Comment by thwarted
17 days ago
It's not about the consumption of raw materials or repurposing of the raw materials used for chips. peterlk said:
> How many hospitals, roads, houses, machine shops, biomanufacturing facilities, parks, forests, laboratories, etc. could we build with the money we’re spending on pretraining models that we throw away next quarter?
It's about using the money for to build things that we actually need and that have more long term utility. No one expects someone with a 100M signing bonus at Meta to lay bricks, but that 100M could be used to buy a lot of bricks and pay a lot of brick layers to build hospitals.
I think it's a mistake to believe that this money would exist if it was to be spent on these things. The existence of money is largely derived from society scale intention, excitement or urgency. These hospitals, machine shops, etc, could not manifest the same amount of money unless packaged as an exciting society scale project by a charismatic and credible character. But AI, as an aggregate, has this pull and there are a few clear investment channels in which to pour this money. The money didn't need to exist yesterday, it can be created by pulling a loan from (ultimately) the Fed.
Those companies were each sitting ~$50-100B in cash even before the AI boom.
I mean, you're just talking about spending money. Google isn't trying to build data centers for fun. These massive outlays are only there because the folks making them think they will make much more money than they spend.
Seems like the main issue is that taxes in America are far too low.
Again people confuse paper wealth and material assets. If you take half of money of 0.001% people imagine there will be material change in world of atoms but thats not true. You can't take 8 mil Richard Mille watch and build an apartment building. We are mostly resource constrained. There are no material assets to convert all the paper wealth into. Telsa's physical assets are like 5% of Tesla's market cap the rest is cultish belief in Elon. You can't convert that into a hospital. It's trivial to observe on AI side there is unlimited amount of $ available and yet companies are supplied constrained on the atoms side from gas turbines having 3-4 year lead times to ASML running 24/7 prod cycle and yet unable to meet demand.
You can tax wealth, assets and paper wealth as well. Some countries like Switzerland does it. Annual tax is 0.05-0.3% and that what should billionaires pay to the society.
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