Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI is slowing down

wheresyoured.at

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

581–590 of 820 posts

Re: AI is slowing down

#581

Post by zuzululu »

degamad wrote: post #482
zuzululu wrote: post #163

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?

do you think so ?

Re: AI is slowing down

#582

Post by raincole »

avarun wrote: post #578
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…

There is no substance to the article to tackle. Ed Zitron is a clown that makes seven million dollars a year writing unsubstantiated bullshit on the internet. He has been consistently wrong in every single one of his predictions and will continue predicting the sky is falling, because his content has zero educational value. It is purely a confirmation-bias inducing dopamine hit for the perpetually aggrieved.

The funniest thing is that his articles are constantly pushed to HN frontpage, and every time the top comments (or the comments one level nested below top comments) are pointing out how wrong he's always been.

Either that he's HN mods's favorites or we're experiencing a special case of xkcd 1053[0]: there are always ten thousand people haven't realized how wrong Ed Zitron is.

At this point I don't think even Ed himself believes what he writes. It's just fan service for subscribers. And that is totally reasonable if we view blogging as a business.

[0]: https://xkcd.com/1053/

Re: AI is slowing down

#583

Post by latexr »

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…

> Which is even sillier when you think about it, because if it's useless, then you really shouldn't care: the markets will eventually find out that it's useless, and everything will go back to normal

People who are against AI don’t care if it’s useless, they care it’s harmful. And you can’t systematically cause harm then say “oops, our bad” and have everything return to how it was with a snap of the fingers. The consequences of harm don’t go away when the source does.

> I do think they're worried about what it'll do to their prestige

Why must this always be the argument? It was the same with cryptocurrencies and NFTs, there is a specific type of proponent who always accuses critics of secretly being pro the technology but publicly against it due to some ulterior motive. Most people aren’t selfish lying rat bastards who think like that.

Re: AI is slowing down

#584

Post by zuzululu »

degamad wrote: post #477
star-glider wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> ... the markets will eventually find out that it's useless, and everything will go back to normal, and the people you don't like will have lost money, so there's no point in being outraged... Except that in the process of the markets finding out, things will not go back to normal if everyone's retirement is tied to the market. And in the process of finding out, things will not go back to normal if the hype cycle di…

They'll be fine

Re: AI is slowing down

#585

Post by zuzululu »

degamad wrote: post #472
asveikau wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess one of Zitron's arguments is that the utility you see today is based on subsidized costs, that if you had to pay more it might not be worth the tradeoff to you. So the claim is the cost isn't coming down enough to make it make sense for a lot of uses in the long term. When I hear that next to the most wild claims, some by influential people, that the entire white collar workforce is going to be replaced very…

Exactly. The question is not "are people using it to do stuff?" because we know right now they are. Given free or heavily-subsidised access to powerful tools, people will use them. If I had someone giving me free access to cranes and excavators, I'd be raving about how easy it was to build houses now. But tomorrow when I have to pay full price for them, I'm going to be making very different calculations about return…

you cant operate setup cranes or excavators alone

Re: AI is slowing down

#586

Post by zuzululu »

degamad wrote: post #454
0000000000100 wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha thought you were referring to the upsell at the start asking to subscribe to the newsletter for $70 / year. But yes it does call out the unprecedented amount of money getting dumped into AI. What turned me off though was this paragraph: > This is a hysterical era perpetuated by liars, cowards, imbeciles, craven boosters and the easily-fooled. Those excited about generative AI are either the victim or the perpetr…

[flagged]

well if he takes after you i 'd say he tops out at 100m

Re: AI is slowing down

#587

Post by raincole »

vb-8448 wrote: post #96

Zitron is in the business of content creation and not successful predictions . It doesn't matter how many times he (and several others around) will say the end is here , they have to be right only once. BTW, one thing for sure he is right about are the economics, as of today there is no way these massive investments are gone be paid.

They don't have to be right even once. Why do they?

Re: AI is slowing down

#588

Post by toasty228 »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #374
toasty228 wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/this-is-how-the-ai-bu... > AI-related stocks have accounted for 75% of S&P 500 returns, 80% of earnings growth and 90% of capital spending growth since ChatGPT launched in November 2022.

has it occurred to you that AI companies may be making huge returns because AI is genuinely increasing productivity and driving actual economic growth via their products? If all these false practices can pull revenue out of nothing, why doesn’t every company do it? How come AI companies seem to be able to pull off financial magic that no other company can match? All your analyses still ignore the revenue point.

> has it occurred to you that AI companies may be making huge returns because AI is genuinely increasing productivity and driving actual economic growth via their products?

Then why can't anyone point at actual numbers? The best we get is "look: line go up" while pointing at either the companies selling the AI shovels or the companies selling $1 of tokens for 50ct.

When cars replaced horses we didn't have to twist the numbers to understand the benefits. When emails replaced mails we didn't have to do 6 hours of mental gymnastics to see the increased productivity. Heck my grandma could tell the benefits of computers when the town hall she worked for finally discontinued typewriters

They're spending hundreds of billions if not trillions, and have nothing to show for it besides like 5 stocks pumping like shit coins. On top of the the drawbacks are massive and very visible...

Re: AI is slowing down

#589

Post by toasty228 »

no-name-here wrote: post #496
toasty228 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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”?

> in what kind of market is +16% “nothing”?

It's nothing because it happens all the time, it's not statically relevant, like not at all: https://www.macrotrends.net/2526/sp-500-historical-annual-re...

This forum is full of techies with very strong opinions about their toys but 0 economical, political or historical education, and it shows

Re: AI is slowing down

#590

Post by vessenes »

avarun wrote: post #578
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…

There is no substance to the article to tackle. Ed Zitron is a clown that makes seven million dollars a year writing unsubstantiated bullshit on the internet. He has been consistently wrong in every single one of his predictions and will continue predicting the sky is falling, because his content has zero educational value. It is purely a confirmation-bias inducing dopamine hit for the perpetually aggrieved.

I like how he's started preliminarily saying "Now listen, I don't make any trades on this fine thinking. And that's okay by me." So far below the standards of public markets due diligence. Sadly credulous readers will follow his advice. Which could turn out to be accurate in the public markets -- who knows? But if it's accurate it will be an accident, because the quality of analysis is so poor we should not call it analysis.
Post reply on HN