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AI is slowing down

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Re: AI is slowing down

#31

Post by cogman10 »

gdcbe wrote: post #21
dkobia wrote: post #9

Zitron is begging for a collapse at this point. Yes, his macro analysis correctly identifies a massive financial risk but his incessant pessimism completely misses the incredible ground-level utility that many of us on HN celebrate every day through undeniable, massive productivity gains. At this point I'm trying to believe there's a middle ground where the level of individual capability this unlocks, leads to major…

I do not disagree with what you are saying, but I honestly still believe that most of the utility we experience are honestly gonna become very boring very soon that we can just run local... Even if it's a bit more slow who cares, can just run in background while you work on other stuff yourself, read up on things, review other work... It's not that the utility of it put in question. What is however a giant question m…

Even more dangerous to the big 2 AI companies is the fact that the 20 different Chinese companies are catching up fast and for a lot lower cost.

Why should someone pick Opus 4.8 when Qwen3.7 Plus produces similar results for about 1/20th the cost.

That sort of pricing disparity is across the board. But further it's becoming more and more apparent that they are doing more with less parameters. That's what's giving the local models their super powers.

Re: AI is slowing down

#32

Post by aogaili »

partiallypro wrote: post #28
aogaili wrote: post #16

Some people seem to see the world only through bubbles. But if you look at human history, despite the ups and downs, we have a trajectory; generally speaking, human-created systems evolve toward ever-increasing complexity, impact, and efficiency. The current wave of AI unlocked language - the tools are now speaking and understanding. This, on its own, is astonishing progress. Language is the foundation of our culture…

The only "bubble" with AI is that the initial build out is cyclical, and many of the high flying chip stocks with no software arms (ala Nvidia's CUDA) will come back to Earth. I think anyone that thinks AI is going away or won't have massive impact (though maybe not in the doomsday scenario) are in complete denial.

I share the same perspective.

Re: AI is slowing down

#33

Post by elorant »

dkobia wrote: post #9

Zitron is begging for a collapse at this point. Yes, his macro analysis correctly identifies a massive financial risk but his incessant pessimism completely misses the incredible ground-level utility that many of us on HN celebrate every day through undeniable, massive productivity gains. At this point I'm trying to believe there's a middle ground where the level of individual capability this unlocks, leads to major…

Even if we assume that everything you said holds true, how is that we as a crowd can make viable a service that eats some $300bn annually in infrastructure costs? Where would that money come from? Most tech companies these days are cutting their AI budgets because the per token pricing is killing them.

Re: AI is slowing down

#34

Post by alexashka »

dkobia wrote: post #9

Zitron is begging for a collapse at this point. Yes, his macro analysis correctly identifies a massive financial risk but his incessant pessimism completely misses the incredible ground-level utility that many of us on HN celebrate every day through undeniable, massive productivity gains. At this point I'm trying to believe there's a middle ground where the level of individual capability this unlocks, leads to major…

[flagged]

Re: AI is slowing down

#35

Post by adamtaylor_13 »

Ed is an interesting character. His financial analysis of the AI industry makes logical sense to me (though I am not knowledgeable enough to actually know if it is correct.) However, he seems to be so angry at AI in general, that he misses the obvious areas where LLMs are actually changing the State of the Art.

Coding seems to be one of the core use-cases for LLMs (as Simon Willison pointed out recently) and even if that's the only real use-case for LLMs, they're wildly useful. I do understand that useful != profitable and that's where I think Ed has a real point: until inference becomes much cheaper these companies cannot be profitable. Some mega-players will pay the API token price, but most will not.

Re: AI is slowing down

#36

Post by bayarearefugee »

happycube wrote: post #10
bpodgursky wrote: post #5

What's the point of arguing with any of this. It's like someone arguing that cheese isn't real. Yes I can go to the grocery store and take a picture of cheese and show it, but what's the point? They can live in their own world. It doesn't change any of our lives. The world is what it is.

Lol... in this case, cheese imports from China are much cheaper, just not quite as good. And for those who are all "but dur CCP get all ur data" you can use things like AWS Bedrock (at least for earlier versions of Deepseek and Qwen for now) and have more familiar people get all your data. Or buy (at obnoxiously inflated prices) your own HW and not send your data to anyone.

> "but dur CCP get all ur data"

The funniest part of this is that people are often talking about how LLMs are now writing 100% of their code, then also saying that they don't want to expose their code to foreign government exfiltration by using foreign models.

But, uh, if an LLM is writing 100% of your code you have no actual secret sauce to hide from anyone, so why worry about it.

