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AI is slowing down

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481–490 of 820 posts

Re: AI is slowing down

#481
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…

It's disappointing that this article got mindshare when a more neutral author could better argue the bearish case for AI valuations. I want the steelman argument from a more respected individual.

The problem is when untrusted authors take positions, then it circulates widely, then people discredit the author and by proxy the position, when the position could be correct.

The article has a number of emotional appeals in it. Something more focused on raw numbers would foster more curious discussion.

Re: AI is slowing down

#482

I don't think anybody actually believes that the current investment is going to yield returns that they are projecting. Neither did people back in Dotcom or Railways or any other hype/bubbles. Yet these technology did transform and the returns came to fruition. Internet continued to thrive and grow even after the stock market came and went, it took 13 years to roughly nasdaq to recover but the explosion of GDP from i…

> it took 13 years to roughly nasdaq to recover

So it's okay for everyone's who's due to retire in the next 13 years to have their 401k or equivalent wiped out when the correction happens?

Re: AI is slowing down

#483

Always a bit eyebrow-raising to me how much people focus on Ed’s style rather than his message, which is, broadly, that the tech industry is deeply morally corrupted. He struggles to speak about it without becoming impassioned, but I read it as incredulousness rather than baseless hyperbole: “How are you still investing in and working for companies like Meta, despite the overwhelming evidence that they are terrible c…

> his message, which is, broadly, that the tech industry is deeply morally corrupted If that's his message, why is he going on about ecconomic sustainability? Whether or not you have a coherent business model has nothing to do with how morally corrupt you are. Ultimately i agree with the GP post, the article reads like something preaching to the choir. If you already agree it seems natural. If you don't agree it look…

Arguing against the business model is a method of exposing the tactics of AI businesses as a short term grift rather than a principled venture. The entire economy suffers when grifters profit - there’s not infinite money to spread around.

Re: AI is slowing down

#484
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?

> Could a better or more polite writer have convinced you with the same shape of logic?

If you're writing in an attempt to convince people of something, isn't how you deliver the message of critical importance?

This is basic Sales 101. The way you sell (products, services, ideas, etc.) is directly related to how successful you are.

Re: AI is slowing down

#485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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…

Glad to be of service. I can't take credit for the idea, it was stolen from a meme I saw long ago, but it was one which sticks with you.

Re: AI is slowing down

#486
post #140

Anthropic has made $330 billion in compute and chip commitments between Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, another $30 billion with CoreWeave and another $15 billion with SpaceX. To pay for this compute, Anthropic must meet its projected revenue of $174 billion a year by 2029. Anthropic has raised $95 billion across rounds in February, April (from Google and Amazon), and May. These funds will be insufficient to cover Ant…

That wasn't an S1 and we have zero idea what GAAP compliant numbers for Anthropic or OpenAI would look like

Re: AI is slowing down

#487
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

Honestly, I don't think I need anything from AI at all. It's a convenience but it doesn't really enable anything I wasn't doing before. That's probably their biggest problem. The biggest thing is it enables non-coders to write code, but it's very debatable that that's a good thing excluding personal projects

Re: AI is slowing down

#488
post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ar…

5-6 years is wildly optimistic for GPUs in an AI data center

Try 1-2: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/datacenter-g...

Re: AI is slowing down

#489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> personally the only real use-case for AI that I've seen is code generation or automated sales or scam calls. That seems like a giant paucity of imagination. I can easily name a lot of areas where AI is already having a large impact and it's not hard to imagine the impact growing: 1. Customer service. Yes, we all like to laugh at the silly chatbot mistakes, linked list reversals and Instagram oopsies, but a lot of c…

Radiology isn't using chat bots

Re: AI is slowing down

#490

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?

> Could a better or more polite writer have convinced you with the same shape of logic? If you're writing in an attempt to convince people of something, isn't how you deliver the message of critical importance? This is basic Sales 101. The way you sell (products, services, ideas, etc.) is directly related to how successful you are.

He is not writing his blog to convince people, his primary audience already agrees.

That doesn't make him wrong.

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