Growth companies not paying dividends is normal and they're likely many years out from when they'd need to seriously consider it. I don't think thats a big deal.
I strongly doubt it will even provide us with a roof over our heads. In an unconstrained market, the pressure to extract as much as possible from the UBI will be enormous. The amount of UBI will probably always lag years behind the actual amount required to create a liveable situation, and increasing its amount will be a constant political struggle.
UBI in an unconstrained market is nothing else than enslavement.
Fair and progressive taxation and proper social systems are far more efficient. UBI is just an excuse to get rid of social systems and leave everyone individually stranded with problems no one can solve alone.
UBI could be done a lot of different ways, but it's a natural fit with progressive taxes. A UBI funded by taxes makes taxes more progressive. It's somewhat like the standard tax deduction, except you still get it if you don't pay any tax.
It keeps the wolf from the door, but you still need to save enough to retire on.
The US standard tax deduction amounts to about $1300 a month. Suppose that were instead paid out automatically? For the employed, the government check and increased paycheck withholding (if the standard deduction were removed) would largely cancel out. But if you lose your job, you still get the government check.
You could also see this as a reworking of unemployment benefits so that everyone always qualifies for them and they don't run out.
Making a good progressive tax scale is a task which a freshmen can do in a hour. The problem is not a better tax scale, the problem is how to find actual shit to tax. Doing nothing, we have the modern state of economy, when there are poor people having small to no tax basis, then "middle(lol)" class exposing all their assets and funds fully to the tax office and paying maximum taxes on this planet among everyone because of that, and then passing middle class we have people becoming richer and richer but "somehow" paying fewer and fewer taxes, culminating in billionaires who legally have zero assets, zero saving and zero income. You tax tax such a person 5%, or 50% or over 9000%, the end math will always be zero. Good luck funding UBI from taxing billionaires :) . And salaried people actually paying max bracket taxes already can't fund the whole planet by themselves, math is not mathing here.
One thing that might help is closing loopholes around unrealized capital gains. Suppose that, as an alternative to taxing capital gains on its stock, a startup could deposit 20% of issued stock into a sovereign wealth fund? For a company with all its growth ahead of it, this is roughly equivalent and can’t be avoided later (not even with buy, borrow, die) because it’s already been paid. And yet, shareholders would probably find it attractive because they don’t pay the tax themselves.
If other countries were that friendly to startups, people would already be doing it.
Startups get done in the US because of the network effect: this is where the other startups are, and where the people who fund startups are. It's hard for them all to de-camp at once to a different country, especially since most of the countries they'd want to go to already have higher taxes than the US.
There's probably some limit beyond which people would leave anyway -- presumably, lower than 100%. I don't know if they'd leave over 20%. But I bet you could demand a 5-10% stake, and get many threats but few actual departures.
Let’s say it’s voluntary and it only applies to whichever class of stock you designate, which can be non-voting. You use it for employee stock or to sell stock to investors who want a tax-free investment.
> UBI in an unconstrained market is nothing else than enslavement.
How? It’s going to be a better situation than the current situation where people just become homeless and live on the streets. Yes, rent and food will cost more but there will always be vendors willing to make a reasonable margin.
If you're talking about introducing it somewhere where there's currently no social safety net, sure. Where I live if you were to replace the existing safety net with say £1k a month (the level of our state pension, which is widely considered a time bomb of unaffordability), that's like a million instant homeless people.
Those price increases will increase the pressure to use cheaper / free models (commoditization), thus cutting into the revenue projections of the frontier model vendors. Its going to be exciting to see what happens to these huge investments and valuations.
> increase the pressure to use cheaper / free models
Not necessarily. Many factors go into what models are available at enterprise level. If you look around, not many companies (everywhere around the world) use DeepSeek models even though they are significantly cheaper.
I think part of this is due to the fact that the closest competition cheap but comparable intelligence models are all mostly Chinese models.
Think what you want but even when hosted in the US, at the enterprise level going all in on that would be a legal and/or political death sentence.
We need better open source/cheap but high intelligence western models that are proven to work well in agent if tooling and have strong legal agreements for enterprise to even consider it.
Because what is aligned, how and for whom? And who decides how that alignment should look like? There are probably many domains in which required alignment is in conflict with each other (e.g. using LLMs for warfare vs. ethically based domains). I can't imagine how this can be viable on the required scale (like one model per domain) for the already huge investments.
