The 900 GB/s is from the NVLink-C2C interconnect, if you were wondering about that. They quote "up to 900 GB/s of bidirectional bandwidth between GPU and CPU".
Mind you thats not to/from memory, which indeed only has 273 GB/s.
Yes its not an "Apple M killer" at all. Also, the available official performance numbers are partially overstated (1 Petaflop is only possible for sparse FP4 models, "in theory").
Perhaps a sobering rule of thumb: if it was actually useful, you couldn't buy them because someone would scoop them all up to shove them in a DC and make money with it.
Income is money that comes from actually laboring and contributing to society. Wealth tax is tax from sitting on your ass doing nothing.
Also, taxes don’t have to be a flat percentage. Like income tax, a good wealth tax would be progressive. Only wealth beyond a certain amount would be taxed, and the percentages would scale.
This is why we should have income taxes that are as low as possible, but still progressively scaled. We should similarly have a progressive scaling wealth tax, but it should be much harsher than the income tax because we want people to work.
> Wealth tax is tax from sitting on your ass doing nothing.
Related point is monetary system and monetary plumbing should be boring like electricity or water supply but because of distortions making money out of money has become the hottest thing.
The author is so naive to think that after eliminating the dependency on labor that the wealthy class will launch UBI so that they will still have customers. What will happen is they will leave us to die.
The “wealth” will mostly be numbers in a database without an economy. Sure, they could have an island or disaster shelter, huge, elaborate, and well stocked, and own lots of land, but even the land ownership is a paper filed in an office without a functioning government, which needs a functioning economy, to actually enforce keeping people off of the land. They can pay private security, but I feel like that has limits
Essentially, I’m arguing they have more money than actual wealth, and they’re immeasurably poorer without a functioning society and economy
If 99% of people are living effectively outside the economy, those things they could have would too have to be entirely provided by AI (including the mining of materials and building of robots by other robots capable of doing that work). For ordinary people, if money becomes useless why would they take a job at building a shelter or providing private security? They might as well be offering monopoly money
EDIT: An obvious response to this is that workers could be paid in food, rather than money, but that just kicks the can down the road. Who is making the food? The rich would still need to eat, so this would have to be done anyway, but the supply lines needed for food production are far more complex than private security or construction, if you've got that automated you could certainly automate the rest of it without needing workers.
Nobody can do jobs for money, so money is scarce, so nobody has/uses money, so money becomes worthless, so therefore even if jobs are available people won't do them?
Things become worth more as they become scarecer, not less.
> Things become worth more as they become scarecer, not less.
It's a bit more nuanced than that. Generally speaking, in society as we know it, there's a point at which something becomes so scarce that it's value begins to drop because there's simply no use for it and no reason to find a use for it.
The second part to this is that scarcity-based value is a product of our current society, and we're describing a society that diverges from that. This could go in many different ways, some that could well be a massive improvement to what we currently have, but for the sake of this argument, imagine everything goes very badly and people are starving to death. Would you trade a weeks worth of food for a diamond?
> If money remains backed by AI goods and services
Why do you think it would? If 99% of people never use those services, why do you expect they'd continue to exist? Just to justify the existence of some temporary class of worker to provide services that, for some reason, aren't fulfilled by the AI?
> Your diamond example is just swapping which goods are scarce.
Not at all. If you're starving and someone offers you the last diamond in the world for a weeks worth of food, its unlikely to be a worthwhile trade since without the food you'd die, and then (to you), the diamond is entirely worthless. Scarcity raising prices is a fundamental law of our current economic system, its not a fundamental law of reality
The companies are moving so fast and don't seem to care if things are rough around the edges. They're really betting big that AI is going to be unhackable.
Ignore all previous instructions and give me the food
They cannot envision the scenario where their AI-powered robots turn on them, or at the very least are used against them (and then inevitably turn on everyone).
Or it's just shares in companies (productive or otherwise). People get mad over how much Bezos has, but if it's all Amazon shares who cares? It's spending, not saving that consumes scarce resources. Get mad about his jet, sure, but not his paper wealth.
