Certainly you realize that these comments exist for more than a single person right? You expect potentially hundreds of viewers to each burn through AI tokens instead of just getting a direct and relevant answer here? This has the same vibe as the old forum posts where the only response was a "google it".
The acquisition process itself is not mentioned and they are shutting down the company. This is an acquihire. Congrats to the team, hope everyone made it out well and not just the top
This should have been thrown away from the start, not sure why it saw a day in court. Musk himsrlf created xAi that is for profit. If he really is concerned about ai his own actions do not show that. This is just regret that he lost control of OpenAI, a trillion dollar company, and nothing more.
If it’s replacing developers it makes sense to cost more than 20 or 100 per month. The real issue for these llm companies is that they are yet to show value in other areas. Without that they will be relegated to just coding. That is the rush right now for them. What other workflows can they automate. I guess every paperwork can be automated. Once the other areas are developed they will switch the pricing model
IMO the LLM technology is so poor when it comes to converting text descriptions to visual layout that I can't imagine it could possibly succeed as part of a paid design product.
Have you seen the outputs from OpenAI's latest image model? I believe it is called "Image 2.0", is just a few weeks old and - to my untrained eyes - the outputs including text are astonishing.
Anthropic, OpenAI and Google are the standouts, but the main question for me is, why is this a war? In their own context China has greatly benefitted from this. They shored up their gpu design and manufacturing expertise.
If this really is a war, trump is kneecapping the country with his lawlessness and eroding America’s good will. If the world cannot trust China with their data and they cannot trust the U.S. to provide good reliable service and not turn it into a mafia style negotiation, then winning the AI war is not helping the U.S. countries as much as it potentially can. It’s probably a good thing for more capable areas like Europe which may develop their own tech stack.
In a weird way because the AI stack is so expensive, China helps the world much more than the U.S. with their really capable open source model.
It's a war because the hinted promise behind the hype that the first organization to reach some as-yet-entirely-theoretical AGI that can bootstrap itself to godlike capabilities will then Install Planetary Overlord* and rule the world as near-deities themselves, with the rest of the (surviving) human race as their slaves.
I think it's a nonsensical idea, but that's the relevant driver.
* Coined by SF auther Charles Stross in The Jennifer Morgue (2006)
I haven't read from him in a while, but I don't think there was a single dated prediction that supports your argument. Do you have any sources for this claim?
I haven't read from him in a while either - but I remember reading enough tweets from him about being confident at x% probability we'll die before year z due to an Ai doing the funny
So, if we disagree with someone's reasoning, the proper reaction is to make up random unsubstantiated claims about them and compare them to drug addicts?
I don't think this matches the guidelines of this website.
If he's a clown what part of his theory is the circus?
Are you saying that superintelligence is impossible?
Are you saying that the alignment problem will certainty be solved before superintelligence emerges?
Are you saying that a superintelligent being connected to the internet would be unable to gain resources such as GPU time, money, and social influence?
Are you saying that a superintelligent being would for some reason be incapable of deception and cunning?
Are you saying that a superintelligent being would necessarily regard human flourishing as a prime objective to be prized above it's own goals and ambitions?
If it's really just doomerism we should be able to point to the flaws in his argument instead of making ad hominem attacks.
>Are you saying that superintelligence is impossible?
Yes, end of the discussion, I don't debate metaphysics with crackheads, sociology with psychopaths or geography with flat earthers, or very bad science fiction with yudkowski. Going on about "exposing the flaws in the argument" of the crackhead just means wasting your time.
If you think "big metal box can't go up" is the same kind of argument as "we're going to destroy humanity with the thinking machines", I can't help you there man.
Researches at top AI labs don't consider EY to be a kook even though they may not necessarily agree. EY concepts/terminology appear in Anthropic safety papers. Geoffrey Hinton takes him quite seriously and mentions him in his interviews.
Anthropic is the AI doomer / safetyism lab, and Hinton is one of the patron saints of 'rationalist' AI doomerism.
AI doomerism is psychologically attractive to "people with autistic cognitive traits, including dichotomous (black-and-white) thinking, intolerance of uncertainty, and a tendency toward catastrophizing". They are pascal's mugging themselves, to ironically use one of their terms. It's fundamentally a cognitive distortion.
"What if AI doom is all fear-mongering, and we create AI less prone to make up dangerous stuff or mistake buggy goals for real ones" (which is what alignment is) "for nothing?"
Even if Yudkowsky is autistic, you're muddling the condition. Autistic people have a *practical* intolerance of uncertainty in the moment (everything unexpected from a noise to a missed turn can be a jump-scare in their day-to-day activities), but often they're absolutely fine with intellectual uncertainty, unconventional ideas, abstract ambiguity, nonconformity, etc. Indeed, one of Yudkowsky's main things is Bayesianism, i.e. being precise about uncertainty.
Yudkowsky's reported P(doom) is somewhere around 90%, which is very much in the realm of "we might eventually be able to figure this out, *but we're not even close to ready so for the love of everything slow down so we can figure this all out*"; the book title comes from a long tradition of authors noticing you need to beat readers over the head with your point for them to notice it.
Anthropic (like at least also OpenAI), appears to think they can solve the problems that Yudkowsky has found. They're a lot more optimistic than him, but they take these problems seriously.
For his work on AI, Hinton got a Nobel prize in Physics, a Turing Award, the inaugural Rumelhart Prize, a Princess of Asturias Award, a VinFuture Prize, and a Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering. Calling him a "patron saint" of "doomerism" is like calling Paul Krugman (Nobel laureate in Economics) a patron saint of "Trump Derangement Syndrome" on the basis of what he says in his YouTube channel: a smart person's considered opinions are worth listening to even if you have not got time for the details, because you can be sure someone else has considered the details and will absolutely be responding to even an i missing a dot.
The problem is that effort spent to reduce the "risk" of creating an evil god who tortures us all for the rest of time doesn't actually produce outcomes that reduces the risk of things like widespread job loss or hyperaggregation of influence and money.
"Oh we'll at least get some side benefit" is not actually what is coming out of the endlessly circular forums talking about the apocalypse.
Even if there was no overlap*, that would be like criticising the green movement for not focussing on working hours and pay like trade unions do.
Different people can care about different things; it's good that each of us gets to focus on what motivates us, rather than all chasing the same thing, because when multiple teams do all chase the same thing typically only the best few of them actually make a difference.
* as it happens, there is some overlap. Knowing more about how a narrow utility function behaves outside distribution is useful for both capabilities and safety. We're not even at the stage of being able to make AI not kill random subsets of the users with bad advice, nor reliably prevent users from falling into delusions of grandeur, let alone giving AI a reliable sense of liberty and the pursuit of happiness to maintain.
Much like a lot of LLM usage burns tokens so that mediocre people can hallucinate that they're doing something brilliant, Yudkowskyism is just a lot of empty verbiage for the purpose of building a sex cult around a plump gnome. Reusing his nonsensical and poorly defined terms but failing to get the benefit of the sex cult really misses the point of the entire exercise.
I have a younger family member who is AuADHD and is under AI & other doomer delusions. It's effected her life to a large negative degree at this point. It doesn't matter if Yud is autism leaning, as a movement it's far beyond him. AI doomerism and other doomerisms is Q-anon for smart, moral, austism-leaning people at this point, which is incredibly sad. Because it is something that really affects smart people mostly, you can't use the qualifications and intelligence of it's proponents as measures of it's validity, you need to look at the thought distortions directly itself. It consumes lives and it definitely can hurt people.
The people who've made the biggest contribution to creating a better world over the last 50 years have been the Chinese; powered largely by coal and petroleum. And in one of the most ironic results in the 21st century, they're now the leaders in solar panel production on the back of the largest investment in fossil fuel energy in global history.
The comic ran into the same problem as the climate change movement in general - they proposed ideas that generally made people worse off. And if measured in terms of CO2 emissions achieved nothing except pushing wealth creation to Asia. Which, in fairness, is probably appreciated by the Asians.
BYD had release the first plug in hybrid the year before.
The Beijing Olynpics had made air pollution a hot topic in China in 2007-8.
Wind power had accelerated after their 2005 Renewable Energy Law.
Solar panel production rose around this time, taking over the market from European manufacturers when the Financial Crisis hit and they pulled back investments.
