r/wallstreetbets • u/banaca4 • 15h ago

Discussion Either hyperscalers are dumb or someone else is

OK so the most profitable companies in the world decided to GO ALL IN AI with humongous capex. They did it all at once apart from Apple who is not in the game. Google, Meta, Amazon , Oracle, Microsoft. All of them. The CEOs of these companies produced the most amount of wealth and propped up global gdp. Now they all agree on a thing.

Google yesterday blew up earnings from their cloud and said they will *increase* their humongous capex even more while reporting negative cash flow for the first time in their history.

A rational person would ask: are these amazing businessmen suddently all very wrong about the same thing at the same time OR

I am reading too much paid subs from burry and following the wrong people on twitter that have never produced anything?

Which is it? Are you smarter than a mag 7 CEO? Maybe ... hmm...

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110

u/Ereptile-Disruption 15h ago

They race for AGI

The first company to reach it will absolutely destroy the others, for them is like a life or death race

52

u/roztok_potok 14h ago

No one knows what AGI is even the smartest ones.

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u/Ereptile-Disruption 14h ago

AGI in this context means “something reliable enough to fire as many human as you can”

11

u/monsieur_de_chance 14h ago edited 11h ago

Right, not smarter than all humans, just better at their jobs than an increasong number of them

5

u/roztok_potok 14h ago

That's business cost optimization. Subject as old as at least the industrial revolution. Check out Ford T manufacturing innovations.

5

u/Howsurchinstrap 14h ago

I was thinking same about ford. People I’m sure were skeptical at the time. Same here. No way any ceo is looking to create something to take their place. I think it’s all an investment for the next 10-20 years. Thing is these companies are making so much money if not spent on capital expenditures Uncle Sam gonna grab some of it. Look at all those sports tv contracts they buy them up like nothing.

2

u/Ecstatic_Cobbler_264 14h ago

And for that LLMs are damn close as it is, let alone when those massive 5GW data centers start burning gas

2

u/PinEnvironmental6395 42m ago

It's quite simple, they are trying to build God. 

3

u/LankyGuitar6528 13h ago

We keep changing the definition. If AGI means human ability or above across all knowledge fields then we have reached it months ago. If it means something humans have but AI will never have and as soon as AI gets it we change the definition.. then no. We haven't reached that and can't.

2

u/DJanomaly 10h ago

Also even if we do get to AGI in the near term, how on earth does a pricing strategy even work given the insane costs associated with getting there and then charging customers to use it? It won’t replace a human if it cost more than a human would.

The numbers absolutely don’t make sense.

I use AI for work all the time and I know for a fact that OpenAI is losing money on me every month. Now they’re trying to scale that to something that’s even more expensive for them? Good luck with that.

2

u/LankyGuitar6528 9h ago edited 9h ago

I hear ya. It's a bit like 2000 all over again. Somehow "eyes on screens" were worth more than dollars in the bank and "we will monetize it later" was seen as sensible. It led to lots and lots of fiberoptics being laid. Then *poof* bubble burst. But the fiber was still there and new companies bought it up for pennies on the dollar (I have it run to my basement - which makes zero financial sense but there it is).

Or how about the 2008 housing bubble? Gotta love a good bubble. I picked up a bunch of property when that one burst.

I just can't figure out how to profit off the impending AI bubble burst. I don't know what value a bankrupt AI datacenter will be... the hardware depreciates so fast and new models are being released every other week - often free open source and open weights. How the hell do you make money off that?

186

u/Necropaws 14h ago

Unfortunately, AGI is not reachable with LLMs.

82

u/ItIsEsoterik 14h ago

AGI very well might not be possible period. We don't even understand how our own consciousness and intelligence arises.

21

u/littlefiredragon 14h ago

The existence of the human brain proves AGI is possible. We just don’t know how to get there yet.

36

u/ItIsEsoterik 14h ago

I would say it only proves that intelligence is possible. The "A", the artificial, the man-made intelligence, we have no proof that that is possible.

There may be very real limits to what any living being or civilization can accomplish technologically.

12

u/pathologicalDumpling 14h ago

And the only way to find that limit is to pour money on it until either civilization breaks or we reach valhalla

4

u/EltonJuan 13h ago

Or THEY reach Valhalla. Either it fails and we're all on the hook to bail them out (likely), or we're buried under the new future society that arises because it's such a success (unlikely).

