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AI is slowing down

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Re: AI is slowing down

#171

Post by lompad »

simianwords wrote: post #74
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…

> until inference becomes much cheaper these companies cannot be profitable. Some mega-players will pay the API token price, but most will not. This is often repeated but comes from ignorance mostly. You have * zero * reason to believe inference is costly other than just vibes. If you go by data and intuitions - the margins are high. This kind of thinking really reinforces my belief that people have no idea and are u…

We know that inference cost is very significant, as he shows for example in this piece.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/oai_docs/

However, it needs to be said that he received those numbers. I personally have quite a few issues with him, but there's no reason to doubt his journalistic integrity. Because of that, I believe he reports truthfully on data he receives by informants.

Additionally, none of the frontier models actually publicly talks about inference costs in anything but broad, "let's just forget that"-like takes. Which does not exactly spark confidence.

I'm eagerly awaiting anthropic's public disclosure of their financial details. That should be rather interesting in any case and finally put the inference-discussion to rest.

Re: AI is slowing down

#172

Post by tim333 »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #133

"Last week I went on Bloomberg and discussed the state of the AI bubble with a clarity that rattled even the sweatiest boosters, mostly because I spoke with clarity about an investment frenzy whipped up through hype, deceit and mythology." Bloomberg is interested in what he has to say But not HN commenters

Well there are a lot of commenters so presumably some interest. I just had a look at the Bloomberg bit https://youtu.be/zbKDmkJPVvI and didn't see sweaty boosters rattled, just Ed doing his usual spiel - they are loss making and so it's all a big con. Which is kind of unproven on the big con bit.

Re: AI is slowing down

#173

Post by Kye »

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.

He also does PR for AI companies and only really acknowledges this in interviews. As far as I know he never discloses it in his rants.

Re: AI is slowing down

#174

Post by Terr_ »

putzdown wrote: post #136

One of the "smells" that gives away a quacky ranter is they speak in impassioned, "Why doesn't everyone understand this?" tones, but in fact their argument just doesn't flow. If Zitron's argument were as solid as he keeps saying it is, you would read it and understand it and see that it is solid. He would begin somewhere–statistics on AI demand, say–and then walk the calculations carefully over to the next step–maybe…

> He would begin somewhere–statistics on AI demand, say–and then walk the calculations carefully over to the next step–maybe revenue needed for profitability by AI companies–and you could follow the argument.

Which of the hyperlinks provided at the beginning sounded like what you wanted, and after you clicked it* how did it disappoint you?

The information you are describing is stuff I would not expect anybody to repeatedly duplicate across periodic blog-posts.

* (Yes, I'm being sardonic, but if you did bother to click them, then I'm legitimately interested in your answer.)

Re: AI is slowing down

#175

Post by mashlol »

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…

Has rate of progress increased? How does one measure that? Genuinely curious - would be very interesting to map out the "effectiveness" of each AI model vs how long it took to train/release.

From my perspective, the model gains are mostly incremental now and a lot of the gains are just from things like improving the agent harnesses. I could be wrong though.

Re: AI is slowing down

#176

Post by aspenmartin »

lbrito wrote: post #164
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?

It’s a very hard experiment to run. You have a population that’s already “treated”. You can’t blind them to the fact that they’re using AI tools. It’s hard to imagine a study that wouldn’t have serious flaws that people would then use to dismiss and form their own conclusions. Sure you have METR but that was very low n with a very old model.

I think the surest sign of productivity gains is the sheer volume of adoption. If you look beyond headlines, adoption is just incredible. Of course adoption does not necessarily point to productivity gains, but if this was some sort of FOMO or smoke and mirrors you would not see this much retention and this feverish a pace of adoption. You would not see a large segment of the profession using coding agents exclusively. All of these companies track productivity, again with imperfect proxies, yet everything points to a pretty consistent picture. Same with benchmarks, again a lot of crappy benchmarks but a lot of high quality ones too and a very diverse collection of tasks and capabilities they probe.

Re: AI is slowing down

#177

Post by yalogin »

As a tangent, I don’t understand where and why meta fits into the AI race. They did not get any mind share (consumers) from the llms so far, granted they started the open source side to this but the Chinese companies produce far better models and have essentially become the default for on device set up.

They have ai glasses and integration into instagram and facebook as the other avenues. I don’t see ai glasses as compelling yet, and don’t know how much more ad revenue or user engagement they can squeeze out with llms baked into the IG of FB flows. They are spending a lot and not seeing any returns. Am I wrong in being pessimistic about meta with AI?

Re: AI is slowing down

#178

Post by toasty228 »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #167
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 $$$?

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 seei…

> YOY earnings growth rate for the S&P 500 is 21.7%

Now remove the companies selling the AI shovels: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HIAjbZxacAARHwD.png

> Not sure what your point is.

My point is that they're selling us Skynet and the end of employment as we now it, things that we shouldn't even have to measure to perceive the results of, yet no one is able to measure any of it

Pointing a finger at nvidia, google, and the other few companies stuck in circular investment schemes that shouldn't even be legal and saying "OOGA BOOGA line go UP, UP GOOD!" doesn't count in my book

Re: AI is slowing down

#179

Post by aspenmartin »

deaton wrote: post #152
PedroBatista wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> undeniable, massive productivity gains. The jury is still out on that.

Yeah they're very much deniable. Raw LOC/hr is much higher, and putting together a MVP, but I've yet to see any evidence that an LLM is capable of doing anything unsupervised, and if you need a human supervising everything it does... why bother having an LLM in the first place?

Because it can perform much faster? Monitoring allows you to multitask more effectively. I would also disagree that you can’t one shot anything…claims like this are weak and I have enough counter examples in my own life that it’s trivially false. The question is more: can it one shot the right things with a low enough failure rate for it to be a good replacement. It’s hard to figure that out a priori.

Re: AI is slowing down

#180

Post by nfw2 »

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.

To be clear, your position here is that insurmountable barriers to information is the preferable state of the world?

One claim of the parent comment was that AI is ineffective. For the purpose of finding answers to questions, it is more resource-efficient than the alternatives, and, to your point, capable of answering questions that were impossible to answer via other means before. In what way is that ineffective?

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