As people were pointing out in this morning’s comments, the stock market is taking a bit of a dump today. (Sorry, “correction” — I think I’ll start calling my trips to the bathroom “corrections” too, I like the ring of it.)
The proximate cause is that China has some new open source AI software, DeepSeek that uses less processing power, can be “trained” more sensibly, etc. I don’t know the details, and it remains to see if they’re true based on testing by programmers who aren’t on the DeepSeek payroll. Since current AI uses a ton of computers running specialized chips made by Nvidia, that company in particular is getting pummeled, since DeepSeek can probably do as well with general purpose computers. Companies that were going to build datacenter and power plants to run AI are also getting hit.
Of course, Trump’s genius is fully on display here, as usual, since he just announced project “Stargate” to create a bunch of AI infrastructure.
The underlying cause is that yet another Webistics bubble is about to end and smart money is getting out. This one is AI, which, like every other recent bubble, is a useful tool or technology that was way oversold. Well, on to the next!
Open thread.
raven
And here I thought it was going to be Asleep at the Wheel!
Hunter Gathers
So, let me see – China’s vaporware is less resource intensive than our vaporware, causing a company that makes chips for criming, I mean cryptocurrency, to tank a bit, dragging down the entire market.
Over vaporware.
Undefined vaporware at that.
Baud
Via blue sky
scav
Shit, I’ve simply got to be at least five financial tempests behind and we’re still in January.
trollhattan
@raven:
Judges would also accept Neko Case. (Never fails to give me chills.)
scav
@Hunter Gathers: Undefined vaporware would make the best bubbles, no?
trollhattan
@scav:
By next Sweeps Week, Ow My Balls will be the top show in the land.
Citizen Dave
I’ve heard that us beating China in the AI race is a national imperative. Waiting to see if our AI overlords will kill us humans or change our thinking–1984-style.
Also would like to know how AI will conquer our current overlords–cats.⁸
Steve LaBonne
@trollhattan: I think I’ll stop in at Starbucks.
Steve LaBonne
@Citizen Dave: The cats will be displaced by cockroaches soon enough.
bbleh
But … but the Wisdom Of The Market …!
@mistermix.bsky.social
@Baud: I hope someone keeps track of all of these reprobates and the crimes they’ll inevitably commit.
Steve LaBonne
I wonder if there’s a any chance this AI “breakthrough” is as real as Volkswagen’s magical diesel emissions technology.
hueyplong
@Baud: Not sure how that story will play out, but it’s fair to guess that “shoulda complied” won’t be part of the coverage/commentary.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
Out of left field, I’m wondering if this means that NVIDIA will go back to making computer graphics cards that aren’t liable to be snapped up by speculators (first it was Bitcoin mining, then it was AI) and will sell for a somewhat reasonable price if demand goes down, or if they’ll collapse completely.
Hope they hedged their bets.
Baud
@Steve LaBonne:
Yeah chatGPT made a big splash and then came down to earth somewhat. We’ll see.
Captain C
@Baud: Here’s my surprised face.
Phylllis
@bbleh: I can hear my daddy now talking about how the stock market is a sucker’s bet and you’d come out just as well by setting your money on fire.
Old School
@Baud:
Article says he was out on supervised release since last July, so the pardon didn’t directly lead to his death.
Some sort of traffic stop doesn’t seem to be worth ending up dead. Curious what the bodycam footage will show (if it exists).
Lee
I want to create a new publicly traded company specializing in AI. I’ll call it Dutch Tulips because reasons. I’ll be rich! At least for a while.
Belafon
@Hunter Gathers: Except Nvidia’s hardware is used for actual useful things as well, like tumor detection.
We don’t blame Ginsu for murders.
matt
the other issue is that Deepseek is open source.
YY_Sima Qian
Going from asset bubbles to asset bubbles is the consequence of having an over-financialized economy, where the political establishment has largely been captured by the monied interests.
The most recent AI bubble has been ripe for rupture, but it has been partially justified by everyone in the U.S. (from Big Tech to Wall Street to MSM to USG) by the Great Power Competition w/ the PRC – “must beat China to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) & Artificial Super Intelligence”, because the company & country that gets there 1st is supposed to have an overwhelming & insurmountable advantage. Pure hype & fear mongering w/ a series of unexamined assertions/assumptions.
Now the hot money will probably flow to crypto.
El Cruzado
Gotta disagree with that one. All the blockchain/crypto stuff has no real use beyond various fraud maneuvers.
hueyplong
@Old School: The only surprising thing so far is that a fox outlet is mentioning it.
Belafon
@Bruce K in ATH-GR: The reason NVidia is in the machine learning market is that around 2006, some researchers were using their cards, which do lots of similar computations in parallel, to perform ML operations by retrieving the values the cards would generate to display and interpreting those results. All NVidia did after that was make the computation part directly available. And those have been valuable for many ML tasks that have nothing to do with LLMs.
ML has found many uses, it’s the hype that’s the issue, that’s always been an issue with ML ever since the beginning. We’re always one step away from the “big” breakthrough.
Belafon
@El Cruzado: And where was blockchain mentioned?
rikyrah
@Baud:
What’s for dinner?
sentient ai from the future
there are no “big” breakthroughs in ai, because ai is not about machine learning per se, or about “general intelligence”.
it is about recordkeeping and blame.
when you train a model on a large quantity of data, at a certain level you are basically doing data compression with large multidimensional matrices. so you get this thing, and then you can nearly-costlessly reproduce that thing.
but you can’t decompress the data.
and it’s only if you can sift through the data that you can troubleshoot things if, say, you find that your chatbot is liable to give you a remote code execution if asked in just the right way. (this has been demonstrated). then you have to go to the trouble of recompressing the data without the offending part of the model, which is a huge pain. but it’s impossible if you dont have access to the training set.
then, because the models are black boxes, companies like unitedhealth can use them to deny coverage while claiming innocence. it was the ai, we just work here.
wall street and silly valley, of course, sense the importance of being able to blame an artificial entity for whatever offense against reason and humanity they cook up.
the abusers here, are basically building realdolls to serve as their enablers.
