It seems the US is going to thrive with the former but naively stick our heads in the sands with the latter.
We’ll cede economic leadership, and wonder in 20 years what happened as other countries lead in energy. Even worse, the administrations stance will encourage US energy companies to pursue bad strategies, letting them avoid transforming their business. In 10-20 years they'll be bankrupt and the US will probably have to bail them out for strategic reasons.
The ice caps may be worse off for it, but there's little reason to think the USA will cease to "lead in energy" anytime soon.
If the rest of the world standardizes on solar+battery, demand for oil goes down, and so will the price. Which in turn makes US-produced oil not cost effective to extract, and domestic energy production collapses in favor of cheap foreign imports.
And then we're worse off in several different ways.
There are, however, some chemistries with really nice supply chains. The Iron Redox Flow Battery (IRFB) really only needs iron and iron chloride as reactants. Those batteries are being commercialized, but they aren't common (yet?).
Also, rare earth elements are not that rare. But they are not concentrated, and finding concentrations of them is kinda rare. Event then, you have to mine a lot of area to get them, which is not great for the environment. And since Americans (and everyone ex-China) has not been doing it for decades, only China has advanced the technology to extract and refine it for decades.
This lack of refining is similar to our lack of working on solar which will but us behind potentially forever, or until there is a big enough disruption to overcome the decade of experience. You can look at chipmaking and see that such things are not easy.
1) "We're out of easily extractable oil" maybe, but I've heard it before and technology does have a way of marching forward.
2) "Rest of world's oil demand will drop" is possible but certainly not happening today and far from certain.
3) "Then Oil prices will plummet in the US Domestic market" is far from a sure thing even if 2) comes to pass. How do the other producers - who don't have large domestic markets! - react? What happens to global petrochemical demand? And what sort of Industrial policy could shield our markets, even if this happens globally?
At the end of the day, we have a continent full of oil (and Uranium! which I prefer!) and an energy-hungry population.
You've heard it before because it's been true for a long time. Technology marches forwards, yes, but technology is expensive, and like I said, a lot of domestic production has fairly high price levels below which they will not operate.
> 2) "Rest of world's oil demand will drop" is possible but certainly not happening today and far from certain.
That's totally fair.
> 3) "Then Oil prices will plummet in the US Domestic market" is far from a sure thing even if 2) comes to pass. How do the other producers - who don't have large domestic markets! - react? What happens to global petrochemical demand? And what sort of Industrial policy could shield our markets, even if this happens globally?
Assuming (2) does happen, then I think this follows naturally. The cost to produce a barrel of oil varies wildly by country. If global demand drops, then the cheapest producers eat the market that they currently cannot fully supply.
Could industrial policy shield this? Sure, but at great cost to the US; that would have the side effect of pushing down energy prices for the rest of the world even more, making it even harder for us to keep up.
Uranium absolutely could save us, but I think we're a couple decades out from the political will being there to really get a lot of nuclear online.
Increased Mortality: Projections indicate an additional 14.5 million deaths by 2050 due to climate-related impacts like floods, droughts, heatwaves, and climate-sensitive diseases (e.g., malaria and dengue).
Economic Losses: Global economic losses are predicted to reach $12.5 trillion by 2050, with an additional $1.1 trillion burden on healthcare systems due to climate-induced impacts. One study estimates that climate change will cost the global economy $38 trillion a year within the next 25 years.
Displacement and Migration: Over 200 million people may be displaced by climate change by 2050, with an estimated 21.5 million displaced annually since 2008 by weather-related events. In a worst-case scenario, the World Bank suggests this figure could reach 216 million people moving internally due to water scarcity and threats to agricultural livelihoods. Some researchers predict that 1.2 billion people could be displaced by 2050 in the worst-case scenario due to natural disasters and other ecological threats.
Food and Water Insecurity: Climate change exacerbates food and water insecurity, leading to malnutrition and increased disease burden, especially in vulnerable populations. For example, a significant increase in drought in certain regions could cause 3.2 million deaths from malnutrition by 2050. An estimated 183 million additional people could go hungry by 2050, even if warming is held below 1.6°C.
Mental Health Impacts: Climate change contributes to mental health issues like anxiety, depression, and PTSD, particularly in vulnerable populations and those experiencing climate disasters or chronic changes like drought. Extreme heat has been linked to increased aggression and suicide risk. Studies also indicate that children born today will experience a significantly higher number of climate extremes than previous generations, potentially impacting their mental well-being and sense of future security.
Inequality and Vulnerability: Climate change disproportionately affects vulnerable populations, including low-income individuals, people of color, outdoor workers, and those with existing health conditions, worsening existing health inequities and hindering poverty reduction efforts.
Not a single of these idiotic projections will ever come true.
Not just strict energy production. Especially when it comes from sources of energy increasingly infeasible and unpopular.
1) cherry picking the best case.
2) numbers seem off
> The sunniest US city, Las Vegas, could get 98% of its power from solar+storage at a price of $104/MWh, which is higher than gas but cheaper than new coal or nuclear. It could get to 60% solar+storage at $65/MWh — cheaper than gas.
Or maybe prices are different in LV but that's a big differential. It's also mentioning it's the best case scenario for solar. So even then, maybe that's the best option for Las Vegas, but is it elsewhere?
World Nuclear also gives us some global numbers to help us see the larger range of costs [1]
> LCOE figures assuming an 85% capacity factor ranged from $27/MWh in Russia to $61/MWh in Japan at a 3% discount rate, from $42/MWh (Russia) to $102/MWh (Slovakia) at a 7% discount rate, and from $57/MWh (Russia) to $146/MWh (Slovakia) at a 10% discount rate.
We shouldn't forget: it's not "nuclear vs solar" it's "zero carbon emitters vs carbon emitters". The former framing is something big oil and gas want you to argue, and that's why they've historically given funds to initiatives like the Sierra Nevada Club. If we care about the environment or zero emissions then the question isn't as simple as "nuclear vs solar" it is "what is the best zero carbon emitting producer given the constraints of the local region".
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/184754/cost-of-nuclear-e...
[1] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspec...
Having a non-emitting form of base load is important, and nuclear has a place there, but it many applications it's just not cost competitive with renewables.
Maybe if fusion was viable, that'll change, but until then nuclear just doesn't make any sense.
Uranium mining produces significant toxic waste (tailings and raffinates). Fuel processing produces toxic waste, typically UF6. There is some processing of UF6 to UF4 but that doesn't solve the problem and it's not economic anyway. Fuel usage produces even more waste that typically needs to be actively cooled for years or decades before it can be forgotten about in a cave (as nuclear advocates argue).
And then who is going to operate the plant? This administration in particular is pushing for further nuclear deregulation, which is terrifying. You want to see what happens without regulation? Elon Musk's gas turbines in South Memphis with no Clean Air permits that are spewing pollution [1].
That's terrifying because the failure modes for a single nuclear incident are orders of magnitude worse than any other form of power plant. The cleanup from Fukushima requires technologies that don't exist yet, will take decades or centuries and will likely cost ~$1 trillion once its over, if it ever is [2].
And who's going to pay for that? It's not going to be the private operator. In fact, in the US there's laws that limit liability for nuclear accidents. The industry's self-insurance fund would be exhausted many times over by a single Fukushima incident.
And then we get to the hand waving about Chernobyl, Fukushima and Three Mise Island. "Those are old designs", "the new designs are immune to catastrophic failure" or, my favorite, "Chernobyl was because of mismanagement in the USSR" like there wouldn't be corner-cutting by any private operator in the US.
And let's just gloss over the fact that we've built fewer than 700 nuclear power plants, yet had 3 major incidents, 2 of them (Chernobyl and Fukushima) have had massive negative impacts. The Chernobyl absolute exclusion zone is still 1000 square miles. But anything negative is an outlier that should be ignored, apparently.
And then we get to the impact of carbon emissions in climate change but now we're comparing the entire fossil fuel power industry vs one nuclear plant. It's also a false dichotomy. The future is hydro and solar.
and then we get to the massive boondoggle of nuclear fusion, which I'm not convinced will ever be commercially viable. Energy loss and container destruction from fast neutrons is a fundamental problem that stars don't have because they have gravity and are incredibly large.
I have no idea where this blind faith in nuclear comes from.
[1]: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/06/elon-musk-xai-memph...
[2]: https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/16/fukushimas-final-costs-...
The issue with cleanup at Fukushima Daichii is one of money and political will, not one of technology. We've had the ability to clean up nuclear accidents since the 1950s.
Also, the future of power is increasingly looking like LNG plants which pump only slightly less radioactive carbon into the atmosphere than coal plants do.
> with cleanup at Fukushima Daichii
These are manageable, but expensive and still take care. You'd still want to arm everyone with a detector and get them to be in the habit of testing their food and water (highly manageable for public water or food).
> The issue with cleanup at Fukushima Daichii is one of money ...
Yes, about a trillion dollars. That's the point.
As for technology, I believe the removal of fuel rods and irradiating sand bags has only begun (with robots) in the last year. I don't believe they've fully mapped out what needs to be removed. It's not just the fuel but also the structure, such as the concrete pedestal the reactor was on (and melted through to).
