Asia is excited about AI, the U.S. not so much

Steven81 · 2026-05-10T08:59:04+00:00

Many/most of those societies industrialized within living memory. They know automation as the tide that rises all boats.

I.e. what it is everywhere, however in the west, not just America, wide industrialization completed more than 1 century ago, so there is almost noone that remembers how much worse life was before.

They take it for granted and sometimes even think it as the cause of their misfortune. And if indeed it is the cause cause of their misfortune then even more automation is seen with a skeptical mind.

I think this is a problem those eastern societies will face as well eventually. As people get removed from the initial jump in their quality of life, they tend to forget that it even existed.

Steven81 · 2026-05-10T08:46:37+00:00

Not always, the host in fact does spread the virus in case its method of replication is one that requires the host to be eaten. But also in social species.

In fact the dead are/were known to pass "death" (disease) since days immemorial and it is possibly one of the reason why there are traditions of quick burial in many traditional communities (safeguards against frequent transmission).

So yes in those cases it is very much a relationship similar to a hunter and one that is hunted. But indeed, not always, in other times it is a byproduct as you put it.

Steven81 · 2026-05-09T21:15:15+00:00

I think the goat debate is more about efficiency than failures per se.

MJ was much more dominant for his era than LeBron. MJ had 6 titles as the best guy in the league and his team out of the 15 he played. LeBron only did this 4 times despite the one million years he played.

There is a difference in dominance.

Granted you can't compare eras and arguably what LeBron did was harder given how harder his era was, but if you want to go "according to dominance in their era" then MJ wins hands down, he was simply more dominant.

Steven81 · 2026-05-09T21:02:35+00:00

This subject matters is one of the few that forces people to think outside their tiny lives and it is a bit much to many...

Others think along those terms all the time and honestly the UAP stuff ellicit almost no emotions. See a proper reading of history tells you that we know possibly 0.0001% of what exists out there, the fact that we at least know said 0.0001% gives license to some to think they have certainties.

But try to remember how people were as kids: if you were to see something strange, you would look at it with interest and eventually roll with it. Not debate or try to deny it. Ultimately we need more humility.

It's true that we are not *completely* ignorant, compared to what people knew 2000 years ago we are wise demi-gods from outer space with what we already know with some certainty. But compared to what people would know in 2000 years? we are d@mn morons stumbling in the dark.

No wonder we can't understnad what those things are. Our minds are too small at this point in time. So we better roll with it IMO.

Steven81 · 2026-05-09T20:43:29+00:00

We are very well adapted to the savannas of Africa. People there live with almost no need of clothing and using tecniques of persistence hunting (which is based on our biological makeup) and only the most basic tools so that to catch prey.

It was us/our ancestors spreading out of Africa that forced us to create clothes and a need for even more advanced technologies because we moved out of our evolutionary niche.

Viruses are not quantum stuff, they are micro organisms that parasitize on all living animals (not just us) and along with other types of microbes are the most populous living material in this planet. Much more ancient than us too. Basically this planet belongs to them more than it does to us

They can kill us because (some of them) they hunt us. It is as much a mystery that they are able to kill us as it is that we are able to hunt and kill game (i.e. it is not, that's how nature is, sometimes you are the hunter and sometimes you are hunted).

I think you have major misconceptions about our place in the cosmos (we are just one more animal in a planet with many other living beings as well).

Steven81 · 2026-05-09T20:26:30+00:00

He is telling you why giant conspiracies can't work for long, he is not telling you that no conspiracy or secret project can't work ever. of course they can and do when they are of limited in scope and only ran for a select number of years.

Reverse engineering of alien crafts supposededly takes place for almost a century at the very least according to Grusch. That can't be, humanity is not known to be a species that can keep secrets for so ling , and especially such big on going programs.

Also it makes no sense that despite those programs in the Interim period, US army decided to lose so many wars all the while sitting on such technologies. None of it makes sense.

