@xgranade AI boosters will never actually do this, tho they might claim to. All they want are excuses to ignore damage from AI, so they can do what they want to without criticism or pushback. It's not good enough to have all the money in the world on their side, they don't even want to see dissent.

Instead they will tell you how it's not as harmful as you think, or it's less damaging than other things people accept, or the harms will be fixed soon, or it's worth it to build an enslaved god.

first of all, when i began i was quite skeptical on commercial AI.

this exercise has only made me more skeptical, for a few reasons:

first: you actually can hit the "good enough" point for text prediction with very little data. 80GB of low-quality (but ethically sourced from $HOME/logs) training data yielded a bot that can compose english and french prose reasonably well. if i additionally trained it on a creative commons licensed source like a wikipedia dump, it would probably be *way* more than enough. i don't have the compute power to do that though.

second: reasoning models seem to largely be "mixture of experts" which are just more LLMs bolted on to each other. there's some cool consensus stuff going on, but that's all there is. this could possibly be considered a form of "thinking" in the framing of minsky's society of mind, but i don't think there is enough here that i would want to invest in companies doing this long term.

third: from my own experiences teaching my LLM how to use tools, i can tell you that claude code and openai codex are just chatbots with a really well-written system prompt backed by a "mixture of experts" model. it is like that one scene where neo unlocks god mode in the matrix, i see how all this bullshit works now. (there is still a lot i do not know about the specifics, but i'm a person who works on the fuzzy side of things so it does not matter).

fourth: i built my own LLM with a threadripper, some IRC logs gathered from various hard drives, a $10k GPU, a look at the qwen3 training scripts (i have Opinions on py3-transformers) and few days of training. it is pretty capable of generating plausible text. what is the big intellectual property asset that OpenAI has that the little guys can't duplicate? if i can do it in my condo, a startup can certainly compete with OpenAI.

given these things, I really just don't understand how it is justifiable for all of this AI stuff to be some double-digit % of global GDP.

if anything, i just have stronger conviction in that now.