Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

After the AI Crash

potsandpansbyccg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 244 posts

Re: After the AI Crash

#121

Post by ekidd »

toasty228 wrote: post #110
ekidd wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're unlikely to ever be priced out of tokens, at least if you'd be willing to settle for a model closer to Sonnet 4.5. That level of model certainly isn't as efficient as Fable 5, but it can crank out CRUD apps and other consulting mainstays quite well, with some supervision. To give you an example of model in this class, the DeepSeek V4 Flash preview is a 284B A13B model, with a native quantization mixing 4 bit a…

> You can easily run it on an RTX Pro 6000 Sure, and people can just build their own dropbox for like $250 too. How many people will bother though

Well, since you "freelance using GPT" and you expressed concern that you'd stop being able to make a profit if you had to pay API prices, I figured that swapping an off-the-shelf graphics card into a gaming rig might be a reasonable way to stay in the black. If it came to that. And the software setup on Linux is just compiling and installing llama-server, which shouldn't be enough to stop any programmer trying to make a living.

Or you could just take your credit card and spend $20 on credits at https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash. I'm not sure that I could manage to spend even a $1/day at those rates.

My larger point is that while frontier tokens are a near-monopoly and who knows what they really cost, many real-world workflows can be run using commodity tokens, or even served in-house by anyone who can afford to hire US or EU programmers. And if you're willing to settle for what would have been a state-of-the-art coding model in October 2025, commodity tokens are close to free.

Re: After the AI Crash

#122

Post by palmotea »

Kuyawa wrote: post #14

AI investment will crash but AI itself (the technology) will continue thriving, learning, improving and there is absolutely no way to stop it. The only reading on the crystal ball is if US companies fail, China will take the lead by leaps and bounds, so the only solution is to keep pushing the cart until the wheels come off or we all cross the finish line, together.

> AI investment will crash but AI itself (the technology) will continue thriving, learning, improving and there is absolutely no way to stop it.

No, there's is a way to stop it. As obvious counterexample: go all Butlerian Jihad: death sentence for anyone caught "making a machine in the likeness of a human mind." It's doable with a few laws and treaties. I'm not saying that's the only way it could be stopped, it's just a way it could.

I'm fucking sick of TINA, especially with arguments from vigorous assertion.

Re: After the AI Crash

#123

Post by 21asdffdsa12 »

vrganj wrote: post #57
21asdffdsa12 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, the empire aka, protection of free trade as a service is still alive and well with no viable alternative on the horizon. Every other empire is either not free trade or - just plain mercantilism and thus will exploit way more then the quite "idealist" us- trump is just a taste of what the others in power would feel like.

I don't think the country that singlehandedly messed up the global economy by launching a pointless war on Iran - without even coordinating with its allies! - that predictably got the Strait of Hormuz closed gets to call itself protector of free trade anymore. The US has lost its appeal as a hegemon. Constantly threatening allies with invasion isn't helping either.

Open a history book- before the us century- this stuff was the norm. Its what is to be expected after the us- retreats inwards. China blockading japan. The world blockading china. Russia blockading eastern Europe and vice versa. The shitty old world pre the ww2 order.

Re: After the AI Crash

#124

Post by ofjcihen »

LogicFailsMe wrote: post #58
joshstrange wrote: post #34

> Most new technologies have been welcomed by the public with open arms. I'm not going to predict how this is going to turn out in either direction but this statement gives me pause. I don't think that's ever been true. Yes, the siren song is strong but initially most new tech is met with skepticism. Are we so quick to forget "the internet/computers are just a fad"-type thinking?

Heliocentrism calling... Yeah, we reject anything new and scary. Gotta wonder what the cavepeople made of the wheel. Edit: still triggered by heliocentrism in 2026? OK then.

I mean Zeppelins were supposed to be the premier form of air travel despite the glaringly obvious issues.

Invoking “heliocentrism” is the HN version of “Ive already drawn you as the virgin and me as the Chad.”

Re: After the AI Crash

#125

Post by vrganj »

21asdffdsa12 wrote: post #123
vrganj wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the country that singlehandedly messed up the global economy by launching a pointless war on Iran - without even coordinating with its allies! - that predictably got the Strait of Hormuz closed gets to call itself protector of free trade anymore. The US has lost its appeal as a hegemon. Constantly threatening allies with invasion isn't helping either.

