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Why Everybody Is Losing Money On AI

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Re: Why Everybody Is Losing Money On AI

#91

Post by uncircle »

bbreier wrote: post #43

Does controversy cause articles to slide on HN? I noticed that this had more points in less time than several articles ranked above it, which surprises me a bit e.g. at time of writing a post about MentraOS has 11 points in 1 hour compared to this article's 51 in 53 minutes, but this is ranked 58th to Mentra's 6

Yes. Too large a comment/vote ratio causes articles to be defrontpaged, as well as some domains. Moderators do a lot of manipulation behind the scenes to keep what they deem ‘hot-button topics’ down in 3rd page or shadow-banned altogether. Then there’s the user flagging system that is abused whenever some popular article goes against the grain.

That’s why I use https://news.ycombinator.com/active to find the interesting topics instead of having to rely on the strict moderation algorithm

Re: Why Everybody Is Losing Money On AI

#92

Post by ffsm8 »

uncircle wrote: post #90
ffsm8 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not getting a phone didn't really cost you either for the first 5-10 yrs. But the people that didn't definitely had a harder time adjusting when it got increasingly annoying to live without a smartphone. It's ultimately a choice you can make, but it definitely also comes with consequences - especially if your dayjob is software - as this is an industry that loves to discriminate against people that aren't aboard the…

You forget that the vast majority of software engineering in the real world is boring tech, not the new hotness that’s being peddled on Hacker News. There is a large market for Java, C++ and COBOL engineers to this day, despite all startups on here are talking about React and Rust. There will still be a large need for actual engineers that use their meat brain and are not paid by line committed for the foreseeable fu…

Ok I didn't forget. As a matter of fact, most LLMs are outright banned at my workplace.

However, the writing is on the wall and it's likely going to become one of the bullet points you'll be expected to have significant experience in when changing jobs. And I doubt that's gonna take 10 yrs

Re: Why Everybody Is Losing Money On AI

#93

Post by simonw »

Lariscus wrote: post #84
simonw wrote: post #28

> Please don't waste your breath saying "costs will come down." They haven't been, and they're not going to. Cost to run a million tokens through GPT-3 Da-Vinci in 2022: $60 Cost to run a million tokens through GPT-5 today: $1.25

The price of a token doesn't necessarily reflect the true cost of running a model. After Claude Opus 4 released the price of OpenAIs o3 tokens where slashed practically over night.[0] If you think this happened because inference cost went down, I have a bridge to sell to you. [0] https://venturebeat.com/ai/openai-announces-80-price-drop-fo...

Sell me that bridge then, because I believe OpenAI's staff who say it was because inference costs went down: https://twitter.com/TheRealAdamG/status/193244032829380632

Generally I'm skeptical of the idea that any of the major providers are selling inference at a loss. Obviously they're losing money when you include the cost of research and training, but every indication I've seen is that they're not keen to sell $1 for 80 cents.

If you want a hint at the real costs of inference look to the companies that sell access to hosted open source models. They don't have any research costs to cover so their priority is to serve as inexpensively as possible while still turning a profit.

Or take a good open weight model and price out what it would cost to serve at scale. Here's someone who tried that recently: https://martinalderson.com/posts/are-openai-and-anthropic-re...

Re: Why Everybody Is Losing Money On AI

#95

Post by exe34 »

palata wrote: post #60
exe34 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If LLMs are going to "eat the world" they need to either be a lot better in the median case (bad prompts, bad model selection) or they need to be so cost-effective that you can farm out your query to an ensemble and choose the result dialogue-tree-style. LLMs have been around for two years. it took decades before the PC really took hold.

> LLMs have been around for two years. it took decades before the PC really took hold. But virtually everybody has been using LLMs already. How long would it have taken for the PC if everybody had had the opportunity to use one for more than a year?

so everybody is using it and it's not good enough for everybody to use yet? why is everybody using it?

Re: Why Everybody Is Losing Money On AI

#96

Post by exe34 »

wood_spirit wrote: post #56
exe34 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If LLMs are going to "eat the world" they need to either be a lot better in the median case (bad prompts, bad model selection) or they need to be so cost-effective that you can farm out your query to an ensemble and choose the result dialogue-tree-style. LLMs have been around for two years. it took decades before the PC really took hold.

The IBM PC was an overnight success. It was less than a decade after the first “PCs” and it was the hockey stick moment. I remember x86 clones being seemingly everywhere in just a year or two

Pretty much everybody I know is using an LLM for something. some are even using it for things they shouldn't be using it for.

Re: Why Everybody Is Losing Money On AI

#97

Post by rcarmo »

joenot443 wrote: post #80
candiddevmike wrote: post #2

This is a really well written article and contains references to back up the claims made. This part was mind blowing though: > Cursor sends 100% of their revenue to Anthropic, who then takes that money and puts it into building out Claude Code, a competitor to Cursor. Cursor is Anthropic's largest customer. Cursor is deeply unprofitable, and was that way even before Anthropic chose to add "Service Tiers," jacking up…

What are the odds that Microsoft acquires Cursor eventually, folding those users into a VS Code Premium of sorts?

Microsoft has an arguably better and more generally useful solution in GitHub Copilot.

Re: Why Everybody Is Losing Money On AI

#100

Post by alones »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #71
FL33TW00D wrote: post #6

"Please don't waste your breath saying "costs will come down." They haven't been, and they're not going to." Yes, every new technology has always stayed exorbitantly priced in perpetuity.

There has to be a name for the fallacy where people in our profession imagine that everything in technology follows Moore's law -- even when it doesn't. We're standing here with a kind of survivorship bias because of all the technologies we use daily that did cost reduce and make it. Plenty did not. We just forget about them.

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