AI is propping up the US economy

Can't speak for anyone else, but for me, AI/LLMs have been firmly in the "nice but forgettable" camp. Like, sometimes it's marginally more convenient to use an LLM than to do a proper web search or to figure out how to write some code—but that's a small time saving at best, it's less of a net impact than Stack Overflow was.

I'm already a pretty fast writer and programmer without LLMs. If I hadn't already learned how to write and program quickly, perhaps I would get more use out of LLMs. But the LLMs would be saving me the effort of learning which, ultimately, is an O(1) cost for O(n) benefit. Not super compelling. And what would I even do with a larger volume of text output? I already write more than most folks are willing to read...

So, sure, it's not strictly zero utility, but it's far less utility than a long series of other things.

On the other hand, trains are fucking amazing. I don't drive, and having real passenger rail is a big chunk of why I want to move to Europe one day. Being able to get places without needing to learn and then operate a big, dangerous machine—one that is statistically much more dangerous for folks with ADHD like me—makes a massive difference in my day-to-day life. Having a language model... doesn't.

And that's living in the Bay Area where the trains aren't great. Bart, Caltrain and Amtrak disappearing would have an orders of magnitude larger effect on my life than if LLMs stopped working.

And I'm totally ignoring the indirect but substantial value I get out of freight rail. Sure, ships and trucks could probably get us there, but the net increase in costs and pollution should not be underestimated.

I actually do get clear utility, with major caveats, namely that I only ask things where the answer is both well known and verifiable.

I still do 10-20x regular Kagi searches for every LLM search, which seems about right in terms of the utility I'm personally getting out of this.

> Can you explain how you don't find clear utility, at the personal level, from LLMs?

Sure. They don't meaningfully improve anything in my life personally.

They don't improve my search experience, they don't improve my work experience, they don't improve the quality of my online interactions, and I don't think they improve the quality of the society I live in either

There was a study recently that showed how not only did devs overestimate the time saved using AI, but that they were net negative compared to the control group.

Anyway, that about sums up my experience with AI. It may save some time here and there, but on net, you’re better off without it.

Gemini wasted my time today assuring me that if I want a git bundle that only has the top N commits, yet is cleanly clone-able, I can just make a --depth N clone of the original repo, and and do a git bundle create ... --all.

Nope; cloning a bundle created from a depth-limited clone results in error messages about missing commit objects.

So I tell the parrot that, and it comes back with: of course, it is well-known that it doesn't work, blah blah. (Then why wasn't it well known one prompt ago, when it was suggested as the definitive answer?)

Obviously, I wasn't in the "the right mindset" today.

This mindset is one of two things:

- the mindset of a complete n00b asking a n00b question that it will nail every time, predicting it out of its training data richly replete with n00b material.

- the mindset of a patient data miner, willing to expend all they keystrokes. needed to build up enough context to in effect create a query which zeroes in on the right nugget of information that made an appearance in the training data.

It was interesting to go down this #2 rabbit hole when this stuff was new, which it isn't any more. Basically do most of the work, while it looks as if it solved the problem.

I had the right mindset for AI, but most of it has worn off. If I don't get something useful in one query with at most one follow up, I quit.

The only shills who continue to hype AI are either completely dishonest assholes, or genuine bros bearing weapons-grade confirmation bias.

Let's try something else:

Q: "What modes of C major are their own reflection?"

A: "The Lydian and Phrygian modes are reflections of each other, as are the Ionian and Aeolian modes, and the Dorian and Mixolydian modes. The Locrian mode is its own reflection."

Very nice sounding and grammatical, but gapingly wrong in every point. The only mode that is its own reflection is Dorian. Furthermore, Lydian and Phrygian are not mutual reflections. Phrygian reflected around is root is Ionian. The reflection of Lydian is Locrian; and of Aeolian, Mixolydian.

I once loaded a NotebookLM with materials about George Russel's concept of the Lydian Chromatic, and Tonal Gravity. It made an incomprehensible mess of explaining the stuff, worse than the original sources.

AI performs well on whatever is the focus of its purveyors. When they want to shake down entry-level coding, they beef it up on entry-level coding and let it loose, leaving it unable to tell Mixolydian from mixing console.

I think that there's a strong argument to be made that the negatives of having to wade through AI slop outweights the benefits that AI may provide. I also suspect that AI could contribute to enshittification of society; e.g. AI therapy being substituted for real therapy, AI products displacing industrial design, etc.