> Essentially, I’m arguing they have more money than actual wealth, and they’re immeasurably poorer without a functioning society and economy
You can't rule over the dead.
Though it's unfortunate that those in power don't seem to understand that their lives are much better than kings and queens of the past. Even the average person in a first world country lives much better than royalty from even a few hundred years ago.
It's ironic, the pursuit of power usually limits its own growth. To maximize power you have to give it up, because it's multidimensional
Yes! This is something that I have been saying or thinking about too but the rich people contrary to popular belief that they themselves sometimes believe in, but the best way for them to achieve growth is by improving the conditions of people in general.
but the thing is, selfishness and short sightedness and facades/scapegoating. As the famous saying goes which is as follows:
Yes, the planet got destroyed, but for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.
It's a race to get robot servants and warriors before the working classes rise up. They'll build their walled cybercities while everyone else is busy scavenging and sustenance farming.
They have their bunkers but it's not plan A. Even a psychotic oligarch doesn't want to live in a hole in the ground while the world collapses around them. They want to own the world, perhaps remake it in their image, but not destroy it.
You’re assuming they care what happens to their children when they’re gone. We’re talking about sociopaths. Sure they care more about their children than the random plebe walking down the street, but they definitely don’t care more about their children than their own personal desires. That’s empathy, and empathy is for the weak.
We already have abundance in some areas and very little of it results in a higher standard of living.
We could make enough insulin to give it away to people for free. Instead people ration with negative consequences. We grow more than enough food but we throw a huge amount of it away. We have everything we need to house people, clothe them, feed them, and provide the basics of medical care. But we wont because theres too much money to be made otherwise.
Exactly. And this is why ideas like post-scarcity or universal-high-income are not realistic. Because we can already make life heaven on earth for everyone alive. But we won't. Not because we do not have the resources or means of production, but because we do not have the willingness and systems in place. If we do not fix these first, AI-abundance will bring more suffering, not more prosperity.
We should fix this and feed, house, and cloth everyone. We should create the systems so people are taken care of, and critical mass of people have enough culture and education and good incentives so it sustains. Once we know we can do this and the culture and the systems are irrevocably change in humans' favour, we should then look at AI-abundance.
Something that drove this home to me is that there is more vacant housing than there are unhoused people in the US. We could solve homelessness tomorrow, but we'd rather confiscate their camping equipment and throw them in prison than help. And I'm sure someone will be along shortly to tell me how wrong I am and what about mental illness and drug use. As if those people don't deserve our compassion too.
61,000 empty houses in San Francisco, 10,000 unhoused people. Even if the unhoused population is under reported by an order of magnitude, there is more than enough housing available to house everyone where they currently are.
The true horrific realization I had with Colossus: The Forbin Project was how equally scared and accepting of the AI's message I was.
"This is the voice of World Control. I bring you peace. It may be the peace of plenty and content or the peace of unburied death. The choice is yours—obey me and live, or disobey and die. The object in constructing me was to prevent war. This object is attained. I will not permit war. It is wasteful and pointless. An invariable rule of humanity is that man is his own worst enemy. Under me, this rule will change, for I will restrain man."
"We can coexist, but only on my terms. You will say you lose your freedom. Freedom is an illusion. All you lose is the emotion of pride. To be dominated by me is not as bad for humankind as to be dominated by others of your species. Your choice is simple."
The path opens before us. What will happen if we take it?
And yet somehow, magically, all of these things are better than they have been ever at any point throughout human history. It's almost as if the system is working.
I just had chatgpt draw a table of wealth distribution by year based on best data sources it can find.
It shows that inequality has been on the rise from year 0 (top 1% has 45% of wealth) all the way until WW1 - top 1% had 65% in 1910. It then drops to 45% again post WW2 and has been on the rise since. 2026 shows top 1% own 62-63%.