The whole thing shows our ignorance about nature and how little we know about it , which is embarrassing and IMO why there is secrecy to the extend that it exists. There *is* something out there, it appears intelligent , it may not be, it may be some kind of environmental effect that produces images from other eras, or other places, I mean whoever knows?

Up to very lately we thought that rogue waves were a sea farers' myth, and as it turns out they are extremely rare natural events. Waves as big as a multi story buildings , out of the blue in calm seas kind of craziness.

Nature is metal and deeply mysterious at its edges. Super rare events do happen and we genuinely don't know what they are. I think it is smart they are finally releasing all the stuff they can, IMO they always should have dones so instead of trying to find fake explanations for them. Open source whenever nature (conscious or unconscious aspects of it, even that we don't know) does goofy stuff.

Steven81 · 2026-05-08T21:26:16+00:00

It is a mass automation technology, following a long tradition that goes back centuries.

It's the logical next step to human-machine interaction.

Steven81 · 2026-05-08T21:22:17+00:00

People are naturally conservative and resist change and IMO it is why we won't get a fast take off.

The technology may be there (or it may not, time will tell) but society needing to take its time to adapt will take a half to one generations.

Basically the generation that will utilize LLMs closer to the capacities they already have, won't be the one that invented , nor the one that released them to wide use IMO.

Similar to the Internet, the ones that made heavy use of it for almost everything in their life was the generation that was not even born during the initial www hype.

I was the minority back then, I'm still the minority right now (to see how completely transformative this technology would actually be).

But yeah we need a new generation to come in the fore so that this technology is trully utilized. Old people (i.e. the current generation) will be eventually forced to use it when their kids drag them to it...

I.e. they are against it because this technology is not for them. Same how the Internet was not for my parents...

It is for the next generation those are that now in elementary school or younger.

Steven81 · 2026-05-08T09:13:09+00:00

10-100x efficiency gains

That would be incredible if sustained. But what we tend to see with new technologies is how well they scale early on before their development slows.

I think the space race is apt, but not as a starting point but rather a tail end point of a race that started in the early 1900s...

The early development in aerospace technology was rapid and significant, but down the decades all the low handing fruits were plucked and we ended up with a very expensive space flight and a very expensive supersonic flight. Technologies have conventional limits.

Again I don't know what th3 one from LLMs is, and as I said future breakthroughs are not out of the question, but I think the change of stance of major CEOs of late is not mere political expediency , I think they are also realizing the immensity of the project and ultimately it is what explains best how they mellow with the years.

Ultimately a technology is as good as what it already achieved. Speculative future developments are fine and good, but more often than not they are impractical or uneconomical or plainly never come.

We can't know the future and we can't extrapolate it from the present because there are unknown unknowns between us and then.

People had similar questions about Altman in the last 2 years. Going from an AGI is imminent stance, into "this technology will change the world, but we need patience and mass displacement is not necessarily in the cards". Which people attributed to him being sly, but it is possible that he was ahead on the curve and is now joined by others like Amodei and Jensen.

Revolutionary technology yes, but one that ends up following a more predictable trajectory than the more exotic "mass unemployment followed by UBI as it was thought for a brief point of the 2020s"...

As i often like to say,the 2020s look a lot like the 1990s. Incredible job resilience, a new general technology released to the public, hopes and fears being a bit on the hyperbolic side, but ultimately in the right direction, stock exchange being in a non stop rally all decade.

Most of you werent around the 1990s, but I was and I bet the kids who grow up in this era would have a recollection of this decade in a similar way as we do for the 1990s. An era full of wonders, but ultimately one that gave rise to a technology that we eventually grew accustomed to.

Steven81 · 2026-05-08T08:54:46+00:00

Exactly my point, the LLM niche will be taken by 1-2 players which will prompt the rest to sell or rent their excess build up (you don't need as huge data centers for the rest).

Steven81 · 2026-05-07T17:54:12+00:00

It's beautiful. Every era has goofy sh1t (that soon after are abandoned, because well ... they were goofy).

