Matt E Allen

I recently asked Marcus and two other skeptics to predict the impact of generative A.I. on the economy in the coming years. “This is a fifty-billion-dollar market, not a trillion-dollar market,” Ed Zitron, a technology analyst who hosts the “Better Offline” podcast, told me. Marcus agreed: “A fifty-billion-dollar market, maybe a hundred.” The linguistics professor Emily Bender, who co-authored a well-known critique of early language models, told me that “the impacts will depend on how many in the management class fall for the hype from the people selling this tech, and retool their workplaces around it.” She added, “The more this happens, the worse off everyone will be.” Such views have been portrayed as unrealistic—Nate Silver once replied to an Ed Zitron tweet by writing, “old man yells at cloud vibes”—while we readily accepted the grandiose visions of tech C.E.O.s. Maybe that’s starting to change. If these moderate views of A.I. are right, then in the next few years A.I. tools will make steady but gradual advances. Many people will use A.I. on a regular but limited basis, whether to look up information or to speed up certain annoying tasks, such as summarizing a report or writing the rough draft of an event agenda. Certain fields, like programming and academia, will change dramatically. A minority of professions, such as voice acting and social-media copywriting, might essentially disappear. But A.I. may not massively disrupt the job market, and more hyperbolic ideas like superintelligence may come to seem unserious.

Continuing to buy into the A.I. hype might bring its own perils. In a recent article, Zitron pointed out that about thirty-five per cent of U.S. stock-market value—and therefore a large share of many retirement portfolios—is currently tied up in the so-called Magnificent Seven technology companies. According to Zitron’s analysis, these firms spent five hundred and sixty billion dollars on A.I.-related capital expenditures in the past eighteen months, while their A.I. revenues were only about thirty-five billion. “When you look at these numbers, you feel insane,” Zitron told me. Even the figures we might call A.I. moderates, however, don’t think the public should let its guard down. Marcus believes that we were misguided to place so much emphasis on generative A.I., but he also thinks that, with new techniques, A.G.I. could still be attainable as early as the twenty-thirties. Even if language models never automate our jobs, the renewed interest and investment in A.I. might lead toward more complicated solutions, which could. In the meantime, we should use this reprieve to prepare for disruptions that might still loom—by crafting effective A.I. regulations, for example, and by developing the nascent field of digital ethics.

The appendices of the scaling-law paper, from 2020, included a section called “Caveats,” which subsequent coverage tended to miss. “At present we do not have a solid theoretical understanding for any of our proposed scaling laws,” the authors wrote. “The scaling relations with model size and compute are especially mysterious.” In practice, the scaling laws worked until they didn’t. The whole enterprise of teaching computers to think remains mysterious. We should proceed with less hubris and more care.

Loved this piece from Cal Newport in the New Yorker about what if AI doesn't get much better than it is today, and not just because he quotes me
www.newyorker.com/culture/open...

Private Equity Targets The “Dumbest” Investors In the Room David Sirota’s full interview with former federal regulator Ted Siedle on Trump's order allowing 401(k) plans to invest in alternative assets.

The largest ongoing upward transfer of wealth is America’s public pension system using workers’ retirement savings to pay billions of dollars of annual fees to private equity billionaires in exchange for returns that don’t beat cheap stock index funds.

www.levernews.com/private-equi...

Totally understand how these dudes ancestors lost the civil war

Violent Crime in D.C. Hits 30 Year Low Total violent crime for 2024 in the District of Columbia is down 35% from 2023 and is the lowest it has been in over 30 years, according to data collected by the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) a...

Still on Trump's f*cking justice department website. They don't even care enough to see through the lie. Lazy, cruel, stupid.
www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/v...

"Healing, transparency, accountability for these survivors is important, and they deserve it, and it is long overdue." Rep. Ayanna Pressley tells Jen Psaki she is "already in touch" with Maria Farmer about coming to the House Oversight Committee with her testimony.

reminder of reminder

boxofficega.me
November 3, 2006
✅ 150
✅ 110
❌ 0
✅ 150
✅ 150
🏆 560

There should be hard cam footage of DC, LA, NYC, etc every time a Republican describes a city as a war zone so you can see them saying it next to clips of 30yo project managers going to Pilates in their workout gear or someone in business casual zipping past on a scooter.