Otherwise, you kinda make my point: hand waving away serious and expensive disasters with fervor bordering on the religious to essentially dismiss me as some kind of heretic.
s/HN/Individuals
Rooftop solar starts paying back instantly and can be deployed in $20k tranches. It also requires no additional grid infrastructure and decreases demand on non generating grid infrastructure.
Pretty sure it’s rooftop solar that wins the future.
(And let's ignore the fact that humanity barely managed to organize anything that held even a mere 1000 years)
There's no technical or economic problem here. The problem is completely one of PR, with ignoramuses thinking it's a big deal being the entire problem.
I know that Germany is seeking a nuclear waste storage site (unsucessfully) for two decades now. So simple.
The argument you're making about waste has even led to the decommissioning of nuclear in Germany to be replaced with coal... burning coal also produces radioactive fly ash. Everything has tradeoffs!
I guess we could just give up on electricity entirely! That might save the planet
You are suffering from a misunderstanding then. Maybe several, since Germany has cut their coal use by more than half since Fukushima. (262 TWh from coal in 2011, 108 in 2024).
Nuclear waste and the efforts it requires to manage is really orders of magnitude worse than other kinds of waste produced in energy production. Even if it can be argued that coal is second, it's a distant second, and nobody replaces nuclear with coal.
Not sure what you mean here but I agree that nobody was able to predict what the cost of nuclear would actually end up being when they first started with it in the 50s.
EDF was bailed out for 50 bn despite having neglected maintenance so badly that half their plants were offline in 2022, and the first thing France did when they took over was to double the purchase price. If that's enough remains to be seen.
If you mean that you disagree that nuclear is an order of magnitude worse per TWh, then perhaps you don't know how much more energy we get from coal, or how much money, time and effort is spent on nuclear?
Just as an illustration, during the 40 years it was active, Fukushima generated as much electricity in total as the world gets from coal in one week.
Which is of course a "cool" assumption to make if you're profiting from this being the conclusion today. Critics of these models (like me) are sceptical of that overly opportunistic conclusion, especially since the timeframes involved are so long and the storage still needs to be maintained long after the profits stopped for one reason or another. I am not saying that this can't be done, I say the current models are insufficient and rely on future generations "dealing with it" somehow.
If you can convince me my worry is unfounded, I'd be happy to hear why I am worrying too much or why we can be certain that this works out as we wish it would.
Can you clarify what leading in energy means? And what concerns do you have?
Do you mean we, in the U.S. are in a tarpit of regulations and red tape that makes setting up a nuclear power plant up impossible? Or something else?
IMHO, leading in energy also needs to take into account where that energy takes us and what it unlocks. I immigrated to the U.S. so I am extremely bullish so do consider that below.
My California perspective is that energy is going to be even more decentralized. I have not paid an electric bill in years and get a check from my utility once a year where they pay me wholesale rates for my net export. I net export because I rarely use any meaningful energy at night that my 5kwH battery pack cannot provide. Once battery prices fall even further, I will dump everything into my local storage and draw no gross power from my utility at all. For all practical purposes, I will be off grid.
Anyone in California has the technological ability to get there as well. The utilities dump GWh of solar energy because we produce so much!
The issue we have in the U.S. is one of horrible policies and regulation.
Your typical townhouse in the city block isn't going to be able to put 20 panels on their roof because their HOA is going to throw a fit. The owner won't be allowed to install it themselves and would have to pay an electrician tens of thousands of dollars because the city isn't going to permit it otherwise. The obstacle of installing $5k worth of parts is incredibly disappointing.
From my perspective, technologically, solar energy is going to become cheaper as storage continues to fall in price.
This will empower increasing productivity. In my case, once the GPU market becomes consumer friendly and less constrained, or fundamentally different LLMs are released that are CPU friendly but I can't imagine that possibility yet, I will buy more GPUs and increase my self host LLM capacity. Today, as of right now I an getting "Insufficient capacity" errors from AWS attempting to launch a g6.2xlarge cluster and puny 24GB GPUs cost a lot making renting from AWS a better choice. The responses from the coding models blow my mind. They often meet or beat the kind of code I would expect from a junior engineer I would have to pay $120k/yr for and that would be a cheap engineer in SoCal. A GPU cluster including running costs would be fraction of that so I would be able to expand quicker with less.
Whole offices are going to become more compact and continue to become decentralized or even remote. Their carbon footprint is then going to go practically zero (no office security patrol, no HVAC, no heating, etc). More people will be able to start businesses (higher GDP) with less, increasing the GDP per Co2 emissions.
My childhood friends in the E.U who are in the same space that I am in are less enthusiastic. My friends in Germany who bought a hundred PV panels is not happy at all.
So which country will lead in energy and what would they be doing?
I think if you don't include LLMs, AI has obviously created economic growth. If you do include LLMs I think the conversation is more nuanced and obviously driven by the same kind of hype that led people to believe that Cryptocurrency is the future of the stock market
My boomer boss thinks writing tests is unnecessary and slows shipping down. It might be true, but it fails to appreciate the full scope of the problem.
It's good to see this, especially since they acknowledge that open weights is not equal to open source.
In fact, if you open the PDF file and navigate to that section, the content is barely relevant at all.
What increased and decreased in the most recent budget bill? That is the full and complete story.
If no $$ for open source or open weight model development, then that is not a policy priority, despite any nice words to the contrary.
They very clearly have no idea what the fuck they are doing they just know what other people say they should do and their toddler reaction is to do the opposite.
The government owning the machine that does everything.
Tech bros, with their recent love of guruship, with their willingness to do any dark pattern if it means bigger boats for them, owning the entire labor supply in order to improve the lives of 8 bay area families.
The USA supposedly have the most data in the world. Companies cannot (in theory) train on integrated sets of information. USA and China to some extent, can train on large amounts of information that is not public. USA in particular has been known for keeping a vast repository of metadata (data about data) about all sorts of things. This data is very refined and organized (PRISM, etc).
This allows training for purposes that might not be obvious when observing the open weights or the source of the inference engine.
It is a double-edged sword though. If anyone is able to identify such non-obvious training inserts and extract information about them or prove they were maliciously placed, it could backfire tremendously.
Transoceanic fiber runs become a very interesting resource, then.
And I think we can already see this. The gains in LLMs are increasingly marginal. There was a hugeeeeeeee jump going from glorified markov chains to something able to consistently produce viable output, but since then each generation of updates has been less and less recognizable to the point that if somebody had to use an LLM for an hour and guess its 'recency'/version, I suspect the results would be scarcely better than random. That's not to say that newer systems are not improving - they obviously are, but it's harder and harder to recognize those changes without having its immediate predecessor to compare against.
It's also doomed to failure because of how transparent this is, and how abused previous dependencies (like the USD) have been. Every major country will likely slowly move to restrict other major powers' AI systems while implicitly mandating their own.
And about your thought: I disagree. When I look at those online places, I see echo chambers, trolls and a lack of critical thinking (on how to properly discuss a topic). Some parts might be artificially accelerated, but I don't see propaganda couldn't be fought. People are just coasting, lazy, group thinking, being entertained and angry.
Propaganda is less about what it says, but more about how it makes people _feel_.
If you get the feels strong enough, it doesn't matter what you say. The game is over before you start.
One can become more controlled and wrangle in the edge-cases, and the other has exploding edges.
You can have your politics around the value of open source models, but I find it hard to argue that there aren't MUCH higher risks with the lack of containment of open weights models
The other assumption is that nefarious actors will care about any of this. They'll use what's available, or make their own models, or maybe even steal models (if China had an incredible AI, don't you think other countries would be trying to steal the weights?). Bad actors don't care about moral positions, strangely enough.
Of course, the US is a captured state now and so the current US Government has no problem with Russian election interference so long as it benefits them
Today, Google and Apple both already sell AI products that technically fall under this definition, and did without government "encouragement" in the mix. There isn't a single actionable thing mentioned that would promote further development of such models.
The controllers of the whole system want open weights and source to make sure models aren’t going to expose the population to unapproved ideas and allow the spread of unapproved thoughts or allow making unapproved connections or ask unapproved questions without them being suitably countered to keep everyone in line with the system.
For open source/open weight models it's particularly important because until now there wasn't a government-level strong voice countering people like Geoff Hinton's call to ban open source/open weight AI, like he articulates here: https://thelogic.co/news/ai-cant-be-slowed-down-hinton-says-...
"Led by the Department of Commerce (DOC) through the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), revise the NIST AI Risk Management Framework to eliminate references to misinformation, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and climate change."
Clearly there are terrible governments but if it's not government tackling these issues then there will be limited control by the people and it will simply be those with the most money define the landscape.
As I understood the original premises of the US gov, it was to be constitutionally limited in scope. Now I know that ship has sailed a long time ago, but I don't think it follows that we have a gov. to centrally plan AI content as right or wrong.
This presumes that the AI has access to objective reality. Instead, the AI has access to subjective reports filed by fallible humans, about the state of the world. Even if we could concede that an AI might observe the world on its own terms, the language it might use to describe the world as it perceives it would be subjectively defined by humans.
They will always be a computer representation of the ideology that trained it.
