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AI is slowing down

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Re: AI is slowing down

#501

Post by crakhamster01 »

simonw wrote: post #132

Ed's argument for why "AI is slowing down" rests on company spending caps, in particular the Uber $1,500/engineer/tool cap. I interpret the exact same evidence in the opposite direction. A year ago the idea that a company would spend $1,500/month/employee on AI tooling felt absurd, what could people possible want to do with AI that would cost that much? Then coding agents (and, increasingly, general purpose agents) h…

I don't really understand how engineers at Uber are hitting $1500/month. Are they forced to pay API costs?

My company provides employees with API keys and soft limits, but as soon as you approach ~$400/month they ask that you get a Claude/Codex Max subscription instead. Curious if it's not the same case at Uber.

Re: AI is slowing down

#502

Post by aix1 »

dofm wrote: post #316
Yizahi wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's imagine for a second that this a few billion dollars per year to Google is correct. Why do you assume that it covers everything to be done by Google itself - from hosting to running actual servers? Apple may very well pay Google a licensing fee, take a trained LLM and run inference themselves locally or even at a yet another 3rd party for example a datacenter corporation or any mix of these. And then a true rea…

> Why do you assume that it covers everything to be done by Google itself - from hosting to running actual servers? I don't, and that's the point, isn't it? It's the keys to a substantial chunk of the kingdom for $1B a year. Literally they are getting, for a very small price, the right to distill their own models from Gemini. Is there money in this for someone with a data centre? Possibly. Is there money in it for NV…

> It's the keys to a substantial chunk of the kingdom for $1B a year. Literally they are getting, for a very small price, the right to distill their own models from Gemini.

Here is a different interpretation: Apple bought the rights to distill and use a smaller version of one unspecified model in the Gemini family (there are many such models).

The distillation will be carried out at Google's data centres so that the original weights never leave Google premises.

For this to be keys to be kingdom it would need to cover all current and future models and would need to be very permissive with regards to distillation parameters and allowed uses of the distilled model.

I expect the reality to be somewhere between these two extremes.

Re: AI is slowing down

#503

Post by KennyBlanken »

This is apparently news to all the hardware retailers who are continuing to maintain the insanely overinflated prices on NVME storage, DDR5, and even DDR4 memory.

Some are still steadily increasing prices.

A 1TB NVME drive - a good one - cost about $70. Now it costs anywhere from $150 for shit-tier drives to $300+ for the higher end stuff that used to cost $100-120.

Re: AI is slowing down

#504

Post by ai_critic »

michael-ax wrote: post #437
ai_critic wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

To put it more bluntly: he provides neither in his pursuit of rage views.

Re: AI is slowing down

#505

Post by no-name-here »

Grombobulous wrote: post #422
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 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…

Grandparent comment’s primary claim was that Ed has frequently claimed untrue things in the past and so questioned why people would continue going to such a source, but your reply didn't seem to address that at all?

Someone else separately linked Ed’s 2024 claims [1] that:

A. AI revenue had about already maxed out.

B. AI's output accuracy was already about as high as it would ever be

C. AI users were already declining or was as high as it would ever be.

So we have 3 2024 claims about whether AI was already the biggest/best it would ever be, and whether AI usage was even already shrinking. All ended up being the opposite of true.

Have you looked at whether Ed’s previous claims that went against popular AI views and are testable ended up being true or not?

Does it matter whether an author’s claims like that are true or not for whether you will continue consuming them?

If straightforward claims like the above are so easily disprovable, what makes you believe that he isn't cherry-picking other stats in order to spread misinformation or disinformation, as the individual stats he points to might even be completely true, but if they are cherry-picked, they may be more misleading than elucidative?

If someone has a multi-year history of frequently spreading false claims, should we trust their predictions about future events more than other sources?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48447549

Re: AI is slowing down

#506

Post by overgard »

zymhan wrote: post #498
overgard wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It turns out I am any given person

Re: AI is slowing down

#507

Post by overgard »

adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #35

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…

So here's the thing. I am not generally an angry person. But Ed's writing really resonates with me, because for the last four years these people have been making a strategy of scaring the shit out of us while trying to ruin something I genuinely love (coding), while simultaneously fucking up the economy and multiple industries and turning the internet into slop. I very badly want more people to call these guys "chucklefucks" or whatever innovative ways he comes up with to insult them because they deserve far more public ridicule and disdain than the (captured, useless) media is giving them.

So far the data for productivity in coding is.. sus. The productivity gains outside of toy projects are mostly anecdotal and it's hard to tell if those accounts are even real humans or just astroturfing and bots. Almost every programmer I know personally has a pretty measured opinion on where these things are useful and where they're not. The breathless hype seems mostly from non coders.

Re: AI is slowing down

#508

Post by beloch »

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…

It's more interesting to ask, "Does AI need to follow the current model of evil megacorps building massive data centres that, collectively, guzzle more energy than most nations on Earth?"

Perhaps LLM's (or something better) will develop to be more efficient and quickly become something most people run on local hardware. Perhaps fad-obsessed management types will move onto the next big thing and AI will start being used more judiciously. Perhaps society will set sane regulatory limits that shape the direction AI is going in, from models that take jobs people want to models that, given the right hardware, can do the jobs few want.

Anthropic and OpenAI don't have to succeed for AI to succeed. If they turn out to be a bubble that bursts and torches a lot of investors, it might actually be a fundamentally good thing for everybody else.

Re: AI is slowing down

#509

Post by overgard »

DonsDiscountGas wrote: post #125
adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #35

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's pretty likely that inference will get substantially cheaper. His argument is that for these companies to be profitable some very major and (pre 2022) unprecedented things have to happen. Which I tend to agree with, except I think they will happen, seeing as how they've been happening for a few years.

Except inference has been getting more expensive, not less

Re: AI is slowing down

#510

Post by overgard »

star-glider wrote: post #468
adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #35

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…

I see little evidence that people combine all three positions together. You're making a broad generalization based on personal vibes.
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