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Someone in management read and misunderstood "The Velocity of Money" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocity_of_money)?

I was expecting to see Mark Baum on the phone saying "hey, we're in a bubble".

Yup. If you follow the links to the original JP Morgan quote, it's not crazy:

> Big picture, to drive a 10% return on our modeled AI investments through 2030 would require ~$650 billion of annual revenue into perpetuity, which is an astonishingly large number. But for context, that equates to 58bp of global GDP, or $34.72/month from every current iPhone user...

So for that GDP gotta show growth of over 5% extra to other growth sources (so total yearly growth will be pretty high). I doubt this will materialise

Have you ever seen US GDP go up 5% yearly for several years?

You're saying that the entire increase in US GDP goes into the pockets of like 5 companies.

What can we use fields of GPUs for next?

> Bubbles are a desirable feature of the American experiment

Wild speculation detached from reality which destroys personal fortunes are not "a desirable feature."

It's only a "desirable feature" to the nihilistic maniacs that run the markets as it's only beneficial to them.

I have to admit I'm flip-flopping on the topic, back and forth from skeptic to scared enthusiast.

I just made a LLM recreate a decent approximation of the file system browser from the movie Hackers (similar to the SGI one from Jurassic park) in about 10 minutes. At work I've had it do useful features and bug fixes daily for a solid week.

Something happened around newyears 2026. The clients, the skills, the mcps, the tools and models reached some new level of usefulness. Or maybe I've been lucky for a week.

If it can do things like what I saw last week reliably, then every tool, widget, utility and library currently making money for a single dev or small team of devs is about to get eaten. Maybe even applications like jira, slack, or even salesforce or SAP can be made in-house by even small companies. "Make me a basic CRM".

Just a few months ago I found it mostly frustrating to use LLM's and I thought the whole thing was little more than a slight improvement over googling info for myself. But the past week has been mind-blowing.

Is it the beginning of the star trek ship computer? If so, it is as big as the smartphone, the internet, or even the invention of the microchip. And then the investments make sense in a way.

The problem might end up being that the value created by LLMs will have no customers when everyone is unemployed.

Not many. Money is not a perfect abstraction. The raw materials used to produce 100B worth of Nvidia chips will not yield you many hospitals. AI researcher with 100M singup bonus from Meta ain't gonna lay you much brick.

FWIW the models aren't thrown away. The weights are used to preinit the next foundation model training run. It helps to reuse weights rather than randomize them even if the model has a somewhat different architecture.

As for the rest, constraint on hospital capacity (at least in some countries, not sure about the USA) isn't money for capex, it's doctors unions that restrict training slots.

There is a certain logic to it though. If the scaling approaches DO get us to AGI, that's basically going to change everything, forever. And if you assume this is the case, then "our side" has to get there before our geopolitical adversaries do. Because in the long run the expected "hit" from a hostile nation developing AGI and using it to bully "our side" probably really dwarfs the "hit" we take from not developing the infrastructure you mentioned.

It has never _not_ been time to build all the power plants we can environmentally afford.

More power enables higher quality of living and more advanced civilization. It will be put to use doing something useful, or at the very worst it'll make doing existing useful things less expensive opening them up to more who would like those things.

> I'm a simple man, I just want these companies to pay taxes where they make money.

The folks who bankroll elections work tirelessly to insure this doesn't happen.

Incredible how quickly that moment passed. Four months on it's barely clinging to the App Store top 100, below killer apps such as Gossip Harbor®: Merge & Story.

Ok I’ll bite. Was it worth it? What have people missed that haven’t used it.

What is Sora?

Seems to be.

Facebook's investment is to be $135bn [1]. The Channel Tunnel was "in 1985 prices, £4.65 billion", which is £15.34bn in December 2025 [3], or $20.5bn at current exchange rate.

That is staggering.

(I didn't check the other figures.)

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn8jkyk78gno

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_Tunnel

[3] https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/in...

> Plus, it makes natural moat against masses of normal (i.e. poor) people, because requires a spaceship to run. Finally intelligence can also be controlled by capital the way it was meant to, joining information, creativity, means of production, communication and such things

I'd put intelligence in quotes there, but it doesn't detract from the point.

It is astounding to me how willfully ignorant people are being about the massive aggregation of power that's going on here. In retrospect, I don't think they're ignorant, they just haven't had to think about it much in the past. But this is a real problem with very real consequences. Sovereignty must be occasionally be asserted, or someone will infringe upon it.

That's exactly what's happening here.

The difference is that we've more or less hit a stable Pareto front in education and healthcare. Gains are small and incremental; if you pour more money into one place and less into another, you generally don't end up much better off, although you can make small but meaningful improvements in select areas. You can push the front forward slightly with new research and innovation, but not very fast or far.

