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How the AI Bubble Will Pop

derekthompson.org

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Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#341

Post by senordevnyc »

ForHackernews wrote: post #159
emp17344 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed… I feel increasingly alienated because I don’t understand how AI is providing enough value to justify the truly insane level of investment.

The same way that NFTs of ugly cartoons apes were a multi-billion dollar industry for about 28 months. Edit: People are downvoting this because they think "Hey, that's not right, LLMs are way better than non-fungible apes!" (which is true) but the money is pouring in for exactly the same reason: get the apes now and later you'll be rich!

So just like any investment?

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#342

Post by Quarrelsome »

xiphias2 wrote: post #147
donatj wrote: post #123

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 a…

Just you switching away from Google is already justifying 1T infrastructure spend. Just think about how much more effective advertisements are going to be when LLMs start to tell you what to buy based on which advertiser gave the most money to the company.

> when LLMs start to tell you what to buy based on which advertiser gave the most money to the company.

isn't that quite difficult to do consistently? I'd imagine it would be relatively easy to take the same LLM and get it to shit talk the product whose owners had paid the AI corp to shill. That doesn't seem particularly ideal.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#343

Post by benterix »

donatj wrote: post #123

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 a…

> 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"...

Same, also my first thought is how to turn the damn thing off.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#344

Post by thisisit »

kumarm wrote: post #12
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…

[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

haven't we established that if you are layman in an area AI can seem magical. Try doing something in your established area and you might get frustrated. It will give you the right answer with caveats - code which is too verbose, performance intensive or sometimes ignoring best security practices.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#345

Post by Quarrelsome »

_heimdall wrote: post #21
rimeice wrote: post #2

> Some people think artificial intelligence will be the most important technology of the 21st century. I don’t, I think a workable fusion reactor will be the most important technology of the 21st century.

What makes you think we'll have fusion reactors in the 21st century?

ITER apparently fires up in 2039.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#346

Post by 9rx »

dimava wrote: post #337
Gerardo1 wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not reasonable to claim inference is profitable when they've also never released those numbers. Also the price they charge for inference is not indicative of the price they're paying to provide inference. Also, at least in openAI's case, they are getting a fantastic deal on compute from Microsoft, so even if the price they charge is reflective of the price they pay, it's still not reflective of a market rate.

DeepSeek on GPUs is like 5x cheaper then GPT And TPUs are like 5x cheaper then GPUs, per token Inference is very much profitable

You can do most anything profitability if you ignore the vast majority of your input costs.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#347

Post by spyckie2 »

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 bet is that people will pay for services which are under the hood being done by AI.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#348

Post by ttoinou »

____mr____ wrote: post #114
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 n…

Do you need a measure or a quantification to do anything in life ? I don't wait for others benchmarks or others computing ROI factors to actually start using a technology and see it improves my workflow

  how and why?
How : we'll always be able to run smaller models on consumer grade computers

Why : most of the tasks humans need to do that computers couldn't do before, now can be improved with new AI. I fail to see how you can not see applications of this

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#349

Post by ttoinou »

rwmj wrote: post #52
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

The technology is there til the GPUs become obsolete, so about 3 years.

Our current GPUs can last a decade or more, no ?

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#350

Post by jacknews »

Seb-C wrote: post #256
jacknews wrote: post #83

I think these articles slightly miss the point. Sure, AI as a tool, as it currently is, will take a very long time to earn back the $B being invested. But what if someone reaches autonomous AGI with this push? Everything changes. So I think there's a massive, massive upside risk being priced into these investments.

Except that the bubble's money is not being invested into cutting-edge ML research, but only into LLMs. And it has been obvious from the start to anyone half-competent about the topic that LLMs are not the path to AGI (if such a thing ever happens anyway).

I don't think it's that obvious, in fact the 'bitter lesson' teaches us that simple scale leads to qualitative, not just quantitative improvement.

It does look like this is now topping out, but it's still not sure.

It seems to me a couple of simple innovations, like the transformer, could quite possibly lead to AGI, and the infrastructure would 'light up' like all that overinvested dark fiber in the 90s.

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