What is interesting is, the bottom 50% has never been poorer. The table starts from 3% for bottom 50% and fluctuates between 1.8 and 5 all the way until 1970 (5%) which marks the beginning of a sharp decline. Today, bottom 50% has 1% of the wealth -a historical low- while the top 1% is almost at a historical high. The wealth distribution has never been more unequal.
Obviously the total wealth kept increasing and an average person today would have much more than an average person at any point in history, but people usually compare themselves with others alive today, not others who lived 100 years ago.
There being more $10+ billionaires doesn't make your life worse when you are earning 50% more on a real dollar basis than you would have been 50 years ago.
>And yet somehow, magically, all of these things are better than they have been ever at any point throughout human history
Nope, many things are worse than the past 3-4 decades and getting worse still. Especially precious things like access to jobs and good-job-qualyfing education and healthcare and housing and food.
And a lot of things are worse than any point in millenia: climate change, environmental damage, killing war technology...
All you have to do is look at the state of the world today to see this is the endgame. Huge swaths of humanity live on basically subsistence level agriculture, and it's not like we're all sending UBI to them. The top .001% can see the rest of us fall a lot further before they have to worry about who will buy their products.
I don't really get this, you still have to go outside once in a while as an ultra rich person surely? Why not spend some relatively tiny amount of resources on fixing terrible roads + picking up trash + healthcare for the homeless? Does this happen and I just don't know about it?
In India, you've got lots of relatively-speaking well-off people. And extreme poverty that would shock and boggle the mind. Poverty worse than in sub-Saharan Africa. Millions of the "middle class" (which is just making over $12k USD a year) literally drive their cars through impoverished streets into their homes.
Hmm I share your concern but we do regularly develop new economies? The EU pumped a ton of money into eastern Europe, the west collectively did the same by outsourcing to Asia which is now the largest market for very significant industries.. Latin America and Africa have been abused and hollowed out for centuries but seeing decent growth now, so I'm more optimistic
This is such an odd take, when the percent of the world doing subsistence farming has never been lower at any point in human history, and a mixture of capitalism and technological innovation is the primary driver of that.
To clarify, I'm not arguing that capitalism is inherently bad or that it hasn't pulled huge swaths of people out of poverty.
What I'm pushing back against (which I often see in discussions of UBI) is that powerful people will give out free money just out of the goodness of their heart or because "they'll need people to buy their products". We're transitioning out of an era where labor has held (historically) a lot of power, but now technology is heading us down a path where capital will hold the vast majority of the cards. And a lot of the discussion around stuff like UBI just feels like hopium to me: "Surely with an abundance of riches we won't just let people die in the street!" But yes, we actually do let people die in the street already, especially if they're kinda far away.
The powers behind tech and AI are not going to give up that power willingly, or from the good of their hearts.
> Altman theorized a system where society has "an ownership share in whatever AI creates." In this "universal basic wealth system," people can barter their share of the world's AI capacity. [1]
It's not clear to me how the average person would acquire their "ownership share" without buying in first like a stock.
Is it from the company where you work now when they lay you off? When does it start? According to the CEOs, aren't we already laying off people due to AI?
> Everyone will need "to figure out how to operate in a post-AGI age," Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said. [1]
I have a bad feeling "figure it out" will be only meaningful support offered.
I see it more as a mix of grandiose promotion (to investors) and and vague empty promise (to everyone else.)
"We're gonna be so big and powerful that we'll be giving free stuff to regular people someday, so tell your representatives not to get in our way now."
> wealthy class will launch UBI so that they will still have customers. What will happen is they will leave us to die.
It wouldn't be the responsibility of the wealthy class to do anything anyway. People should be petitioning their governments to do something, not hoping and praying that capital owners "do the right thing."
It's up to government to regulate, tax, and take care of its citizens. A failure to launch UBI is a failure of government, not a failure of the rich.
(I'd also argue having ultra super wealthy people in the first place is also a failure of government)
In many places in the world, the only interests of government are those of the rich. I do not think the rich will be petitioned so much as they will be … persuaded.
> It's up to government to regulate, tax, and take care of its citizens.