The current generation of AI is an opportunity for quick gains that go beyond just a few months longer lifespan or a 2% higher average grade. It is an unrealised and maybe unrealistic opportunity, but it's not just greed and lust for power that pushes people to invest, it's hope that this time the next big thing will make a real difference. It's not the same as investing more in schools because it's far less certain but also has a far higher alleged upside.

> Finally intelligence can also be controlled by capital

The relationship between capital and AI is a fascinating topic. The contemporary philosopher who has thought most intensely about this is probably Nick Land (who is heavily inspired by Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk and Friedrich Hayek). For Land, intelligence has always been immanent in capitalism and capitalism is actively producing it. As we get closer to the realization of capitalism's telos/attractor (technological singularity), this becomes more and more obvious (intelligible).

2% is a lot! There's only fifty things you can invest 2% of GDP in before you occupy the entire economy. But the list of services people need, from food, water, shelter, heating, transportation, education, healthcare, communications, entertainment, mining, materials, construction, research, maintenance, legal services... there's a lot of things on that list. To allocate each one 1% or 2% of the economy may seem small, but pretty quickly you hit 100%.

I will put it differently,

Investing 1 or 2% of global GDP to increase wealth gap 50% more and make top 1% unbelievable rich while everyone else looking for jobs or getting 50 year mortgage, seem very bad idea to me.

It’s implied you mean that the ROI will be positive. Spending 1-2% of global GDP with negative ROI could be disastrous.

I think this is where most of the disagreement is. We don’t all agree on the expected ROI of that investment, especially when taking into account the opportunity cost.

Yeah I don't think this get's enough attention. It still requires a technical person to use these things effectively. Building coherent systems that solve a business problem is an iterative process. I have a hard time seeing how an LLM could climb that mountain on it's own.

I don't think there's a way to solve the issue of: one-shotted apps will increasingly look more convincing, in the same way that the image generation looks more convincing. But when you peel back the curtain, that output isn't quite correct enough to deploy to production. You could try brute-force vibe iterating until it's exactly what you wanted, but that rarely works for anything that isn't a CRUD app.

Ask any of the image generators to build you a sprite sheet for a 2d character with multiple animation frames. I have never gotten one to do this successfully in one prompt. Sometimes the background will be the checkerboard png transparency layer. Except, the checkers aren't all one color (#000000, #ffffff), instead it's a million variations of off-white and off-black. The legs in walking frames are almost never correct, etc.

And even if they get close - as soon as you try to iterate on the first output, you enter a game of whack-a-mole. Okay we fixed the background but now the legs don't look right, let's fix those. Okay great legs are fixed but now the faces are different in every frame let's fix those. Oh no fixing the faces broke the legs again, Etc.

We are in a weird place where companies are shedding the engineers that know how to use these things. And some of those engineers will become solo-devs. As a solo-dev, funds won't be infinite. So it doesn't seem likely that they can jack up the prices on the consumer plans. But if companies keep firing developers, then who will actually steer the agents on the enterprise plans?

Why do we need people to consume when we have the government?

Serious question. As in, we built the last 100 years on "the american consumer", the idea that it would be the people buying everything. There is no reason that needs to or necessarily will continue-- don't get me wrong, I kind of hope it does, but my hopes don't always predict what actually happens.

What if the next 100 is the government buying everything, and the vast bulk of the people are effectively serfs. Who HAVE to stay in line otherwise they go to debt prison or tax prison where they become slaves (yes, the US has a fairly large population of prison laborers who are forced to work for 15-50 cents/hour. The lucky ones can earn as much as $1.50/hour. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2017/04/10/wages/

At some point rich people stop caring about money and only care about power.

> US$700 billion could build a lot of infrastructure, housing, or manufacturing capacity.

I am now 100% convinced, that the US has power to build those things, but it will not, because it means lives of ordinary people will be elevated even more, this is not what brutal capitalism wants.

If it can make top 1% richer in 10 year span vs good for everyone in 20 years, it will go with former

There is no shortage of money to build housing. There is an abundance of regulatory burdens in places that are desirable to live in.

Its not due to a lack of money that housing in SF is extremely expensive.

What $700 billion can't do is cure cancers, Parkinsons, etc. We know because we've tried and that's barely a sliver of what it's cost so far, for middling results.

Whereas $700 billion in AI might actually do that.

> you'll also end up with scores of people who "correctly" followed the signals right up until the signals went away.

I think this is where we're headed, very quickly, and I'm worried about it from a social stability perspective (as well as personal financial security of course). There's probably not a single white-collar job that I'd feel comfortable spending 4+ years training for right now (even assuming I don't have to pay or take out debt for the training). Many people are having skills they spent years building made worthless overnight, without an obvious or realistic pivot available.

Lots and lots of people who did or will do "all the right things," with no benefit earned from it. Even if hypothetically there is something new you can reskill into every five years, how is that sustainable? If you're young and without children, maybe it is possible. Certainly doesn't sound fun, and I say this as someone who joined tech in part because of how fast-paced it was.