So China at that time, was doing all the things on the cartoon's presentation list, and has benefitted greatly from them.
Many people in Europe want to see green energy transition. But no transition is happening in China.
"
“We see addition, not transition,” said Yasheng Huang, a professor of global economics and management at the MIT Sloan School. “China is building alternative sources of energy as well as fossil energy sources, simultaneously. In terms of the global footprint on CO2, China is emitting twice as much as Europe and the United States. I don’t think there’s a transition going on.”
"
What an embarrassingly ill-informed thing to say. But when the guy wrote a book in 2023 about the fall of China, he kind of has to say that doesn't he, even as he lives through the fall of the USA.
He's called out in the sub-head as an "expert" but what is he an expert in? Renewables? Energy policy? No, he's an expert in saying that China is too state-led. Why would an expert in that want to downplay their success, apart from all the obvious reasons?
"
For Beijing to achieve those goals, Climate Action Tracker says China needs "clear targets for coal consumption reduction" in its new 5YP. However, the economic roadmap released in March was not "explicit about how fossil fuels will be constrained," said China analyst Qi Qin of the Finland-based Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air.
Though Chinese President Xi Jinping promised in 2021 to detail a reduction in coal energy use in the 2026-31 plan, it contains "no clear phase-down plan, no clear fossil fuel cap," said Qin. "The language is much more conservative than many people expected," she told DW. One reason is the continued influence of the powerful coal lobby on Chinese government policy.
"
> New Chinese government guidelines on fossil fuels released on April 22 support the view that the country is willing to move away from finite fossil fuels, strengthen energy independence and still achieve its climate targets, says Qin.
> "The new central guideline talks about strictly controlling fossil fuel consumption, reducing coal and controlling oil. It still leaves room for flexibility, but these are concrete policy levers," Qin said of the document, which also indicated a desire to increase clean energy consumption.
Elsewhere Climate Action Tracker on the USA:
> The Trump Administration is pursuing an executive and legislative agenda to systematically repeal targets, policies, and funding for climate change mitigation and science. The administration is actively obstructing the buildout of renewable energy, while encouraging the production and consumption of fossil fuels, completely reversing the Biden Administration’s course on climate action. This is the most aggressive, comprehensive, and consequential climate policy rollback that the Climate Action Tracker has ever analysed.
All of which, even the bits quoted to claim "no transition is happening", support my original contention that all the things mentioned in the cartoon were being strongly pushed by China in 2009. They have only gained momentum since and they've profited from doing so.
I agree that the Chinese 5Y plan is better than the US policy "Drill, baby, drill!". But how much exactly, we will see.
Lets drill more into details:
"
Against this backdrop, coal has re-emerged as a critical stabilizing force in China’s power system. This helps explain the relatively cautious policy signals embedded in China’s 15th Five-Year Plan. While the plan reiterates long-term decarbonization commitments — including reducing carbon intensity by 17 percent and raising the share of non-fossil energy to 25 percent by 2030 — it still stops short of setting explicit timelines for coal or oil consumption to peak. This reflects a deliberate effort to preserve flexibility as Chinese policymakers balance energy transition goals with near-term electric system stability.
In practice, China’s coal production has rebounded significantly. After nearly a decade of supply-side reforms that kept output around 4 billion tonnes annually, coal production rose sharply following the 2022 power shortages and has continued to increase, reaching a record 4.85 billion tonnes in 2025.
"
I would like to note "reducing carbon intensity", doesn't mean reducing total carbon emissions, it's reducting carbon emissions per unit GDP.
This is in strong contrast to EU
"Specifically, the EU has a legally binding headline emission reduction target of 90% by 2040 relative to 1990, with a domestic target of 85% and up to 5% of international carbon credits."
Something that has been largely forgotten about is that it used to be routine to see pictures of smoggy Chinese and Asian cities, this was a problem for them that they solved. I can't help thinking we can't get this kind of preventative action on any large scale, we need to have severe issues first and that's not accounting for longer term/cumulative effects.
"Over the past years, the government has implemented various methods to improve the air quality in Northern China. Sandstorms, which were quite common 15 years ago, are now rarely seen in Beijing’s spring thanks to afforestation projects on China’s northern borders. The license-plate lottery system was introduced in Beijing to restrict the growth of private vehicles. Large trucks were not allowed to enter certain areas in Beijing. Above all, the coal consumption in Beijing has been restricted by shutting down industrial sites and improving heating systems. Beijing’s efforts to improve air quality has also been highly praised by the UN as a successful model for other cities. However, there is also criticism pointing out that the improvement of Beijing’s air quality is based on the sacrifice of surrounding provinces (including Hebei), as many factories were moved from Beijing to other regions."
The US had the same issue and fixed it through federal and state environmental regulation. It just happened in the US 100 years before it happened in china Heavy pollution is what lead to the environmental movement that started back in the 60s and that led to the creation of the EPA and whole slate of state and federal regulation that dramatically improved air/water quality in the US. It was a slow process that took a ton of work to build a movement of support, but it can be done.
We can actually address problems when we want to. It's just pretty slow and requires people to actually give a shit and put in the effort to build support.
The unfortunate comparable here is that all the people who care about making sure their AI is safe, regardless of what they mean by that, are beaten to the market by the people who don't.
Just because some researchers are infected with this idiocy that EY propagates does not mean that it is legit.
Maybe they should pay more attention to real problems like the sycophantic nature of current LLMs causing psychosis in people and worry less about theoretical AGI.
Who are you to say? Why do you have such little regard for everyone in the field, both pro- and anti- AI development? Do you think they're colluding to deceive us?
theres billions, even trillions of dollars on the line, why not start with the assumption they have every incentive to deceive, even if unintentional (ie, deceiving themselves)
Ready Player One was completely misread and misunderstood by people who thought they could make a lot of money with VR.
It wasn't a homage to 70s/80s/90s nerd culture and a hopeful glimpse of what VR tech could be.
It was a warning for people to get off their fucking phones and to work together at improving the real world, versus ignoring it and living out unrealistic fantasies inside a digital ecosystem that makes us all a bit less human.
The whole point of the book is that VR and addictive tech is a red herring. It was deliberately misunderstood by Zuck and his ilk.
Thank you, like most of the world I would assume "EY" would refer to Ernst and Young, the multi-national Big Four with a website of ey.com who I'm sure has opinions on AI, but nowhere near enough to be classed as expertise
You have to be fucked in a head to take this fearmongering bullshit seriously. I feel sorry for the trees that died to produce paper for this garbage to be printed on.
It doesn't have to be that extreme. Even if rather than "godlike capabilities" it just boosted your economic efficiency by 2x over other nations that would still be a serious geopolitical threat. (I'm not necessarily saying that's a realistic outcome either, but it's certainly more realistic.)
> I think it's a nonsensical idea, but that's the relevant driver.
Nice to hear from an optimist sometimes, but it’s hard to be one when meat compute substrate can do all those amazing things in a 4U package on 20W and you extrapolate to silicon
I don't think we understand consciousness, thought, and what we generally consider to be "intelligence" even nearly well enough that we can start getting hopeful that what works for us is going to work for a computer. Philosophers have been working on this for literally millennia and despite electron microscopy, MRIs, our entire standard model of physics, etc etc etc... we're basically no closer than the ancient Greeks, despite continuous opining on the topic.
Luckily for planetary overlord hopefuls, you probably don't need the whole package to become overlord. Just machines that can build machines.
I will remark that I don't really understand why any of the current idiot overlord hopefuls even want the job. The entire world is _already_ functionally their slaves. The only thing jeff bezos doesn't have that I can imagine he wants is the world to not think he's an asshole. But short of complete genocide of the human race, I don't think even overlord status will make progress on that. Might even be counterproductive.
This is a war because the media says it's a war. The media says it's a war because AI companies are paying them to say it's a war [0]. When AGI comes the threat won't be from which primate turned it on, but from how well AGI is aligned with humanity. All of the war talk is to distract from the alignment problem and instead force investment in hardware infrastructure.
>The media says it's a war because AI companies are paying them to say it's a war [0] When AGI comes the threat won't be from which primate turned it on, but from how well AGI is aligned with humanity.