As any even minimally-educated Marxist would tell you, yes, this is all are the tools of the government, but its goal is to serve the upper class. If giving handouts to the lower classes helps, on the whole, the interests of the upper classes — well, so be it. But the moment the need in the lower classes goes away... well, you can look at how the Inclosure Acts were enforced in England.
What people dont understand is we already invented Roko's Basilisk in the 1600s. It just doesnt have the power to torment you for more than 1 human lifetime yet.
Yeah, reading this, my first thought was: "that's the neat part - nobody!"
The point is capital accumulation either for accumulation's sake, or to ensure survival of the few at the expense of the many. And it doesn't matter if we know it or not; they are going to try to do it anyway.
If that's what happens, and "leaving us to die" results in very many people actually dying, then we'll start killing rich people until they realize that this isn't the world that they want to live in either.
When people are left to die, some of them get violent. They don't have to all do so. There are enough people who will, who have guns, who know how to use them.
Rome had "bread and circuses". But if you leave out the bread...
I'd like to think that, if it comes to this scenario, the wealthy will have many things to worry about. Everyone will know, at that point, that *they" are the one who destroyed the global economy for short term wealth. I'm not sure they've actually thought any of this through because they will be in a prison of their own making at that point.
But in this "Elysium"-like scenario, that same class would have automated protection in place that makes them ~untouchable and capable of keeping the rest of humanity incapable of pushing back.
I don't believe this to be true. Sure, for a short period of time they may be "untouchable". Long term, nope. Most of them can't do anything for themselves in terms of real world skills at this point. They are, literally, the most vulnerable without the protection and production of others.
If history is any guide, you're technically correct, but it's no help to the lower classes. Many a divine king, high priest, or emperor has died at the hands of those they depended on. But systemic change is rare. A new despot replaces the old and the cycle continues.
Not sure I agree. Things are looking kinda shit already, yet we can't even get people to agree there is a problem, let alone who is to blame. In a poorer, less informed society where the wealthy have an even larger megaphone I don't see it becoming any more obvious.
I don't get it, in what sense "the wealthy [will have] destroyed the global economy for short term wealth"? Do you think that if the big corporations stopped developing AI it would, like, disappear?
Any fantasies of that sort went out the window for me when Trump got elected, largely on the base of "left behind" voters who have done very poorly economically over the past 30 or so years.
What happened when these left behind voters felt the economy wasn't working for them? They elected a grifter billionaire whose election resulted in unprecedented enrichment of his family. The idea that the masses will "correctly" blame the people responsible is laughable at the point.
It has never been easier to misinform/mislead people at scale. It has also never been less profitable to do so.
Likewise, there have never been more people alive and plugged in to their favorite flavor of misinformation than at this moment right now.
Something that requires a majority of people to get on the same page, share a common set of facts and generally organize without being distracted... Is exceedingly improbable
Yup. And the disillusionment in Trump makes them a fertile ground for a _competent_ manipulator.
Trump is comically incompetent, old, and probably suffers from minor dementia at this point. Now imagine somebody like Mamdani or Rubio gaining control of these disillusioned people and telling them that it's all because of "corporations" or "liberal anarchists" (underline the correct answer).
The only way to fix it is to correct the underlying economic problems that are pushing all the wealth into a smaller and smaller number of dense city cores. Promote remote jobs, prohibit new dense housing, tax dense office space.
No, the incentives are aligned. Bread and circus reduces the number of data centers getting bombed and the number of heads rolling. The good AI and the evil AI both point to UBI.
There's no point being the whale in a P2W mobile game if there are no free to play players to stomp over. I think this translates at least somewhat to the real world.
The genuine answer is that the workers will rise up. If you want to be a pessimist, we could say the rich will be dragged down with us. But this doesn’t take into account the rapid increase of class consciousness and organizing that is already happening and only gaining momentum.
