More likely they would buy the assets of AI companies for pennies on the dollar. There could be a lot of H100s floating around at fire sale prices. Or they would acquire these companies for talent.
Google did this for several years in the early 2000s – snapping up talent and data center capacity from the casualties of the dotcom bust.
What will they do with all that H100s? They dont O&O any data centers. AFAIK, Apple uses GCP for iCloud.
Also, remember H100 will be ~years old. Sometimes I wonder whether the average HN crowd really thinks through things.
Apple has historically shown an unwillingness to deploy capital to "own" things. They partner with TSMC for manufactoring, they get their panels from Samsung, Google on Gemini ..
Vertically integrated doesnt mean they "make" everything, but instead partners build things to their specification.
Unless they change their tack, Apple is unlikely to go head to head against Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace because they only target their own ecosystem (macOS/iOS). For MS and Google these Apple-owned platforms are not their primary user base.
In fairness to all concerned, the MacOS to MacOS X transition was brilliantly executed. These days we take VMs for granted, but back then it was a novel idea to run MacOS 8 as a process inside of MacOS X (the "blue box"). For most users it was seamless.
Yet they completely failed to do so for Mac 32-bit apps. There is a huge library of apps that have not been updated to 64-bit to this day and it is a travesty they never released a virtual classic mode to run 32-bit and even OS 9 apps. It is the one place Microsoft shines in comparison, and the only excuse they give is “deal with it”.
I am certain the reason Wine never tried Mac emulators is fear of Apple legal and consequently you far more easily run ancient Windows programs on Mac then you can even fairly recent Mac Applications.
In the grand scheme it's good to invent things that replace human labor. It frees up people to do more interesting things. The goal should be to put everyone out of a job.
Well, because consuming art, reading poems, having code written for you that solves a problem, and listening to music is also fun. Recently I wanted a grand elegy to Britain written as the Empire started failing and set to music in a specific style. I had it playing in the background while fixing some issues with some software.
It truly was joyful to have this available to me. It didn’t have to have mass appeal or need me to pay the right artists the right amounts. I had it in moments.
And if you consider art something to be consumed for light entertainment, that viewpoint makes sense. For people that consider art a way to express, and conversely experience, otherwise inexpressible things about our humanity, your wonderful world is a cheap, superficial, and sad way for tech companies to amalgamate and sell other people’s ideas and labor.
To me the image of a world where everyone does menial work while entertaining themselves with AI-generated "art" doesn't seem fun, it seems extremely depressing and dystopian. I guess we just have different values.
Yes. The entire job markets for game concept art, stock photography, and storyboarding have been decimated and those were the lowest-hanging fruit for diffusion model applications.
Like beg on the corners and starve in the street? Trying to figure out how the basics of capitalism where labor is exchanged for money is not going to work well when the only jobs left are side gigs. Something will have to change and a lot of People will fight said change.
We will come up with new jobs, like we have for all of human history. I think even in an abundance utopia people will still work - we need purpose to sustain our existence.
The work will become even more fulfilling however.
Throughout human history that didn’t happen fast enough to avoid an astonishing amount of human misery. Nobody’s worried about the future of work. They’re worried about the people that rely on tech jobs for food, mortgage/rent, cancer treatments, elder care, retirement, et al. Look at what happened to the rust belt, coal country, etc. etc. etc.
I agree with you, IMO largely this is an affordability crisis though, which is fuelled by inflation. I don't really offer many solutions besides eliminating inflation. I apologise if that is insufficient (it is).
1) It’s not my job to fix all the problems of Capitalism. It’s painful to try to fight the system without collective action. My family and I have to eat too.
2) We have had a solution all along for the particular problem of AI putting devs out of work. It’s called professional licensure, and you can see it in action in engineering and medical fields. Professional Software Engineers would assume a certain amount of liability and responsibility for the software they develop. That’s regardless of whether they develop it with LLM tools or something else.
For example, you let your tools write slop that you ship without even looking? And it goes on to wreak havoc? That’s professional malpractice. Bad engineer.
If we do this then Software Engineers become the responsible humans in the loop of so-called “AI” systems.
It’s not your job to fix capitalism. But it is your job to evaluate if your money making skill comes at too high a price for others.
Say you found a job shooting people in the head for money. Like if you work for ICE or something…
You need to feed your family. Is this job ok? You may decide yes. I decided no. I will find another way to feed my family.
You don’t get to escape consequences because you are a small cog in a large system.
In the bigger picture, automation should free people from labor. But that requires some very greedy people to relax their grip ever so slightly. I imagine they see automation as a way to reduce reliance on labor, and if they don’t need labor, they don’t need people. So let them starve and stop having kids.
> But it is your job to evaluate if your money making skill comes at too high a price for others.
It’s not even the money-making skill: it’s the application of it. People that are good at shooting people can be beneficial to society as protectors or they can be the the business end of systemic oppression. People with software development skills don’t have to help optimize the motor in the brand-new shiny capitalism juicer.
> In the grand scheme it's good to invent things that replace human labor. It frees up people to do more interesting things. The goal should be to put everyone out of a job.
To a point. Then it just frees up people to do nothing.
> The goal should be to put everyone out of a job.
That is in fact the goal. The less labor capital needs, the more money (and power) the capitalists get to keep for themselves.
The problem is that most people consider doing art, writing, making music, and heck, even coding, “more interesting” than orchestrating a pile of knowledgeable but idiotic robot interns because that’s what’s profitable.
Agents playing the iterated prisoner's dilemma learn to cooperate. It's usually not a dominant strategy to be entirely sociopathic when other players are involved.
You don't get that many iterations in the real world though, and if one of your first iterations is particularly bad you don't get any more iterations.
> You don't get that many iterations in the real world though
True, for iterations between the same two players, but humans evolved the ability to communicate and so can share the results of past interactions through a network with other agents, aka a reputation. Thus any interaction with a new person doesn't start from a neutral prior.
They still fail in the real world, where a single failure can be highly consequential. AI coding is lucky it has early failure modes, pretty low consequence. But I don't see how that looks for an autonomous management agent with arbitrary metrics as goals.
Anyone doing AI coding can tell you once an agent gets on the wrong path, it can get very confused and is usually irrecoverable. What does that look like in other contexts? Is restarting the process from scratch even possible in other types of work, or is that unique to only some kinds of work?
What hit me when I read Rama in the 1980s is how alien it all was. This is not Star Trek where the aliens speak English and look human-ish.
There's a lesson there for AI I think. We anthropomorphize AI in the media but perhaps the more realistic possibility is that AI is a fundamentally different type of intelligence that may never be fully human-like.
IMHO the EU is the best place to live if you're a rank-and-file worker, and the US is the best place to live if you're ambitious.
EU integration brings some advantages but it also becomes harder to experiment. Ideally you'd have a few member states vying to become the Shenzhen of Europe but that won't happen under EU integration.
Well said. Another factor that nobody in the EU likes to talk about is regulations like worker protections that make it hard to do layoffs. Such regulations are popular but they strongly favor large predictable companies over startups.
No economy has both: (1) a predictable investment and work environment, and (2) a vibrant technology sector. You make your choices and you live with them.
As we approach this pole running off to infinity, what bit of reality will intervene? An infinity in a model indicates you're missing some aspect of saturation or friction that will act to slow things down. Every exponential eventually becomes an s-curve.
Data center space? Electrical power? The amount of training data available? Society's capacity to accept rapid change?
Google did this for several years in the early 2000s – snapping up talent and data center capacity from the casualties of the dotcom bust.
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