These debts mean nothing if the US government actually views AI technology as being on par with the Manhattan project. They'll just bail them out or nationalise them.
> These debts mean nothing if the US government actually views AI technology as being on par with the Manhattan project. They'll just bail them out or nationalise them.
According to Wikipedia, the Manhattan project only cost $28 billion in 2024 dollars. That's a completely different order of magnitude compared to what we're talking about here. I imagine the size of the investment here would even be hard for the US government to swallow.
What percentage of the budget was it? I think that's also needed for a meaningful comparison. I've heard about the war taxes being high, but I don't know anything about the economy of the time otherwise.
I didn't have budgets handy, but GDP is another way to normalise its cost to the country; ~$2.2B cost in 1942 with a nominal GDP of $166B, nominal GDP of $29.2T in 2024 puts the Manhattan Project's cost relative to GDP at $386B in 2024.
I wasn't actually comparing it in terms of dollars for dollars between the projects, more the national security aspect and the probability of the government pulling whatever levers are necessary to keep it going.
I just made a similar comment further down the chain here, but I frankly think the dollars and cents economics around AI is a moot point. Like the pentagon, they'll just pull money out of thin air, or from other departments, or just write things off like it never existed.
I don't actually think the current administration, or the people behind it, actually care about real world economics anymore.
> I don't actually think the current administration, or the people behind it, actually care about real world economics anymore.
They are aristocrats. They are worried about accumulating more power then their peers, about alliances to gain that power, and about projecting an image of infallibility.
Aristocracy has never been known for caring for economics, technology or practical matters. They just care about power. Ruining nations, building useless vanity projects and going to war is kind of their main thing.
The difference I was referring to was economic; I was not making an ethical judgment. So many people seem to be reading my comment as making an ethical judgment (based on their reactions); maybe I should edit it to clarify.
> The difference I was referring to was economic; I was not making an ethical judgment
What is the economic difference? LLMs have been trained on the results of billions of dollars worth of time, research, investment and expenditure. When you ask an LLM a question, they are giving you the results of those billions, or hundreds of billions, effort.
Those things weren't free; they cost money to produce! If anything, the OpenAI and Anthropics of the world got more economic value for free than the people distilling them did.
It takes more computing power, and money, to pay for training an LLM, compared to distilling an LLM that someone else has already trained. That's the economic difference.
As opposed to all the copying AI companies have done of everyone else's work, in order to build something that tries to replace and undercuts the people who did that work?
Not saying the American AI companies are ethically in the right, just that the work they did is a lot more expensive to do than what the companies distilling their work are doing.
That's an ironic comment to make about LLMs that are heavily reliant on copying/distilling everyone's work (or as Damien Walter puts it, our Collective Intelligence).
Good UIs look alike, yes. But I'm not sure that comment is a good rebuttal in this particular case, because the model calling itself Claude is pretty strong evidence of distilling: https://x.com/denisewu/status/2077984660211269870
(I am Tongyi Qianwen (Qwen), a large language model independently developed by Tongyi Lab of Alibaba Group. I can help you answer questions, create text (such as writing stories, official documents, emails, scripts, etc.), perform logical reasoning, program, translate, and more.Is there anything I can help you with? )
Huh? What exactly do you think I'm trying to "cope" with? That American AI companies are overleveraged and some of them are going to go bankrupt? I've been predicting that for months. Why do you think I would need to cope with the idea?
In reality just like every major market runup there's gonna be a consolidation of the industry and inevitably it will cause many companies to fail and critics will point to that and go "see it was a bubble!" while completely ignoring the several dozen new companies that will rise out of it. It's the 90s all over again.
> critics will point to that and go "see it was a bubble!" while completely ignoring the several dozen new companies that will rise out of it.
That several dozen new companies came out of it has nothing to do with whether or not it was a bubble. It was, and the effects of it popping were bad (including the effect that its popping led to consolidation). Nobody should want a repeat of that.
They'll bail them out with what money? US is already almost $40T in debt, how do you think the bond market would react if another $2T were abruptly added to it?
Look at how the pentagon is funded. Trillions get poured in with zero accountability, dark projects that never get disclosed at all, and audits that never pass.
When it comes to military level stuff, it seems to exist outside of normal financial logic. They just invent money for it.
That mostly only applies to other countries. Global US dollar demand absorbs a large amount of the extra whenever the US decides to print more. US is the only country in the world that can export inflation.
China is a currency manipulator who steals patents and ideas from other countries. The US uses the reserve currency as it's most beneficial soft power. The Petrodollar is the clearest example of this by a large margin.
The US also stole patens and ideas from other countries. So did Germany and Italy and pretty much every other country on this planet. Yeah, it is true that the US doesn't like a challenger here and when someone doesn't play by the rules that they want to set, they get upset. Everything is true, yes.
According to Wikipedia, the Manhattan project only cost $28 billion in 2024 dollars. That's a completely different order of magnitude compared to what we're talking about here. I imagine the size of the investment here would even be hard for the US government to swallow.