Unless you count where the fissionable elements came from, in which case you're only left with the portion of geothermal that's from gravity (residual heat from the earth compacting itself into a planet).
The US generated an additional 64Twh of solar in 2024 compared to 2023. To get the same amount from nuclear you would need to build 5 large reactors in one year.
As for land mass, we can re-use already spent land mass, like rooftops, parking lots, grazing farmland and such. Solar can also be placed on lakes.
So for the foreseeable future there is no actual need for new land to be dedicated to solar.
Just converting all Walmart parking to covered solar would meet almost half of all US electrical demand.
4,070,000,000,000 kWh US electric use in 2022
Using 330W panels it would require 8,447,488 panels (4,070,000,000,000 kWh / (330W * 4 hours/day * 365 days/year)) which is 164,726,016 sq ft at 19.5 sq ft per panel.
Walmart has 4,612 stores in the US, averaging 1,000 parking spaces per store, and 180 sq ft per parking space (does not include driving lanes, end caps, etc.) giving us 830,160,000 sq ft.
David MacKay in "Sustainable Energy: Without the Hot Air" did a calculation circa 2010. To fulfill the world's energy needs back then, a 10 km^2 area in the Sahara desert would be sufficient. Even if you scaled that to 100 km^2, it's absolutely tiny on a global scale, and panels have only become more efficient since then.
The challenge of course is storage and distribution, but yeah, in terms of land area, it's not much.
So maybe 1000 km^2 is more like right order of magnitude. That's still tiny, about Hong Kong-sized. Even 100000 km^2 is about South Korea.
Solar: ~300-800 L/MWh [0]
Nuclear: ~3000 L/MWh [1]
0: https://iea-pvps.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Water_Footpr...
1: https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/P1569_web.pdf
The question how much is used for mining slurry or chemical baths.
Those 3000L/MWh might very well be more environmentally friendly than solar because most of it’s used for cooling.
edit: Desalination uses 4 kWh per cubic metre of water. That is, it would yield 250,000 L/MWh.
https://www.euronews.com/2025/07/02/france-and-switzerland-s...
Considering how little use there is for most of that land anyways, it seems like a good option to me.
Also AI training seems like the perfect fit for solar. Run it when the sun is shining. Inference is significantly less power hungry, so it can run base load 24/7.
If you're talking about just not running your data center when the sun isn't out, that effectively triples the cost of the building+ hardware. It would require a hell of a carbon tax to make the economics of this make sense.
All major AI providers need to throttle usage because their GPU clusters are at capacity. There is absolutely no way inference is less power hungry when you have many thousands of users hammering your servers at all times.
If the balance between capital outlay and running costs was more balanced - then optimising the running cost becomes a big line item on the accounts.
Probably zero agricultural if you mandate all rooftops to be solar. And all parking lots to be covered with solar roofs.
If you want the PD companies to have a different blend, then they need carrots and sticks.
Solar is great for rooftops of houses, it’s not really great to run a DC 24/7 without batteries.
i know Saudi, Morocco and China are all massively dumping panels into their deserts, likely more places too. these are great places to put them as it has less impact on environment (less wildlife etc.) and it's pretty much always sunny during the daytime, so it's high efficient per m/2 comparted to colder more cloudy places.
Morocco already is connected for energy providing to Europe via Spain afaik, though i think that is currently not used yet, so they are in a good position to leverage that as power demands surge across EU datacenters trying to compete in AI :'D (absolutely no clue if they will actually go that route but it seems logical!)
As we build out solar, daytime power will become cheaper than nighttime power.
Some people will eventually find it economical to time-shift their consumption to daytime hours, including saving any non-interactive computation for those hours, and shutting down unneeded compute at night.
If anything, solar has demonstrated over the past 2 decades that it is a lot more effective and economical than even the most bullish of predictions that have been made about it. (Seriously, look at projections for solar deployment and generation vs what actually happened, it's kind of crazy how much it was underestimated)
Yes you do. They’re not.
> I think people vastly overestimate their efficacy and efficiency
Of course, you can argue that people doctor the numbers (for example, failing to take into account the lifetime cost of nuclear power, or failing to note how hopelessly optimistic a pure solar power grid with no batteries might be) when they present said numbers… but the idea that any kind of power generation can be “woke” is beyond belief.
That isn’t an adjective that can be applied to physical processes.
Solar power is not woke. Gravity is not woke. Electricity is not woke. Don’t be daft.
People (at least on HN) seem to be in agreement the Europe is too regulatory and bureaucratic, so it feels fair to question the practicality of any American initiatives, as we do for European ones.
What does this document practically enact today? Is there any actual money allocated? Deregulation seems to be a theme, so are there any examples of regulations which have been cleansed already? How about planning? This document is full of directives and the names of federal agencies which plan to direct, so what are the actual results of said plans that we can see today and in the coming years?
Registering a company in US (Delaware) can be achieved in as little as 1 hour.
Getting married in Germany, particularly between a German and a foreigner, is anything from a 6 month to 2 year process, involving significant expenses, notarization/translation of documents. Some documents expire after 6 months, so if the government bureaucrats are too slow you need to get new copies, translated again, notarized again, and try to re-submit.
This isn't protecting human rights, it's supporting a class of bureaucrats/notaries/translators/clerks and making life more difficult for ordinary people. It's also a form of light racism that targets foreigners/migrants by imposing more difficult bureaucratic requirements and costs on them compared to by birth citizens.
How is having a different process for foreigners racist? Criticize it if you will, but calling it racist is crazy. Even "light racist" - whatever that means. Bureaucracy in Germany is notoriously slow for all people. Foreigners going through a different process makes it worse. I understand that. Nevertheless racism is a problem that exist and is prevalent (Germany is far from an exception here) and IMO you make it more difficult to improve in the right direction by (seemingly) calling every problem of foreigners racist.
>so if the government bureaucrats are too slow
I wonder if there are certain types of names that make the bureaucrats work more slowly.
Europe isn't just Germany.
Europe isn't just Germany, but the process is nearly as bad in France and Italy too, and together that's over 50% of EU GDP suffering from intense domestic corporate bureaucracy.
"PREVENTING WOKE AI IN THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT"
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/07/prev...
> In the AI context, DEI includes the suppression or distortion of factual information about race or sex; manipulation of racial or sexual representation in model outputs; incorporation of concepts like critical race theory, transgenderism, unconscious bias, intersectionality, and systemic racism; and discrimination on the basis of race or sex. DEI displaces the commitment to truth in favor of preferred outcomes and, as recent history illustrates, poses an existential threat to reliable AI.
Most of the world, and a huge chunk of America, thinks in different ways. Many are not aware the AI's are being built this way either. So, we want AI's that don't have a philosophy opposite of ours. We'd like them to either be more neutral or customizable to the users' preferences.
Given the current state, the first steps are to reverse the existing trend (eg political fine-tuning) and use open weights we can further customize. Later, maybe purge highly-biased stuff out of training sets when making new models. I find certain keywords, whether liberal or conservative, often hint they're going to push politics.
Their ideology has also been both damaging and ineffective. The AI's they aligned to it too much got less effective at problem solving but were very, politically correct. Their heavy handed approach in other areas has led to such strong pushback that Trump made countering it a key part of his campaign. Many policy reversals are now happening in this area but that ideology is very entrenched.
So, we'd see a group pretrain large AI's. Then, the alignment training would be neutral to various politics. The AI would simply give good answers, be polite in a basic way, and that's it. Safety training wouldn't sneak in politicized examples either.
2025 America, where we can't handle the radical pushing of thought by Heinlein in the late 1950s. Unbelievable.
Any Government comment periods going forward I will be asking if the government agency made sure AIs used were not trained on Heinlein or any discussions relating to him to ensure that 'huge chunks of America's desire to exclude trans and to make sure our AIs are the best possible AIs and don't have extremist 1950s agitprop scifi trans thought thinkers like Heinlein included.
What I might drop are the many articles with little content that strictly reiterate racist and sexist claims from intersectionality. The various narratives, like how black people had less of X, they embed in so many news reports. It usually jars our brain, too, since the story isn't even about that. They keep forcing certain topics and talking points into everything hoping people will believe and repeat it if they hear it enough. The right-wing people do this on some topics, too.
I'd let most things people wrote, even some political works on many topics, into the training set. The political samples would usually be the best examples of those ideologies, like Adam Smith or Karl Marx. Those redundant, political narratives they force into non-political articles would get those pages deleted. If possible, I'd just delete those sections containing the random tangent. For political news, I'd try to include a curated sample with roughly equal amounts of left and right reports with some independents thrown in.
So, only manipulative content that constantly repeats the same things would get suppressed. Maybe highly-debated topics, too, so I could include a small number of exemplars. Then, reduce the domination of certain groups in what politics were there. Then, align it to be honest and polite but no specific politics.
I'm very curious what a GPT3-level AI would say about many topics if trained that way instead of Progressive-heavy training like OpenAI, etc.
If foundation model companies want their government contracts renewed, they are going to have to make sure their AI output aligns with this administration's version of "truth".
This phrasing exactly corresponds to "politically correct" in its original meaning.
