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AI is slowing down

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Re: AI is slowing down

#121

Post by Capricorn2481 »

zachthewf wrote: post #51
root_axis wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

Most notably? This is not a mass market use case in the way the author is describing. They are asserting that the amount of spend they need to get this off the ground necessitates the entire world coming in on it, and I would say that opinion has aged pretty well. There are a lot of coders, but there are more people scratching their heads as AI is shoved into every part of their lives.

Re: AI is slowing down

#123

Post by helloplanets »

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #18

Buried lede (if the title is the actual promise), the sources don't seem to back the title either. Someone with more patience can correct me if I accidentally missed a bombshell anyway. Edit: > If you’re wondering what the story is, [...] I expect it to be out in the next two weeks [...] I can guarantee you it’ll be worth it, and you’ll be stunned by what I report. Ok, this takes clickbait to new lows. The headline i…

Given this, his righteous anger towards craven boosters and grifters is pretty funny. Pot calling the kettle black.

Re: AI is slowing down

#125

Post by DonsDiscountGas »

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…

It's pretty likely that inference will get substantially cheaper. His argument is that for these companies to be profitable some very major and (pre 2022) unprecedented things have to happen. Which I tend to agree with, except I think they will happen, seeing as how they've been happening for a few years.

Re: AI is slowing down

#126

Post by bazaah »

I hadn't heard of the TMobile and Brex spend caps, only knew about Uber's because it went viral last week. I expect we'll see more of that now that everyone is paying per token, and it sort of feels like you cannot both have spending caps and require extensive AI usage for performance reviews -- I wonder that will shake out in the end?

Anecdotally, $dayJob consumes Anthropic models via Azure subscriptions which lend themselves pretty neatly to the spending dashboards Ed mentions are missing from Anthropic themselves, and finance seems ok with the current usage, but there's no real hard incentives internally for AI usage either.

I guess Q3-4 are going to be interesting to see where this all goes.

Re: AI is slowing down

#127

Post by DonsDiscountGas »

vb-8448 wrote: post #96

Zitron is in the business of content creation and not successful predictions . It doesn't matter how many times he (and several others around) will say the end is here , they have to be right only once. BTW, one thing for sure he is right about are the economics, as of today there is no way these massive investments are gone be paid.

For the purposes of content creation they don't even have to be right once

Re: AI is slowing down

#128

Post by spmurrayzzz »

pluto_modadic wrote: post #119
spmurrayzzz wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He has also consistently demonstrated, at least to me, that he doesn't really understand how inference works from a technical perspective, which weakens much of his core thesis for why there should be a collapse. I do value having some naysayers in the mix generally, because we do need balanced critique in what is otherwise a very frothy hype cycle. I just don't think he's making sound arguments, and that's even assu…

I think he doesn't need to understand the technology to point out the books are cooked. a business can sink in either way: the technology flops or the finances flop. he's arguing the /finances/ would flop. he doesn't argue that the /technology/ would flop, only that they can't come up with the money to pay their debters.

There is a piece of this I agree with. That you do not need to be a deep technical expert to notice that a company is burning cash by overcommitting to capex, or relying on heroic revenue projections that may or may not come to pass.

But that is not the full argument he is making. If the claim is that the labs will not be able to pay their creditors because inference is structurally incapable of becoming profitable, then he absolutely needs to be right about the technical economics of inference.

One part of that is the balance-sheet argument (which already shows insanely good margins). But it also depends on how inference-time compute actually works: routing, batching, kv cache reuse, model segmentation, different latency tiers, etc. Much of those details he's just been straight up wrong about in his writing, so as a result I have to call into question the rest of his reasoning as well (in part to avoid Gell-Mann amnesia).

Re: AI is slowing down

#129

Post by simonw »

jimmaswell wrote: post #30
ericmcer wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah they seem clickable because anything Anti-AI is a bit soothing right now, but he is constantly wrong and usually is pushing the angle of "these businesses aren't even profitable!" Instantly close the tab as soon as the popup to subscribe to his newsletter pops up.

Why is anti-AI soothing?

Because there are still a huge number of people who would be very relieved if the whole AI thing just went away.

Re: AI is slowing down

#130

Post by bakugo »

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…

> undeniable, massive productivity gains.

Just because you keep repeating something doesn't make it an undeniable truth.

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