Artificial Intelligence

[Hektor]

14 hours ago, Spekulatius said:

Yes, these circular relationships are nothing new. Lucent gave generous finance terms customers who probably could not afford the equipment otherwise.

Similar to DE/CAT/CNH financing their customers, I guess. These do syndicate this debt.

[Peregrine]

I'm of the belief that these tech founders/CEOs, master-of-the-universe types are so completely out of touch with this world that they might as well not be on it.

 

In the US, we have a drug epidemic that's claiming over 70,000 lives a year and rendering nearly a million homeless, epic income inequality, completely inability to even fix a damn pothole or get a permit to build anything including housing and all these guys can obsess over is spending trillions to build a digital god? I feel like I'm living in a simulation.

Edited September 25, 2025 by Peregrine

[Milu]

20 minutes ago, Peregrine said:

I'm of the belief that these tech founders/CEOs, master-of-the-universe types are so completely out of touch with this world that they might as well not be on it.

 

In the US, we have a drug epidemic that's claiming over 70,000 lives a year and rendering nearly a million homeless, epic income inequality, completely inability to even fix a damn pothole or get a permit to build anything including housing and all these guys can obsess over is spending trillions to build a digital god? I feel like I'm living in a simulation.

I never really understood this argument. Essentially if something bad is happening in the world then nobody is allowed to be interested in focusing their energy on something else. Comment always ends up being “why is Jeff bezos focusing on going to space when he could be saving the rainforest in Brazil”, “why is Zuckerberg focusing on the metaverse when people are dying from fentanyl”. People have diverse interests, ambitions, and care about different causes. If somebody wants to focus on saving dolphins and somebody else wants to focus on drug epidemics then it’s up to each person to follow what drives them. Who are we to judge.

[Eldad]

18 minutes ago, Milu said:

I never really understood this argument. Essentially if something bad is happening in the world then nobody is allowed to be interested in focusing their energy on something else. Comment always ends up being “why is Jeff bezos focusing on going to space when he could be saving the rainforest in Brazil”, “why is Zuckerberg focusing on the metaverse when people are dying from fentanyl”. People have diverse interests, ambitions, and care about different causes. If somebody wants to focus on saving dolphins and somebody else wants to focus on drug epidemics then it’s up to each person to follow what drives them. Who are we to judge.

I think you are kind of both right. Maybe the pendulum towards individuality and away from the sense of a community has swung too far. In other eras it would be seen as an obligation of the most powerful to help to fix these things and would have been dangerous to their position and status for them to “do them” only. But in our current epoch, Milu is right. It will probably swing back and probably already is swinging back. 

[Peregrine]

28 minutes ago, Milu said:

I never really understood this argument. Essentially if something bad is happening in the world then nobody is allowed to be interested in focusing their energy on something else. Comment always ends up being “why is Jeff bezos focusing on going to space when he could be saving the rainforest in Brazil”, “why is Zuckerberg focusing on the metaverse when people are dying from fentanyl”. People have diverse interests, ambitions, and care about different causes. If somebody wants to focus on saving dolphins and somebody else wants to focus on drug epidemics then it’s up to each person to follow what drives them. Who are we to judge.

 

Because these are real problems afflicting the country that wouldn't cost even a fraction of what AI spend is costing now. More importantly, no one even knows what the hell this AI spend is going to be good for. The way these guys are spending money to create Digital God that will somehow solve all of the world's problems seems like a total joke. More like a huge amount of money being lit on fire in a speculative heap.

[LC]

The AI spend will address a single cost: that the majority of office jobs, middle management, white collar positions…these are positions that do not require any unique talent. Train an AI model with the communication and problem solving strategy of the generic individual with a bachelors/masters degree, and you can replace 50% of white collar employees. That is a huge, huge ongoing corporate expense which these models aim to replace. That is the value proposition.

[Red Lion]

21 minutes ago, LC said:

The AI spend will address a single cost: that the majority of office jobs, middle management, white collar positions…these are positions that do not require any unique talent. Train an AI model with the communication and problem solving strategy of the generic individual with a bachelors/masters degree, and you can replace 50% of white collar employees. That is a huge, huge ongoing corporate expense which these models aim to replace. That is the value proposition.

 

+1

[Spekulatius]

9 hours ago, Hektor said:

Similar to DE/CAT/CNH financing their customers, I guess. These do syndicate this debt.

There is no circulatory in this financing. it would circular if DE/CNH would invest directly in farms providing capital to farmers so they can buy their equipment.

CAT does not producing farming machinery.

[Eldad]

1 hour ago, LC said:

The AI spend will address a single cost: that the majority of office jobs, middle management, white collar positions…these are positions that do not require any unique talent. Train an AI model with the communication and problem solving strategy of the generic individual with a bachelors/masters degree, and you can replace 50% of white collar employees. That is a huge, huge ongoing corporate expense which these models aim to replace. That is the value proposition.

Massive streeeeeeeeeetch
 

Then we are going to SPAC a 3D printed Crypto that will become the reserve currency of the metaverse. 

