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Comment by RobertDeNiro | Hacker News Reader

It’s hard not to see this as a bubble at this point. LLMs are useful, but are they bringing trillions in added value to our economy?

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Yes, whenever I see the word 'trillions' I instinctively know that it's some kind of scheme. Nothing and no industry on this planet requires a trillion dollars to build or will ever be worth a trillion dollars due to competition and the value that competition brings.

It's clearly a plot to put more control of world finances into the hands of the US. Nations should not expose themselves to such risks.

It probably costs a billion dollars to train a GPT4 successor. Might be 10B to train the next one. I mean it might require a million of $30k GPUs.

I think there might be some giga infrastructure projects, but we are not politically ready to invest in those. And by giga-projects I mean multiple continent spawning networks of actual high speed rail and power networks.

The valuations and money flowing around are not necessarily relevant to today, but say something about future expectations. I think that LLMs and other tools will bring trillions in added value eventually.

EDIT: Typo

Sure, but the question is would OpenAI be around to see the investment bear fruit after such a spend? In the 90's infrastructure companies (you know, the 'rock solid' infra companies who were going to be around forever) spent billions to lay a lot of dark fiber that was to be the future of the Internet, went bankrupt during the dotcom bust and then Google and other Internet companies gobbled up said fiber at fire sale prices. Of course it was the future of the Internet... just not for them.

On second thought... go for it, Sam! I'm looking for some powerful AI hardware at great prices...

yeah timing is everything for an emerging company

the thing is you can't know if it's the right time, it's indeterminate. all you can do is go for it. usually the world will benefit, whether you win or lose

Nvidia itself had a sky-high valuation for many years and still do. People were always expecting exponential growth to kick in and make it all add up. Looking at their profit charts, it's currently happening [1]

[1] https://valustox.com/NVDA

maybe trillions in potential savings to the financial elite. Who are all we need to convince to get this ball rolling, unfortunately. The bigger question is how much the governmental powers will fight against this.

though even trillions is an exaggeration here. If they all collectively had 10m employees making 100k on average for 10 years, we're an order of magnitude off.

Language models are a path to Super Intelligence. Not the most efficient one, but it might be good enough to be able to brute force it.

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