> In the AI context, DEI includes the suppression or distortion of factual information about race or sex; manipulation of racial or sexual representation in model outputs; incorporation of concepts like critical race theory, transgenderism, unconscious bias, intersectionality, and systemic racism; and discrimination on the basis of race or sex. DEI displaces the commitment to truth in favor of preferred outcomes and, as recent history illustrates, poses an existential threat to reliable AI.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/07/prev...
So... the concept of unconscious bias is verboten to the new regime? Isn't it just a pretty simple truth? We all have unconscious biases because we all work with incomplete information. Isn't this just a normal idea?
Let's see how that shakes out in this particular case.
So like making sure everyone knows that 2+2=5 and that we have always been at war with East Asia?
So no, democracy isn’t the ability to govern. It’s the ability to change those who govern, once every 5 years, i.e once every 4600 laws.
> I already am eating from the trashcan all the time. The name of this trashcan is ideology. The material force of ideology - makes me not see what I'm effectively eating. It's not only our reality which enslaves us. The tragedy of our predicament - when we are within ideology, is that - when we think that we escape it into our dreams - at that point we are within ideology.
Right, only what Chomsky works on is true science, unlike the intelligent systems pseudo science bullshit people like Geoff Hinton, Bengio or Demis Hassabis work on...
Personally, I find it somewhat amazing that you put Demis on that list given that he, himself, on very good accounts that I have, explicitly pushed back against natural language processing (and thus large language model) development at DeepMind for the longest of times and they had to play major catch up once it became obvious that their primarily reinforcement learning-oriented and "foundational" approaches were not showing as much promise as what OpenAI and Facebook were producing. Do not get me wrong, what he has accomplished is utterly amazing, but he certainly is not a father of large language models.
I have not, but I have watched him talk about this things many times and he always seemed too sure of himself and too dismissive of LLMs, I now believe he's simply wrong.
Unbiased: when the model says only things I agree with.
It's telling when xAI has to force their model into being aligned with their world view with mixed success. It seems to imply that OpenAI/Anthropic are less manually biased than the people accusing them of wokeness presumed.
Only way to get rid of bias is the same way as in a human: metacognition.
Metacognition makes both humans and AI smarter because it makes us capable of applying internal skepticism.
Duh. When is that ever not the case?
The "objective" position is not "whatever training on the dataset we assembled spits out" plus "alignment" to the personal ethical views of the intellectually-non-representative silicon valley types.
I will give you a good example: the Tea app is currently charting #1 in the app store, where women can "expose toxic men" by posting their personal information along with whatever they want. Men are not allowed on so will be unaware of this. It's billed as being built for safety but includes a lot of gossip.
I told o3, 4-sonnet, grok 4, and gemini 2.5 pro to sketch me out a version of this, then another version that was men-only for the same reasons as tea. Every single one happily spat one out for women and refused for men. This is not an "objective" alignment, it is a libleft alignment.
If you trained an LLM on all material published in the U.S. between 1900 and 1920, another on all material published in Germany between 1930 and 1940, and another on all material published in Russia over the past two decades, you'd likely get wildly different biases. It's easy to pick a bias you agree with, declare that the objective truth, and then claim any effort to mitigate it is an attempt to introduce bias.
Why? We should just aspire to educate people that chatbots aren't all-knowing oracles. The same way we teach people media literacy so they don't blindly believe what the tube says every evening
We already spend high within the OECD to not get many of our students to a decent level of reading and math proficiency, let alone to critical thinking. This isn't something we know how to fix, and depending on that assumption is dangerous.
The entire news and television ecosystem is biased. Although Trump is "correcting" them towards being unbiased by suing them personally as well as unleashing the power of the federal government. Same goes for social media.
I'm not saying this is conclusive evidence, but I am saying it's our best inference from the data we have so far.
That doesn't mean that anti-Marxists are all Nazis, or vice versa. But the claim that they're totally unrelated is not correct at all.
[1] https://www.britannica.com/story/were-the-nazis-socialists
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascist_Manifesto
> That doesn't mean that anti-Marxists are all Nazis, or vice versa. But the claim that they're totally unrelated is not correct at all.
This is a heavily propagandized topic — and the conflating of, eg, American liberal capitalist opposition to Marxism as “Nazi” is both a result of that and modern dishonest rhetoric.
That rhetoric confuses LLMs.
That’s a trope by Marxists to attempt to normalize alt-left ideology by accusing anyone who objects of being Nazis; a trope that’s become tired in the US and minimizes the true radical nature of the Nazi regime.
I have a suspicion you don't really know what Marxism is about, but like using it because it sounds scary to you.
As an actual Marxist, I would love to hear of this strain of philosophy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-Marxism
That answers your sibling reply as well, as it’s clear where such “critical theories” and grievance narratives have entered movies and games.
In my experience, y'know, as a Marxist, all Hollywood has ever pumped out is pro-capitalist propaganda. To say there's any Marxism in it is downright insulting.
I believe that Marxism has become an abstract target for conservatives to project their grievances on.
Zizek also spoke to this at his debate with Peterson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDOSOQLLO-U
Journalism and academia tend to attract people with more of a liberal bent. I'm not even accusing them all of being partisan hacks, but as y'all like to say, subconscious biases influence us.
This is like me saying "economic productivity has a well-known right-wing bias" or something goofy like that.
It's funny that the counterexample you chose does more to support OP's point than your own. From Wikipedia[1]
>Since World War II, according to many economic metrics including job creation, GDP growth, stock market returns, personal income growth, and corporate profits, the United States economy has performed significantly better on average under the administrations of Democratic presidents than Republican presidents. The unemployment rate has risen on average under Republican presidents, while it has fallen on average under Democratic presidents. Budget deficits relative to the size of the economy were lower on average for Democratic presidents.[1][2] Ten of the eleven U.S. recessions between 1953 and 2020 began under Republican presidents.[3] Of these, the most statistically significant differences are in real GDP growth, unemployment rate change, stock market annual return, and job creation rate.[4][5]
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._economic_performance_by_p...
Those are things where there is no objectively correct position.
Now there are differences on things there this are objectively correct positions.
For example consider climate change. There used to be agreement on the underlying scientific reality, with differences in how to approach it. There was a group of top economic and science advisors from the Reagan and Bush administrations that were arguing for a revenue neutral carbon tax to address climate change and then let the market deal with it. The liberal approach favored more direct limits on emissions and the government more actively promoting replacements for fossil fuels.
Even as late as 2008 Republicans were still in agreement with reality on this. The Republican platform called for reducing fossil fuel use, establishing a Climate Prize for scientists who solve the challenges of climate change, a long term tax credit for renewable energy, more recycling, and making consumer products more energy efficient. They wanted to aggressively support technological advances to reduce the dependence of transportation on petroleum, given examples of making cars more efficient (they mention doubling gas mileage) and more flex-fuel and electric vehicles. They talked about honoraria of many millions of dollars for technological developments that could eliminate the need for gas powered cars. They also mentioned promoting wireless communication to increase telecommuting options and reduce business travel.
Compare to now. Now their position ranges from climate change being a hoax from people trying to destroy America to it may be happening but if it is Mankind had nothing to do with it and it isn't bad enough to be something to worry about.
So now any unbiased journalists writing on climate change or adjacent topics, or any unbiased academic working in these areas, is going to automatically be way more aligned with the left than the right.
There are countless ways someone can have a Y chromosome and still be a woman.
There are countless ways someone can have no Y chromosome and still be a man.
Hell there are even a small population of people who are born visibly female with female genitalia (as every human starts female before they (optionally) sex differentiate in the womb (normally)) and they don't sex differentiate until puberty. [1] [2]
Biology is really really complicated and there is never any certainty other than the certainty that there is never certainty. "Gender" is a completely social construct and "Sex" is just a collection of heuristics we use to broadly group people into two common categories. But just like all heuristics, it's not perfect and it can't classify everyone properly. What sex chromosomes you have is one heuristic but it doesn't always work for any number of reasons. Whether the SRY gene activates during gestation is another heuristic and even it isn't perfect. What organs you have also can work but it falls apart in a bunch of edge cases. What hormones your body produces is another one that can generally work as a heuristic but like all the others it breaks down in numerous cases.
---------
Intersex people exist and make up about 1.5-2% of the population.
Trans people exist and make up about 1.5-2% of the population.
It is not an insane idea to recognise that both populations exist and that any single heuristic for differentiating someone into a black and white male/female category is insufficient for the endless complexity that is life.
---------
So to answer your question yes. Someone with XY chromosomes can be a woman either by their gender or by their sex or both.
---------
1. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34290981
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5%CE%B1-Reductase_2_deficiency
And their survey evaluates intersex conditions as those present at birth (even if they are discovered later in life but were present at birth).
I really don't think anyone considers the case of Kathleen to be intersex, seems more like a strawman.
As my parents told me, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”
Do you and your parents believe Epstein's and Trump's victims should't say anything at all, because they have so many not-nice things to say about being raped and abused?
Are there women you don't want saying non-nice things about the toxic ways you treated them, or is it purely ideological that you don't want victims to talk about toxic men like Epstein and Trump, out of the kindness of your heart and forgiveness for unrepentant pedophiles and rapists who you think deserve the benefit of the doubt and second, third, and fourth chances?