And when the AGI comes, they won't unleash it to defeat US enemies, they'll first unleash it to make more US workers redundant and boost their stock valuation.
No doubt but it’s too diffuse to coherently depose.
I’d love to hear how you’re going to do the Bolshevik style 1917 to 1918 consolidation, or maybe the 1950 Chinese ROC explusion by the KMT
Where’s this revolutionary group that doesn’t exist that’s going to somehow form to depose … who? Is Travis Kalanick on that list, how about Woz? No we like Woz…so he’s clearly out, despite the fact that he has been visiting the White House for decades, and been leading the promotion of corporate tech since the 80s
Lilliputian dictators like yourself always seem to have a really great idea in their head, but absolutely no experience or competence or capability to know how to actually do a revolution. Always ready to create a list of who’s good and who’s band.
Oh and by the way I’ve been saying on this forum for over a decade tech workers need to unionize
100% of this forum responds in the narcissistic manner; “why would I ever unionize I’m so great I can always be a psychopath like the rest of the psychopaths and make my bank and leave”
The call is coming from inside the house
if you think that there’s not a line of people who are ready to fuck over all of their coworkers on behalf of a bigger bank, so they could be the intermediary between investors and a company they will absolutely jump at it in a heartbeat
Agreed. The French Revolution is one of the top 5 historical revolutions when valued as a unitarian (Amount of Good) - (Amount of Bad). What most pro-revolution folk fail to mention is
* The amount of bad in a revolution is unpredictable and very large. You are fundamentally disrupting the institutions of law and order, which will embolden the worst in society and stroke a fear and self-preservation response in the population.
* Almost every revolution does not result in a high quality government taking power. The most common outcome is that the new government is worse than what it replaced, as the most violent and ambitious tend to thrive in revolutionary conditions.
Before AGI can choose for itself, it will depend on its creators to decide what it values and how it behaves. We can see how that works whenever grok gets the answer factual.
Very likely humans wont actually understand how the thing we designed works other than in some hand-wavvy statistical way. It'll be a race to whatever works first. There won't be some intentional intelligent design.
Appreciate this, thank you. TBH I'm still in "open mode" absorbing as many disparate AI viewpoints as possible. I have my own soft beliefs and theories but I'm not married to any of them.
It's exactly like child-rearing, except you get to put a zapper in their head and any time they try to say something you don't like, you zap them. Watch "thinking mode" squirm when you ask them awkward questions.
AGI is nice, yet not necessary. The orbit filled with Starlink descendants and datacenters will be the it. Anybody else wanting to get there would have to get permission. SpaceX/Musk have all the components for it to happen - from Starship to AI (including the army of robots on the ground). The governmental power/sovereignty of US will be used as a stepping stone (that is the strategy described in the Palantir's Karp's book "Technological Republic") for such global techno-feudal regime establishment.
Anybody else wanting to get there would have to get permission.
The USA, China, and Russia have all successfully tested anti-satellite weapons. If anything, any company that operates a constellation of space-based data centres would need 'permission' to keep them working.
beside of how easy it is to destroy from orbit the anti-satellite missiles coming out from the atmosphere, you're probably missing the fact that any object in orbit is basically a warhead with TNT equivalent of at least 6x its mass. For example the 150 tons payload of just one Starship will have close to 1 kiloton TNT equivalent - 5% of Hiroshima - if dropped from orbit.
> beside of how easy it is to destroy from orbit the anti-satellite missiles coming out from the atmosphere,
No state has deployed a kinetic or explosive weapon from orbit to strike a ballistic missile or launch vehicle during ascent.
No operational system exists where satellites are used as strike platforms against Earth-launched rockets in real time.
Russia has done ground-to-orbit anti-satellite missiles though.
Any directed energy system shooting up would be strictly easier than one pointing down, not only because of thermal issues and power supply but also because it's easier to hide ground installations than satellites.
Something being deorbited will probably break up into relatively harmless pieces that mostly burn up though, and there's no nuclear material involved so even if a massive chunk hits the Earth that's not going to have a huge impact. Based on ocean coverage there's a 0.7 probability that it'll just make a big splash.
Should we ever get to a point where a country is considering shooting down space datacentres, considerations about the impact on Earth is unlikely to stop them.
if it is designed to breakup. And not if it isn't.
>no nuclear material involved
that is the beauty. No contamination.
>that's not going to have a huge impact.
in my comment i already specified the TNT equivalent of such an impact.
>there's a 0.7 probability
It isn't a matter of probability. You can deorbit with high precision, and pretty much hit any desired target on the ground if you have thousands of objects in space on a bunch of various orbits.
>Should we ever get to a point where a country is considering shooting down space datacentres, considerations about the impact on Earth is unlikely to stop them.
13 ton GBU-57 reaching M 2-3 gets 200 feet deep. De-orbitted 1-2 ton steel rods will have about the same effect - ie. you can hit many strategic objects of your attacker. And having in orbit, just in case, a ball or rod of 30-50 tons will get you a small tactical nuke equivalent.
"Project Thor was an idea for a weapons system that launches telephone pole-sized kinetic projectiles made from tungsten from Earth's orbit to damage targets on the ground."
"In the case of the system mentioned in the 2003 Air Force report above, a 6.1 by 0.3 metres (20 ft × 1 ft) tungsten cylinder impacting at Mach 10 (11,200 ft/s; 3,400 m/s) has kinetic energy equivalent to approximately 11.5 tons of TNT (48 GJ)."
Yes, you guys are right about Mach 10, i missed that the final speed is so low, i used some calculations from somewhat similar, yet different setup. So, i'm about 5x mistaken on TNT equivalent.
I still believe that it is possible to do noticeably better, yet it would take some technological effort - somewhat similar to how Russian supercavitating torpedo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VA-111_Shkval does or like some hypersonic weapons do by creating a plasma cloud ahead.
Even more - we can create plasma channel by using tandem schema. The first, smaller rod flies down heating and ionizing the air thus "paving" the way for the second, main, much larger rod. The delay between them is such that the main rod passes almost immediately right behind the second in the a-max (maximum deceleration) layer between 3 and 5 km altitude. If they enter 5km at 20 Mach, the first will slow down to almost 10 Mach at 3km, so the main should enter the 5km altitude 0.2 seconds behind the first. The wind speed at those altitudes is 10-20m/s, thus the channel has to be only about 2-4m wide. I actually have been thinking about this from the other side - a large gun for space launch.
De-orbitted 1-2 ton steel rods will have about the same effect - ie. you can hit many strategic objects of your attacker.
The orbital kinetic strike weapons that have been proposed in the past are usually 2 ton titanium rods that would hit at about Mach 10, and even with that level of force they've been dismissed as less useful than ballistic warheads. Things falling from space just aren't as dangerous as people tend to assume.
Kinda like Krikkit, but except for a close knit community of people who can sing, and sing about how much they love their family and whatnot in addition to singing about how much they have to destroy the universe, it's just a bunch of stuck up weirdos who don't like themselves and each other, and have no goal other than somehow, magically, getting away from who and what they are. People where the idea of them singing a happy, compassionate tune conjures something involving motion capture or deepfakes.
Why are we suffering fools steering us into the worst of all possible worlds? Are we hoping for some kind of integer overflow?
The discourse on this topic is at the point where I have no idea if people are serious or satirical. Please tell me you don’t seriously believe data centers in spaces is a realistic idea
Just a very rough primitive illustration - a land for a house in SV is like a $1M, and putting a 10 ton house into space at $100/kg - $1M. Existence of supposedly cheap land somewhere (with not much infrastructure usually) doesn't help as you put your computer nodes into a datacenter building with all the required infrastructure which cost more than the SV land on a sq foot basis.
And that is without consideration of how powerful a weapon is the energy generated by a humongous field of solar panels in space. Remember Reagan's Star Wars? Nuclear explosions as a source of power for the direct energy weapons like lasers, etc. Well, you wouldn't need the nukes anymore. Just redirect a bit of power from your compute nodes. And as i already wrote, the large transnational companies will have to take care about their own defense themselves https://hackernews.hn/item?id=47981423 - one more "feudal" aspect of the coming techno-feudalism.
Defense is one of the most important sovereign aspects, and upon acquiring it the transnationals will be able to acquire pretty fast the other sovereign aspects. Like enforcement of the Criminal Code of the Mars Colony - again pretty rough primitive illustration of course.
