Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI is slowing down

wheresyoured.at

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 820 posts

Re: AI is slowing down

#231

Post by aspenmartin »

sterlind wrote: post #222
aspenmartin wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t get this. We already have an insane demand. And yes exactly, this is primarily just with coding agents, but are you aware of what’s coming down the pipeline? It’s not hard to be you just have to find a decent way to keep up with literature. * robotics (need to close data gap and release first viable product to get a data flywheel) * conversational ai (no one is ready for this and we’re getting closer and clos…

I don't think the issue with robotics is a data gap. maybe somewhat, but the real issues are that: - RL is extraordinarily sample-inefficient. - distribution shift/catastrophic forgetting aren't solved. only off-policy learning with giant decorrelated batches works. - the breakout success of transformers as an architecture doesn't neatly translate to robot motion policy models. the field is missing fundamental breakt…

All of these points are great. The first one motivates world models which lots of labs work on. Not many people tend to understand the strategic value of those “open world” or interactive generation models: its robotics and planning. But also like you say you’re right, there are complicated problems to solve and it’s not totally clear the timeline. But where there’s data and compute, there’s a way.

For conversational AI these labs do have lots of things to do lol but you’re right; it likely also requires some architectural improvements but you see the infancy: look at the llama4 speech duplex model. Very unimpressive yet all of the components are there. Just a matter of pushing on them, licensing and commissioning better data, etc. takes time and compute is stretched thin.

Re: AI is slowing down

#232

Post by dofm »

ccamrobertson wrote: post #221
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…

Agreed. Phrases like "journalists are currently gooning over OpenAI and Anthropic" really put me off. It's a poor attempt at modern muckraking; cheeky yet offering little substance.

He's just a Brit, writing in a style we write in. Sweary, comical, red-top. The Register did it for years.

Re: AI is slowing down

#234

Post by jillesvangurp »

I think it's time to distinguish between what frontier AI companies need regarding AI, and what will happen with AI if these companies don't get everything they need. Probably there's a bit more to this. Much of the technology is available via open source already and there's a growing ecosystem of AI tech that isn't really dependent on anything else than the hardware infrastructure needed to run it.

A good analogy might be networking companies and infrastructure companies during the dot com bubble. It devalued a lot of companies but the internet stayed. A lot of dot com companies didn't make it. Much of the infrastructure investment did not go to waste, however. Nor did a the technology go away.

I think it will be the same with data centers, related infrastructure, GPU hardware, algorithms, OSS components, etc. for AI companies. More companies need that stuff than is currently available. The ones that don't make it will have a lot of assets that they can pass on to the one that still have a chance. I don't think a lot of that stuff will get decommissioned or will be underutilized. It might get a little hair cut in value though. And like during the dot com bubble, some companies actually survived and did quite well. Especially those in the business of selling shovels during a gold rush.

After the inevitable consolidation that follows the next logical stages in the hype cycle, I don't think AI will go away. It might be a bit of a bloodbath for some silicon valley investors that placed the wrong bets in the last few years. But that's the price of doing business over there. That doesn't mean it's all bad. And the smarter ones probably spread their risk enough that they still might come out looking alright.

And like with the dot com bubble, many financial types have no clue what is happening and are running around like headless chickens. Which is why they ended up sinking a lot of money in exactly the wrong things. You'd hope they would have learned something.

But articles like this suggest that that might be too much to hope. They still don't really get how technology tends to not stagnate and might continue to deliver potential for performance and cost optimization. The current level of investment is only unsustainable if that doesn't happen and nothing else changes. I don't think those kind of closed world assumptions are a safe bet at all.

Re: AI is slowing down

#235

Post by bigstrat2003 »

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.

That's the exact opposite of rational. It is, in fact, a formal logical fallacy (ad hominem). His argument can be correct even if he himself is not typically correct.

Re: AI is slowing down

#236

Post by josefritzishere »

He may be bombastic but Zitron is right about the AI problem. These companies do hemorrhage cash, and have no viable plan to even become solvent. It may not be a scam but it sure looks like one. The problem it poses for the economy... is just as he says.

Re: AI is slowing down

#237

Post by aspenmartin »

48terry wrote: post #227
aspenmartin wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 adoptio…

Your second paragraph appears to be 3 different instances of saying "X does not necessarily point to productivity gains... but in the case of AI, X definitely means productivity" without really saying why that is true or why other explanations do not fit. Adoption meaning productivity supposes there are no other dominant factors for the AI push nor AI retention. It is possible for practices to be picked up or continu…

It’s 3 different weak but complimentary proxies. We form beliefs from imperfect evidence and I find these fairly convincing when it’s hard to find any hard evidence of no productivity and exactly the scenario you would expect under the hypothesis that we do see productivity gains. None of this is supposed to be unassailable. I would challenge then if you disagree what the evidence you have for this is?

Adoption implying at least some significant productivity gains doesn’t contradict there being other factors. You’re seeing entire companies reshaped. The argument is this is all for show or CEOs are in some sort of idiot class?

“It is possible for practices to be picked up or continued in spite of causing productivity drops” well of course. I just find that incredibly far away from Occam’s razor.

My point is: we have lots of evidence that’s highly consistent with real productivity gains, and I don’t see many pieces of evidence to the contrary.

Re: AI is slowing down

#238

Post by irishcoffee »

jollyllama wrote: post #220

Lots 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…

If I thought there were some actual small cabal of people running the global economy, this is almost like a novel: massive amounts of money entered the economy starting in 2008 and 2020-2023, the rich became insanely wealthy. Their wealth is now all tied up in the 2020s version of the railroad/fiber, we're going to essentially erase trillions of dollars from the global economy and reset.

We sure do need a reset.

Re: AI is slowing down

#239

Post by dofm »

Today Apple launched its revamped AI offering. Judging by several reports, Apple pays Google a mere billion dollars a year to operate it. Essentially just licensing the IP. Google are (allegedly) happy to turn over the right to operate and distill their models for only a billion a year.

Consumer revenue is only a smallish share of the puzzle, but still:

If you are a consumer and you have a Mac or an iPhone, what do you need from AI that Apple's new offering won't provide? Why would you pay for ChatGPT, or even tolerate its inevitably increasingly desperate ad placements?

Assume Google will have similar tools in their phones, and Google search will continue to have the offering it does.

In short, where is the evidence that once Apple's tech exists, consumer AI is worth, to Anthropic or OpenAI, anything noticeably more than that $1B a year?

Maybe OpenAI strikes a deal to put something in Samsung phones. Let's say Samsung is ten times as desperate as Apple (which is how it looks, often). Still only $10B a year?

2026 consumer revenue projections from OpenAI are pitched at $14-15 billion, apparently. If they get that, it's the only year they will get that, because by late this year, everyone with an iPhone will have something useful built in.

Ed Zitron is a mouthy British rabble-rouser, but I think he is probably mostly on the money.

Re: AI is slowing down

#240

Post by SlinkyOnStairs »

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.

That's exactly what the first (titled) section does?

Post reply on HN