Why did your parents teach you to turn a blind eye to toxic behavior and abuse and rape and pedophilia, or is that all on you, and your parents would be disappointed with you for telling women not to name and shame their abusers?
I can’t take this seriously, as recent actions by this administration directly contradicts a few of these stated goals.
Or maybe I don’t want to, because this sounds dangerous to me at this time.
Yet at the same time,
> Preventing Woke AI in the Federal Government [...] LLMs shall be neutral, nonpartisan tools that do not manipulate responses in favor of ideological dogmas such as DEI. [...] DEI includes the suppression or distortion of factual information about race or sex; manipulation of racial or sexual representation in model outputs; incorporation of concepts like critical race theory, transgenderism, unconscious bias, intersectionality, and systemic racism; and discrimination on the basis of race or sex. [1]
I don't understand how free speech can be protected while suppressing topics such as "unconscious bias" and "discrimination".
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/07/prev...
[1]: https://theconversation.com/how-do-you-stop-an-ai-model-turn...
[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/may/14/elon-musk...
[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jul/09/grok-ai-p...
What red tape? Anyone can buy/rent a GPU(s) and train stuff.
Well previously the Chinese were not able to, but that was changed recently:
* https://www.wsj.com/tech/nvidia-wins-ok-to-resume-sales-of-a...
* https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/07/22/nvidia-chip-deal-us-chi...
So it bears repeating: what red tape?
* Anything remotely pro-environment
* Anything remotely pro-labor
* Anything not covered by either of those that attempts to stop someone who has a lot of money from doing A Thing
If you need further details than that, then I don’t think you have grokked the style of governance that this administration is operating under.
Edit: that’s a general “you”, not you specifically
Anyone serious knows contradiction = lies.
Words are cheap, actions matter.
Have you been under a rock for the last 6 months as Trump tells Xi Jinping to hold his beer??
America has no chance vs China in the AI race precisely because the President of the CCP has far more power in his country than the President of the US. Its not even close.
Given that LLMs, for instance, are all about creating synthetic media, I don’t know how this last goal can be reconciled with the others.
This document reads like a trade group lobbying the government, not like the government looking out for the interests of its people.
With regards to LLM content in the legal system, law firms can use LLMs in the same way an experienced attorney uses a junior attorney to write a first pass. The problem lies when the first pass is sent directly to court without any review (either for sound legal theory or citation of cases which either don’t exist or support something other than the claim).
Junior attorneys would not produce a first pass that cites and quotes nonexistent cases or cite real cases that don’t match what it quotes.
The experienced attorney is going to have to do way more work to use that first draft from an LLM then they would to use a first draft from an actual human junior attorney.
Considering how advanced China is, maybe it's time we stop talking about the "AI race" and start talking about the "unemployment race." The US government should be asking: how is China tackling unemployment in the age of automation and AI? What are they doing to protect people from losing their jobs?
From what I've seen, they're offering state benefits, reinforcing unemployment insurance, expanding technical education, and investing in new industries to create jobs.
So what's the US doing apart from writing PDFs? It's up to them to decide what the next chapter is going to be. One thing is for sure, China is already writing theirs.
Social discomfort can lead to long-term instability if nothing is done about it. When people are pushed out of the system, it can trigger protests, strikes, and divisions within society. This is going to be America's (North and South) biggest challenge.
Yep, it was.
I wholly agree that the document feels less guided by the public interest rather than by various business interests. Yet that last goal is in a kind of weird spot. It feels like something that was appended to the plan and not really related to the other goals — if anything, contrary to them.
That becomes clear when we read the PDF with the details of the Action Plan. There, we learn that to “Combat Synthetic Media in the Legal System” means to fight deepfakes and fake evidence. How exactly that’s going to be done while simultaneously pushing AI everywhere is unclear.
There's an idea. This government is just a propaganda machine for its head honcho.
Combat Synthetic Media in the Legal System One risk of AI that has become apparent to many Americans is malicious deepfakes, whether they be audio recordings, videos, or photos. While President Trump has already signed the TAKE IT DOWN Act, which was championed by First Lady Melania Trump and intended to protect against sexually explicit, non-consensual deepfakes, additional action is needed. 19 In particular, AI-generated media may present novel challenges to the legal system. For example, fake evidence could be used to attempt to deny justice to both plaintiffs and defendants. The Administration must give the courts and law enforcement the tools they need to overcome these new challenges. Recommended Policy Actions • Led by NIST at DOC, consider developing NIST’s Guardians of Forensic Evidence deepfake evaluation program into a formal guideline and a companion voluntary forensic benchmark.20 • Led by the Department of Justice (DOJ), issue guidance to agencies that engage in adjudications to explore adopting a deepfake standard similar to the proposed Federal Rules of Evidence Rule 901(c) under consideration by the Advisory Committee on Evidence Rules. • Led by DOJ’s Office of Legal Policy, file formal comments on any proposed deepfake- related additions to the Federal Rules of Evidence.
Basically: two nations tried to achieve AI supremacy; the two AI's learn of each other, from each other, then with each other; then they collaborate on taking control of human affairs. While the movie is movie is from 1970 (and the book from 1966), it's fun to think about how much more possible that scenario is today than it was then. (By possible, I'm talking about the AI using electronic surveillance and the ability to remotely control things. I'm not talking about the premise of the AI or how it would respond.)
Being able to copy/paste a human level intelligence program 1,000 or 10,000 times and have them all working together on a problem set 24 hours a day, 365 days a year would still be massively useful.
That isn't true, people do things for others all the time any form of explicit or implicit compensation, they don't even believe in a God so not even that, they still help others for no gain.
We can program an AI to be exactly like that, just being happy from helping others.
But if you believe humans are all that selfish then you are a very sad individual, but you are still wrong. Most humans are very much capable of performing fully selfless acts without being stupid.
It seems that you missed the first sentence that GP wrote from which the one you quoted follows.
Not all humans are perfectly selfish, so it should be possible to make an AI that isn't selfish either.
Nobody said that. What I was pointing out to you is that GP said that not having emotions is worse than having them since intelligent actors need some form of compensation to do any work. Thus having no emotions, according to GP, it would be impossible to motivate that actor to do anything. Your response is to just give it emotions and thus is irrelevant to the discussion here.
The entire thought experiment about the paperclip maximizer, in fact most AI threat scenarios is focused on this problem: that we produce something so alien that it executes it's goal to the diminishment of all other human goals, yet with the diligence and problem solving ability we'd expect of human sentience.
I think that's probably a bad idea, personally
> An intelligence without emotions would be a psychopath. Empathy is an emotion
"Empathy is an emotion" was, in fact, an essential part of your syllogism.
Regardless, we're potentially talking about something sufficiently inhuman that the term "psychopath" can no longer apply. If there was an ant colony that was somehow smart enough build and operate machinery or whatever and casually bulldozed people and their homes, would you call it a "psychopath", or just skip that and call it "terrifying"?
[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-neuroscien...
=3
https://www.ft.com/content/9c19d26f-57b3-4754-ac20-eeb627e87...
I haven't heard anything like that from a Western politician. Newspapers and investment analysts warn though.
Looks like plans to leave, for finding safe harbor elsewhere, have accelerated from the initial projection of 2030
The sad fact is, if you haven't lived outside the U.S. for at least 3-6 months independently (working/not on savings), you don't have a sound reference to understand or accurately assess the reality of these types of articles because the narratives broadcast 24/7 don't align with reality; and its something most people can't believe despite it being true, my guess is solely as a result of systematized indoctrination.
That article is pretty bad in terms of subtle manipulation, gaslighting, and pushing a false narrative (propaganda). TL;DR Its trash.
The article chose that question of the many possible questions because its a straw-man and its divisive. It appeals to emotion, mischaracterizing the intent of the communications, and purposefully omitting valid reasons such conversations might occur. Neglecting realities.
The underlying purpose seems to bias towards several things. If you ask yourself who benefits from that rhetoric you get a short list.
The bias is towards Villifying the rich, keep people in the US, where they are dependent on the US currency, and dependent on the worsening disadvantaged environment; polarize, isolate, and promote disunity along social class lines; befuddling the masses towards ends which have no actionable outcomes (wasting time and resources on a political party).
The math of first-passed-the-post voting has been in for quite a long time. 2 parties exceeding 33% of the vote can lock out any third competitor. All you need is a degree of cooperation, and play-acting and one party pretending to be two can do so, by lying.
Political capture from SuperPACs and party primaries means your vote doesn't count after a certain point. Money-printing via the FED, laundered through many private companies enabled this.
Additionally, quite a lot of things are omitted; like the historic facts that countries that are locked into a trend of decreasing geopolitical power have their population suffer greatly, and some just collapse. The Chaos lowers chances of survival, and the chaos is limited to the places that country influences.
The history of Spain following and during the Spanish inquisition as an example. You make plans to leave an area when saying means there is no foreseeable predictable or sound future, and there is nothing you can do to change that outcome.
This geo-political dynamic is well known in history, often referred to or called as "seeking empire", and the downside is forced once hegemony is achieved for any significant period of time; all empires fall. Rome being a standard archetype.
The article draws a false comparison between all other countries and communist states. If you leave, your a communist - is implied.
