Like fuzzy logic before it, this arm of AI development will most likely hit a wall, find where it is useful, and then become cheap and embedded all over to the point where we won't even recognize it as AI anymore.
California's 2025-26 budget for health and human services was $307 billion for 39 million people. Compared with France at $370 billion for 67 million people.
There's plenty of affordable housing outside of areas like the Bay area (or Hong Kong, Vienna, London, etc.). Why in the world would someone want to destroy what makes those areas desirable in the name of "affordability"?
The fact that these areas are highly competitive is what keeps them desireable.
When I was in Cali, I lived in Tracy, Stockton, and outside Sacremento because while I was a tech worker, I wasn't a top 1% tech worker. Not everyone needs to live in the Bay.
> Why in the world would someone want to destroy what makes those areas desirable
If low density is the crucial factor in determining desirability, why aren't Manhattan apartments basically free and tiny houses in rural Montana being sold for tens of millions?
> When I was in Cali, I lived in Tracy, Stockton, and outside Sacremento because while I was a tech worker, I wasn't a top 1% tech worker. Not everyone needs to live in the Bay.
Did you commute into the Bay?
Because by my count, Stockton to SF or Stockton to Menlo Park is a 3-hours/day commute. 3 hours/day on the highway may be surviving, but it sure as shit isn't living (just in case anyone from outside the US thinks this is an extreme outlier, I worked with a number of QA folks in the Bay who had commutes this bad, or worse)
Stockton to Cupertino... Tracy to SF and Cupertino. I also commuted to Sacremento for a while.
I made about half as much as my co-workers (I was contract) but I took home more due to the difference in living expenses. Also, I had a house instead of an apartment.
Well when I was much younger (19) and lived in North Hollywood but worked in downtown LA, I walked as I didn't own a car. I was considered a freak because everyone in LA at that time drove everywhere... even to the end of the block.
Now, decades later, I have no desire to be anywhere "trendy" or "hip". I want affordability, stability, space, and quiet.
Eventually these models will get commoditized (we're already at the "good enough" stage for real work), then they will get turned into custom hardware and get 1000x faster, then that hardware will get commoditized (like DSPs) and they'll be everywhere and cost $1.
From a very high level view DSP's and GPU's are the same thing: highly programmable number crunchers. A better example would be Google's Tensor chip. It's not as general purpose as a DSP or GPU, it's more optimized to do inference.
That trend will continue.
I figure there are 6 order of magnitude events that could happen in the next decade to lower token prices:
- more specialized / better chips
- IC technology: smaller feature size, higher clocks, etc.
- more efficient algorithms
- solar power is getting cheaper at an order of magnitude per decade, batteries even faster.
- pricing pressure from open source models
- breaking of the Nvidia monopoly and it's 75% gross profit margin
Maybe all 6 won't happen, but certainly a 1000x reduction in price in the next decade seems highly likely. Jevon's paradox says that the 1000x reduction in price will likely result in more spend on AI, not less.
AMD bought Talaas specifically to make AI accelerator pieces to be embedded into generalized chips.
At work (we're a medium sized manufacturing firm), we bought our own inference server for $107k and run Kimi 2.8 for nearly all of our use cases (and dropped our cloud AI spend to $0).
You dropped your cloud AI spend down to the price of capital plus the cost of electricity and maintenance on that server. When/if tokens become a commodity, the price of tokens would be the marginal cost, AKA about the same. Big when/if, though.
When I travel internationally, I do not take any electronics with me.
If I need a cell phone, laptop, etc., then I will buy or rent something cheap at the destination.
I got into the habit while traveling back and forth the mainland China as it was our corporate policy (and we never brought any electronics back, either).
Then when I tried to log in to my Gmail account at my destination, it flagged it as a suspicious login attempt and wouldn't let me in without entering a code they texted to my American phone number, which meant I was locked out of my email for the duration of the trip.
Plus travel day realities often require your phone and accounts - plane tickets, Uber/Lyft, hotel reservations or updates from Airbnb with check-in instructions, door codes, etc.
It's a tremendous challenge and hassle for any regular person. We really just need to push back on the government overreach. It's tragic that half of the Trump voters proclaim to be "small government" and "Don't tread on me" but then tolerate things like this. There's certainly a bipartisan group of people opposed that are large enough to effect change if we work together.
I 100% agree that the best solution would be for the law to catch up and actually treat privacy as a human right. Until that time there are things which, while challenging and a hassle, do help.
I would use the same sim-card in the burner phone. Any attack by the government that they can do with your real sim card can also be done through phone number spoofing.
For email, use unique emails (things like booking+youremail@...) for reservations/bookings/tickets and have those forwarded to a second email account that you want to use during the trip. It is already good privacy hygiene to use unique emails for all types of registrations, and you will have more control when services eventually have a leak.
This is so trivially easy to bypass. If you're a service selling email addresses, just strip off the booking+ part and you have the "real" email address.
All my sign-up email addresses are via a catch-all email, so I can just give a service "thisservice@mydomain.com", or "thatservice@mydomain.com", so I there is no single "real" email address, and I get to track who exactly is selling my email address. So far I haven't had problems with anyone spamming "anything@mydomain.com".
They can bypass it, and as the user you can also use any other sign or character that you want. If you email is foo@ then you can use the letter x, as registrationxfoo@. A popular choice for a company email is first.lastname@, so you can use a . for it, or the - character. + is just what some program, like procmail and Sieve, will recognize without much trouble.
Using a a catch-all email with your own domain works also perfectly fine. Doesn't work as well if there is multiple email users of that domain.
It isn't that they tolerate it, it simply doesn't affect them, so they don't care. Besides, it affects many they dislike, so that's always a bonus.
Remember, when ultra-partisans, of most political ideologies, demand rights and freedoms, there's almost always an implied "for me and mine" in there. Exceptions to this are extraordinarily rare, even more so nowadays.
>It's tragic that half of the Trump voters proclaim to be "small government" and "Don't tread on me" but then tolerate things like this.
Let's be real. Those people don't travel. They've never left the country, and most have likely never left their state, or even their hometown. I know a person like this - they refuse to fly on a plane to go anywhere because they are not allowed to bring their gun on the plane - they are a real "don't tread on me" 2nd amendment/NRA type. And they will never vote for anyone but a Republican no matter how bad things get.
You can bring a gun on the plane, you just need to have it in a locked case, and it can’t be a TSA lock. You also have to declare it and open the case for inspection when checking it.
That isn't their deal. They want to bring their loaded gun on the plane with no restrictions, or they simply will not fly. Reason does not work with a person like this.
Well that’s unwise of them. I just wanted to clarify since some people don’t understand that you can fly with firearms. A lot of people who go to events like Defcon will pack a firearm as this prevents TSA from inspecting the bag without you present—at least that’s how it’s supposed to go, unless there’s a secret room where they have skilled lockpickers on standby.
They are an in-law of mine, yes I've spoken to them. They want to bring their loaded gun on a plane with no restrictions - that is literally why they refuse to fly on an plane. Good for the rest of us, I guess.
https://epoch.ai/data-insights/ai-datacenter-cost-breakdown
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