AI costs aren’t going to stay this high. They will go down. Nobody is going to turn off AI, but they will care about making sure that we are reasonably efficient when using it. Compute that can happen locally will. Communities that responsibly want to build data centers are. Climate implications will be addressed by policy. People said the same about the internet 30 years ago… It’s not about raw productivity. It’s about perceived effort. If a job feels easier with AI assistance we’ll demand it. If AI checking a human’s work is more reliable than a human checking AI’s work (it is) that’s what we’ll deploy.
I think you might be fooling yourself with AI
11–20 of 174 posts
Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI
#12I think you might be fooling yourself. Personal-plan subscription subsidies do not equate to "it's not viable, and all of it is about to be shut off." If that were true, then Kilo Code, Claude Code, Cline, Pi, and Command Code would not be occupying 5 of the top 10 apps using OpenRouter. People have purchased 20 trillion tokens this month already for coding on OpenRouter alone at full-price market rates.
Would you commission a study about whether cars are really a faster form of locomotion before deciding to purchase one?
There is empirical data right in front of your face. You're just choosing to exclude it because of where you already stand.
That's exactly what Feynman was warning about.
Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI
#13Many improvements have come to AI that have reduced costs of inference and training, like sparse attention, and many more will arise in the future. To talk about the cost of AI right now versus the future is to talk about the first IBM computers versus the personal computing that appeared years later. The cost will go down. In fact that is what the major labs are definitely banking on.
Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI
#14These articles are so off from reality to the point that it can't be taken seriously at all. I keep wondering how they keep popping at HN. At least the author admit he is biased..
"These articles are so off from reality to the point that it can't be taken seriously at all"
So you disagree with the quote from Feynman? (the quote that forms the basis of the article)
I'm genuinely curious to know what part of the article you feel is "so far off from reality"?
Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI
#15I think you might be fooling yourself. Personal-plan subscription subsidies do not equate to "it's not viable, and all of it is about to be shut off." If that were true, then Kilo Code, Claude Code, Cline, Pi, and Command Code would not be occupying 5 of the top 10 apps using OpenRouter. People have purchased 20 trillion tokens this month already for coding on OpenRouter alone at full-price market rates. Would you co…
It's like looking at the popularity of sports betting and concluding that it's a viable way to make money.
Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI
#16> And I'm also standing by my own idea that AI will run out of money and just be turned off due to the huge operational cost.
Thats a pretty strong outcome. It implies that not only are GPUs that power AI too expensive long term, but they cost too much to operate even if they were free.
Seems to me the more likely outcome is a wave of dotCom style bankruptcies wiping out equity holders for companies who contracted to buy chips and datacenters at MSRP, and a second wave for the groups that step in after to operate whats left without the absurd financing charges and lower capex.
Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI
#17Now imagine if this was written about the first steam engines being used inefficiently to pull coal up out the ground and pump out the water. It's so expensive -- is this really more effective than just hiring 50 men? We all know how that ended up...
Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI
#18I've noticed that you can either move very fast with AI, or very slow. Moving fast, you place a lot of trust in the agent and let it proceed and create something very quickly that works at a surface level and that you don't understand at all. Moving slow you take the time to ask questions and understand every part of the application and learn more about how to code it yourself and make changes as necessary. One thing…
This, I'm working on a game engine as a hobby project. I can do one "big" feature over a weekend, most of it including designing and manual testing that it's working as expected, but then it takes me 2 weekends to break up the changes into smaller commits using jj, which also gives me the chance to review and understand the code myself. So it's a weird mix of fast and slow, but I think I've grown to prefer reviewing…
> …but then it takes me 2 weekends to break up the changes into smaller commits using jj, which also gives me the chance to review and understand the code myself.
I just tell Claude Claude code, "commit all, grouping logically" after a tranche of work.
Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI
#19This is the perfect archetype of an intellectually lazy anti-AI post. The author ends with his admission of bias, but he'd be better off starting with it, as it's clear that his reasoning flows entirely from it. AI is bad for productivity, says this single study from 2025. AI is unsustainable, says this article I found. AI will all just disappear one day... because I hope so?
Ironically, the author would have been better asking an LLM to write the article. At least it would have found better sources and developed more convincing arguments.
Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI
#20These articles are so off from reality to the point that it can't be taken seriously at all. I keep wondering how they keep popping at HN. At least the author admit he is biased..
"These articles are so off from reality to the point that it can't be taken seriously at all" So you disagree with the quote from Feynman? (the quote that forms the basis of the article) I'm genuinely curious to know what part of the article you feel is "so far off from reality"?
The part that says
> AI will just be turned off.