141–150 of 160 posts
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Because it’s economics, a social science. Not a physics experiment you can replicate in a lab. You do what a serious person does: look at the thesis, look at the sources, look at the numbers, and do your own analysis
Serious people own their words and admit their mistakes.
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If Altman seriously believes his role is to create AGI then ask how to make the company profitable, he should get removed from his position of leadership asap. That’s crazy territory. It’s a grift, “AGI will save us” is the same as Musk’s “Mars colony”, it’s not supposed to ever happen, it’s supposed to be a goal post they ever move further
He said the following in 2019, at a StrictlyVC event, “The honest answer is we have no idea, we have never made any revenue, we have no current plans to make revenue, we have no idea how we may one day generate revenue. We have made a soft promise to investors that once we've built this sort of generally intelligent system, basically we will ask it to figure out a way to generate an investment return for you. It soun…
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If you fervently posit a theory but its predictions fail, why would anyone believe it?
Because it’s economics, a social science. Not a physics experiment you can replicate in a lab. You do what a serious person does: look at the thesis, look at the sources, look at the numbers, and do your own analysis
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It's kind of complicated to argue on the economic viability as the spending does seem a bit excessive but if you assume an industrial revolution kind of situation it can be justified, if you assume it's just another tech product to hype then it isn't and will all fall apart. I think Zitron is wrong on that but can't prove it as I can't see the future. You can look as past quotes like "that sound you hear is the slow…
It's difficult to trust the viability of this when the amount of money that it needs to generate as revenue is in the "several trillions" ballpark just for "break-even". If you assume that this will be "industrial revolution" situation... maybe? It doesn't help if this happy scenario takes 30 years to materialize. The money needs to be there by sometime in the next few years. Also, every risky bet has a happy scenari…
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I don’t trust someone who is dumb enough to think LLMs aren’t useful at all. Of course, he may just be deceiving himself or his audience about this belief. I don’t think he is actually dumb. But this alternative is equally problematic.
I choose evaluate claims on their merit. Many times in the past I was convinced by good arguments that came from people I dislike. I think Zitron is wrong in the usefulness of AI; but then again, so are the people hyping AI way beyond its capabilities. The numbers he brings up in the article are solid though. That said, if Zitron irks you, you can watch the most recent Patrick Boyle video on the big tech debt: https:…
The thing about "hyping AI way beyond its capabilities" is that the future capabilities will no doubt be greater than the current ones so they may just be talking about the future a bit.
There's a bit of a tipping point in usefulness between AI being a bit worse than humans and a bit better, like for mathematical theorems that's probably happened where being not very good was kind of useless and just recently they are proving lots of things. That will probably gradually happen in other fields creating a lot of economic value.
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There’s also Michael Burry and Gary Marcus, and you can sort of infer Warren Buffett believes the market is frothy
Didn’t Warren Buffett just approve a $10B investment in Google?
He seems to have quite a nuanced take that AI is a big deal but it's tricky to figure who will profit.
https://www.thestreet.com/investing/warren-buffett-alphabet-...
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>The actual risk that the author does not even broach upon for investors... the thing that will actually torpedo this massive investment are the open source open weight chinese models that commoditize the entire endeavor. If you don't have a monopoly, you cannot rugpull and 6x the costs on the consumer. This is the thing: let's just reason it out. What if OpenAI and Anthropic both fail and end up in bankruptcy? What…
I think the nuance that's being missed here is that the profit margin of inference serving when there's perfect competition is close to 0. Zero profit means no recouping investment costs effectively bursting the bubble. Technological progress can come at extreme pace but the lack of profits can still torch both the startup frontier labs and the hyperscalers. We plebians can then pick up H100 gpus off Ebay to help us…
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I choose evaluate claims on their merit. Many times in the past I was convinced by good arguments that came from people I dislike. I think Zitron is wrong in the usefulness of AI; but then again, so are the people hyping AI way beyond its capabilities. The numbers he brings up in the article are solid though. That said, if Zitron irks you, you can watch the most recent Patrick Boyle video on the big tech debt: https:…
I thought the Boyle vid was good. The thing about "hyping AI way beyond its capabilities" is that the future capabilities will no doubt be greater than the current ones so they may just be talking about the future a bit. There's a bit of a tipping point in usefulness between AI being a bit worse than humans and a bit better, like for mathematical theorems that's probably happened where being not very good was kind of…
I avoid making predictions on tech:
- AI may speed up on improvements and be a singularity moment, truly a new industrial revolution.
- AI may have only incremental improvements in the next few decades with diminishing returns.
- AI improvements may plateau and fizzle out.
All those are possible scenarios, and if you dig you may find evidence and historical precedence for all of those. I don't think making wild bets that can tank the whole economy based on a FOMO-fueled prediction that everything will work out in a best-case scenario is healthy.
This is a bit of a doomer article, but quite honestly, 200 billion dollars a year on a 30 billion dollar a year business that is growing does not really sound as bad as the author makes it out to be, especially when that business consists of growth startups that are currently primarily concerned with completely automating your current revenue stream. The obvious way to recoup spend is to grow, rugpull by cranking up…
"And having two whale customers is not really out of the ordinary for any software company... it's just the scale that is staggering." Does the Apple lawsuit over trade scret theft, including secrets concerning "metal-finishing finishing process", suggest that this "software company" may have plans to sell hardware