AI is slowing down • Hacker News Board

Re: AI is slowing down

#371

Post by pitched » Mon, Jun 08, 2026, 10:31 PM UTC

jredwards wrote: post #242

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…

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

The free Chinese models are always approaching frontier-level power. The cost to Enterprise to run these models is where Anthropic and OpenAI are competing against in the long run.

Re: AI is slowing down

#372

Post by th0ma5 » Mon, Jun 08, 2026, 10:34 PM UTC

josh-sematic wrote: post #370

mhitza wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anthropic's revenue increased from $1 billion in Dec. 2024 to $47 billion May of 2026. That's the kind of claim that requires and asterix, and things like this are what feeds into the AI propaganda machine. That is an anualized revenue, which are projected numbers and not "real numbers".

Divide both by 12 then and you have monthly revenues. The ratio between them remains the same and remains rather astonishing.

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Re: AI is slowing down

#373

Post by LogicFailsMe » Mon, Jun 08, 2026, 10:37 PM UTC

mlyle wrote: post #359

LogicFailsMe wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Those excited about generative AI are either the victim or the perpetrator of a con centered around a technology to ingratiate at the highest cost possible." How else would you read the above statement? He's just preaching to his own choir IMO. My take: like any gold rush, a lot of dumb ideas will get backed and they will all fail. And then we'll keep the ones that worked. SSND. Good luck picking the winners a prior…

I read it in context as being about the market prospects of genai. The problem is, when there is so much overinvestment, everything gets wrecked. In the aftermath of the dotcom boom there was at least a bedrock of fiber and still useful equipment to build upon amid the rubble. This time we are going so much further; also many of the durable assets are misplaced bets and the depreciating ones will depreciate more stee…

Someone should do the analysis of a decade and a half of Nvidia datacenter GPUs from Fermi to Kepler to Maxwell to Pascal to Volta to (Turing) to Ampere to Hopper to Blackwell and generate some hard depreciation numbers. Fiddling around a bit, 16-20% annual depreciation (so 5-6 years total and then any further revenue is bonus goods) it would appear, but that's a fiddle number.

But confounding this, K80s and V100s are still offered by cloud providers 13 and 9 years after their releases and academia still loves their GTX 1080 Pascals in their desktops. At companies, the beancounters take a computation and find the best architecture !/$ for that calculation. It does not need to be brand new shiny. It's Nvidia's job to make that case, not them. But anyway, the real data is right there. And those old GPUs demonstrate the dark fiber is already in place (and it's not so dark or they'd pull their racks).

AI is the special case. New GPU generations are the only way to access HW implementations of last year's research on precision modes and matrix math. If that slows down, that would be the first real bellwether of a slowdown. It hasn't happened yet. I'm a little surprised myself, but I also think coding agents are the vanguard of general design agents and that's going to hit a lot of industries at once. So as long as the next generation of GPU halves the price of tokens and doubles throughput (or better), the demand for tokens will continue to rise IMO.

What I don't think is that AI can come for anyone's job successfully no matter what the C-suite sorts insist.

In summary, if you're a bear, you can point to the depreciation cycle and scream the sky is falling. And if you're a bull you can point to GPUs staying in production for a very long time despite the depreciation. Guess we have to wait for 2030.

Re: AI is slowing down

#374

Post by atleastoptimal » Mon, Jun 08, 2026, 10:43 PM UTC

toasty228 wrote: post #334

atleastoptimal wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're claiming that the revenue growth of the S&P 500 over the last few years is largely due to "selling dollars for 50ct" and circular deals?

Yes. https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/this-is-how-the-ai-bu... > AI-related stocks have accounted for 75% of S&P 500 returns, 80% of earnings growth and 90% of capital spending growth since ChatGPT launched in November 2022.

has it occurred to you that AI companies may be making huge returns because AI is genuinely increasing productivity and driving actual economic growth via their products?

If all these false practices can pull revenue out of nothing, why doesn’t every company do it? How come AI companies seem to be able to pull off financial magic that no other company can match?

All your analyses still ignore the revenue point.

Re: AI is slowing down

#375

Post by jimbokun » Mon, Jun 08, 2026, 10:51 PM UTC

al_borland wrote: post #303

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? I've been using Kagi Assistant for my AI needs, and have to say, Siri will probably replace it in the fall. The question will be, will I still want to keep Kagi for search, or will this new Siri get me where I need to be on all fronts? I need to start paying more attention to how often I actually…

Very very few consumers will be looking to use an AI to write code for them.

