Median American pay for full-time workers was ~$62,000 USD in Q4 2024 (BLS), which is around $85,000 CAD. The median Canadian salary is very definitely not $85,000 CAD.
It's not like Americans are all buying X so they can't afford to buy Y - there isn't really a major category of consumption where the US median is below the OECD median. If the US had a higher savings rate, then people could smooth out consumption more (build up savings some years, draw them down in bad years or in retirement), and maybe enjoy more psychological security. But it doesn't really make sense to say that Americans are unusually "bogged down in expenses" and yet have more goods and services in every significant category.
The median American is, materially, much richer than the median person pretty much anywhere else. The US is a bad place, by rich-country standards, to be in the bottom 10%. But in terms of consumer wealth - how large your house is, how many cars your family has and how nice they are, if you have a dishwasher and home A/C, how often you eat at restaurants or travel long distances, can you afford a home repair or the latest gadget - typical American workers are second to essentially nobody. Having grown up in and left the US, I am deeply familiar with all of its downsides, but there's an abundance of data to support this.
A ten year old Honda Fit is like $12K, pretty fuel efficient, and probably reliable and low-maintenance (I owned one until recently). People aren't buying $50,000 new Ford F-150s because they just need a working car to go to work and the grocery store.
The first example I saw (think the order might be randomized?) was an EU ban on plastic straws, which is silly. Straws are a negligible fraction of plastic waste, and have no good substitute ("compostable" plastic straws are also banned; paper straws fall apart easily; metal/glass straws are inconvenient and require washing). This would flunk any serious cost/benefit analysis. You can hide the costs by making them regulatory instead of financial (the inconvenience of not having plastic straws doesn't appear in GDP stats), but the costs are still there, they're just hidden.
Obamacare was passed via regular order (60 Senate votes), not reconciliation. There was a follow-up package to tweak it that passed via reconciliation in 2010, but the original bill was regular order. It's the only (very brief) window where one party has held 60 Senate seats since 1977.
"Despite Democrats holding thin majorities in both chambers during a period of intense political polarization, the 117th Congress (2021-2023) oversaw the passage of numerous significant bills, including the Inflation Reduction Act, American Rescue Plan Act, Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, Postal Service Reform Act, Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, CHIPS and Science Act, Honoring Our PACT Act, Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act, and Respect for Marriage Act."
All of these except the first two were bipartisan and got 60 Senate votes (or more)
This ignores batching - token generation is much more efficient in batch - and I strongly suspect is itself written by AI, given the heavy use of bullets
You can't choose arbitrary bits of mantissa, because what types are allowed is defined by the underlying hardware and instruction set (PTX for Nvidia). People have done some exploration of which layers can be quantized more vs. which need to be kept in higher precision, but this is usually done post-training (at inference time) and is largely empirical.
AI GPUs are bottlenecked mostly by high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips and CoWoS (packaging tech used to integrate HBM with the GPU die), which are in short supply and aren't found in consumer cards at all
The vast majority of federal spending goes to the military (including Veterans Affairs), Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and debt interest. Everything else doesn't matter much. This is especially true given that Republicans will probably increase the deficit; any money saved will go to tax cuts for the rich, and then some.
He doesn't actually say that, the (very biased and polemical) article writer seems to have made that up. The actual quote is:
"Us self-claiming some [artificial general intelligence] milestone, that's just nonsensical benchmark hacking to me. So, the first thing that we all have to do is, when we say this is like the Industrial Revolution, let's have that Industrial Revolution type of growth. The real benchmark is: the world growing at 10 percent. Suddenly productivity goes up and the economy is growing at a faster rate. When that happens, we'll be fine as an industry."
That's a completely different statement from "AI is generating no value"!
"Also, some of the materials used to make them, such as silicon, are becoming scarcer and thus more expensive."
!?
The Earth's crust is 28% silicon by mass. It's literally the second most abundant element. I'm not a professional, but isn't most of the cost of solar outside the panels now anyway - installation, cabling, inverters, permitting, storage for use during peak hours, etc?