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AI is slowing down

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Re: AI is slowing down

#611

Post by pjc50 »

s08148692 wrote: post #601
beloch wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is why there is so much interest in space based AI compute. It's not just SpaceX - Google, Anthropic and Nvidia have openly expressed interest If you look at SpaceX plans and ambitions, they hope to deploy massive compute to orbit (multiple Terrawatts, hundreds of thousands of sats). If their ambitions even slightly materialise it would make ground based compute pale in comparison. Whether or not they succeed in…

What is the multiplier in cost for a teraflop of compute in space vs on the ground? 100x? 1,000x?

> Whether or not they succeed in their plans is beside the point

No, I think that does matter eventually? Maybe for the IPO value?

Re: AI is slowing down

#612

Post by dgellow »

s08148692 wrote: post #601
beloch wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is why there is so much interest in space based AI compute. It's not just SpaceX - Google, Anthropic and Nvidia have openly expressed interest If you look at SpaceX plans and ambitions, they hope to deploy massive compute to orbit (multiple Terrawatts, hundreds of thousands of sats). If their ambitions even slightly materialise it would make ground based compute pale in comparison. Whether or not they succeed in…

Can we stop spreading the obvious bullshit that is space compute?

Re: AI is slowing down

#613

Post by lelanthran »

jimmaswell wrote: post #404
Jtarii wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gen AI is strictly bad for society.

Can't really agree. It's improved my life more than any other single innovation made in my lifetime.

> Can't really agree. It's improved my life more than any other single innovation made in my lifetime.

So? Something can be bad for society while improving your individual lot in life.

Re: AI is slowing down

#614

Post by munksbeer »

watwut wrote: post #606
tipiirai wrote: post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where is the source for that "makes seven million dollars a year" claim?

Also, I would not see "making seven million dollars a year by writing" as a reason to dismiss someone. Like, sounds like that such person is doing something other writers just cant.

The reason is obviously that engagement drives his revenue, and correctness or facts have nothing to do with it. Everyone knows that content creators will maximise engagement, and clearly he has found an audience who are seeking out a certain narrative, and will write to that narrative to generate revenue.

Re: AI is slowing down

#615

Post by pjc50 »

madaxe_again wrote: post #559
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…

The other question nobody seems to ask - what will $3tn in 2030 be worth? I would bet quite a bit less than it is today.

US inflation is slightly under 4%, so by my maths receiving $3tn in 2030 would be worth about $2.5tn in 2026 dollars.

Re: AI is slowing down

#616

Post by simianwords »

emil-lp wrote: post #568
simianwords wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the data here and intuition https://simianwords.bearblog.dev/conclusive-proofs-that-llm-... But if you don't believe me, lets have a bet based on what the IPO filings show?

Remember that OpenAI is subsidized from here to the highway. A better way to model this, since you seem interested is the following: How much would it cost you to start such a service for, say, 10k users? Any other internet service has had virtually Zero cost, $0. Google, Facebook, youtube, Wikipedia, you name it. They all went into the dumpster to pick up a thrown away desktop computer, and they could serve up towar…

> How much would it cost you to serve, say, 10k simultaneous users with a SOTA model? And if you wanted to go cash positive after a year, how much would each user have to pay?

My post has this same argument - we have multiple third party companies running open weight models. They are obviously not subsidised. And people are willing to pay for it. And these models are as good as the SOTA models from last year. So this kinda proves my point that SOTA is sustainable.

Re: AI is slowing down

#617

Post by pjc50 »

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…

Tetraethyl lead is not useless; in fact, it was hugely useful to the petrol engine economy throughout the 20th century! It just happens to cause nonobvious brain damage throughout societies.

In some ways things that are both useful and harmful are the hardest to deal with. And this isn't just "prestige", it's the already-decaying post-truth infosphere and the already-overheating CO2 levels in the atmosphere.

AI is useful in cases where you can automatically catch errors. Programming is uniquely suitable for this, because we have already got all our machinery of type systems and CI tests to catch human errors. How useful it is in other cases depends on how cheap it is to catch errors and how much they cost - and whether the cost of errors is inflicted on other people.

Re: AI is slowing down

#618

Post by Pingk »

joebe89 wrote: post #605
s08148692 wrote: post #601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why there is so much interest in space based AI compute. It's not just SpaceX - Google, Anthropic and Nvidia have openly expressed interest If you look at SpaceX plans and ambitions, they hope to deploy massive compute to orbit (multiple Terrawatts, hundreds of thousands of sats). If their ambitions even slightly materialise it would make ground based compute pale in comparison. Whether or not they succeed in…

How would cooling work in space based computing? To a layman like me it seems like a significant hurdle to overcome.

It really doesn't. You're purely relying on radiation fins to carry heat away, which are incredibly inefficient.

> The radiator surface area problem also scales uncomfortably. At 838 watts per square meter, rejecting 1 megawatt of waste heat requires roughly 1,200 square meters of radiator. Deploying that much surface area on a satellite is a structural engineering challenge that gets harder with every order of magnitude. The ISS solar arrays span about 2,500 square meters total.

So even a 2MW data centre in space requires a cooling array rivalling the international space station. Starcloud launched a single H100 in November and they were unable to run it 24/7 due to heat buildup.

Even with novel solutions to make heat transfer to the fins more efficient, like phase-change liquids, the limiting factor is that the vacuum of space is a tremendous insulator.

https://thecoolingreport.com/intel/starcloud-orbital-data-ce...

https://satnews.com/2026/03/17/the-physics-wall-orbiting-dat...

Re: AI is slowing down

#619

Post by pjc50 »

Pikamander2 wrote: post #594
raincole wrote: post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fl…

People (ab)use the flagging system for that. I've seen plenty of categories of article that get upvoted onto the front page and then instantly vaporized off it by flagging.

Re: AI is slowing down

#620

Post by zmmmmm »

overgard wrote: post #509
DonsDiscountGas wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

check out DeepSeek V4 Pro .... this is where the threat vector comes from IMHO. If anything is triggering a rush to IPO imho it's seeing these cheap / free models on the horizon that are "good enough" for 80% of the core use case supporting their valuation.
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