[awongh]

Most people mean this to say that 1 trillion is a lot of money, but it still comes back to what you believe AI is- in hindsight, does 1 trillion dollars to build the internet sound like a lot or a little? (That is, spending 1 year of USA's defense budget to get the entire internet)

It comes back to your perception of what AI is because to people who say AI is glorified auto-complete won't believe that the money is worth it.

The AGI-pilled true believers who say it will end all money and result in a post-scarcity world believe literally any amount is justifiable.

Most people, me included, land somewhere in the middle- it seems like AI is a humanity-level sea change in technology and how computers work and serve us. It seems plausible that a few trillion is a reasonable amount.

[mapping365]

I'm not going to make a prediction of what will happen with AI whether it will autocomplete / productivity or AGI. I will say it seems to be trending towards former than the latter just by how scaled down the promises have become over the last year (we went from curing all disease and cancer / post-scarcity to productivity and code.) The amounts being spent on this can only really justified by some paradigm shifting returns and within the timeframe investors expect. This isn't something like Apollo / Manhattan project - those were taken on by the government with public money. This is explicitly a profit making enterprise funded by markets.

[mrloopex]

I have personal experience using it at work so I come down on the “it’ll be a big productivity boost” side rather than Deep Thought. At my job we are still evaluating ROI so it is mandated we all use it to help us, via copilot. For example I recently did a code port that one team said would take a month and sonnet did it for 18000 tokens in a seven hours. Thats 180.00$ vs tens of thousands. Thats a huge productivity boost. Now with the rise of token cost the question is about ROI for my company. What bothers me the most are the hidden costs to the environment that my company does not factor into the equation. From that perspective it seems more than a profit making exercise but I can’t help wonder if it could be done cheaper, and really is an over inflated circle jerk to mint a million new billionaires. It’s like if Martin Shkrelli discovered fire. A great product from an absolute scum bag.

[arka2147483647]

> Most people mean this to say that 1 trillion is a lot of money, but it still comes back to what you believe AI is- in hindsight, does 1 trillion dollars to build the internet sound like a lot or a little?

You are talking about the Value of AI, but the key is the Revenue of AI.

If AI companies cannot get the Revenue to pay for all those investments, somebody is going bankrupt.

A trillion is a lot of money to cover.