Cheaper hardware, discounts on stocks, and we keep AI itself? My flavour of hopium, sign me up.
How the AI Bubble Bursts
271–280 of 557 posts
Re: How the AI Bubble Bursts
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know there is a large force on HN that want to deny the value of tokens and I know it’s anecdotal but the writing is on the wall. If it’s not valuable to your workflow today it will be soon. I already have tests being written, automated hooks into bugs where an initial PR gets generated with a potential fix. It’s far from perfect but junior engineers are far less productive.
> there is a large force on HN that want to deny the value of tokens there is an even larger force on HN that financially _needs_ the value of tokens to be inflated (so much so that bots have overwhelmed the site)
That’s not me. I am simply an engineer who gets a ton of value out of these tools.
Re: How the AI Bubble Bursts
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> Software is or was one of the few remaining arenas wherein a person can find a consistently. I want to add something additional to this: it is one of the few fields that can afford middle or upper middle class lifestyle and is accessible . I have no doubt if I could redo my life with the necessary resources I’d be more than capable of putting myself through med school and gone with a secure career that paid more th…
> I suspect many will find themselves locked out the middle class for generations.
On the other hand, once software as a high paying career dies there will be nothing to prop up the status quo (high cost of housing, for example) so the middle class will return to being much more accessible to modestly paid jobs.
Re: How the AI Bubble Bursts
#274It’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…
> The cost to serve tokens is absolutely profitable today How can you possibly say that? Everyone knows that's not the case, these companies are losing money every day selling tokens. Revenue is not the same thing as profit.
Don’t confuse what I say. Bottom line these companies are not profitable yet but it is profitable to serve a token via the API. They have increasing demand, not enough supply, models are getting better on quick timelines. For sure there may be some losers but it’s not hard to see that that token serving can be a profitable activity.
Re: How the AI Bubble Bursts
#275> 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…
consumer ram is starved by production capacity shifting to HBMs. Hbms dropping in price would not affect consumer RAM on any immediate timeline. Also, as pointed out by many, Jevons Paradox
Re: How the AI Bubble Bursts
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Software is or was one of the few remaining arenas wherein a person can find a consistently. I want to add something additional to this: it is one of the few fields that can afford middle or upper middle class lifestyle and is accessible . I have no doubt if I could redo my life with the necessary resources I’d be more than capable of putting myself through med school and gone with a secure career that paid more th…
It was kind of a flash in the pan moment where you could leave your retail floor manager job, crash course this thing called "javascript" in a 3 month class, and then get hired for a six figure remote job if you could choke out a mildly competent github repo.
Exactly. I don’t know why folks take so much offense to it. You could absolutely do just as you describe. Spend 3-4 hours truly working while enjoying the lunch today sessions and in-house lunch and barista. I definitely benefited from this and I am not ashamed of it but absolutely it was this weird moment in time.
Re: How the AI Bubble Bursts
#277Okay lets suppose all those companies are profitable if training would stop today. What if token demand is shrinking ? I think big parts of the current demand is artificially build by e.g. FOMO and marketing without real value generated by them. There is no indication in economic data about some productivity boom resulting from AI usage. Next thing is Energy costs - that will soon eat into profitability too. I don't…
I don't think token demand will shrink because we're still just learning how to use it, demand will skyrocket. The problem is what price we'll be willing to pay for it, specially if competition keeps soaring.
Re: How the AI Bubble Bursts
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
Debatable sure. Not 0. Tulips are 0. They add nothing to anyone's output. LLM's are not. LLM's are not tulips.
This is changing the narative. Nobody really cares about tulips and some dumb throwaway comparison. Unless LLMs are worth an awful lot the math here does not make sense. That is both debatable and important.
No it isn't changing the narrative. Tulip bulbs were a huge bubble based on speculation, completely. No one ever used a tulip to create a piece of software, or anything else. Their economic value was precisely 0. The whole thing was based on a bubble. LLM's may be IN a bubble, but they aren't tulips.
Re: How the AI Bubble Bursts
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's a winner-takes-all market and everyone wants to be the next Google absolutely isn't! if billed per token, there is no reason to be married to a single model family provider at all. the models have very different strengths and weaknesses, you should be taking advantage of this at all times.
people used to say this about search engines and web browsers, as well regardless, eventually Google became the universal default for both. When it comes to software, the average person doesn't shop around for the technologically optimal choice, they just use what everyone else is using.
my point is today there is no clear winner. opus, gpt 5.4 and gemini have different strengths. google search was running circles around competition in basically all use cases.
Re: How the AI Bubble Bursts
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
Jevons paradox only applies if demand hasnt already been saturated. The fact that public LLM usage is leveling off at a price of $0 and Jensen "we make the shovels in this gold rush" Huang is rather desperately claiming that you need to spend $250k/year in tokens to be taken seriously suggests that demand saturation may not be that far off. Whether Jevons' Paradox applies to software engineers I think is another open…
LLMs haven't remotely begun to be integrated into the lives of the typical person. Not even close. The typical person is using LLMs not at all as it pertains to their daily life tasks. They're using them almost entirely for limited discussion matters (eg having a discussion with GPT about a medical issue, or a work related matter). This is the first or second inning in the LLM rollout. It'll take 15-20 more years for…
> LLMs haven't remotely begun to be integrated into the lives of the typical person. Not even close. The typical person is using LLMs not at all as it pertains to their daily life tasks. They're using them almost entirely for limited discussion matters
This is an argument in favor of demand having leveled off.