Don't worry, once the Wall Street tap runs dry, the U.S. government will be more than happy to step in and bail out the AI corps. at the taxpayer's expense.
> Don't worry, once the Wall Street tap runs dry, the U.S. government will be more than happy to step in and bail out the AI corps. at the taxpayer's expense.
I have a brilliant idea. Why not start this now?
The US government will give every child born $1000 in money in order to hand it to the small number of families who own 70% of equities in order to purchase equities the child can't touch for 18 years. That is US Government -> child -> rich person who currently owns the equity, although the rich person gets the cash in hand the child has to wait 18 years to sell the equity.
Where does the US Government get this $1000 per child from? Borrow it, adding to the $38,000,000,000,000 in national debt.
Here is the interesting part of my brilliant plan. That child will inherit, calculated per capita, $111,000 in debt the moment she is born. That child will be responsible, calculated per capita, for ~$3,000 a year in interest on that debt.
In order to sell the idea, every time the US Government gives $1000 to a child to purchase stocks I own, I will give $250 to another child to purchase stocks I own. Let's do the math: $1000 profit - $250 loss + $250 profit = $1000 profit. Best part is the media will run this as the leading news story for 3 days making me look like God.
Subtract GDP growth and it’s slightly negative, meaning simply borrowing more money and the at current rates the debt to GDP ratio decreases over time. Massive spending sprees are why it’s gotten so huge, kicking it down the road turns it into a smaller problem soon as politicians stop actively making the issue worse it goes away.
We could argue about the risk if things start to fail, but in an emergency the US could change its constitution and abandon its debt.
The new AI data center I build to do what ever it is that AI Clippy does over at Microsoft will run on coal energy and those dirty chimneys are not going to clean themselves.
Not to disagree with the overall point, but because this comes up a lot I'll nitpick it: issuing debt is not the same as printing money
With debt, along with the proverbial "cash" comes an opposing "IOU" -- any change* is thus only temporary, in the time dimension (essentially that's what's being exchanged: time)
Printing money out of nowhere is different, because it's missing that other half
* at the risk of stating the obvious: "change" meaning "difference" and not "cents"
A lot of debt also arises because of savings needs. If everyone is saving for retirement, for example, that savings has to be debt marked somewhere else. Examples:
* Social security used to have a huge surplus, that was savings that had to go somewhere (even if it was just a savings account in a bank, the bank would then be able to lend it out). They instead buy treasuries and that savings becomes debt to the USG.
* China likewise needs to save dollars because it doesn't want them sloshing around in their economy leading to inflation, so instead of using it to buy things they buy treasuries, and their savings becomes debt to the USG (not always a great deal for China if interest rates are below inflation).
The dollar has been so useful in the past as a currency of trade because you could save large amounts of it easily by buying US treasuries. One reason China doesn't want the RMB to be used so heavily for trade is that they don't want to do the same yet.
Actually it kind of is, in as much as it expands the money supply.
When a bank issues debt, the money is created 'out of thin air'. When the debt is paid off, that money is destroyed. However usually more debt is being created than redeemed as things go on, so the total money supply increases (this is a good thing, as it allows the economy to expand).
Various regulations and central bank market interventions (quantitative tightening/easing) control this process, which thus can be induced to 'print money' if the government wishes - assuming they have a sovereign currency.
Fractional reserve banking is still not the same as printing money outright
If you borrow $100 USD from the bank, and pay it off immediately after, it's clear no money was "created" as such
If $100 USD is "printed" outright, it's clear that there's no way to achieve that same result
The fact that the debt isn't generally paid back immediately doesn't change that fundamental. That's what I meant when I said any apparent "change" is about "time" rather than "money"
It is true that the money supply should expand with the economy. Turning raw materials into finished goods represents a larger "net economy" at the end of the process than at the beginning. (Indeed that's basically how it makes sense to have interest on debt in the first place)
Nevertheless, printing money out of whole cloth is different from issuing debt
> If you borrow $100 USD from the bank, and pay it off immediately after, it's clear no money was "created" as such
The bank "printed" money by handing out cash that it didn't have. It only had a fraction of it. That new money went free into the world with the same respect any other cash gets. You and I can't pull that off.
