AI capex is so big that it's affecting economic statistics

- The birth of the space age, and more realistically the birth of the ICBM and satellite age. Both key to national security, and in the context of a cold war.

- 40% of long-distance ton miles travel by rail in the US. This represents a VAST part of the economic activity within the country.

- A literal plague, and the cessation of much economic activity, with the goal of avoiding a total collapse.

- ...Come on.

So we're comparing these earth-shaking changes and reactions to crisis with "AI"? Other than the people selling pickaxes and hookers to the prospectors, who is getting rich here exactly? What essential economic activity is AI crucial to? What war is it fighting? It mostly seems to be a toy that costs FAR more than it could ever hope to make, subsidized by some obscenely wealthy speculators, executives fantasizing about savings that don't materialize, and a product looking for a purpose commensurate to the resources it eats.

> What essential economic activity is AI crucial to?

The continued devaluing of skilled labor and making smaller pools of workers able to produce at higher levels, if not their automation entirely.

And yeah AI generated code blows. It's verbose and inefficient. So what? The state of mainstream platform web development has been a complete shit show since roughly 2010. Websites for a decade plus just... don't load sometimes. Links don't load right, you get in a never-ending spinning loading wheel, stuff just doesn't render or it crashes the browser tab entirely. That's been status quo for Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, fuck knows how many desktop apps which are just web wrappers around websites, for just.. like I said, over a decade at this point. Nobody even bats an eye.

I don't see how ChatGPT generating all the code is going to make anything substantively worse than hundreds of junior devs educated at StackOverflow university with zero oversight already have.

I agree we don’t have an actual ROI on AI yet. There is a ton of activity but the progress for society is speculation at this point. I don’t think we will have an idea on societal progression for at least 10 years and maybe 30.

It continually surprises me when people are in denial like this.

Literally every profession around me is radically changing due to AI. Legal, tech, marketing etc have adopted AI faster than any technology I have ever witnessed.

I’m gobsmacked you’re in denial.

Stack Overflow university is quite good, honestly. The bigger problem is documentation written by Twitter and Facebook folk: their "solutions" don't even work within those companies, and certainly don't work when other people adopt them. On Stack Overflow, people occasionally point out the bad practices that others try to promote.

You could be right, but I'm not the one here who's paycheck depends on AI being worth more than the cost.

The adoption curve is self evident to any one not living under a rock. I suspect you’re mostly just a grumbler than making cogent arguments

I don't live under a rock and I'm also not seeing it.

I mean, companies are trying to force it onto us, but it's not ready for any real work, so the "adoption" is artificial.

The adoption rate seems driven by a race to bottom, a desire to control "the next big thing" before someone else does, executive reflex, and some real use cases.

But then we saw the same thing with Crypto, tons of money poured into that, the Metaverse was going to be the next big thing! People who didn't see and accept that must not understand the obvious appeal...

Interestingly I just talked to several lawyers who were annoyed at how many mistakes were being made and how much time was being wasted due to use of LLMs. I suppose that still qualifies as radically changing — you didn’t specify for the better.

Within 10 minutes earlier today, I took 1.5 years of raw financial trading data and generated performance stats, graphed out return distributions, ran correlation analysis, and to top it off created monte-carlo shock tests using the base data as an input for the model and ran hundreds of simulations with corresponding charts.

Each of the 15 charts would have been a page of boilerplate + Python, and frankly there was a huge amount of interdisciplinary work that went into the hundreds of thought steps in the deep reasoning model. It would have taken days to fill in the gaps and finish the analysis. The new crop of deep reasoning models that can do iteration is powerful.

The gap between previous "scratch work" of poking around a spreadsheet, and getting pages of advanced data analytics tabula rasa, is a gap so large I almost don't have words for it. It often seems larger than the gap between pen and paper and a computer.

And then later, off of work, I wanted to show real average post-inflation returns for housing areas that gentrify and compare it with non-gentrifying areas. Within a minute all of the hard data was pulled in and summed up. It then codes up a graph for the typical "shape of gentrification", which I didn't even need to clarify to get a good answer. Again, this is as large a jump as moving from an encyclopedia to an internet search engine.

I know it's used all over finance though. At Jane Street (upper echelon proprietary trading) they have it baked into their code development in multiple layers. In actual useful ways, not "auto completion" like mass market tools. Well it is integrated into the editor and can generate code, but there is also AI that screens all of the code that is submitted, and an AI "director" tracks all of the code changes from all of the developers, so if a program starts failing an edge case that wasn't apparent earlier, the director will be able to reverse engineer all of the code commits, find out where the dev went wrong, and explain it.

Then that data generated from all of the engineers and AI agents is fed back into in-house AI model training, which then feeds back into improvements in the systems above.

All of the dismissiveness reminds me of the early days of the internet. On that note, this suite of technologies seems large. Somewhere in-between the introduction of the digital office suite (word/excel/etc) and perhaps the Internet itself. In some respects, when it comes to the iterative nature of it all (which often degrades to noise if mindlessly fed back into itself, but in time will be honed to, say, test thousands of changes to an engineering Digital Twin) it seems like something that may be more powerful than both.

One of the problems I have with AI is that industry adoption is 95% about reducing costs, not improving quality.

I refuse to believe this will not have long term consequences.

I WISH that after this, companies will put up quality guardrails to basically offer the same product 60% cheaper at better quality, but I don't trust companies.