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AI is slowing down

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Re: AI is slowing down

#431

Post by Jedd »

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…

Does that '100s of billions' come from a big bucket somewhere called 'spare cash', or does it correlate to a commensurate reduction in the 'around $500 billion in ad revenue' that Google and Meta are extracting?

Do your assumptions - " if you look at the trajectory " - factor in a slowing economy, a slowing growth in quality improvements in the tech, and/or the asymptote of market saturation for punters happy to stump up more than $50 a month?

Re: AI is slowing down

#432

Post by 16bitvoid »

nfw2 wrote: post #408
16bitvoid wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A request that isn't asking for information isn't a query

That's just what some people generally use to refer to LLM input string/prompt/message/etc. The only thing the LLM can do is return information...in the form of text, so every request is one for information.

If we want to get really pedantic, every generated token is the answer to the query: what's the next most probable token in this sequence of tokens?

Re: AI is slowing down

#433

Post by scubbo »

LogicFailsMe wrote: post #344
mlyle wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well, he dismisses any value whatsoever to GenAI. I didn’t read it that way. I see a lot of value in it. I just don’t see us justifying the amount of infrastructure being built or current valuations. Or in the unlikely event that we do, the societal upheaval is going to take away the ability to monetize it meaningfully. OpenAI and Anthropic may make it through. But that is different from saying valuations are justi…

"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…

SSND?

Re: AI is slowing down

#434

Post by windexh8er »

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.

That's cool, but the enterprise is cheap. If you have any proximity to sales in the space you know that procurement and lawyers exist that have a full time job redlining purchase orders and agreements to the N-th degree. The enterprise will pay for something that will make them money or prevent them from losing it. But the enterprise isn't paying a premium and they know that.

Even within the Fortune 5 of the US if be surprised if any of them are paying more than $1B annually currently in total.

And then you can take the parent context into account. If they can just equip users with a slightly more expensive Mac and call their Dell rep to order a few thousand DGX Spark to handle the rest... Why would they risk their trade secrets and intimate details flowing into models that may or may not be trustworthy long term?

Most large enterprise have been burned by SaaS over the years in some way. I can't imagine there aren't architects in the large organizations that are truly weighing how to effectively use AI. And beyond that we're seeing more and more progress in SLMs and orchestration agents which become easier to run at scale on-prem.

Re: AI is slowing down

#435

Post by Grombobulous »

lz400 wrote: post #426
Grombobulous wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He provided a lot of quantitative analysis in this article. Perhaps an example or two you think these numbers are off-base could help bolster this point? I think the most compelling part of the article is that these numbers point to a situation where the level of investment required seems unsustainably high by plain dollars. You don’t really have to agree with the author to see how it plays out. OpenAI and SpaceX and…

I guess what I'm saying is that I won't look at his numbers since he's an unreliable source from my point of view and there's a chance that he's going to try to deceive me and it's a waste of time for me to listen to him. I do have other sources of information and I probably agree in general that AI companies are doing pretty shady financial shenanigans. I even think it's possible that openai is in real trouble. But…

I would agree with you that extrapolating to “AI is useless” is definitely a giant step too far, and that part of the article ruins a lot of the other interesting bits of it.

It’s great that he cites a lot of sources but some of them aren’t great, like the Microsoft story about canceling their Claude spend. I think that particular story isn’t much of an indicator of anything, and it might not even be true.

But the financial part…this guy isn’t the only person out there sounding the alarm about the math not mathing.

Re: AI is slowing down

#436

Post by dabedee »

lz400 wrote: post #426
Grombobulous wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He provided a lot of quantitative analysis in this article. Perhaps an example or two you think these numbers are off-base could help bolster this point? I think the most compelling part of the article is that these numbers point to a situation where the level of investment required seems unsustainably high by plain dollars. You don’t really have to agree with the author to see how it plays out. OpenAI and SpaceX and…

I guess what I'm saying is that I won't look at his numbers since he's an unreliable source from my point of view and there's a chance that he's going to try to deceive me and it's a waste of time for me to listen to him. I do have other sources of information and I probably agree in general that AI companies are doing pretty shady financial shenanigans. I even think it's possible that openai is in real trouble. But…

This is what critical reading is for. It requires you examining your own assumptions as much as the text's. If you don't engage with something or someone because of your own bias or assumptions, that is also willful ignorance; you also might end up never updating your prior stance when new information emerges.

There is a financial argument and capability argument.

In this case, he doesn't make the claim one follows from the other.

Re: AI is slowing down

#437

Post by michael-ax »

ai_critic wrote: post #340
mike_hearn wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 frequentl…

It helps if you look at Zitron's work history and experience. He's a hype man and a games journalist. His opinions on this are whatever sells, not exactly whatever is correct. This is alarmingly obvious whenever he talks out of his depth about things like how companies actually use AI and reason about business decisions.

accuracy and precision are not the same thing. he's delivering one, you're asking for the other. no?

Re: AI is slowing down

#438

Post by jredwards »

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…

I think OpenAI is just getting beaten so badly in the Enterprise space that they have to make rosy predictions about the consumer space.

Re: AI is slowing down

#439

Post by chupchap »

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…

People who use ChatGPT have fed so much data about their own lives and interests into it. This includes a lot of information about personal lives, interests, plans, business and even family! Shifting to another AI app is painful as they would need to start from scratch.

Re: AI is slowing down

#440

Post by lz400 »

dabedee wrote: post #436
lz400 wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess what I'm saying is that I won't look at his numbers since he's an unreliable source from my point of view and there's a chance that he's going to try to deceive me and it's a waste of time for me to listen to him. I do have other sources of information and I probably agree in general that AI companies are doing pretty shady financial shenanigans. I even think it's possible that openai is in real trouble. But…

This is what critical reading is for. It requires you examining your own assumptions as much as the text's. If you don't engage with something or someone because of your own bias or assumptions, that is also willful ignorance; you also might end up never updating your prior stance when new information emerges. There is a financial argument and capability argument. In this case, he doesn't make the claim one follows f…

There's no shortage of sources of information. I'll exercise "critical reading" with sources I consider trustworthy to begin with. I've no time to engage with difficult analysis from people who are not worth the effort. You wouldn't engage with every lunacy you read on a tabloid, right? similar principle
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