Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How the AI Bubble Will Pop

derekthompson.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 531 posts

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#121

Post by lm28469 »

jstummbillig wrote: post #88
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?

People are always so fidegty about this stuff — for super understandable reason, to be clear. People not much smarter than anyone else try to reason about numbers that are hard to reason about. But unless you have the actual numbers, I always find it a bit strange to assume that all people involved, who deal with large amounts of money all the time, lost all ability to reason about this thing. Because right now that…

> All the important people at FAANG, all the people at OpenAI/Anthropic, all the investors.

It's like asking big pharma if medicine should be less regulated, "all the experts agree", well yeah, their paycheck depends on it. Same reason no one at meta tells Zuck that his metaverse is dogshit and no one wants it, they still spent billions on it.

You can't assume everyone is that dumb, but you certainly can assume that the yes men won't say anything other than "yes".

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#122

Post by mixedbit »

Back of the envelope calculation: Nvidia market cap is 4.5T$, their profit margin is 52%. This means Nvidia would need to sell 1067$ worth of equipment per human being on Earth for investors that buy Nvidia stock today to break even on the investment. Nvidia, unlike Apple, doesn't sell to end users (almost), but to AI companies that provide services to end users. The scale of required spending on Nvidia hardware is comparable to tech companies collectively buying IPhones for every human on Earth, because the value that IPhone users deliver to tech companies is large enough that giving away IPhones is justified.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#123

Post by donatj »

I feel kind of like a Luddite sometimes but I don't understand why EVERYONE is rushing to use AI? I use a couple different agents to help me code, and ChatGPT has largely replaced Google in my everyday use, but I genuinely don't understand the value proposition of every other companies offerings.

I really feel like we're in the same "Get it out first, figure out what it is good for later" bubble we had like 7 years ago with non-AI ChatBots. No users actually wanted to do anything important by talking to a chatbot then, but every company still pushed them out. I don't think an LLM improves that much.

Every time some tool I've used for years sends an email "Hey, we've got AI now!" my thought is just "well, that's unfortunate"...

I don't want AI taking any actions I can't inspect with a difftool, especially not anything important. It's like letting a small child drive a car.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#124

Post by joules77 »

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…

Cause the story is no more about Business or Economics. This is more like the nuke arms race in the 1940s. Red Queen Dynamics.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#125

Post by spicyusername »

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…

I mean... there are many situations in life where people are bad judges of the facts. Dating, finances, health, etc, etc, etc.

It's not that hard to imagine that your friend feels more productive than she actually is. I'm not saying it's true, but it's plausible. The anecdata coming out of programming is mostly that people are only more productive in certain narrow use cases and much less productive in everything else, relative to just doing the work themselves with their sleeves rolled up.

But man to seeing all that code gets spit out on the screen FEEL amazing, even if I'm going to spend the next few hours needing to edit it, for the next few months managing the technical debt I didn't notice when I merged it.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#126

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

TheCapeGreek wrote: post #72
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> adoption is low to nonexistent outside of programming Odd way to describe ChatGPT which has >1B users. AI overviews have rolled out to ~3B users, Gemini has ~200M users, etc. Adoption is far from low.

> AI overviews have rolled out to ~3B users Does that really count as adoption, when it has been introduced as a default feature?

Yes, if people are interacting with them, which they are.

HN seems to think everyone is like in the bubble here, which thinks AI is completely useless and wants nothing to do with it.

Half the world is interacting with it on a regular basis already.

Are we anywhere near AGI? Probably not.

Does it matter? Probably not.

Inference costs are dropping like a rock, and usage is continuing to skyrocket.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#127

Post by squidbeak »

asdf1280 wrote: post #76
cornholio wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's silly to say that the only objective that will vindicate AI investments is AGI. Current batch of deep learning models are fundamentally a technology for labor automation. This is immensely useful in itself, without the need to do AGI. The Sora2 capabilities are absolutely wild (see a great example here of what non-professional users are already able to create with it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXp8_w3XzgU…

The problem is that it’s already commodified; there’s no moat. The general tech practice has been capture the market by burning vc money, then jack up prices to profit. All these companies are burning billions to generate a new model and users have already proven there is no brand loyalty. They just hop to the new one when it comes out. So no one can corner the market and when the VC money runs out they’ll have to ja…

Compute is the moat.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#128

Post by bakugo »

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…

You're working under the assumption that punching a prompt into ChatGPT and getting up to grab some coffee while it spits out thousands of tokens of meaningless slop to be used as a substitute for something that you previously would've written yourself is a net upgrade for everyone involved. It's not. I can use ChatGPT to write 20 paragraph email replies that would've previously been a single manually written paragraph, but that doesn't mean I'm 20x more productive.

And yes, ChatGPT is kinda like an addictive drug here. If someone "can't work without ChatGPT anymore", they're addicted and have lost the ability to work on their own as a result.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#129

Post by tbrownaw »

fundatus wrote: post #78
tbrownaw wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We'll finally have electricity that's too cheap to meter.

Why would it be too cheap to meter? You're still heating up water and putting it through a turbine. We've been doing that for ages (just different sources of energy for the heating up part) and we still meter energy because these things cost money and need lots of maintenance.

But that's the whole reason fusion is so important. Just like it was the whole reason fission was so important.

https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/basic-ref/students/history-10...

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#130

Post by lotsofpulp »

mixedbit wrote: post #122

Back of the envelope calculation: Nvidia market cap is 4.5T$, their profit margin is 52%. This means Nvidia would need to sell 1067$ worth of equipment per human being on Earth for investors that buy Nvidia stock today to break even on the investment. Nvidia, unlike Apple, doesn't sell to end users (almost), but to AI companies that provide services to end users. The scale of required spending on Nvidia hardware is c…

> This means Nvidia would need to sell 1067$ worth of equipment per human being on Earth for investors that buy Nvidia stock at current prices to break even on the investment

In what period of time?

Post reply on HN