oceanplexian

If only we had a limitless form of energy that comes out of the sky. Or if that doesn't work, maybe there's some miraculous form of energy that can be extracted from rocks, produces no emissions whatsoever, and could power society for thousands of years.

Nah, let's make a really convoluted system to jack up energy prices for everyone, and increasingly rely on a dwindling supply of non-renewable energy.

If all the talk is true that something approximating human intelligence can be scaled simply by building more datacenters, absolutely, it will be the most desired commodity in the world surpassing all others.

It's hard to say what their motivation is.

Not for anyone who reads history.

Back in the late 18th century, England was the world's top economy, in big part due to its textile industry. England had an export ban on the technology, but textile worker named Samuel Slater brought blueprints over (Supposedly in response to a bounty posted in a newspaper by the US government!). The technology diffused rapidly because the legal environment made competition easy, and ironically the US had better sources of energy (superior water-power sites).

Arguably, China is doing the same thing in the 21st century.

Imagine if we applied this train of logic to humans.

"That artist saw a pelican at the beach once!" [cue the outrage] "He's not a real artist, he's a cheater and produces nothing original!"

There is a lot of precedent for this. Even on Earth, in 2026, international maritime law states that there is no such thing as a vessel with "democracy" and that a captain always has supreme command. Ships, airplanes, etc are all in a category that operate as strict autocracies.

Perhaps, but it is horrifically long in terms of human stuff.

Not really, unless you're obsessed with the idea that great works need to happen within your lifetime. Europe is chock full of cathedrals that took 400-600 years to build, worked on by countless generations who would never live to see them completed.

It's an unenforceable clause. The affected party has no means to prove that a breach has happened.

Big tech spends hundreds of millions in high powered lawyers, audit logs, and contractual agreements with the sole purpose of proving your point wrong.

Releasing free or cheap versions of the models undermines US economic growth.

This would be like saying that the creation of the PC undermined the 1980s economy because it hurt IBM's profits. Instead the consequences of cheap, ubiquitous personal computers grew the economy 10-fold.

There is an entire class of wholesale model providers that stand to gain from open source models. Then there are companies building platforms on top of LLMs that would otherwise be impossible with closed models due to cost. And there are entire enterprise use cases that would simply be non-viable at $50/million tokens, like OpenClaw, Hermes, etc.

Lots of organizations are continuing to refuse to use chinese models

Correction: Lots of organizations are refusing to use Anthropic Fable because they have forced opt-in data collection as part of their privacy policy, even for Enterprise.

Clearly this is a problem, Texas being the one state notoriously known for not having any natural resources or energy production infrastructure.

Do you use it or is this speculation?

The AI tooling I used 12-24 months ago if frozen in time, monetized correctly is probably 100x the capability of what software could do before (And software was already eating the world long before AI). The bull case is that we just invented the 21st century equivalent of the printing press or electricity. And that website is the 19th century equivalent of someone criticizing electricity as a concept because it would be expensive to build power lines.

If anything it's a miracle that the US economy is so efficient that we can just skip all the small talk and bullshit and build out the infrastructure to support AI immediately.

Starlink accounted for 69% of SpaceX revenue pre-merger and is speculated to be already profitable including launch costs.

And this is all before they launch a phone or something, or replace global fiber interconnect with a lower latency space-based alternative, replace all forms of space based telecommunications (TV, Satellite Radio, etc). Starlink is a $1T+ business without even getting creative.

Performance of these models has been completely inconsistent. They are a black box that they quantize/throttle/batch internally without telling their customers. Speaking as a FAANG engineer who practically lives in Claude Code.

On day 1 Fable was quite intelligent but last night (Presumably Monday morning China when things are getting slammed) Fable couldn’t edit a css file and repeatedly hit syntax errors on tool calls like I’d expect from a 9b Qwen model.

There is zero transparency in what we are paying for with Anthropic.

The US has fantastic fiber optic internet that's why this is total BS. I have multi-gig symmetrical fiber in UT, so does family have access to it in New Hampshire, and my friends who live in the Southeastern US.

The only places that have shit internet are states like California and New York. That's not an "America" or a "Capitalism" problem. That's a problem of living somewhere with a dysfunctional government that doesn't allow anyone to build new infrastructure.

Switzerland is 1/5th the size of Utah, seems like a fair comparison to me.

We had this in Utah for over a decade now (Approx. 24% of the State) via Utopia, congrats to Switzerland on finally catching up. I believe 10G is around $200/month and you can select from a dozen or so ISPs on the other end.

If you were really gung-ho about proving something to this annoying blogger I'm sure you could convince one of the mom and pop ISPs on the network to throw a 100G optic on both ends. Unlike Switzerland Utah lets you buy the physical strand of fiber outright for around $3k (Hopefully that's not too capitalist for you).