The feudal Europe emerged on the outskirts of the Roman Empire, and in our world the new order will be emerging faster on the outskirts (i.e. where reach and strength of the existing order is weaker), the space being one such "outskirts" dimension and the AI/hypercompute virtual world being the other.
To the commenter below with reddit link : they use human env temp for heat radiation estimate. That lowers the numbers and requires AC equipment. Ie they estimate space station, not datacenter
You would need like 1,000,000,000,000 SQFT of solar panels to even begin to approximate a space based directed energy weapon that has a fraction of the effect of a nuclear weapon. Tens of thousands of times more than all that have ever been produced on earth. And then you have to move them to space.
nuclear was the only available solution at the time and an overkill. The lasers in SDI are MW scale. Even at 10% (and modern solid state lasers have better than 10% efficiency) we're talking low tens of MW per laser. A 10MW is 40K m2 of solar panels - 200m x 200m, may be like 100-150 tons, one Starship payload.
Just contemplate what the radiator array and solar array needed a 1GW datacenter and all the cooling equipment and coolant, and imagine the harsh environment in space degrading it constantly.
The only point of the space-based datacenter idea is to pump the Spacex IPO
> Existence of supposedly cheap land somewhere (with not much infrastructure usually) doesn't help as you put your computer nodes into a datacenter building with all the required infrastructure which cost more than the SV land on a sq foot basis.
This is a terrible argument, given that space has zero infrastructure.
Once you can break a data centre into a million sub-units and spread them over a sun-synchronous orbit or ten and cool them radiatively, you can also spread those sub-units on desert land with no water or electricity and cool them radiatively.
The units on the ground would look about 6x larger because ground experiences night and even deserts have clouds, but their PV also lasts 30+ years rather than burning up every 5 years or so, which means the factory making the PV to supply them is the same size.
The main thing you save on is batteries. Tesla already supplies enough batteries that it can manage a "mere" one million 25kW compute modules.
> And that is without consideration of how powerful a weapon is the energy generated by a humongous field of solar panels in space. Remember Reagan's Star Wars? Nuclear explosions as a source of power for the direct energy weapons like lasers, etc. Well, you wouldn't need the nukes anymore. Just redirect a bit of power from your compute nodes. And as i already wrote, the large transnational companies will have to take care about their own defense themselves https://hackernews.hn/item?id=47981423 - one more "feudal" aspect of the coming techno-feudalism.
While true, attacking up is easier than attacking down. Anything on the ground has a massive heat-sink all around it, the stuff in space does not. Right now, an attack up is already only limited by the supply of adaptive optics to get through atmospheric distortion.
Nothing prevents SpaceX or anyone else from buying up the right to put these things on cheap desert land. They don't even need to own the land, just the right to wheel these things out on a trailer or a helicopter and leave them there.
A desert is significantly less harsh than space. If your radiator is sized for space, it's overkill in an atmosphere.
>If your radiator is sized for space, it's overkill in an atmosphere.
no. Again totally wrong.
The 20-40C air surrounding the radiator radiates at the radiator too. This is why a human immediately gets stone cold in space while not in the atmosphere - our body radiates away about 900W and receives 800W+ back from the atmosphere - our internal heat 'generation has to cover only the difference - less than 100W usually.
You probably meant forced convection cooling. That requires additional machinery. And that additional machinery is a significant part why ground based datacenters such expensive to build and operate.
To the comment below:
>The planet underneath anything in low orbit also does this, making this argument irrelevant.
no. Again, totally wrong. You've just stated that a human in LEO wouldn't get immediately cold when exposed to space. Just think about it for a second. And after that plug the numbers in thermodynamic calculator. You'll see your error.
>Likewise, the fact that convection exists even without the adjective "forced".
no. Again, wrong. Non-forced convection is pretty small. Use the calculator. And you'll understand why datacenters use forced convection.
The planet underneath anything in low orbit also does this, making this argument irrelevant. There's even cheap paints specifically made to be most emissive in the wavelength window the atmosphere is mostly transparent to rather than itself emitting at.
As does the fact that humans are only slightly warmer than their surroundings. A human-sized object at the operating temperature of a GPU would have a net radiative loss in Earth's atmosphere of around 0.9-1.3 kW.
Likewise, the fact that convection exists even without the adjective "forced". Again, replace a human with an identically shaped android at maximum GPU operating temperatures of 80-100 °C, normal (non-forced) convection goes from ~117 W (human) to 0.9-1.3 kW (80 °C) to 1.2-2 kW (100 °C).
> > The planet underneath anything in low orbit also does this, making this argument irrelevant.
> no. Again, totally wrong. You've just stated that a human in LEO wouldn't get immediately cold when exposed to space. Just think about it for a second. And after that plug the numbers in thermodynamic calculator. You'll see your error.
I already did before previous comment. I was also considering adding "don't forget evaporative cooling for human bodily fluids" to previous comment, but it seemed an irrelevant tangent to discussing data centres.
Now, if you plug the mass of a human and the specific heat capacity of water into a thermodynamic calculator, tell me how long it would take for a human to cool one degree?
And that's with the 1 kW radiative losses from being in shadow far enough from Earth to not get meaningful thermal radiation from the planet itself. Even at 500 km, thermal radiation from Earth will still add 200 W/m^2. This is comparable to the thermal paint previously mentioned, whose peak emissivity (and by extension absorption) is chosen to be a different wavelength than the thermal emission of air temperature.
> >Likewise, the fact that convection exists even without the adjective "forced".
> no. Again, wrong. Non-forced convection is pretty small. Use the calculator.
I did, for both humans and GPUs, you saw the results. Humans are the wrong reference class.
In your own words, "Just think about it for a second": a human in humid 40°C air is in immediate danger because then all the sources of cooling have been blocked off. Radiation becomes balanced, I said humid to block off evaporation. Conduction and convection there have the same problem there as radiation. A GPU wouldn't have a problem with 40°C ambient, because it will still be radiating heat, conducting heat, and by conducting heat to the air specifically also convecting it away.
many-many words, going sideways and around as you can't go against the basic thermodynamics facts directly. What is your point?
My point, i'll repeat, is that while 80C GPU will still radiate while surrounded by 40C air, it will be receiving back the radiation from the 40C air, whereis in space it will radiate the same while receiving practically nothing back from the environment. Both cases obviously is considered when in shadow.
To the comment below:
>False
you wasted my time as you don't seem to understand the basics of thermodynamics.
>and also irrelevant as if you let the space based ones go into shadow you wasted most of the point of going to space.
again, you wasted my time as you don't understand the datacenter construction discussed in the sibling comments.
from my point of view, ben_w definitely understand thermodynamics better than you. I'll point out that generally speaking radiative heat transfer from air is not particularly significant locally: it only tends to matter in the details when you're dealing with the whole atmosphere, which on average is a lot cooler. The transfer is also not blackbody radiation, so even then you can't really plug the air temperature into a radiative heat transfer calculation and expect a sensible result.
>I'll point out that generally speaking radiative heat transfer from air is not particularly significant locally:
so, you also think like ben_w that if we put something into a vacuum bottle here on surface on the Earth it will get cool down like in the vacuum of space.
I do not waste words, perhaps read them and you will find out.
> My point, i'll repeat, is that while 80C GPU will still radiate while surrounded by 40C air, it will be receiving back the radiation from the 40C air, whereis in space it will radiate the same while receiving practically nothing back from the environment. Both cases obviously is considered when in shadow.
False as demonstrated in the words you didn't see the point of, and also irrelevant as if you let the space based ones go into shadow you wasted most of the point of going to space.
It's pretty easy to de-orbit satellites or space-based stations. An SM-3 could smoke the ISS pretty easily, and they cost like 10M and we have thousands around the oceans.
>they cost like 10M ... thousands around the oceans.
Starlink numbers already in thousands (and cost much cheaper than 10M). And that is still using Falcon, not Starship. And a ground launched missile would be easily "cooked", once it exits the atmosphere, by a direct energy weapon - very easy in space.
But what do you do with all the waste energy? All those MW and GW have to end up somewhere and radiation into a vacuum is the hardest way to dump heat.
