271–280 of 820 posts
Anthropic has made $330 billion in compute and chip commitments between Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, another $30 billion with CoreWeave and another $15 billion with SpaceX. To pay for this compute, Anthropic must meet its projected revenue of $174 billion a year by 2029. Anthropic has raised $95 billion across rounds in February, April (from Google and Amazon), and May. These funds will be insufficient to cover Ant…
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.
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> 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.
It's useful/necessary to use past writing/arguments from an author to say whether they should actually receive any further critical evaluation, or be dismissed. We shouldn't say definitively "they're always wrong, so they're wrong now". However, it's reasonable to say: the author has a demonstrated lack of credibility, so we can probably assume they're wrong here, particularly if they have been wrong in this domain so many times before. Or if they happen to be correct, it's probably not strongly demonstrated by their work.
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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…
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…
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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.
I'll gladly tell my customers all the most glorious stuff about AI and big tech while spending a significant chunk of the money they pay me on supporting AI-/tech-counterculture, such as doctorow, zitron and quite a few other writers, journalists and activists.
It's the old "you live in a society" counter-point against anti-capitalist activism. Needing to make ends meet does not imply that your points or principles are meaningless, it just implies that you have no interest in being homeless and that way losing your chance to actually change things.
So that's fine to me. But: I stated it for a reason, because I know others don't agree. I, personally, consider him trustworthy. You do not, and that's fine. I suspect we both await anthropic's Z.1, which will be able to settle a big chunk of the debate.
If he is right, the numbers will show it.
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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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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 think it's a good analogy in many ways, and personally I think car-centric society has a lot of flaws. I think the ease that AI brings to tasks may erode mental capabilities in the same way cars have eroded our collective physical health.* That said, it doesn't seem to me that we would be better off without cars altogether, despite all the related issues. I am concerned about the environmental impacts that AI poses…
Oh my god, no. I also want the benefits of automobiles! They are strictly more capable than, say, trains. That's where I would derail the discussion completely when going into details, but no, I am not against cars as a technology.
Apart from all the ethical and social arguments (logistics, ambulances, the elderly, etc etc). But that's not where I wanted to go.
I was making a leap here simply because of the whole complex around prisoner's, dilemma, the commons, state economy, and so forth.
Since at least ~100yrs ago, I guess cars and streets as the primary mode of transportation have also "won the vote" / are what the majority wants, so it's also an interesting analogy for diminishing returns maybe.
Building out more car infrastructure is certainly not controversial where there is absolutely none but there are commercial or residential buildings.
Anyway, lots of associations are worth considering here IMO. The ultimate limiting capacity here, when disregarding all environmental or health concerns, is simply space and the positive externalities (cities etc) around existing infrastructure.
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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.
The PR-thing was always openly communicated by him and is not some secret or gotcha. It's essentially "fleecing the boosters", which I fully approve of and do similarly myself. I'll gladly tell my customers all the most glorious stuff about AI and big tech while spending a significant chunk of the money they pay me on supporting AI-/tech-counterculture, such as doctorow, zitron and quite a few other writers, journali…
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I think its worse than that. I admit that if a small team or an individual uses an LLM, it's likely they can create value faster. I think as soon as you don't own the responsibility for the defects you generate with an LLM, their use starts to destroy value. Regardless of product maturity. This is what I think the data says. https://unessays.substack.com/p/talk-is-cheap
You're not really getting it. If you are producing something that delivers a far better experience, irrespective of what's under the hood (see Claude Code et al), you will decimate an incumbent who is trying to use LLMs in the context of incrementally improving a mature product. LLMs are suited for the development of revolutionary innovation, not incremental.
I think I just disagree about the power of the LLM to deliver revolutionary innovation. That's something you do. Not the machine.
And, pretty soon on your journey to scale, the LLM becomes a hinderance rather than a help.