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I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

louwrentius.com

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Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#21

Post by jackb4040 »

dcow wrote: post #11

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 ab…

> AI costs aren’t going to stay this high. They will go down.

People said this a year ago, then all the companies admitted they were incinerating cash and had to increase to token pricing. Consumers basically mutinied and managed to push back a bit, but that is the struggle right now - to keep prices from increasing 25+ times, not to see them decrease.

If you're premising this on some future technology like ASICs, even if that works out then we probably shouldn't be spending a trillion dollars on datacenters that it will make obsolete.

Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#22

Post by duendefm »

I think it really depends on your knowledge and skill, and the kind of work you are using it for. It's hard to measure because the more you use it the more you lose some skills. But I have to admit that I can do much more parallel work when using the best models. It's messy, because sometimes I feel that I get lazier and just prompt them and go do some random stuff and sometimes even skip the part of verifying what they actually did meanwhile. But you can command AI to do massive stuff, you can get smart non developers to do useful work with them, it's really a new paradigm. One funny thing that I think people should consider more is pride in the code. If I code something by hand, like fully developing a service, I will get proud of seeing it work, I will attach to it like if it's my creation. That hardly happens if I use AI a lot.

Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#23

Post by johngoode »

aogaili wrote: post #9

These 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..

I stopped reading at the productivity comment, it's just deeply unserious stuff.

Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#24

Post by p2detar »

aogaili wrote: post #9

These 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..

From the article:

> This is why I'm not using AI. I'm not using AI on moral, ethical grounds.

The funny thing is - they are using AI and they will be using even more AI as it soaks into world economy even more; they just won‘t be using it directly. Well, not for a while at least, until practicality overcomes subjective morals.

Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#25

Post by scotty79 »

jldugger wrote: post #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…

> even if they were free.

They are free. You can download glm-5.2 and run it on your own hardware. Even you got hardware for free, electricity would cost you more than the sub, in most places.

Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#26

Post by podgorniy »

xyzsparetimexyz wrote: post #5

I think it's very productive in areas that aren't economically impactful. Reverse engineering old windows games for example. Doing absurd ports between languages.

> very productive in areas that aren't economically impactful

Writing emails and summarizing other emails...

Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#27

Post by runtime_terror »

dcow wrote: post #11

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 ab…

> AI costs aren't going to stay this high

Why do you feel this way? Are you talking about frontier models from US companies or smaller weight open source models?

From the perspective of US companies, it seems pretty clear they're severely under water and will need some way to become profitable or risk collapse, so how else will they do that or they than jacking up prices or some unknown future miracle advancement?

I could see the argument applied to self-hosted/OSS models tho.

Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#28

Post by sgallant »

aogaili wrote: post #9

These 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..

I appreciate how the author is explicit about their bias.

This opinion piece is more what he wants to happen rather than what's actually happening on the ground

Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#29

Post by ChicagoDave »

These people keep citing that survey from 2025.

That kills all arguments from the article instantly.

December 2025 through today GenAI has become massively better. I’ve built things with Claude in contracted spans of time that would have been man-years in the before times.

Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#30

Post by hsuduebc2 »

These AI sceptics always omit the possibility that running LLMs could become much cheaper in the future, which it almost certainly will.

This is largely an infrastructure problem, and it will be solved just as similar problems were solved with storage, network capacity, and computing power.

There will be bankruptcies, but the technology will prevail, just as the web did after the dot com bubble. Personally, I see the loss of craft and practical skill, which can only be built through doing, as a much greater danger. I still practise LeetCode from time to time so I do not lose the ability to write code myself.

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