221–230 of 557 posts
I do hope that RAM prices come down but this was just wishful thinking.
> RAM prices are crashing because new models won’t need as much Reality begs to differ [0] and following the link for that text goes to an article [1] where they talk about Google's TurboQuant which supposedly will lower the RAM requirements. Now if that means RAM prices come down (as speculated, not reported on, in the link) or the AI companies just do more things with their extra ram is yet to be determined. The fa…
Stock price is the best forward indicator I can think of
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> The cost to serve tokens is absolutely profitable Can you explain why you know better than the analyst at Cursor cited in this article?
That analyst was talking about subsidizing tokens through the subscription plans, which is a different claim.
It’s incredible how polarizing the AI rush is. I keep the perspective that the technology is an absolute step change but I have no idea where the cards will fall. I take a lot of issue with these style of articles. I get a sense that the authors are being overly defensive. The cost to serve tokens is absolutely profitable today and that’s been true for at least a year. What’s unclear is how R&D and capex fit into the…
My main worry is - once this is all over, the market consolidates and using LLMs will become a requirement in job listings, what's the highest price per million tokens companies will be able to charge us? Currently on a given day I'm chewing through approximately the equivalent of my lunch money, but where there's opportunity to extract wealth, someone will find a way to do it.
But there is no real higher limit. Imagine a LLM which could answer the question "what does my company need to do to beat the competition?". And then realize that the competition asks their LLM the same question. So now everybody is bidding the price up or using more tokens to get a better answer
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Demand of tokens is absolutely skyrocketing. And unlike the traditional "this will replace humans right away", I think what this introduce is a lot of incentive to spread those token in places where there was never any incentive to hire a software engineer for previously. In turn, that will drive a lot of business activity in those area that will potentially fail given the current quality of the output. This feels li…
>potentially fail given the current quality of the output. The question is how big the fail is if you measure it in 3 month increments going back to late 2022.
As long as there are more amount of success, then it should be net positive.
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This is a classic HN mistaking the map for the territory. R&D and capex absolutely figure into de-facto profitability and sustainability for AI labs, despite their separate treatment in accounting. > well most of us here on HN have benefited from decades of overinflated engineering salaries being paid by often companies that were not profitable and not only unprofitable This is a really concerning perspective: people…
> This is a really concerning perspective: people were paid what they were worth. The parent comment doesn't discount that, only pointing out that "what they were worth" was inflated due to a speculative environment. Wherein lies your concern?
Salaries across industries in the US have remained flat since the 1970s. Calling the one sector that can provide access a middle class lifestyle inflated s to play into a narrative capital is eager to tell, even if OP didn't intend that.
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> RAM prices spiked speculatively Didn't OpenAI buy up 40% of the capacity all at once?
No, they signed a bunch of contracts for future deliveries. That's not a supply constraint. The factories making RAM continued operating and serving their existing deliveries, and in fact they still are. Freshman economics would say that supply is fine and that prices shouldn't move. But they did anyway. And the reason is speculation.
Except the investment is more like a railway or utility. It generates like 3% return, which is definitely not good enough for the people providing the money, or (in the case of the profitable companies) anywhere near the double-digit returns they make on their technology products. I won't be surprised when we see consolidation of marginal players and abandonment of the losers, just like you can find rail lines to nowhere, and fiber that's never been used.
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Tulips sales also skyrocketed. Seriously, what value are tokens providing other than justifying layoffs. Concretely. Today. Not in the speculating scenario that cardiologist could be replaced with models. We see this new trend of agentic coding, again a promise software will be written that way going forward, despite the number of fiasco already experienced when trusting a model turned bad. The use case may provide v…
Tulip futures skyrocketed, it was economic speculation on a useless asset, not supply and demand. Crypto is the analogy, not AI. Given that the major AI labs other than GDM are private, this is even more true. Agentic coding absolutely blew up from demand , users are not being tricked into paying $200 a month, and they’re not complaining about hitting rate limits because it’s useless.
users are not being tricked into paying $200 a month
This belief is so common amongst AI collapse people online. I'm guessing these people have only used free ChatGPT or worse, they use Windows and get Copilot shoved down their throats?
Meanwhile, I'm flying around with a $20 Codex subscription doing everything from writing code, analyzing stocks, coming up with ideas, etc.