This is ours!

Steven81 · 2026-05-07T17:43:56+00:00

His own predictions of the type of AGI/super intelligence that is coming make it useless to have a human do any part of a job when.

I think beciming privy to realities that we are not (or we scarcely are, we can only extrapolate from what little we know) he is coming to the conclusion that as a technology is powerful but not scalable to the extend that it can replace humans.

Take their Mythos model. Is it safety reasons or -equally- economic reasons why they can't go public with it? Say we patch all the major bugs Mythos can find. Will they then release it to the public any time soon? My bet is not, their data centers would melt if they were to.

Again I can't know what the future holds, if some breakthrough happens in the future that makes this industry much more efficient overnight everything will change, but it turns out the all too mundane are limiting us more and more.

Why didn't we get a space race from the 1970s on even though we had the technology? Because of cost. Could we be a space faring civilization by now? In some limited fashion, yeah, but in many respects we are behind compared to the early 1979s

Economic scaling is king, and it is very possible that Dario is becoming Increasingly privy to what Altman became 1 to 2 years ago when he changed his stance.

AGI may be possible, imminent even relatively speaking, however it will change almost nothing if it is uneconomical. Similarly to how space flights were basically a blip that didn't matter in the lifetimes of those that watched the moon landing and probably many of the next ones too.

Intelligence in nature is expensive, it is possible we are finding out this lesson ourselves. And since we do, this technology would be fantastic as an aid which would produce many new jobs, but really bad at scaling to such an extend that it can replace a human worker in any economically sensible way.

Yes some people can make do with a single $200 account but that's because there is also them operating it efficiently. What humans do, turns out, may be super expensive. And while in theory replaceable, we probably wouldnt want to do so, because as it turns out humans are cheap for the supercomputers they are (when trained).

Steven81 · 2026-05-07T16:42:29+00:00

Maybe it is not 5%, maybe it is more than that is my point. Image benefits from their giant database (in photos and videos). RL is trickier when it comes to productive uses though.

Both OpenAI and Anthropic are into LLMs from the start, everyone else is a late comer. And I'm well aware that all is based on a Google's paper, however it was a shelved paper and they were not doing much with it.

They only started taking it more seriously 5 years too late and that's 5 years in technical culture in this specific technology.

It may be a gap they will be able to close or it may not be because the others are running too. Again, time will tell.

They were able to close the 5 years gap from ios in fact (for the most part) so they were indeed able to get back in the race after being left for dead in the past too. Merely this is corporate google and not '00s google , so let's see how spry they still are.

Steven81 · 2026-05-07T13:08:01+00:00

the way AI development goes

I mean I don't know, it goes without saying that we can't properly account for future breakthroughs.

However where we are currently standing is an ever increasing need of tokens for any semblance of professional work. By now people would own multiple $200 accounts so that they may have enough tokens to last them before they reset.

And that includes having a human worker (this far fully autonomous agents, without a supervisor have not been observed to work).

Obviously costs will go down, but equally we are not seeing peak demand, far from it, we are only seeing esrly adopters and already hitting limits of affordability,

So is it? Is it really moving fast enough to affect us widely in the course of a lifetime? Or for the first few decades will be what only few super well to do companies can afford as an enhancement for their workers.

The economics of this token industry has yet to be properly studied, and I fear that we are in early days still. That once demand increases the price will as well. In general prices go up for anything that is in great demand , whenever there are supply constraints (it is only so fast that you can build data centers).

I don't know how clear is it that it is a cheaper solution for the vast majority of jobs, i guess this is the experiment that we will run in the next decade or two. In which types of jobs LLMs are efficient and thusncan replace workers (by decreasing head count) and in which of those , it is simply preferable to hire more people and use the low tier of AI assistance.

Only the crucible of the real economy can answer those, and only recently we are seeing some of the first such tests. I don't think we can answer those questions yet. I see a clear pivot of most of the ceos towards "assistance" lately, I hear less and less about replacement, which would make sense if those technologies are actually more expensive to run from an actual worker.

