Torsten Slok, chief economist at Apollo Global Management, recently argued that the stock market currently overvalues a handful of tech giants – including Nvidia and Microsoft –...
I’m going to disagree, just a tad. American strategy on AI is a bubble because they are not looking to increase productivity but to bring about further austerity and dislocate entire employment sectors. They think they’ll lock in ludicrously profitable contracts where this AI or that does the job of various departments, but without paying customers they are going to be in for a rough fucking time, and the bubble will pop - if the country doesn’t collapse first.
I am gonna, and I apologize for this ahead of time, paraphrase Thomas Friedman in his podcast interview with Ezra Klein: The Chinese economy is also investing in AI, they have AI modules in their software suites but they are not doing that AND firing staff. Now the employees get done in 3 hours what took them several weeks. AI can, and is, helping a lot of people do a variety of things. Of course, in this country where most jobs are bullshit, its value is often meaningless, but I’ve been using it at work for a bunch of things in an underfunded and understaffed department. And it works.
It’s a force multiplier. Hexbear tends to hate on it reflexively which, given the externalities, makes sense. But to write it off as useless is a mistake. The models are constantly improving, and to your point there are real and valuable applications. The hard part is separating the signal from the noise.
I’m going to disagree, just a tad. American strategy on AI is a bubble because they are not looking to increase productivity but to bring about further austerity and dislocate entire employment sectors. They think they’ll lock in ludicrously profitable contracts where this AI or that does the job of various departments, but without paying customers they are going to be in for a rough fucking time, and the bubble will pop - if the country doesn’t collapse first.
I am gonna, and I apologize for this ahead of time, paraphrase Thomas Friedman in his podcast interview with Ezra Klein: The Chinese economy is also investing in AI, they have AI modules in their software suites but they are not doing that AND firing staff. Now the employees get done in 3 hours what took them several weeks. AI can, and is, helping a lot of people do a variety of things. Of course, in this country where most jobs are bullshit, its value is often meaningless, but I’ve been using it at work for a bunch of things in an underfunded and understaffed department. And it works.
It’s a force multiplier. Hexbear tends to hate on it reflexively which, given the externalities, makes sense. But to write it off as useless is a mistake. The models are constantly improving, and to your point there are real and valuable applications. The hard part is separating the signal from the noise.