DOGE is staffed precisely by the tech elite. Like 20 year old grads who are elite programmers winning competitions, that type.
Are they not part of the tech community now? You highly overestimate the political homogeneity of the tech community, because opposing voices were previously so shut down. You would be surprised by what your co-workers are thinking deep down.
In that respect it is astonishingly successful by every measure. Musk got his global political shift and becoming co-president of the US for a causal $40 billion.
But was the complete annihilation of all safety measures on twitter and chasing away most advertisers necessary to accomplish that? Couldn’t he have bought twitter, truly kept it an open place to discuss topics with less misinformation, kept his advertisers, and still shit post and donate his way into the White House?
He undoubtedly slashed spending, but didn’t he also tank revenue? The question I have is was any of that really necessary for him to get to where he is right now?
This, the US is the country most willing to make daring bets on innovation.
Europe will not spend even 0.1% of its pension/welfare fund on big research bets. The private investors their will only want real estate investments, not fancy wancy "VC".
Young talent will flow one way from other countries to the US, because they've already seen what the grass is like on their side.
If the sentiment upthread holds, and large numbers of US academics move overseas, then relatively shortly, Europe may shift towards being more willing to make big research bets.
The population shift introduces new ideas, new perspectives, new ways of operating research, new connections towards funding and money, new views on what big bets even means.
The influx of foreign scientists and academics into America over the last century caused significant shifts in how America operated and viewed the idea of research and academia. Post-war Europeans (Von Braun's crowd being an obvious example) caused a large shift in the way America funded "big bet" projects. Saturn V perhaps. Same may happen in Europe.
Those academics can use HN from the opposite side of the Atlantic. VC money especially has the possibility of being territorially bound, yet its often far less constrained by the those types of lines in the dirt than many funding opportunities.
This theory presumes there is shortage of talented researchers in other countries, which is not the case.
There aren't countries with unfilled academic positions awaiting people from the US. If anything, the landscape is even more competitive outside the US.
The sentiments that you see online are meaningless. Ignore what people say and look at what they actually do. I guarantee you that very few US academics will move to Europe. The US has long had positive net migration from Europe, and some temporary changes to federal government funding policies won't significantly change that trend.
There's a titanic market with people wanting some uncensored local LLM/image/video generation model. This market extremely overlaps with gamers today, but will grow exponentially every year.
How big is that market you claim? Local LLM image generation already exists out off the box on latest Samsung flagship phones and it's mostly a Gimmick that gets old pretty quickly. Hardly comparable to gaming in terms of market size and profitablity.
Plus, YouTube and the Google images is already full of AI generated slop and people are already tired of it. "AI fatigue" amongst majority of general consumers is a documented thing. Gaming fatigues is not.
It is. You may know it as the "I prefer to play board games (and feel smugly superior about it) because they're ${more social, require imagination, $whatever}" crowd.
"The global gaming market size was valued at approximately USD 221.24 billion in 2024. It is forecasted to reach USD 424.23 billion by 2033, growing at a CAGR of around 6.50% during the forecast period (2025-2033)"
Farmville style games underwent similar explosive estimates of growth, up until they collapsed.
Much of the growth in gaming of late has come from exploitive dark patterns, and those dark patterns eventually stop working because users become immune to them.
>Farmville style games underwent similar explosive estimates of growth, up until they collapsed.
They did not collapse, they moved to smartphones. The "free"-to-play gacha portion of the gaming market is so successful it is most of the market. "Live service" games are literally traditional game makers trying to grab a tiny slice of that market, because it's infinitely more profitable than making actual games.
>those dark patterns eventually stop working because users become immune to them.
Really? Slot machines have been around for generations and have not become any less effective. Gambling of all forms has relied on the exact same physiological response for millennia. None of this is going away without legislation.
> Slot machines have been around for generations and have not become any less effective.
Slot machines are not a growth market. The majority of people wised to them literal generations ago, although enough people remain susceptible to maintain a handful of city economies.
> They did not collapse, they moved to smartphones
Agreed, but the dark patterns being used are different. The previous dark patterns became ineffective. The level of sophistication of psychological trickery in modern f2p games is far beyond anything Farmville ever attempted.
The rise of live service games also does not bode well for infinite growth in the industry as there's only so many hours to go around each day for playing games and even the evilest of player manipulation techniques can only squeeze so much blood from a stone.
The industry is already seeing the failure of new live service games to launch, possibly analogous to what happened in the MMO market when there was a rush of releases after WoW. With the exception of addicts, most people can only spend so many hours a day playing games.
I think he implied AI generated porn. Perhaps also other kind of images that are at odds with morality and/or the law. I'm not sure but probably Samsung phones don't let you do that.
I'm sure a lot of people see "uncensored" and think "porn" but there's a lot of stuff that e.g. Dall-E won't let you do.
Suppose you're a content creator and you need an image of a real person or something copyrighted like a lot of sports logos for your latest YouTube video's thumbnail. That kind of thing.
I'm not getting into how good or bad that is; I'm just saying I think it's a pretty common use case.
AI porn is currently cringe, just like Eliza for conversations was cringe.
The cutting edge will advance, and convincing bespoke porn of people's crushes/coworkers/bosses/enemies/toddlers will become a thing. With all the mayhem that results.
