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AI is slowing down

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Re: AI is slowing down

#491

Post by monodeldiablo »

sailfast wrote: post #478
Jedd wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What about a few hundred billion in salary and benefits reductions due to mass layoffs? 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.

A few hundred billion in salary and benefits reductions equates to millions of layoffs. At minimum, we'd be looking at something about the same magnitude as the 2008 financial crisis. That scale of workforce reduction would have profound implications for the broader economy.

In a consumption-driven economy, businesses need consumers. Any gains from these layoffs would be short term at best.

Re: AI is slowing down

#492

Post by no-name-here »

RajT88 wrote: post #201
moritzwarhier wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true, and I am not anti-AI. I was not only thinking about the environmental effects of some single prompt or a certain amount of tokens. Neither did I want to say that a car is always more wasteful than some alternative. But defaulting to the behemoth is inefficient, unless everyone is driven to do it: then it's in some way reasonable. By adding "corrupt" and "dependent", as well as the economic terms, I wante…

> I was not only thinking about the environmental effects of some single prompt or a certain amount of tokens. Hand wringing about AI datacenter's environmental impact is well and good. We should keep the data centers accountable for their consumption and waste. I just wish the same people had been upset the last 20 years with poor water resource management in a lot of areas (the west US especially) with urban, ranch…

The past may be past, but it's important that even now we point out the relative scale of resource usage, pollution, etc going forward of everything from cars to AI to golf courses to beef.

Re: AI is slowing down

#493

Post by ElProlactin »

sumeno wrote: post #490
ElProlactin wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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

He's selling a paid newsletter, so at least one of his motivations is to make money. His target subscribers are certainly people who lean towards his viewpoint but he still needs to do some convincing because the market of people who are open if not warm to his thesis is much bigger than the market of people who already share his thesis.

> That doesn't make him wrong.

I think it's way too early for anyone pontificating about AI, the economics of AI, etc. to be declared "wrong" or "right". This is going to take years, if not decades, to play out.

Re: AI is slowing down

#494

Post by ido »

jollyllama wrote: post #220

Lots of dismissive comments ITT, very few tackling the substance of the article. > AI Cannot Afford To Slow Down — It Needs $3 Trillion Or More In Revenue By End Of 2030 To Sustain Its Existence Is this true? With the total 2024 wages being 11.7 trillion USD [0], and nonfarm payrolls totaling 158,000 in the same year [1], it's an order of magnitude higher than my back of the napkin guesses I've made that AI needs to…

Why only US wages rather than global wages? The US is the biggest economy but it’s still only a minority of the global economy.

Re: AI is slowing down

#495

Post by monodeldiablo »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #390
cmiles74 wrote: post #284

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…

You annihilated your own argument with the inclusion of radiology. The only successfully deployed "AI" in use by radiologists (that I'm aware of) are bespoke image analysis models, not LLMs. And that space is rapidly fragmenting as there's a frustrating and seemingly irresolvable tension between sensitivity, generalizability, and accuracy.

Re: AI is slowing down

#496

Post by no-name-here »

toasty228 wrote: post #178
atleastoptimal wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what your point is. Stock markets are based on money going into securities based on estimated future value. Even if AI were doubling productivity at a non-AI company, there is more leverage to that money going into an AI company. The question is, is AI leading to massive productivity gains in companies that implement it? AI productivity gains take time to diffuse, but so far companies in the S&P 500 are seei…

> YOY earnings growth rate for the S&P 500 is 21.7% Now remove the companies selling the AI shovels: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HIAjbZxacAARHwD.png > Not sure what your point is. My point is that they're selling us Skynet and the end of employment as we now it, things that we shouldn't even have to measure to perceive the results of, yet no one is able to measure any of it Pointing a finger at nvidia, google, and th…

Your grandparent comment:

> Take any stock index, remove AI stocks, what do you see? That's right! Nothing...

Parent comment:

> Now remove the companies selling the AI shovels: https://pbs.twimg....

From your linked image, "excluding AI stocks" is "+16%" (the figure with AI stocks is far higher).

Your sole source says +16% excluding AI - in what kind of market is +16% “nothing”?

Re: AI is slowing down

#497

Post by zymhan »

ido wrote: post #494
jollyllama wrote: post #220

Lots of dismissive comments ITT, very few tackling the substance of the article. > AI Cannot Afford To Slow Down — It Needs $3 Trillion Or More In Revenue By End Of 2030 To Sustain Its Existence Is this true? With the total 2024 wages being 11.7 trillion USD [0], and nonfarm payrolls totaling 158,000 in the same year [1], it's an order of magnitude higher than my back of the napkin guesses I've made that AI needs to…

Why only US wages rather than global wages? The US is the biggest economy but it’s still only a minority of the global economy.

Just consider the math there for a second, when you factor in the average US wage.

Re: AI is slowing down

#498

Post by zymhan »

overgard wrote: post #487
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 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 person…

They were not asking for your individual opinion. They were asking why any given person would need it.

Re: AI is slowing down

#499

Post by duttish »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #427
throwthrowuknow wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows has been pushing the same thing hard without much success. Why do I care if AI is integrated into my OS when I can choose my preferred AI and it can use the OS directly?

This. The other day I wrote up some notes for a presentation. Opened Google Slides, clicked the gemini button, pasted the notes in and asked it to make the slides. Nope; gemini can only modify a single slide at a time in Google Slides. Pasted the same notes into claude, it wrote a pptx file, I imported that into Slides, job done. Being integrated into the product doesn't always mean a better result.

That's progress, last time I tried that a month or something ago gemini (the web app) crashed when trying to generate slides.

Re: AI is slowing down

#500

Post by bawolff »

datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #483
bawolff wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Is it really a grift when everyone knows? Its not like they are keeping their financials secret. Heck, the main AI companies aren't even public yet, so its largely sophisticated investors getting "grifted".

Normally a grift involves tricking someone. The AI situation seems more like a bunch of investors knowingly investing in something very speculative. If they lose their money, while that is the nature of speculative investments.

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