I think the current gold-rush of nearly all money into GPU Datacenter and frontier LLMs is essentially starving the economy of innovation.

Academics and founders who might work on developing practical products using NN / ML / RL techniques to solve a realworld problem in engineering/logistics/medicine are not getting investment money. VCs and most people are blind to the fact there is AI outside of LLMs, despite the fact that we have seen AlphaGo and AlphaFold as evidence of non-LLM AI progress in hard domains.

This is perhaps a sub-problem of a larger issue - hyper-inequality means that capital is not allocated to talent [ capital is localized, talent is more widely spread throughout the population ].

We are not getting money to things that will grow our future such as :

  - small innovative startups
  - university science research
  - people who are young enough to have kids, being able to afford them
  - new garage bands / authors / musicians / photographers
  - public works / infrastructure / libraries
  - local retail : bookshop, artisanal bakery, cafe

My thesis is that during the 70s-90s we had higher tax, lower inequality, lower median income to median house price ratio, higher levels of innovation and more original art, literature and music being made.

AI could be a golden age of human flourishing - but thats not where we are heading, what we are seeing is a territory rush by the megacorps.

The fact that RAM and GPU prices have risen so fast, is evidence of supply and demand effect where inequality steals resources from the commons [ middle of the economy ].

Can a talented garage inventor / math or arts student afford a Ryzen AI dev platform, let alone a DGX spark on which to create the next important technology innovation ?