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How the AI Bubble Will Pop

derekthompson.org

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Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#111

Post by Wowfunhappy »

piker wrote: post #15
kumarm wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[even in programming it's inconclusive as to how much better/worse it makes programmers.] Try building something new in claude code (or codex etc) using a programming language you have not used before. Your opinion might change drastically. Current AI tools may not beat the best programmer, they definitely improves average programmer efficiency.

> Try building something new in claude code (or codex etc) using a programming language you have not used before. Your opinion might change drastically. Try changing something old in claude code (or codex etc) using a programming language you have used before. Your opinion might change drastically.

I have! Claude is great at taking a large open source project and adding some idiosyncratic feature I need.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#112

Post by randomtoast »

incomingpain wrote: post #96

>Others insist that it is an obvious economic bubble. The definition is that the assets are valuated above an intrinsic value. The first graph is Amazon, Meta, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle. Lets check their PE ratio. Amazon (AMZN) ~ 33.6 Meta (META) ~ 27.5 Google (GOOGL) ~ 25.7 Microsoft (MSFT) ~ 37.9 Oracle (ORCL) ~ 65 These are highish pe ratios, but certainly very far from bubble numbers. OpenAI and others are al…

The thing is, if you say that "AI is a bubble that will pop" and repeat this every year for the next 15 years, then you have a good probability of being right in 1 out of 15 cases if there actually is a market recession within the next 15 years that is attributed to AI overspeculation.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#113

Post by hermannj314 »

raincole wrote: post #26
hemloc_io wrote: post #7

The most frustrating thing to me about this most recent rash of biz guy doubting the future of AI articles is the required mention that AI, specifically an LLM based approach to AGI, is important even if the numbers don't make sense today. Why is that the case? There's plenty of people in the field who have made convincing arguments that it's a dead end and fundamentally we'll need to do something else to achieve AGI…

> adoption is low to nonexistent outside of programming In the last few months, every single non-programmer friend I've met has ChatGPT installed on their phone (N>10). Out of all the people that I know enough to ask if they have ChatGPT installed, there is only one who doesn't have it (my dad). I don't know how many of them are paying customers though. IIRC one of them was using ChatGPT to translate academic writing…

My daughter and her friends have their own paid chatgpt. She said she uses it to help with math homework and described to me exactly why I bought a $200 TI-92 in the 90s with a CAS.

Adoption is high with young people.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#114

Post by ____mr____ »

ttoinou wrote: post #25

Every financial bubble has moments where, looking back, one thinks: How did any sentient person miss the signs? Well maybe a lot of people agree already with what the author is saying : the economics might crash, but the technology is here to stay. So we don't care about the bubble

If the tech is here to stay, my question is: how and why? The how: The projects for the new data centers and servers housing this tech are incredibly expensive to build and maintain. These also jack up the price of electricity in the neighborhoods and afaik the US electrical grid is extremely fragile and is already being pushed to its limit with the existing compute being used on AI. All of this for AI companies to not make a profit. The only case you could make would be to nationalize the companies and have them subsidized by taxes.

But why?: This would require you to make a case that AI tools are useful enough to be sustained despite their massive costs and hard to quantify contribution to productivity. Is this really the case? I haven't really seen a productivity increase worth justifying the cost, and as soon as Anthropic tried to even remotely make a profit (or break even) power users instantly realized that the productivity is not really worth paying the actual compute required to do their tasks

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#115

Post by freetonik »

therealmarv wrote: post #46

It reminds me what I said to somebody recently: All my friends and family are using the free version of ChatGPT or something similar. They will never pay (although they have enough money to do so). Even in my very narrow subjective circles it does not add up. Who pays for AI and how? And when in the future?

I'm sure providers will find ways of incorporating the fees into e.g. ISP or mobile network fees so that users end up paying in a less obvious, less direct way.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#116

Post by freehorse »

aurareturn wrote: post #102
hshdhdhj4444 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This friend told me she can't work without ChatGPT anymore. Is she more productive though? People who smoke cigarettes will be unable to work without their regular smoke breaks. Doesn’t mean smoking cigarettes is good for working. Personally I am an AI booster and I think even LLMs can take us much farther. But people on both sides need to stop accepting claims uncritically.

