The drones run on literally whatever is available because any Western-built one is restricted to Iran or Russia.

Yes, it would! That's why frontier labs don't open-source their models :)

The point is that the technology is already too democratized for anyone to hold onto it. Google had chatbot LLMs in 2019 and tried to keep them under wraps, how many years did that buy them?

> Do you really need the problem between chair and keyboard will be needed after another 10? And do you really think that in 20 years time that we will all be paid to prompt increasingly advanced and independent LLMs?

I think that things are going to get so much cheaper that we'll still be paid more than enough.

> The way automation is going, knowledge work will be automated first before any physical production processes are.

So far, LLMs are great and all, but they only really "fill in the blanks." That's a fundamental limitation of the entire concept of modelling in general; you cannot generalize to out-of-distribution inputs. The bottleneck is going to end up being human beings no matter which way you slice it. Because the bottleneck will be people, more and more of them will be hired, even though each individual is incredibly productive. This is also called Jevon's paradox, when making a resource less expensive leads to overall market growing.

> You are pretty much just describing some sort of fantasy automated communism.

If you went back a thousand years ago and told someone carrying a bucket full of water that one day pipes would run across the civilized world and water would literally be free basically everywhere, they might react the same way. If VLA-driven robots start reducing manufacturing prices, is it so unreasonable to slowly expect more and more things to go that direction?

Here's another framing for you: at this point _there are no longer rich and poor people_. There are fewer people, but we knew that was going to happen as a consequence of declining birthrates. The elderly are taken care of despite an otherwise unsustainable dependency ratio, because robots can manage the actual business of survival. In that world everyone is a member of the nobility by the virtue of being _human_. There are a few holdouts - mostly religious nuts and other cults - but by and large everyone who is willing to accept the machine's gifts has their every material need catered to.

There is no world where legions of filthy rich AI barons lord it over the technologically illiterate peasants, though. How could there be, when literally anyone can plop down $20 and get access to a frontier model? When open weight models trail _at most_ a year behind the closed ones and compute continues to proliferate?

One of the few things we have figured out about AI is that productivity gains are mostly captured by the people using the tools, not the person paying for the model. In other words, using an LLM is a skill and there is still no substitute for the human driving it.

Nobody wants to be king of the ashes. The future is going to be the same as now, just with a little less menial work.

Being saturated with ragebait slop is a good way to get people to associate ragebait with wasting their time.

It's an expensive part to be sure, but not so expensive that a plant couldn't keep a few spares.

My rates (before PG&E were forced to concede) were as high as 49¢/kWh, a 7x factor.

These are residential rates and not industrial ones, but I hope my point is clear.

China has very cheap power compared to the US, there's a reason why they had to ban bitcoin to get rid of miners.

It's pretty clear that this is being done to solve an actual problem that they and their customers have. I'd prefer if it wasn't necessary, but I'll take this over solving challenges any day.

It's here to stay, and IMO once VLA-driven robots enter the real world there will be enough money to pay for the datacenters. This coding stuff is great but there are only so many engineers to sell to.

Satya Nadella once said (more or less) "if AI is so good, why doesn't it show up in GDP?"

That's gonna be the step where it shows up in the GDP. Being able to train a machine to solve any problem that can be phrased in tokens (i.e.: most of them) is going to remake society.

I would be SHOCKED if there was nowhere in Europe where painted road markings make navigation legally impossible. There are a lot of roads and not that many painters.

Maybe someday we'll understand the way our minds work well enough to design from first principles but until then we've only got one template for how a thinking machine should look.