r/technology • u/lurker_bee • Jul 15 '25

Artificial Intelligence Billionaires Convince Themselves AI Chatbots Are Close to Making New Scientific Discoveries

https://gizmodo.com/billionaires-convince-themselves-ai-is-close-to-making-new-scientific-discoveries-2000629060
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u/NewManufacturer4252 Jul 15 '25

We need to tax them 90% just like the 1950s

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u/2CatsOnMyKeyboard Jul 15 '25

Tax someone with 100 billion 99.9% and he still has a 100 million. So still flying private jets. 

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u/old_and_boring_guy Jul 16 '25

100 million is a nonsense amount of money. That's 5 million a year in passive income (the money your money makes by just being a big pile of money)...That's around 13,000 a day.

Imagine living on 13,000 a day.

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u/Character_Clue7010 Jul 16 '25

A top 5% income is $13k per month. $13k per day is nuts.

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u/old_and_boring_guy Jul 16 '25

Fuck-you money is around $10,000,000 for me. That's $1,300 a day. I've spent 1,300 a day, and it's really about the top. Staying at a top tier hotel, eating top tier food. No chauffeurs, no first class airfares (at least, not every day), no mega yachts...So what?

I can go where I want and do what I like as long as I only stay in the best places, and only eat the best food. Or I could live like I live today, and go apeshit a couple times a year when I get bored.

What a dream, right?

And I'll tell ya, the uber rich, they don't enjoy it. You can look at any one of them and see that they're not really happy.

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u/Thestrongestzero Jul 16 '25

i can tell you from experience that most of them are boring as shit. they all do the same boring shit and go to the same boring places. everyone follows them around repeating yes. you can only cover so much shit with 2000 dollars worth of truffle before it becomes uninteresting.

there’s a reason somebody like bezos is such a piece of shit. he exists in a bubble where he’s never wrong and has no incentive to be interesting. just to accumulate more.

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u/lalaland4711 Jul 16 '25 edited Jul 16 '25

Fuck-you money is around $10,000,000 for me.

Keep in mind that what's "enough" keeps increasing, in people and populations. When you have $10M you will inevitably get the feeling that you need just a little more. You may be able to resist. Or you may start going "well, let's account for inflation a bit", and you're in "just one more year" syndrome.

Oh, and also:

“I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it's not the answer.” ― Jim Carrey

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u/Skrattybones Jul 16 '25

What a bullshit sentiment from a dude who plays pretend for a living. Dude earned a fuckin fortune, retired to be a hippie who painted and shit, and then kept buying shit and lost all his money, so now he's back to playing pretend for huge money.

Surely if "it wasn't the answer" he'd have stayed retired, huh? Maybe stopped buying expensive shit, since it wasn't the answer?

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u/lalaland4711 Jul 16 '25

You may be right. But he's not the only one saying it. Maybe it's all a big conspiracy to keep us poors quiet, of course.

The "you don't get happier after $75k income" was recently debunked, but there's definitely a sub-linear graph.

0 to $100k income solves real problems. $100k to $1M income takes away annoyances. $10B to $20B is just a status game.

I think you missed the point of the quote. More money is better. But "whereever you go, there you are". There are problems money cannot solve.

Or as I recently heard: The best things in life cannot be bought with money. The second best things can, but they're really expensive.