I agree there's a path where this encourages people to be even more sedentary and lazy. On the other hand, if I cook every meal and clean up after, plus take care of home cleaning, I could easily spend 3 hours a day on a variety of home tasks. A robot could potentially prepare better quality meals from fresh ingredients and save me 3 hours a day. It could also fix holes in my clothes and do other tasks I'm just not motivated enough to do. So the way to think about it is like you just gained a huge amount of energy and free time to do things you weren't doing before.
I think people are also literally fighting datacenters. As others have said the increase in energy costs is a problem for the average person. Not only is AI potentially competing for your job, it's also competing for your access to energy to power your home or your vehicle. Energy costs also affect the price you pay for basically every good and service.
Then there's the fact that many of those datacenter are being built over what would otherwise be usable farmland. I'm sure many will say "it's not that much land", but then tech billionaires would like to build datacenters the size of Manhattan. What for? To train a bigger LLM? Yay?
Is there actually a shortage of usable farmland? (If anything, I think the world would be better off if farmers used their land more efficiently and sustainably.)
If the cost of energy is a problem, I feel like we should fix that problem instead of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. There's no reason residential customers should pay the same amount as data centers.
> Then there's the fact that many of those datacenter are being built over what would otherwise be usable farmland. I'm sure many will say "it's not that much land", but then tech billionaires would like to build datacenters the size of Manhattan. What for? To train a bigger LLM? Yay?
Sure but you can say this about everything. Where are the protests about the wine industry in California? 500,000 acres of land for vineyards, far more water used for growing grapes than cooling data centers, all so a handful of people can make fortunes selling empty calories to the rich?
If you want to focus purely on utilitarian "optimal land use for essentials only" arguments there's way worse offenders than datacenters, the anti-DC sentiment is purely part of the anti-AI wave.
It takes 870 gallons of water to produce 1 gallon of wine -- if people were genuinely protesting water waste it would be a good idea to start there. Almonds too.
I like wine and almonds. They are valuable commodities with a variety of uses and anyone can enjoy them for a modest price. They can be used and made into many additional valuable things, from sangria to baklava. What can LLMs do for me?
I am glad you like some things. Some people like other things, such as LLMs, or hosted server infrastructure.
Now explain to me why you are allowed to have the things you like which use a lot of water, while other people are not allowed to have the things they like which use a lot of water.
> Napa Valley’s most contentious political battleground — winery and vineyard development — has potentially reached a significant turning point following a series of key victories for proponents of limited expansion, leaving continued growth of Napa’s prized wine region uncertain.
> While final votes were being cast in the midterm election on Nov. 8, (2022,) Napa County’s Board of Supervisors voted to revoke a permit for one of the largest winery development proposals in the region's history, the Mountain Peak winery, following nearly nine years of opposition. ... locals fiercely objected to the project’s scale, voicing concerns over water supply and quality, increased fire risks and potential environmental and biological harm.
> The first phase of Coakley Vineyards is what was the most distressing to neighbors: the construction of an irrigation reservoir—also known as an ag pond—to hold 3.3 million gallons of water when full. The pond would be filled (and replenished after depletion and evaporation) with groundwater from three wells on the property.
> To the locals surrounding the property, the plan posed a very real threat to their water supply.
> Steve and two other concerned landowners met with one of the Coakley project leaders, Randy Heinzen, the chief operating officer of local vineyard management and consulting firm Vineyard Professional Services, to discuss their qualms about the project.
> Neither Coakley nor Heinzen responded to requests for comment from New Times for this story.
> According to Steve, the meeting only exacerbated their fears about the pond’s potential stress on surrounding groundwater levels.
> Protesters in Coahuila have occupied the winery of Mexico’s oldest winemaker since Friday night, accusing its owners of using too much water from a shared source, leaving them with too little to irrigate their crops.
> Communal landowners took over the Casa Madero winery in the town of San Lorenzo, 140 kilometers west of Saltillo, to demand that the owners reduce their water use. They first arrived at the winery on Wednesday but left when state police arrived, only to return to enter the property two days later.
> The company accused the protesters of violently installing themselves on the property and blamed municipal police for failing to take action, despite being present. The newspaper El País reported that the protesters were armed with machetes, picks and shovels.
On the other end, local governments can raise excess water usage rates on farms, golf courses, and wineries, instead of giving them offsetting tax or rate breaks and subsidies to attract them: https://www.sanluisobispo.com/news/local/environment/article...
You could say this about anything, but it's being said about AI datacenters. People like wine! They don't like AI and the NSA. It's really not a mystery.
That's exactly my point! Everything has negative externalities, and focusing on them is the way to seem "rational" even though you don't actually care about them. It's the same as how people will protest high density residences "ruining the character of the neighborhood" when they really just don't want poor people living near them. You can't just outright say you don't want poor people in your neighborhood, so you talk about how these residences ruin neighborhood character, disrupt view cones, cause traffic problems, etc.