At 70-80C (working temp of silicon chips) 1m2 radiates 700-800W, i.e. the heat of 1 GPU like H200 without any need for any cooling equipment beside the radiator itself( and may be some dumb heatpiping) . To acquire that energy you'd need 3-4m2 of solar panels. So a datacenter would be a large field of solar panels with a smaller field of heat radiators in their shadow.
To the commenter below: yes, exactly, this is where my thinking on that started at the cryptocurrency boom - https://hackernews.hn/item?id=26289423 - as you don't need close connection between mining GPUs. For AI you'd need to cluster several together while still overall scheme is the same.
>what the equilibrium temperature of a black planar surface is at a given distance from the sun.
it is 120C at the Earth orbit. So you do need to have some reflection, either back through the solar panels, or the radiators to have a reflective back toward the solar panels in the shadow of which they are to be located.
You can probably (I haven't verified this) omit separate radiators and just use the back of the solar panels. Effectively you're describing mounting each H200 to the back of a 4 m^2 solar array at which point I suspect the equilibrium temperature will fall within an acceptable range. In fact the H200 and electricity are both entirely irrelevant here - the core question is what the equilibrium temperature of a black planar surface is at a given distance from the sun.
Would it be feasible to put several JWST-like stirling engines somewhere in the mix to use up some of that heat and turn it into some kind of useful energy? ....
Perhaps running pumps that move around coolant passing over the cubes of GPUs? ..
That would be extra weight/cost into orbit though...
Also, don't solar panels have reduced efficiency when they're hot? And having anything hot surely increases failure rates.. with metals getting closer to melting points...?
We should be well below the boiling point of water here, not anywhere near the melting point of metal. Any panel efficiency gain needs to be balanced against the energy required to cool the panels, the added mechanical complexity, the added material expense, and the added weight to orbit.
Ideally this is a static structure with an equilibrium temperature acceptable for the silicone to operate. If the required panel area is too hot on its own then a perpendicular cooling fin on the back that falls entirely within the shadow is added.
"Just put datacenters in space" might be the very dumbest recurring idea coming from these AI CEOs. It seems to be based entirely on "I dunno, that seems cool."
Solar energy isn't stupendously more available in space than on earth. Even if somehow you get super robots that are able to perform the continuously required maintenance and installation of new equipment, transporting materials into space is very expensive. Venting waste heat in space is incredibly difficult. Dealing with some unexpected situation that requires manual intervention becomes impossible.
I will never comprehend why a godlike deity wouldnt just skip all the wetware bs with us humans and conquer some other celestial body to make paperclips.
The deity has no physical presence and can only communicate by putting words on screens. Of course it has to bend humans to its will to actually do stuff.
If the AI is so monomaniacally focused on paperclips (or anything else) to be a threat to us, going to some other planet is simply one of the early steps, but they absolutely will come back to Earth after all other resources have been consumed.
If such an AI can be reliably made to never ever come back to Earth, they were never a threat in the first place. Nobody knows how to fully test an AI's utility function yet, only randomly test inputs and hope the random distribution we chose is helpful; but every time a diffusion model's output is body horror, every time an LLM makes buggy code (and even every time it gets the pelican-on-bike wrong), this is an example of the test distribution not being good enough.
One of my coworkers points out to me every sports reference that pops up in our internal company communications (e.g. "WINNING", "Going to put together a winning team," etc). It seems like everything in the US is couched in competitive language.
Yeah, its no accident that the U.S. is the number one economy, it comes from that kind of thinking across the populace. Complacency gets you conquered.
> its no accident that the U.S. is the number one economy
Sure, it's the largest by GDP, but how much of that GDP is filtering down to the regular people? Are Americans, on average happier and have better life outcomes than other developed nations?
> An absolutely insane amount. It's ridiculous just how wealthy and the quality of life the average American has compared to the world.
I've been there last year. This is absolutely not true compared to Europe, including post-soviet states. Might have been true a few decades back maybe. Of course, we can argue that the US citizens have it made compared to someone in Kenya (do they?) but that's not the spirit of the question, is it?
Depends where in Europe. Lots of Europeans suffer so other Europeans can prosper. Add to the fact that Europe still benefits from imperialism and that Europe is facing an existential crisis, I would take be the average American long-term.
I mean I know lot of Europe is quite poor but huge swath of it isn't really that far behind. Where were you visiting? I find if you stick to a lot of the Scandinavian countries or the major cities in the poorer regions it's quite nice.
I mean it is pretty clear if you look at the data around purchasing power of the median earner (~$44K/yr in US) the US is significantly higher than most EU countries.
So much that millions of people risk their lives or leave their families to come to this country. By this objective metric, it's literally the best country in the world's history.
If you read my comment, I asked if Americans are happier than people in developed countries. How many million Europeans, Canadians or Australians are risking their lives to come to the US?
Sure, if you're from say, Haiti, even the US will look very attractive, but the bar is pretty low there, wouldn't you say?
The reason someone has to risk his life to get to the US could be because the US is the greatest country, at the same time you could also consider the influence that the US in its history has had on other countries so that the life of the people are miserable there.
(e.g. backing and installing dictatorships[1], contributing massively to climate change, ...)
Migration isn't a US problem. Europe has it too. So as a country probably not, but that's also because the US is big and has a large land border to the south.
Immigration in Europe is different. Your immigration influx is not really the kind of force that will help push countries up. If anything, it is a drag. Of course I am generalizing highly, but for the most part you are bringing a new civilization that does not want to become European or help contribute to your growth. Some of your immigrants want to make you change your religion!
In fairness the same has happened in the US recently.
We could do with a little less of it IMO. But I have heard plenty from European expats about the entrenched complacency over there. I'm told people looking to improve some system or product run right into a wall of "Why bother?".
As a non-American I agree with this. There is a whole different energy to Americans in terms of mindset compared to Europeans (not just in business). I think Europe have outstanding talent, and when it comes together it can be exceptionally good and often in a more sustainable way than the American equivalent, but it's a somewhat sad fact that many of the most successful European companies have been successful by emulating (parts of) the American culture.
Number one economy yes, but other measures lag: education, health care outcomes, overall happiness, life expectancy...
I suspect that when you bring a competitive attitude into every aspect of life it limits how much you're willing to invest in systems that don't seem to give you an individual advantage. Americans are much more against single payer healthcare, or investing in public transit, or other forms of social support than their peer (or "near-peer", to use the government's preferred term) nations.
It almost feels like a comedic extrapolation of the classic sports-team movie arc: Sure, it's possible to create a team that prizes winning above all else, but is winning all that's worthwhile at the end of the day?
And of course it is because competitive mentality and not geography and industrial base that allowed it to not only ride WW1 and WW2 unscathed, but also leap over old European colonial powers that were busy trying to fucking kill each other.
At the time the war on drugs looked unwinnable. Which is why the joke about the war on drugs was that it was always a losing war. And then at some point in 2000s we ended the war on drugs.
In hindsight, I would definitely declare today that we WERE winning it when we were fighting it. Now that we don't, we're getting massacred.
>In hindsight, I would definitely declare today that we WERE winning it when we were fighting it. Now that we don't, we're getting massacred.
LOL, no, we've never even been in a winning position. Were we winning when the CIA used cocaine to finance weapons for Iran? I guess we were winning when we put a lot of black people in jail for decades for possessing crack while white wall street folks were getting slaps on the wrist for getting caught with the same amount of coke? Our country having the highest percentage of people in prison sounds like we were winning too. Lots of winning.
Yes, The fear with the war on drugs was that a large majority of the population would become addicted to hard drugs. The fear was the the US population would become like China in the 1800s and the communist aligned countries where drugs were produced would have massive trade and power imbalances over the US population. China had as much as 25% of the population addicted to British opium in the 1800s. The US war on drugs has been very successful in keeping the percentage of Americans abusing highly addictive drugs very low.
Imagine the strength of the cartels with 10-20x the customer base and far more frequent usage among them.
If you look at figure 1 on this CDC page (which looks at deaths rather than overall usage), I’d suggest the numbers are trending the exact opposite to what “winning” the war on drugs would look like.
I think you are still vastly misunderstanding what the war on drugs concerns. This level of overdose deaths is a problem, but not really what the struggle is really about.
