[lII1lIlI11ll]

>As a research topic, modern AI is a miracle, and I absolutely love learning about it. As an economic endeavor, it just feels insane. How many hospitals, roads, houses, machine shops, biomanufacturing facilities, parks, forests, laboratories, etc. could we build with the money we’re spending on pretraining models that we throw away next quarter?

This is a wrong way to look at it. The right way is to consider that AI investments generate (taxable) economic activity that your government can use to build "hospitals, roads, houses, machine shops, biomanufacturing facilities, parks, forests, laboratories".

[efficax]

they pay very little tax and most of the cash is going into datacenters and electricity which provide very little long term employment. llms can do some amazing things but at the same time they’re setting mountains of cash on fire to nudify random women on twitter and generate more spam than we could’ve ever imagined possible

[anon7000]

Not so much when there’s a race to the bottom for which municipalities, and states can offer the most tax breaks.

[lII1lIlI11ll]

People working on those facilities still pay income tax to the municipality no matter how much of a discount the business gets. People buying AI tokes/subscriptions pay VAT to the municipality where they reside.