511–520 of 820 posts
It always seemed very natural to me that AI will move “down the stack”, where Open AI and Anthropic don’t really have a foot in the door. Who makes consumer devices? Google Who makes operating systems? Google Who makes browsers? Google Who makes the world’s most popular websites? Google By the time 90% of average internet users get to chatgpt.com or whatever, they already went through several Google chokepoints, each…
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One of the "smells" that gives away a quacky ranter is they speak in impassioned, "Why doesn't everyone understand this?" tones, but in fact their argument just doesn't flow. If Zitron's argument were as solid as he keeps saying it is, you would read it and understand it and see that it is solid. He would begin somewhere–statistics on AI demand, say–and then walk the calculations carefully over to the next step–maybe…
One of the "smells" that gives away a quacky ranter is they speak in impassioned, "Why doesn't everyone understand this?" tones, but in fact their argument just doesn't flow. If Zitron's argument were as solid as he keeps saying it is, you would read it and understand it and see that it is solid. He would begin somewhere–statistics on AI demand, say–and then walk the calculations carefully over to the next step–maybe…
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…
Zitron is begging for a collapse at this point. Yes, his macro analysis correctly identifies a massive financial risk but his incessant pessimism completely misses the incredible ground-level utility that many of us on HN celebrate every day through undeniable, massive productivity gains. At this point I'm trying to believe there's a middle ground where the level of individual capability this unlocks, leads to major…
> undeniable, massive productivity gains. Take any stock index, remove AI stocks, what do you see? That's right! Nothing... So where is all the productivity going? Where is the value? Where are the massive unemployment stats or the millions of new startups making big $$$?
Infrastructure doesn't produce value overnight. How long did it take the Interstate System to provide measurable value? I asked Gemini. Supposedly increased national productivity by 25% over 39 years[1]. But if you drove on a newly finished interstate in 1959, you saw the same cars just moving a lot faster.
That's what we're seeing right now. People can produce an incredible amount of stuff really quickly with AI. Is it directly connected to measurable productivity across the entire economy? No, because, realizing a mass productivity increase from infrastructure takes time.
[1] - https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/econ_focus...
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>undeniable, massive productivity gains. How can something so undeniable have zero scientific evidence? Are there any large peer reviewed or meta studies confirming your claim?
It’s a very hard experiment to run. You have a population that’s already “treated”. You can’t blind them to the fact that they’re using AI tools. It’s hard to imagine a study that wouldn’t have serious flaws that people would then use to dismiss and form their own conclusions. Sure you have METR but that was very low n with a very old model. I think the surest sign of productivity gains is the sheer volume of adoptio…
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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
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Even more dangerous to the big 2 AI companies is the fact that the 20 different Chinese companies are catching up fast and for a lot lower cost. Why should someone pick Opus 4.8 when Qwen3.7 Plus produces similar results for about 1/20th the cost. That sort of pricing disparity is across the board. But further it's becoming more and more apparent that they are doing more with less parameters. That's what's giving the…
Because it doesn't. Not for the tasks where using Opus instead of a lower tier model is appropriate, at any rate. Benchmarks show this, as do revealed preferences of actual users. To believe that Qwen is as capable as Opus at 1/20 the cost you have to believe that every person who does not make the choice to use Qwen over Opus for a given task is some mix of ignorant or delusional. This is certainly an opinion you ca…
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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.
I don’t know anyone who uses ChatGPT who cares about that stuff. Most people just use it as a Google replacement. I actively hate it when it brings in some nonsense it thinks it knows about me. I told it my income once in an attempt to use it to find the perfect rewards credit card mix. Now anytime I try to get it to search for a deal it brings up some nonsense about “as a high income individual you don’t worry about…
I have iterated through different option configurations to reach a level of 'customization' that more or less conforms to my own use case, and this does include opting out of any and all lasting memory between instances and across chat sessions; and adds a selection of single initialization prompts which shape the chatbot's behavior to my requirements for that session's objective. these trim most if not all af the sycophantic interactions, reduce outputs to the specific formats and contours as defined and omits any of the 'explanations of the underlying reasons behind...' which is just noise. This also has enabled some pretty useful results without ever spending a dime on a paid account: the premium behavior presented to 'potential customers' as a lure continues to work for me, and for iteration across instances and accounts is possible with machine-ready yaml context file when a single sessions hits the 90% wall : one emit and ingest cycle rotation across account profiles in firefox and i pick right up with a fresh limit.
Bouncing between ChatGPT and Claude, and between models for discrete subsets of larger tasks has really been impactful for my particular needs; but as i am not working in regions of knowledge that are beyond my own expertise and because I require the model to limit responses to very specific parameters, the logic space for unchecked hallucinations is low (but not zero).
The most useful project results for me have been in developing an air-gapped private menagerie of multi-domain models which uses an operating structure not dissimilar to OpenMythos; but then my background includes HPC environment development for NUMA, unikernels, MPI and bare metal hypervisor design - so getting a design plan and functional code without requiring a team of programmers and months of time in order to even start using models under my control which have zero public facing risk for the projects i'm working on is a much better place to spend limited budget on. Last gen hardware in the V100 class is perfectly capable of running and delivering the physics calculation optimizations as required and I would rather buy and/or install solar+storage to supply the electricity for token generation than rent the same from any of the frontier models AND trust that "don't train and learn from me" preferences are and continue to be followed.
If your use-case is a a 'lifestyle shopping assistant' then just turning off customization might be sufficient to stop it from telling you how to live your best life.
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 "chuck…
They are not only useful it is obvious they are. If you don’t see it I really, really don’t know what to tell you. You can tell yourself I am bot or shill or whatever if that helps you sleep but .. just trying to help out another dev here. Wake the F up.
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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…
> All his numbers about costs, revenues etc are guesses or attempts to work backwards from off the cuff and frequently inconsistent comments by tech executives. They could easily be very far off. Agreed, but I'd argue that Ed doesn't have much else to work with. I'd like to see journalists take this tack and start asking these executives to either back up their statements or back down from them. They should be held a…