Things can get both more expensive and cheaper at scale, hence the term.

For example (and relevant to AI) I can generate electricity on my roof at $0.20-25/kWh, batteries included. In California the electric utility can’t offer it cheaper than $0.30-0.50/kWh. Therefore at scale, electricity is actually more expensive.

There are many such examples.

Honestly your best bet is to buy a $20 Claude subscription, ask Claude to set it all up with Pi and llama.cpp and come back in 20 minutes after a cup of coffee. This is also a good idea because it will help set expectations of what a local model can do vs. a frontier model.

If you want to do coding with a local LLM your best bet is a 6 year old Nvidia 3090 which is substantially more powerful than the highest end overhyped Apple product for 1/5th the price.

I disagree. AI is doing exactly what it was predicted it would in science fiction.

The computer can now literally talk to you in natural language and then perfectly produce sophisticated actions in response to completely arbitrary and unstructured input. It trivially passes the Turing test. By any definition prior to the year 2023 we are living with Artificial General Intelligence and it’s here now.

It's fascinating because there are 3+ Constitutional Rights being stepped on which makes this much more nefarious than impacting some 3D printer hobbyists. If they can get their foot in the door on this issue you can kiss all of your civil liberties goodbye.

1) The right to bear arms absolutely gives you the right to make your own gun. It would be like saying the right to vote doesn't give you the right to use a pen or enter a polling place.

2) For the politicians that lack an imagination, print out the GCODE file and put it in a paperback book. Now is the government going to claim it's illegal to disseminate a book?

3) Neither does the government have a right to "search" a 3D printer without probable cause. That's a violation of the Fourth Amendment.

I started to have the opinion that the Chinese models would crash the AI bubble simply because they are an order of magnitude cheaper and almost as intelligent.

But if the government can simply ban models from the market? especially given how much the admin loves the idea of Tariffs? Knowing Trump the chance of this happening is 99.9%

We will all be stuck paying $50/mtok to Anthropic (And by we I mean only Big Tech will be able to afford tokens). The rest of the competition will be outcompeted by super intelligent machines. And AI CO’s /Big Tech will take over the economy.

Yeah, who am I going to trust, a few thousand years of history, or yet another blogger claiming that no, this time is different, a populist uprising would definitely not fail the 800th time because computers or something and we will all be pets for the AI overlord?

I don’t follow this train of logic.

AI will go no differently than the Industrial Revolution. Some people will profit immensely, and society as a whole will benefit but it might be a bumpy road getting there. But if it did go wrong for some reason, Feudalism is more plausible than the other scenarios presented.

I was in Italy 6 months ago, more than one person told me they are at the point of desperation due to the incredibly low wages (<3000 EUR/month).

OpenAI genuinely have AI technologies that can improve chip design (bold, unlikely claim, needs evidence)

Why is that a bold and unlikely claim?

Are you saying that AI, which has been proven to cure diseases, solve our hardest math problems, write complex computer code and generate entire generated worlds and HD video from a simple prompt would somehow be like, my bad, I guess I can't design chips?

AI is the canary in the coal mine. They don't have an AI problem they have an everything problem. Inability to maintain energy security, declines in manufacturing, their social programs are no longer sustainable (Pension age rises and reforms), German car industry is in decline, increased spending demands for defense, and so on.

All that's needed is another sovereign debt crisis to spark what is essentially dry tinder and I think the EU is a lot closer to collapsing than anyone even remotely realizes.

I live a few hours outside Las Vegas and it's a lot more survivable than you would think given primitive technology and some knowledge.

I have one of those portable evaporative coolers and they don't need much power (50-100W). I have one and measured ~110F input and 78F on the output side using nothing more than water and a fan, pretty remarkable. The trick is staying out of direct sunlight, and the body can cool itself well with the same mechanism. Sweating is extremely effective due to the low humidity.

Yeah, 20 months of Claude Max until they rugpull you. I’m spending 7-10k/month in raw token costs on Claude Max. Having an alternative is a nice insurance policy.

It depends what you’re using it for. Real time interactive Claude code session? No, it’s kind of impractical.

But if you already have agent loops dialed in (For example I have one that uses a browser testing framework), it wouldn’t really affect me at all if it crunched away at 7 tokens per second all night long.

As soon as Llama came out I had a realization what was coming and went all-in on hardware with the assumption open source would catch up with GPT4. Surprise, it did, we now have small models that absolutely crush GPT4 in performance.

It wasn’t that absurdly expensive for a hobby, I bought 64GB DDR4 ECC sticks between $70-$100 on eBay before everything took off. Now everyone is in here debating if open source is 1 month or 3 months behind SOTA. The future is obviously local.