.

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With AI everyone is a net loser.

People using it get dumber.

What is being produced is slop and discardable poc-like trash

The environmental costs of building and training LLMs are huge. That compute and water could have been useful for something.

Even the companies building and peddling AI are losers. They are not profitable, need constant billions of dollars of financial help to even syay afloat and pay their compute depth.

The worst part is that even bigger losers will be the general population. Not only are our kids gonna be dumber than us thanks to never having to think for themselved, but our pensions are tied to the stock market that will inevitably collapse when the realization that the top 30% of companies in terms of value are just dominoes waiting to collapse.

But the biggest loser of all is Elon Musk. Just because of who he is.