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AI is slowing down

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Re: AI is slowing down

#531

Post by overgard »

paulbjensen wrote: post #204

I find it nuts that I can use Claude Code for $20pm - I imagine that won't last forever but have to say it is great value for money. So when I see monthly budgets in the thousands for developers at some larger companies, I'm curious to learn how they are managing to spend that kind of figure: how much code/documentation are they feeding into their prompts, are they using agent orchestration systems to make the code f…

I just looked at ccusage for a personal project. In 5 days (doing it as a hobby) I've managed to spend $250 in API tokens on a $200 subscription. 5 days, and thats on one computer (I split time using 3 of them). If I had to pay $2000 a month -- no fricking way, not worth it.

Re: AI is slowing down

#532

Post by danny_codes »

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #378

I'm sort of an AI skeptic but I have been seeing this guy's essays for years now and he has always been super pessimistic on AI progress. I think a much more reasoned critique of AI is that of Tyler Cowen, whose argument is basically that most processes aren't constrained by lack of intelligence but by organizational and social factors which mean for AI to be useful you have to redesign organizations and work to take…

Completely agree. AI is here to stay, it's going to garner more and more use overtime. However, I'm skeptical that the investments being made right now are at of the right scale & at the right time. I completely agree that over time we'll rework more and more of our society around LLMs or their successors. However, like you say it's a slow process: we have to learn how to do it effectively, organizations need to change, people's attitudes and behaviors have to adapt. I just don't see is "getting there" fast enough to justify current spending levels.

Re: AI is slowing down

#533

Post by overgard »

yalogin wrote: post #177

As a tangent, I don’t understand where and why meta fits into the AI race. They did not get any mind share (consumers) from the llms so far, granted they started the open source side to this but the Chinese companies produce far better models and have essentially become the default for on device set up. They have ai glasses and integration into instagram and facebook as the other avenues. I don’t see ai glasses as co…

You should probably be more pessimistic about Meta. Look at their last major venture, the Metaverse, which was basically embarassing. Their AI strategy is incoherent.

Re: AI is slowing down

#534

Post by JacobAsmuth »

techblueberry wrote: post #6
ElFitz wrote: post #2

I find it difficult to separate this piece’s tone from its content. The tone puts me off and makes it hard for me to judge it on its merits, despite some of the arguments seeming sound and well supported.

Given the way tone has been intentionally abused, particularly in this industry, I’ll take a few f bombs and the truth.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/peakai/

"I believe that artificial intelligence has three quarters to prove itself before the apocalypse comes, and when it does, it will be that much worse, savaging the revenues of the biggest companies in tech. Once usage drops, so will the remarkable amounts of revenue that have flowed into big tech, and so will acres of data centers sit unused, the cloud equivalent of the massive overhiring we saw in post-lockdown Silicon Valley."

Ed Zitron. Mar 18, 2024

Re: AI is slowing down

#535

Post by overgard »

wrsh07 wrote: post #397
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…

> 2026 consumer revenue projections from OpenAI are pitched at $14-15 billion, apparently. If they get that, it's the only year they will get that Would you care to wager on that? Because I would gladly take the other side at even odds. > consumer AI is worth, to Anthropic Anthropic does not really care about consumer AI. I expect consumer is where their least profitably customers are. My primary expectation is that…

When I use these models, I honestly can't tell much of a difference between any of the frontier ones. Admittedly I'm not sitting around benchmarking them during the hype cycles, but as a coder I have zero issues switching to whatever's cheapest. Custom harnesses or whatever are not much of a moat (honestly Claude is so buggy right now that I've been using codex and opencode just so I don't have to deal with a flickery mess that screwed up my arrow keys)

I just don't see how being the "premium" provider really works if much cheaper models are basically good enough.

