[throwaway918299]

I'm more skeptical than most on the current wave of AI tech innovation.

However, believe it or not, humanity can collectively work on different things at the same time. And the people putting emoji generators in phones are probably not the people I would want doing cancer research. And many many things that we rely on today were not directly created by research in those topics and were born from innovation in other unrelated areas.

[chefandy]

You don't feel that the astonishing amount of resources poured into current consumer level AI products is different?

[borski]

No. We poured similarly large amounts of resources into hundreds of companies in the dotcom boom, crypto, and so on.

This is a phase, just like many others, and will pass.

AI and LLMs will stick around and be important. The hype? That will die in favor of something else.

[clcaev]

In each round of expansion more externalities happen; we just fail to tax the externalities to reflect the real world consequences.

[borski]

I’m not sure I understand what you mean. Could you clarify?

[chefandy]

"It's what we've always done" is a classic non-argument against doing something. Is there an amount we could spend on something that essentially winds up being useless that you think would be bad? Do you not think there's a trade-off at some level about the sort of things people invest in?

[borski]

That's not the argument I made. You were responding to an argument that "humanity can collectively work on different things at the same time," and "many things that we rely on today were not directly created by research in those topics and were born from innovation in other unrelated areas."

Your response was "You don't feel that the astonishing amount of resources poured into current consumer level AI products is different?"

To which I responded that no, I don't feel that the amount of resources poured into current consumer level AI products is different; it is the same as it has always been.

That is not the same as making an argument that that is how it should be.

[chefandy]

Sure, that's not the point of what you said but it's the premise.

> We poured similarly large amounts of resources into hundreds of companies in the dotcom boom, crypto, and so on.

I don't agree with your ostensible implicit assumption that in this iteration of this cycle a) the economic and social costs are not consequential enough to care, (e.g. the social impact of how much easier scamming people is with these extremely capable base models,) b) the costs are comparable to those other things, (e.g. Goldman Sachs says we're looking at a 160% increase in data center energy usage driven by AI) and c) ignoring it will have the same negligible consequences that ignoring those other things did.

[rswail]

160% increase compared to today? Or to a forecast non-AI energy usage growth in data centers?