Comment by bawana

The bottom line is that scaling requires money and the only way to get that in the private sector is to lure those with money with the temptation they can multiply their wealth.

Things could have been different in a world before financial engineers bankrupted the US (the crises of enron, salomon bros, 2008 mortgage debacle all added hundreds of billions to us debt as the govt bought the ‘too big to fail’ kool-aid and bailed out wall street by indenturing main street). Now 1/4 of our budget is simply interest payment on this debt. There is no room for govt spending on a moonshot like AI.

This environment in 1960 would have killed Kennedy’s inspirational moonshot of going to the moon while it was still an idea in his head in his post coital bliss with Marilyn at his side.

Today our govt needs money just like all the other scrooge-infected players in the tower of debt that capitalism has built.

Ironically it seems china has a better chance now. It seems its release of deep seek and the full set of parameters is giving it a veneer of altruistic benevolence that is slightly more believable than what we see here in the west. China may win simply on thermodynamic grounds. Training and research in DL consumes terawatt hours and hundreds of thousands of chips. Not only are the US models on older architectures (10-100x more energy inefficient) but the ‘competition’ of multiple players in the US multiplies the energy requirements.

Would govt oversight have been a good thing? Imagine if General Motors, westinghouse, bell labs, and ford competed in 1940 each with their own manhattan project to develop nuclear weapons ? Would the proliferation of nuclear have resulted in human extinction by now?

Will AI’s contribution to global warming be just as toxic global thermonuclear war?