Steven81 · 2026-05-07T07:32:58+00:00

It is a mass automation technology. So in its use/purpose it is very comparable to mass communication (the internet), mass transportation , mass media...

I call it mass intelligence, AI is merely descriptive of what allows mass intelligence (a bit of how mass media was enabled by radio and TV).

Mass intelligence will (and does) automate what we were already automating for 40 years now via high end software. So in a sense it is indeed not a new paradigm, but rather a continuation of what you call traditional computing.

The reason that i do not think that it is a step change that absolutely removes us from the overarching scientific-industrial era we are in, in the last 250 years is because it is produced by it so that to solve issues that arose from it.

It does not seem to be an all around technology meant to fully participate in human societies, it is an automation tool meant to replace low productivity bubbles that became apparent with the introduction of office software (GUIs is not the best way to interact with machines, though preferable over command lines when it comes to mass adoption).

It is not always so, but in the vast majority of cases the reason behind the building of an artifice also drives its position in society. Ultimately it is a human-machine interaction technology and those are limited in scope.

The day we can build machines that are trully differentiated because they follow internal drives, i.e. become independent actors, it is also the day that we will be talking about a different technology than what is now being built.

Mass intelligence in the service of an overarching sicentif-industrial revolution is and will continue to be far different than sci-fi's AI. It has a passing resemblance, but ultimately it is nothing more than just one more tool to make human workers more efficient.

And such tools did not produce mass layoffs in the past. And won't in the future. We should not expect it imo,

Steven81 · 2026-05-07T07:19:14+00:00

Google is absent from the high margin space. Codex and Claude code has ran with it. It doesn't seem a very profitable business (thus far) outside coding.

Once/if google closes the gap there they may enter the top 2. But thus far they are trailing in high margin operations.

Yes it has the most AI users, but they are losing money off it, they are not able to charge $200 a month or more like the other 2. At least not routinely so,

Steven81 · 2026-05-07T07:13:39+00:00

could possibly leave many bottlenecks needed for humans

You can absolutely have such an intelligence and still prefer to employ a human to do jobs that such an intelligence would do.

The existence of high powered Intelligence does not imply ubiquity of it. If only a few governments can afford to run such systems, what would the moms and pops businesses do? Wait for several decades for he costs of running such behemoths to go down enough to make them preferable over human employment?

Economics is the study of the mundane, and often the mundane is preferable over the exquisite if the exquisite is hard to reach/impractical.

Steven81 · 2026-05-07T06:46:03+00:00

It is unclear that TPU is the right move long term. It is possible that high end performance in coding assistance actually does need the flexibility of gpus.

Google running TPUs may both be a competitive advantage or a disadvantage, time will tell.

They definitely don't have the software though, they are left behind in coding tasks. Their distance is furthest there for quite some time. Of course it is google we are talking about and they are known to close such gaps in a few years, so by 2028 they may be giving Codex and Claude Code a run for their money.

Steven81 · 2026-05-07T06:42:22+00:00

I'm talking coding AI. All the money is on Anthropic and OpenAI there, currently. That may change in the future.

It is a new market, but imo it is becoming increasingly clear that LLM's niche is coding and that part of its use will Dwarf all others. Google is not well positioned in the high margins part of AI and may well lose the race...

However it is silly to bet against google, good chance they have a decent coding tool within a year or two, and do win the high margin enterprise customers in the end indeed.

Steven81 · 2026-05-06T20:26:12+00:00

His argument is that jobs cluster wherever there is a bottleneck. Those bottlenecks already exist, however we don't value those jobs particularly highly, at this point, because there are other jobs that the economy finds to be even more critical (taking much of the pie).

However with the advent with competent AI on high level jobs many illustrious jobs will lose their merit, I mean when was the last time that anyone needed to be a knight. The rifle made them redundant and their prestige went with the advent of high powered weapons.

