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AI is slowing down

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Re: AI is slowing down

#671

Post by oudlys »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #411
oudlys wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Productivity is not value. It's quite possible for you to experience productivity improvements, and actual value to not be created. That is what I think the most robust data is showing. https://unessays.substack.com/p/talk-is-cheap

That report doesn't match what faros.ai conclude which is mostly a paywalled report.

The report was not paywalled for me. It just required a work email. Which is totally fair from my perspective. Faros is providing a ton of value with the report. People do deserve to get paid - even if in collected emails.

You're right my analysis is at variance to what Faros.ai says. I think they interpret their data trying to rescue utility for the dominant patterns of LLM use.

But I think to anyone who is experienced with process improvement or queuing theory, their interpretation is clearly weak. Rework is a huge problem in queue systems, and they mostly just elide the throughput impact of an 860% increase in code churn coupled to a massive spike in bugs.

Obviously draw your own conclusions. But I don't think because I disagree with the interpretation of the people who originated the data makes me wrong.

Re: AI is slowing down

#672

Post by MSFT_Edging »

moritzwarhier wrote: post #299
MSFT_Edging wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vonnegut said in his last living work that the greatest addiction modern people face is the drug of cheap oil. We got addicted to the convenience and overuse, and have started a mass extinction event because of it. The perverse incentives will come for us all.

It is exactly this thought, in the form of this sentence, that could replace almost all of my comments in this thread. It feels depressing, but I think the same. When thinking about the larger world, it becomes increasingly hard to ignore. And of course it is not new. There were "doomers" already in the midst of the 20th century, but it doesn't mean that they were wrong.

There's nothing the selfish hate more than hearing their "choices" have a net negative effect. They hate the "doomers", because it puts a damper on their little side-effect free party. Doomers are more often correct because it only requires bare minimum pattern recognition. It requires more effort to defend an action that will certainly be different this time.

AI, Crypto, car-centric urban planning, cardboard suburbs in a barren field with bright green grass.

You tell someone that their selfish choice to drive a pickup truck only to haul something maybe one time a year, they shit their pants. They can't stand it, they start personal attacks and ask "what about you??". They seem to know it's wasteful, damaging, etc but they deserve it for some reason.

Re: AI is slowing down

#673

Post by mayankgoel28 »

I see this kind of arguments made all the time by people I know in finance etc, who seem willing to look at AI only from a finance/sociopolitical lens, disregarding tech altogether. The very fact that they are still writing about this for me is impact enough.

Re: AI is slowing down

#674

Post by [deleted] »

oudlys wrote: post #285
nyeah wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah this part scares me a little. I imagine it scares everyone who is more than a couple of years out of school. I hear that "the solution to LLM tech debt is more LLM." That might be true, but it might not be.

It scares me too. I actually think this is precisely the reason LLMs can't be the basis for a technological revolution. Because it's only one way. Like, if you have a compiler, and it has a bug. You can discover if that bug is influencing your code execution and patch it. You can go both up and down the stack. With LLMs, there is no way to patch it's translation function. You have to rely on it to forward process. I…

[deleted]

Re: AI is slowing down

#675

Post by y0eswddl »

datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #428

Always a bit eyebrow-raising to me how much people focus on Ed’s style rather than his message, which is, broadly, that the tech industry is deeply morally corrupted. He struggles to speak about it without becoming impassioned, but I read it as incredulousness rather than baseless hyperbole: “How are you still investing in and working for companies like Meta, despite the overwhelming evidence that they are terrible c…

because ad hominems are easier for the intellectually lazy.

Re: AI is slowing down

#676

Post by Hendrikto »

famouswaffles wrote: post #281
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…

>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…

> There's even a copilot button on new keyboards!

But not because anybody asked for that. It is part of the force feeding so execs can make this exact argument, and pretend that demand is there.

Re: AI is slowing down

#677

Post by Hendrikto »

putzdown wrote: post #136

One of the "smells" that gives away a quacky ranter is they speak in impassioned, "Why doesn't everyone understand this?" tones, but in fact their argument just doesn't flow. If Zitron's argument were as solid as he keeps saying it is, you would read it and understand it and see that it is solid. He would begin somewhere–statistics on AI demand, say–and then walk the calculations carefully over to the next step–maybe…

> One of the "smells" that gives away a quacky ranter is they speak in impassioned, "Why doesn't everyone understand this?" tones, but in fact their argument just doesn't flow.

Exactly what the AI evangelists are doing.

Re: AI is slowing down

#678

Post by datsci_est_2015 »

bawolff wrote: post #500
datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arguing against the business model is a method of exposing the tactics of AI businesses as a short term grift rather than a principled venture. The entire economy suffers when grifters profit - there’s not infinite money to spread around.

Is it really a grift when everyone knows? Its not like they are keeping their financials secret. Heck, the main AI companies aren't even public yet, so its largely sophisticated investors getting "grifted". Normally a grift involves tricking someone. The AI situation seems more like a bunch of investors knowingly investing in something very speculative. If they lose their money, while that is the nature of speculativ…

What’s the line that separates grift from speculative investment? Does it only require true believers? If Elizabeth Holmes truly believed in her product, would that have made it not a grift?

> The AI situation seems more like a bunch of investors knowingly investing in something very speculative. If they lose their money, while that is the nature of speculative investments.

This is a bit reductive, especially as the government’s role in shaping American life is reduced and the influence of extremely high wealth individuals impacts every citizen. We’re somewhat losing our democratic rights when Congress does not answer to our interests, and the extremely high wealth individuals directly (FoxNews) or indirectly (X, Meta incentives) manufacture consent.

The whole theory of low taxes and light regulations is that high wealth individuals will be incentivized to “create jobs”, like modern Lords of the Manor. When those who essentially steer the direction of the economy take actions that are highly speculative seemingly only to enrich themselves and concentrate wealth further despite public outcry … well, maybe there isn’t a word that elegantly describes that situation, but “grift” is as close as I can muster.

Re: AI is slowing down

#679

Post by barrell »

Spixel_ wrote: post #635
barrell wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The studies you are talking about are probably outdated, it's difficult to deny the actual productivity boost of coding agents. I'm not talking about the quantity of code produced, but about actual user needs that are now resolved that would not have been before. The main productivity gain will not come from existing software engineer, but from people that couldn't code at all before but are now able to do things by…

As a developer who has not been able to get any boost in productivity from coding agents, I find it incredibly easy to deny.

I’m a solopreneur, if I could lighten my load I would. However I have yet to save time using coding agents, with the exception of “I made this change to my model file, update all model to match the new format.” Which is cool, but maybe 0.01% of my job, and took a 1 hour task down to 10 minutes.

Re: AI is slowing down

#680

Post by svantana »

tipiirai wrote: post #604
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.

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

Probably this: [1]

80k * $7/month * 12 months/year = $6.7M/year

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/19/ed-zitron...

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