Edited September 26, 2025 by Eldad

[Dalal.Holdings]

1 hour ago, LC said:

The AI spend will address a single cost: that the majority of office jobs, middle management, white collar positions…these are positions that do not require any unique talent. Train an AI model with the communication and problem solving strategy of the generic individual with a bachelors/masters degree, and you can replace 50% of white collar employees. That is a huge, huge ongoing corporate expense which these models aim to replace. That is the value proposition.

 

What happens when your new LLM Middle Manager hallucinates stuff at you

[Eldad]

1 minute ago, Dalal.Holdings said:

 

What happens when your new LLM Middle Manager hallucinates stuff at you

Or when it becomes self aware and just wants to take a 2 hour lunch and get drunk at Chotchkie’s. 

[Dalal.Holdings]

It feels like ‘99 in that AI is still early and not really going to change much. I’d bet that most of the companies that will get huge as a result of this technology have yet to be born, and a lot of the companies held in high regard today won’t live up to lofty expectations

[Dalal.Holdings]

3 hours ago, Peregrine said:

I'm of the belief that these tech founders/CEOs, master-of-the-universe types are so completely out of touch with this world that they might as well not be on it.

 

In the US, we have a drug epidemic that's claiming over 70,000 lives a year and rendering nearly a million homeless, epic income inequality, completely inability to even fix a damn pothole or get a permit to build anything including housing and all these guys can obsess over is spending trillions to build a digital god? I feel like I'm living in a simulation.

 

A lot of them have egos. They also have lived through an era in tech where it was winner-take-all or winner-take-most and think that they have no choice but to run this race. That if they don’t participate, they’ll wither away into irrelevance…

[LC]

1 hour ago, Dalal.Holdings said:

 

What happens when your new LLM Middle Manager hallucinates stuff at you

 

This is why it only replaces 50% of the workforce. But the 50% (or whatever percentage) is a very significant cost savings.

 

How feasible is up for debate, but that's the consensus objective.

[LC]

1 hour ago, Dalal.Holdings said:

 

What happens when your new LLM Middle Manager hallucinates stuff at you

Also - what happens today when middle managers screw up or make poor decisions? Relatively nothing, really...

[Castanza]

31 minutes ago, LC said:

 

This is why it only replaces 50% of the workforce. But the 50% (or whatever percentage) is a very significant cost savings.

 

How feasible is up for debate, but that's the consensus objective.

Im not sold on this….Every time my job gets easier because some new tool has simplified or taken away some task; it also becomes more complex and challenging in other ways because it’s freed me up for different purposes. Don’t get me wrong, there are a LOT of paper pushers out there that are responsible for like 2 documentation tasks and somehow have survived 20 years at a company making 90k/yr…I’m just not convinced these companies spending massive amounts of money will focus on those people. I think they’re going to want to focus on the bleeding edge. Also think from a normal company standpoint. You need people to implement these new solutions with your legacy customs garbage. Well that takes money and resources. My company is implementing AI in a bunch of different ways but we are not focusing on these middle management workers because our competition likely is not either. You’ve got to focus on driving innovation vs cleaning up the laggards otherwise you will in turn become a laggard. Maybe AI gets so good it can assist with resource constraint to the degree it tackles all this…idk…but that’s not how I’m seeing it today. In a lot of ways I think highly specialized people are more at risk depending the industry. 

[Milu]

10 hours ago, Peregrine said:

 

Because these are real problems afflicting the country that wouldn't cost even a fraction of what AI spend is costing now. More importantly, no one even knows what the hell this AI spend is going to be good for. The way these guys are spending money to create Digital God that will somehow solve all of the world's problems seems like a total joke. More like a huge amount of money being lit on fire in a speculative heap.

Hasn't there always been real problems in every country all the time, I wouldn't say that today's problems are any better or worse than they were 20, 30, 50 years ago. And I also I think your term 'Digital God' is a bit of a loaded term and not representative of what most people are focused on. For the majority of the hyperscalers they are building out compute to further improve the quality of their recommendation engines for what videos to serve in your youtube feed, newsfeed etc, what products to sell (in the case of Amazon).

 

Many of these CEOs (Zuckerberg, Altman etc) are still quite young so are not in the giving back to society phase of their career yet so I also don't see a fair comparison. The big philantopists like Rockerfeller, Buffett were in their 70's when they established foundations or signed giving pledge. Gates started giving back in his 40's which is likelier on the early side but again it's not a competition. Society would be a lot better if each of us focused on our own giving back, whether small or big, and care less about criticising what other choose to do with their capital.

[Hektor]

12 hours ago, Spekulatius said:

There is no circulatory in this financing. it would circular if DE/CNH would invest directly in farms providing capital to farmers so they can buy their equipment.

CAT does not producing farming machinery.

Or more like MSFT investing in AAPL long ago.

