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AI is slowing down

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Re: AI is slowing down

#291

Post by oudlys »

fl4regun wrote: post #282
oudlys wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sure. But that's not, in my view, how most people use the word productivity when describing LLM use.

In my field - operations - productivity is usually described as some rate of production for a specific asset. 100 widgets / machine / hour - for example.

"My productivity is 3 PRs / day with the LLM as opposed to 1 PR per every three days". That's how I think people are thinking about it.

My point is that's not the same thing as value. I.e. what people will pay for.

Re: AI is slowing down

#292

Post by mike_hearn »

cmiles74 wrote: post #284
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 reven…

Not the OP but Zitron makes clear errors:

• He seems to think that the moment Nvidia release new hardware, all existing hardware becomes worthless. It doesn't and there are plenty of tokens being served by old GPUs. This makes all his calculations about how quickly datacenters have to pay off useless.

• All his numbers about costs, revenues etc are guesses or attempts to work backwards from off the cuff and frequently inconsistent comments by tech executives. They could easily be very far off.

• He doesn't seem to understand that datacenters have never been full of hardware on their opening day. A lot of his attacks revolve around this confusion - he learns that an opened datacenter isn't yet at full load or fully equipped with GPUs and thinks that means it's been delayed. I remember when Google first opened their facility in the Dalles, it took years for it to completely fill with machines.

Re: AI is slowing down

#293

Post by lompad »

simianwords wrote: post #279
lompad wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why do you consider him trust worthy when sooo many of his predictions are false? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48447549

He was right about the cost changes, which he predicted quite some time ago. People shouted at him that he was making it all up - yet it was correct.

He was also right about AI-video and sora in particular being a fundamentally flawed idea.

He was also right about the dangers and problems with the general inaccuracy of LLMs and people relying on it.

Also about the expected triggering of ROI-checking in companies, such as Uber is doing now. His prediction is, ROI is negative. And I'm awaiting the society's consensus on that.

The general direction seems correct to me. He's not a technical guy and does not have the knowledge to critique models on a factual basis. I do wish he'd just focus on the stuff he _does_ know about, which is the financial side of things.

He is a much needed counterweight to the unhealthy hype going around, imho.

Re: AI is slowing down

#294

Post by major505 »

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…

This would be greate for google, because most people, specially in the apple environment don't much care to install new tools if they have a native tool that works reasonable well. If you have an ai assistant that's minimally competent in your desktop or phone, you will not care to go after chatgpt or alternatives, and google will receive tons of data to improve their models.

Re: AI is slowing down

#295

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

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

"Can I Advertise On Your Newsletter?

Yes! Email me at ed@ezpr.com. I have an extremely high bar both for advertisers and the cost of advertising on here - I have 84,000 subscribers and a 55-60% open rate, as well as an 8-11% clickthrough rate.

I do not do any kind of outcome-based advertisement (IE: X number of people click through and you pay me Y), so any kind of agreement would effectively be a sponsorship. I have an engaged reader base and you will have to pay to get in front of them, as I also do not need advertising to support this newsletter."

Maybe the "AI" companies could pay for sponsorship

Would he take the money and run their ads

Re: AI is slowing down

#296

Post by dolebirchwood »

argee wrote: post #197
sigmoid10 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I particularly enjoy reading big banners asking me to pay for a newsletter subscription if I "liked" the content. Not if I found it interesting. Not if it actually provided any value whatsoever to me. No, you just have to "like" it. In other words, it is meant to be written in an engaging way and perhaps reinforce your believes like an echo chamber or even stir up certain strong emotions. Not to convey information. S…

A big chunk of text asked for support on the basis of the article. I hadn’t read the article. I scrolled down a bit to read. A popup took up my screen, asking me to subscribe, having read essentially nothing at this point. I just left. Life is too short.

I know the HN guidelines discourage commenting on "tangential annoyances" on a website, but I think this issue is more than just tangential and more than just an annoyance.

When an author is this relentless in pushing you to sign up, there is good reason to suspect that financial motives are unduly driving an agenda.

I counted 8 such instances:

1. In the sidebar

2. At the top of the article

3. Popup in the middle of the screen after just a couple of scrolls into the body

4. Several paragraphs into the article

5. At the bottom of the article

6. At the bottom of the page under the comments section

7. Popup at the bottom of the screen after scrolling to the end of the body

8. (My personal favorite) Click the "user" icon in the bottom-right corner, which you'd normally expect to open an AI chat bot these days, and (surprise) you're prompted to sign up for a paid subscription

This sort of behavior just completely tanks any and all credibility this person may have.

Re: AI is slowing down

#297

Post by nostrademons »

mike_hearn wrote: post #283
nostrademons wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They weren't wrong. We were in a tech bubble driven by social media. Digg, StumbleUpon, Kongregate, MySpace, Orkut, Slide, Meebo, Mahalo, Bebo, Justin.TV, etc. aren't exactly around anymore. Facebook and YouTube are the winners.

Anyone remember this video?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6IQ_FOCE6I

How many of the logos that scroll by there still exist?

Re: AI is slowing down

#298

Post by thewebguyd »

Whats a bit wild to me is Google's only selling point for their Pixel phones are increasingly Gemini.

Now that you can get Gemini, operated by Apple (with the Apple privacy features that come along with that), why would you ever consider going Android/Pixel (outside of running GrapheneOS, but I'm talking regular consumers here)?

Google isn't even making anything on the deal with Apple. They pay $20B/year to be the default search engine. This is Apple just giving a $1B a year discount to that to be able to license Gemini.

Re: AI is slowing down

#299

Post by moritzwarhier »

MSFT_Edging wrote: post #141
moritzwarhier wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Vonnegut said in his last living work that the greatest addiction modern people face is the drug of cheap oil. We got addicted to the convenience and overuse, and have started a mass extinction event because of it. The perverse incentives will come for us all.

It is exactly this thought, in the form of this sentence, that could replace almost all of my comments in this thread.

It feels depressing, but I think the same. When thinking about the larger world, it becomes increasingly hard to ignore. And of course it is not new.

There were "doomers" already in the midst of the 20th century, but it doesn't mean that they were wrong.

Re: AI is slowing down

#300

Post by fl4regun »

oudlys wrote: post #291
fl4regun wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sure. But that's not, in my view, how most people use the word productivity when describing LLM use. In my field - operations - productivity is usually described as some rate of production for a specific asset. 100 widgets / machine / hour - for example. "My productivity is 3 PRs / day with the LLM as opposed to 1 PR per every three days". That's how I think people are thinking about it. My point is that's not the sa…

You're correct, I just wanted to add that there is another definition that you may see used online, and it is very specific, and it's important to be aware it's NOT exactly the same thing most normal people mean when they say "productivity".
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