It will always be cringe due to how so-called "AI" works. Since it's fundamentally just log-likelihood optimization under the hood, it will always be a statistically most average image. Which means it will always have that characteristic "plastic" and overdone look.
The current state of the art in AI image generation was unimaginable a few years back. The idea that it'll stay as-is for the next century seems... silly.
If you're talking about some sort of non-existent sci-fi future "AI" that isn't just log-likelihood optimization, then most likely such a fantastical thing wouldn't be using NVidia's GPU with CUDA.
This hardware is only good for current-generation "AI".
I think there are a lot of non-porn uses. I see a lot of YouTube thumbnails that seem AI generated, but feature copyrighted stuff.
(example: a thumbnail for a YT video about a video game, featuring AI-generated art based on that game. because copyright reasons, in my very limited experience Dall-E won't let you do that)
I agree that AI porn doesn't seem a real market driver. With 8 billion people on Earth I know it has its fans I guess, but people barely pay for porn in the first place so I reallllly dunno how many people are paying for AI porn either directly or indirectly.
It's unclear to me if AI generated video will ever really cross the "uncanny valley." Of course, people betting against AI have lost those bets again and again but I don't know.
> No. There's already too much porn on the internet, and AI porn is cringe and will get old very fast.
I needed an uncensored model in order to, guess what, make an AI draw my niece snowboarding down a waterfall. All the online services refuse on basis that the picture contains -- oh horrors -- a child.
Yeah, and there's that story about "private window" mode in browsers because you were shopping for birthday gifts that one time. You know what I mean though.
I really don't. Censored models are so censored they're practically useless for anything but landscapes. Half of them refuse to put humans in the pictures at all.
That's not true, and only seems true because of highly selective examples.
Money can force people to work, out of the necessity of survival. What it buys is reliability. You can force a toilet cleaner to come to work day after day, and the toilets stay clean.
But human progress, social progress, economic growth, does not solely come from people grinding through their jobs. It comes from people 'giving it their all', look at the great scientists, Newton, Von Nuemann, all the people at bell labs etc. These people create titanic economic value in their wake, and they are motivated by passion, which heavily mixes altruism with self interest.
Indeed, the 'developed economies' are precisely the ones that also allow 'care' to scale, that's why we have social welfare, that's why we have free education.
Its that 'Care' doesn't scale, its that its impossible to centrally monitor and control. People in the third world work harder than the first world, and are 10% as rich, because no one in their societies care.
Public schools are notoriously uncaring. It's expensive private schools which can afford to have small class sizes, so the teachers can develop personal relationships with the students. "Care" in this context isn't just "doing something for someone's benefit"; it requires a caretaker's undivided attention, which is why it doesn't scale.
The quality floor of "reliable" work produced solely by economic self-interest is also quite vulnerable to misaligned incentives.
If you don't provide the right balance of economic incentives for quality, the rational economic answer becomes "quiet quitting", and quality plummets. And maintaining that balance of incentives is also someone's job, which needs the right economic incentives to be done well, so it's turtles all the way down (or up).
In practice, it's an unstable, patchwork combination of care and economic incentives that keeps real-life institutions in working order.
> People in the third world work harder than the first world, and are 10% as rich, because no one in their societies care.
typically they "care wrong" and the first world comes in and dismantles everything to keep raw resource prices at a price point that they like. advanced third world economies are a threat to first world prosperity.
Stockholders don't even have that much influence. Because of all the index investing, board votes are often decided by say Vanguard/Blackrock, not mom and pop investors
It is only after stocks suffer severe shocks, does private equity spring into action, and discipline executives via the threat of acquisition & firings.
So its is actually executives that can be shortsighted, not an ultra-long-termist passive investment dominated US investor base.
Once you have paying customers, you can hire an actual developer.
Claude is not 100x for any typical software work, but the biggest gains come from precisely 'non-typical work', which is previously impossible.
Imagine a domain expert, who knows a niche super well with all the weird edge cases and untapped demand. Hiring a developer for it doesn't work because.
1. The communication costs are too high, the developer won't know the business niche in depth enough to make a good product.
2. The niche is not profitable enough to risk hiring a developer.
Now LLMs allows the solo non-technical founder to make a MVP app, and put it to market to test, for very little cost and risk. Sure the app is not really extendable, may have to be heavily rewritten to expand and maintain, but hiring a developer then, will be a much lower risk task.
It doesn't even reduce developer employment this way, as now there's a ton more niche use cases being opened up, and becoming profitable enough to support developers.
How small are the autonomous attack subs? GPUs powerful enough to power autonomous decision making attack subs are going to consume a lot of energy, a lot more than what a car sized system powered by batteries can provide.
As such, only nuclear AI subs may be viable, since that gives the strategic advantage of a submarine that doesn't need to resurface for like years. But putting nuclear reactors in an autonomous AI system sounds like a terrible idea.
Human societies have spent millenia developing the infrastructure to produce reliable/trustworthy soldiers. AI is not nearly at that level in terms of trustworthiness/fault tolerance, even if they will quickly be as smart as soliders.
Even in day to day interaction, forcing someone to be silent, is far more of a gentler 'social action' than forcing someone to speak.