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AI eats the world (Spring 26) [pdf]

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Re: AI eats the world (Spring 26) [pdf]

#141

Post by pjc50 »

stego-tech wrote: post #29
gallerdude wrote: post #20

I was a baby when the Internet Revolution happened. I was in high school and college when the Mobile Revolution steamrolled everything. It’s been interesting to see this one, as an adult working in the world. I wonder how far it will go.

Further than the doomers think, but not enough to pay off the investors of the original boom. I say that as someone who has been an early believer in the internet (first website in the 90s), mobile data (slurping down the 'net, IRC, and IMs via EDGE data), smartphones (N80ie), streaming media (RIP Windows MCE), the list goes on. Models were always going to be the commodity, just like the most popular and viable use c…

> Further than the doomers think, but not enough to pay off the investors of the original boom

Not an uncommon event - not only did this happen to many companies who were big in the original internet boom (e.g. Sun Microsystems, as well as all the Boo, Pets.com etc), it also happened to the railway boom of the previous century, and even the Channel Tunnel.

Re: AI eats the world (Spring 26) [pdf]

#142

Post by nmfisher »

menaerus wrote: post #134
nmfisher wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

antirez running (quantized) DeepSeek V4 Pro on a Mac Studio M3 Ultra with 512GB of RAM: https://bsky.app/profile/antirez.bsky.social/post/3mlzwmvlov... It's much closer than you think. We're going to see specialized hardware in the next 24 months capable of running 2025-era frontier models. That's big.

2-bit quantization? That's a lot of signal being removed. Considering how quickly the AI models are progressing in their capabilities (still exponential curve), I will not want to use the 2025 model in two years time. Similarly, how I don't want to use llama-3 or old Anthropic model from 2023 or 2024. Newer models are so much better that it makes it very difficult to ignore. Once and if the advancements with the AI m…

Opus 4.6 was a 2025 model and many people (myself included) feel that if that's where models peaked, we won't be disappointed.

Even at 2-bit quantization, DS4 is probably on par with a 2024 frontier model. You can run that today on local hardware, and at a minimum, local models are going to keep pace over the next 12-24 months. Even if they don't close the gap with frontier models, they'll still play an important role in the overall pipeline for cost, speed and privacy reasons.

That's without even mentioning the additional capability that something like a Taalas chip churning out 17k tokens/sec could unlock.

Re: AI eats the world (Spring 26) [pdf]

#143

Post by galdauts »

thrance wrote: post #130
arexxbifs wrote: post #129

> Imagine asking “What will be changed by the internet?” in 1997 Pretty much all of the stuff that was suggested back then or earlier: Shopping, advertising, video conferencing, collaboration, software distribution, media consumption, banking, finance and of course communication overall. Most of these ideas weren't exactly new in 1997, but go back to services like CompuServe and even Douglas Engelbart's Mother of All…

Knowing why we're trying to build something is a good smell test to segregate promising tech from snake oil, in my experience. Take quantum computers for example, a lot of the time people will compare that to the dawn of classical computing, with claims such as "we can't know yet what we'll be able to achieve, we have to build it first!". Except that even the first classical computers were built with goals and applic…

I think a more nuanced take is appropriate here. It‘s true that computers were invented with the express goal of speeding up military and corporate computing (back when computers were still people), but their influence on our culture and society extended far beyond those initial applications. The telephone was invented as a means of long-distance communication, but it shaped our values surrounding communication as well. Therefore it may be hard to predict what will ultimately become of a technology.

I agree that there are a lot of overhyped technologies though. Quantum computing has been in the works for decades now, with little to show for it in the popular perception.