> it takes about 3 years to properly train even a "normal" residential electrician

To pass ordinary wire with predefined dimensions in exposed conduits? No way it takes more than a few weeks.

Serious question, but have you not used it to implement anything at your job? Admittedly I was very skeptical but last sprint in 2 days I got 12 pull requests up for review by running 8 agents on my computer in parallel and about 10 more on cloud VMs. The PRs are all double reviewed and QA'd and merged. The ones that don't have PRs are larger refactors, one 40K loc and the other 30k loc and I just need actual time to go through every line myself and self-test appropriately, otherwise it would have been more stuff finished. These are all items tied to money in our backlog. It would have taken me about 5 times as long to close those items out without this tooling. I also would have not had as much time to produce and verify as many unit tests as I did. Is this not increased productivity?

> I am still waiting to see where it increases productivity...

If you are a software engineer, and you are not using using AI to help with software development, then you are missing out. Like many other technologies, using AI agents for software dev work takes time to learn and master. You are not likely to get good results if you try it half-heartedly as a skeptic.

And no, nobody can teach you these skills in a comment in an online forum. This requires trial and error on your part. If well known devs like Linus Torvalds are saying there is value here, and you are not seeing it, then then the issue is not with the tool.

Are you doctor or a farmer?

If you are a software engineer you are missing out a lot, literally a lot!

I agree with you that STEM don't hold a monopoly on intelligence.

> engineers that can't get laid in Singapore are the same "brilliant" engineers that can't get laid in their home town

Maybe so, but not for the same reasons. Back in their home town, they cannot vibe with anyone because the few who might be compatible have long since left. In a STEM hotspot, they go to an event and meet compatible people, but it's 11 guys for every 3 girls, so unless they are top dog in that room, they aren't going to score.

We can blame the individual for the cost we've outsourced into him. When he collapses under that load, we can attribute it to personal shortcomings. Some people survive, even thrive, in the current environment, after all. We've coalesced a plurality of games into a single one, and in a sense, it works great. We have our smartphones, AI, online shopping, and targeted advertising.

Notepad now has Copilot built right into it, after all. That wasn't going to happen by now if we took the human psyche as a given and built around that.

…not to mention they are completely ignoring the existence of smart girls as well

>>It's incel and eugenic reasoning wrapped up all together.

More like French post-structuralism.

It’s the same nonsense as people going “Idiocracy is a documentary.“ Of course none of them think they’re the idiots.

AI is an attractor. In general, attractors absent barriers have the potential to act as a resource shredder in the context of an ecosystem where stability was predicated on said barriers being present.

I called AI a "capital shredder" because I'm asserting that it is one (of many) by comparison to a more even distribution of capital investment. The non-attractor small town where the capital that would have gone into a self-reinforcing progress cycle has it redirected into an external context. If you don't care about that and just want more AI, then no worries, because that's what we're optimizing for.

I was trying to limit my point to something clear with linear reasoning, but AI is indeed also an IQ shredder in both the immediate and transitive sense. For the former, it's an aggregator of talent. From the perspective of the small town (both domestic and foreign), its best human resources have been extracted.

Relation with production is irrelevant for the purposes of being a shredder, but this system does generally serve for increased production of a sort. That's why we ended up with it. The small town doesn't get its factories, local governance doesn't get good programmers, etc. Those resources are being redirected into getting us to wherever AI is going to go because that's what the global economic machine desires right now. Likewise in the past for NFTs, crypto, cloud, etc.

To personalize this: I was drawn to an attractor and rode one of those waves myself, and, at least economically, it worked out great for me as it probably has for others here. However, this system isn't a free lunch.

Why not just not compare to others because it’s easy to game anything?

Just look for patterns and then act out of self interest. Nobody is coming to save you.

I’m no high IQ person but if I can figure out how to get a STEM job without STEM degree, make money by getting lucky at a unicorn, invest and sell for profit and invest again (only losers HODL so others can take profits), then there’s really no excuse why someone else can’t.

And I’m originally from a country that has like 70 IQ nationally or so it is said. So I’m not a genius, maybe the only quality I have that makes me different is I don’t know how to quit until I meet my goal.

More people should stop crying and be a man. Our ancestors literally survived against nature and each other so we could post here on HN. I don’t mean being able to lift 500lbs like a caveman either.

Exercise your brain, it gets stronger too because I have a hard time understanding concepts sometimes, but taking steps to break it down and digest it in pieces helps me. Takes a bit longer but hopefully you have tomorrow.

Within the Landian system, I suspect he'd say the answer is economic "territorialization", the economic equivalent to the mechanism originally defined by Deleuze+Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus based on the territoriality of earlier work.

