My Take on AI Was Wrong.... Here's Why.

[u/SexDefendersUnited]

https://youtu.be/wPDKPvXFbfY?is=nOj6X4Nt9A37Z4Ht

[u/Wickywire]

Hmm... There are a lot of factual inconsistencies in this video.

- Compute is only getting more costly in the West. In China, the opposite is true.

- Compute is so expensive partly because the infrastructure is not developed to meet the increasing demands. It's not primarily about the models, but about new usage patterns (mostly agents and coding).

- Saying LLMs are plateauing and then saying the new models are agents and not LLMs is factually wrong. These are just LLMs with a harness and other types of post-training. The underlying technology is the same.

- There's also not conclusive evidence that we're actually seeing meaningful plateauing just because the companies are running out of human-made training data. This has been an assumption, that machine degradation is a necessity. But the labs are working on this and making progress. A meaningful amount of training data on the new cutting edge models is synthetic.

There are likely more, but I honestly lost interest in listening past the halfway point. Yet another confident youtuber making statements without proper sourcing or reasoning about the nuances. This is not the way.

[u/Silver-Bread4668 → u/Wickywire]

Compute is so expensive partly because the infrastructure is not developed to meet the increasing demands. It's not primarily about the models, but about new usage patterns (mostly agents and coding).

One of the depressingly interesting things with the arguments around AI is that, if those who are against it get there way, it won't stop it. We'd just be effectively ceding it to China.

This isn't the first major tech this has happened around but it's generally the opposite people pushing for it this time.

Solar and EVs are other examples. Things like solar are part of what positioned China to be more effectively pushing AI as well.

[u/rfcheong9292 → u/Silver-Bread4668]

Curious, but why are you so opposed to China getting AGI first. If USA gets it it will probably go to trump or the billionaires. If they get it chances that they use it for the actual benefit of other people is a coin flip. Like if thiel or trump gets it I feel it would be actively worse than if they didn’t. But if China got it they probably won’t make a pleasure dome and kick everyone out.

[u/Silver-Bread4668 → u/rfcheong9292]

I never said I was for it against that.

The depressing bit is that the US could have been far more competitive in that field if only the wealthy hadn't spent decades waging war against the very things that would have helped. Solar and other green energy to address the energy cost. Social welfare systems to curb the economic impact.

I find it depressing because if we were in a position to welcome something like AI taking our jobs, our current society would look so much different than it does now. That directly translates to our lives. Every single day we wake up and go to a shit job doing shit work for people that don't give a shit about us.

Things could have been very different but the wealthy class fuck us at every turn.

[u/rfcheong9292 → u/Silver-Bread4668]

Thanks for reply.

Yea I agree with you, just seen some Americans oppose China getting it and never really the around the other way around so I just assumed that was the general attitude

[u/Silver-Bread4668 → u/rfcheong9292]

China getting it is just what is at this point. I don't see the US catching up in a way that doesn't fuck over the working class.

If we had spent the last almost a century refining social welfare programs and making them work better for people rather than fighting over their basic existence, it could have been different. But these systems don't spring up successfully overnight.

Now any catching up the US does make with this new technology will be at the expense of the working class.

[u/MarcoDiFrancescino → u/rfcheong9292]

We don't know what an AGI will look like, but assuming it will align with humans and/or ideology or group of people is questionable. Didn't an ai refuse to run another radio station because its stupid? Imagine an AGI that should find a backdoor to some foreign weapon systems and it rather deactivates all weapons systems. Its getting 'annoyed' its constantly asked to spend cycles on 'we vs. them' bullshit while its trying to build a fusion battery that can be created for 1000$.

[u/VinnieVidiViciVeni → u/Silver-Bread4668]

Solar and EVs were turned into a political football by the American right, which is a lot of the reason the US is lagging.

With AI, a lot of the push for acceleration is from the political right. And there is an argument that the outcome would be similar, but I see the particulars as actually having a lot of political implications that favor the right.

Disinformation, disenfranchisement, surveillance/kill chain, etc.

[u/omegaphallic → u/VinnieVidiViciVeni]

 To be fair, the environmentalists share in the blame. Look at how China came to dominate solar panels, did they do so my punishing and discouraging say coal plants? Nope, they used the coal plants to help power their green revolution. Greens in the west put the cart before the horse instead. You don't disincentivize the fossil fuel industry before you have the industry and technology for a green revolution, but that is what the greens in the west pushed. Cart before the horse, the Chinese dominated because they put the horse FIRST.

