I’m curious if someone can truthfully explain this. What’s the main motivation for all the money being thrown at R’s from these and other high up tech people?
What I want is specific reasons not the usual Reddit “they’re rich therefore evil blah blah” zero-insight answers. Okay, but why? Almost nobody wakes up and says “I’m going to be evil today!” People have motives and objectives and belief systems.
Wooing the Republicans (despite them being scoundrels openly) is the wealthy and powerful tacitly saying they believe that the Democrats are toothless. The Democratic Party has shown no real leadership, has no real popularity (again, despite an open scoundrel being the President opposing them giving them a perfect target for energizing undecided voters!) and has no interest in changing their tactics or platform to increase their popularity. While the Democrats are likely to make gains and have a better shot than they deserve at winning the presidency in 2028, they are very much unloved and will be at risk of being deadlocked in Congress and then kicked right back out in later election cycles.
An example, "... A record-high 45% of U.S. adults identified as political independents in 2025 ... Importantly, these party shifts do not indicate that Americans are warming to the Democratic Party. In fact, favorable ratings of the Democratic Party are no better than those of the Republican Party, and are among the worst Gallup has recorded for the Democratic Party historically." from https://news.gallup.com/poll/700499/new-high-identify-politi...
I posted a longer comment above which kinda answers this but without repeating myself too much, Republicans mainly serve to keep Democrats from being able to consolidate power, and Democrats have now shown us what 15 years of a (D) trifecta gets you.
Taxes are higher than ever, cost of living has spiked even more here than other places, tens of billions wasted on CAHSR with nothing to show for it, and no good news on homelessness, poverty, or housing costs either.
Crime has been gradually going down per capita (at least what people have bothered to report), but that's a nationwide trend. If Dems are as good at governing as they claim to be, they ought to have more to show for their efforts than "we had the same results as Texas did."
And the latest Democratic superstars like Mamdani enter the picture, with "government run grocery stores" as his big innovation?
So, my question is why wouldn't one want to deprive these people of more power?
Because that's how corruption and graft works in the US. Donating to political campaigns doesn't count as bribery. The donation is what gets them access to the candidate, so instead of writing a letter or calling their office you can have 30 seconds to a few minutes of their time at an election campaign fundraising dinner or over a phone call where they want to thank their donors during which you can press them to support whatever you personally want.
They're giving them money in exchange for the opportunity to try to convince the candidate to support what they want.
> leaders at the San Francisco-based tech incubator are trying to build a tech-forward future
They're donating money to anyone who isn't anti-tech / anti-business / anti-datacenter / anti-AI
That ~50% of those folks are R being the newsworthy part is the real question. Why should Silicon Valley support people who clearly loath the technology industry just because they're blue? The simplest explanation is the most obvious one, and the one this article explains: Tech leaders are donating money to tech-friendly politicians.
The same point was made by many in the music industry about huge scale Internet music piracy vs people dubbing CDs onto mixtapes.
Everyone laughed at them and rolled their eyes or called them greedy even though we now know that mass piracy was probably a push to break the music industry and force them to accept bad deals (like paltry streaming revenue). At the very least it had that effect.
Piracy has always been a major part of the computer and Internet industries, and yes the companies themselves have historically been massive hypocrites about it. It’s okay when they pirate but not you or anyone else. It goes all the way back to early companies stealing code and UI designs from each other.
Lots of modern software plays it loose with privacy, but this IMO crossing a second line: doing so with zero notification whatsoever, in a massively intrusive way, against data that is almost certainly private and possibly illegal to exfiltrate, with no obvious way to turn it off.
That crosses into outright malware.
Makes me not want to use GLM or other Z.ai models either, since who knows what interesting easter eggs are embedded in their training data.
You know... (puts on foil hat)... I did notice that Z is also the weird Russian logo for their invasion of Ukraine and Russia and China have cooperated to some degree (or at least China is helping Russia in exchange for access to resources). I dismissed this when I first thought of it, but I will now leave it here. Still probably coincidence but my Bayesian priors were just updated in its direction very slightly.
How do you know this is not true with other vendors? I'm not defending them but I wouldn't believe anyone in this business unconditionally. Anthropic agent fwiw is not open source, gemini and codex are.
People have found many nasties embedded in Claude Code over the last couple of years. You can't trust a closed source harness. You can barely trust an open source one.
IMO if they didn’t have proper licensing to train on the data the model should not be copyrightable.
In the long term though I think models have no moat, so the cost will fall to the cost of compute and storage. Which is why they’re pushing AI safety panics: regulatory capture to outlaw open models and outlaw competition.