It's the process where social, political, or cultural meaning is rooted in some context. It's a state of stability and boundaries. For just the economic, the geographic would likely be the centroid of that, but the other vectors are not irrelevant.

One could argue that we suffer to the degree we are deterritorialized, because the effects thereof are alienating. So, we need structure that aligns both our economic and psychological needs. What we have is subordination to the machine, which will do what it's designed to: optimize for its own desire, which is machinic production.

Note that none of this is inherently good/bad. Like anything, a choice has trade-offs. We definitely get more production within the current structure. The cost is born by the individual, aggregating into the social ills that are now endemic.

California had a great mechanism for this in their land grant colleges, which back before the protests of the Vietnam War were required to offer the valedictorian of nearby high schools (or the person with the highest GPA who accepted) full tuition and room and board --- then Governor Ronald Reagan shut down this program when the students had the temerity to protest the Vietnam War --- it was also grade inflation to keep students above the threshold necessary for a draft deferment which began the downward spiral of American education.

A little less min-maxing, perhaps.

That’s definitely part of it as well, this sort of general distillation into a smaller and smaller pool of content or objects or goods that cost ever more money.

Like how most of the royalties Spotify pays out are for older catalogue stuff from “classic” artists, rather than new bands. Or how historical libraries of movies and films are constantly either up for grabs (for prestige) or being pushed off platforms due to their older/more costly royalty agreements.

With AI though, it’s the actual, tangible consumption of physical goods being threatened, which many companies involved in AI may argue is exactly the point: that everyone should be renters rather than consumers, and by making ownership expensive through cost and scarcity alike, you naturally drive more folks towards subscriptions for what used to be commodities (music, movies, games, compute, vehicles, creativity tools, TCGs, you name it).

It’s damn depressing.

> why listen to uncle Harry's shoddy guitar play?

Uncle Harry is not playing guitar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXzz8o1m5bM

THIS! Instrument-playing capability of a social environment: By today, I know only of one person playing a piano regularly in his club, he is the only one I know. When I was young, you had some basic instrument introduction in music classes at school - I do not know if these still exist today.

Regarding singing - I do not know a single perso who can "somehow" sing at least a little bit.

The society is loosing these capacities.

"Comparison is the thief of joy" as they say. Some dude has the world's highest score in Pac-Man in the Guinness Book Of World Records. It doesn't mean that I can't play Pac-Man to beat my own personal high score and enjoy the process because the game is fun in it's own right.

The market might not be able to tell the difference. It takes effort to count fingers and toes in art. Part of the problem is also: So many companies are doing it now, that it doesn't seem effective to call people/companies out for the use of AI slop.

A big part of the problem is also: AI art is usually not labelled as such. The market can not make an informed decision.

The free market is not some universal force of balance. It is a system of systems that is routinely influenced, disrupted, damaged, manipulated, and controlled overwhelmingly by a small cadre of wealth and asset-owners with disproportionate influence after a century of government policies against market intervention or regulation.

C'mon, be better than some "lol free market" quip.

The fact you're nitpicking specific details instead of actually absorbing and discussing the core argument (that AI is having negative impacts on multiple systems, sectors, and markets beyond narrow verticals like programming, and that this is something worth acknowledging and discussing) really reveals that you're not here to discuss things seriously and are just looking to feel right about your personal positions.

Be better.

I mean, what was once an accessible hobby that taught folks how computers worked to a degree is now an RGB-lit target for thieves who know they can flip that memory and GPU for a grand or so pretty easily.

That's a pretty big turnabout that could get some more folks thinking about and discussing the impacts of AI on non-AI systems or markets.

Corporate LLMs also are going to be the absolute biggest rug-pull.

The billionaire companies responsible for this claim they can bed used for intellectual and artistic labor. Sure, they're the biggest piracy and plagariam engines.

Once people start losing the abilities of what LLMs were trained on, will be the next phase. And thats to ratchet up prices to replace what they would have paid to humans.

It will be the biggest wealth transfer we will have ever seen.

This whole socio-econic equasion would be different if we all did actually gain. Raising tides raise all ships, but sinking ships get gobbled faster and faster.

And if everybody could thrive, then I say go for it.

But thats nowhere near the system we have. Instead, this is serving to take all intellectual and artistic labor, and lower everyone into the 'ditch digger and garbage man' class, aka the low wage class.

LLMs was never about building upwards. Its about corporate plundering from the folks who get paid well - the developers, the artists, the engineers, you name it. And its a way to devalue everyone with a pretend that they can be replaced with the biggest plagiarism machine ever created.

https://www.reddit.com/r/economicCollapse/comments/1hspiym/t...

is correct in their take. Why else would we see a circular economy of shoving AI everywhere? Because it serves to eliminate wages, paid to humans.

This stratification and cementing social classes nearly permanently is a way to have our race of humanity die. But hey, shareholder value was at an all time high for a while.