JoyceH
It will be interesting in a decade or two to look back and see how many Americans were bankrupted by crypto and how many were bankrupted by online gambling apps. Which money-suck will win?
narya
Since it’s an open thread: fuck cancer. In this case, specifically, what looks to be colon cancer in my brother. He doesn’t have a confirmed diagnosis yet, but the colonoscopy doc knows what he’s looking at, and apparently there’s a mass, which he biopsied. My mother, who turns 90 this weekend, does not want to bury another child. And I don’t want to bury another sibling. No need to respond–I know you’re all in the “fuck cancer” band.
A Ghost to Most
It’s supposedly open-source, so the competitors are seeing profit margin fly away.
hueyplong
@JoyceH: My assumption is gambling.
trollhattan
@JoyceH: FOMO is very powerful, such as when football teams get in a bidding war for a free agent blue chip quarterback.
Hey, you just acquired the best guy in the game now have no money left to invest in an offensive line to protect his blue chip ass. Good luck!
Belafon
@sentient ai from the future:
You can if the purpose of your model is to store the data. But most models aren’t about compressing the data. Most models are about finding the what relates the training input to the training output. I could train a model to produce the dominant color in an image. The original image would be completely lost.
Albatrossity
@hueyplong: Yeah, gambling addiction is real, and there are a lot more gamblers than bitcoin investors, I suspect
@mistermix.bsky.social
@El Cruzado:
Yeah, good point.
@A Ghost to Most:
Agree that this is probably spooking investors, but Meta’s tool is open source, too, apparently. And AI isn’t like an open-source version of, say, Word — a lot of work is needed to stand up an AI bot even if the software is free, and it’s gotta be hosted.
Citizen Alan
@Baud:
…
I just sat here for 20 seconds trying to think of something witty to way about this that I would not have considered monstrously cruel and unfeeling just ten years ago. Like I keep saying: the thing I hate most about conservatives is how hard they’ve worked my whole life to make me hate them.
zhena gogolia
@narya: I’m so sorry.
Steve LaBonne
@narya: Ugh. But my wife’s 34 year old daughter in law has beaten colon cancer, and he can too.
SiubhanDuinne
@narya:
That’s awful, Narya. I’m very sorry, and hope the medicos find that the colonic mass is easily excised and contained. Wishing your brother all the best possible news.
Oh, yeah. FUCK CANCER.
F U C K C A N C E R.
rikyrah
@narya:
Sending prayers for your brother.
SW
They’ve been calling it AI because “Marginally less stupid Computers” didn’t do well in focus groups.
Betty Cracker
@narya: That sucks — I’m sorry. Treatment options have expanded a lot recently, including new immunotherapy applications. I hope he can benefit from that.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
Well, that’s the good news I guess. Bad news is as noted above, if the electricity requirements for money laundering
crypto “mining”become less, we might just see more money flow into it which might then lead Our Economic Betters to want to “invest” shit in it and so on.And El Cruzado’s statement, which is so basic and yet conveys everything anybody ever wanted to know about the crypto scam, it should be used every time it’s mentioned.
YY_Sima Qian
@Hunter Gathers: The productivity gains from AI (including but not exclusively in the form of ChatGPT), to programmers & researchers, are real. LLMs have been improving rapidly since ChatGPT-4, w/ the latest wave coming from Chinese players (not just DeepSeek, but Chinese Big Tech such as Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, ByteDance, & scrappy start ups such as Moonshot AI, 01.AI). The latter are pushing the performance frontier at an incremental level, while causing disruption by dramatically reducing cost (of training & inference), capex & energy consumption, & the majority being open source to boot. They are outcompeting Meta’s open source models, while undermining the [tenuous to begin w/] business models of closed source shops (such as “Open”AI, Anthropic & Google).
The hype around AGI/ASI, on the OTOH, are IMO fantastical scams.
Going forward, the emergence consensus in the global AI community appears to be that the open source & very affordable Chinese models will democratize advanced AI (which is ironic) & greatly expand the horizons for value creation, but mostly zero out the value capture opportunities at the LLM level (which are more like operating systems). The opportunity for value capture will be at the application level. The U.S. Big Tech have far too over indexed on chasing the AGI/ASI fantasy, & have neglected applications relevant to the corporeal world, to enhance tangible products & services. The PRC, OTOH, has been laser focused on the application end, even as Chinese companies are also working at the frontier, or following very fast.
The respective industrial policies pertaining to AI announced in the past week are instructive. The US$ 500B Project Stargate is intended to “win” the perceived sprint to AGI/ASI before the PRC does, by building gargantuan data centers & computing clusters, but will mostly serve to inflate the AI asset bubble, may very well fail to materialize (at least anywhere near the hyped extent). The RMB¥ 1T (equivalent to US$ 127B) effort launched by the PRC government is still laser focused on realizing applications in robotics, automation, advanced manufacturing, advanced communications, the “low altitude economy”, & miltech as the end goals. The former effort reflects the financialization of the U.S. economy & the monied interests that stand to benefit. The latter effort reflects the fact that the PRC now is the industrial/manufacturing superpower that the U.S. once was immediately following WW II.
Kay
I think the best case is it bursts now before they embed in the whole economy and bring us all down for the next 5 years.
Why do we keep doing this? Why is no one prudent and responsible? Is it like a contagious disease? Why are so few immune?
Baud
@Kay:
Too many people here are addicted to the promise of asset appreciation. No one wants to work anymore.
YY_Sima Qian
BTW, DeepSeek is the AI startup of a Chinese “quant” trading hedge fund. It would not surprising me if the team knew their ultimate impact o on the valuations of US companies hitherto flying on the AI bubble, & has made a killing shorting the latter’s stocks.
The technical papers from DeepSeek about their V3 LLM was published in late Dec. which had already shook the AI industry. It launched its R1 reasoning model last week, which left no doubt as to its capabilities & its competitive threat to U.S. Big Tech. Paper by Moonshot AI about its Kimi K1.5 reasoning model, published on the same day as the one on DeepSeek V3, confirmed that it was not just DeepSeek. The reason NASDAQ tanked yesterday was because the general public, & by extension Wall Street fund managers, are finally learning about it. & because Nvidia had ballooned to 20% of the market cap of NASDAQ.
