These people believe they're on track to create life and displace the majority of labor in the world. Nothing else makes the level of investment make sense. It's a prisoner's dilemma where they all think they need to try because regardless of the likelihood of success, the expected value remains astronomical and the risk of not being the winner is extinction.
Yeah, half of my AI skepticism isn't that the tools don't work. It's that I'm having a tough time figuring out how these things are ever going to produce ROI.
Like, at some point the end product needs to be a literal genie's lamp or fountain of youth.
Scale AI has deep cooperation with military agencies and a fresh large contract with the Gulf state with the largest US military presence. It's likely they're building a new generation of combat command systems and the like, consolidation of surveillance and management tooling in the ongoing and future US wars isn't surprising.
[Okay so the third option that I thought of but decided not to put down was: literal genie's lamp, fountain of youth, or robot army. Because then who cares if you collapse the economy if AGI, you'll be safe with your robot army. Not particularly happy that this option is potentially not far from the mark.]
Not sure what you mean, but it's not like the militarisation of "tech" is a secret. The current US administration is bragging about its militaristic totalisation efforts:
If "absurd" implies "too high": I always thought strong reactions to valuations a bit strange. Businesses are complicated and assuming that somebody who is willing to spend billions of dollars thought a bit harder about the value than what I can provide with my gut reaction seems reasonable.
So I started to treat it as more of an update, as in "Huh, my idea of what something is worth just really clashed with the market, curious."
Does not mean the market is right, of course. But most of the time, when digging into it and thinking a bit more about it, I would not be willing to take the short position and as a consequence moderate my reaction.