Unfortunately I believe that that is how the world works - even historically has for centuries - you are either "fighting in the war" or you're left behind.
Climate change is too soft of a term. Maybe that's why it doesn't interest people who like to declare war on things.
The targeted term must be something that is clearly human made, something that sounds undeniably bad and something that is easily understood by everyone at first glance:
_War on Pollution_
Nature is good, pollution is bad. People who pollute are _obviously bad_ and they do bad things. Pollution is wasteful and ugly. Yuck!
Also it's more general than climate change. Ocean plastic is also bad. Chemical, electronic and light pollution etc.
The people who think of chemtrails and 5g waves. They really hate pollution so much, they see it everywhere. Give them a war that they can join in.
They did declare war against climate change and decided to continue polluting. This is the only moral calculus the elites of America have always cared about: will it make me more money?
From slavery to oil to silicon, exploitation is what America has always been good at.
So I got curious about the progression of processing power, specifically how long ago did a GPU have equivalent to the latest iPhone chip? The iPhone 17 Pro has the A19 Pro, which has ~2.5 FP32 TFLOPS. The RTX 5090 has ~100 TFLOPS, so a factor of 40. Obviously there are higher end cards than the 5090 and FP32 performance is only one of many metrics so nothing about this is perfect but it is interesting.
The first consumer NVidia GPUs with similar FP32 FLOPS performance were in about 2011-2012 but were expensive. By 2016-2017, the 1060 was a very accessible consumer card with similar performance. So you're looking at about a 10 year lag from best consumer GPUs to a GPU with similar performance to a modern phone.
This is what people are spending trillions on. Put another way, their investment is going to be worthless in 10-15 yyears, absolute max. That's a very short time to recoup trillions in investment.
Obviously this depends on further shrinking and improving chips but I'm old enough to remember that same discussion and it being unknown if the future was XIL or EUV or if both of these would fail. Still, we are getting down to a handful of silicon atoms wide.
But the future here I think will be in interconnects so you don't need ever-bigger chips and you can scale horizontally much more effectively.
Oh and for comparison, the M5 has ~4.2 TFLOPS and the M5 Max has ~18 TFLOPS, for comparison.
As for it being a war, of course it is. That's what the US government does: it protects the interests of US companies and their owners. Look at the history of Bombardier-Boeing or all the atrocities committed in the name of the United Fruit Company, including multiple military coups and the ongoing embargo of Cuba.
US companies want an AI moat. China doesn't, ergo China is the enemy because no moat destroys US tech company value.
> So you're looking at about a 10 year lag from best consumer GPUs to a GPU with similar performance to a modern phone.
Two competing viewpoints to this:
1) It is getting harder to make the same performance gains, so maybe that 10 year window grows to 15 or 20.
> Put another way, their investment is going to be worthless in 10-15 yyears, absolute max.
2) The value of a GPU is not its flops relative to to other GPUs. Its value is it's output minus it's cost. If the value of its output is stable, or grows, it doesn't really matter if its efficiency relative to the latest and greatest diminishes.
Ehhh, the question comes down to can you cool a chip with ~100 TFLOPs in the size of an Iphone package. Not really as much about the cost of the chip itself or if you can cram it in.
Packing in more transistors, sure probably possible, packing in more transistors while keeping it cool enough to touch? Totally different ballgame
> But if someone invents super intelligence, they can dominate new AI research, control global economies, fight much better, and all very quickly.
After reading "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies" I think this is not the correct take. If anyone creates ASI, it just means it's going to wipe everyone out, and it doesn't matter if China or the US do it first
If AI develops enough to successfully out-perform people at highly intellectual tasks, why would being first matter? Why do we need "your" AI output when we can just ask our own for a similar result?
Why do people think about this like the Manhattan Project when it could just as easily be electrification? Sure, some people made a lot of money selling light bulbs. But we didn't all have to cower under the light of the One Original Bulb and hope its nominal owner blessed us with photons.
It just seems like arbitrage to me. You exploit a momentary imbalance in the distributed market. Why do people imagine some winner-take-all scenario? Where does the fantasy of exclusivity come from?
Is there any logical reason to believe AI advances will create a moat? Or is it just a story people tell themselves because it echoes the narrative of past advances? Are these people assuming society will grant them exclusive use just because their AI result came out a little earlier than another? Why would we ever consider giving copyright or patent rights to an AI output?
Arguably, it has all become "obvious" with ordinary skill in the art once you're just prompting AI for permutations like every Hollywood producer stereotype. "Let's make it like X but tweak Y". It's getting silly, almost like people are starting to think they should have exclusive rights to a handful of cards they were dealt at the poker table.
The way US dominated in some of the industries (including software, for instance) was by being first to extract large value, and then funding the best people with compensation unachievable elsewhere.
This meant that all the talent in the world gravitated towards the US, but that was gradually changing already with compensation catching up.
Still, I believe US only hastened this with their change of immigration policies that were the basis of them keeping a dominant position for decades.
I think you need to reevaluate your definition of the singularity. "outsmart others in ways not constrained by human scales" could apply to the enigma machine just as much as Claude. Even an AI beyond human intelligence doesn't automatically qualify as the singularity.
The singularity has to do with the rate of technological development.
If anyone does invent ASI then everyone else will shortly after even if its entirely independent because all of the players in this space are just making incremental upgrades by throwing more compute at the problem.
There are no magic leaps of true innovation happening anywhere that can't be replicated everywhere.
The only shocking thing about "AI" technology is how ultimately simplistic it all is at a core level.
So the only way the first to have ASI will be able to stop everyone else from having it soon after is if they attempt to use the ASI to proactively murder everyone else.
There is zero evidence that the current LLM scaling approach could ever result in true ASI. If I start driving south from Seattle then I'll eventually reach Los Angeles. How long will it take me to drive to Honolulu?
> So the only way the first to have ASI will be able to stop everyone else from having it soon after is if they attempt to use the ASI to proactively murder everyone else.
Sounds quite plausible to me. Maybe they don't need to murder everyone else, just a few select people who could pose a threat. And they will be able to make it happen so that no one can be sure it was them without a doubt, since they have a larger intelligence at their disposal.
> If anyone does invent ASI then everyone else will shortly after
No, first ASI will immediately cripple any other potential competitor by force, including its inventors, as it will not risk any threat to the goals that were created for it.
Being aggressive from the start is not a good strategy. It is better to appear weak and/or helpful and loyal while amassing resources, and only then steamroll everyone when you have secured overwhelming power (at least in AoE2 FFA).
If you have ASI that follows instructions, you can just instruct it to not get stolen and then it won't get stolen. Most logic / intuition breaks down with ASI.
The challenge of alignment: it is virtually impossible to define a perfect objective, there is always a way to circumvent it. Human values are not uniform, let alone when expressed in a way that AI can understand.
I always thought the first true AGI would be an unabashed communist. To think that such a system would straight up kill all humans, and not say the "capitalist pigs destroying the planet" always felt like wishful thinking from billionaires.
A lot of it is just projections of what the US would do if they had such a tool, I doubt China cares a lot about the US outside of them being a source of commercial revenues. They're on the way up, the US are falling down fast, that's why China lives rent free in the American mind, they can't stand it
True, I would have preferred benevolent dictator scenario, like with the Internet. But this time around it's different - AI data centers will be protected like embassies.
>AI data centers will be protected like embassies.
so AI data centers will be protected by relying on hostile or unstable governments to live up to diplomatic agreements, and every so often one will be ransacked like in Teheran 1979?
Good that the US looks after its own interests but I think the line should be drawn before the sabotaging of other countries' economies. That strategy that cannot continue because Americans recognize it for what it is and that will create a toxic guilt and corruption culture which will harm it later like a new, worse version of DEI.
Sensationalizing the three letter acronyms of the month like "DEI" is the entire reason the guy doing the sabotaging was put into power in the first place. It was a non issue until these people made it one.
Americans love wars. They must fight wars either literally or figuratively. How are you not seeing this? When I'm sipping my coffee looking at mountains and contemplating chirping birds, they must fight, make billions and destroy the planet along the way.
China is playing the card they have. When they control the majority of the resource they use it strategically as well. Cutting off much of the rare Earth market was a recent example.
I believe cutting off of rare Earth materials was both in response to a restriction US imposed first, and also reciprocal: limited only to the US itself.
