Commodification of Intelligence: Good, Bad, and Ugly Circular AI Deals

Posted by cl42 1 hour ago

Commodification of Intelligence: Good, Bad, and Ugly Circular AI Deals(www.emergingtrajectories.com)

23 points | 14 comments

andiey 1 hour ago|

If healthy and risky circular financing deals look similar at first, how can investors or regulators tell when a circular deal has crossed the line into something dangerous...especially when it's off the balance sheets?

cl42 1 hour ago|

This has been bugging me quite a bit. I think the more "off-balance-sheet" the deal is, the shadier it gets... But it's really hard to tell early on.

I actually think Nvidia's deals have been above-board, generally speaking, because they are transaprent.

Less true for Meta and Terawulf.

firasd 1 hour ago||

I think the real question in all sorts of financial setups is really “is the dollar actually worth a dollar”. So when company A invests in company B which buys from company A the actual question is whether the valuation of the investment and the valuation of the purchase is correct or are they getting high on their own supply

dragontamer 1 hour ago|

A recession is a cash/dollar bubble.

First cash/dollars are considered bad so they collapse in price. When the psychology shifts, suddenly the dollar climbs in value and itself bubbles over, causing a recession.

cl42 34 minutes ago||

Not sure if you're referring to dollars as an alternative to other forms of cash (e.g., treasuries, money market funds, etc.) or as an alternative to other currencies (e.g., Euro, Yen, etc.). If it's the latter, then I think we've seen recessions and booms where the opposite happens, depending on the balance of payments situation.

rambambram 54 minutes ago||

> commodification of intelligence

Is HN really this fast!? Everybody already skipped the hard questions whether LLMs are intelligent? 'It' can already be commodified?

So how much time and effort it took from these companies? A couple of years and millions spent on PR? And LLMs are "intelligent" all of a sudden, is what everybody says nowadays?

Especially applicable for programmers: naming things is not only hard, it's also important, and can be very insidious. Remember, marketeers also name things. For example, naming the internet 'the cloud', some 15 years ago.

I can't stop thinking about a quote of one of my favorite authors (Theo Kars): "Progress can only be technical in nature, because knowledge is transferable and wisdom is not." [translated from Dutch]

root_axis 48 minutes ago||

I'm pretty skeptical of the LLM hype, but I'd say it's fair to describe LLMs as displaying some form verbal intelligence.

wnmurphy 15 minutes ago||

Intelligence doesn't require sentience.

Think of it like this: if you can offload a task to an AI model that requires reasoning or representing a nonlinear system, you are offloading intelligence.

Animats 1 hour ago||

Whether inference hardware will be a commodity remains to be seen. We had twenty years of most servers being x86-64. That's commodity compute. Inference hardware isn't a mature architecture yet. There will be progress and obsolescence.

cl42 1 hour ago|

Observing how the US stock market is behaving this week (up-down-up-down...), I feel like many investors don't appreciate the distinction between good and bad circularity.

gadflyinyoureye 1 hour ago|

Part of the market issues this week are Korea imploding and Japan about to implode. Japan's bond rate moving up could mean the end of the carry trade. Korea apparently has many stock tickers but only two distinct companies behind them. This caused their market and their overly leveraged retail investors a lot of pain.

cl42 1 hour ago||

Good point. Do you think the NASDAQ selloff will recover once Korea stabilizes?

gadflyinyoureye 1 hour ago||

Eventually. I'm a bit concerned about it right now. I think SpaceX showed that the AI story is weaker than promoted. This will make people wonder about all the money going into it. If the bubble pops, the blow back on that particular index will be huge. Maybe dotcom bursting huge. But after 15 years QQQ move positive.

cl42 37 minutes ago||

SpaceX is a really interesting one, tbh, especially in the context of circular deals... they're making $2b/month leasing their data centers to Anthropic and Google, which is a huge markup.

... but then again... if they are leasing the compute then it implies their own AI work isn't paying off?

In short: I agree with you.