SW
@YY_Sima Qian: Good points. The US doesn’t do industrial policy. It is against our Adam Smith based national religion. What passes for industrial policy here is just tribute to billionaires.
dm
@Hunter Gathers:
It’s not vaporware, is downloadable and inspectable.
It’s a classic case of a clever algorithm being better than throwing a lot of hardware at a problem.
It still uses GPUs, just more efficiently — it allegedly can be trained with 1/50th the cost in resources.
So… this might just mean that those acres of datacenters just got 50x more powerful.
Though, really, it might mean that those few places where generative AI is actually useful (programming, producing boilerplate, first pass on translation), might now make economic sense, instead of being vastly over-capitalized.
narya
@zhena gogolia: @Steve LaBonne: @SiubhanDuinne: @rikyrah: @Betty Cracker: Thank you all. It prompted me to call and schedule mine–and they had a cancellation, so I got in for February 10
ETA: He just found out today, so he hasn’t even seen a doc for treatment, or even gotten the biopsy back, but the doc wasn’t suggesting at all that it was benign.
hueyplong
@Baud: And few are willing to accept modest, but more reliable returns.
Hallmarks of the Trump era are both assholedom and irresponsibility.
robtrim
AI is proof that with enough high powered processors and gigawatts of electricity you can get a computer to play chess with you or write a sophomoric term paper. AI (meaning to most people Artificial Intelligence) is certainly artificial, but has little to do with what we think of as intelligence. It’s really a marketing term to inflate the product in the eyes of the consumer. It’s a moving target that the Chinese may have outdone.
And the fact that Trump has signed on big-time to Crypto and AI is probably a signal that neither is worth the time of day.
Jackie
Don’t know if it’s been mentioned, but CNN is reporting the Justice Department is firing more than a dozen key officials who worked on Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team prosecuting President Donald Trump.
TBone
@trollhattan: Dr. Phil teamed up with Tom Homan to provide live commentary on ICE raids in Chicago.
Melancholy Jaques
@Baud:
It is true, though, that people have made money by investing in tech companies. Not me, of course, but there are winners in the game. Their friends & associates hear about it & figure they ought to give it a try, then . . .
We’ve been in a bull market since October 2022 and bull markets usually last about two years or so. Has far less to do with who is president than anyone wants to admit.
Ohio Mom
@narya: It’s hard to balance being dispassionate and being hopeful, which is the place you are at. There are so many variables when it comes to cancer, you and your family won’t know what to expect for a while more. Having lived through that limbo myself, it’s excruciating. But yes, Fuck Cancer
Holding you and your family in the light,
Ohio Mom
CarolPW
Anybody know a good probate/estate lawyer in the Sacramento area?
zhena gogolia
@narya: Even if it’s cancer it can be treatable.
NotMax
FYI.
Report on ICE (and other departments) raids in Chicago.
RSA
@YY_Sima Qian: Good summary.
The panic, to my eye, isn’t among AI researchers, who are happy to have a new, more accessible platform:
China’s cheap, open AI model DeepSeek thrills scientists (Nature News)
But yeah, the investor class is upset. Also people who worry about the extent to which information systems can subtly influence people’s views and choices. TikTok suddenly becomes small potatoes in comparison with a Web portal to an information source plausibly under the influence of a global competitor.
A final side note: Artificial Intelligence has gone by that name since the mid-1950s. It’s not a marketing term but the name of the research field, and it’s been around for longer than most people have been alive.
Bill Arnold
@YY_Sima Qian:
It has been a truism for a while in large-model-AI that if you increase the compute budget, models can get more capable, partly just by being bigger.
Give deepseek a bigger compute budget, or replicate their training procedures(+larger compute budget), and more capable models will result.
I’ve barely skimmed their paper/docs:
DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning (arxiv, pdf, 22 Jan 2025)
DeepSeek-R1 github, more information (easier reading)
One interesting aspect is that they finetuned a couple of open source dense models, including some Llama models (Meta’s open source models) with examples made by deepseek. (a form of what is commonly called “distillation”), to improve their reasoning abilities.
Also, the general approach (I’m a fan of reinforcement learning) is interesting, but it can (and probably will be) be scaled up to use more compute.
Jay
@narya:
Sorry to hear that.
T has just come through that march and is recovering,
Redshift
@Kay:
In part because we have too much money sloshing around chasing higher returns. Higher taxes on the super rich would solve more problems that just funding the government at levels necessary to make life better for everyone.
zhena gogolia
@NotMax: Wow, the comments are a cesspool of Nazis. That we now share this country with.
Baud
@zhena gogolia:
We obviously have too many Nazis here, but YouTube comments have always been a cess pool.
Redshift
@RSA:
Right, but saying LLM=”AI” is pure marketing, and it pisses me off for the exact reasons you state.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Bill Arnold: Then basically they just took Metas and others open source models and did some fancy tweaks. They didn’t build a new LLM from scratch. That’s exactly why it’s cheaper.
Captain C
@Baud: When TCFG first was running for President, wasn’t he described as “the YouTube comments section come to life”?
Old School
rikyrah
Brennan Center (@BrennanCenter) posted at 7:56 PM on Mon, Jan 20, 2025:
Trump reverses a Biden administration criminal justice policy that eliminated Department of Justice contracts with private prisons. https://t.co/BPvRgOZW4L
(https://x.com/BrennanCenter/status/1881521289719906634?t=3VEanIFpmL2aA6rLak9r2Q&s=03)
tobie
@narya: So sorry to hear this. I hope everything turns out to be okay for your brother. They say regular testing helps, and I’m sure epidemiologically that’s true, but it sure seems to have us on tenterhooks all the time. Good luck to you.
RSA
@Redshift: True, you’re right about that. LLMs and other generative AI are definitely oversold, as AI.
Bill Arnold
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony:
They built a big model that specializes in “reasoning”, and used it to train traditional LLMs to be better at such according to several benchmarks, by my brief skimming of their docs. It appears to be a breakthrough, but the methods or analogues or improvements will be absorbed quickly by others.
Miss Bianca
@Phylllis: There are thousands of people out there living on modest to substantial income streams generated by stock market investment who would likely disagree somewhat with your dear old dad’s formulation.
rikyrah
@Kay:
You say it all the time…we have such low-quality elites.