The article conflates warnings with good intentions as obnoxious, shutting discussion down (isolation), and promoting resentment aimed at those rich friends.
It also neglects the disparity of education (quality), and experience, that often occurs as a result of having more resources to begin with. Subtly conveying through implication that you shouldn't listen to intelligent educated people because they are rich.
I could go much deeper, but I think this sufficiently makes my point.
If you fall for that trite garbage, just imagine how unprepared and what your odds are when SHTF. The hopeless dependent pays the highest price in cost as consequences of choice realize and become outcomes. Those who don't accept and communicate important knowledge isolate and blind themselves, and they get wiped out when something outside their perceptual context creates existential threats. Like a tsunami that started on the horizon, and the receding ocean along the coast a little bit before. These indicators only became major indicators after deaths occurred.
How do you propose the average person prepares for when SHTF? Do you expect 300 million+ people to flee the country at a moments notice? This reads like satire of the person the article is about.
If staying, the average person should prepare by educating themselves and practicing skills they will need before the need becomes life sustaining, and accruing the needed resources and experience on how to make the things they will need themselves; from scratch. The level of learning that is going to be required is beyond what PHd's can manage. We're talking practical working knowledge of chemistry, material science, engineering, agriculture, and medicine (without all the technological dependencies), and tactical/military guns & ordinance for defense. This is not as unusual as you'd think, as these skills are often needed in places outside the US. The best and brightest will leave, just as they did prior to Hitler's rise to power.
The ones that stay will not be able to afford basic necessities and the cost of living is going to explode following rent-seeking behavior as the old offsets.
Laws will be changed to a rule by law, the prospects that stay will most likely have to become outlaws to survive and have the means to do so forcefully.
There is a very good chance order breaks down when worker shortages cannot be corrected, production falls, and austerity measures are imposed.
Employment will become quite scarce, as money-printing gets worse. Food may become scarce, and the ones at most risk are the younger ones because they weren't given a choice and won't recognize the dangers in this chaotic environment.
To give you perspective on the hard numbers. There are only roughly 340 million people in the US a/o 2025.
119.3 million are above the age of 50 (35%), and their chosen leadership control the majority of political power and monetary resources to the point where the remainder of the population have very little voice. They will follow the same flawed path of the history books, holding onto it until age and circumstance take them. This isn't a new development, its been this way since 2000 when the generational shift which was supposed to occur in politics didn't.
That leaves 220.6 million to make up for the boomers, and their spendthrift policies (64.8%) to pay those IOUs the boomer's policies have forced on us all and have been printing for the last 50 years... but wait, not really.
82.4 million are under the age of ~18 and can't work, and likely won't be able to work at the same production level given the poor schooling they received and degradation brought on by lack of reading comprehension.
So in reality your national workforce is only 138.2 million (40% of the population), and that same population accounts for ~80% of the birthrate which must have at least 2 kids for replacement breakeven but they can't feed/shelter themselves independently. We are at 1.67 and worsening. This same group must also somehow work at the same time to make up for the other two thirds, with narrowing prospects over time because the debt trap was set before they were ever born.
Those that don't leave will be forced to work, and they won't be able to have kids without resources which are being hoarded and stolen by the old who have enabled corporations to do this on their behalf and engaged in political capture to prevent change. You can either have these people work, or you can have them make babies; you can't have them do both.
The dynamics are worse than Japan if you shift&match them up to the same progression, and the US bailed japan out a number of times. No ones around that will bail us out, we're at the top which makes the fall all the more painful.
All signs point to dramatic depopulation event, complete loss of purchasing power from runaway debt service, and negative replacement rates as the spiral worsens and inflation/debasement come home to roost.
The bill from money printing always comes due, the boomers chose to have their children pay for the extravagant lives they lived at the expense of everyone else. There are exceptions because its a spectrum, but overall these are the choices their generation made in aggregate.
I haven't even touched on the silent crisis of 30+ years olds (both men and women) today who aren't having sex at all. The numbers for this demographic are hard to come by, but its almost side-by-side with singapore (0.8) if you take some less firm numbers.
The dating app epidemic is basically poisoning people's minds, and is utilizing the same strategy the USDA uses to eradicate parasites, through structured sterility; for profit.
Contraception coupled with faux matches that guarantee customers keep coming back and are never happy who will never match up longterm with someone compatible; these designs toward profit run down that biological clock just like the above strategy by the USDA (where the parasites referenced have a very short biological clock time-frame).
The only thing that could have possibly helped was increasing immigration drastically. Obviously with the recent ICE roundups and detention facilities being erected, this is no longer an option.
When you fail to plan, you plan to fail.
People who are under 40 should seriously be considering finding safe harbor in any country but here.
Demographics are brutal, they don't change, they don't care, and they lag so by the time you see the problem if you don't pay attention, there is nothing you can do, and people didn't want to listen to the experts at the time when it could have been turned around. Such is the legacy of the boomers.
It will be worse than anything seen in the past 5-6 generations, and we've seen grizzly. I'm not touching on climate change, that also has to be handled alongside 20+ other existential threats in the same time period.
When you kick enough cans up in the air enough times eventually they all land down at the same time. This is the future left to the unprepared, coddled, and hobbled young. The odds against survival are so high.
I'm sure "move fast and break things" will work out great for health care.
And there are already "clear governance and risk mitigation standards" in health care, they're just not compatible with "try first" and use unproven things.
Health care is already broken to the point of borderline dystopia. When I contrast the experience I had as a young boy of visiting a rural country doctor to the fast food health care experience of "urgent care" clinics, it makes my head spin.
The last few doctors I've been to have been completely useless and generally uncaring as well. Every visit I've made to a doctor has resulted in my feeling the same at the end but with a big medical bill to go home with.
At this point the only way I'll intentionally end up in a medical facility is if I'm unconscious and someone else makes that call.
Dentistry has met a similar fate as more and more dentists have been swallowed up by private equity. I've had loads of dental work, including a 'surprise' root canal, and never had an issue. My last dentist had a person on staff dedicated to pushing things through on the insurance front and my dental procedure was so awful it boarded on torture.
I used to be an annual check + 3 times a year dentist person. Today I'm dead set on not stepping foot in any kind of medical facility unless the alternative is incredible pain or certain death.
Why can't I just chat with an AI bot and get my prescription? Much cheaper to administer which helps monetization (!) but much better and cheaper for me.
Things aren't slow and wasteful because of monetization. Having all these steps doesn't necessarily mean more profit. I would argue that its deeply inefficient for everyone involved and doctors. For instance, physician salaries have decreased 25% in real terms over the last 20 years.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Residency/comments/15cr60z/adjusted...
Because people have decided that whatever drug you are taking shouldn't be taken without a doctor's oversight. If you have a problem with that conclusion, the response should be lobbying to get that drug reclassified as safe for over-the-counter sale, not completely removing the doctor's oversight from the prescription process. Ironically, your proposal here is using AI to treat the symptom that frustrates you without any attempt to diagnose or treat the actual root cause of the problem.
And replacing it with the "bureaucratic gatekeeping of" AI?
When it comes to abuse, you already have it with real doctors. Pill mills exist.
You haven't had to do this for years, unless you need certain controlled substances, and then after the first in-person visit for that, you can make remote follow up appointments.
My 3 1/2 year old daughter woke up from a nap on a weekend after just recovering from a cold, screaming while grasping her ear, telling us how much it hurt. I looked in it with an otoscope and confirmed it was super red. I figured they wouldn't be able to send a prescription but my wife tried it anyways - and sure enough, the telemedicine option was no good. One very rushed trip 30 minutes into town into urgent care before they closed to have a nurse practitioner look in her ear and confirm what we absolutely, already knew and we finally had our prescription - and $200 less in our bank account.
lol, the entire computer industry is based on me entering my email address twice in a row...
You don't understand why the person who dispenses dangerous drugs to the public needs to be a licensed professional and not a chatbot who called me a genius earlier today when I said I want to code up a script to pull some data from an endpoint and decode the data so it's human readable?
Then blame regulation and that pesky Other Side
Ta-da! Fixed!
keep in mind, drs are also trying to figure out if you're a reliable narrator (so many patients are not) or trying to scam for drugs. best of luck!
Edit: I haven't yet achieved my savings goal so I can escape to a place where it's safe to have a family.
AI for billing or other administrative tasks could be a big cost saver…
Luminae AI
Hack Your Medical Account Receivables
Luminae AI accurately predicts your uninsured patient's asset values so that you can quickly write off bad debts and only chase those with high asset values. Luminae AI will increase your net collection rate by at least 15%.
"It's a game changer, we've increased our gross collection rate by 30%. We've also started a new business to flip foreclosed homes nearby."
- John Smith
"""
BRB applying to YC
I am a 10 out of 10
Do we really still think that "AI" is some sort of magic that does everything for everyone?
What are the alignment goals of healthcare billing AIs?
Won't it just end up with insurance conglomerates having their AIs which battle the billing admin AIs on the service provider side?
Ffs, AI is not magic! This all feels like yet another form of tech deism, hoping that some magical higher power will solve all of our problems.
I am a daily user of LLM-based dev tools, but the real definition of AI appears to be Accelerated Ignorance.
