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AI is slowing down

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Re: AI is slowing down

#161

Post by lxgr »

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.

That might be true, but at least I started asking way more questions since we’ve had competent LLMs.

Re: AI is slowing down

#162

Post by gilbetron »

themafia wrote: post #112
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.

> Before you spend 20 minutes reading this article, it's worth understanding that the writer has been posting popular but consistently wrong So, judge the book by it's cover? > arguing that AI is failing, is a waste of money, is bad, will never work, etc. Then the opposite should be easy to prove. AI is succeeding, is efficient, is universally good, and is working everywhere it's tried. Are those true?

> So, judge the book by it's cover?

It is literally judging the book by it's author, which is an extremely rationale judgement to make.

Re: AI is slowing down

#163

Post by zuzululu »

I don't think anybody actually believes that the current investment is going to yield returns that they are projecting. Neither did people back in Dotcom or Railways or any other hype/bubbles. Yet these technology did transform and the returns came to fruition.

Internet continued to thrive and grow even after the stock market came and went, it took 13 years to roughly nasdaq to recover but the explosion of GDP from internet has been largely decoupled from the previous bubble boom and bust.

If you use the stock market as a yard stick to project new revolutionary technology we shouldn't have had trains, internet. In fact internet should've stopped with the bust of Nasdaq and everybody would've moved back to using paper but we didn't it gave rise to the next wave of economic output powered by this new tech.

I don't see AI to be any different.

Re: AI is slowing down

#164

Post by lbrito »

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.

How can something so undeniable have zero scientific evidence? Are there any large peer reviewed or meta studies confirming your claim?

Re: AI is slowing down

#165

Post by moritzwarhier »

toasty228 wrote: post #150
nfw2 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I do plenty of AI queries, both pragmatic ones and some for entertainment: witnessing talktotransformer was mind-bending already at the time! And since then, I've tried frontier models, local, coding agents, and use plenty of them on the regular.

I awe at the capabilites of generative AI.

I also enjoy sitting in or driving a car.

I did not want to make a moral argument, unless you consider each and every form of utilitarianism as moralism.

Re: AI is slowing down

#166

Post by RigelKentaurus »

The handwringing tone of the article is off-putting.

Ed is confused between whether AI is useful, and whether the current level of funding and valuations are sustainable. The following statements can both be true:

1. AI is already quite useful and will continue to be so. This is true even if AGI doesn’t happen.

2. The funding and valuations of many AI companies are too far ahead of their skis, and will probably roll back. Some may fail entirely.

About the “where’s the productivity in AI?” question: I think it’s entirely possible that the primary benefit of AI will not be top-line growth but reduced costs (through reduced human labor). Companies will need to reduce prices to prevent losing market share to existing or new competitors, meaning that GDP may not increase, but costs will.

Re: AI is slowing down

#167

Post by atleastoptimal »

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 $$$?

Not sure what your point is. Stock markets are based on money going into securities based on estimated future value. Even if AI were doubling productivity at a non-AI company, there is more leverage to that money going into an AI company.

The question is, is AI leading to massive productivity gains in companies that implement it? AI productivity gains take time to diffuse, but so far companies in the S&P 500 are seeing very high growth. YOY earnings growth rate for the S&P 500 is 21.7% https://advantage.factset.com/hubfs/Website/Resources%20Sect...

Re: AI is slowing down

#168

Post by nostrademons »

asveikau wrote: post #120
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.

Not sure where I heard this, but I'm reminded of a story about someone predicting the dotcom crash early, circa 1998. For 2 years they were demonstrably crazy, and missed out on massive stock market gains. Then they were right. (And yes, tech slowly bounced back after that.) Predicting the timing of such a thing is notoriously difficult. I don't think being wrong about timing 2 years ago means there won't be a correc…

I'm also reminded of all the HN posts from 2007-2009 that predicted that the adoption of social networking would be a terrible thing for privacy, that it would destroy society, that people would lose their jobs over crazy shit they said on the Internet, that it would lead to the decline of trust and in-person interactions, that people would forget how to socialize, etc.

They were right about all of that but it took 15-20 years and the companies involved grew 100x in that timefold, eventually reaching trillion-dollar valuations that would've seemed insane in 2007.

There is a tremendous amount of money to be made in destroying society.

Re: AI is slowing down

#169

Post by [deleted] »

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 $$$?

[deleted]

Re: AI is slowing down

#170

Post by B56b »

simonw wrote: post #144
gdcbe wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The problem is that $1500/engineer/month would be a pretty modest amount of demand for labs. OpenAI/Anthropic are basing their $1T valuations on the explosive uncapped growth of unlimited agentic token spending. On so many levels of the industry this growth is now priced in. You don't think so?
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