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AI is slowing down

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Re: AI is slowing down

#181

Post by simonw »

B56b wrote: post #170
simonw wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I don't have a particularly great answer to that question - I'm not enough of a financial analysis to have confidence in an opinion.

I do however think that shouting "look, Uber capped pricing at $1500/engineer/month hence AI is slowing down" is a questionable position to take.

Re: AI is slowing down

#182

Post by aspenmartin »

elorant wrote: post #33
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…

Even if we assume that everything you said holds true, how is that we as a crowd can make viable a service that eats some $300bn annually in infrastructure costs? Where would that money come from? Most tech companies these days are cutting their AI budgets because the per token pricing is killing them.

Cite a real source for that last bit, I don’t think that is true. Also the budgets should be cut the spend at some places goes beyond any reasonable amount. The strategy there is to hook everything in and find the right processes, then cut the rest. Things then get better and better with each model release.

The way you make a viable service that eats 300bn annually is to have enough demand to service that. Anthropic underbought compute. That tells you something.

Re: AI is slowing down

#183

Post by _aavaa_ »

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?

Because even in a field like software engineering where the output of our work is save in version control, measuring baseline productivity is hard.

LoC: people argue it’s not what’s important

PRs/day: same as LoC

Getting projects done faster: oh but what about the quality.

Solve the technical problems and actually be more productive, the social systems build around the old way of doing things will hole you back.

Finish a PR in 10 minutes doesn’t matter if you’re waiting days for a human review.

Re: AI is slowing down

#184

Post by alfalfasprout »

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…

It's not entirely clear to me that the opposing argument is well-formed either. You constantly see numbers and statistics being wildly mis-used or overextrapolated.

Re: AI is slowing down

#185

Post by themafia »

gilbetron wrote: post #162
themafia wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> It is literally judging the book by it's author

How is that better?

> which is an extremely rationale judgement to make.

So it's "rational" to take bias into reading? Why even read? If you know what you think and refuse to accept new information then what purpose is there in consuming anything?

You should just read the comments and get a warm fuzzy that the crowd, for the time being, agrees with your intentionally static ideology.

Comments like these obviously hope they can sway the crowd before they can take an unbiased reading of the article. If the author is that wrong then the crowd here should be able to discover that on their own. If the author convinces the crowd then I'd think you'd want to present a better argument than "well, he was wrong _before_." Post hoc, ergo propter hoc, in action.

Re: AI is slowing down

#186

Post by sigmoid10 »

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…

I particularly enjoy reading big banners asking me to pay for a newsletter subscription if I "liked" the content. Not if I found it interesting. Not if it actually provided any value whatsoever to me. No, you just have to "like" it. In other words, it is meant to be written in an engaging way and perhaps reinforce your believes like an echo chamber or even stir up certain strong emotions. Not to convey information. So, thanks, but no. I'm sure this opinion blog is very well written, but I don't think it is more well founded than anything else in this sea of opinions that sports a bigger garbage patch than the Pacific Ocean.

Re: AI is slowing down

#188

Post by A_D_E_P_T »

dsign wrote: post #154

The way I see it, AI is going to change the world radically. It could be for the worse, the better, or a mix of both, but in my mind there's no doubt. We are only five or six years into the leap LLMs represent. For reference, radio waves were discovered in 1886, Marconi used them for communications in 1895, and while telephone and radio coexisted for many decades, it wasn't until the 1995 that mobile phones and wirel…

> For example, LLMs to drive NPC dialog and world mechanics in games is not a thing due to cost.

Hah, I'm actually working on just this problem.

Cost isn't the issue. There are only so many coherent (in context) responses and scenarios, that you don't need an LLM to generate text in the game, in real time. Instead, you can have LLMs build a vast corpus of "atoms" (dialog messages, fragments, cues, etc.) that can be stringed together in a deterministic way in response to player input. These can also be pre-screened and subjected to various tests prior to implementation.

To a player interacting in the game, a system like this would seem functionally indistinguishable from generated text within the game's designed interaction envelope. And it has huge advantages: Although it can expose seams if the player breaks character and decides to probe it, it won't be exploitable the way an LLM would be.

Re: AI is slowing down

#189

Post by famouswaffles »

B56b wrote: post #170
simonw wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

>OpenAI/Anthropic are basing their $1T valuations on the explosive uncapped growth of unlimited agentic token spending.

No they're not. In reality, actual 'explosive uncapped growth of unlimited agentic token spending' will result in valuations several times more than a 'mere' $1T.

Re: AI is slowing down

#190

Post by GaggiX »

techblueberry wrote: post #6
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.

Given the way tone has been intentionally abused, particularly in this industry, I’ll take a few f bombs and the truth.

>I’ll take a few f bombs and the truth.

Don't want to ruin it but go read some old posts from the author about AI, the tone is the same and he is very much wrong.

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