> Reusing so many GPU's might be harder

It could have some unexciting applications like, oh, modeling climate change and other scientific simulations.

a data centre is a big warehouse

the vast expense is on the GPU silicon, which is essentially useless for compute other than parallel floating point operations

when the bubble pops, the "investment" will be a very expensive total waste of perfectly good sand

Luddites weren’t anti technology at all[0] in fact they were quite adept at using technology. It was a labor movement that fought for worker rights in the face of new technologies.

[0]: https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/rethinking-the-l...

Railroads move people and cargo quickly and cheaply from point A to point B. Mechanized textile production made clothing, a huge sink of time and resources before the industrial age, affordable to everybody.

What does AI get the consumer? Worse spam, more realistic scams, hallucinated search results, easy cheating on homework? AI-assisted coding doesn't benefit them, and the jury is still out on that too (see recent study showing it's a net negative for efficiency).

Apples to oranges.

Luddites weren't at a point where every industry sees individual capital formation/demand for labor trend towards zero over time.

Prices are ratios in the currency between factors and producers.

What do you suppose happens when the factors can't buy anything because there is nothing they can trade. Slavery has quite a lot of historic parallels with the trend towards this. Producers stop producing when they can make no profit.

You have a deflationary (chaotic) spiral towards socio-economic collapse, under the burden of debt/money-printing (as production risk). There are limits to systems, and when such limits are exceeded; great destruction occurs.

Malthus/Catton pose a very real existential threat when such disorder occurs, and its almost inevitable that it does without action to prevent it. One cannot assume action will happen until it actually does.

I mean, for them it probably was.

With this generation of AI, it's too early to tell whether it's the next railroad, the next textile machine, or the next way to lock your exclusive ownership of an ugly JPG of a multicolored ape into a globally-referenceable, immutable datastore backed by a blockchain.

The mechanical loom produced a tangible good. That kind of automation was supposed to free people from menial work. Now they are trying to replace interesting work with human supervised slop, which is a stolen derivative work in the first place.

The loom wasn't centralized in four companies. Customers of textiles did not need an expensive subscription.

Obviously average people would benefit more if all that investment went into housing or in fact high speed railways. "AI" does not improve their lives one bit.

what? crashing the economy for a psychotic sci-fi delusion "makes sense"? how?

Please don't cross into personal attack. We ban accounts that do that.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

>Have you heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect?

Have you heard of the disagreement hierarchy? You're somewhere between 1 and 3 right now, so I'm not even going to bother to engage with you further until you bring up more substantive points and cool it with the personal attacks.

https://paulgraham.com/disagree.html

Sure, you can make the case that things could get pretty ugly. You could even make the case that things could get about as bad as the Great Depression.

But for things to be much worse than the Great Depression, I think is an extraordinary claim. I see the ingredients for a Great Depression-scale event, but not for a much-worse-than-Great-Depression event.

Never totally discount _deflationary_ scenarios.

Good question, I don't believe they break out their workloads into training versus inference, in fact they don't even break out any mumbers in any useful detail. But anecdotally the public clouds did seem to be most GPU-constrained whenever Sam Altman was making the rounds asking for trillions in infra for training.

However, my understanding is that the same GPUs can be used for both training and inference (potentially in different configurations?) so there is a lot of elasticity there.

That said, for the public clouds like Azure, AWS and GCP, training is also a source of revenue because other labs pay them to train their models. This is where accusations of funny money shell games come into play because these companies often themselves invest in those labs.

> it's important to bear in mind that lower interest rates can also stimulate investment which help to create jobs for average people as well.

Precisely! Yet the big problem in the Anglosphere is that most of that money has been invested in asset accumulation, namely housing, causing a massive housing crisis in these countries.

>more money in the economy drives inflation

Not necessarily. Sure, it that money is chasing fixed assets like housing but if that money was invested into production of things to consume its not necessarily inflation inducing is it? For example, if that money went into expanding the electricity grid and production of electric cars, the pool of goods to be consumed is expanding so there is less likelihood of inflation.

Gerrymandering in Texas and elsewhere they might stay in power, if they do it's unlikely to change. Basically speed running a fascist takeover.

> he might have some 'splanin to do

About what? Like seriously what would they even do other then try and lame duck him?

The big issue is Dem approval ratings are even lower then Trumps so how the hell are they going to gain any seats?

People are upset at the tariffs as taxes because they hurt poorer people more. That’s how it works when everyone pays the same amt of taxes

I have not heard a single left wing pundit demand interest rates go down

Who cares? Even if it were true, why is your first reflex to point the finger at progressives when they're absolutely irrelevant to the current government?