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AI is slowing down

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Re: AI is slowing down

#591

Post by [deleted] »

famouswaffles wrote: post #330
dofm wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Will Apple's offering be providing any meaningful/significant benefit over just using GPT ? If not, don't expect any miracles. Judging by the announcements today about its integration into the OSes? They are offering useful things ChatGPT cannot offer unless they write an "everything app". One can (maybe should) make the argument that this is the browser monopoly again, but given that the USA has seemingly no inten…

Just because Apple said they're 'integrating into the OS' (which can really mean a lot of things) doesn't mean they'll offer something users will actually care about that Open AI can't match.

[deleted]

Re: AI is slowing down

#592

Post by vessenes »

beloch wrote: post #508
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 us…

To be clear, nobody WANTS to have to go build all these datacenters. Well, maybe some pure-play hyperscalers do. But there's an immense amount of economic incentive to be able to do this more efficiently, capital and energy. And, what those hyperscalers want will not matter for a second if there isn't demand for the tokens output by those datacenters - they'll go instantly dark and have to seek new forms of valuable compute to offer.

If this current building spree ends in massive solar and other power generation being overbuilt and cutting energy costs, we've had a really good outcome.

Re: AI is slowing down

#594

Post by Pikamander2 »

raincole wrote: post #582
avarun wrote: post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 himse…

One of HN's quirks, for better or worse, is that the lack of ability to downvote submissions encourages "controversial" content to rise to the top.

On Reddit, if 500 people like a submission and 500 people dislike it, then it'll end up with 0 points and fail to reach /r/all

But on HN, the same content will end up at 500 points since only the people who like it can affect its rank (unless it dies after getting mass flagged).

The end result is that HN's system favors "hot takes" while Reddit's system favors "preaching to the choir".

The two systems have their pros and cons, but personally I dislike being unable to downvote articles that are full of nonsense.

Re: AI is slowing down

#596

Post by mnsc »

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.

Well I sure hope that the gemini developers don't have access to agentic development tools because they might read this comment, build the multi slide editing feature using 450M tokens and ship it yesterday removing that Claude edge forever.

Re: AI is slowing down

#597

Post by Aerolfos »

barrell wrote: post #539
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 wild…

> I do think Ed in intentionally ignorant of the capabilities of LLMs. I think it's more complicated than that too. He's pretty well versed in the stated capabilities of LLMs.

The fact that he isn't a deeply involved technical developer who knows the ins and outs and nuances of using LLM tools is the point, because the stated capabilities of LLMs are that they are trivial to use, extremely powerful, and getting so much better every month that you personally can replace developers without even trying as a completely non-technical person with basic writing skills.

Given the hype and extreme claims being made, the fact that he remains ignorant and gets practically no use out of LLMs immediately disproves those statements. The counterargument boiling down to "you're using it wrong" is actually just a further indictment of Sam Altman and his like, because it shouldn't be possible to use LLMs wrong!

The rest, well, the hype needs to die before anyone can make sane estimates of what LLM tech can do for us in various fields. Right now it's all a complete mess.

Re: AI is slowing down

#598

Post by no-name-here »

toasty228 wrote: post #589
no-name-here wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Those kind of returns would generally be considered at least ‘good’ even if they weren't excluding some of the best performing stocks such as AI as was done here. Some periods truly have no returns or even negative returns, even without excluding some of the best performing stocks like was done here.

And even more so since inflation was 2-3%, not considered high, during most of that period.

Re: AI is slowing down

#599

Post by Aerolfos »

latexr wrote: post #583
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…

> 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 con…

> > 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.

Meanwhile, the prestige to be gained/lost from supporting/doubting the big mainstream thing is immense, and the incentives are actually in completely the opposite direction...

Anyway, on that topic The Line Goes Up video covers the arguments about prestige far more extensively and far more elaborately than I ever could: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g

But it's very much not the doubters who are worrying about prestige in crypto and NFTs, and probably not with AI either.

Re: AI is slowing down

#600

Post by kristianp »

D_Alex wrote: post #475
famouswaffles wrote: post #281

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? Why would you pay for ChatGPT, or even tolerate its inevitably increasingly desperate ad placements? Probably the same reason the Gemini app is still well behind ChatGPT in consumer usage and adoption despite being preinstalled on android phones worldwide ? Why are people using GPT on Windows. The…

That's all true... however the point that Google will get just $1 billion per year from Apple for the AI service is still insightful. If AI use via Apple represents 10% of the total that vaguely implies that the total AI market is worth around $10 billion per year (which admittedly seems a bit low), and if it is just 1% (which also seems low) then we get $100 billion per year upper-end estimate. Which just is not eno…

Uber was recently said to have a $1500 per head per month AI budget (1). Business use dwarfs consumer spend.

(1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48383056

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