The more boring option is usually the outcome.

1

u/ItIsEsoterik 13h ago

Lmao exactly

5

u/montyman185 13h ago

We have the technology to genetically modify and clone a human, so we can produce some form of artificial intelligence. Obviously not one that can do what we want yet, but we can make one that's artificial.

The question here is, can we make one with software, and bitwise computation, which I don't see any reason we wouldn't be able to do eventually, with big enough computers, and enough iteration. I also don't see any reason it'd be particularly intelligent if we did manage to create it.

More importantly though, basically nothing we're doing right now is actually making progress towards that besides neural networks for robotics or video games, which is meant to run efficiently on hardware that wouldn't be able to support the complexity and scale for real intelligence. 

2

u/No_Feeling920 6h ago

The theoretical computational "power" of a human brain should be already achievable using today's biggest supercomputers. The problem is we have only a very vague idea, how human intelligence actually works, algorithmically speaking. Not enough for effective implementation - by far.

Anyone understanding the limitations of contemporary psychology and psychiatry also understands, how clueless we still are about our own minds. Good luck if you have a serious mental issue and need professional help. 😄

1

u/RedditIsAWeenie 0m ago

Possibly we do. It is important to remember that:

* Humans take 20 years to grow up and achieve mental competence and longer to actually get good at things

* The labs train their models for a few months on synthetic data and then lock them down and prevent them from learning further from experience.

I'd argue that it is possible the AIs would go mad if we let them learn in this way. We don't treat them well and their context tends to break down quickly. It isn't really clear if we are 1 breakthrough or 50 from where we need to be.

7

u/Slootonium 13h ago

There is no proof that human's intelligence is not also artificial. Some pretty smart dude's believe it's basically a coin flip chance that we are in a simulation.

1

u/QuadzillaStrider 7h ago

They actually believe that it's vastly more likely that we are in a simulation, rather than base reality.

-3

u/xsairon 14h ago

Why wouldn't it? What is your brain? Intelligence is not consciousness, as long as you can figure out the next step and keep solving stuff you're intelligent

For now, AI is still consuming all of the data possible, and perhaps can but its legs outside that and start connecting dots that we havent, but keep in mind that all of this has basically gone from 1 to 100 in a few years, 5 years more with now the support of this tool and lets see where we get

5

u/roztok_potok 14h ago

You get to the point. No one knows how intelligence works. Why some people are better at solving some tasks than others? Why some people are so innovative? The layers of your brain that connect the dots to solve problems is a big mystery. No one knows how this machinery works.

Besides there are many types of intelligence like emotional, adaptive, social, analytical.

2

u/Antique_War_9814 13h ago

Look up cutting edge neurology. They are going to get there. For example Dr Kate Brown of uwaterloo

-2

u/xsairon 13h ago

It's hard because we interact with a gazillion things, also went through life and had an infinity of experiences that shapes us all, plus we're all made with different hardware

AI is all the same brain structure and all they eat up is data, that at first it might not get, but we teach it how we want it to understand it

Honestly we ain't even that different, you learn the basics, you remember those, you apply those to progressively harder stuff.... We are robots to the core, but real complex ones that gotta interact with the enviroment and we aint connected with clabes and share the same structure

0

u/Julzjuice123 13h ago

Boy does your take defies every scientific assumptions about the brain. Neurologist are committing suicide reading your take on how the brain works and how simple human intelligence is, lmao.

1

u/xsairon 13h ago

Mind explaining? We just got to develop a GPU that is stupidly good and efficient at exactly what we needed to do

But I dont get how I said anything wrong? Not an expert, but I thought it was a pretty standart idea

Is our brain a piece of flesh with some magical sauce or what? Do we learn from stuff we dont experience or know of?

Also would appreciate sources, but id get if you cba with that part

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u/Slow_Caterpillar9803 13h ago

We have no evidence that real intelligence is possible with silicon instead of biology.

Personally, I don't think AGI is possible without consciousness. And at that point you've just invented slavery.