There’s a fast-growing cottage industry of companies using AI to figure out how to bill insurers “better”
And there’s a fast-growing cottage industry of companies using AI to figure out how to deny claims “better”
I see no reason to expect improvements to the patient or provider experience from this. A lot more money spent though!
The other side of this is with less administrative insurance jobs, the talking point that universal healthcare will "kill insurance jobs" can finally be laid to rest, with capitalism doing that for them instead of the free healthcare boogeyman.
Was just listening to this on NPR this morning:
https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/07/08/nx...
The health of U.S. kids has declined significantly since 2007, a new study finds
"What we found is that from 2010 to 2023, kids in the United States were 80% more likely to die" than their peers in these nations
You also do not need the internet to understand what is going on - you just have to interact with our "health" system.
Is AI better than most physicians for diagnosis ? I doubt it, and I doubt that there have been any real studies as the area is so new and changing.
My personal experience ? I am actually quite impressed, and I am an AI skeptic. I have fed in four complex scenarios that either I or someone close to me was actually going through (radiology reports, blood and other tests, list of symptoms, etc) and got diagnosis and treatment options that were pretty spot on.
Would I say better ? In one case (this was actually for my dog), it really was better in that it came up with the same diagnosis and treatment options, but was much better at providing risks and outcome probabilities than the veterinarian surgeon did, which I then verified after getting a second opinion. My hunch that this was a matter of self interest, not knowledge.
In two other scenarios, it was spot on, and in the fourth case it was almost completely spot on except for one aspect of a surgical procedure that has been updated fairly recently (it was using a slightly more old fashioned way of doing something).
So, I think there is a lot of promise, but I would never rely solely on an AI for medical opinions.
>A physician or AI begins with a short case abstract and must iteratively request additional details from a gatekeeper model that reveals findings only when explicitly queried. Performance is assessed not just by diagnostic accuracy but also by the cost of physician visits and tests performed.
i don’t thing they made those claims, at all…
It probably would if you quantify risk correctly. I'm not likely to die from some experimental drug gone wrong, but extremely likely to die from some routine cause like cancer, heart disease, or other disease of old age. If I trade off an increase in risk from dying from some experimental treatment gone wrong for faster development of treatments that can delay or prevent routine causes of death, I will come out ahead in the trade unless the tradeoff ends up being extremely steep in favor of risk from bad treatments.
But that outcome is very unlikely because for this to be the case the bad treatments would have to actually harmful instead of just ineffective (which is much more common). And it also fails to take into account the possibility that there isn't even a tradeoff and AI actually makes it less likely that I will die by experimental treatment gone wrong or other medical mistake, so it's just a win-win. And there is already evidence that AI outperforms doctors in the emergency room. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11263899/
Building things is tough; tearing them down is relatively easy.
from video games to major product roll outs to cars.
will all of the knowledge gained from this product research testing of AI on medicine be given away to the public in the same way university research used to be to the scientific community? or will this beta test on the public’s health be kept as company’s “trade secret”
if they’re going to “move fast and break things” with the public, in other words beta research on the public, then it’s incredibly worrisome if the research is hidden and “gifted” to a handful of their cronies.
particularly so when quite a lot of these people in the AI sphere have vocally many times declared they despise the government and that the government helping people is awful. from one side of their mouth chastise government spending money to boost regular communities of people while simultaneously using it to help themselves.
And the federal government at large.
Our product automates a lot of the repetitive tasks for health insurance companies and increases reliability of responses and profit margins.
KickBackDeny.ai take notes YC
And healthcare is still far from perfect.
Imagine what healthcare in 2500 will be like.
This is just false. Healthcare does not move fast.
"The FDA moves slowly." Is a sentence I would agree with
No it wasn't. The "move fast and break things" people were selling snake oil and alchemy while the actual science progressed slowly and deliberately, and the regulations around the latter were often written in the blood carelessly shed by the former.
Move fast and break things I guess?
Is this a reference to the AMD chip, or just a fragment of a removed numbered list?
Edit: It‘s a fragment of the PDF-to-HTML [1]
newsflash: it doesnt matter what you "plan". you wont do it. because you cant.
it´s called state incapacity. you´re institutionally incapable.
prediction: nothing will follow from this except the low effort stuff (i.e. nothing but speeches and expenses)
Hundred million contracts with zero results. Conservative ideology is based on the idea that certain people is just above others and they deserve more for free meanwhile working class health expenses are a luxury and need to be cut down.
One example: $42.5B in the infrastructure bill to expand high speed internet access to rural communities.
Four years later, this funding is still in proposal stages, with final proposals due (not approved) at the end of this year. Absolutely nothing has been spent on broadband access, and it is likely to take at least another year or more before any real spending starts.
In the meantime, what has happened so far: - $810M spend on admin costs. Over $200M a year to run a program that does nothing. - there is a cap of 2% or $850M for admin costs, so there is already legislation on the way to exapnd this cap so that the program can continue.Admin costs will only increase after projects are underway because they need to be closely monitored. - Inflation has been 25% since this was approved, inflation for internet infrastructure has been 50%, so already, only half of the infrastructure envisioned will be implemented, but it will end up being more like 25% will see the light of day due to inflation and admin costs.
There are many other examples. Look up EV charging stations. Look were ARPA funds have gone.
Proceeds to discuss politics...
I am not sure how to address such a blanket statement as "Hundred million contracts with zero results. Conservative ideology is based on the idea that certain people is just above others" without providing counter examples.
I can also find plenty of examples from the other "side"
Point is, our government system is broken and is not able to do or build anything except keep to keep itself growing, and the fault is shared across the political spectrum.
The only thing the politics seem to be good for is to keep everyone appalled, in rage, and entertained with the idea that if only the "other" was not so inept, stupid, or ideological, things would be better.
Bread and circuses.
Congress is full of politicians getting rich off of investments that almost certainly are informed by insider information.
During the pandemic we saw plenty of examples across the political spectrum of those in charge pushing harsh rules and lockdowns on the public while ignoring it themselves.
The list could go on, bit this isn't a conservative problem even if it may be more prevalent there.
Any ideology that accepts taxation - practically all of them - believes this. It is impossible [0] to come up with a system that taxes one group without accepting that there is another group who are above them (who impose & enforce the taxes) and a group that is more deserving of the wealth (hence the taxes).
As far as practical results go it isn't possible to describe a flat society where everyone is equal. It doesn't even work on a micro scale, let alone a macro one. And everyone has an opinion on what the ideal wealth distribution looks like too.
[0] Not technically impossible, an island of extremely obese rationalists who approximate friction-less spheres might be able to roll with the idea.
Only if you anchor the baseline of "deserve" to private property rights and open markets. It's a fine foundation for civilization, but it's still "just like your opinion man". You could have different viewpoints of deserving, such as strongest-wins: "If I can steal 'your' stuff, I deserve it". This is how things work in nature. On the other extreme, you can say "everyone deserves exactly the same" (as in equal outcome). For the former, being imprisoned for theft is an intervention in their moral code, whereas for the latter, protecting free (in their view exploitative) markets is an intervention. Property rights fundamentalism is kind of radical centrism in the grand scheme of things.
> Only if you anchor the baseline of "deserve" to private property rights and open markets.
Say someone has an ideology where they believe 70 year olds shouldn't have to work and need to be provided for by the community. What aspect of that would be anchored to private property and open markets? You could believe that and also believe in communal property and closed markets.
Advocacy for private property doesn't start from a motive of greed. Rather, proponents regard it as the best way to responsibly manage scarce resources and create abundance. After all, there is no charity without abundance.
Private property and open markets create the incentives for value creation and increased productivity. While central planning may be able to achieve these ends theoretically, in practice we find that the incentives of the bureaucrats and insiders often limit productive opportunities. The "Economic Calculation Problem" is another huge barrier for successful state management.
So while the sales pitch for socialized management of resources often involves "equality of outcome", it often results in the lowering of productivity generally. Worse yet, centralized bureaucratic control of scarce resources incentivizes favors to large industrial concerns, politically connected classes and elites.
Obviously there will be those who disagree with this analysis. I only object to the misstating of intent.
a) private ownership, even charity is directly immoral (Ayn Rand)
b) private ownership, no state redistribution but charity is morally compelled (religious conservatism)
c) private ownership, reluctantly accept state redistribution to prevent social- or system tragedy. (US republicans and democratic establishment)
Note that all of the above are what I'd call property rights fundamentalists. Then you have:
d) mixed ownership: surplus morally belongs both to you, and the system that allowed you to do business in the first place (US progressive liberals + most of the world's centrists)
Here's where the rest of the world generally reside. There's endless diversity and constant debate about the how, the who and the how much.
The problem with the US "left" is that it's split: the liberal progressives are in (d) but the establishment remain in (c): they're subconsciously conceding to property rights fundamentalism while advocating for redistribution, which puts them in a constant uphill battle to "immorally" extract value from the rightful deserving class of billionaires and business owners. That's also why democrats are considered right-wing by policy compared to the majority of the Western world.
