"Meta is claiming that the costly A.I. computer chips it buys from companies, including Nvidia, are entitled to a taxpayer-provided discount as part of the experiment."
Why do these schemes always involves these private companies siphoning money from taxpayers? It's "communism" (or whatever) to subsidize public health, yet we are expected to subsidize experimental AI companies.
We aren't expected to. We (or our elected representatives) passed a law saying that experimental spending gets tax breaks. And I don't really see an argument that LLMs aren't in an experimental phase.
I'm happy to make that argument. LLMs were experimental in 2023. It's 2026 now, and enormous numbers of people use them on a daily basis (ChatGPT has 1.2 billion weekly users now, according to Sam Altman at OpenAI DevDay).
They're only experimental in the way that computers are still experimental, since we continue to find new ways to use computers.
I mean this is clearly a huge stretch. Presumably the intent of this law is to incentivize novel innovation. In this case we incentivize nothing. Data centers are commodities.
LLMs are not and Llama did pretty much exactly what this type of program encourages. It was a pilot that made no money, was thrown away, and spurred a ton of independent research.
This is also a weird split brain with HN. Half the front page is mocking companies for throwing away money on AI. That Chinese models (which surely got a huge boost from LLaMa) are going to render all this investment a gigantic loss.
Most people don't pick up the bill. Anyone net tax-negative does not pick up the bill. Facebook definitely pays more tax than me, both as a corporation and from all the employees they employ.
But _you_ are tax positive I assume, and therefore are picking up the bill. When FB tax dodges, we incur debt that _you_ will pay for. Perhaps indirectly, but you are paying for it as a taxpayer.
What debt are we incurring? If I stop working and don't pay tax, I didn't rob you. Me paying less tax doesn't rob you. Stupid spending of your taxes on things you don't need or want robs you.
> If I stop working and don't pay tax, I didn't rob you.
Depends if you have income from capital.
> Me paying less tax doesn't rob you.
Depends on the tax code.
> Stupid spending of your taxes on things you don't need or want robs you.
Fair.
The argument comes down to the "fairness" of society. What level of taxation is "fair"? There's probably not a single right answer.
However, there are answers that result somewhat deterministically in rising inequality. So for those of us who don't want to live in a highly inequitable society, there is a "more right" answer.
Now, I'm sure other people (presumably people who are doing well under high inequality) would think the "right answer" is to increase inequality as much as possible.
Personally, I don't think that kind of society would be very nice to live in.
Inequality is not a problem in a world where people can choose to work really hard or chill their whole lives and have the hard workers pay for their food stamps.
The main thing is choice, and that will always result in different outcomes. A violinist will probably end up with less money in her life than a stockbroker ends up in his, but money is not the only measure of a life.
On that measure however, with the massive scale that certain companies can achieve, some people will have far more net worth than others. But that won't be because the others had anything taken from them. It'll be because massive value was supplied to some customers, or some value was supplied to millions of customers.
A multi-millionaire artist costs society £150k in damages and you are OK with that? Why doesn’t the artist pay for the cleanup and removal? They have more than enough money.
> The problem is, your employer doesn’t care whether your brain is creating new neurons and connections. They care about productivity and profit.
I feel like this is an odd thing to be reticent about. You're working for someone who doesn't care about you and, in this changing landscape, you're compartmentalizing that in order to determine how best to care for yourself. Logically, to care for yourself you'd need to find an environment in which your needs aren't being neglected.
I personally believe AI is most readily positioned for top-down automation, rather than bottom-up automation. This seems painfully obvious in almost every domain.
It seems the paper conflates "fertility" and "reproductive rate". Which is akin to conflating "soil fertility" and gross yields. It also seems many comments here have not picked up on that.
I think your bigotry override got tripped - the person above never claimed they were representative of some imagined average, just that it was two people actually playing video games...
"... and I don’t care about what we are building."
I find this is the main culprit behind most career dissatisfaction. Spending 8+ hours a day working to build and support something you don't care about is a recipe for being unhappy.
I've turned down jobs that were more lucrative for jobs that I felt more personally compelled to participate in, because I felt the impact of the work would be more beneficial. On tough days, it's a pretty good motivator to keep my chin up.
If you enjoy software development, then finding a more personally compelling job might be the right call. If you truly don't like the process, outside of your current environment/employer, I'd say life is too short to spend it doing something you don't enjoy.
I think it’s the case. Perhaps I do need something more compelling. I’d love be building solutions that people can self-host. Power to the people type stuff
I'm not sure I understand the $1700 price tag. Self rocking bassinets can be had for a couple hundred dollars. Many have the same functionality, with cry detection and white noise capabilities. They also don't require the use of an app, it's just a self contained unit. Where is the 500% upcharge going?
Right but the comment you are replying to is making the argument that the same functionality, and the same increase in sleep, can be had for a fraction of the cost.
"like the snoo" appears to be the sticking point. What specific features do you think that A) are important for helping a baby sleep and B) are only found on the snoo?
I've never used the snoo or any other self-rocking bassinet (luckily my daughter is a decently good sleeper on her own), but this product [0] certainly looks like it's pretty similar for a fraction of the price, and it's even from a known brand.
Just google "self rocking bassinet", but that is also why I asked - so if you are confident enough to say it's not true, then please explain.
Does it just come down to a different controller/set of algorithms for governing the rocking/white noise capabilities? The product itself doesn't seem to cost $1700 dollars to produce - it seems to be a bassinet on rollers with a motor attached that can play sound.
Why do these schemes always involves these private companies siphoning money from taxpayers? It's "communism" (or whatever) to subsidize public health, yet we are expected to subsidize experimental AI companies.