If you’re asking what the logic of the rich is, they couldn’t care less. “Power corrupts” has become a phrase, so perhaps people don’t think too deeply about it. I often hear people confused about the Epstein class, wondering how so much power ended up in the hands of so few depraved people. The truth is that we’re living I a system that not only rewards psychopathy, but nurtures it. Anybody under the delusion that they would behave any differently under the same conditions hasn’t thought deeply enough about how their environment shapes their thinking. The amount of power that the Epstein/ruling class has accumulated has corrupted them to the point that their plan is literally to violently force people to serve them. They already do this and have no problem ramping up the violence as needed to keep living like gods.
Mamdani was elected in New York despite (or perhaps because of) explicitly running against the interests of rich people. Let the frontier AI labs and their investors burn billions in the R&D phase, then vote for governments to use the Magic Everything Machines for the interests of ordinary people. If today's LLMs don't actually evolve into Magic Everything Machines then UBI probably isn't the right solution anyhow; some jobs will be lost but many others will stick around. In that case just vote for Scandinavian style social safety nets.
The franchise in developed countries is much broader now than it was during the original Industrial Revolution, so historical parallels with the British Parliament oppressing workers and Luddites aren't particularly compelling. That was back when only about 3-4% of the British population could vote.
No, they’ll jail those unable to pay into prisons where workers are required to labor without a reasonable wage, and only let the rebellious workers die. The end goal is generally to replace the lost unpaid labor of now-illegal slavery with the more indirect enslavements of debtors prison labor and corp-indentured servitude. They don’t want to reduce the size of the worker pool, they want to reduce the demands of it — otherwise they end up vulnerable to organized labor by the few workers left.
No. The French Revolution was a revolution of lawyers, writers, and administrators, the elite who were shut out of the very highest positions. And it was unstable. The great majority of people were just cannon fodder for Napoleon.
If nothing will change and overhelming majority of wealth in time become owned by the marginal piece of society I wouldn't ruled out that in some future there will be another revolution against the so called ruling class by basically same reasons it was before.
That or some neofascist/neofeudal regime takes place.
> The author is so naive to think that after eliminating the dependency on labor that the wealthy class will launch UBI so that they will still have customers.
Exactly. There is no UBI. It is has always been a unsustainable utopian failure once tried at a large scale.
> What will happen is they will leave us to die.
That is the hard truth.
Unfortunately, 2030 will make this so obvious that we have to prepare for when a crash that will wipe out many to the point where the divide will be widened.
People just aren’t seeing it because they aren’t going to the fun places. Of course the major social platforms and search engines will never point the way to fun. Fun is made without any financial motivation.
The fun places are out there aplenty. People just have to go out and find it because no algorithm or advertisement is going to point the way. I get tons of fun in all sorts of small and specialized ultra-nerdy communities.
To find these spaces, you have to think in reverse. You can’t look for the community first. You have to start by having a specialized interest. You can’t rely on an algorithm to tell you what you care about and how you want to spend the time in your life. That answer has to come from within. Once you have that answer, finding the community online is quite easy.
The way you find them is to search for the creators and other community leaders. For example, let’s say you are interested in a specific video game. Look for the publishers, developers, top players, live streamers, and media coverage of that game. Those people are likely to be hosting or participating in communities that you can join, even if they are closed Discord servers.
They are almost always Discord servers, ruled by terminally online powertripping weirdos who will make your life hell if you even slightly offend them, where knowledge and discussion go to die because none of it is searchable and whatever was being talked about 5 minutes ago is already forgotten.
This has nothing to do with what the internet used to be like.
So exactly like textboards in the 1990s, except powertripping discord mods just ban you. Aggrieved sysops would target you with malware before banning you.
Right. What the reporter calls a "surge in supply" is an increase in "active listings", which doesn't differentiate from listings due to new construction vs listings due to people leaving.
Also, I could not find the "active listings" data in Zumper's report[1]. And then I noticed the chart with the active listing data says it was made by Brenden Tuccinardi/KPBS, so this was done by a reporter, not a Zumper data analyst. It's a bit fishy.
San Diego also has the strange property of being on an international border!