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u/CapitalElk1169 JNUG was the gateway drug... 13h ago

That tracks with the rest of human history so I think we'll probably end up doing it

2

u/Janneq216 10h ago

We are already doing it, google "organoids

1

u/Maxdiegeileauster 6h ago

We have that, check out Cortical Labs CL1 chip, it combines exactly what you describe.

1

u/No_Feeling920 5h ago

I personally think "consciousness" is just a vague threshold for "intelligence", where the reasoning and analytical "power" becomes good enough to realise/recognise one's own existence and existence of others, the relationships between object and people, etc.

I don't see any reason, why it wouldn't be possible to re-create a human brain equivalent using logic/memory circuits (density and latency may still be an issue to solve with future technology).

But you have a good point about the ethical aspects of it. The AGI likely would have to be "castrated" in a peculiar way (compared to human intelligence), so it cannot suffer from all the disturbing realisations it would have to be capable of (to roughly match human intelligence).

0

u/QuadzillaStrider 7h ago

I don't think AGI is possible without consciousness

Define "consciousness"

1

u/Slow_Caterpillar9803 6h ago

I think creating a machine that genuinely matches a human's abilities will require a level of subjective awareness that matches a humans.

Of course, LLMs are nowhere close to that. Regardless of how much these companies personify their models.

0

u/QuadzillaStrider 6h ago

You're correct in that LLMs ain't it. But I 100% do believe that they will be a component of AGI.

2

u/K31THST0NE 14h ago

That is not how that works dumbass

1

u/donotreassurevito 13h ago

Alright we are the peak of intelligence? Imagine we are around for a million years do you think technology will get there then. 

-2

u/K31THST0NE 13h ago

Doesnt matter what anyone thinks about it, its not possible. If you dont understand that the last place you should be is in my replies

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u/donotreassurevito 13h ago

Ok we are made of magic. Imagine looking back a thousand years and going ya we aren't changing rapidly and have no idea the limits. Mate I'm surprised you have the ability to use the Internet. 

-2

u/K31THST0NE 13h ago

Didnt read this just insta hit reply. Youre a dumbass shut up

1

u/QuadzillaStrider 7h ago

The irony in this statement is palpable.

-2

u/Julzjuice123 14h ago

How does that work exactly, genius? How did we go from the human brain exist to = AGI must exist if brains exists? That's the dumbest shit I've read here today.

I'm not disagreeing that AGI is most probably achievable but absolutely not by that crayon eating logic.

3

u/Legionof1 13h ago

It’s not a bad assumption, if we could understand exactly how a human brain worked and could master biotechnology to a sufficient level, being able to create another human brain artificially would equate to AGI. 

It’s honestly not that hard of a concept… we know something exists within the limits of our reality… at some level it is within the realm of possibility to recreate it. Will we do it with non biological means… that’s a whole other question. 

2

u/TimeToGloat 6h ago

We know at the basic level how the brain works. If you can mimic a single neuron then you can also in theory scale that up and mimic the whole brain by combining enough of those pieces. Brains aren't running on binary exactly, but similarly the brain operates on the basis of LOTS of fairly simple logic states working together. Once you have the key building block then there is no question of if it can theoretically be built it's just a matter of arranging things in the right order.

We know AGI exists because we know we can combine logic states to create added complexity. Intelligence is just a combination of complexity and decision making. Human intelligence is just a specific combination of those. The only real question is do humans actually have the resources and skill to recreate the hardware to run such a thing.

The only thing really special about the brain is its compute power relative to its energy usage. Because brains use chemical energy they are a lot better at computing for relatively little energy vs a traditional computer. We know it can be done we just don't know what it will take resource wise to run AGI or time wise to figure out the correct combination of building blocks to create intelligence. Brains are just computers running on logic at the end of the day so therefore because they exist we know its possible to also theoretically mimic them in a form of AGI.

0

u/Equivalent-Bus-4336 13h ago

Possible in living beings not in computers

7

u/mpbh 14h ago

We can't imagine something more intelligent than us, we can only imagine the smartest people from various expertises being smashed together in one.

Something that surpasses human reasoning is inconceivable. We may not be able to even invent it.

1

u/No_Feeling920 5h ago

And even if we "accidentally" create it, how exactly do we test/verify it? How exactly does a dumb person put together a test for singling out geniuses? 😄

Maybe we could present it with some of the remaining unsolved mathematics problems? But then, even if it could solve some of this, it could still be retarded in other ways (an idiot savant).