WHY did it take Biden to actually DO infrastructure?
I mean it. It’s been falling apart for 30 years.
The jobs are good paying jobs that can’t be shipped offshore.
But, the GOP isn’t interested in infrastructure, because, if done right, it proves good government.
And, they’d rather the country turn to shyt that admit that government can do anything right.
The best part about the TikTok shutdown was getting on Red Book and seeing how actual Chinese live.
Aside from the food videos, which were amazing….the shopping and cooking….
The infrastructure in China. I can never get past their high speed rail. it’s a marvel.
YY_Sima Qian
@Bill Arnold: What has burst is the notion that U.S. Big Tech firms are competent (as developers of products or as managers of investment in capital assets). More compute will always be beneficial, but DeepSeek & other Chinese players, forced to innovate because the USG closed the “easy” path of just buying more compute, might have shown that compute will not be the bottle neck for a while.
Thus, the threat to Nvidia’s long term health is not dramatically more efficient models, that’s actually beneficial (will massive expand the application space of LLMs), but that its near monopoly is ripe for disruption. Part of DeepSeek’s bag of tricks was apparently (I’m not an AI expert) to writing their own base level language & creating their own architecture that is more efficient than the off the shelf ecosystem associated w/ Nvdia (CUDA & PyTorch).
Bill Arnold
@Old School:
Interesting. Thanks for the link. Quote from the piece, bold mine:
robtrim
@RSA: Exactly, Artificial Intelligence has been a source of speculation and research since the 50s. But the term itself was coined to define the computer output as something approaching real life human intelligence. The current term, AI, has been bastardized to infer that its output is more than slapping zeros and ones around. Also, back when Artificial Intelligence had some real meaning, people could distinguish between “expert systems” – computer programs that use reams of date base output and computer logic to achieve answers.
Take the instruments in the cockpit of today’s aircraft – the navigation data they produce is not AI, it’s an expert system that derives choices and solutions based on computer logic. The idea that some AI based computer is “thinking” is absurd. Self-driving cars are unable to accomplish a skill that most 16-year-olds succeed in routinely.
Bill Arnold
@YY_Sima Qian:
I’d rather read the deepseek (and related) papers/docs first.
Certainly, there is always a possibility of disruption; USA AI researchers are not slouches; advances that work in practice get adopted quickly and improved by others.
YY_Sima Qian
@YY_Sima Qian: & DeepSeek made their model & architecture compatible w/ AMD & Huawei GPUs, probably because they’ve had to use these alternatives, in addition to the slightly neutered Nvidia H800s, since the most advanced Nvidia chips (H100s) were the 1st to be placed under export control by USG.
Smiling Happy Guy (aka boatboy_srq)
Felonious Thunk isn’t interested in intelligence, artificial or otherwise
Stargate is a sop to extraction energy. All that AI-churning real estate will need electricity from somewhere and Cheatolini is allergic to renewables.
YY_Sima Qian
@Bill Arnold: The US has the largest share of the best AI researchers in the world, even if a lot of them were trained in the PRC as undergraduates or even post-graduates. It’s their managers & corporate leaders (who tend to be best at sales or accounting) that are mid-witted or dim-witted. The incompetence (or maybe just mid-wittedness) was in going all in on building scale at eye watering costs, rather than innovating on the algorithms to improve efficiency.
YY_Sima Qian
@rikyrah: The HSR network in the PRC has been marvelous since the mid-‘10s, but the Western MSM do an atrocious job of covering China in its complexity, expanse, diversity, contradictions, & rapid pace of change.
Chris
Has he ever seen an episode of Stargate? Because the number of problems caused by an artificial intelligence going off the rails on that show is not low.
Sure Lurkalot
@Baud:
Asset appreciation? Our billionaires don’t give a fuck about the real value of real assets. Not when they can borrow millions based on the upside down valuation of their ephemeral worth to support their botox lifestyles and avoid the taxman.
They need to go away like Billy Ray and eat the crab AND the lobster every day. Leave the planet to people who give a fuck about it.
Redshift
@rikyrah:
And they especially don’t want to now, because propaganda of “government is bad and you shouldn’t want anything it offers” that they’ve been pushing since Reagan is what allows officials who never deliver anything and spend all their time trolling to get reelected.
Redshift
@YY_Sima Qian:
You would think people whose only skill is accounting and management would have figured out that once they stopped giving it away for free, the about people would be willing to pay was never going to match those high costs. But no…
YY_Sima Qian
@Bill Arnold: I’ve no doubt that U.S. start ups & non-profits & academic teams will take the open source advances out of the PRC, & build on them to push the frontier further. It’s the U.S. Big Tech firms’ business model of building uncrossable moats on the foundation of massive capital investments to charge monopolistic/oligopolistic rent that are now being challenge by the money men.
lowtechcyclist
@YY_Sima Qian:
And that’s because TALOMSAATT – There’s A Lot Of Money Sloshing Around At The Top of our economy. Way too much money sloshing around at the top, more than can be invested in normal businesses, and way more than can be spent for pleasurable purposes.
We are not taxing billionaires and centimillionaires remotely near enough, is what it comes down to. Not just income, their estates need to be taxed at 95% or more, regardless of where they’ve parked their assets, so that the heirs of someone leaving behind $1B have to rough it on a mere $50M. How cruel, right? But dammit, that’s what we need to fix this over the long run.
RSA
No disagreement here. We, as a society, or maybe just as human beings, like easy explanations, and we anthropomorphize just as much as our Iron Age ancestors.
Watching a computer demo, if there’s an unexpected pause, someone will joke, “It’s thinking…” and that someone might even be the person who wrote the software.
sentient ai from the future
@YY_Sima Qian: i’ve always operated on the assumption that NVDA is growing because of bubble dynamics.
they still need to get their silicon from TSMC like everyone else, so today was a buying opportunity IMO
Westyny
@narya: Sending thoughts of serenity and comfort to you and your brother. I know several people who have survived. Going in for what I hope is my last colonoscopy tomorrow (I’m 72).