Re: AI eats the world (Spring 26) [pdf]

#144

Post by NitpickLawyer »

kannanvijayan wrote: post #72
jkhdigital wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, the crazy thing is that much of the groundwork for the “rules-and-heuristics” mode of AI was laid down in the 70s and 80s, long before we had the raw compute power to reliably extract patterns from reality-scale inputs. Those early efforts failed miserably mostly because the rules had to be populated manually and in a ridiculously space-inefficient format (compared to the density of information in model weight…

I feel like the talk about "world models" is trying to reach at that, but cast it in different terminology. World model is just domain model, and once you're at domain model, there are multitudes of domains. Unsupervised learning over domain rulesystems has the potential to let us define really well-defined, scoped models that behave a lot more deterministically and don't colour outside the lines, and reserve their w…

> Mixture-of-Experts seems like an attempt to do this - the domain structure being extracted into specific sub-models that are presumably trained on particular domain-associated content

This is a common miss-conception. MoE LLMs are NOT trained with each expert receiving domain-associated data. It's just an unfortunate naming decision that stuck, and is commonly miss-understood by non practitioners.

Re: AI eats the world (Spring 26) [pdf]

#145

Post by pingou »

libraryofbabel wrote: post #84
btucker wrote: post #4

You can find the 4 versions of Benedict's deck here: https://www.ben-evans.com/presentations I appreciate the temporal view into this thinking. My interpretation: Nov 2024: Don’t dismiss this; it may be the next platform shift. But the actual questions are still unsettled: scaling, usefulness, deployment, and business model. May 2025: The model layer is already showing signs of commoditization, so the important quest…

Thanks for the summary. I do love Benedict‘s work; I find he’s one of the few commentators who consistently strikes a balance between taking the transformative potential of AI seriously while not falling over into hype. Some things that stand out: * He’s really good with his historical analogies, especially looking at previous transformations like the early Internet and mobile; no surprise given that he has a history…

I just got a bit triggered by the "hype" word. What if the hype was real? It is easy to say that nobody knows how all of this is going to work, and I would say it is a prudent thing to say, but there is value in making a bold prediction from the start instead of just updating your view to respond to change. In one case you are predicting stuff, in the other, just reacting.

But I absolutely agree that in hindsight we are often asking the wrong questions about each new technology.

I keep seeing on HN that AI is a hype, and many here are anti AI (which I get, as a programmer AI made my job less interesting, and I'm even worried about losing it), but where has AI underdelivered?

Re: AI eats the world (Spring 26) [pdf]

#146

Post by musebox35 »

aurareturn wrote: post #106

In slide 22, it compares LLM labs (OpenAI/Anthropic) to mobile data telecoms (AT&T, Verizon, TMobile) in 2010s. The difference is that mobile telecoms follow a standard (3G, 4G LTE, 5G) and there is little to no differentiation. It's virtually the same no matter which company you choose or which country you travel to. A better comparison is actually AWS/Azure/Google Cloud/NeoClouds to AT&T and Verizon. The data cente…

Most of your analysis I can easily relate to except “There is evidence that the Chinese models are falling further behind, not gaining.” Where is that evidence? Deepseekv4 claims to be trailing front runners by six months. I read people agreeing with this. I watched Eric Schmidt to recently make similar comments. Is he just scaremongering? Why do you claim they are falling behind?

Re: AI eats the world (Spring 26) [pdf]

#147

Post by benedictevans »

tovej wrote: post #132
benedictevans wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of these points are simply wrong. I charted the revenue reported by Anthropic and OpenAI as gross and net because those are the numbers they disclose. Anthropic does not report net revenue nor give us any way to calculate that, and the same in reverse for OpenAI. It would be great if we had GAAP revenue, but we don't. This is what we have, and it still tells an important story. What are we supposed to do - just n…

It is not industry practice to actually give the sources then? Just list vague names in a short "Sources:Companies" note? I now see the inflation indication as well. Which is not on the y-axis label, but in the "Sources:"-note. I will concede that. But what the hell my guy, why is it down there. If "financial analysis" is less rigid in sourcing requirements than grade school, what are you guys even doing. If you have…

You are surprised to discover how an entire industry you know nothing about does things. You conclude that everyone in that industry must be an idiot doing bad work.

This says far more about you than it does about me.

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