Re: AI is slowing down

#376

Post by 16bitvoid » Mon, Jun 08, 2026, 10:53 PM UTC

nfw2 wrote: post #180

toasty228 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No, they're saying that 80% of genai queries (aka anything sent to an LLM; I won't speak on the validity of the percentage) are not things someone would search on Google. It's things like trial-and-error vibecoding, openclaw-like agentic loops, talking to chatgpt like it's a person, etc. In other words, most genai queries are not for getting "obscure information" or even getting direct information at all. It's about either getting it to do something you don't want to do yourself, or using it as a replacement for someone else (junior dev, therapist, friend, significant other, etc).

Re: AI is slowing down

#377

Post by vatsachak » Mon, Jun 08, 2026, 10:53 PM UTC

loandbehold wrote: post #360

Tanjreeve wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So basically you can't find fault with the numbers but you find the tone annoying?

He implies $400 billion in revenue by the end of 2029 is unrealistic when in fact it's very doable if you look at the trajectory of this technology since ChatGPT 4.0 launch. Google and Meta bring in around $500 billion in ad revenue between two of them annually. ChatGPT will easily bring 100s of billions in ad revenue if fully monetized given 1. it has billion weekly active users 2. ChatGPT conversation provides even…

And if a pig had wings it could fly

Re: AI is slowing down

#378

Post by jeffreyrogers » Mon, Jun 08, 2026, 10:53 PM UTC

I'm sort of an AI skeptic but I have been seeing this guy's essays for years now and he has always been super pessimistic on AI progress.

I think a much more reasoned critique of AI is that of Tyler Cowen, whose argument is basically that most processes aren't constrained by lack of intelligence but by organizational and social factors which mean for AI to be useful you have to redesign organizations and work to take advantage of what AI is good at. Since most organizations are fairly bureaucratic that takes a while, especially in the large industries that are the most economically important.

Ed's criticism of the large AI companies seems particularly misguided to me since they are the ones actually advancing the technology and seem to have real moats given their access to large amounts of training data from their users. I don't see any possible future in which 5 or 10 years from now there is less AI than we have now and I would expect usage to be much higher.

Re: AI is slowing down

#379

Post by Jtarii » Mon, Jun 08, 2026, 10:54 PM UTC

1attice wrote: post #254

Kiro wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you know what "gooning" means. It's edgy Gen Z slang and has nothing to do with being British.

Sure, but does that vibe invalidate the argument? What an odd time the middle of an argument is to be clutching pearls and worrying about prose quality. Style and vibes notwithstanding, is there anything in your view that wrong with the argument itself? Could a better or more polite writer have convinced you with the same shape of logic?

It shows that the author has a strong negative emotional reaction towards AI which likely influences his opinions and impartiality.

He is preaching to the choir, if you already hate AI you will love the article, if you don't hate AI already you will find the article insufferable.

Re: AI is slowing down

#380

Post by hn_throwaway_99 » Mon, Jun 08, 2026, 10:57 PM UTC

athrowaway3z wrote: post #341

Terr_ wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Which of the hyperlinks provided at the beginning sounded like what you wanted, and after you clicked it* how did it disappoint you? The information you are describing is stuff I would not expect anybody to repe…

He's right that its all going to pop dramatically and catastrophically for some. But having read a bunch of his stuff, there are two things he's just plain wrong about and they make his martyrdom tone too grating. - His own objectivity - he consistently throws shade (rightfully) at the pro-AI side being financially 'required' to hold a certain world view, but is completely blind to his own claim to fame effecting him…

Yeah, to be honest I think his take is a bit nonsense because it's so historically inaccurate.

Most hugely transformational technologies in the past also resulted in giant bubbles that burst, because investors piled into lots of companies in the hope that their particular company would win out. Railroads, automobiles, telecommunications networks, the Internet, etc. etc. were all hugely important, transformational technologies that all caused giant bubbles that burst.

But Ed Zitron seems hellbent on saying AI is a nothing burger, and that's why the bubble will burst. But the latter doesn't necessarily follow from the former, and indeed the examples I gave show that the exact opposite is often true.

I believe that the AI bubble will burst precisely because it is such a transformational technology. AI may not live up to the ways its biggest cultists like to shout ("Feel the AGI flow through you!!!"), but similarly in the .com boom/bust there was tons of nonsense about how we'd do absolutely everything online, we were in a new "eyeball economy", whatever that meant, yada yada, yet I'd argue that in some ways the Internet was actually a bigger impact than originally envisioned, just not necessarily in the way that late 90s boosters envisioned it.