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I love LLMs, I hate hype

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Re: I love LLMs, I hate hype

#251

Post by SilverSlash »

byzantinegene wrote: post #235
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #13

At least for me, the jump in productivity has resulted in building stripped down one-off software for my highly specific use-cases. You can use an LLM to create anything but you still need to know what it is that you're building, and you need to think through how everything should work or the LLM will just fill it with sausage. You can tell that the models are still quite jagged and limited by the mixed quality from…

it makes financial sense at current subscription prices, but this might not hold true when they have to raise prices eventually

Why will they have to raise prices eventually?

Re: I love LLMs, I hate hype

#252

Post by [deleted] »

SwellJoe wrote: post #103
arscan wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who is going to end up capturing all this value being generated is going to be very interesting. Back in 1980, who’d have thought MS would capture the majority of the value from PCs over the next 3 decades, and not IBM?

So far, it seems to be the reverse of that disruption. Hardware companies, Nvidia, Apple, AMD, Intel, ARM, memory companies, are all having record-setting quarters, and it's actual profits, not subsidized by investors and circular investments (though the hardware companies are investing in the AI companies to keep the hype train rolling).

[deleted]

Re: I love LLMs, I hate hype

#254

Post by derwiki »

lubujackson wrote: post #224
SwellJoe wrote: post #81

This line: "this is my main argument against the valuation of frontier labs. It’s not that AI won’t create that much value, it’s that they won’t capture it." That is a very astute and concise way to explain everything about how the frontier labs are behaving and how they're trying to push more people to pay token rates for the best models. At the current subscription prices ($100 or $200 a month for a generous, thoug…

Best comparison is Anthropic/OpenAI are AOL/Prodigy. Massive market capture, no moat. Little by little, the convenience and weight will be scraped off, but they (probably) won't roll over and die for quite a while. By the same measure, NVDA is Cisco, providing the backbone and capturing a ton of the early benefits, but soon becomes furniture while the excitement moves further up the chain.

Cisco is also doing quite well with the AI boom

Re: I love LLMs, I hate hype

#255

Post by NetOpWibby »

apsurd wrote: post #30
NetOpWibby wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

False equivalency

ooh I like your site: https://webb.page false equating that author's AI hate is hating SF tech-bros? Oh I think I am being misunderstood, that makes me feel better about the insta-downvotes. Author states it plainly: > This is negative valence hype, not only is it not true, it’s mostly designed to make you feel bad about yourself and move to shitty San Francisco where everything really does suck like how these people…

Thanks!

The author didn't "go out of his way to blame shitty SF." At least, that's not what I (and seemingly most other people) got from it.

He's speaking to the AGI nuts who are convinced humans are going the way of the dodo because of AI and that kind of hype only really works in SF (and SF-pilled areas).

Re: I love LLMs, I hate hype

#256

Post by wmf »

helloplanets wrote: post #66
Aurornis wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are all still very subsidised. I think the opposite: I think the frontier labs have good margins on their inference unit costs. We can already see what it costs to run near frontier-size models. There are independent business pivoting to serving these models at reasonable prices and they're competing on OpenRouter for costs much lower than frontier labs. > Is there any guarantee that I'll be able to run a Opus…

The subscription based plans are heavily subsidized, but the direct API inference pricing (which larger companies need to pay) is profitable. Using a full Claude Max 20x plan to 100% of weekly usage would easily cost you 2k through the API. While the Claude Max 20x plan is 200 a month.

$2k through the API

Which costs them $200 to serve.

Re: I love LLMs, I hate hype

#257

Post by nulltype »

LugosFergus wrote: post #151

Since no one is talking about it: T2 isn’t about machines taking over the world. That has happened (or will happen). But humans eventually defeat the machines. Skynet is trying to prevent that by killing John Connor. That’s what the movie is about. I suppose it’s also about John searching for a parental figure through the T800. He doesn’t get that through is foster parents and his estranged mother. Anyway, I don’t th…

Maybe he meant to link to Colossus: The Forbin Project

Re: I love LLMs, I hate hype

#258

Post by timr »

wccrawford wrote: post #167
lacedeconstruct wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Makes perfect sense to anyone good at using these models. It doesn't really, because whenever I ask them what did they actually create, its always a shitty dashboard or a finance tracker or something derivative and worse than what is out there

You're missing the point that it isn't worse than what's already out there for them . They've implemented only the parts they need, and removed all the crap that just complicates the system for them. They've made it do exactly what they need, exactly how they need it. It's something that you couldn't afford to do previously, sometimes even as a programmer. Now, it's often quick and easy, up to a certain complexity.

> They've made it do exactly what they need, exactly how they need it.

…until it breaks, or the bot goes off and does something ridiculous that you can’t understand without domain expertise. Which always happens.

I’m sympathetic to your argument, but I also strongly believe that most of these so-called “exactly what I need” projects will be abandoned within a fairly short time. That’s totally fine, but it’s not where most of the effort in professional software lies.

Re: I love LLMs, I hate hype

#259

Post by helloplanets »

Aurornis wrote: post #111
helloplanets wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The subscription based plans are heavily subsidized, but the direct API inference pricing (which larger companies need to pay) is profitable. Using a full Claude Max 20x plan to 100% of weekly usage would easily cost you 2k through the API. While the Claude Max 20x plan is 200 a month.

> Using a full Claude Max 20x plan to 100% of weekly usage I doubt many of their customers are on the 20X plan. Of those, I doubt many of them are using 100% of their weekly usage regularly. Comparing the 100% maximum usage scenario of their most discounted plan against the API cost has been a trap in this conversation since it came out. I bet if we saw their financials it would be a tiny sliver in a pie chart somewh…

True, it'd be a whole other situation if the tokens limits were cumulative. I guess it would all come down to whether their Claude Code subscription plans are turning in a profit or not.

At least for the segment of 20$ subscribers who actually use Claude Code it seems that it wasn't being profitable, as a couple months back they were testing out a pricing model where Claude Code would've not been included in the 20$ plan.

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/04/anthropic-tested-removing...

Re: I love LLMs, I hate hype

#260

Post by helloplanets »

wmf wrote: post #256
helloplanets wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The subscription based plans are heavily subsidized, but the direct API inference pricing (which larger companies need to pay) is profitable. Using a full Claude Max 20x plan to 100% of weekly usage would easily cost you 2k through the API. While the Claude Max 20x plan is 200 a month.

$2k through the API Which costs them $200 to serve.

Yes, it is a 10x markup on the API prices. Depending on whether you factor in cooling costs, data center staff, etc. Or GPU costs and the electricity the GPUs are using only.

Either way, inference is very much where the money is made, training is where the money is lost.

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