No she’s less productive. She just use it because she wants to do less work, be less likely to get promoted, and have to stay in the office longer to finish her work. /s What kind of question is that? Seriously. Are some people here so naive to think that tens of millions out there don’t know when something they choose to use repeatedly multiple times a day every day is making their life harder? Like ChatGPT is some…

It is the kind of question that takes into account that people thinking that they are more productive does not imply that they actually are. This happens in a wide range of contexts, from AI to drugs.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#117

Post by ACCount37 »

therealmarv wrote: post #46

It reminds me what I said to somebody recently: All my friends and family are using the free version of ChatGPT or something similar. They will never pay (although they have enough money to do so). Even in my very narrow subjective circles it does not add up. Who pays for AI and how? And when in the future?

The cost of serving an "average" user would only fall over time.

Most users rarely make the kind of query that would benefit a lot from the capabilities of GPT-6.1e Pro Thinking With Advanced Reasoning, Extended Context And Black Magic Cross Context Adaptive Learning Voodoo That We Didn't Want To Release To Public Yet But If We Didn't Then Anthropic Would Surely Do It First.

And the users that have this kind of demanding workloads? They'd be much more willing to pay up for the bleeding edge performance.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#118

Post by deadbabe »

bakugo wrote: post #90
aurareturn wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where's the business value? Right now it doesn't really exist, adoption is low to nonexistent outside of programming and even in programming it's inconclusive as to how much better/worse it makes programmers. I have a friend who works at PwC doing M&A. This friend told me she can't work without ChatGPT anymore. PwC has an internal AI chat implementation. Where does this notion that LLMs have no value outside of progr…

> This friend told me she can't work without ChatGPT anymore. This isn't a sign that ChatGPT has value as much as it is a sign that this person's work doesn't have value.

I find it’s mostly a sign of how lazy people get once you introduce them to some new technology that requires less effort for them.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#119

Post by jbstack »

lowsong wrote: post #30
kumarm wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[even in programming it's inconclusive as to how much better/worse it makes programmers.] Try building something new in claude code (or codex etc) using a programming language you have not used before. Your opinion might change drastically. Current AI tools may not beat the best programmer, they definitely improves average programmer efficiency.

> using a programming language you have not used before But why would I do that? Either I'm learning a new language in which case I want to be as hands-on as possible and the goal is to learn, not to produce. Or I want to produce something new in which case, obviously, I'd use a toolset I'm experienced in.

There are plenty of scenarios where you want to work with a new language but you don't want to have to dedicate months/years of your life to becoming expert in it because you are only going to use it for a one-time project.

For example, perhaps I want to use a particular library which is only available in language X. Or maybe I'm writing an add-on for a piece of software that I use frequently. I don't necessarily want to become an expert in Elisp just to make a few tweaks to my Emacs setup, or in Javascript etc. to write a Firefox add-on. Or maybe I need to put up a quick website as a one-off but I know nothing about web technologies.

In none of these cases can I "use a toolset I'm experienced in" because that isn't available as an option, nor is it a worthwhile investment of time to become an expert in the toolset if I can avoid that.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#120

Post by mrbungie »

aurareturn wrote: post #102
hshdhdhj4444 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This friend told me she can't work without ChatGPT anymore. Is she more productive though? People who smoke cigarettes will be unable to work without their regular smoke breaks. Doesn’t mean smoking cigarettes is good for working. Personally I am an AI booster and I think even LLMs can take us much farther. But people on both sides need to stop accepting claims uncritically.

No she’s less productive. She just use it because she wants to do less work, be less likely to get promoted, and have to stay in the office longer to finish her work. /s What kind of question is that? Seriously. Are some people here so naive to think that tens of millions out there don’t know when something they choose to use repeatedly multiple times a day every day is making their life harder? Like ChatGPT is some…

> What kind of question is that? Seriously. Are some people here so naive to think that tens of millions out there don’t know when something they choose to use repeatedly multiple times a day every day is making their life harder?

That's just an appeal to masses / bandwagon fallacy.

> Is it so hard to believe that ChatGPT is actually productive?

We need data, not beliefs and current data is conflicting. ffs.

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