Chris
@sentient ai from the future:
I’ve thought for years that the whole concept of AI, both the actual plagiarism engines and the “basically Skynet!” fantasy that’s being sold to people, has a lot in common with the whole concept of corporations in general and corporate personhood in particular. And this is pretty much why.
In both cases, what you end up with is a fantasy buck-passing mechanism. You’ve got a fantasy that there’s a “person” at work other than the humans involved (who is both “a person” and “not a person” depending on what your argument needs to be at the time). And you’ve got the fantasy that that “person” has all the reasoning abilities of a human, but in a purely rationalist and self-interested way that removes human error, bias, and emotion from the equation, so therefore whatever it’s doing or wants you to do must be the smartest and best move.
As opposed to the reality, which is that the corporation or the AI is just a tool being used by humans to rationalize what they wanted to do anyway. (Although even these humans frequently forget that that’s what’s going on).
Xavier
@Albatrossity: there’s gotta be a lot of overlap between gamblers and crypto speculators. I was just thinking the other day that crypto has never tempted me because I’m allergic to gambling.
geg6
@Citizen Alan:
Same.
Baud
Tesla in Seattle, via Reddit
geg6
@narya:
Oh, I’m so sorry! Sending positive vibes to you all! I do know two people who beat it, so keep up hope.
Baud
@narya:
Fingers crossed.
lowtechcyclist
@rikyrah:
That’s one of the things that bugs the shit out of me. Europe and Japan have had high speed rail forever now, and China has it too. Why the fuck don’t we??
Because Republicans, that’s why. Obama tried to get us started on HSR, tried to get stimulus money used for that. The Republican governors in the states where HSR lines were proposed for, all told him to get lost. And GOP idiots like George Fucking Will were basically saying mass transit was socialism and an undermining of our great individualistic spirit. (A bunch more graves to piss on when their time comes.)
Chris
@SW:
TBF, I’m pretty sure Adam Smith would be disgusted by what we’ve turned our economy into. He wrote plenty about how dangerous the rich were when allowed to run amok.
The god of our economy isn’t Adam Smith but Ayn Rand. Market economics not as economics, but as revenge porn and self-fulfillment for a certain type of sociopath. Whose behavior becomes worse with each cycle as they become more and more disconnected from any consequences for their actions.
Ksmiami
@Redshift: people have a herd mentality when it comes to investing- it’s almost tribal.
Sure Lurkalot
@Chris:
No kidding. Corporate documents used to state more or less legitimate business purposes, like making widgets or developing real estate. Paying dividends to investors regardless of actual profits, borrowing money off stock valuations and inventing tax avoidance schemes are not business purposes but that’s what too many of these jokers do.
The “no one wants to work anymore” that Baud ridiculed above needs to be changed to “no one wants to make real money anymore.” Trump and his genius visa “wife” peddled “coins” to their griftees and their net worth increased by BILLIONS? America’s top bankers lent billions to Musk to buy an asset that is (generously) worth less than a quarter of what he grossly overpaid for it and now they’re trying to offload the debt for 90 cents on the dollar? Are there marks stupider than them that will buy their worthless debt?
Old Man Shadow
@Citizen Dave: I think the Chinese made killbots would be more efficient and reliable, but they wouldn’t have the cool pew pew stuff American made killbots would.
The Pale Scot
I would not put money against that
YY_Sima Qian
@lowtechcyclist: This is much more than just tax rate on top income earners. This is about how the economy is conceptualized or mis-conceptualized at a basic level. It’s the over-financialization that result in money replacing tangible goods/services as the unit measure of activity & success, as opposed to a convenient but limited shorthand correlation to tangible goods/services mediated by price.
It’s the necessity of huge monetary easing programs to respond to crises, to save the financial system & hope some of that will trickle down to the middle & working classes. It does, but the wealthy capital owners are bailed out & have ways to benefit the most.
NotMax
FYI (WaPo link).
RSA
This is a nice insight, which I say because I share your view about the risk of buck passing.
One way to think about it is that when you make a decision, especially a decision that has ethical implications or involves high stakes, it can be important to understand the context. Did you have the necessary knowledge and judgment? Did you have the authority? Can you take responsibility for the outcome?
When we cede decision making to an AI system without understanding how it reaches its conclusions, we’re saying yes to the first couple of questions I’ve posed above, among others, but we’re punting on the last one. An AI system can’t take responsibility for anything. For ethical reasons we shouldn’t put AI systems in a position of authority for decisions in medicine, finance, the job market, the criminal justice system, etc. without some human being taking responsibility for what they do, but this is happening more and more in the U.S. It’s to our society’s serious detriment.
YY_Sima Qian
@lowtechcyclist: OTOH, CA hasn’t covered itself in glory wrt HSR, either.
Denali5
@narya:
So sorry to hear this. Hoping for the best outcome for your brother.
Ksmiami
@Phylllis: hard disagree. If you view investing as buying a part of a business, it’s an effective way to understand and benefit from the future.
SW
@Chris: talk to the invisible hand
Shalimar
@Lee: Call it “Greenland” and you might confuse Trump into paying half a trillion dollars for it.
Kirk
1500 arrests per day, but the deportation holding facilities (dare I say concentration camps?) are not yet purchased or built.
So the next tragedy comes from undersupplied tent camps in February
cope
@Westyny: Good luck. I just had my last one at 74 and was told I will not need another. That’s a good feeling initially but really means something else will kill me before colon cancer could. I’ll still take the good news though.
TONYG
Every time I call a customer service number, the automated “voice recognition” system is totally useless. I’ll believe that Artificial Intelligence is more than vaporware when I have a useful experience with one of those systems.
Captain C
@Sure Lurkalot:
Or perhaps ones who are nastier and more willing to use extralegal means to either collect on the debt or take their payment in favors.
Bill Arnold
@Shalimar:
It’s worth a lot more than that. I’d probably start a negotiation with 20 trillion as a take it or leave it offer. But, really, that would be giving it away.
tobie
If Yashar Ali’s reporting is correct, Tillis was going to vote ‘no’ on Hegseth and promised Danielle Hegseth he would support her before he chickened out. Utter cowardice.
noncarborundum
@Belafon:
It was mentioned by implication:
Unless you want to claim that blockchain/crypto is not a recent bubble.
karen gail
Trump is now floating idea of having US’s worst criminals sent out of the country to be imprisoned; he wants a penal colony. Maybe, someone will suggest Greenland?
