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AI is slowing down

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Re: AI is slowing down

#281

Post by famouswaffles »

dofm wrote: post #239

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 y…

>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?

Probably the same reason the Gemini app is still well behind ChatGPT in consumer usage and adoption despite being preinstalled on android phones worldwide ? Why are people using GPT on Windows. There's even a copilot button on new keyboards!

Or maybe its the same reason Microsoft Edge is not the most popular Windows browser ? Maybe its the same reason Instagram threads did not even dent Tiktok ?

You are asking the question the wrong way around. People use and like what they like and have a strong preference to continue doing so.

This is just human behaviour. You don't need mind blowing moat. You begin to have problems only when:

- Users are constantly using your product unsatisifed.

- There's a competitor(s) with a significantly better offering that people are talking about.

Will Apple's offering be providing any meaningful/significant benefit over just using GPT ? If not, don't expect any miracles.

Re: AI is slowing down

#282

Post by fl4regun »

oudlys wrote: post #142
amatheus wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It does depend on how you define productivity. But the way it's commonly used is "I'm going faster, personally, with these tools." The thing people I think have a hard time seeing is that "I go faster" does not mean "more features get finished". It's a scale issue, and one scale is better than the other. People only pay for finished features, they do not pay for how much code you emit.

economists define productivity as gdp per hour worked. Like a lot of other economic measurements, its mostly a bogus number people use as an argument on why their politics are better than someone elses politics. You can have an efficient business located in a poor country making the same product and same quality as that same business in a rich country, the rich country will be more "productive" because local cost of goods is higher there (i.e. a restaurant in NYC is more "productive" than a restaurant in bangladesh).

Re: AI is slowing down

#283

Post by mike_hearn »

nostrademons wrote: post #168
asveikau wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 also reminded of all the HN posts from 2007-2009 that predicted that the adoption of social networking would be a terrible thing for privacy, that it would destroy society, that people would lose their jobs over crazy shit they said on the Internet, that it would lead to the decline of trust and in-person interactions, that people would forget how to socialize, etc. They were right about all of that but it took 1…

Eh, you can find HN posts predicting that literally everything will destroy privacy/society/trust/etc. Predicting doom is a popular pasttime.

What I remember from that time period is people predicting that we were in a tech bubble driven by social media, that obviously Facebook and LinkedIn were overvalued because social media was a trivial fad, and so on. Example article pulled at random:

https://theconversation.com/linkedin-is-floating-on-air-or-i...

And yet there was no bubble, these companies did fine and Meta became a financial Godzilla.

Re: AI is slowing down

#284

Post by cmiles74 »

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 don't read Ed Zitron, aside from when he appears here on Hacker News, and I also find his tone to be over-the-top. I think we might agree on that much.

These articles are lengthy but, to my understanding, Ed's idea is...

* AI companies have committed to purchasing X amount of compute

* Data centers are being constructed to meet this demand, they'll need to charge amount Y

* AI companies do not have sufficient revenue to pay amount Y

IMHO this isn't surprising, personally the only real use-case for AI that I've seen is code generation or automated sales or scam calls. This doesn't seem like a big enough market for the huge dollar amounts I'm seeing thrown around.

I'm curious why you think Ed is so far off the mark on this. To me, it seems like we are headed for a big correction on the whole AI thing.

Re: AI is slowing down

#285

Post by oudlys »

nyeah wrote: post #243
oudlys wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah this part scares me a little. I imagine it scares everyone who is more than a couple of years out of school. I hear that "the solution to LLM tech debt is more LLM." That might be true, but it might not be.

It scares me too.

I actually think this is precisely the reason LLMs can't be the basis for a technological revolution. Because it's only one way.

Like, if you have a compiler, and it has a bug. You can discover if that bug is influencing your code execution and patch it. You can go both up and down the stack.

With LLMs, there is no way to patch it's translation function. You have to rely on it to forward process.

I don't think there is any way to avoid us understanding our tech stacks.

Re: AI is slowing down

#286

Post by [deleted] »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #133

"Last week I went on Bloomberg and discussed the state of the AI bubble with a clarity that rattled even the sweatiest boosters, mostly because I spoke with clarity about an investment frenzy whipped up through hype, deceit and mythology." Bloomberg is interested in what he has to say But not HN commenters

[deleted]

Re: AI is slowing down

#287

Post by hnuser123456 »

lispisok wrote: post #275
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…

Oddly suspicious how this comment which was not one of the first comments which does not address the content at all but the tone skyrocketed to the top.

The tone is written as abrasive to anyone who doesn't already agree, which shows this is more of an emotional opinion piece than open minded objective research.

Hype cycles never last forever, but that doesn't mean all the value has been tapped by any means. The fact that modern GPUs can solve ridiculously complex high dimensional functions is a superpower in every possible field of research.

Re: AI is slowing down

#288

Post by mike_hearn »

dofm wrote: post #246
jredwards wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expect that a lot of the money will be in Enterprise AI.

Right but OpenAI are for real making that prediction about their consumer revenue, which seems decidedly ambitious (considering that they are making nothing from their current phone placement). And they have said that they expect it to be quite a large share! https://mlq.ai/news/openai-projects-over-280-billion-revenue... "OpenAI projects revenue will be divided nearly equally between its consumer and enterprise busi…

Fidji Simo had to take medical leave so they're behind on their advertising platform. But in principle that could make a ton of money.

Re: AI is slowing down

#289

Post by marcosdumay »

irishcoffee wrote: post #238
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.

I really doubt the US will erase any money any time soon.

The reset is prone to happen by other means.

Re: AI is slowing down

#290

Post by mschuster91 »

frisbee6152 wrote: post #41
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…

He’s been continuously predicting that the collapse was just around the corner, that progress was slowing, and that there was no market for inference, since 2024. The fact he’s never reflected on the glaring failures in his analysis tells what we need to know about his intellectual integrity. There’s truth in some of his words about financial risk, but if you can’t acknowledge that there’s upside too, you can’t evalu…

> He’s been continuously predicting that the collapse was just around the corner, that progress was slowing, and that there was no market for inference, since 2024.

Old WSB saying: The market can remain irrational for (far) longer than one can remain solvent.

And unfortunately, a lot of the market on the "buyer" side has been acting irrationally. When you see CEOs telling their employees that they don't care about token cost, only about "how much AI do you use" because that is what the stock market wants to hear - that's when you know we're all getting cooked, the question is how long it takes until the bubble bursts.

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