TLDR: U.S. AI growth is hitting a wall because the power grid is weak and slow to expand. China has huge surplus power and uses data centers to soak it up. State-led, long-term planning gives China an edge, and the U.S. will fall behind unless it changes.
Good. I’d rather see the leading edge of AI development under the regulation and discretion of the PRC than under the unregulated control of private interests.
This is why I keep saying that electricity generation is a much more reliable measure of a country’s overall economic strength then GDP, countries will naturally find ways to consume as much electricity as they can and there is much less room for voodoo in the calculations. That would place China at already being over 2x the size of the US economy and place Russia as the 4th largest economy rather then the 11th behind countries like Canada and Italy which is just plain absurd.
That would place China at already being over 2x the size of the US economy and place Russia as the 4th largest economy
Funnily enough that’s also more or less in line with PPP adjusted GDP rankings:
https://www.worldeconomics.com/Rankings/Economies-By-Size.aspx
Country GDP PPP 2025 (Billions, Int$)
China 43,203.79
US 27,614.91
India 21,874.99
Russia 7,687.97
Japan 6,379.74
Indonesia 6,220.25
Germany 5,779.61
Brazil 5,600.03
France 4,450.91
UK 4,213.25
But energy consumption figures are still the better measure to use because even adjusted for PPP, GDP is over-inflated for neoliberal economies thanks to all their non-productive finance bullshit.
That’s why they’re trying to make data centers abroad, like at least here in Brazil, I know data centers are not exactly computing centers but I think it’s somewhat possible to convert once it’s properly set up
According to more perfect union video I recently watched they will claim success at 100 billion in profit, or roughly 1% of the total annual wages of all U.S. workers. Only a fraction of wages are profits. The A.I. being developed here is anti human.
The replacement of the work force is made worse by their destruction of homes. The capitalists are attempting to decimate the workplace literally. The sooner this ends the better.
That is the legal definition of “AGI” used in a contract between OpenAI and Microsoft.
The real definition of AGI is much worse, and refers to an AI basically equivalent in capability to a human across all domains, allowing it to be copied ad infinitum to replace any and all human labor.
As much as AGI in the hands of socialists is the best way to reach fully automated luxury communism, in the hands of capitalists, it is also the way to resolve the class conflict forever by killing everyone else and replacing them with robots.
The book Four Futures explores these 2 possibilities further.
I’m no expert, but reading/listening to stuff by Ed Zitron and Paris Marx, I’m extremely skeptical that anything remotely resembling AGI will be made in my lifetime, these LLMs are mostly a party trick that can’t replicate good work or judgement. If anything, these techbros are fanning the flames of the hype simply to get more funding.
The whole AGI discussion is deeply misguided in my opinion. What we’ll actually see is a gradual increase in capabilities of AI system across different domains. While LLMs get most of the attention right now, they’re far from the only technique we know about, and people are already combining many different approaches together. For example, you have stuff like neurosymbolic systems where LLMs are used for classifying noisy input data, and a symbolic logic engine is used to reason about it. We’re also seeing a move towards world models as the basis for reasoning systems, and I think that’s where you start getting the ability to do genuine judgements. A system which has an internal persistent model of the world can reason about it in a similar way to a human.
In my opinion, it is highly likely we will be seeing automation replacing much of the labour that can only be done by humans within a few decades. However, I also expect that this will be happening in China where there’s actual industry to automate.
I very much agree with the points Alibaba cloud founder makes in this interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0PaVrpFD14
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Is that a good book?
Highly recommend. It’s written by socialist Peter Frase.
This video by 1Dime in collaboration with Second Thought provides a nice overview of the book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5NM68BTpSk
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