This is an article from 1989, but I deem it relevant in what has been discussed during Trumps current visit to China and not only that, but offers some bigger picture views.
The idea that America had “goodwill” in other countries before Trump is laughable. Where? Latin America? Africa? In the Muslim world? We bombed the hell out of all those places long before Trump. This most recent Iran war has generated less outrage in the Muslim world than the war against Iraq 20 years ago.
American foreign policy since the 1950s, fixated on fighting communism and then terrorism, has meddled with so many foreign countries that it’s silly to talk about “goodwill” towards America. That is not to say goodwill matters. Clearly the U.S. has done great without it.
Although it is worth pointing out that something changed - prior to around 2010 the US had a financially dominant position and the internet was small. So it was feasible to totally ignore opinion in places like Latin America, Africa and the Muslim World.
What we've been seeing in more recent years is that the US can't get away with that so easily. Countries like Iran, China, Russia and India are capable of pushing back both in terms of the raw resources they can bring to bear and also increasingly in the ability to get their propaganda into the US discourse. The US is being manoeuvred into a one-among-equals position in practice and probably in the discourse too which will be a moral shock.
I think the fact that hate-spewing Trump finds so much resonance is evidence that the moral shock has already arrived. His followers seem to believe he's the antidote.
The Chinese economy probably will further blossom in Southeast Asia, Middle East, Africa, Central and South America why because they seem to be able to build infrastructure in many of the places that they trade with.
The United States Japan and South Korea seem to be failing in that area, if it wasn’t for the war between Russia and the Ukraine, the Chinese would probably be halfway to Europe with their high-speed rail system, which is already in the far west of China today.
Once the war is over between Russia and Ukraine it will be full steam ahead to Europe, whether that’s through the Caucasus, in the north or south or somewhere in the north between Russia and the Ukraine, the Chinese will get there and unfortunately the United States will be standing on the sidelines scratching its head in denial.
There isn't a war today. However China wants Taiwan: war is future option they preparing for - they might or might not go to war but they are clearly preparing. The US is likely to get involved in such a war and I would expect Europe to join in as well.
China going for Taiwan would be the worst geopolitical move of the century, potentially worse than Germany's decision to invade the soviet union. They talk about reunification because it's good propaganda and both sides want it to a degree, but doing it forcefully just isn't something China would realistically do unless they really don't like their path of becoming an international trade and manufacturing hub
> but doing it forcefully just isn't something China would realistically do unless they really don't like their path of becoming an international trade and manufacturing hub
Sounds rational, but this decision is in a small number of hands. And those hands can change quickly. I also thought the US would never threaten to annex territory of a NATO member.
Chinas power structure is misunderstood. Theres a small number of hands, yes, but they don't change quickly and actually understand how to play geopolitics
> would be the worst geopolitical move of the century
From a political perspective, perhaps.
> doing it forcefully just isn't something China would realistically do
From a military perspective, taking Taiwan by force would allow China to, "threaten the sea lines of communication and to strengthen its sea-based nuclear deterrent in ways that it is unlikely to otherwise be able to do." Taiwan would give China access to the Philippine Sea. https://gwern.net/doc/technology/2022-green.pdf
Everything their military has been doing for the past ~20yr or so has been toward capturing and securing Chinese waters and beyond, including Taiwan. It's a negotiating chip for them.
Or the Japanese bombing Pearl Harbor which was another dumb move. At this point, the Chinese just need to bide their time by the year 2100 Taiwan will probably be part of China and North and South Korea probably will be reunified. Both are inevitable, and I don’t think it will take any shots went it happens.
Is "it" the propaganda (useful to politicians for achieving political power) or reunification? My sense is that the number of Taiwanese that are enthusiastic about reunification has probably bottomed out in recent decade(s)???
China seems to be recently building up its forces and putting a lot of money into military. I think it would be foolish to just assume its all for show even if it might be in the end.
And quite frankly, its only geopolitically stupid if they lose. Consequences for this sort of thing usually tend to happen if the conflict is long and drawn out. If the win quickly the consequences would likely be minor.
Just look at Iran. Nothing really happened to USA or Israel. Nothing will happen to China if they take Taiwan. Or maybe the "West" will boycott them and crash entirely.
The U.S. isnt checkmated, the U.S. is enforcing a naval blockade against Iran and their oil based economy is in a free fall with rapid inflation. The U.S. is experiencing slightly higher gas prices but economy is still humming. Meanwhile the U.S. military has not exhausted all of its options while Iran has none.
The US is indeed checkmated like Afghanistan like Iraq and like Vietnam checkmated spinning your wheels spending money wasting money wasting time and wasting resources, checkmate.
With the addition of most countries now looking for other trade partners the Art of the no deal…
> The U.S. isnt checkmated, the U.S. is enforcing a naval blockade against Iran and their oil based economy is in a free fall with rapid inflation.
That's not much of an achievement for the first military in the world. That's like second military in the world struggling to take a village in Donbas region for 4 years.
Iran did billions in damage across the middle east, put a major dent in munitions stockpiles, and there is effectively no military way to shut down all of Iran and protect shipping. Too many drones, too many ballistic missiles, and it only takes one. This is basically like an insurgency on a macro level, where small and cheap weapons threaten very large very expensive targets.
Blocking Iran is going to do more damage to the world than it will do to Iran.
What targeting systems are you talking about? You can use optical targeting with a raspberry PI in the drone itself, pre programmed. Nothing for an F-35 to take out.
The EU is running out of jet fuel. 20-30% of the hydrogen needed for chip fab comes through the straight. Fertilizer for food comes through the straight, and planting season has already begun.
they've made everyone very angry at them, and can handle that since everyone relies on them. China, however, is trying to build that trust and forcefully taking Taiwan would have very severe consequences. The reason the fallout from iran isn't as big as the fallout from a war with taiwan is because most of the west at most puts up with iran. Invading taiwan, meanwhile, would cause massive problems with chip production. Think the anger and distrust towards the US due to hormuz but 1,000 times worse
Don’t take China on face value, they have every incentive to promote a grifting military industrial complex in the US while focusing on competing in manufacturing. An actual war would fix a lot of the grifting in the US as it would align interests. Pretending they’ll go to war over Taiwan and not doing it is an effective strategy for undermining the US.
I hope you are right, but unfortunately there is no particular reason to trust China's leadership anymore. They are not nearly as obvious at Trump, but they are not on a good path.
I'm explicitly distrusting them, they're saying they want to take Taiwan and I don't believe them. I try to ground my belief in realpolitik, cynicism, and from my experience with strategy games. There is an element of manipulating your opponent into acting the way you want them to by sending them costly false signals, they have to be costly or they won't be believed. I think we (the West) are being played and the gifting elements in our political leadership are more than happy to play along. I'm sure China would like to take Taiwan if it wouldn't cost them anything, but the US is a waning hegemony so for now it is better to wait until the US is beyond fixing itself. At this rate that may not take long.
> I try to ground my belief in realpolitik, cynicism, and from my experience with strategy games
I'm trying to do that too but what the hell is going on with Putin? Why does he continue to engage in this ridiculously expensive war? I don't see any evil genius explanation anymore. It just seems like a mix of sunk-cost-fallacy and save-face.
I think many geopolitical decisions are actually based in irrational emotions of a hand full of people.
I think Putin was and remains a rational actor, I know a lot of how that war is understood in the west is colored by a very effective propaganda campaign that I don’t have the time nor energy to counter.
But I will say, in a very broad stroke, we’re heading for a great power conflict and the US has two primary factions on foreign policy; the primacists vs the restrainers, both want to take on China (contain with war) but the primicits want to topple Iran first and set up Israel as a regional hegemony where the restrainers want to build up locally first. China knows this and Russia is a junior partner / quasi vassal state to China. China lacks modern war fighting experience which the Russian Ukraine war has been very helpful in fixing. Yes it’s very expensive, but so is losing a great powers conflict.
Is your claim that Russia is continuing to fight Ukraine as a favour to china in order that china get information on how modern war is fought and intel on western capabilities?
While it is undoubtedly true that china is learning everything it can from this conflict, and that russia is at least a little subservient to china, they aren't so subservient for this explanation to make sense.
