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Comment Re: How is this different than 2008 (Score 2) 55

Those were bailouts. This is an investment. The US government has a long and very successful track record of funding the development of computing technology. In this case itâ(TM)s just being done more directly than when it is done by funneling money through NASA or the military.

Comment The one guy who got it right! (Score 3, Interesting) 21

Giannandrea is the one nerd in the AI world who tried to build a product around a SLM running on-device. An AI that actually considers user privacy. Apple started designing chips for on-device AI processing in the 2010s and has been shipping them in its hardware since at least 2020. This stands in stark contrast to everybody else’s plan to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on datacenters. Did he pull it off? Well, no. But he did try to find Apple an alternative to getting totally in bed with that weirdo Sam Altman. Or handing all of our texts and emails and photos over to Google. Giannandrea had a dream, and while that dream failed, maybe it will inspire a future AI boffin to make it work.

Comment Re:Frozen at starting salary of $135K? (Score 1) 54

The jobs that pay those salaries are typically in cities with a very high cost of living. $135k in London or New York isn’t a bad junior salary but people can do better on a lower salary somewhere else. And many of them do, which is why the pyramid is huge at the bottom.

Comment AI is (sadly) where the jobs will be. (Score 1) 86

The problem is that graduates who know how to research and reason and write will end up working at Starbucks. Short sighted employers are going to hire people who can cut costs by doing everything with AI, not people who want to take time doing it right. It will be a business disaster in the long run, but the CEOs don't care because they will get seven figure separation payouts.

But maybe down the line the smart people will get paid to clean up the mess. Like the good programmers who are now getting paid to fix AI generated software.

Comment Not everybody needs to go to college. (Score 1) 194

The USA used to have vocational schools. Many of them were high schools. They taught draftsmanship, printing, auto mechanics, and other trades. There were also one and two year schools that would teach people how to be plumbers and electricians and diesel mechanics. Over the last couple decades we lost that. Instead everyone was going to work in The Service Economy. Lots of those service economy jobs were either outshored or never even existed. Thousands of people who would have been fine with a vocational degree ended up tens of thousands of dollars in debt with a degree that cannot pay for itself. This is a failure of leadership by parents, principals, school boards, politicians, and of course by the colleges that marketed themselves as the newer, better vocational schools. This isn't just an American problem, it's even worse in China. We need to stop pretending that college is for everyone and return to the days of educating people for a realistic future instead of pretending that there will be an endless supply of jobs for anyone with a degree in anything.

Comment Re: If the LLM based AI bubble does pop. (Score 1) 77

Depending on when it pops many of the datacenters may not have been built. The ones that have been built might not have power, and (in the USA) by the time all those big Westinghouse reactors and small SMRs have been built the datacenters might be obsolete and not worth updating without big AI customers. So there's a possibility that they'll just end up abandoned building complexes in the desert.

Comment Here comes the next round trip! (Score 1) 83

OpenAI will be fine. They just need a few more infusions of cash from Microsoft, AMD, Nvidia, and Oracle that they can use to buy stuff from Microsoft, AMD, Nvidia, and Oracle. This can go on forever because this is not a scam. Just trust your capitalist masters, they are CEOs and in America CEOs know what's best for us all,

Comment Protect shitty Detroit cars! (Score 0) 32

BYD makes the best cars. They're also very well priced. Europe is keeping BYD out of their markets with tariffs. So BYD is setting up a plant in Europe. Trump knows that American tariffs cannot keep BYD from opening a plant here. So to make sure that Tesla, Ford, and GM keep cranking out poorly engineered and overpriced cars BYD has been put on a bad list.

Comment Re:I'm no nuclear engineer (Score 1) 113

Wind and solar are only less expensive if you can actually build them. The current president has made it clear that he will not allow any new large wind or solar projects in the USA. Given the long running tendency of the GOP to swing even further to the extreme right, and the Democratic party's long history of capitulating to the GOP, it makes little sense for businesses to make long-term plans around renewable resources. Even if Trump leaves office and is voted out by a Democrat he might be replaced by someone who's even crazier and decides to actively destroy old renewable power setups. So if you need power for your data centers it just makes more sense to bite the bullet and go with nuclear.

Also, nuclear can probably done for a lot less money if they get the government out of it. Take out public financing and pork barrel contracts and nuclear can be less expensive. Especially if the same companies build the same reactors repeatedly instead of implementing one new design on a rare occasion. We'll find out if Starlink actually gets built and it's four reactors are powered on before the AI industry goes tits up.

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