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AI is slowing down

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Re: AI is slowing down

#641

Post by lofaszvanitt »

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…

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Re: AI is slowing down

#642

Post by pjc50 »

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…

> 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.

This is the big one. It's clear that AI can generate huge volumes of code by KLOC. It is not clear that spending a lot of money tokenmaxxing will eventually result in increased real revenue for software businesses, and eventually even an MBA has to look at a "money in vs money out" chart.

Re: AI is slowing down

#643

Post by emil-lp »

simianwords wrote: post #616
emil-lp wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I didn't find the answer there, that's why I asked.

What hardware is needed, how much of it, cooling, and what does it all cost you?

Or are you saying I can take my old desktop and serve Deepseek v3.2 to 10k users simultaneously and it would cost me about $1 per megatoken?

Re: AI is slowing down

#645

Post by jorisw »

dgellow wrote: post #612
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…

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

Care to at least refer to some sources why?

Re: AI is slowing down

#646

Post by davemp »

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…

Ah yes. Just need to displace 16 million people’s livelihoods. No big deal.

Re: AI is slowing down

#647

Post by 0xpgm »

The best outcome of the AI hype for was to be the investment into next generation nuclear power plants, ushering the world into a post energy scarcity era.

Maybe we'll get there, maybe not. These days I only hear of datacenter investments.

Re: AI is slowing down

#648

Post by senordevnyc »

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…

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.

This is a bizarre way to try and estimate market size.

Maybe Apple’s AI represents 100% of the market! Maybe it represents 0.000001%! We can make up any numbers we want!

Anthropic subscriptions alone already dwarf your $10 billion number.

Re: AI is slowing down

#649

Post by MrBuddyCasino »

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.

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Re: AI is slowing down

#650

Post by abroszka33 »

simianwords wrote: post #38
simianwords wrote: post #17

Ed Zitron speaks to a particular type of angry tech conservative. He’s not speaking truth or exposing anything. He’s the soothing voice the tech nerds of yesterday year are yearning for. The angry polemic that goes on and on and on with cuss words used liberally is just meant to evoke emotion and cathartic resolution to the type of people mentioned above. Not truth. The thing is, there are a lot of people that find c…

I'm collecting many kinds of predictions Ed Zitron made so that you can see for yourself whether he has a good track record. ------- > While complex, generative AI is a technology that probabilistically generates answers, and has no "intelligence." It is inherently limited by its architecture, and in turn can only get "better" in a linear fashion. I see no signs that the transformer-based architecture can do signific…

> He wrote this in 2024 before reasoning models came out. Remember how ChatGPT was in 2024? Do you think this person is someone who gets predictions right?

Any benchmark on AI shows that it gets better linearly. So his prediction was correct. There is no exponential AI improvement anywhere.

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