And yeah, EA is neither effective nor altruistic. It’s a cult, part of the “Rationalist” and adjacent cluster of tech cults. They’re to tech what Scientology is to Hollywood I guess.
> IMO high housing prices are destroying civilization.
It's like a game of musical chairs. There aren't enough houses to go around. You go around and the music stops. Everyone scrambles to their nearest chair. Obviously the person on crutches will be the first to fall out of the game. The rest then talk about laziness, drugs, bootstraps, and all the rest. But add 1 more chair and there's no problem, even the dude with the broken leg can sit.
Someone tried to build the extra chair but the endless required studies and legal challenges from existing chair-sitters bankrupted the would-be chair builder.
Also the chair, if actually built, would be so expensive that one legged guy can’t afford it. His best hope is someone with a worse chair takes it, then he tries to take their seat, but there’s already a dozen two-legged guys in front of him.
> Also the chair, if actually built, would be so expensive that one legged guy can’t afford it. His best hope is someone with a worse chair takes it, then he tries to take their seat, but there’s already a dozen two-legged guys in front of him.
Maybe you need 5 chairs? Here in SF supply has fallen decades behind the demand curve to the point it may be impossible to catch up even if all you did was build build build.
decades of reasonable, consistently applied housing policy led to the creation of islands of wealth, surrounded by oceans of poverty. ergo, this is the purpose. this is how the people there want to live. I left many years ago when I realized the futility of it all.
I call SF and Silicon Valley “the world’s only slum for the rich.”
What buys you a trap house or an apartment with hallways that smell like piss in SF or the Valley will buy you a mansion in 90% of the country at least.
Everyone wants to blame existing landowners and sure they share part of it but the lion's share of the blame ought to be directed at do-gooders (land owning or otherwise) who are unwilling to be honest (with themselves, or in the internet comments) and admit that every policy that "looks good" based on the one sided statements presented in abstract by its peddlers.
Each one of those policies is part of the system that gets us the results we have and the peddlers all share in the blame.
Well, for generations now, exponential growth in all things has been state policy and it was good (tm). Because of population growth, there's always a shortage of housing. Population is projected to peak this century. Whatever will we do when there are already enough houses for everyone to have one?
> Whatever will we do when there are already enough houses for everyone to have one?
In many places in Europe and Asia, the govt will essentially pay you to go live in near-abandoned villages and revitalize them.
In USA it’s just ghost towns. See also Detroit
The problem is better described as "There aren't enough homes where people want to live". We have plenty of houses, even in america. The "where people want to live" part largely comes down to density, zoning laws, and the fact that for most people their primary residence represents their entire net worth and it would be materially impactful if the price went down (by building more/better homes nearby). So everyone resists building.
But it's okay, if you resist building for long enough then your town will eventually collapse and your house will be worth nothing anyway. Many american Towns are essentially insolvent and can't afford realistic upkeep prices for services like sewage, roads, good schools, etc., and are living on borrowed time until infrastructure collapses and nobody wants to buy there. See Strong Towns the book.
> The "where people want to live" part largely comes down to density, zoning laws, and the fact that for most people their primary residence represents their entire net worth and it would be materially impactful if the price went down (by building more/better homes nearby).
Infrastructure is a major deal. You can't really exist as a member of modern society without broadband Internet, unless you're Amish or whatever and even they have begun to shift attitudes. Starlink changed the calculation quite a bit, and it definitely helps, but other things such as cellphone reception and emergency services that arrive in a reasonable time are also important.
Surely at least part of it is the concentration of wealth and economic activity. There's large masses of decaying rural towns where houses are cheap, but at the same time the whole reason they're decaying is because there just isn't enough economic opportunity to afford even these cheap houses.
I have no clue what the overall balance of housing looks like, but surely it doesn't help that big chunks of the housing market are being deprecated at the same time.
> It's like a game of musical chairs. There aren't enough houses to go around.
Actually, there are. In Germany for example, we have millions of units left empty... the catch is, these are in (extremely) rural areas. Areas that used to be populated, but no longer are because the government has let them fall extremely behind in modern amenities. Some even do not have cellphone service.
Normally, you'd expect people and companies to do a pricing arbitrage and move where housing is cheap, but unfortunately, when there is no local employment or the infrastructure does not support remote employment, or other crucial requirements (safe potable water, electrical grid, grocery stores, schools, some sort of entertainment) are lacking, this does not work out any more.
See I’ve had this insane wild idea for years that homelessness could be related to inadequate housing supply.
Wild I know. People not having something being related to not enough of that thing.
But we have to stop those developers! If there’s ever a food shortage will people be saying “stop greedy farmers?”