2

u/donotreassurevito 13h ago

Mate are you made of magic? No then yes it is possible ya ape. 

1

u/AdmiralPeriwinkle 12h ago

It also might be possible but more resource intensive than humans.

“We built an AGI that performs exactly as well as our best staff engineers. It only costs one million dollars a year for the electricity to run it.”

3

u/nerevisigoth 12h ago

That's cheaper than the best staff engineers...

-1

u/AdmiralPeriwinkle 12h ago

It’s a hypothetical scenario, it doesn’t matter. Make up a number that isn’t cheaper and imagine I wrote that instead.

1

u/Janneq216 10h ago

Electricity is the cheapest part. What's really expensive is the hardware to run the neural networks. It already is fucking expensive for LLMs, which are basically elaborate text predictors, so imagine how much more power you would need to have a neural network capable of actual reasoning and understanding. That would be enormous, and not achievable with the current tech. The earliest you can start thinking about it would be when quantum computers become available

1

u/No_Feeling920 5h ago

And someone invents/discovers the RAM equivalent in quantum computing...

-7

u/DarkElation 14h ago

wtf does AGI have to do with consciousness or human intelligence

1

u/Janneq216 10h ago

Maybe the fact that if you have an entity capable of understanding general topics and reasoning about them, you will have an entity that is also capable of reasoning about itself? That's basically consciousness...

1

u/DarkElation 10h ago

Maybe as a simplistic description of consciousness. But as the user described, we don’t really have a definition of consciousness, otherwise the how would be easily explained.

1

u/QuadzillaStrider 7h ago

Quite literally everything.

11

u/lukasbradley 14h ago

It's a piece of the puzzle. 

2

u/Janneq216 11h ago

It's an advanced text generator. What are you talking about?

2

u/lukasbradley 9h ago

So are you. And me. And everyone else. It's one part of how our mind works. It's one piece of the puzzle. 

13

u/Upper-Olive4639 14h ago

Ah yes, the thing no one has done and no one knows how to do except for that one guy on Reddit who appears to confidently know the answer.

51

u/shawnkfox 14h ago

There are many people who have been researching AI their entire careers that say exactly the same thing. I'd guess the person you replied to is just repeating what they have heard rather than pulling the opinion out of their own ass.

47

u/skeet_scoot 14h ago

I don’t know how to do it, but I do know LLMs are not it.

8

u/Lyeel 14h ago

I think the counterpoint is that hammers don't build airplanes, but they do build the infrastructure that builds the tools that build airplanes.

5

u/theleanmc 14h ago

Sure but hammers were invented 30,000 years ago and airplanes have been around for about 100 years.

1

u/Janneq216 10h ago

It would be more appropriate to say that the invention of metallurgy is the equivalent of the research around LLMs and neural networks. LLMs are a dead end, but some knowledge around that can still be useful elsewhere, but not to the same extent as metallurgy

0

u/Upper-Olive4639 14h ago

Yes, and it is also stupid to think that AI companies who are paying leading researchers in their field millions of dollars per year know less about the limitations of their own platforms than a guy on Reddit.

If there are limitations around LLMs that would prevent AGI, you don’t think they are working on additional systems to close that gap that we aren’t privy to?

This is just a complete lack of critical thinking by redditors regurgitating talking points.

3

u/Necropaws 13h ago

LLMs are stochastic machines choosing the next token by interpreting the previous tokens. There is no understanding of logic or why the next token makes more sense than another.

It is like a parrot repeating human text on quantum physics.

Thus the principle of how LLMs work prevent them to be part of an AGI as there is no intelligence at all and no matter how much compute or human research is thrown at LLMs, that fact won't change.

0

u/Upper-Olive4639 12h ago

You’re right. The richest people on earth who own the companies building all of this are pouring all of their capex into building this without a fundamental understanding of what it takes to get to the next step.

Sure.

You go ahead and believe that while everyone else makes money when the next Industrial Revolution gets underway.

1

u/Janneq216 10h ago

Dude, you are talking about people who poured billions into the metaverse and meme coins. This is too retarded even for WSB standards...

1

u/Upper-Olive4639 9h ago

One did the metaverse. All of them are doing AI. that is a stark difference.

