S&P bear market being what it is, Apple launched a round of Steve Jobless photos to jumpstart the faithful.  Lions were surprised he would have been only 70 today.  It seemed like a lot more time passed since the last speech.  It's only been 14 years.  No boom since 2011 has loomed as large as the mobile app boom he started.  Engagement for engagement's sake has replaced any killer app.

He made it to only 56.  That's much younger than it was 14 years ago.  55 seems to be the great filter.

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The AI boom is the 1st boom that lions can find no evidence of benefiting anyone.  It's only creating the largest destruction of wealth in lion memory.  It's no dot com boom.  The dot com boom was a time of massive labor demand.  Why automation created so many jobs in the late 90's while automation today is destroying so many jobs is an interesting question.

 

Everyone is investing in the basic necessity of national security, gaining the high ground & being 1st.  It's causing massive job losses.  Speculation about large language models just replacing entry level workers was optimistic.  The fact is it allows any common secretary to do what used to take a highly skilled programmer & it completely replaced beginners.

The energy requirements are impacting everyone with higher prices.  So far, they've managed to avoid rolling blackouts, but they're coming.  They're going to have to prioritize AI training over individuals.  The suppliers of AI tools aren't doing so well either.  It's optimizing itself so fast, high end GPUs are becoming worthless.  AI models optimize themselves so fast, model designers aren't winning.

The AI model under the guise of national security is replacing the reason national security exists.

The mane thing missing is a more efficient language than good old Merriam Webster for communicating with the models.  The AI models are yet another programming model.  We've arrived at the ages old problem of needing yet another programming language for a new type of programming model, one that's higher level than python, but more precise than what the king james bible is written in.  Maybe it's fitting that the language of the king james bible is what AI communicates in.

Lions are satisfied that the current state of the art transformer model is what animals have always done.  Despite years of formal education in grammar, we've always communicated only by appending most likely words from our training database.  This model causes animals to quote movies.

 Similarly, convolutional networks are how animals have always recognized objects.  The only difference could be the lack of any reasoning inside the model, but maybe animals don't have any reasoning either when they're communicating.

 

Most impressive to lions is how we surpassed what used to be purely fiction.  Any modern animal transplanted to 1987 would expect confusers to have the exact natural language interface Scotty expected.

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Noted social security's estimated benefit is based on working a full 35 years & making the maximum taxable amount in every year.  The reality is lions are only going to get 29 years at most.  They would have to work until age 64 to hit a full 35 years.   That would have only been age 57 if everything went perfectly & lions went straight from undergrad to gainful employment.

25 years ago, it seemed likely lions would get the maximum SS benefit.  The income limit was well below lion income.  The maximum income level was then rapidly increased while the maximum benefit was only adjusted for inflation, thus decreasing the benefit.  That's what we were always told to expect from any pension or government program.  Dramatically raising the income limit is the mane way the government is reducing its social security commitment.

Optimistically assuming full employment for 8 more years, lions will receive $200 less than what the SSA is estimating at 62.  If the party ends now, they'll receive $400 less.  The maximum income is going to continue to increase, so that's optimistic.

In Dave Ramsey's mind, if you really need a government benefit to survive, you're screwed anyway.  In reality, the existence of SS is always going to affect a lion's plan & it's going to be lower than the estimate.

The $200 option is going to cost $96k over the remaneing life expectancy, possibly more with the COLA.  $96k could be more than what a conservative 401k would yield, but you're counting on SS not going away.

Getting the maximum SS benefit would require continually getting raises & keeping up with the income limit for 35 years, which lions aren't going to do anyway.

It would have taken a truly stellar career, moving up the pyramid, possibly starting a company, obtaining a 3 letter job title.  It's possible that another lion who followed the straight path from undergrad to lifetime big corporation would now be making $300k, but it's also accepted that changing jobs yields higher pay for most animals.  Most animals have to take more risk to get wealthy.

Reviewing some Micron openings, they're now paying $300k for board layout but everything requires a MS & above.  It's kind of an incredible amount of effort in an age when that skill level is a germane video on the gootubes.  It's kind of unbelievable that professors & the grad school research system are still being used as a gatekeeper.  Are they trying to kick back money to professors?  After 25 years, lions never saw anything in board layout that resembled the work in university research.  The average hacker is doing a zillion times more than what a grad student does.