Captain C
@tobie: “Thom breaks his promises” would be a good campaign slogan in 2026.
Soprano2
@Baud: Karma came fast for that January 6th felon, didn’t it?
Chris
@Captain C:
It’s worth noting that the entities most able to deploy these gangster tactics to resolve economic disputes (whether it’s collecting debts or welshing on them) are national governments and the elites that control them. Putin’s Russia and, as we’re going to see over the next four years, Trump’s America.
Savor the irony: the race to the bottom in the name of unregulated markets and libertarian ideology ultimately leads us right back to the world of “the king decided all the Templars needed to burn at the stake because he owed them money and didn’t want to pay up.”
Chris
@karen gail:
So he’s supporting self-exile for himself, his crime syndicate, and his 1/6 supporters?
That sounds like a reasonable arrangement. Let’s deport them to Russia!
Baud
Google has caved
Baud
zhena gogolia
@Baud: Are you kidding me?
Elizabelle
Today is the 80th Anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.
BBC site has a lot of stories about it.
Baud
@zhena gogolia:
In 100 years, the paper maps will be collectors items on antique’s roadshow.
Elizabelle
@Baud: That is ridiculous. I hope Google changes its mind.
Baud
@Elizabelle:
It says it follows official records.
Elizabelle
@Baud: What official records?
The ones that just renamed their corporation Scrotum? Those kinds of records?
What stops us from ending up citizens of Trumplandia?
MagdaInBlack
@Elizabelle: Shhhh. He hasn’t thought of that yet.
Elizabelle
@MagdaInBlack: So you say.
We would still be hearing the screams and seeing the pearls fly from pearl clutching if Biden or Obama ever tried anything like that.
I guess it’s up to Mexico’s President Claudia Sheimbaum to come up with some great rejoinder.
Wag
@Albatrossity:
I’m probably late to the game, but I’d be willing to bet that the Ven diagram of addicted gamblers and cryptocurrious dorks has significant overlap.
Elizabelle
Apple Inc. had built up years of goodwill. Which was ruined, for most of us, with seeing Tim Cook show up at The Felon’s installation.
He and they cannot live that down. I am typing this on my beloved MacBook, but I am just disgusted with that company right now.
Oligarchs got to stop bending the knee. Have some respect for yourselves. And us.
Miss Bianca
@NotMax: I wonder if, when this turns super ugly super fast, and if/when that target proves to be impossible, even the most reactionary ICE thugs will start turning on Hair Furor.
A girl can dream…
Baud
@Elizabelle:
Soon to be TrumpBook.
thruppence
Damn. Remember when GWB was the worst president ever? I’m terrified to say it can’t get worse.
Elizabelle
@Baud: No, it’s too slim. Has been trustworthy.
And it actually works hard.
Steve LaBonne
@Elizabelle: No ethical consumption under Trumpism.
TBone
(Elno’s grandparents were officially members of the Nazis in Canada before moving to S.A.)…
https://crooksandliars.com/2025/01/northern-ontario-mp-has-had-it-elons-sht
Marc
Narya, I am so sorry to hear this. I got colon cancer when I was 36 (and small intestine at 50). I’m over 70 now and still here, so it’s not necessarily the end of the line. The big news these days is there a number vaccines in the works aimed at preventing and treating colon tumors. I’ve just finished up a trial on one and one of my nieces (my family has a genetic issue called “Lynch Syndrome”) is undergoing a trial right now for another one that directly attacks an existing tumor.
TBone
@Baud: Hillary had the proper reaction
https://bsky.app/profile/mamasissiesays.bsky.social/post/3lgae2toyz22a
Elizabelle
@Marc: Glad you are still here. There have been so many medical advances.
@ narya: hope your brother has a good outcome, and my sympathies to all of you for going through this.
TBone
Some fuck in Mississippi legislature today introduced a bill to formally legalize chattel slavery for “illegal” immigrants using their reporting system where anyone can report anyone they deem suss.
Mississippi goddamn.
Elizabelle
OK. Well, if no evening thread, will find something else. Ciao, jackals.
TBone
PSA: Rod Steiger on TCM alert!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pawnbroker_(film)
Marc
@Steve LaBonne: Getting colon cancer at 34 is very unusual, I hope she was tested for the various genetic mutations, as treatment needs vary greatly based on whatever mutations are present. In my case, surgery would be called for, but not chemo or radiation, as the cancer is unlikely to metastasize remotely.
Chris
@TBone:
One of the things the recent era’s shining a light on is just to what extent the upper class has always had a Nazi problem. Not racist, not authoritarian, Nazi. People talk about the resurgence of fascism over the last ten years, but you keep seeing these cases where it’s like “[insert famous person here] is a Nazi now, his [parents/grandparents] were Nazis back then.” What exactly are the odds that this is a random occurrence that just happened to pop up in both eras, as opposed to “the family was always Nazi-adjacent at best, they just got a little more discreet about it for a few decades?”
I mean, remember Prince Harry wearing a Nazi uniform to a costume party, way back in 2005 before the current resurgence was underway? Where the fuck does a person get the notion that that’s a good idea, except from growing up in an environment where that kind of thing is far more normalized than it pretends in public?
TBone
I read part of this explainer on the DeepSeek thing earlier, didn’t get to finish yet
https://www.fastcompany.com/91267354/deepseek-explained-china-llm-chatgpt-nvidia-microsoft-stock-ai-rattled
TBone
@Chris: good eye! Psychopathy and Nazism can be passed down through the “nurture” side of the nature/nurture argument…
John S.
@Elizabelle:
It would be nice if Senate Democrats stopped bending the knee, too. They just confirmed Trump’s odious Secretary of Treasury by 68-29. 16 Democrats supported the nomination.
Know how many Republicans approved of Tim Geithner? Only nine. Jack Lew at least managed to secure 20 Republican votes. Janet Yellen fared much better in her confirmation. But these people were at least qualified for the job.