Actually they probably will. Not enough food so obviously farmers are causing it and it’s a conspiracy. I’m sure that’s what the TikTok slop and Xhitter rage bait would say.
The solution is deregulation and land-value taxes. Tax land so that it reaches its maximum utilization. Deregulate so that buildings can actually be built.
My favorite idea is that the universe expands because mass-energy in our 4d parent universe is falling into our universe, which is a black hole. We exist as information upon the 4d hole’s 3d event horizon, and experience its inflation as our time dimension (as well as space inflation).
Inflation is accelerating because as the black hole grows it eats more.
Don’t know how crackpot this is. From what I’ve read it actually can be coaxed into fitting observation but there’s just no possible way to test it.
There is a middle ground. This kind of fatalism makes people not want to try.
I think we have made political office and running for it so insanely adversarial and toxic that only three kinds of people will dare sign up for it: narcissists, crooks, and ideologues who think they are on a crusade. (The latter includes a variety of religions and ideologies.)
Competent sane well balanced people with reasonable balanced views of things like ideologies or for whom religion is more personal and spiritual? No way they’d go near it.
People with some of these negative characteristics, like narcissism, but who are also very competent? They can make more money and get often as much prestige in business. So we don’t even get competent narcissists.
Why is it so toxic? The media, the process, and us. The media and the people absolutely roast anyone running, and the winner take all process encourages a brutal slug fest.
Other countries don’t have it as bad. We could start by asking what they do differently.
Not being pure winner take all is one big one. They allow coalitions. That encourages alliances and dialogue. It also limits below the belt attacks since you might have to work hand in hand with these people, so you better not trash them too badly.
> Unless I misread it, are they saying local GPUs use less energy?
You misread it. From the abstract:
> local accelerators achieve at least 1.4× lower IPW than cloud accelerators running identical models
That's "intelligence per watt". They also have IPJ, per Joule.
So, they find local is 40% "dumber" than cloud for the same power or 40% more power for the same "intelligence".
Tables 13 and 14 summarize their IPW and IPJ metrics.
But, to your actual point, I think the "local is 40% dumber per watt than cloud" message is still an understatement. And maybe this is something I failed to find in the paper but they seem to ignore the "idle baseline" costs and talks about explicitly focusing on the power consumption of just the accelerator under load.
There is a large baseline power consumption just to support the accelerator. CPUs, memory, PS losses, network, fans, general environment cooling. This "cost floor" is different for data centers and a "random local computer" and I think must be in favor of data centers which are designed and built with efficiency in mind.
Idleness should also be considered. My local GPUs at $WORK and home are idle more than they are used. Idle time energy in real world scenarios should be somehow attributed to those brief, punctuated times when LLM functions are actually active on the accelerator. Actual, local LLM usage of a GPU is brief (assuming one user per PC). Even with my heavy usage developing s/w I'd guess I heat up a GPU about one hour per day total, sometimes much less. If that is local then one must pay 23 hours of idleness for that 1 hour of "intelligence". Of course a local PC is used for other things and the idleness penalty must somehow account for that. OTOH, data centers try to maximize utilization so their idle time penalty would be much less, perhaps close to zero, by construction.
> Of course a local PC is used for other things and the idleness penalty must somehow account for that.
I'd argue the idleness penalty only applies if you wouldn't have otherwise had equivalent hardware. If you already have the exact same dGPU for gaming and it doubles up for inference then the only inefficiency is power consumption (both by the GPU and potentially by AC for your living space).
Conversely I think we should consider that privacy, distributed compute that you can access without an intermediary, and a more distributed power grid all provide net benefits to society at large.
You can most definitely batch local models and do unattended inference on a 24/7 basis to maximize utilization on local hardware too. The limits are usually set by some combination of memory utilization for KV cache (particularly on small dGPUs) and overall thermals/power limits (particularly on iGPUs with unified RAM/VRAM). (If you're not near thermal limits, the main alternative to batching is to use MTP or speculative decoding in order to raise arithmetic intensity and speed with the same memory utilization. But batching requests is generally viewed as preferable.) Newer models, especially from DeepSeek, do a nice job of reducing KV cache memory impact for any given context length and/or amount of parallel sessions, so batching on local hw really ought to be quite feasible.
Small models are much smaller than frontier models though, which is how they end up consuming less energy despite low batch count. (Though with local models growing strong agentic capabilities, batching becomes a reality with local models as well).
What I want is specific reasons not the usual Reddit “they’re rich therefore evil blah blah” zero-insight answers. Okay, but why? Almost nobody wakes up and says “I’m going to be evil today!” People have motives and objectives and belief systems.
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