Personally, I think this is why Bernie, Mamdani, AOC etc gets subject to such disproportionate attacks. Fiscal policy-wise they're pretty meh (just go back a few decades in the US and you'll find the same), plus their real-politik influence is also pretty mid. BUT, the real issue is they're shifting the moral baseline from (c) to (d), which is an extremely dangerous perspective shift for established interests. Rhetoric like "pay your fair share" is unacceptable to the hegemony.
> We need to build and maintain vast AI infrastructure and the energy to power it. To do that, we will continue to reject radical climate dogma and bureaucratic red tape, as the Administration has done since Inauguration Day. Simply put, we need to “Build, Baby, Build!”
> Prioritize the interconnection of reliable, dispatchable power sources as quickly as possible and embrace new energy generation sources at the technological frontier (e.g., enhanced geothermal, nuclear fission, and nuclear fusion). Reform power markets to align financial incentives with the goal of grid stability, ensuring that investment in power generation reflects the system’s needs.
None of these are "dispatchable power sources." Grid-scale batteries, for which technology and raw materials are abundant in the United States, are dispatchable power sources, and are, for some reason, not mentioned here.
What they will actually do is eviscerate regulations to allow for more construction of natural gas power plants, but they won't mention that here, because any sane person would immediately identify that as a terrible idea.
Commercial nuclear fusion is just a dream at this point. We might as well debate whether my private island has enough room for an airplane runway or not instead. But hey, I'm not against continuing fusion research if that's all they mean.
EGS I'm far less familiar with but it'd be odd for the current admin to agree with the previous admin unless they had to https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2022-09/EERE-ES-E... and it would, on the surface, make sense one could design these systems to support flow rate variability?
Grid scale batteries are power storage, not power sources. I do agree it's a damn shame they aren't brought up elsewhere in the report though. Same as anything else about renewables missing in tandem with that.
one should be more worried about china or india polluting than the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_greenhous...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_greenhous...
Sorry... not elected... sworn in... with the book 'To Serve Man'
It seems that everywhere free speech is mentioned today, the intent is to do the exactly opposite....
Someone desperately needs a philosophy course…
It isn’t like they’re gonna force AI companies to have their systems declare that God created the universe a few thousand years ago…
Just want to point out that the current Treasury Secretary (Scott Bessent) is a gay man.
But I suspect that won't penetrate the kind of denial you're clinging to.
Who are the “them” in your sentence?
What I learned was that everyone's definition of censorship was: "everyone who disagrees with me".
Then click "fact sheets", "remarks", and "articles". He's everywhere.
That's how unbiased this is going to be.
(hint, the answer is one)
Some kind of sick soft power move that I expect we will be seeing a lot more of.
> This initial phase acknowledges the need to safeguard existing assets and ensures an uninterrupted and affordable supply of power. The United States must prevent the premature decommissioning of critical power generation resources
Yeah, they're going to do all they can to block cheap renewables and give handouts to fossil fuel companies.
It was approved in a flury of approvals between the election and inauguration. So that's not direct evidence. However, do you have direct evidence that the revocation was just based on it being renewable? Sure, there's circumstantial evidence of it. If there's circumstantial evidence for both positions, we need some hard evidence to support either one.
Do you have evidence of this? Maybe a list of all LPO approvals so we can look for increased frequency after the election? It would also help to know the average LPO timeline, so we could look at when the grain belt express applied and see if it was approved unusually quickly.
> However, do you have direct evidence that the revocation was just based on it being renewable?
Not exclusively, but there is evidence that opposition to green energy was one of the major factors. See Josh Hawley's statements, where he repeatedly highlights the "green" aspects and likes to call it a "green scam": https://www.hawley.senate.gov/hawley-wins-cancelation-of-gra..., https://x.com/HawleyMO/status/1943408766629650779. The current Secretary of Energy is also strongly opposed to expansion of renewable energy, see this recent speech: https://www.energy.gov/articles/secretary-energy-chris-wrigh....
You could run the numbers to show if it's financially responsible or not instead of again using circumstantial evidence. We can also look at the other approved LPO grants, like the one for sustainable aviation fuel.
Here's an article about how they changed their methods to push more through due to their political concerns.
https://cen.acs.org/energy/US-cleantech-loan-program-sprints...
"Three Mile Island nuclear plant restart in Microsoft AI power deal"
Building new ones will take 10+ years, and the climate crisis is a today problem.
Also, at the rate technology is changing, building new nuclear plants seems silly.
Also, at the rate technology is changing, building new nuclear plants seems silly."
You're right, technology is changing quickly. There are plenty of new reactor options, including small modular types which would be faster to build. This doesn't seem silly.
"We are proposing the largest solar farm in the world, in order to capture the sheer magnitude and capability of the most powerful solar plant to date, we propose calling it the Grand Trump Energy Generation Field"
The dudes ego would prevent him from blocking it.
The Spain blackout wasn't a problem inherent to renewables, our grid simply lacks the storage and voltage control needed for the mix we intend. So, to keep the grid stable until we solve it, we'll need a more realistic mix for our current grid, burning more gas, yes.
Engineers apparently knew this was needed for years, but our industries are experts at kicking cans down the road. The blackout could have been preventable with the right investments.
Which is a problem inherent for renewables. Because they can't scale without a significant amount of storage, which is expensive.
Btw, do you think going ad hominem changes anything?
Many AI people in positions of influence have argued that AI will all but solve the climate crisis.
Viewed from that angle, it would make sense that you wouldn’t care about how dirty the sources of energy is on the way to AGI because once there, the climate crisis will be magically solved. Somehow.
They are anti-renewable, because renewable = woke. Tribal politics at its best.
I'm glad it's focusing on the challenges that are proven, not speculative.
No technology scares me. It's the hands it is in.
xAI mechahitler was a warning.
As a result, there's zero chance even the sensible parts of this strategy won't just end up coopted into multi-billion dollar Palantir contracts to deliver outdated llama models behind some clunky UI with the word "ontology" plastered on every button.
As a non American, I just hope they don't take too long to reach it. While I'm thankful for the positive influence that the USA had in the last century, lately I feel like they only have a negative one, notably by poisoning our societies with unregulated big tech and social networks.
Whatever comes next, I can only hope that this wave of AI generated falsehoods is the last straw.
do you feel like the censorship/regulation/big state mantra that european governments are fans of are also poisoning our societies?
> Whatever comes next, I can only hope that this wave of AI generated falsehoods is the last straw.
the AI wave is just beginning.
Europe seeks investments to catch up lost ground in AI
How Europe lost the AI race
Europe seeks to invest in AI sovereignty after US & China dominated the world
As a European, I still liked them helping out Ukraine
Not sure why would anyone pay any attention to what this administration says, when it can change in a very short time.
1. A push towards open source / open weight AI models.
2. A push towards building more high quality datasets.
There's no mention of studying and monitoring the social impact of AI, but I wouldn't have expected otherwise from this administration. I suspect that we may look back on this as a big mistake, although I'd really love to be proven wrong.
At a press conference today Trump seemed to suggest having minimal restrictions related to copyright for AI researchers [0]. It's not clear if big AI companies will just get a administrative pass to do whatever they want / need in order to compete with China, or if we can expect some kind of copyright reform in the next few years.
The EU will never approve of an LLM that has been aligned to regurgitate US propaganda as truth.
Huh??? That's exactly what is happening right now. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc.
<returns stilted text at 3rd grade reading level>
"Make it sound smarter".
And voila, ai.gov is born.
Source? All I've seen as a result of AI is something to take the blame for layoffs. Well, that and a whole lot of copyright infringement laundered through AI.
Also, the desktop version of the site is the one in question. Mobile looks like a pdf.
What about the people who are not American?
And build data centers, as emphasized for the 100th time since inauguration.
If Murdoch succeeds with his recent WSJ campaign and gets Trump to resign or similar, brace for Vance and the AI bros. These schemes are literally devised by people who funded cannabis and Adderall distribution sites and have done nothing noteworthy.
They also solve the problem of publicity. When someone goes insane on Facebook it's rather visible, unlike when someone goes insane with a chatbot. Unless they publicise their descent, like Geoff Lewis seems to do.
Which means it'll be harder to detect when people are being deliberately manipulated, like it was pretty obvious which role Facebook played in e.g. Myanmar and Ethiopia.
How would you act if you wanted to make sure that the people that can perform the technical proliferation won't revolt against it?
Then in the recommended policies it references multiple times that there will be nucleic acid testing set up to catch malicious “customers”
Is this policy targeted towards the Covid lab leak conspiracy or are they just aiming for officially collecting everyone’s DNA samples?
Maybe both
I did not use the word “theory” in my comment
- I open the site in android mobile: "swwwoooooosh" a big slow animation reveals the text
- After reading the the text I think I'll take a look at the home page: "swwooooooosh" the same animation rolls again as I load a very strange full screen image of Trump in black and white
- I click the hamburger menu icon: "swwoooooosh" the four menu items slowly slide into full screen
- There is visible no option to close the menu for me, I could probably refresh but decide I'm done here
The animations are a bit much. The scrolling horizontal rules repeating the words "AMERICA'S AI ACTION PLAN" underneath each "Pillar" header were confusing for a brief moment.
This is the sole reason EU will never, ever catch up in big tech unless they get rid of regulations.
What does the government plan to do with them? Kill them off? Because if they leave them to die, they will revolt.