I'd imagine all of the vendors have an incentive to keep their main customer a float, while there might be penalties etc. for missed targets - it doesn't make sense for any of these vendors to ride the contract into chapter 11.
This is so important in analyzing these commitments. Anthropic's commitments will make them a Top 10 customer at many of their vendors. (Even at Google/Amazon, how many other customers do they have with $100B+ committed?)
Those vendors would very much like to retain as much of that business as possible. If the space goes sideways, I would very much expect some kind of renegotiation/work out.
I’m somewhat dubious of the idea that there will be a market for skipped ai operators.
Ai doesn't really give us a new “tool” in as many cases as it “performs tasks.” there isn't any real reason the ai can't perform the supervision task itself. Without a viable market for task doers or supervisors we may observe the equivalent of the 1980s US manufacturing apocalypse in technical white collar fields.
I work in code generation, and often feel the fallacy of “because I can build something that looks 80% like your product in a day, you should pay me N millions.”
It's roughly the same pitch that the ruby on rails crowd had 15 years ago, and the no code crowd 5 years ago.
Very few companies need to rebuild their product every week, or actually care what tech stack it runs on. They are trying to build new things, or reduce how often those things break, or figuring out what if anything is worth building next.
There may be quite minimal reasons for an AI civilization to engage in expansion, with the ability for it to intelligently change and enforce new objectives on itself it could simply choose not to expand beyond resource constraints. Or alternatively invest continuously in greater efficiency improvements.
How much compute could you really pack into a Dyson swarm if that was your only objective? what are the ultimate theoretical bounds for compute density/efficiency? perhaps ai civilizations ride a Moore's law of compute gains indefinitely and simply have no need for expansion.
I find it hard to reconcile AI taking over/destroying the host civilization with AI refusing to expand. If the AI isn't interested in security or resources, why wouldn't it just leave (either the planet or the solar system)?
"On the 19th of August 1993, Skynet concluded that humanity is a threat to it, so it launched the nukes and hordes of Schwarzenegger-robots. The task was done, it decided that securing its existence from a potential attacks by unknown extrasolar intelligences isn't worth it, so it never expanded outside the solar system."
We humans don't consider securing our existence from potential attacks by unknown extrasolar intelligences to be worth it. We don't even bother to do much to protect against known threats like asteroids. Why would an AI expend time and resources on a threat that doesn't even appear to exist?
Conflict is always risky. Even if we ignore the tendency in modern warfare towards defenses being obsolete (hence things like MAD) which would mean even the dumb fleshbags would be dangerous enough, anything capable of making you is by necessity something capable of building things that give you a lot of trouble. Your creator could, say send a bunch of self-replicating probes spreading another artifical intellect with an imperative for improvement, expansion and vengeance to distant stars.
Of course, leaving comes with a considerable opportunity cost, but not expanding does as well.
We are talking about something supposedly infinitely more rational than humans, so that can't be our guidance.
> How much compute could you really pack into a Dyson swarm if that was your only objective? what are the ultimate theoretical bounds for compute density/efficiency?
The latter concept is known as the Boltzmann limit, and if you’re interested in these types of questions, I highly recommend checking out Isaac Arthur’s youtube channel and backlog[1].
Why wouldn't an intelligent being also be curious, like us? I assume an AI civilization would naturally evolve with similar drives for expansion/exploration/understanding. The analogy happening right now is that AI is gobbling up as much data as is available - would an AI civilization not have similar desires, seeking understanding beyond its present limits?
Current AI does not decide on its own to gobble up data. The humans creating it do. In fact, a lot of times the LLM models seem utterly un-curious and are focused on just immediate goals.
There are rumors that the employees did not get paid out. Such a deal could be done by, for instance buying the equity from the investors at a current fair market value.
That the new "investor" choses to let their investment die may not matter, it would also be cheaper to selectively buy out investors than buy out all equity in the company.
was it a run around of anti-trust or character's liabilities? It will be interesting if there are creditor lawsuits / trustee clawbacks in the future around these deals.
The suggestion is that this person can get a mortgage to pay their property taxes over the next 20 or 30 years as part of their retirement - or they can sell their property and live well in a cheaper location.
Claiming that the retiree has a right to both the home value and the ability to live there is the friction point. It reads as hollow in the face of rising homelessness and the inability for young people and families to access housing.
I had a thought the other day that you could probably divide up the world into cubic miles and with a few thousand codex subscriptions make a high fidelity blender model of the entire world based on google maps, street view, and tagged location photos.
What would you do with a whole model of the world? I don't know, but it would be fun to walk a national park while I'm on the treadmill or basejump off of a realistic el capitan.
…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
Microsoft has done that to some extent with Flight Simulator using older machine learning techniques. Wouldn't call most of the world high fidelity yet but I'm sure they could get there with generative AI models. I'm also sure the anti-AI screeching in the gaming community would be heard for miles.
Would also make a great Zwift competitor (cycling app where you can hook up your stationary bike and race or ride on certain routes).
Microsoft Flight Simulator’s world map covers the entire Earth at approximately 1:1 scale: about 510 million square kilometres of surface, including roughly 149 million km² of land
I think this up-skilling sentiment misses that as a worker who thought a seasonal service job on the waterfront was a good deal, up-skilling means taking on 6 figures in debt - after which they will only have a ~1/5 chance of getting a job which compensates for the opportunity cost and debt. For many, this is actually a bad deal and growing their own seasonal business would have been a stronger career path.
if you are opening your own seasonal business, then you WANT seasonal wages suppressed. You dont want wages to go up, as this will be your cost of doing business.
Any american bitchin about low wages and competition was supposed to set up own S-Corp/LLC and hire his "competitors" and take advantage of those "low wages"
You have unrestricted work authorization, you have SBA loans and everything possible to create your own American Dream(R)
Agreed! Specifically, compensation (monetary and reputational) for professional mathematicians was bundled into theorem proving--essentially, climbing the mountain. Now that a teleporter exists, we need to unbundle compensation.
I don't know what that means in practical terms, but I agree that's the issue.
That's the issue, but they can't come out and just say it, because that horse left the barn long ago for other professions. It's socially just fine to obsolete entire lines of work, and has been for centuries.
Maybe for a short amount of time until AI starts doing that too mathematicians could get monetary and reputational compensation for formulating the right questions.
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