History reminder to everyone: The dot com companies were not bailed out. Only the Detroit auto industry. What is with this rage-bait assumption that a bailout is guaranteed?
China is focusing heavily on AI applications. They have basically decided already to deal with their coming demographic bust with robuts/AI rather than immigration. Its not even about military applications, the US is just afraid that China will shoot so far ahead of us economically that they won't have any leverage over it in the future at all.
There's a lot of nonsense that comes out on both sides of the aisle. I wish there was a solid single source of truth to figure out what's really going on in China and what's really going on behind the scenes in the U.S.
Some talk about how China has some strategic issues, such as do they have a reliable supply of food and energy? (Zeihan etc.)
I guess the energy portion is being solved with renewables. And I guess if they solve the issue of demographic collapse with robots and AI, that's something.
But really, if there's less people and they're getting older, what's the point? What are they really working towards?
This question is also becoming a problem post-Trump immigration ban in the U.S.
Who knows what the U.S.'s demographics are going to look like now?
Trump inherited a U.S. with some of the best demographics of all nations on the planet, especially in the West. And he managed to throw that in the garbage.
> I wish there was a solid single source of truth to figure out what's really going on in China
What kind of sources are you looking for? The Five Year Plans are the best source of truth for what they are planning on doing nationwide. The annual Statistical Communiqué on National Economic and Social Development and China Statistical Yearbook from the NBS contain statistics on how that implementation is going. Then every year the NDRC delivers the Report on the Implementation of the Plan for National Economic and Social Development and on the Draft Plan to the National People’s Congress which packages up the statistics on how the plan is progressing.
They’re the most reliable source we’re going to get without being party insiders. There’s still Soviet-style inflation of figures to meet quotas but China has been cracking down on that for the last few decades because they want accurate data for the five year plans. I think it’s more of a problem with outer provinces, less so for the major manufacturing hubs.
Alternative sources to verify are a bit harder to find without knowing the languages (lots of the NRDC and NBS stats are available in English).
Yes, people also compare some of these statistics with export/import data and with data from other countries on the other side of these transactions, and the numbers match.
You could just go over there and live for a few years, you can be your own source. But yes, they have energy, no they don't have oil, yes they have lots of agriculture land, no they messed up some of their environment and that will take time to heal, yes they are working on it.
> But really, if there's less people and they're getting older, what's the point? What are they really working towards?
China wants to be a rich country even if their population stabilizes at only 900 million people or so. Mostly they want to avoid the middle income trap, which would have been a problem regardless of their demographics falling off a cliff. Automation is the best way to get around it, and they have enough tech, production know how and capacity, and smart people to pull that off.
China is going to continue doing what is best for it, and they haven't gone stupid like the USA has. Embracing AI for productive uses rather than just fixating on the slop produced is one place where they are racing past the west.
>You could just go over there and live for a few years, you can be your own source.
No I can't. First of all single anecdotes do not equal national numbers and secondly the truth may be hidden away from westerners and not easy to gleam even if I live there. I experienced this when moving to Europe. I thought WOW this place has every potential to be a strong equal to the US. They got (enough)money, so much bright talent, they can do anything the US can do and then some. But I missed the structural problems at a macro level and it wasn't until I left and many years passed that I finally understood. I just want that insight without having to go through all of that.
There's a lot of nonsense that comes out on both sides of the aisle. I wish there was a solid single source of truth to figure out what's really going on in China and what's really going on behind the scenes in the U.S.
I've always assumed that there is such a source of truth, but that I had never heard of it, wouldn't have access to it, and couldn't afford it if I did.
Reading a few tweets from Musk was all it took to correct that misapprehension. It's increasingly clear that nobody at any level of play knows jack shit about anything.
This is not true. I was recently reminded of this during the recent small elections that occured. The parties have "internal polling" that was significantly more accurate such that it caused shifts in actions (see the recent surge in efforts by Trump and his party to maintain control of the TN house seat).
