Given how I can manage and develop a huge production code base with an incredibly small team - and the rest of the industry apparently is not able to do it - I deem that we are still in the very early days.
AI is slowing down
211–220 of 820 posts
Re: AI is slowing down
#212Earlier 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…
I agree with your message but not sure about the conclusion. Cars themselves are commodified luxury available (in the US pretty much required) to everyone, and they do need to be subsidized, both in terms of infrastructure and the lifestyle they require.
But with AI what is the exact price? My understanding is that R&D is extremely expensive, but running non-SOTA models is not that bad. We are getting pretty close to models which can be useful locally in many applications.
Or do you mean that at scale running them locally is not possible and hence the infrastructure price is in data centers, which will be expensive to maintain and scale for demand?
Re: AI is slowing down
#213Ed'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…
It's also not $1,500 per month per engineer. It's that per month per engineer per tool. Which means it could easily be at least $3,000 (Claude Code and Cursor) or $4,500 if Codex was also an option on top of those two.
And as you have written on your blog it's a soft cap that can be exceeded with justification.
Re: AI is slowing down
#214Earlier 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 $$$?
> 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?
They went from ~9% of the sp500 to ~35% over your timeframe...
Re: AI is slowing down
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 th…
Is the image you provided depicting revenue, or stock value? My point is about revenue.
Revenues don't matter when you sell a dollar for 50ct and half of the deals are circular anyways
Re: AI is slowing down
#216Although I see huge utility in AI, I think he is right in terms of overspending and overenthusiastic build out. Because of for example what Apple is doing by putting an extremely efficient model with task adapters right onto phones.
Also because we now have a massive demonstration that vastly more efficient hardware is desperately needed.
Similarly other effective efforts towards on-device AI like Nvidia RTX Spark PCs and 2bit quants of strong models like DS4.
So inevitably, significant investment will be going into vastly more efficient CIM efforts like Mythic AI and new FeFET devices etc. in order to make human-level and beyond AI at scale feasible. There is so much demand for this and the power requirements of current hardware are so excessive, it seems unlikely that the data center build-outs will be able to recoup their costs before the more efficient paradigms make it out of the lab and start scaling.
Re: AI is slowing down
#217The 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…
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Re: AI is slowing down
#218Zitron 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 $$$?
The original point of the stock market was to fund gigantic society-level projects (like railroads). Modern VC has replaced some of that at smaller scales but not all of it at the largest scales. So this could just be the stock market performing the function it was designed to perform -- helping fund something transformative on a societal level.
Re: AI is slowing down
#219Zitron 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…
They are absolutely deniable. Huge swathes of people deny them.
Re: AI is slowing down
#220Lots of dismissive comments ITT, very few tackling the substance of the article.
> AI Cannot Afford To Slow Down — It Needs $3 Trillion Or More In Revenue By End Of 2030 To Sustain Its Existence
Is this true? With the total 2024 wages being 11.7 trillion USD [0], and nonfarm payrolls totaling 158,000 in the same year [1], it's an order of magnitude higher than my back of the napkin guesses I've made that AI needs to take or create 1/20 jobs minimum to break even.
[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BA06RC1A027NBEA [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PAYEMS