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AI is slowing down

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Re: AI is slowing down

#201

Post by RajT88 »

moritzwarhier wrote: post #156
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.

That's true, and I am not anti-AI. I was not only thinking about the environmental effects of some single prompt or a certain amount of tokens. Neither did I want to say that a car is always more wasteful than some alternative. But defaulting to the behemoth is inefficient, unless everyone is driven to do it: then it's in some way reasonable. By adding "corrupt" and "dependent", as well as the economic terms, I wante…

> I was not only thinking about the environmental effects of some single prompt or a certain amount of tokens.

Hand wringing about AI datacenter's environmental impact is well and good. We should keep the data centers accountable for their consumption and waste.

I just wish the same people had been upset the last 20 years with poor water resource management in a lot of areas (the west US especially) with urban, ranching and farming development.

> That's true, and I am not anti-AI.

Me neither!

Re: AI is slowing down

#202

Post by zachthewf »

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 open-minded to arguments about AI being a financial bubble and a bad business.

I'm not open-minded to arguments about utility, given that I personally witnessed LLMs evolve from interesting but useless toys to insanely helpful tools I use every day.

Re: AI is slowing down

#203

Post by quater321 »

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…

[dead]

Re: AI is slowing down

#204

Post by paulbjensen »

I find it nuts that I can use Claude Code for $20pm - I imagine that won't last forever but have to say it is great value for money.

So when I see monthly budgets in the thousands for developers at some larger companies, I'm curious to learn how they are managing to spend that kind of figure: how much code/documentation are they feeding into their prompts, are they using agent orchestration systems to make the code factory run 24/7, and how much value is coming out the other end versus before?

And, if they are pouring thousands into LLMs per developer, have they considered looking at alternatives like having LLMs running locally on own hardware with their own agent harness?

Those are the kind of questions I'd love to ask - I just wonder how much stuff is truly cutting edge and how much might be wasteful?

Re: AI is slowing down

#205

Post by remich »

freejazz wrote: post #48
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…

Every day people here debate whether or not there are any actual productivity gains from LLM, and it's only in the limited context of software development. While I understand that this place obviously skews heavily towards the software industry, the notion that LLMs are anywhere near as useful in other industries is hubristic (at best).

Perhaps they aren't, but not currently viable !== always unviable.

Re: AI is slowing down

#206

Post by w29UiIm2Xz »

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.

Productivity is defined revenue per worker hour. And we know worker hours are going down as there are fewer workers with the layoffs.

Re: AI is slowing down

#207

Post by simianwords »

james2doyle wrote: post #102
simianwords wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm collecting many kinds of predictions Ed Zitron made so that you can see for yourself whether he has a good track record. ------- > While complex, generative AI is a technology that probabilistically generates answers, and has no "intelligence." It is inherently limited by its architecture, and in turn can only get "better" in a linear fashion. I see no signs that the transformer-based architecture can do signific…

How’s that meme go? "We are 2/3 years into being 6 months away from AI taking all white collar jobs". The criticism goes both ways. The word "fixed", in Ed terms, can be translated to "become a viable business that justifies the spend". In regards to AI video, I think the fact that Sora is no long around is an indicator. And there is seemingly no real appetite for AI video outside of memes, jokes, and misinformation,…

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Re: AI is slowing down

#208

Post by 48terry »

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…

> 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.

Worthless statement. Wow, you suspect something can make things better, worse, or both? That's a keen insight there.

> 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 wireless technologies started picking up.

We are still so early.

I mean, we have advertised them in multiple super bowls, have companies that basically own tech news (incredulous journalists will repeat any stupid insane shit a CEO wants to say), that say they're valued at over a trillion dollars and nobody with the power to argue those finances seems willing to do anything but agree. We have built hundreds and hundreds of acres of data centers (and made deals for data centers that are never going to happen) that demand *billions* per month. They are devouring all the silicon to where people are visibly seeing the price of hardware double, triple, more in price. Work places insist on employees using AI (then pulled back because it turns out this stuff costs money and it's not fun anymore when it's not subsidized).

But we just need more time, more eyes, more people looking at it.

Where in the radio wave timeline did this happen?

Re: AI is slowing down

#209

Post by remich »

lompad wrote: post #171
simianwords wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 a…

No reason to doubt his journalistic integrity? He's not a journalist for starters. He's a PR flack who does PR for AI startups on the side while blogging on substack. There is every reason to doubt his journalistic integrity.

Re: AI is slowing down

#210

Post by cogman10 »

remich wrote: post #199
cogman10 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even more dangerous to the big 2 AI companies is the fact that the 20 different Chinese companies are catching up fast and for a lot lower cost. Why should someone pick Opus 4.8 when Qwen3.7 Plus produces similar results for about 1/20th the cost. That sort of pricing disparity is across the board. But further it's becoming more and more apparent that they are doing more with less parameters. That's what's giving the…

Because it doesn't. Not for the tasks where using Opus instead of a lower tier model is appropriate, at any rate. Benchmarks show this, as do revealed preferences of actual users. To believe that Qwen is as capable as Opus at 1/20 the cost you have to believe that every person who does not make the choice to use Qwen over Opus for a given task is some mix of ignorant or delusional. This is certainly an opinion you ca…

The benchmarks between the two are close and the engineers that have used both (like myself) can attest that the differences aren't so wide as you might believe.

I'd say that yes, ignorance plays a role here because a decent number of engineers are looking strictly at the benchmarks and choosing Opus just for that reason.

But I'd also say that a major factor for Opus use is because Opus is being purchased for the engineers by their employers. They don't get to pick which models they are using.

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