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AI is slowing down

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Re: AI is slowing down

#51

Post by zachthewf »

root_axis wrote: post #25
zachthewf wrote: post #15

Before you spend 20 minutes reading this article, it's worth understanding that the writer has been posting popular but consistently wrong takes for 2+ years (e.g. https://www.wheresyoured.at/peakai/ from March 2024) arguing that AI is failing, is a waste of money, is bad, will never work, etc.

Can you point to anything specific from the article that you'd describe as consistently wrong? Not disagreeing with you, but nothing popped out to me after skimming the article.

I didn't read the posted article (I don't read this author anymore because I think it's basically anti-AI ideological propaganda).

But from the article I linked back in March 2024:

"Generative AI models are expensive and compute-intensive without providing obvious, tangible mass-market use cases. Murati and Altman's futures depend heavily on keeping the world believing that development and improvement of their models' capabilities will continue a rapacious pace of progress that has unquestionably slowed, with OpenAI admitting that GPT-4 may be worse on some tasks.

As I've written before, hallucinations are a feature not a bug. These models do not "know" anything. They are mathematical behemoths generating a best guess based on training data and labeling, and thus do not "know" what you are asking it to do. You simply cannot fix them. Hallucinations are not going away."

Since then:

- hallucinations are dramatically less of a problem

- several mass market use cases have emerged, most notably coding

- rate of progress has increased

Re: AI is slowing down

#52

Post by azakai »

root_axis wrote: post #25
zachthewf wrote: post #15

Before you spend 20 minutes reading this article, it's worth understanding that the writer has been posting popular but consistently wrong takes for 2+ years (e.g. https://www.wheresyoured.at/peakai/ from March 2024) arguing that AI is failing, is a waste of money, is bad, will never work, etc.

Can you point to anything specific from the article that you'd describe as consistently wrong? Not disagreeing with you, but nothing popped out to me after skimming the article.

Not the person you are responding to, but here:

> I believe that artificial intelligence has three quarters to prove itself before the apocalypse comes, and when it does, it will be that much worse, savaging the revenues of the biggest companies in tech. Once usage drops, so will the remarkable amounts of revenue that have flowed into big tech, and so will acres of data centers sit unused, the cloud equivalent of the massive overhiring we saw in post-lockdown Silicon Valley.

We have seen 8 quarters since. Has any of that come to pass?

Re: AI is slowing down

#53

Post by asdfasgasdgasdg »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #42
oudlys wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Productivity is not value. It's quite possible for you to experience productivity improvements, and actual value to not be created. That is what I think the most robust data is showing. https://unessays.substack.com/p/talk-is-cheap

Also, supposed productivity gains are dubious. I personally experience at best no productivity gains when using LLMs to write code, and sometimes it's an active drain on my productivity. There was that one study a year or so ago showing similar results. People are trying to say the productivity gains are there and undeniable, but that is not true. It is very much a subject of controversy whether AI helps productivity…

I can see an argument that the productivity gains are illusory / don’t translate to economic productivity. I’m not denying the possibility.

However, most of the engineers I respect have gone from being skeptics a year ago to convinced today. I don’t personally know any true holdouts any more. If there are studies that disprove productivity gains more than six months ago, I’m happy to believe that it was true of the AIs that were available at the time. But I’m going to need something much more recent before I disbelieve my lyin’ eyes where it pertains to the AIs available today.

Re: AI is slowing down

#54

Post by freejazz »

zachthewf wrote: post #15

Before you spend 20 minutes reading this article, it's worth understanding that the writer has been posting popular but consistently wrong takes for 2+ years (e.g. https://www.wheresyoured.at/peakai/ from March 2024) arguing that AI is failing, is a waste of money, is bad, will never work, etc.

And its been 3 years of AI boosters telling me that my job as a litigating attorney will not exist in 2 months. Yet here I am, gainfully employed.

Re: AI is slowing down

#56

Post by nyeah »

oudlys wrote: post #13
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…

Productivity is not value. It's quite possible for you to experience productivity improvements, and actual value to not be created. That is what I think the most robust data is showing. https://unessays.substack.com/p/talk-is-cheap

That's possible, sure. But I think the answer is more likely in the numbers, not in just qualitatively saying AI isn't worth anything. Like if I pay $30k for an ounce of gold, I got value. Gold is worth something. But that amount of gold wasn't worth what I spent.

EDIT: In fact, parent comment has a link to some numbers.

[EDIT: Most] people don't want to go through the numbers. Ok. But there's a history here. When people don't want to see the numbers, certain kinds of things tend to happen.

Re: AI is slowing down

#57

Post by recursive »

bayarearefugee wrote: post #36
happycube wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Perfect for idea people. All the value is in the prompt. Ideas are important, not execution. A decade or two ago, they would have been looking for a technical co-founder.

Re: AI is slowing down

#58

Post by cogman10 »

hungryhobbit wrote: post #43
partiallypro wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

RTFA; it's not about AI's massive impact or lack thereof ... it's about these businesses not having a viable business model that will sustain them (beyond the next couple years).

I think Zitron's problem is he's equating AI to OpenAI and Anthropic. I'd agree with him that both those businesses are in a dangerous position given how fast they've burnt through cash. However, that's not the entirety of the industry and there are a lot smaller labs doing more for a lot less capital.

The business model does appear to be viable for these labs. But that viability comes because they aren't wasting a bunch of R&D money developing worthless products like AI video production.

Re: AI is slowing down

#59

Post by hungryhobbit »

kunai wrote: post #44
brindleth wrote: post #29

Whenever I read these kind of articles about AI financials, I'm reminded of identical screeds I read about Uber a few years ago. They were angrily insistent that Uber was a scam company run by criminals and charlatans and could never, ever become profitable or make money for its investors. It was a house of cards that would come crashing down sooner or later, and take everyone's money with it. Now it's 2026. Uber sti…

Uber used the classic triple-E philosophy of Microsoft and entered a market that was ripe for disruption -- many cities lacked reliable taxi service entirely, others were cartels that fixed prices. They undercut prices to an extreme degree, subsidized fares, and when it either drove local taxi companies out of business and spurred widespread adoption as the default, it had a captive market and duopoly with Lyft which…

Yeah, people forget the risk to Uber was real in the early days. If municipalities had enforced their taxi laws, the company would have died and all those millions invested would have been lost (or pivoted into something else).

It was only because Uber successfully bulldozed over all regulations that it was able to succeed ... and that was hard to predict before it happened.

Re: AI is slowing down

#60

Post by viccis »

metadat wrote: post #4
ElFitz wrote: post #2

I find it difficult to separate this piece’s tone from its content. The tone puts me off and makes it hard for me to judge it on its merits, despite some of the arguments seeming sound and well supported.

Agreed. I am open to the possibility of the bubble bursting or whatever, but this piece is like 3,000 words and cites everything as evidence the sky is falling. It's just as bad as the pro-AI grifters, just in the other direction. Does the truth normally lie somewhere in the middle of it all?

>Does the truth normally lie somewhere in the middle of it all?

Usually does when you decide what constitutes extreme.

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