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AI is slowing down

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Re: AI is slowing down

#411

Post by dzhiurgis »

oudlys wrote: post #13
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…

Productivity is not value. It's quite possible for you to experience productivity improvements, and actual value to not be created. That is what I think the most robust data is showing. https://unessays.substack.com/p/talk-is-cheap

That report doesn't match what faros.ai conclude which is mostly a paywalled report.

Re: AI is slowing down

#412

Post by dwaite »

brap wrote: post #329

It always seemed very natural to me that AI will move “down the stack”, where Open AI and Anthropic don’t really have a foot in the door. Who makes consumer devices? Google Who makes operating systems? Google Who makes browsers? Google Who makes the world’s most popular websites? Google By the time 90% of average internet users get to chatgpt.com or whatever, they already went through several Google chokepoints, each…

Part of the pitch of AI companies is that they mediate and provide a new surface for ads, for taking an affiliate cut of sales, etc.

But it isn't like this hasn't been the long-running strategy for Google as well - provide more results on search so that people don't go to the site with ads, provide paid product results for shopping, to offer more services to keep people providing personal/behavioral queues to Google and more opportunities for ad placement.

If anything, AI turned up the heat such that the frog noticed what temperature the pot was. But that doesn't really put them in a better position to execute than Google.

Re: AI is slowing down

#413

Post by dwaite »

vineyardmike wrote: post #313

The obvious answer to where the AI Labs get customers is Cloud GPUs. Most users (globally) have cheap phones with poor CPUs and small amounts of RAM. They can't run usable models locally, and it's not clear from the Google-Apple deal if G is selling access to their cloud compute as part of that $1B, or just sharing the weights/IP. Apple themselves have said there is usage limits, with a subscription upgrade for more…

> Apple themselves have said there is usage limits, with a subscription upgrade for more usage.

Specifically for image generation. They haven't indicated you have limits for Siri interactions.

Re: AI is slowing down

#414

Post by akoboldfrying »

It's possible that AI is the greatest technological leap forward since the Industrial Revolution, and simultaneously a bubble that will pop in the near future.

I don't know much about the economics side; TFA gives a barrage of stats that seem to make a compelling case for bubblehood. OTOH, the claims about the utility of LLMs being unmeasurable are weak (the same criticism applies to hiring programmers, or indeed most office workers) and the metal spider straw man is frankly embarrassing to anybody who has actually used recent frontier agents for programming and seen what they can do.

Re: AI is slowing down

#415

Post by 1attice »

Jtarii wrote: post #379
1attice wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, we don't have to speculate as to whether there is some sort of emotional taint on Zitron's thinking; it's shot through. But again, that does nothing to damage or offset _the argument_, which is available for your inspection and consideration, and you, as a thinking person, are handily capable of vetting. :) There is no need to use a heuristic; you have the thing itself.

Re: AI is slowing down

#416

Post by dwaite »

iknowstuff wrote: post #301
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…

ChatGPT has >1B users globally a mere 3 years in. iPhone is at 1.5B mostly concentrated in rich areas.

It does not look nearly as good when you compare paying customers.

Re: AI is slowing down

#417

Post by beepbooptheory »

spmurrayzzz wrote: post #128
pluto_modadic wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he doesn't need to understand the technology to point out the books are cooked. a business can sink in either way: the technology flops or the finances flop. he's arguing the /finances/ would flop. he doesn't argue that the /technology/ would flop, only that they can't come up with the money to pay their debters.

There is a piece of this I agree with. That you do not need to be a deep technical expert to notice that a company is burning cash by overcommitting to capex, or relying on heroic revenue projections that may or may not come to pass. But that is not the full argument he is making. If the claim is that the labs will not be able to pay their creditors because inference is structurally incapable of becoming profitable,…

Doesn't this kinda imply its own smoke and mirrors though? Like if the name of the game with inference is already routing things around and caching so you can make money, why is the newest biggest model always the most important critical thing? How does this square with any of their press about it? Also wouldn't that just add more inference? Because you need to pre-judge every prompt to know where to route it?

Also, if there is significant gains from caching, then like.. what are even doing here? Inputting something and then reading cached pieces of text based on their similarity to the input? Kinda like a search engine?

Re: AI is slowing down

#418

Post by fc417fc802 »

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.

Dividing by 12 you still have the same problem. They're projected numbers as opposed to real ones as well as being grossly skewed by any short term fluctuations.

Re: AI is slowing down

#419

Post by JoeJonathan »

lz400 wrote: post #410

Already many comments saying this but Ed Zitron is not a person I trust. He's been so biased and wrong on stuff that I consider very obvious and trivial that his complicated analysis with numbers and trends I can't just take at face value. As an example of obvious wrong things, I remember a tweet of his where he was mocking people talking about agents and agentic coding. He was kind of saying that he was going crazy…

He also calls everyone a grifter, when he seems like one himself. Im deeply skeptical of our AI overlords, but its disingenuous to keep pretwnding theres nothing there.

Re: AI is slowing down

#420

Post by aronowb14 »

Havoc wrote: post #155

>have to be roughly twice the size they are today, and then double again basically every year until 2029 or 2030. Anthropic is growing way faster than doubling yearly so don't think this is entirely implausible

I asked around my network recently - in the last month or two basically every large company has put in spending limits per engineer. Curious what their S1 will look like when they go public.
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