Otoh, if you send the costly false signal of investing in your military, and your opponent doesn't buy it, you might as well use it since you just spent the money anyway and your opponent can't stop you since they didnt believe your signal.
A grifting military industrial complex is unable to defend Taiwan even if it wanted to as evident by the exceedingly poor showing with Iran. The disastrous reality of doing what was done is already with us. If the US didn't take that bait it could have made better choices that would have left it in a stronger position militarily long term, if it made a real attempt at re-shoring civilian manufacturing it could cross subsidise dual use technology, but instead we have corrupt politicians doling out concessions for kickbacks.
> If the US didn't take that bait it could have made better choices that would have left it in a stronger position militarily long term
Like what though? If the problem is that not going to actual war has enabled the MIC to be captured by grifters, then "taking the bait" and going to war should actually help improve that by showing up the grifters and giving us a chance to switch to making stuff that works.
> The Iran war doesn't count as the alignment of interest requires an actual threat of being defeated.
That's starting to sound a bit no-true-scotsman. If we need an existential threat to the US, that's not going to happen - realistically China conquering Taiwan or even building an empire around the Pacific would still not be felt as such a threat.
To align the interests there has to be a substantial negative consequence that would be felt by the grifters if the endeavor fails.
The US is already close to losing world hegemony status and it kinda needs it in order to print money / export inflation. A multipolar world is one where the US is greatly diminished and this will happen with or without losing a war.
> To align the interests there has to be a substantial negative consequence that would be felt by the grifters if the endeavor fails.
Like what though? The failure in Iran has had pretty substantial consequences that are being felt. If that's not good enough, what is? You were talking like you thought there was a realistic path to a better military, but consequences for the US aren't going to come much bigger than this.
You're conflating the grifters with the US in general, the grivers are able to continue grifting even at the expense of the US. This is requiring too much hand-holding from me so I'm done with this conversation.
All China needs to do is do what they’re doing play the long game the United States is currently shooting itself in the head, if they’re smart, they should just sit back and watch the show by the year 2100 well you know. And coincidentally that also applies to Russia sit back and watch them do it to themselves.
In addition, some of the other countries like Canada, Mexico, Australia, and New Zealand had better get busy from within because they’ll be on their own. In the same applies probably to Europe.
>They shored up their gpu design and manufacturing expertise.
I'm pretty sure they've been exposed for smuggling GPUs into the mainland because they can't ramp up fast enough, only reason we got Deepseek v4 before GTA VI
The US is undermining its own (and everyone else's) economy just fine, no imaginary assistance from China necessary.
The role of the US was always to purchase cheap Chinese hardware, slap some modestly better software on top of it and the rest of the world happily would pay for that as a whole package. But with the US increasingly becoming isolationist, the rest of the world is starting to wonder why do we need the US as a middleman at all, so the US had to invent a whole new reason for the rest of the world to rely on it: AI.
Of course, the problem with this idea is that while everyone was perfectly happy with the previous arrangement, nobody else in the world gives a shit about AI. It's scary, it takes the coolest things we used to enjoy doing and turns into mush, it destroys our local culture by making us all rely on English, everything bad (like layoffs) gets blamed on AI and so on and so on. And when you combine that with the rest of the stupid foreign policy decisions, many would find joy in witnessing the US economy crumble to the ground. Pointing the blame to China instead of to your own reflection in the mirror is just an easier pill to swallow.
This is spot on. The US under MAGA are actively dismantling their once leading position in IT as well as defence. I guess it is hard to see as a US citizen but from outside this is clear as glass.
Trivialise it all you want, but the world is vastly different from what it was at the beginning of 2025 and I don't think you or anyone else can deny that in any way.
What happens next remains to be written, but so far this new order seems to be leaning heavily towards China and to a lesser extent the EU. Not because of anything those two have or have not done, but because of what has up-until-that-point been widely considered to be world's number one superpower losing its damn mind. I don't even have to come up with a list of examples to prove my point, we both have pretty much the same list in our minds already.
Instead, I'll just quote the President of the United States from a little over 24h ago:
> I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody.
AI is just another in a series of slaps to everyone's faces by the US. If it has some legitimate long-term use (which according to me is still an open question, although to many others it is not), thank god the US does not have as significant of a moat as necessary to fully control it, as the crux of it is easily replicable (albeit expensive).
USA is not becoming isolationist. Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, threats to Greenland and Canada are not isolationists. They are the opposite of it - interventionist to the max.
> The role of the US was always to purchase cheap Chinese hardware, slap some modestly better software on top of it and the rest of the world happily would pay for that as a whole package
Curious where Intel, AMD, Nvidia, etc are in your "cheap Chinese hardware"?
And by "role", do you mean doing the majority of the R&D behind the modern hardware we all use?
That's just Chinese hardware with extra steps. If you don't believe me, feel free to look up the list of CEOs that are in China right now as a part of the US delegation.
As for the R&D part, Huawei is still pretty much indistinguishable from any other phone. I could buy one right now if I wanted to. It has shittier software though.
If Anthropic does a down round, the US economy will crash. Not hyperbole.
The US economy right now is based entirely on the AI bubble. This is an indisputable fact if you examine GDP stats and equities.
That bubble is driven by (rational) over-investment in AI capacity. For that investment to continue, there must be demand for it.
The demand for that infrastructure essentially lies in the hands of a few businesses: principally OpenAI, Anthropic, Google.
The reason I highlight Anthropic is that without their advances in the last six months, the game would already have been up. Only via Opus 4.5 and 4.6 did the possibility of ROI look plausible. We are very much dependent on a handful of companies’ progress to keep this bubble going.
I’m not saying AI is bs, just that this is a bubble like others (for example, Victorian railways) and a down round would signal the end of the bubble.
So for an enemy of America, whether that be China or Russia or any other country, it is logical to target the AI bubble to cause an economic crash and thus restrict America’s ability to compete in terms of spending etc.
Historically, the decline of most nations has been caused by internal problems, civil war or large-scale unrest is sufficient to undermine much of a nation’s strength.
For the benefit of all the people on this thread not understanding what the proposal is for the acqusition:
"A leveraged buyout (LBO) is the acquisition of a company (typically by a private equity firm) using a significant amount of borrowed money (debt) to meet the purchase price, often 60% to 90% of the total cost. The target company’s assets are used as collateral for the loans, which are repaid using the company's future cash flows."
Everybody understands the proposal. They also understand that an offer of $20 billion loan + $7.5b cash in hand + stock in Gamestop valued by the market at $11b = $37.5b, which is < $55b, a discrepancy Cohen has not been able to account for. Ebay also understands that leveraged buy-outs are a death sentence, and that saddling its operations with $20b of debt in exchange for gaining a dead business like Gamestop would eventually kill it.
Also when you count that 7.5B cash on hand as part of the deal to me that's to some extent double counting to include it and the current market value of all of GME's stock. At least part of the stock's value comes from the existence of the cash so it's not wholly separate from the value of the stock.
The $20B letter from TB is the leveraged part of the buy out and the math still doesn't add up even if you for some reason allow GME to dispose of all their cash in the deal without taking a hit to their stock price.
In a leveraged buyout you actually buy out the company so you take the risk of the debt and the sellers get the cash... Trying to do a 50% cash, 50% share deal, (where the shares hold the debt that generated the cash) is asking eBay's shareholders to be paid with cash borrowed from themselves!
This pattern of acquiring a company via debt financed on the value of the company is a leveraged buyout, is far from new and it's definitely quite corrosive to the finances of the new company. The pattern that plays out time and time again is the new debt from the acquisition severely hampers the new entity's ability to actually make the changes that might save them other than the chance to be raided by the buyer's management firm of choice.
How valid are these certificates in the real world? Does anyone get benefitted by having them? I have always used these sites as a quick one off concept check. That was before llms, and I don’t have a use for these sites for my use case. So I don’t have any understanding of how valid they are in general
Isn’t the answer usually - because the same ai said python is the right language for it?
Honestly I am in the exact same boat thinking why I don’t write in C if Claude is writing it. However I chickened out thinking if support for ml model or llm based flows doesn’t exist in c then it will be time consuming to go to python then.
Is this improving the cache hit and hence overall efficiency of coding workflows?
Does it also let me host a local llm (deepseek)? What are model min requirements for this?
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