Furthermore we saw Musk's and his buddies confidence in the 2024 election. We now know he had internal applications built to better understand what was really going on and access to better analytics than what was shown in the news.
The regular people (like me) were left to rely on pollsters and our confidence come from the fact that many of these pollsters had decades of experience getting things right. This was then regurgitated among all the news (and political youtubers) about how things were going only to have all their predictions be wrong and these esteemed pollsters deciding to retire.
Looking back it may have been all a scam and that its possible that these pollsters were getting ready to retire anyway and gave into party pressure to make Kamala look better than she really was. The end result is that we wasted our time believing nonsense and I am done with it.
I agree that political sentiment analysis is one area where the high-level players really do have oracular resources that the rest of us lack. Besides Musk, a good example might be how Bezos pivoted instantly from neutral to pro-Trump leading up to the 2024 election. Seems clear that he knew what was about to happen when he killed the Harris endorsement in the Post.
But the question here is more general than that. Musk didn't have a reliable source of ground truth when he accused the Thai cave diver of being a pedophile. If he did, he didn't use it. Ditto, when he woke up one day and decided that Twitter was worth $54.20/share. You could point to countless other examples where highly-positioned, highly-resourceful, "high agency" people simply read the room wrong.
> There's a lot of nonsense that comes out on both sides of the aisle. I wish there was a solid single source of truth to figure out what's really going on in China and what's really going on behind the scenes in the U.S.
Isn't this simply the answer?
That what's going on is gaslighting of the public and that there are people behind the scenes and they don't want hoi polloi to know what they're up to?
This geo-politics (or politics) talk is 'intellectual' men's astrology.
When a woman asks me my astrological sign, I know she's a deeply unserious person. When a man says 'do they have a reliable supply of food and energy'...
I said the same thing on a different post and people downvoted it. The current administration believes that the US can't fall behind China in this AI arms race. So don't expect anything too drastic to happen to the large players in the game.
Does anybody know how much an ML model is actually worth to build a new model? Like when they start making a new model, do they modify the old or do they start from scratch?
I'm asking to know how much owning a model is actually worth, not in how much it could make money by selling use, but in how much it deprecates and keeps value to make a new one. If say one side of China/US lacks out on a model generation, do they only need to follow progress on the science behind it and when they own the data, the algorithm and the hardware all they need is "just" time and energy or is it important, that they actually have their on instance of a large model from every generation continuously?
Maybe, but a clear Republican bailout of AI might wipe them out for several election cycles / foreseeable future. Big tech isn’t popular, AI isn’t popular and bail outs aren’t popular
What evidence do you have that that's going to be the case? I ask because my entire life, I've seen terrible things done by the Republican Party. And regular people get really hurt. For example, the great financial crisis. Yet, a little bit of time passes, and that 30-some-odd percent goes right back to voting for them.
The public voted for Republicans in their highest-ever numbers in 2020 when the party did everything possible to denigrate public health efforts and scientific research at a time when hundreds of thousands were dying of Covid, with no Mexican wall or Obamacare repeal promises met.
There is no scenario where the American vote for a party will fall below 48%, and elections will continue to be decided by how 3-4 states vote.
I have a brilliant idea. Why not start this now?
The US government will give every child born $1000 in money in order to hand it to the small number of families who own 70% of equities in order to purchase equities the child can't touch for 18 years. That is US Government -> child -> rich person who currently owns the equity, although the rich person gets the cash in hand the child has to wait 18 years to sell the equity.
Where does the US Government get this $1000 per child from? Borrow it, adding to the $38,000,000,000,000 in national debt.
Here is the interesting part of my brilliant plan. That child will inherit, calculated per capita, $111,000 in debt the moment she is born. That child will be responsible, calculated per capita, for ~$3,000 a year in interest on that debt.
In order to sell the idea, every time the US Government gives $1000 to a child to purchase stocks I own, I will give $250 to another child to purchase stocks I own. Let's do the math: $1000 profit - $250 loss + $250 profit = $1000 profit. Best part is the media will run this as the leading news story for 3 days making me look like God.
It is a brilliant idea.