When Steve Mnuchin was nominated, Democrats effectively boycotted the committee vote and the only Democrat to vote for him was Joe Manchin (spit). So it’s not like the Democrats are unfamiliar with staging opposition.
ETA: Looks like I’ll be calling Sen. Cantwell’s office tomorrow to express my displeasure with her vote.
different-church-lady
You tellin’ me I can put glue on pizza for a tenth of the cost?!?
different-church-lady
@Baud: I suppose that’s one very slow way this mess will get mopped up.
different-church-lady
@trollhattan: More likely to be Ow Your Balls. The cruelty as entertainment is the point.
Phylllis
@Miss Bianca: I’m one of them, with a modest stream from my 401k. He had vivid memories of the depression, which informed a lot of his thinking on the subject.
cain
@Hunter Gathers:
It’s not vaporware. You can in fact use it right now. It’s an open source LLM.
https://www.deepseek.com/
You can create an account. It works pretty decently. The fact that I don’t have to use a GPU is pretty awesome. That makes NVidia less attractive.
This bubble i going to break. But since I work for Intel, the upcoming series of chips might be an opportunity for us.
Marc
Nerd warning: I’ve downloaded DeepSeek and will try to build over the next couple of days (I’m retired!). The main issue is that it currently targets Nvidia H800 GPUs, while I just have two older H100s (picked up from a buddy when his crypto startup failed). In reality, this still requires far too much computation for someone like me to train a full LLM. They say 2.8M H800 GPU hours (H800s cost $30K+ each) or about 350 years using my two H100s. My interest, though, is in models with a few million parameters, rather than hundreds of billions. I’m curious as to whether I can take advantage of the optimizations. Big fun!
YY_Sima Qian
@Elizabelle: Corporations that have gone public are essentially value free, they accommodate themselves to whichever powers that be to maximize shareholder value.
Miss Bianca
@Phylllis: Yeah, well, memories of the Great Depression would tend to color one’s point of view on the stock market, I grant you that!
different-church-lady
@@mistermix.bsky.social: Lord knows the Justice Department ain’t gonna do it.
cain
@sentient ai from the future:
Yes, this is why when people talk about open source AI, the definition of open source is skewed. It’s not open source data without the training data. You can’t call an LLM open source if it doesn’t come with the training data used to train it.
I’m hoping that they will drop from this high and actually spend their money on realistic things. But the investors have been all aflutter about killing labor.
I keep wondering how they will sell product then if nobody can work? Will we move to a socialist/communist model?
different-church-lady
@YY_Sima Qian:
You know, like the Moon landing.
XeckyGilchrist
Yeah, I’m still not convinced it’s going to be all that useful. Good on China for making cheaper, less energy-wasteful bullshit generators, I guess.
Matt McIrvin
@lowtechcyclist: The absence of *real* high-speed rail in the Northeast Corridor, which would be the most obvious place to put it, is mostly about the difficulty of getting the rights-of-way for good HSR tracks in the expensive Northeast. That’s particularly obvious in Connecticut and Rhode Island where even the Acela trains have to creep along this picturesque but janky seashore route.
They’re gradually, gradually upgrading the sometimes century-old infrastructure that already exists, but it’s slow going. Biden’s infrastructure bill freed up a lot of federal money to develop rail lines but of course Trump has frozen all that funding. Amtrak has ordered new train sets to replace the old Amfleet locomotives and cars for the regular lines, that are supposed to come into service in the next few years, but who knows if anything happens now.
Phylllis
@Miss Bianca: It’s ingrained in us ‘kids’ as well. Do I squirrel cash away in the house? Not a lot, but yes. Do I have to tell the intrusive thought ‘now bury some in a jar in the back yard’ to shut the f*ck up? Every now and again.
Matt McIrvin
@Phylllis: then there’s “Oh, you think CASH will be worth anything? Why not GOOOOLLLLD??”
YY_Sima Qian
@Marc: There are several R1 distilled models ranging from QWen 1.5B parameters to Ilama 80B parameters. The smallest one can be run on an iPhone, & the reviews seems to be that it nevertheless performs impressively (albeit still compromised compared to the full 600+B parameters model.
You can try one of those.
cain
@YY_Sima Qian: This is the correct approach. So many things are missing from generative AI and the gaps are bad enough that I don’t know how you can build an application for a market.
I personally would like to see this fail badly and that the rebalancing will be something more sane.
cain
@Kay: Because it’s market hype and expectations. Shareholders force these companies to follow up the hype. It’s all about shareholder value.
hotshoe
@Citizen Alan:
I’m not a good person. I want every single one of the J6 marauders to die, soon. Optionally in some stupid painful way. Just die, goddammit.
If I could bake I would bake myself a cake to celebrate his death, one down, thousands more to go.
But I do appreciate that other folks — here at Balloon Juice and elsewhere in a decent world — have not spent one’s adult lifetime hating the right wing bigots and misogynists as I have. Then y’all find that new Maga-inspired hate feels bad for your own soul. You’re right about that, I’m sorry — but it’s not like I’m gonna improve myself.
Hard to remember, some thirty years ago I told a guy I couldn’t go on a date with him if he voted Republican. Bill Clinton was president. That was peacetime. And even then, I already knew: no ReThugs could ever be loved, trusted, or even tolerated in my life.
Not gonna change, no matter how much longer I might live.
Marc
Real estate in cities like Tokyo and Osaka is far more expensive than in the Northeast Corridor. The Japanese get around this through heavy use of tunneling and viaducts in urban areas. Plus, Shinkansen stations usually aren’t right downtown (Tokyo is the big exception, but the ROW was already there for conventional trains), instead they’ll bypass downtown (which given extensive Metro networks is no big deal) and build a new station in a less developed area and use that as an excuse to develop new office, retail, and residential space. We could do that, but we don’t think that far ahead.
LeftCoastYankee
Late to the party, but I had many fun times in the Crocodile back in the old days, and would have loved to see the great Neko Case there.
I remember the first time I heard her sing “Duchess” from her first album. Definitely one of those “everybody shutup, who is that?” moments in life.
cain
@YY_Sima Qian:
You’re not wrong and I say that inside a large chipmaker. Our decision making capacity has been absolutely moronic.