It is a fundamental problem. Consider the following
- in 2-3 years, it will be cheap enough and powerful enough for enormous, state sponsored agentic systems to monitor every single camera and satellite feed at once, globally. It will be the most intense state surveillance technology the world has seen. Consider Stasi needed hoards of informants and people in vans sitting outside your house. Patriot act surveillance had 2000s technology.
- We already have censorship and state values in Chinese models (and have for awhile, ask Qwen about “sensitive” issues like Taiwan)
- I think you will see more and more governments putting their finger on the scale and exerting more control on alignment. They view it as existential and too risky to trust Silicon Valley nerds to not screw up the technology for what they want to use it for which is violence (war, domestic spying and policing).
- we’re in a golden age where things have not gotten too bad. But e.g. we’re already seeing Palintir do this in Ukraine trying to get AI to work for e.g. drone warfare with what they claim is mixed success.
- the technical problem of alignment conditions on one or more value systems (e.g. people work on conditional alignment of models to more alignment systems, inferring which one from user behavior). That does not remove the ugliness of being forced to push the model towards value systems that are not contradictory and arguably unethical
"After 16 minutes and 41 seconds, it came back" ... "further 47 minutes and 39 seconds" ... "After 13 minutes and 33 seconds" ... "After 9 minutes and 12 seconds" ... "After 31 minutes and 40 seconds" ... plus other computations
Anyone spotting the issue here? What did that really cost?
I am not against compute being used for scientific or other important problems. We did that before LLMs. However, the major LLM gatekeepers want to make all industries and companies dependent on their models. And, at some point, they need to charge them the actual, unsubsidized costs for the compute. In the meantime, companies restructure in the hopes that the compute costs remain cheap.
> "After 16 minutes and 41 seconds, it came back" ... "further 47 minutes and 39 seconds" ... "After 13 minutes and 33 seconds" ... "After 9 minutes and 12 seconds" ... "After 31 minutes and 40 seconds" ... plus other computations
Anyone spotting the issue here? What did that really cost?
Whatever the Joules... (convert to $ using your preferred benchmark price) it is a fraction to what it might take a human Ph. D. weeks to feed and sustain themselves when working on the same problem. The economics on LLMs is just unbeatable (sadly) when compared to us humans.
Compute in science was already subsidized by public funding or by donations. Most supercomputers are financed this way. And that's a good thing. If you have a good science problem that can be computed, apply for compute time. There is nothing wrong to apply that to LLMs as well, like I wrote in my initial post. The human is still required to identity problems that are worth to be computed, to create prompts that the LLM can act on, and to verify results. But, OpenAI providing compute for basically free is still tied to a different incentive: to fuel the hype and to capture the market, while distorting/obfuscating the real costs. That's also the reason for why we cannot claim that 'economics on LLMs is just unbeatable'. It depends on the problem, the reason for a prompt.
Yes I agree and this is what I meant. The cost of electricity, petroleum, transportation, the cost of goods brought in from around the world to feed and clothe the human and so on.
The real power required to support a human life in a developed country is a lot. Wattage for the human brain is definitely miniscule in comparison.
Still not as bad for the environment as animal agriculture, and animal agriculture is absolutely not necessary and only causes harm and suffering for taste pleasure. At least with LLMs we get many positive advancements from them. I don't see these sorts of comments every time someone posts a burger review.
I wonder how this figure was settled. Is it based on consumer pricing? Can't Microsoft and OpenAI just make a number up, aside from a minimum to cover operating costs? When is the number just a marketing ploy to make it seem huge, important and inevitable (and too big to fail)?
That's why there's tomes of overlapping AGENTS.slop folders and 100K lines of "docslop" and people inventing "memoryslop" systems to reduce this token burden. But the agents can't really distill even a simple instruction like "don't delete prod" because those three words (who knows how many tokens) are the simplest that that expression can get and the ai needs to "reread" that and every other instruction to "proceed according to the instructions". It never learns anything or gets into good habits. It's very clear from these kinds of threads that concepts of "don't" and "do" are not breaking through to the actions the bot performs. It can't connect its own output or its effects with its model context.
Sounds like 'never' to me.
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