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Comment This is their own fault. (Score 2) 39

American big tech knew that they would eventually run out of power for their clouds, social media, video, etc. AI just hastened the problem. They should have been planning for this years ago. Nuclear power was always the solution. Tech companies should have been funding their own nuke plants and lobbying politicians to loosen America’s regulations on building new plants. But they fucked around, didn't plan ahead, and it bit them on the ass. Meanwhile the tech leaders in China saw this coming and worked with their government to crank out nuclear plants to run their datacenters. China has been adding a new plant every 8 months for years, and they're only getting faster at it. America's tech companies are going to lose the AI battle with China, even if China can't get the fastest chips, because Chinese business leaders were thinking ahead instead of thinking about their yacht collections and pleasure compounds.

Comment Re:No biggie (Score 2) 63

That’s the plan. The AI industry and its dependents will never make enough money to cover their current CapEx and then replace everything in five years when the chips are obsolete and components are breaking down. But if they tank every company that's using AI software will be fucked and the NASDAQ will tank. So the Fed will print a trillion dollars to bail them all out and everyone else will end up with higher grocery prices.

Comment Ok, but WHY? (Score 2) 10

Is the idea here that high frequency trading and self-dealing can be used to pump-and-dump a given proposition?

So, I find some low-traffic topic suggesting that Pigs Will Fly by the end of 2025 which has "yes" shares trading at $0.01. I buy a bunch of "yes" shares and then buy/sell a small chunk of them back and forth with myself, driving the price up to $0.50. Now I sit back and sell off my "yes" shares for something between $0.50 and $0.40 to anyone who shows up looking to get in on the rapidly-rising "Pigs Will Fly" proposition until a whole bunch of people have bought up the $0.01 shares for 40 times their actual value.

Or is there some other scam at play here?

Comment Re:It's a useless technology anyway (Score 1) 75

At this point most of the money being thrown at AI is for scientific and discovery purposes. Because nobody really knows what AI will turn out to be capable of.They have plans for what they want it to do, but that’s all early stage stuff. In 25 years AI will probably be used for stuff few people imagined. What the AI companies have managed to do is get big investors to throw hundreds of billions of dollars at huge private research institutes instead of being fractured into dozens of small programs where everybody spends half of their working hours writing papers and grant applications. Some of these institutes will never make enough money to survive their insane capital expenditures. But the R&D they’re doing now is laying the groundwork for future generations. It’s similar to the US government throwing billions of dollars a year at the space program and people later finding earthbound uses for the science dreamed up to support NASA missions.

Comment Re:Because YouTube is great. (Score 1) 59

It depends. The guy who does the Chinese business analysis quotes his sources and lists them, with links when possible, in his video descriptions. I like videos by a j-vlogger who’s been in Japan for over a decade and in his serious videos he actually goes out and interviews people so I know he isn’t just talking out of his ass. And when someone with lots of followers lies in a video they’re usually called out by other YouTubers and YouTube will put those videos right into my feed. So while YouTube doesn’t have the gatekeepers that The PBS News Hour or 60 Minutes does, it’s still got some quality control in place if you know how to look for it.

Comment Because YouTube is great. (Score 5, Insightful) 59

I'm 47 and I love YouTube. It has serious intellectual content by people who succeed based on brains instead of looks. I get insightful coverage of stuff going on all over the world by experts who can analyze what's going on and what it means. No TV news channel is going to analyze two years of news reports and think tank papers to tell me what's really going on with Chinese business and political trends. There's a guy on YouTube who does that two or three times a week. Last week I found an Indian university's channel that serves up master's level video courses. Why would I waste my time on network sitcoms or streaming prestige dramas when I can educate myself every day?

Comment Re:AI for nVidia's sake? (Score 1) 24

"I plan on starting an AI company that just sits around and talks about AI companies.

Therefore I need at least eleventy-bazillion nVidia GPUs and three nuclear power plants worth of juice."

I am prepared to invest $2 billion into your startup. Please advise where to wire funds. Thanks you oh so much for this ground floor opportunity! /s

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