Re: AI is slowing down

#536

Post by jurgenburgen »

oudlys wrote: post #291
fl4regun wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

economists define productivity as gdp per hour worked. Like a lot of other economic measurements, its mostly a bogus number people use as an argument on why their politics are better than someone elses politics. You can have an efficient business located in a poor country making the same product and same quality as that same business in a rich country, the rich country will be more "productive" because local cost of…

Sure. But that's not, in my view, how most people use the word productivity when describing LLM use. In my field - operations - productivity is usually described as some rate of production for a specific asset. 100 widgets / machine / hour - for example. "My productivity is 3 PRs / day with the LLM as opposed to 1 PR per every three days". That's how I think people are thinking about it. My point is that's not the sa…

I’ve noticed more gold-plating.

“This random part of the code is slow, I used an LLM to generate a PR that speeds it up.”

Okay, you optimized the part that’s not a bottleneck, sped up nothing and cost the company $100 in tokens. Good job?

Re: AI is slowing down

#537

Post by oblio »

simianwords wrote: post #74
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…

> until inference becomes much cheaper these companies cannot be profitable. Some mega-players will pay the API token price, but most will not. This is often repeated but comes from ignorance mostly. You have * zero * reason to believe inference is costly other than just vibes. If you go by data and intuitions - the margins are high. This kind of thinking really reinforces my belief that people have no idea and are u…

> You have * zero * reason to believe inference is costly other than just vibes. If you go by data and intuitions - the margins are high.

1. What data?

2. Intuitions = vibes.

Vibes are bad when used against you, but good when used in your favor.

Come on :-)))

Re: AI is slowing down

#538

Post by fc417fc802 »

JacobAsmuth wrote: post #523
fc417fc802 wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dividing by 12 you still have the same problem. They're projected numbers as opposed to real ones as well as being grossly skewed by any short term fluctuations.

Divide both by 12 and you do not get the projected numbers. You get monthly revenue, a real measured number. It is the number being reported * 12 when they state a new ARR. E.g. When Anthropic stated $1B ARR (an extrapolated value) what they were actually reporting is $(1/12)B Monthly revenue. If it helps their current monthly revenue is 47 times that, for a grand total of $(47/12)B per month in revenue.

Yes it is the current monthly revenue which is a projected number as far as the other 11 months go. That's fine if the overall economy has low volatility, your sector is well established and predictable, and your company isn't undergoing any significant changes. Absolutely none of that applies to the frontier AI labs.

Re: AI is slowing down

#539

Post by barrell »

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…

I do think Ed in intentionally ignorant of the capabilities of LLMs. But I also don't know that I would classify LLMs as 'wildly useful' for coding. Most productivity gains seem to be hallucinated, and while it's too early to make any claims on long term outcomes, there are plenty of studies indicating they might be even more negative.

There are definitely use cases for LLMs in coding. And at times, they can be wildly useful. But I feel like the industry atm wildly overestimates their broader/long term utility.

Anecdotally, I have not seen an explosion in quality/bespoke software since LLMs. In fact I've noticed the opposite to quite the extreme. Not only are new products worse in quality, but the quality of existing products is falling off a cliff.

Re: AI is slowing down

#540

Post by mrkeen »

zachthewf wrote: post #15

Before you spend 20 minutes reading this article, it's worth understanding that the writer has been posting popular but consistently wrong takes for 2+ years (e.g. https://www.wheresyoured.at/peakai/ from March 2024) arguing that AI is failing, is a waste of money, is bad, will never work, etc.

From your link:

  When asked whether it will be possible to fix Sora's videos after they've been generated, Murati said "eventually," and then couched that by saying "that's what we're trying to figure out...how to use this technology as a tool that people can edit and create with." She promised that there would "eventually" be "more steerability, control and accuracy...and reflecting of intent of what you want." 

  You'll "eventually" be able to add audio to Sora videos, and when asked when Sora's generative videos will be available to the public, she once again said "eventually," and when pushed said that Sora's launch would "definitely be this year, but could be a few months."

  Murati, living in a world of "eventuallies," provided no technical insights, no specifics, and very few details.
And, take a look at https://openai.com/index/sora-is-here/

Please speculate on why OpenAI wouldn't just leave it up (whether or not they were able to improve it).

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