ben_w
9 hours ago
Man whose net worth depends on there not being problems, insists there are no problems.
Unlike all the times I've seen people say "AI doom is marketing", I can easily believe this headline is just marketing.
bigyabai
6 hours ago
Why don't you think that AI doom is marketing? Nvidia has no trouble turning profitable quarters even without crypto/AI, OpenAI and Anthropic are trapped in negative ROI.
Jensen has experience in ML, avoids hysterics, and predicted China's efficiency gains after embargoing Nvidia GPUs. If he's lying to puff up his empire, he's not doing it very well.
ben_w
6 hours ago
> Why don't you think that AI doom is marketing?
Because in the entire history of marketing, the only single example I can think of where someone tried to sell "this is so dangerous it has a good chance of killing everyone" as if this was a reason to buy what they were selling, was Edward Teller, with Project Sundial.
Project Sundial was a "back-yard bomb", a nuclear deterrent which could not be stopped by any interceptor because it would be built in (if you wanted) the middle of the USA and the "delivery" system was to detonate it in place without any movement, because the explosive yield large enough to cause a global nuclear winter all by itself.
On the other hand, cigarettes (and a lot of other drugs), fast food, social media, coal and other fossil fuels, nuclear reactors, British beef, the Church of Scientology, the Warsaw pact, X, all these react to any hint of being unsafe with very strong media (and sometimes legal) campaigns to silence critics and make themselves look like they're not only fine, they're outright good.
> Jensen has experience in ML, avoids hysterics, and predicted China's efficiency gains after embargoing Nvidia GPUs. If he's lying to puff up his empire, he's not doing it very well.
The largest company in the world by market cap? Not doing well at puffing up their empire?
bigyabai
5 hours ago
Edward Teller was known to his peers as an alarmist crank who would lie to advance his own career. Despite his notoriety, his honesty was being questioned by Los Alamos even in the 1940s.
I'm not sure how Sundial and Gnomon are relevant to this conversation, since they're among the most benign, attention-seeking designs that Teller contributed to within his lifespan.
> all these react to any hint of being unsafe with very strong media (and sometimes legal) campaigns to silence critics
Cigarettes, junk food, social media, fossil fuels, nuclear reactors and cults all have a higher ROI than OpenAI or Anthropic. They have lobbyists that defend them because the status quo is great for their profitability. OpenAI and Anthropic will objectively fail if they IPO in their current state. There is nothing that will backstop their profitability, the status quo is a disaster for their survival. They need to pay lobbyists, marketing firms and media outlets to declare a foul on the free market and justify a closer cooperation with the federal government.
Nvidia got big because they're an actual monopoly, the sort of demand-driven business that OpenAI and Anthropic envy. Since America's labs can't beat the openness of Chinese LLMs, they want the authority to be a domestic monopoly for "safety" purposes and demand a slowdown to staunch their bleeding in the global market. None of this is voodoo economics, it's the blatant reason why OpenAI and Anthropic haven't IPOed yet.