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AI is slowing down

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Re: AI is slowing down

#141

Post by MSFT_Edging »

moritzwarhier wrote: post #131
toasty228 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> undeniable, massive productivity gains. Take any stock index, remove AI stocks, what do you see? That's right! Nothing... So where is all the productivity going? Where is the value? Where are the massive unemployment stats or the millions of new startups making big $$$?

Writing about AI, destroying the planet for data centers, there's a lot of money to be made. That being said, AI seems kind of miraculous sometimes. Similar to cars. So enticing that we make everything else in the world worse in order to maximize the profit, make it indispensable, subsidize it, and make the dependency on it irreversible. And it's not even something to blame individual people for. Driving away from al…

Vonnegut said in his last living work that the greatest addiction modern people face is the drug of cheap oil.

We got addicted to the convenience and overuse, and have started a mass extinction event because of it.

The perverse incentives will come for us all.

Re: AI is slowing down

#142

Post by oudlys »

amatheus wrote: post #135
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

From an economic perspective productivity is defined as the creation of value isn't it? Then if you "improve productivity" and does not create value in the end you're no improving productivity at all.

It does depend on how you define productivity. But the way it's commonly used is "I'm going faster, personally, with these tools."

The thing people I think have a hard time seeing is that "I go faster" does not mean "more features get finished".

It's a scale issue, and one scale is better than the other. People only pay for finished features, they do not pay for how much code you emit.

Re: AI is slowing down

#143

Post by lompad »

frisbee6152 wrote: post #106
solomatov wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> progress was slowing Do you think it's not slowing? Do I miss anything really important? My understanding is that we have now is incremental improvement on thinking models which appeared more than a year ago. Of course, a breakthrough might happen, but I don't see one yet.

The most important thing I would point to is Mythos et al and the wave of vulnerabilities that have been discovered in the past couple months. It’s a completely unprecedented event, brought forth almost entirely by improvements in the models themselves. That said. keep in mind, I’m talking about over the past two years. With Claude code and the capabilities gained since December of last year, there have been incredib…

The maintainer of curl - who has access to mythos - disagrees [0].

I think it's dangerous to rely on claims made by people who financially profit from you believing them without checking.

[0]: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2026/05/11/mythos-finds-a-curl-v...

Re: AI is slowing down

#144

Post by simonw »

gdcbe wrote: post #138
simonw wrote: post #132

Ed's argument for why "AI is slowing down" rests on company spending caps, in particular the Uber $1,500/engineer/tool cap. I interpret the exact same evidence in the opposite direction. A year ago the idea that a company would spend $1,500/month/employee on AI tooling felt absurd, what could people possible want to do with AI that would cost that much? Then coding agents (and, increasingly, general purpose agents) h…

Maybe in USA in big tech where companies give absurd wages to engineers anyway in some states, that might be acceptable. But to make their ROI they need that (and more) to be spend world wide... no way that is gonna be a budget that is gonna fly in the long term... Companies love to cut costs, and just like they axe employee numbers at will, they will just as well make that kind of budget quickly dissapear the moment…

The Uber $1,500/engineer/month thing is just the first signal we have had of the price companies may be willing to accept. This price will clearly vary wildly across professions, industries and geographies.

I think it's a poor number to build an "AI is slowing down" narrative around.

Re: AI is slowing down

#145

Post by syawin »

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.

[flagged]

Re: AI is slowing down

#146

Post by nfw2 »

moritzwarhier wrote: post #131
toasty228 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> undeniable, massive productivity gains. Take any stock index, remove AI stocks, what do you see? That's right! Nothing... So where is all the productivity going? Where is the value? Where are the massive unemployment stats or the millions of new startups making big $$$?

Writing about AI, destroying the planet for data centers, there's a lot of money to be made. That being said, AI seems kind of miraculous sometimes. Similar to cars. So enticing that we make everything else in the world worse in order to maximize the profit, make it indispensable, subsidize it, and make the dependency on it irreversible. And it's not even something to blame individual people for. Driving away from al…

The environmental impact of answering a question on an obscure topic with ai model is less than an the impact of answering the question with an hour-long google search hunting for references or a drive to the public library.

Re: AI is slowing down

#147

Post by micromacrofoot »

It doesn't matter if it's slowing down, pretty much no one has implemented it to its full extent yet. It could stop right now and we'll be finding new implementations a decade from now.

Anthropic and Open AI could evaporate tomorrow and we'll still be using the models.

The market may collapse, but the people who think AI is going to disappear as a result don't understand what it is.

Re: AI is slowing down

#148

Post by andrewstuart »

AI companies are racing to win the future of computing.

They are possibly in a winner take all death race against each other.

The stakes are so high that these cash rich companies cannot afford not to throw everything they have into this.

The sunk costs are irrelevant when it’s a question of survival.

Whether you hate or love AI computing is being completely reinvented - at the absolute core of this is computers programming computers.

Anthropic is winning this race by a country mile right now.

This is such an important future bet for these companies that the trillions must be spent because there’s no future or a greatly diminished future for some of them unless they have ownership of the technology.

Re: AI is slowing down

#149

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

toasty228 wrote: post #118
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. Take any stock index, remove AI stocks, what do you see? That's right! Nothing... So where is all the productivity going? Where is the value? Where are the massive unemployment stats or the millions of new startups making big $$$?

> Take any stock index, remove AI stocks, what do you see? That's right! Nothing...

Where did all the stock gains go before AI?

FAANG / MAG-7.

Was everything from 2012-2020 fake, too?

Re: AI is slowing down

#150

Post by toasty228 »

nfw2 wrote: post #146
moritzwarhier wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Writing about AI, destroying the planet for data centers, there's a lot of money to be made. That being said, AI seems kind of miraculous sometimes. Similar to cars. So enticing that we make everything else in the world worse in order to maximize the profit, make it indispensable, subsidize it, and make the dependency on it irreversible. And it's not even something to blame individual people for. Driving away from al…

The environmental impact of answering a question on an obscure topic with ai model is less than an the impact of answering the question with an hour-long google search hunting for references or a drive to the public library.

It's like saying if we didn't have cheap commercial flights people would travel by foot anyways and would consume more resources for food &co. than the plane would consume in fuel...

80% of generative AI queries wouldn't even exist as google searches.

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