I don't fully agree with Zitron on all his points but it's very hard to disprove the larger points will somehow resolve themselves. One point that I think will determine the future, moreso with data centers, is politics. Laws are not unchangeable and making decisions that determine the next 5-10 years of action based on the current law is a recipe for disaster. "Buying" a politician still has to account for the fact they can be voted out.
Let us assume a person cannot change society, they simply do not have the leverage, even if they are a billionaire or most politicians. This is a systems problem, requiring enormous investment of time and resources to change trajectories of. Therefore, the choices available are to continue to live in a low trust society, or move to a high trust society and minimize your exposure to low trust society impact on your life. It's unfortunate. I would very much like to be wrong, please correct me if I am mistaken.
Even if we don't consider economics, the reason "AI" has not increased white collar productivity is because it's not necessary for knowledge work beyond aggregating information for research. Knowledge work has always been a lot more arguing than "doing".
Google was already the default option for this, and Google Gemini is a genuine improvement for Google Search. Google (and Apple) have sidestepped all the drama by just improving their existing products. Sometimes that's the right call in the shorter term, and this is one of those times.
Yes, and the scary thing is, when Google starts selling ads in Gemini results, you wont be able to see them, it will be a bigger business that Google Search ever was.
Update: Perhaps this is what Zitron doesn't want to say out loud, (and why investors are confused), the return on investment is going to come from having the largest mind control machine the world has even known.
There's just no easy way to see what makes LLMs able to duplicate the profits of the entire existing tech sector of the economy. This is the return they need to make based on what they're currently expensing and projecting. Couple that with the circular financing agreements and it's just preposterous. Zitron may have been first and most outspoken to this argument, but like all bubbles it's an open secret.
So right towards the end Zitron says it isn't clear what Google, MS and Amazons plan is. But he just finished explaining that Anthropic and Open AI are paying for them to build data centers, and implied that on face value, this was to rent the data centers back to Anthropic and Open AI.
Seems to me they are just bleeding them dry so that when the money runs out for Anthropic and Open AI, they will be left with data centers that the can run their own (or open) models.
If you read more of Zitron's work, he says that there's little demand for the AI compute power outside of OpenAI and Anthropic. If they are bled dry, then the hyperscalers will not have enough customers for the data centers which they have blown so much capex spend on and will have to soon go into debt to ensure they can be built. The GPUs and the high bandwidth memory they use have little use other than to run and train these LLMs.
I don't fully agree with Zitron on all his points but it's very hard to disprove the larger points will somehow resolve themselves. One point that I think will determine the future, moreso with data centers, is politics. Laws are not unchangeable and making decisions that determine the next 5-10 years of action based on the current law is a recipe for disaster. "Buying" a politician still has to account for the fact they can be voted out.
> making decisions that determine the next 5-10 years of action based on the current law is a recipe for disaster.
How else can one make business decisions? Or any long term decision, financial or otherwise.
If you are correct, which I fear you may be, then we, in the West generally, are now living in a low trust society.
Which is not a good thing at all, and should be of utmost concern.
Let us assume a person cannot change society, they simply do not have the leverage, even if they are a billionaire or most politicians. This is a systems problem, requiring enormous investment of time and resources to change trajectories of. Therefore, the choices available are to continue to live in a low trust society, or move to a high trust society and minimize your exposure to low trust society impact on your life. It's unfortunate. I would very much like to be wrong, please correct me if I am mistaken.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-where-people-trust-e...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/self-reported-trust-attit...
Even if we don't consider economics, the reason "AI" has not increased white collar productivity is because it's not necessary for knowledge work beyond aggregating information for research. Knowledge work has always been a lot more arguing than "doing".
Google was already the default option for this, and Google Gemini is a genuine improvement for Google Search. Google (and Apple) have sidestepped all the drama by just improving their existing products. Sometimes that's the right call in the shorter term, and this is one of those times.
Yes, and the scary thing is, when Google starts selling ads in Gemini results, you wont be able to see them, it will be a bigger business that Google Search ever was.
Update: Perhaps this is what Zitron doesn't want to say out loud, (and why investors are confused), the return on investment is going to come from having the largest mind control machine the world has even known.
There's just no easy way to see what makes LLMs able to duplicate the profits of the entire existing tech sector of the economy. This is the return they need to make based on what they're currently expensing and projecting. Couple that with the circular financing agreements and it's just preposterous. Zitron may have been first and most outspoken to this argument, but like all bubbles it's an open secret.
So right towards the end Zitron says it isn't clear what Google, MS and Amazons plan is. But he just finished explaining that Anthropic and Open AI are paying for them to build data centers, and implied that on face value, this was to rent the data centers back to Anthropic and Open AI.
Seems to me they are just bleeding them dry so that when the money runs out for Anthropic and Open AI, they will be left with data centers that the can run their own (or open) models.
If you read more of Zitron's work, he says that there's little demand for the AI compute power outside of OpenAI and Anthropic. If they are bled dry, then the hyperscalers will not have enough customers for the data centers which they have blown so much capex spend on and will have to soon go into debt to ensure they can be built. The GPUs and the high bandwidth memory they use have little use other than to run and train these LLMs.
Another view of that is, hedging their bets. Which businesses do all the time.