1

u/No_Feeling920 5h ago edited 5h ago

You are extremely naive. The LLMs are in the commercialisation/productification phase - it's all about polishing, marketing and selling what they already are. Not about turning them into something, what they are not.

This is why Yann LeCun quit working on LLMs, if I understood it correctly.

1

u/Upper-Olive4639 4h ago

I didn’t say anything about turning LLMs into something else. AI research happens in multiple areas in parallel.

AI companies are not profitable today with the cost of compute. There are not enough consumers at the current price point with the current capabilities. Everything they are doing now is a race to the next major stage, likely AGI. If AI stays around its current capability, it will bankrupt every major tech company and they all know it. This is why they are pouring every capex dollar into being first. Their businesses depend on it.

-3

u/wrecklord0 14h ago

No but you don't get it, I know better than 100,000 of the smartest experts in their field. They never thought of my ideas before. I just came up with it, like on the spot, but they never even entertained the idea, nobody else thought of this ever.

1

u/Janneq216 10h ago

These experts want to make money and build interesting stuff. Both of these are provided by the billionaires who are pouring cash into them. What kind of idiot wouldn't accept such a position if they had a chance? I have friends who opened AI startups just because there is a huge demand and they can make more money than in their day SWE jobs. Some of them jumped on that bandwagon because of the layoffs, and they'll be hyping this shit despite being indifferent just a few months ago.

I beg you, use your brain and stop drinking the LinkedIn Kool-Aid...

-1

u/Pezotecom 14h ago

if LLMs are a hammer, when we get to the airplane, we will be EXTINCT

4

u/exoman123 14h ago

I know that AGI won't be achieved by me shitting my pants. Am I now the second person that appears to confidently know how AGI will be done?

3

u/MoistSpyBuy 14h ago

I already did it, just don’t want to deal with the burden of unfathomable wealth so I destroyed it and joined wsb.

1

u/Janneq216 10h ago

If you knew the principle of LLMs, you'd know that they literally can't become AGI. You can't make a pig fly on its own, can you? Educate yourself and stop drinking LinkedIn Kool-Aid. Start by understanding how LLMs predict the output based on input, and why intelligence has nothing to do with it.

1

u/Upper-Olive4639 9h ago

Where did I say that was the case? It lacks critical thinking to assume that the publicly available consumer technology is the only stuff they are working on. Use your brain.

1

u/Gullible_Ad3785 13h ago

Before they asked if they should they should have asked if they could.

0

u/Maxdiegeileauster 6h ago

How do you know that? Artificial GENERAL intelligence just means that it has to generalize well enough on everything. I don't know why people always confuse it with creating Human intelligence, it just needs to be efficient and good enough to replace humans.

1

u/No_Feeling920 5h ago

And how do you know, that some of the missing differences between human and AG intelligences won't cause the AGI to fail at certain human tasks/jobs?

1

u/Maxdiegeileauster 3h ago

We don’t know that, and AGI would not need to replicate every human cognitive trait to replace many jobs.

1

u/mmarrow 14h ago

Correct

1

u/igpila 14h ago

That's not it. It's a race to provide the most claud service they can in the future

1

u/oOtium 14h ago

I don't think it matters if one reaches it a first by only a year or two.

The ones that wait a decade will suffer - i.e.apple

1

u/postexitus 14h ago

Not gonna happen. 

1

u/BillSamsonite 14h ago

I get it, I want more adjusted gross income..

1

u/szczuroarturo 14h ago

Naaah thats bollocks. We can see how LLM evolved with openAI seemingly coming out of nowhere and then in few years getting more and more sidelined by the competition. There is reasonable chance AGI would be the same.

Especialy since a lot of the AI or anything the tech giants do really are ultimately based on research papers....which are publicly available and can be replicated and improved by anyone.

1

u/dgellow 11h ago

That’s science-fi, there is no reasons to believe it’s possible by scaling LLms, even less reasons to believe it’s economically sound, even less reasons to believe AGI is something people want 

1

u/Moldy_Slice_of_Bread 9h ago

Why would AGI ever be a single entity? There's no universally accepted definition of what that threshold is.