[Peregrine]

15 hours ago, Dalal.Holdings said:

 

A lot of them have egos. They also have lived through an era in tech where it was winner-take-all or winner-take-most and think that they have no choice but to run this race. That if they don’t participate, they’ll wither away into irrelevance…

 

It's group think and the only company that doesn't fall for it is Apple. They never overhired during the pandemic so a bunch of Gen Z kids can sit around doing nothing, they never took sides in the dumb culture wars of this country, they never get involved in dumb moonshot projects and they're certainly not lighting hundreds of billions on fire in a race that no one knows how to measure or for what purpose. They're like the only sensible big tech company.

[Peregrine]

7 hours ago, Milu said:

Hasn't there always been real problems in every country all the time, I wouldn't say that today's problems are any better or worse than they were 20, 30, 50 years ago. And I also I think your term 'Digital God' is a bit of a loaded term and not representative of what most people are focused on. For the majority of the hyperscalers they are building out compute to further improve the quality of their recommendation engines for what videos to serve in your youtube feed, newsfeed etc, what products to sell (in the case of Amazon).

 

Many of these CEOs (Zuckerberg, Altman etc) are still quite young so are not in the giving back to society phase of their career yet so I also don't see a fair comparison. The big philantopists like Rockerfeller, Buffett were in their 70's when they established foundations or signed giving pledge. Gates started giving back in his 40's which is likelier on the early side but again it's not a competition. Society would be a lot better if each of us focused on our own giving back, whether small or big, and care less about criticising what other choose to do with their capital.

 

The build out of railroads and fiber optic lines of past eras were real, long-lasting infrastructure. Nvidia GPUs go obsolescent in 3 years. About 60% of the freakin spend on data centers are for these chips. People are trying to draw analogies of this boom to prior ones but it's not even close to the same.

 

My broader point wasn't even about philanthropy but about how the ultra-wealthy in tech circles seem to live increasingly in their own delusion.

[Peregrine]

17 hours ago, LC said:

The AI spend will address a single cost: that the majority of office jobs, middle management, white collar positions…these are positions that do not require any unique talent. Train an AI model with the communication and problem solving strategy of the generic individual with a bachelors/masters degree, and you can replace 50% of white collar employees. That is a huge, huge ongoing corporate expense which these models aim to replace. That is the value proposition.

 

It's not even clear whether AI will bring any real positive benefit for the most obvious application and the one most often touted for obsolescence: coding.

 

The only study I found measuring AI efficiency gains in coding showed that AI made programmers even slower. The coders spent so much time trying to figure out what the hell the AI was doing that they may as well just saved their time by writing it from scratch: https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/archive/2025/09/ai-bubble-us-economy/684128/

 

So yeah, AI can write a crap load of lines. Doesn't mean that it'll be useful.

Edited September 26, 2025 by Peregrine

[vinod1]

What I am hearing from friends who have software companies, developing custom software either for clients or as products, is quite different on the impact of AI of software development: It is real and it is spectacular.

 

These are people who actually write the code themselves. The step change in productivity increase is unbelievably high for new software development. 

 

I think the skepticism on AI might most likely resemble "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers" (I understand this is a myth).

 

Vinod

[SharperDingaan]

AI is a hell of a tool, but it's all about application. However, to most folks it's simply a speculative coding stack looking for a potential problem, and NOT the coding solution to a vision outlined in a list of specifications. Of course if the master can't lead, articulate the vision, or work with the coders .... 

 

SD 

Edited September 26, 2025 by SharperDingaan

[Peregrine]

42 minutes ago, vinod1 said:

What I am hearing from friends who have software companies, developing custom software either for clients or as products, is quite different on the impact of AI of software development: It is real and it is spectacular.

 

These are people who actually write the code themselves. The step change in productivity increase is unbelievably high for new software development. 

 

I think the skepticism on AI might most likely resemble "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers" (I understand this is a myth).

 

Vinod

 

I spoke to Microsoft software engineers who have said the complete opposite. The "last mile" work to getting code to actually work properly is still incredibly human-intensive. There is also a whole reddit sub-forum of software engineers working at big tech firms disputing the claims that their CEOs are making.

 

At the very least, these anecdotes suggest that AI isn't gonna render obsolete an entire employment class. Improvements? Sure. 10x improvement? Probably not.

[rkbabang]

18 minutes ago, Peregrine said:

 

I spoke to Microsoft software engineers who have said the complete opposite. The "last mile" work to getting code to actually work properly is still incredibly human-intensive. There is also a whole reddit sub-forum of software engineers working at big tech firms disputing the claims that their CEOs are making.

 

At the very least, these anecdotes suggest that AI isn't gonna render obsolete an entire employment class. Improvements? Sure. 10x improvement? Probably not.

 

 

I'm not too worried about my job as an engineer (IC design), I'm in my early 50s.  If I get to work another 8-10 years I'd be happy.  But what about someone in their early 20s graduating in Engineering or Computer Science today?  What does AI look like 15-45 years from now?  I think I'd be worried if I was younger.

 

I think Amara's Law probably applies here:

 

 "We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run".  --Roy Amara

 

Edited September 26, 2025 by rkbabang