I just can’t believe our Reichstag Fire is the Big Balls Beatdown.

Its Reconstruction, Part II

Might as well begin retaliatory gerrymandering in blue states

Tonight’s dumb napkin cartoon…

Fascism is here. We are not “getting closer” or “in danger of.”

This matters because it frames our discussion: We aren’t trying to prevent it, we’re trying to defeat it. It’s not taking over our institutions, it’s taken them over.

Otherwise, we’re always behind, fighting a past we’ve already lost.

we need to teach the 1930s properly so that people know the Reichstag Fire was exactly this stupid

Even if crime in DC weren't at historic lows, a military occupation is still bad.

Raskin: In any event, if he really cared about public safety in DC… he would not have pardoned 1600 insurrectionists and violent cop beaters on his first day in office. 

So if you live in the USA:

UFC PPVs are having their prices slashed to a small fraction of the current rates.

WWE PPVs are having their prices shoot up dramatically, albeit not necessarily for cable subscribers.

That's...a choice.

WWE to add premium live event in September on same day as AEW All Out WWE will be adding a premium live event in September on the same day as AEW’s All Out pay-per-view.

Exclusive w/ @iamjohnpollock.bsky.social:

WWE to add PLE in September on same day as AEW All Out
www.postwrestling.com/2025/08/11/w...

WWE never delivers the audience they promise & WWE fans *only* watch WWE, so there's no additional benefit to a network. But they always find a new suit to swindle.

The post LA fire real estate market is absolutely insane.

This property in Santa Monica just went up for sale for $110 million.

It previously sold for $41 million in 2017.

There are many reports of multiple bidders on homes in the area.

Listing: bit.ly/40YS3AG

⚾️ Immaculate Grid 862 9/9:
Rarity: 117
IMMACULATE!
🟩🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩
➡️ See my grid:
immaculategrid.com/share/NLcO9Pz

All of my political views and policy ideas have basically collapsed to "Punish the Villains" and I mumble it to myself every time I see a news article these days

Every Republican president in the last 35 years has left office during or just after a recession so the Democrat who followed him had to clean up his mess; Trump is just getting started on it early

The same Jane who testified that Epstein brought her to meet Trump at Mar-a-Lago age 14, saying "this is a good one, right" to Trump, asks for victim identities to stay redacted if grand jury records are released.

Jane also later competed in Trump's Miss Teen USA pageant.

bsky.app/profile/klas...

I am begging y'all to stop calling the militarization of a major city a "distraction".

If *YOU* would rather think about Epstein--- and not about the forced mass displacement of human beings--- then just say that.

Just saw someone call the military occupation of DC a distraction, and that’s it, the it’s a distraction people have lost it. We should wait until the bulldozer is running over your house and all chime in with “isn’t there something else we should be talking about”

Why A Bunch Of Real Dicks Keep Throwing Fake Ones | Defector Every misogynist joke poses a question to its female audience: Can you laugh along? Will you be chill or are you going to make a big deal out of this? Are you going to be a bitch about it? Arriving in...

Why a bunch of real dicks keep throwing fake ones: defector.com/why-a-bunch-...

In America we're faced with a choice: do we keep our inefficient ICE vehicles and contribute to pollution, or do we replace them with hybrids and EVs that we don't own and can't control?

We are so goddamned stupid.

I am going to keep my 2004 Ford Ranger until it falls apart.

It's not the best truck ever, the bed's a little small and it's beat up, but I actually own the goddamn thing and no car company can just shut it off remotely.

Didn't realize we were posting in parallel but this thread is good. If a Dem Senate can't get DC Statehood through on 50 votes & the VP, then the party would rather shout about saving democracy than actually do it bsky.app/profile/nich...

Should have happened decades ago, should definitely have happened right after J6, needs to happen in the next trifecta.

(I'm fully aware that the Senate math was bad in 2021 with Manchin & Sinema but it's the job of presidents & Senate leaders to overcome that when the need & benefit is so clear)