Re: AI is slowing down

#37

Post by mawadev »

dkobia wrote: post #9

Zitron is begging for a collapse at this point. Yes, his macro analysis correctly identifies a massive financial risk but his incessant pessimism completely misses the incredible ground-level utility that many of us on HN celebrate every day through undeniable, massive productivity gains. At this point I'm trying to believe there's a middle ground where the level of individual capability this unlocks, leads to major…

I really like some good drama slop that reads like a thriller, it is entertaining. I don't take any of it THAT serious, but lately with the IPOs that are about to hit the indizes, he has gained a lot of attention. If you look around the internet, most people publish a negative angle on something and then extrapolate it into some grand conspiracy, which is really captivating. Its crazy when you enter some echo chamber you never engage with (movies, gaming, art/comics) and they have their own head cannon for why the world is bad and collapsing. It puts your echo chamber into perspective to see the same patterns of argumentation and presentation spin out in a different way

Re: AI is slowing down

#38

Post by simianwords »

simianwords wrote: post #17

Ed Zitron speaks to a particular type of angry tech conservative. He’s not speaking truth or exposing anything. He’s the soothing voice the tech nerds of yesterday year are yearning for. The angry polemic that goes on and on and on with cuss words used liberally is just meant to evoke emotion and cathartic resolution to the type of people mentioned above. Not truth. The thing is, there are a lot of people that find c…

I'm collecting many kinds of predictions Ed Zitron made so that you can see for yourself whether he has a good track record.

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> While complex, generative AI is a technology that probabilistically generates answers, and has no "intelligence." It is inherently limited by its architecture, and in turn can only get "better" in a linear fashion. I see no signs that the transformer-based architecture can do significantly more than it currently does.

He wrote this in 2024 before reasoning models came out. Remember how ChatGPT was in 2024? Do you think this person is someone who gets predictions right?

> Furthermore, I hypothesize a race to the bottom in generative AI will significantly hamper OpenAI's ability to expand revenue, compounded by the fact that we're approaching the limits of transformer-based architecture.

He wrote this in 2024 and since then Anthropic's revenue increased by 160x to $40 B dollars a year and OpenAI's increased by 6x. Do you think this person gets predictions right still?

> I believe we're reaching the upper limits about what generative AI can do and how accurate its outputs can be,

He wrote this in 2024, do you really think we have reached upper limits? Huh?? What I'm using today is significantly more accurate and 2 tiers above what we had.

> And if there are true industry-changing possibilities waiting for us on the other side, I am yet to hear them outside of the fan fiction of Silicon Valley hucksters.

He says this about AI when we have with all honesty have had industry changing possibilities like agentic coding.

> There are indications that consumers have also lost interest. As pointed out by Alex Kantrowitz’ Big Technology newsletter, traffic to ChatGPT on both mobile and web has started to stagnate, if not decline. In January 2024, ChatGPT had 1.6 billion visits — 11% below the all-time peak of 1.8 billion. This makes it only modestly more popular than Bing, which had 1.3 billion unique visits during that period. On the mobile front, ChatGPT has an estimated 6.3 million US users — or 1.7 times less than the total of new Snapchat users added during Q4 2023.

He agrees with the claim that the consumer interest has declined. Since he said this, there was a 9x growth in active users.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wStScmT748&t=1s

"AI Bubble Already Bursting?" (8 months back)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8ByoAt5gCA&t=1s

"A.I bubble is bursting with Ed Zitron" (1 year back)

He's been constantly crying bubble for years now.

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> AI video won’t get truly fixed just by waiting a year.

This is what he had said in 2024, and you just need to compare video from then and now to check whether the predictions came true. Why would anyone trust what this guy has to say?

Re: AI is slowing down

#39

Post by hungryhobbit »

adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #35

Ed is an interesting character. His financial analysis of the AI industry makes logical sense to me (though I am not knowledgeable enough to actually know if it is correct .) However, he seems to be so angry at AI in general, that he misses the obvious areas where LLMs are actually changing the State of the Art. Coding seems to be one of the core use-cases for LLMs (as Simon Willison pointed out recently) and even if…

I don't think whether "LLMs are actually changing the State of the Art" or not matters for anything he wrote.

If the AI companies need $X billion in revenue to stay afloat, it doesn't matter if 0.5% or 5% or 50% of that revenue is from transforming the State of the Art. It's 100% irrelevant: what matters is that, transformation or no, these companies won't have the income to pay their bills. And if they can't pay their bills, a whole lot of other companies can't either.

So again, transformation or no, it's still a house of cards waiting to collapse. The only thing that would change that is not more "transformation" ... it's a feature set that lets them multiply their current user base (or multiply how much they charge them) several times over.

Re: AI is slowing down

#40

Post by nozzlegear »

enraged_camel wrote: post #22
dkobia wrote: post #9

Zitron is begging for a collapse at this point. Yes, his macro analysis correctly identifies a massive financial risk but his incessant pessimism completely misses the incredible ground-level utility that many of us on HN celebrate every day through undeniable, massive productivity gains. At this point I'm trying to believe there's a middle ground where the level of individual capability this unlocks, leads to major…

Yes. Zitron has been predicting and begging for collapse since 2024. It's not just his brand at this point. It's his entire identity . As such, he cannot back down, he cannot question himself, and he cannot accept any other viewpoint. And he will keep moving his goal posts until something happens that can make him go "aha! I told you guys!!" This, combined with his extreme ignorance, makes him unreadable. The only re…

> This, combined with his extreme ignorance,

Extreme ignorance?

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