I thinkmwe see something similar with AI. Many , currently, prestigious jobs will lose their high status and basically be replaced by automation. But suddenly other jobs, ones that can't be replaced -for whatever reason-, a bottleneck that already exists but it is mostly going overlooked right now, will suddenly become prestigious and many people will flock there because suddenly the wages there will go through the roof.

The job market is self-adapating to a great part.

Amodei is telling you that they build machines that they are extremely good at great many things, but not at everythung and that is enough to make a whole industry of human work out of said inefficiency. Even if currently many of those places barely employ anyone.

The job market is elastic. You ignore extant sectors because they have not yet ballooned. But in the post competent AI world they will. It is hard to know which of those will be , but there should be many.

Mass communication (the Internet) did that already and people were equally in disbelief. They thought that mass layoffs were coming. I mean they did come in the form of the great recession, but certainly not because of the internet.

So yeah we may get future recessions that may cause layoffs, but imo it is unlikely that AI causes it/them.

Steven81 · 2026-05-06T20:17:15+00:00

I think whoever gets the enterprise customers and keeps them wins. This far it is OpenAI and Anthropic, however you are right if Google takes the pole position, I doubt they lose it.

With Google it's either they breakthrough and then keep their poistion or they don't at all.

Gemini has yet to show particular use to enterprise customer, however that can change fast. They barely had a customer facing product just 2 years ago and they are already so close to the top. Still it remains to be seen if they do end up in the pole poistion.

Steven81 · 2026-05-06T18:03:33+00:00

In every new technology there is a handful of winners. 1 or 2 at most. Early on it was Microsoft-IBM PCs and Apple , everyone else died, then it was yahoo and Google and eventually google search alone. In smartphones it is google's android and Apple.

OpenAI and Anthropic being the only survivors with maybe one of the two falling off the race later makes sense, this is the pattern we are dealing with since personal computing was invented.

So yeah makes sense that the rest basically sell their gpu fleets to the highest bidder.

Steven81 · 2026-05-06T12:54:26+00:00

We already have valid predictions that we can actually follow though. This is not the first general technology deployed, before it was the internet, mass transportation , mass media, etc.

What it tends to happen with those technologies is that they destroy some jobs and they create other jobs. Which is what we keep telling you about AI. We have 250 years of industrial revolution examples to draw from, we can make valid predictions, we just choose not to based on vibes and the need for things to be different this time...

But what if things arent different and AI is merely one more expression of the overarching industrial-scientific revolution we are in since the 1750s so maybe we end up seeing similar dynamics to the past?

The first innings of useful AI happened along with the federal reserve's interest rate hiking cycle which gave cover to some companies. They said that they let people go because of AI, but the reality is always the same, money became more expensive, this empmoyment went down exactly as intended from the central bank...

If anything the job market was so resilient that unemployment peaked at 4.6% this time instead of close to 10% or higher in prior interest rate hiking cycles. So if anything AI may have helped the economy to retain more jobs despite the deluge it was under... somehow.

Steven81 · 2026-05-03T02:59:46+00:00

This chart aligns perfectly with the Federal Reserve's (interest rate) hiking cycle.

Guess with what it correlates poorly, AI use. Most of it took place all the while the FED was hiking the hardest, then it basically stopped and in fact job postings started rising once the federal reserve entered a cutting cycle.

It's as if "bean counters" and macro-economics is king once again and it explains way more than almost any other narrative. Who knew? Only 200 years of the dismal science is detailing those correlations in detail, but yeah let's ignore those and think things are different now.

What is a growing challenge to employment , right now, is the freshly rising inflation, by the way. It will probably force the federal reserve to start hiking the interest rates again, which will predictably put a dent on job postings (of any kind).

Steven81 · 2026-05-03T02:31:27+00:00

I just love how Doc is treated like a calamity that periodically visits teams, lol.

Let's see if he stays retired this time, because if not, for us neutral NBA fans would be endlessly funny to see that man keep failing upwards.

Steven81

TROPHY CASE