There was some study saying that Americans have become less intelligent. Yeah.
cain
@lowtechcyclist: Not enough Americans travel abroad. So many don’t even leave the city. Hell I know people who won’t leave the suburbs.
cain
@NotMax: JFC… they’ll just arrest anybody that looks hispanic it looks like. (I assume hispanic, but it could easily be Indian)
Glory b
@rikyrah: Then again, someone on Bluesky said for them to ask their newfound Chinese besties, “What happened on Tienamin Square?”
Poe Larity.
I’m surprised David Sacks isn’t on tv asking for an Nvidia bailout.
Something must be done.
Starfish (she/her)
@Elizabelle: Apple had years of goodwill, and then they introduced the Apple Vision Pro that no actual humans wanted.
Starfish (she/her)
@Marc: Ooh. Poor your family. Lynch syndrome sucks. One of my friends has it.
Wyatt Salamanca
@Baud:
Fuck google.com
Starfish (she/her)
@Wyatt Salamanca: Having solved none of the real problems, Republicans just rename things. This may be dumber than Freedom Fries.
Librettist
@cain:
Once a management career path became codified as a university degree rather than in-house training and development, the derp followed.
BellyCat
@sentient ai from the future: Best explanation yet. Thank you.
Starfish (she/her)
@lowtechcyclist: Remember. They let Elon make stupid tunnels just for HIS cars rather than do proper transportation.
Marc
The particular version we have is now known to be relatively easy to treat. My mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother all died young, but it was incorrect/botched treatments that got them. My sister and I have it, and it’s starting to show up in the next generation. Both vaccines seem to be working in 2nd round studies, hopefully this will be the last generation that has to worry about it.
YY_Sima Qian
@Glory b: You can also ask whether Taiwan is an independent country, or Xi Jinping is a dictator.
The DeepSeek APP & website is hosted w/in the PRC, so obviously it has to follow the CPC regimes’s censorship regulations. However, people have shown that if you run the model completely locally, it will provide fairly comprehensive answers to questions that might run afoul of the CPC regime, suggesting the underlying training data set is not censored, which makes sense.
Furthermore, since the V3 & the R1 models are fully open w/ open source codes & open weights, people can adjust the weights to cleanse any pro-CPC bias, & efforts are already underway around the world.
Generally, every single one of the LLMs have biases that one needs to navigate. Ask ChatGPT & Gemini about whether Israel was carrying out crimes against humanity or genocide in Gaza & see how they prevaricate or play dumb, or show far greater sympathy to Israeli right to security than Palestinian right to self-determination.
Then again, passing normative judgment does absolutely nothing to address the competitive challenge that the Chinese state & Chinese corporations present.
Kayla Rudbek
@Baud: and we haven’t even resolved any of the copyright infringement lawsuits over AI yet. As I said previously on Bluesky, I am waiting for the AI companies to make the mistake of feeding Disney’s copyrighted work into the hopper, and I will buy all the popcorn to eat while I watch the continuing legal education classes on those lawsuits.
YY_Sima Qian
@cain: I work for a large U.S. corporation, too, the pathologies are all to obvious.
RaflW
@Baud: It’s all just so fucking stupid. And deeply disappointing (even if not, alas, surprising).
Kayla Rudbek
@hueyplong:
@JoyceH: gambling has precedent (it ruined a lot of people in the Regency era)
Kayla Rudbek
@narya: May he have the most competent doctors and nurses, the most effective medicine, and fuck cancer
RaflW
@Bill Arnold: Unsurprised that the Quakers have more courage in a handful of Meeting Houses than all of Google with their billions of dollars and ridiculous “don’t be evil” tagline.
Kayla Rudbek
@Chris: I know damned well from bitter personal experience that the forced-birther Catholics that I went to school with are eugenicist scumbags when push comes to shove.
Marc
Thanks, that’s what I was thinking about. I’ve built a few smaller models with Llama and TensorFlow using my own datasets. I ‘m targeting lower end 32/64 bit ARM microcontrollers, but even for small models, training/fine-tuning takes a long time given the hardware I have available.
Ruckus
@SiubhanDuinne:
Yep, turnaround is fair play.
Let’s see 4 of the 5 people in my immediate family had cancer. It killed 2 of them, one other with cancer was cured and aged out at 95 yrs old, the one without cancer died of Alzheimer’s. And I’ve had two different cancers, both caught early. Life is cool. Just not always fun.
Marc
I’ll just say that some of the AI companies see a company like Disney as a big pot of money, so they ain’t gonna piss off the mouse, in fact very much the opposite.
narya
Again, thank all you jackals. I’m sorry there’s so much personal knowledge of this in the jackaltariat, and I intend to exploit it fully if needed. I hope we know more by the end of the week.
Ruckus
@Kay:
Why is no one prudent and responsible? Is it like a contagious disease? Why are so few immune?
1.One word. MONEY.
2. Money is always a contagious disease. Don’t think so? Tell me who doesn’t like money and doesn’t want more? Just because some are smart enough to not let it rule their lives…..
3. Money makes the world go round. OK it really doesn’t but a rather large portion of humanity thinks it does.
4. Money overrides many human’s need for responsibility or control or often reality. (And once again it is a contagious disease)
kdaug
@Ruckus: I think Regina Spektor put it well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fczPlmz-Vug
oldgold
I wonder if Musk’s various governmental contracts will be exempted from this pause?
Nettoyeur
When I was an MIT student in the 1970s I worked near some of the AI enthusiasts. Their big thing then was deep natural language comprehension. Eventually they gave up that grand goal and contributed to voice recognition, better help files, and computer gaming. The present AI wave is about machine learning, which comes down to automating repetitive tasks with extensive training. The challenge is to extend inference beyond that training, ie, extrapolate knowledge beyond what is known, which gets dicey fast. Irrational exuberance has driven all sorts of dreams of massive computer clusters gobbling hundreds of MW of power, which is driving the development of compact nuclear reactors etc. If Deep Seek can more or as well with much much less computing power and electricity, a lot of dreams can be fulfilled with a whole lot less investment, and those who have committed big stakes are going to take a haircut.
Nettoyeur
@sentient ai from the future: Data compression by definition sacrifices information.