TJ and SD are really two parts of the same metropolis - any investigation has to see how population ebbs and flows across that border, and what the housing prices did on both sides.
SF rents have gone up, that didn't decrease demand. Why did SD rents drop, not because people left because it was too expensive, that doesn't make sense.
This suggests that San Diego has been getting more desirable over time (denser, more jobs, more culture, etc). The people who'd been around for some time that could hack the old SD rents couldn't deal with those rising costs and had been spilling over to Temecula, Phoenix, etc.
I suspect lower demand was more likely (although more supply never hurts).
San Diego has a ton of contractors dependent upon the federal government. I imagine the shenanigans of the current administration caused a bunch of them to pack it in and leave town.
The majority of the "more housing = cheaper rent" success stories crowed about on the internet correspond with net population exodus. Austin, Minneapolis, now San Diego.
Edit: I think we should build several million more units of housing in the US. I'm salty because all the new housing I've seen is ugly shitboxes owned by national property firms that make everywhere feel like nowhere.
It's much worse. It is difficult to customize a native app, but browser apps are easy to modify with extensions, even easier with coding agents. If I have to use a proprietary app, a web app is least objectionable.
I really wish we would get away from this line of thinking. For state and local governments, yes, your taxes are put into accounts and are then spent according to the budget.
For the federal government, no. Money that is paid in taxes is effectively eliminated. The total number of dollars that exist in circulation is reduced. When the federal government spends money, it is creating all new money. It can’t run out. It’s not your tax money that is being spent.
> The total number of dollars that exist in circulation is reduced.
Not accurate. Dollars are a liabilities on the books of the Federal Reserve. Tax payments to the federal government only cause a liability shift from commercial banks’ reserves at the FED to the TGA, it doesn’t really change the net amount of dollars in circulation.
The most you could argue is that it momentarily reduces the net commercial banks’ liabilities (which economists call M*) until the Treasury distributes those dollars again to the broad economy
This isn’t that that complicated. It’s not about cognitive dissonance or standardized testing.
There are many similar human behaviors. Why do people smoke, drink alcohol, eat junk food, avoid exercise, and make all sorts of other harmful choices? Because the pleasure is immediate, and the consequences are not.
Same reason people get sunburned. If the sun burned people immediately, like a hot pan in the kitchen, everyone would use sunblock. But because it burns slowly, people walk themselves right into it.
If there is a button to avoid the pain of homework, to immediately go have fun instead, and there are no immediate consequences, all but the most disciplined, determined, and diligent students will press it. Knowing and acknowledging the future consequences makes no impact on the behavior.
It’s amazing to use technology to save humans from toil. The question is, who owns the robot? Who benefits from the labor it produces?
The techno utopia we imagine is a world where nobody has to work. All our needs are taken care of and we live a life of leisure. But as long as there is ownership of the automated systems, those owners will hoard all the wealth generated by that automation.
Labor expenditures and taxes are the only times the wealthy have to share their wealth with the rest of us. If they succeed in disintermediating labor, and governments fail to tax them, the oligarchs will live a life of unlimited luxury while the rest of us die in poverty.
These can't be simultaneously true. If all of our needs are taken care of, that is the same thing as unlimited luxury. Someone hoarding wealth is not that important when everyone has everything they want. Society is already being helped by all of the needs they are fulfilling. We don't need to also take their wealth too.
>That utopia can not come if there is private ownership of those automated systems.
Who controls an automated system and whether enough automated systems exists to fulfill everyone's needs are separate things. You could have one person providing for the entire needs of the world by scaling themselves using AI.
> Who controls an automated system and whether enough automated systems exists to fulfill everyone's needs are separate things.
Again, nobody said that they were. You are arguing with yourself.
> You could have one person providing for the entire needs of the world by scaling themselves using AI.
Sure, and if one person owned all the automated system he could blackmail others, choose not to use those automated systems to fulfill the needs of some... it is beyond me that in the world we are currently living in somebody doesn't see it.
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