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AI's Affordability Crisis

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Re: AI's Affordability Crisis

#341

Post by steveBK123 »

sdesol wrote: post #183
burningChrome wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can give you some additional anecdotal evidence to support your comment. I work at a Fortune 200 company. At first, it was the Wild West. Need an LLM? You got it. Need to or want to build an army of agents? Done and done. We literally had everything at the tips of fingers for about 3 months. Teams were building their own internal tools, the team I work on canceled contracts with several software vendors because tea…

Was there at least performance gains to be measured?

I saw incredible productivity gain call-outs from non-technical teams like "it saves me 15 minutes per day summarizing my email".

Trillions of CapEx for good Clippy/Siri, nice.

Re: AI's Affordability Crisis

#342

Post by beepbooptheory »

simianwords wrote: post #299
mikgp wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this really for comparable models though? Will folks at scale continue to choose Anthropic frontier AI model if OpenAI releases a similar generation at a 90% discount with comparable capabilities? It feels like the fungibility assumes delineation by capability _and_ cost. No one is choosing sonnet over opus at similar price points.

I could get into this line of debate that I find interesting but it doesn't contradict my point that the article itself is wrong and written on false assumptions.

I mean.. get into it! Isn't it much more interesting for you to defend the real world strength of your argument than it is to just gotcha the article? It's highly relevant to all of this either way. Don't leave us hanging!

Re: AI's Affordability Crisis

#343

Post by HDBaseT »

asdff wrote: post #243
KolibriFly wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like this is way too binary. I don't have to write every line of code myself to understand the system. I don't write my own compiler HTTP stack or database either It's more about the level of abstraction. If AI handles 80% of the grunt work and I spend my time on architecture and reviews that's still a win

This works for you because you were trained in The Old Way. Consider the people younger than you. Who are literally shutting their brain off so AI can cheat on their essays and exams. They aren't going to be good architects or code reviewers.

This is some "old man yells at cloud" nonsense.

There will always be proficient programmers who can read and write good as good as yourself. I have 0 reason to believe programmers coming out of University today are any less competent than when you came out of University.

Re: AI's Affordability Crisis

#344

Post by jcgrillo »

segmondy wrote: post #327

The really crisis is that we are now in a phase of ("AGI" or Bust). That's it. Unless we get a self improving autonomous AI heading towards "singularity" then it's all going to blow up. The amount of money invested is ridiculous and would need a long time to recoup. Without AGI, plenty investors are going to start exiting their positions and the entire thing will be drained.

Yes, it's a pyramid scheme. There has been no real tech growth products since Web 2.0/mobile. VR/Metaverse? No. Web3? No. AI is another attempt at a manufacturing a synthetic, viral "growth technology" because we've run out of easy, high-value Web 2.0 eyeballs to mine for "engagement". AI blew up way bigger than web3, and arguably is a little bit less useless, but it's basically made of the same stuff. Unless something fantastic and magical happens. But it won't.

Re: AI's Affordability Crisis

#345

Post by wookmaster »

burningChrome wrote: post #200
sdesol wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was there at least performance gains to be measured?

AFAIK nobody was collecting analytics. The one team I was working on had put out a goal of "30% more efficient" using AI tools. Its about as subject as you can get. We never got around to what exactly that meant before everything got shut down. Myself and several other devs were laughing about the whole thing. The company was so amped about what AI could do they never even bothered collecting any analytics that would…

This is all still going on at my company but they’ve been trying to create dashboards to measure us as good or bad with our output unsuccessfully but they keep shoving it through anyways. It’s demoralized a lot of people.

Re: AI's Affordability Crisis

#346

Post by wookmaster »

Gigachad wrote: post #338
mkozlows wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your company was giving you Copilot, they were never that far on board the AI train anyway.

Github Copilot is a different product than the Windows / Office one. Horrible naming I know but it's basically just a UI and router to pick whatever model you want.

Microsoft names everything copilot anymore so everyone will continue to be confused

Re: AI's Affordability Crisis

#347

Post by wookmaster »

steveBK123 wrote: post #54
piker wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I.e., the demand for programming tokens turns out to be quite elastic.

I would imagine it only gets worse in the face of good-enough open/chinese/local models too right? Microsoft adding Deepseek support already as I recall? That is - for any definition of "they are behind X months" then eventually they get to the point Claude was in January when the world freaked out, but at 1/10th the cost. A lot of firms are going to mandate that is good enough for their developers.

My company banned Chinese models but I’ve got opencode setup with some open source coding models just in case. Luckily our laptops have some RAM (Mac)

Re: AI's Affordability Crisis

#348

Post by Gigachad »

qurren wrote: post #289
steveBK123 wrote: post #44

I think the biggest problem is not necessarily the cost to develop & serve the models, but how quickly user behavior changed with token based pricing. I know a lot of people at companies where the marching orders changed on a dime end of Q1/start of Q2. These are shops that were fully on the "use AI or die (because we will fire you)" train. Now there's monitoring, reporting, alerting not just on overall cost but on "…

What I don't understand is why some companies are so stingy on AI token usage. If you're paying an engineer $X and they're getting 3x the amount of work done you should be happy paying up to $2X in AI tool usage. In reality many companies start complaining at their employees when they hit $0.1*X or less.

Because work done isn’t the same as value produced or profits increased. Spending millions of dollars on useless busywork that no one would have bothered doing manually isn’t productive.

Re: AI's Affordability Crisis

#349

Post by simianwords »

beepbooptheory wrote: post #342
simianwords wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could get into this line of debate that I find interesting but it doesn't contradict my point that the article itself is wrong and written on false assumptions.

I mean.. get into it! Isn't it much more interesting for you to defend the real world strength of your argument than it is to just gotcha the article? It's highly relevant to all of this either way. Don't leave us hanging!

I promise to do it if you agree that the one of the foundational arguments of the article is itself false. And it’s not a gotcha at all.

Once we agree on this, it could be worth discussing further.

Re: AI's Affordability Crisis

#350

Post by 3dss »

anthonypasq wrote: post #211
beepbooptheory wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm no economist but if true don't you have the opposite problem? How do you get people to need X many tokens per day such that you can sell enough to make money? Wouldn't you need an absence of competition for that to be ok?

the demand for intelligence is infinite. you sound like someone in 1960 wondering what the hell we would even do with the functionally infinite cpu cycles we have available to us now.

Stupid poster.

The demand for intelligence when price approaches zero is infinite.

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