Here it's the same thing--the people protesting don't give a damn about water waste, electricity usage, or wasted land. If they did, there are tons of other offenders who are way worse. But they don't want to outright say they're protesting against AI because it makes them seem like luddites.
They don't want to spend resources on something that they don't like (AI), but don't care about resources spent on something they do (wine). This is rational if you assume feelings don't need to be rational, which typically is an uncontroversial statement.
Bogleheads is maximizing potential economic gains from investing in the capital market while minimizing costs from the exposure attempt.
The results from dollar cost averaging into VT or a target date fund for the next 30-50 years is likely superior to gambling on single named securities or options, for the unsophisticated.
I wish the tech field wasn't so full of clueless grifters. The most frustrating thing is that this kind of people, the kind who loudly and confidently assert bullshit claim based on insufficient knowledge, have a knack for positioning themselves in positions of power.
The difference is that LLMs are not compilers. You can't trust the output to be correct. They routinely make bad design choices. If you're prototyping some kind of throwaway MVP, you're just sketching something, it's probably fine not to review it. If you're trying to build a piece of software that's going to survive for years, why are you doing this? The tech is clearly not yet fully mature.
Just yesterday, I was trying to use Claude Opus 4.7 to debug an issue in a program that I wrote, and its solution was to remove a feature, change the design to eliminate the problem without consulting me. I only found out that it had removed this feature through testing. Imagine not reviewing things like that. How can people argue for this with a straight face? We'll probably get there eventually, but there's no need to rush before the tech is ready. Doing that is just being clueless.
For the same reason others have explained here and elsewhere, with some writing entire articles on the topic. Compilers produce semantically equivalent translation of source code into target code. That's not at all what LLMs do. They produce unpredictable results from ambiguous specifications written by people who may or may not understand software engineering. Big difference.
Yeah this is pretty shady. The S&P 500 in particular has fairly strict criteria (e.g. 4 consecutive quarters of profitability) and those criteria exist for a reason. They made me more comfortable buying the S&P 500 knowing I'm not buying pre-revenue companies. This is a bad precedent to set just to please Elon.
I'm a bit out of the loop, but has SpaceX not been profitable for the last 4 quarters? I understand they're investing a lot into R&D for Starship but I was under the impression they've been making a killing on Starlink.
Starlink itself is profitable but the insane valuation they're trying to get for the IPO is based on an assumed continued massive growth of users - and even then I don't think Starlink by itself makes SpaceX a trillion dollar company.
If Musk personally wasn't completely toxic worldwide, and if there wasn't all the other new space companies noticing the Egg of Columbus* that is cheap rockets and the potential for comm sat constellations that launch prices enable, I could believe 100e6 people would buy a $50/month service. A common rating for valuation is profit over 20 years, that revenue (not profit, IDK the margin) would be $1.2T.
Many seem to also be doing this with androids around the time he started talking about them, hence how we can buy them and put them to work even though Optimus still hasn't launched yet.
Past performance as a company is like 20% of the concern here.
The concern is ~80% that a brand new stock enters the market & immediately has to be bought by everyone. The market has no time to adjust & settle.
This is fleecing everyone & it's entirely unclear under what madness this would ever have been considered.
There's so many irregularities and abnormalities being considered here, and all of them seem like pretty straightforward safeguards. It feels like nothing short of a conspiracy that so many norms would be pushed aside to consider listing spacex so quickly in so many indexes. "The proposal could also remove the minimum Investable Weight Factor requirement for megacap companies." For fuck sake! https://x.com/Benzinga/status/2050244492335206911
We don't know. There is reporting that they have positive EBITDA, but that's not the same as profitable. Basically it would completely ignore launch costs.
They also aren't just the rocket and satellite company any more, but include Twitter and xAI, both of which would contribute heavy losses.
Not to downplay their accomplishment but Llama 3.1 8B is a terrible model. It's really outdated at this point. It's cool that they were able to accelerate a model with silicon, but it also feels wasteful since llama 8B is such a useless model?
I guess their point was to demonstrate that it's possible to bake a decently-sized model to a silicon? As with anything related to HW, I guess the lead time will be considerably larger than the software counterparts, so I guess in 1-2 years timeframe we might see something like Gemma 4 baked onto a silicon.
Yeah, I think the important part is the process to convert the model to silicon, not the actual implementation itself.
Whether it succeeds now depends a lot on the rate of improvement of model architecture. They're betting on model design and capability improvements slowing down - and then wiping the floor with everyone else with their inference economics.
I think this is the future. When models start converging at "really good" (which I think is already happening) then burning them into ASIC silicon is the natural next step.
Harnesses can keep improving with a fixed model and the throughput opens up new possibilities like doing 10x more "thinking" or exploring parallel paths and picking the best.
It's not just the UI... It's that producing content is much easier on a laptop or desktop, with an actual keyboard, or video editing software available. The rise of mobile contributed to a shift where the internet was split between producers and consumers, or influencers and followers. A lot of mobile users are only passively consuming content.
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