Open a history book- before the us century- this stuff was the norm. Its what is to be expected after the us- retreats inwards. China blockading japan. The world blockading china. Russia blockading eastern Europe and vice versa. The shitty old world pre the ww2 order.

Indeed. But the US can't do this and also assume people will still accept it as hegemon and protector of free trade.

It's lost those titles when it started behaving that way.

Re: After the AI Crash

#126

Post by agnosticmantis »

Schlagbohrer wrote: post #79
giancarlostoro wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's a few things going on and I also believe that in many (if not most, and dare I say ALL) cases AI as an excuse for lay offs is simply a scapegoat. If AI is so great, why aren't you re-training those who are ineffective at using it, and then cutting those who still don't make the cut? If it's this amazing thing for your company, wouldn't it drive revenue up drastically? I wish the SEC would start auditi…

This is a good example. If AI increases productivity so much, then having more employees would be beneficial, because each can produce even more output. So the firm would only be limited by the imagination of their product managers and marketing team finding new things to produce with this vast capability. And yet...

Devil's advocate: if demand is constrained/finite in a given market, there's an upper bound on revenue, no matter how hard you try. In that case it'd make sense to work on efficiency to maximize profits given fixed revenue.

(Not saying AI helps with that yet.)

Re: After the AI Crash

#127

Post by LogicFailsMe »

bsza wrote: post #115
LogicFailsMe wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heliocentrism calling... Yeah, we reject anything new and scary. Gotta wonder what the cavepeople made of the wheel. Edit: still triggered by heliocentrism in 2026? OK then.

People weren’t as ignorant back then as you think. They had very good reason to reject heliocentrism, namely that constellations don’t grow and shrink in size as the earth moves around. That, they said, would require the universe to be unimaginably big and empty, much more so than any other observation they could make at the time would suggest. If you have the time, I recommend reading Pliny’s Natural History. I thin…

Tell that to Giordano Bruno.

Re: After the AI Crash

#128

Post by bryanlarsen »

cmiles8 wrote: post #95
vrganj wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would one position oneself as an individual investor if one believed this thesis?

Not financial advice, but: Honestly it’s pretty hard and I wouldn’t recommend it. Shorting stocks and getting into bonds / default swaps but the system is broadly rigged against small players doing well here. Ie in the Big Short see everything that was needed for two guys to bet with their own money. It’s likely to be bumpy for all but stay the course with diversified strategy. The .com bust and 2008 are just blips a…

Heck, it's pretty rigged against big guys too. The subprime bubble was not something that only Michael Burry knew about -- it was a front page story on the Economist several times years before the crash.

There were lots of big guys that bet against the bubble, but bet too early and weren't able to keep up with margin calls etc.

Re: After the AI Crash

#129

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

vrganj wrote: post #72
cmiles8 wrote: post #35

It’s not a question of if but when at this point. To parallel to The Big Short this is the point in the movie where folks realize it’s mathematically impossible for things to not implode and so players are quietly positioning themselves for that eventuality before things are allowed to blow. It’s been a dramatic shift these last six months but everywhere I look now folks are quietly preparing their battle armor to su…

How would one position oneself as an individual investor if one believed this thesis?

I don't think there's a good way for individual investors to position themselves against economy-wide investment misallocation. As The Big Short also covered, any profitable short position is going to require making a risky bet about when the bubble will pop, and when things get chaotic there's no guarantee that instruments which "should" be correlated to the thesis will actually remain so. You can:

* identify a bad AI stock at $100 today

* produce an ironclad 100% guaranteed proof the company's valuation will drop below $50 by the end of 2028

* buy a bunch of long-dated puts with a break-even of $75

* see the AI investment bubble visibly falling apart in let's say March 2027

and you still lose if OpenAI acquihires the team at $80 in an attempt to prop things up.

Re: After the AI Crash

#130

Post by drewnick »

ursuscamp wrote: post #48
toasty228 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> absolutely no way to stop it. Unless if they take down the flat rate subs and you have to pay api prices, usage will drop a lot. Right now I freelance using gpt, if I had to pay api prices I'd probably lose 50% of the income, if not more, with the ~40% tax on top I might as well spend my time doing something else

I don't necessarily buy that API prices represent "real" prices of the models.

I moved one of our daily workflows over to Kimi K3 on Fireworks. It replaces two sales assistant positions, and was about $50/day for 14 million tokens total (in/out). They surely are not subsidizing this price as it is just inference only and other providers are even less money.
Post reply on HN