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The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy

ceodinner.substack.com

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Re: The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy

#81

Post by ghaff »

karlgkk wrote: post #78
delfinom wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you’re making engineer money, SV & big tech engineer money. Majority of engineering fields do not make that kind of money to retire at 50. Comfortable compared to the rest of the country, sure.

I think maybe that was implied, considering the topic of conversation and website we’re on. That said if you’re making $250k+ a year and not on track to retire by 50, seriously please open a retirement calculator and figure out what you need to do to get there.

Which is a pretty high salary in the US in tech generally.

That said, a lot of people in US tech can probably retire relatively early if they run the numbers and don't have a lot of external expenses.

Re: The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy

#82

Post by Tuna-Fish »

never_inline wrote: post #51
GMoromisato wrote: post #42

Does OpenAI and/or Anthropic survive the wildfire? Do one or both of them become the next Google? Or do they become Netscape and Google, Microsoft, et al win in the end?

If they are profitable on inference currently, they will be able to recover. People in SWE will continue paying for current SOTA models even if better models are not achieved.

Alternatively, latecomers will make use of newly cheaply available compute (from the firesales of failing companies) to produce models that match their quality, while having to invest only a fraction of what the first wave had to, allowing them to push the price below the cost floor of the first wave and making them go under.

Re: The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy

#83

Post by dvfjsdhgfv »

> The next cycle, driven by social and mobile, burned again in 2008–2009, clearing the underbrush for Facebook, Airbnb, Uber, and the offspring of Y Combinator.

This list of companies made me wonder a bit. Technical progress has been huge, no question about that. But as for the actual quality or experience for the user/customer - I have the impression everything got worse, starting from Google from the first wave.

Re: The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy

#84

Post by pizlonator »

never_inline wrote: post #51
GMoromisato wrote: post #42

Does OpenAI and/or Anthropic survive the wildfire? Do one or both of them become the next Google? Or do they become Netscape and Google, Microsoft, et al win in the end?

If they are profitable on inference currently, they will be able to recover. People in SWE will continue paying for current SOTA models even if better models are not achieved.

> If they are profitable on inference currently

Man that is the question, isn't it

Re: The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy

#85

Post by bdangubic »

flopsamjetsam wrote: post #66
malux85 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gaming, then crypto, then AI - all GPU hungry!

And each one requiring an order of magnitude more GPUs than the last!

this trend will always continue with next big thing

Re: The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy

#86

Post by oasisbob »

kittikitti wrote: post #18

I think this article is nearing the truth in the future of AI. I think the avoidance of claiming it is a bubble is a good sign, but saying it's an AI wildfire is still hyperbole. The idea that inference will drive compute demand is not what I experience because inference is a much easier problem than training. The training of an AI (LLM) is especially demanding and if and when we complete that, inference will be a pi…

Gold rush comparison is an interesting one. Much of Seattle's early economy was based on "mining the miners", especially gold rushes in the Yukon. In addition to profits to local merchants, it would distort the labor pool as people abandoned logging and left the woods to work mining claims instead.

Re: The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy

#88

Post by mNovak »

throw310822 wrote: post #8
devin wrote: post #2

> Every promising engineer, designer, or operator is being courted by three, five, ten different AI startups, often chasing the same vertical, whether it’s coding copilots, novel datasets, customer service, legal tech, or marketing automation. This is flat out wrong.

I still don't understand what should this "wildfire" burn. My perspective is very limited, but where are the pets.com of AI today? Where are all the small companies with improbable business cases that are getting absurd valuations/ investments because they're in AI? The space seems mostly dominated by huge players that, while burning tons of cash, are still making real progress on something that will have more econom…

Grammarly certainly comes to mind, for being essentially a free feature of most chat AIs now.

Interestingly this time around I could see the 'fire' affecting mid-large corporations (or at least some divisions of them) if they don't adapt. Adobe, being heavily focused on graphic design seems like it could be under pressure. Low-end consulting / outsourcing is largely doing the same work AI is good at. Similarly with technical gig-work (like Upwork).

Re: The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy

#89

Post by AbrahamParangi »

jpkw wrote: post #57
AbrahamParangi wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The prerequisite for me to be wrong is that the technology needs to stop getting better entirely *right now* AND we need to discover ZERO new uses for what exists today. That's a fairly tall order.

So if the plateau is unanimously declared to have been reached tomorrow OR just one more tiny use case exists tomorrow and all others dwindle away to nothing, than you consider yourself to be correct? What a wild assertion!

If the plateau is reached at some higher level of capability, I will remain correct, yes. If use cases are discovered that do not exist today, I will also be correct. You said it in a silly way but you're directionally correct.

Re: The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy

#90

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

lkbm wrote: post #61
diamond559 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are these "million people" in the room with you now? Or are they just the bot and shill accounts you're reading on "X"?

They're me, my coworkers, my friends. Talk to people. ChatGPT and the other big LLMs has hundreds of millions of users. You might not like using LLMs. You might not find them useful. You might think they're bad and harmful (I do). But to claim that no one finds them useful is a completely different position, and one that's about as disconnected as it's possible to be.

> They're me, my coworkers, my friends. Talk to people.

I have all of those. Most don't use AI at all. Some use it on a limited basis but it is unclear if there is any worthwhile gain in productivity. Remaining are two who use it with regularity, including one who's all in. I personally use it for 2 limited use cases. Sometimes it helps. Sometimes I'd be done sooner without it.

Conversely, I need to mediate an epidemic of AI foistware and AI UX pollution. 100% of my userbase is subject to overpushy AI offerings and an endless minefield of shifty, unwanted AI elements. These users are clearly more productive when I keep AI out of their way.

On balance, AI is presently a net negative for my clients.

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