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

161–170 of 244 posts

Re: After the AI Crash

#161

Post by B56b »

jsnell wrote: post #147

> analysts have estimated that it will take $2 trillion a year in revenue to pay for the infrastructure that has already been built I doubt any credible analyst has claimed that. What's the total AI capex that's already been spent? About $1T? It's a pretty absurd idea that those DCs need to make $2T/year for 5-7 years -> $10T-14T over their lifetime to break even. (Yes, this is nitpicking in the sense that there are…

He might be referring to this? https://www.wheresyoured.at/big-tech-2tr/

That figure is $2T in the next 4 years though. $2T/year would be quite silly.

Re: After the AI Crash

#162

Post by feoren »

laszlojamf wrote: post #111

I've been reading a lot of stories like this lately. I'm no business genius, but you'd assume that investors are. Are they just blind or are they burning cash on purpose. What's the steelman argument here?

> I'm no business genius, but you'd assume that investors are.

Absolutely not a reasonable assumption at all. Most people are not very good at their jobs.

> What's the steelman argument here?

If you're right about your prediction, but wrong about the timing, then you're wrong. The markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. Meaning, even if you know it's going to crash eventually, you don't know if it's tomorrow or in three years. Betting on stocks going down is extremely risky -- you have to get the timing pretty much exactly right, or you lose everything (potentially much more than you put down, depending on how you do it). Meanwhile, bull positions are basically free money until this point. Getting completely out of the market means you lose to inflation, although many investors have taken this strategy anyway.

Re: After the AI Crash

#163

Post by weezing »

romanovcode wrote: post #46

I think after the AI crash the biggest winner will be Apple. They will release MacBook Pro M10 or whatever that can comfortably run Opus5 levels of performance local model for software development/general ai that is baked in the MacOS for 7k USD.

They are already winners for not sinking money in it.

Re: After the AI Crash

#165

Post by evanelias »

gruez wrote: post #145
tempfile wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. Uber's a successful company and they raised a J round. Therefore the rule (D means Death) is not real. I'm not sure what you're implying, or if you just misunderstood the original comment?

>or if you just misunderstood the original comment? Did you? If you keep on reading, the parent comment further implies that both AI companies and uber are "vibes based". But that's hard to square with the fact that 7 years since IPO the share price is up 75%. Of course, you can argue we're still in the irrational exuberance stage, but that just creates a situation where you can never be called wrong.

> But that's hard to square with the fact that 7 years since IPO the share price is up 75%

Uber has severely underperformed the market. Passive S&P500 index funds had a total return of more than double that in the same time period, while also having less risk than investing in a single stock.

Obviously much worse outcomes are possible than Uber's, but it's far from a massive success, especially after all that hype! This isn't to say the old common wisdom about excessive funding rounds was valid, but it's not completely invalid either.

Re: After the AI Crash

#166

Post by watwut »

Marha01 wrote: post #105
zero_shift wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firstly, this generation of AI is not going to take away all jobs Secondly, we already know what happens when sectors face mass unemployment from the 1980s, when steel and coal workers were laid off en-masse: nobody came to help Accelerationists want to see their jobs go up in smoke because they think that if enough white collar workers are impoverished, everyone who was formerly poorer than them, will chip in to res…

> Firstly, AI is not going to take away all jobs Human-level AGI is by definition able to take away all human jobs. > Secondly, we already know what happens when sectors face mass unemployment from the 1980s, when steel and coal workers were laid off en-masse: nobody came to help There is a massive difference between 20-30% of people in a country being unemployed (historical sector-wide collapses), and 80-100% of peo…

> 80-100% unemployed

This would mean that there are no AI companies at all, because there is no one to buy their products. So, they have nowhere to get money for whatever they want to sell.

Re: After the AI Crash

#167

Post by andrekandre »

AlexandrB wrote: post #150
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?

What's new is the inversion of who holds these opinions. With the internet/computers, company leadership was often the skeptical voice while small pockets of individuals would push these technologies from the bottom. AI is the complete opposite with skepticism coming bottom-up and push to adopt coming top-down. The last time this (almost) happened was "The Metaverse" which seemed to be getting a lot of push from the…

  > This doesn't mean LLMs will be as useless as the metaverse, but a lot of the biggest proponents of the technology within companies are those most clueless about it which feels like a red flag.
(n=1 here) the end-goal i see from the c-suite (and biggest dev proponents) is with llms there is the potential to automate everything, like just write a product description then get all the tickets generated, then all the tickets are implemented by a swarm of agents and out comes a new product feature, ui and all

wether this actually reliably works out, or it just turns out to be a useful plugin/assistant is what will pop the bubble quicker rather than later imho

Re: After the AI Crash

#168

Post by cyanregiment »

Schlagbohrer wrote: post #113
cyanregiment wrote: post #52

Oh no, no one saw it coming. Oh well, anyway. Let’s argue about SQL vs NoSQL again. I miss that.

These days we argue whether the version of SQL created by the AI Swarm at Cursor is really SQL, or whether that benchmark is invalid because SQL and its code is already in the model's training data. Does that scratch the itch for you? X-D https://startupfortune.com/cursors-ai-agents-rebuilt-sqlite-...

Functionalists (philosophical) would say yes!

And this: https://github.com/swapnil404/mineSQL (SQL implemented in a minecraft world).

Re: After the AI Crash

#169

Post by minimaltom »

Most new tech has insane P/E multiples for a time, for me the litmus test between "capex is high but but within a few multiples" and "capex is insanely overbuilt, ahh collapse etc" is whether revenue growth continues its trend line. I appreciate this is probably giving more grace to the bulls than its worth, but as they say, the market can remain irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

Btw the $2T/year number is just wrong, thats higher than current capex.

Re: After the AI Crash

#170

Post by andrekandre »

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...

  > then having more employees would be beneficial, because each can produce even more output
this is true even without ai. the issue is does a company have enough ideas/runway for all those employees to generate new value...
Post reply on HN