471–480 of 820 posts
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I just woke up and THIS! ... you almost owe me a new keyboard! I love it! This statement cleanly encapsulates the entire problem with all of the frontier models' companies' pre-IPO numbers. They have something-something "new technology" and we don't know anything about how the market is going to settle on the ethics, the utility, the human capacity opportunity cost impacts of not training and/or mis-educating an enti…
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I'm open-minded to arguments about AI being a financial bubble and a bad business. I'm not open-minded to arguments about utility, given that I personally witnessed LLMs evolve from interesting but useless toys to insanely helpful tools I use every day.
I guess one of Zitron's arguments is that the utility you see today is based on subsidized costs, that if you had to pay more it might not be worth the tradeoff to you. So the claim is the cost isn't coming down enough to make it make sense for a lot of uses in the long term. When I hear that next to the most wild claims, some by influential people, that the entire white collar workforce is going to be replaced very…
If I had someone giving me free access to cranes and excavators, I'd be raving about how easy it was to build houses now. But tomorrow when I have to pay full price for them, I'm going to be making very different calculations about return on investment.
The question we need to be asking is "what is the likely full-price cost we'll have to pay for these tools, and is that cost likely to be worth paying?"
What Ed's pointing to is that the full-price cost will have to cover the capital expenditures that have been invested, or the companies which risked that capital will go bust. That gives us a floor for what the full price cost will be, and that floor seems higher than the value being offered by the tools.
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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…
Of things to be upset about, an independent journalist asking readers to pay for access ranks very low. Especially compared to LLM companies that are exacerbating the climate crisis, increasing cancer rates among residents, or increasing utilities for residents. This sort of behavior completely tanks any and all credibility this commentator may have.
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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.
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. The…
If AI use via Apple represents 10% of the total that vaguely implies that the total AI market is worth around $10 billion per year (which admittedly seems a bit low), and if it is just 1% (which also seems low) then we get $100 billion per year upper-end estimate.
Which just is not enough to justify the current valuations of AI companies.
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. The…
OpenAI's commitment to privacy is absymal relative to the sensitivity of the data people are dumping onto the platform. The CEO also has a reputation for being untrustworthy.
The biggest threat to ChatGPT's moat may be a brilliant marketing campaign by Apple that really gets people thinking about what platform they want to be upload their secrets to.
Ed is an interesting character. His financial analysis of the AI industry makes logical sense to me (though I am not knowledgeable enough to actually know if it is correct .) However, he seems to be so angry at AI in general, that he misses the obvious areas where LLMs are actually changing the State of the Art. Coding seems to be one of the core use-cases for LLMs (as Simon Willison pointed out recently) and even if…
It seems that a certain kind of person cannot separate the following things: 1) I dislike AI as a technology 2) I dislike the people and companies that profit from AI 3) I think AI is useless These are three completely separate positions to have. You can think AI is incredibly useful and also dislike it because it will, for example, reduce your relative status in society. You can love the tech but think that Sam Altm…
Except that in the process of the markets finding out, things will not go back to normal if everyone's retirement is tied to the market. And in the process of finding out, things will not go back to normal if the hype cycle disrupts traditional hiring/firing decisions.
If it's as bad as some of us believe, then when it falls apart, a lot of people get hurt as collateral damage.
The market eventually found out about Bear Stearns, but a lot of innocent people lost their homes in the process.
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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 stum…
Not saying this would be good (qualitatively) or even good business in any sense, but we’ve already seen companies willing to sacrifice headcount to cover CAPEX for these models.
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I didn't read the posted article (I don't read this author anymore because I think it's basically anti-AI ideological propaganda). But from the article I linked back in March 2024: "Generative AI models are expensive and compute-intensive without providing obvious, tangible mass-market use cases. Murati and Altman's futures depend heavily on keeping the world believing that development and improvement of their models…
His point is that coding is only a “market” because it is being sold at a loss. Businesses have to pay per-token prices and are saying that the cost is not justified. Nevertheless, it all misses the point if we get to AI post-scarcity utopia. But thats a big if.
The only way they make their money back is if everyone pays them tons of money for it.
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Haha thought you were referring to the upsell at the start asking to subscribe to the newsletter for $70 / year. But yes it does call out the unprecedented amount of money getting dumped into AI. What turned me off though was this paragraph: > This is a hysterical era perpetuated by liars, cowards, imbeciles, craven boosters and the easily-fooled. Those excited about generative AI are either the victim or the perpetr…
> Haha thought you were referring to the upsell at the start asking to subscribe to the newsletter for $70 / year. People like you would be why I put "(titled)" in the reply. > That's a very bold claim. Really anyone excited about generative AI dude? That's just an absurd claim, and makes it sound like he hasn't used an LLM since GPT 3.5. It's just the language is so hyperbolic and angry that it's giving me more rant…
Yep. Every man, woman and child, and even then provided we include Russia, Mexico, Cuba, Haiti etc, and, out of desperation to get to 1.5 billion, Turkey, which is in Europe a little.