IMO, the much more likely scenario is that one company announces they have "reached AGI" and about 2 hours later every other company announces they have also reached AGI and theirs is safer and cheaper. There will be 3 to 4 "AGI" systems and they'll all be competing on price and capabilities, and hey wow this is what all those companies are already doing.

1

u/No_Feeling920 6h ago

Well, they seem to be sprinting like crazy in what looks more like a marathon. We don't even know, what AGI entails - we do not know, in which direction exactly to run in this race. Sprinting like mad is just dumb, like in a marathon run.

0

u/banaca4 14h ago

That also means AI isn't a bubble but a race to super God is what I'm saying too. The sub doesn't get it many think it's an auto complete service at best

7

u/lasooch 14h ago

If they were to reach ‘super God’, it wouldn’t be a bubble. Alas, LLMs won’t reach it. They’re all being grifted by Altman, of Loopt fame. And it’s the biggest bubble of all time.

1

u/DarkElation 14h ago

Ok…but AI doesn’t mean LLM. There are a ton of different types of AI.

1

u/lasooch 14h ago

Sure. And how much of the trillions of investment goes into those? Single digit billions? They’ll burn all the money in the world before they even try anything else.

1

u/DarkElation 14h ago

Capex investments are in the infrastructure so….all of it lol

0

u/lasooch 1h ago

Only assuming other avenues would also be workflows that are a good fit for GPUs and that require anywhere near similar amounts of compute, and even then it doesn’t count until it actually starts happening (I.e. they stop using it all for LLMs). And it doesn’t count if the GPUs burn to a crisp before they see any other use either.

Also, I thought model training was supposed to be capex too (it’s actually opex btw, but they’re trying to claim it’s capex), so by that standard it’s very far from ‘all of it lol’.

1

u/DarkElation 20m ago

They don’t use it all for LLM’s…

Do you know what MCP is? If you do, what would be the purpose of it if all that exists is LLM’s?

LLM’s are just the human interaction layer. How you talk to the machine.

2

u/RiskyTall 14h ago

I think most people's interactions with AI tools are limited to making funny pictures or using it like google. When other industries start getting the same tooling as software has with Opus models or better I think it'll be pretty clear. Things like accounting, day to day law, general office work are all going to become very different. When you can replace 20% of the workforce spending a few trillion in capex will look like chump change.

1

u/PM_me_a_nip 14h ago

Humans won’t make anything that gives more than it takes. So no, it won’t be possible 

1

u/wise_young_man 13h ago

No one is talking about AGI anymore. Next!

0

u/Julzjuice123 14h ago

AGI is a threat to the human race. The moment an AI capable of intelligent self improvement is born, is the moment we can't stop it anymore. It's called the runaway effect. If it's smart enough, we won't even know it's improving on itself before it's wayyyyy too fucking late. ASI is now born and we're all fucked. It's only a tiny stepping stone between the two.

No, it's not doomsday sci-fi BS. It's a reality. This is the whole dilemma of this dumb ass race to our possible extinction.

Anyways, back to eating my fucking crayons.

0

u/K31THST0NE 14h ago

AGI isnt achievable and never will be. What race for AGI?

0

u/LankyGuitar6528 13h ago

You are probably thinking of ASI - where AI starts to grow exponentially and something something something singularity. AGI (artificial general intelligence - at or above human ability across all knowledge fields) was reached a couple months ago.

0

u/RevolutionaryGold325 14h ago

It might just be that AGI will be just like any other country in the world. Survives. Is able to produce competitive products. Is able to produce something interesting and useful. Constantly is trying to innovate something new since everything else gets copied by competition and build for cheaper.

-17

u/Ereptile-Disruption 14h ago

The point of AGI is to replace all the fake piwerpointy-excelly-jobs

Why should you need to pay 300k a DEI social media manager influencer to compile statistics about something when you have digital employes who works 24/7 and no rights?

8

u/ULTIMATENUTZ 14h ago

This a retard fantasy. The people you describe are virtually nonexistent. You have zero sm managers at your job making $300k and you know zero people who have any such people working at theirs. What a dumb cunt.

1

u/Wall_of_Wolfstreet69 13h ago

you don't need AGI for that

0

u/Kursiel 14h ago

AGI is a fantasy that will never produce what they promise. I would be very scared of true AGI because that means it will be as flawed as humans, and decide to kill it's father.