AI companies seem much more relaxed than most about their employees posting on twitter/HN about this stuff. I'm not sure if it's about building hype or if it's about retaining talent. Probably both.
Regardless the profit margin as a talking point seems to be bad as AI as a tech might never be reversed whether anthropic failed or succeeded. Indeed it's imperative we subsidize AI companies and tech to make them explore more solutions to scientific problems which has a downstream effect on human flourishing.
Like? I feel breakthroughs that can be found via AI might help us more in the long term where even previously non AI fields can be helped by AI. So you have specific non AI research in mind that we're underinvesting in? Because the USA is already spending crazy anyway for healthcare and I don't feel like funding is the issue but better incentives, reforms etc
But US also spends too much on education as well. The issue doesn't seem to be funding but the educational reform like in mississippi, where they increased student performance without increasing their budget too much. That's why you see bad k12 educational outcomes compared to the budget spent in blue states. It's all about efficiency. Give AIa chance in few years as I feel it can make great strides.. it's hard to imagine that chatgpt released in 2022 and look at the progress in just few years as it just changed software engineering field entirely.. i expect similar kinda progress where of course humans will still be making breakthroughs but it'll be accelerated with the help of AI.
Spending on health insurance is spending on health care.. Americans want free healthcare but no tax bump so health insurance is a compromise.. when even just ACA was passed and premiums increased, democrats got destroyed at midterms so Americans might be living in la la land.
You see funding of chatgpt as a panacea for progress.
I see funding of chatgpt as one of small part of a history where governments and industry fund basic science and moonshot programs, not to generate revenue, but to explore what is possible.
LLM funding is not aimed at improving our understanding of the world, it's aimed at making people reliant so that they may extract wealth through subscriptions for shareholders.
Americans don't get good healthcare and education because that's what they vote for, in elections and wallets. I am hopeful that that changes, but we shall see.
Why can't it both? Of course they are not gonna do it just because it improves the world and understanding but because there's an incentive to align money with progress. Even the vaccines initially were distributed to get monetary gains and as the government started subsiding it as well, it became cheaper to produce.. that's basic capitalism and markets and regulations 101, no human is that selfless to give it out for free and they shouldn't because it's their investment in time, money, effort etc. but we should strive to align the greed aspects with good outcomes.
No Americans get fat and don't have a personal responsibility to maintain their health.. no amount of free healthcare is gonna change that.. they vote for free healthcare, see their taxes raise, then vote against cz they don't see tradeoffs in life.. it's better to maintain better habits than rely on govt to subsidize bad behaviour. There should be some basic coverage for poor people but not too much to sustain irresponsibly
Funding for basic research is being slashed by the current administration. Our society is underinvesting in basic scientific research. And, AI will not fill the gap.
It's just because of this administration but future admins can revert it back and even then, i would expect the fund receivers themselves will eventually use AI so.
I actually have seen comparisons of using AI to a gacha game (quotas per time block, elements of chance, sycophancy in the output leading towards addiction or even psychosis in rare cases).
But I don't think the argument needs to be "AI is like gambling". The argument only needs to be "humans often behave irrationally and even self-destructively".
This is not the argument. It's not a comparison to gambling but a comparison to something that does not materially improve a person's life. Economic expenditure does not equate to human benefit. This is the original argument, and the onus is on THAT person to explain why people spending for AI actually benefit, not the other way around.
I think it’s widely accepted that most things are bought because they satisfy people’s needs or wants. Sure, there are exceptions, like drugs or gambling. Is there any reason to think AI is one of them?
I would say fairly substantially different for a few reasons:
- You can run any model, for example I'm running Kimi 2.5 not Claude
- Every interaction has different (likely real) memories driving the conversation, as-well as unique persona's / background information on the owner.
It much closer maps to how we, as humans communicate with each other (through memories of lived experienced) than just a LLM loop, IMO that's what makes it interesting.