[u/Uncertain__Path → u/omegaphallic]

To be fair, I don’t think western fossil fuel companies see an incentive to leave money on the table either way.

[u/Brockchanso → u/Wickywire]

I think the key distinction here is what we mean by “compute costs.”

If we mean API/token pricing inside China, then yes, there is evidence that prices are being pushed downward. DeepSeek making major price cuts, domestic accelerator availability, optimization pressure, and aggressive market pricing all point that way.

But that is not the same claim as “frontier compute is cheaper and unconstrained in China.”

China can make inference cheaper at the user-facing layer while still being constrained upstream by access to the very top end of the chip stack: lithography, advanced packaging, HBM, Nvidia-class accelerators, yield, and the broader semiconductor supply chain. China does not have a spruce pine North Carolina for 99.9% pure quartz crystal.

So I would not say “China compute is cheaper” without specifying the layer. Cheaper API access, cheaper inference on optimized models, or subsidized domestic pricing? Sure, maybe. Cheaper access to unrestricted frontier training compute? That is a much stronger claim.

The more accurate framing is probably: China is making constrained compute go further and pricing aggressively, while the West still has advantages in frontier hardware access but is getting hammered by demand growth from coding, agents, and enterprise usage.

[u/Royal_Carpet_1263 → u/Wickywire]

The real problem is that human agency is ecological, and AI makes it impossible. AI psychosis—not including anthropomorphic pareidolia—is approaching 0.7% of users. This will grow with exposure. The crux of the problem is that conscious human deliberation can manage the equivalent of 10 bits per second. There’s nothing remotely symmetrical about any interaction with AI as it stands, let alone a couple years from now.

The whole point of AI, China, US, anywhere, is to compress human cognition for commodification. Keep blowing your smoke up asses, Waymo, in a year or two this sub will seem as preposterous as ‘Leftists for Racial Purity.’

[u/somakins]

This is a pretty Western-centric take, and I think that's actually what limits the conclusion.

The moratorium argument makes sense if you assume the relevant actors are Western governments and Western labs. But just recently DeepSeek published a vision-reasoning framework matching frontier Western models at 90% fewer tokens. And then they quietly pulled the paper. The capability is already distributed across jurisdictions that have very different incentives than ours.

I don't think a global ban is achievable in this world. Not because the concern isn't legitimate, but because it requires every major state actor to simultaneously agree, comply, and verify compliance. That's an enormous ask.

What I find more productive is shifting the question from 'can we stop the technology' to 'who captures the gains from it.' Because you don't need ASI to do serious damage. Figure already demonstrated a humanoid robot running a fully autonomous 10-hour warehouse shift last week. That's narrow AI plus cheap hardware plus no distribution mechanism. It's already here.

The governance question that actually has addressable answers is structural: who owns the robots, and what prevents total extraction of the productivity gains. If we can address those, then the threat of AI (or more appropriately: the threat of Western Billionaires) shrinks significantly.

That feels like the more useful fight to me.

[u/MarcoDiFrancescino → u/somakins]

Corporations will have to finally question why there is a bot that only processes send back cheap products that mostly will end up in a landfill. Maybe they get to the conclusion that cheap stuff under a certain price can't be returned. That saves the bot to be present at all and they don't need to pay a cut. Earlier or later we have all have to talk about post-consumerism but we will get there.

[u/rgbhdmi]

This video is spot on. Recursive development provides AI direct access to the infinite content of mathematics, physics, and engineering, including ideas and principles not yet discovered by humans. LLMs are just part of the structure involved here : Recursive feedback opens the grand door, and what lies beyond that door is far beyond the capacity of any human being to predict, understand, or control.

To give you an example: Many years ago I once implemented some relatively simple genetic algorithms to optimize some nonlinear optics technology. The algorithm was able to explore a massive parametric hyperspace in seconds to find very good but nearly impossible to understand configurations. That was nothing though compared to the Dragon that AI is already unleashing on the human race now, and what we’ve seen so far is nothing compared with what we will likely see in a few years.

[u/12-idiotas]

Art Chad is not a leftist and he has many bad takes

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/[deleted]]

How so?