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AI is slowing down

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Re: AI is slowing down

#101

Post by nyeah »

ElFitz wrote: post #89
nyeah wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. If the arguments seem sound and well supported, then all we can do is attack the tone.

You can disagree. Sarcastically, or otherwise. But I think you may be reading more into my comment than I put there. I’m not attacking the piece. I’m not saying it’s right. I’m not saying it’s wrong. What I’m saying is, the tone made it hard for me to judge the arguments fairly, despite finding some of them convincing. And as much as I dislike it, persuasion does partly depend on how an argument is made.

Thanks, it's very clear what you're saying.

Re: AI is slowing down

#102

Post by james2doyle »

simianwords wrote: post #38
simianwords wrote: post #17

Ed Zitron speaks to a particular type of angry tech conservative. He’s not speaking truth or exposing anything. He’s the soothing voice the tech nerds of yesterday year are yearning for. The angry polemic that goes on and on and on with cuss words used liberally is just meant to evoke emotion and cathartic resolution to the type of people mentioned above. Not truth. The thing is, there are a lot of people that find c…

I'm collecting many kinds of predictions Ed Zitron made so that you can see for yourself whether he has a good track record. ------- > While complex, generative AI is a technology that probabilistically generates answers, and has no "intelligence." It is inherently limited by its architecture, and in turn can only get "better" in a linear fashion. I see no signs that the transformer-based architecture can do signific…

How’s that meme go? "We are 2/3 years into being 6 months away from AI taking all white collar jobs".

The criticism goes both ways. The word "fixed", in Ed terms, can be translated to "become a viable business that justifies the spend".

In regards to AI video, I think the fact that Sora is no long around is an indicator. And there is seemingly no real appetite for AI video outside of memes, jokes, and misinformation, probably indicates that the prediction around AI video has come true.

Re: AI is slowing down

#103

Post by cogman10 »

aogaili wrote: post #100
cogman10 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These models are building deep integrations into companies and the entire economy. Once that stabilizes, it will be like the electricity grid—pumping tokens to fuel decision-making across the entire global society. Good luck unplugging from that. Much like the electric grid, what we are seeing is a convergence on standard APIs. For example, most of these cheaper models are hosted using APIs compatible with OpenAI.…

I see your point, but having worked as a consultant for a few years, I think most companies will opt to stay once things are stable. Once these systems are functional, nobody wants to touch them. I remember one government project where we wanted to migrate a system from COBOL to a modern stack. The requirement was for the UI to stay exactly the same as the old green terminal; the evaluation criterion was pixel-perfec…

> the incentive to change them is incredibly low

There is no incentive to rewrite working software in COBOL to something else. You don't really change the people cost of maintaining that code all that much and you incur a huge rewrite cost.

AI is different, it's an ongoing cost to the company. If that cost raises aggressively, you can bet companies will race to eliminate it, no matter how integrated it is. Companies can and do do this all the time.

And the models are close, not the same, but close. That's what matters in LLM stuff in general. If a model is capable of doing the same work for less, it will be chosen. Especially since the switch over cost is often on the level of "point the tool at this URL instead of that URL".

I get what you are saying if this were a more sticky concrete tech that is harder to move away from. But that's simply not the case for these LLMs. A big selling point they have is that they are super flexible.

Re: AI is slowing down

#104

Post by james2doyle »

bayarearefugee wrote: post #36
happycube wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol... in this case, cheese imports from China are much cheaper, just not quite as good. And for those who are all "but dur CCP get all ur data" you can use things like AWS Bedrock (at least for earlier versions of Deepseek and Qwen for now) and have more familiar people get all your data. Or buy (at obnoxiously inflated prices) your own HW and not send your data to anyone.

> "but dur CCP get all ur data" The funniest part of this is that people are often talking about how LLMs are now writing 100% of their code, then also saying that they don't want to expose their code to foreign government exfiltration by using foreign models. But, uh, if an LLM is writing 100% of your code you have no actual secret sauce to hide from anyone, so why worry about it.

Yeah, so true. There is no moat to your competitors using the exact same tools and prompts to generate their apps and services. Companies should be hiring/retaining creative thinkers that give them that human edge rather than laying people off under the guise of "improved efficiency"

Re: AI is slowing down

#105

Post by cm277 »

dkobia wrote: post #9

Zitron is begging for a collapse at this point. Yes, his macro analysis correctly identifies a massive financial risk but his incessant pessimism completely misses the incredible ground-level utility that many of us on HN celebrate every day through undeniable, massive productivity gains. At this point I'm trying to believe there's a middle ground where the level of individual capability this unlocks, leads to major…

Agreed that he has an extreme POV (or more accurately that he trolls for views/subscriptions). But his central argument is valid: if AI underdelivers financially, this bubble will burst and this bubble is magnitudes larger than what we've seen before, so there could be very rough seas ahead.

The question is: what does "underdeliver" mean here? the pro-AI arguments I am seeing in this thread are equating mass adoption to agentic coding. Er, I dont know of any trillion dollar cap companies that sell dev tools. The point is Zitron doesn't have to be 100% right for his central prediction to come true.

Re: AI is slowing down

#106

Post by frisbee6152 »

solomatov wrote: post #94
frisbee6152 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He’s been continuously predicting that the collapse was just around the corner, that progress was slowing, and that there was no market for inference, since 2024. The fact he’s never reflected on the glaring failures in his analysis tells what we need to know about his intellectual integrity. There’s truth in some of his words about financial risk, but if you can’t acknowledge that there’s upside too, you can’t evalu…

> progress was slowing Do you think it's not slowing? Do I miss anything really important? My understanding is that we have now is incremental improvement on thinking models which appeared more than a year ago. Of course, a breakthrough might happen, but I don't see one yet.

The most important thing I would point to is Mythos et al and the wave of vulnerabilities that have been discovered in the past couple months. It’s a completely unprecedented event, brought forth almost entirely by improvements in the models themselves. That said. keep in mind, I’m talking about over the past two years. With Claude code and the capabilities gained since December of last year, there have been incredible gains in the capabilities that are now available. Demand for inference is higher now than it was a year ago, because capability has improved. A specific criticism that I would hold is that claiming that progress with LLMs is slowing, prior to that point, is embarrassingly wrong in my view. One could argue that the model capability improvements are slowing, and all the improvements were in harnesses. I think that’s a stronger argument, but I have a few problems with it. 1. Utility is utility. Whether that comes from the model or the harness is irrelevant when making claims about utility. I don’t think that’s a useful distinction most of the time, but especially when talking about the technology as a whole. 2. Marginal intelligence gain is different than marginal utility gain. It’s estimated that intelligence grows logarithmically relative to investment. However, the utility of a marginally more intelligent model may grow exponentially, because once behavior crosses a reliability threshold, it unlocks new capabilities. 3. Even on those terms, it’s not clear to me that frontier capabilities are slowing down. With Mythos and its contemporaries, we have been seeing a vast change in the security industry as vulnerabilities are discovered at an unprecedented rate. OpenBSD vulnerabilities, more Firefox vulnerabilities found in a single month than the past two years, critical Linux vulnerabilities. It’s hard for me to look at the effects there, a radical new capabilities baked into the model itself, and see stagnation. A part of the reason it might feel like it’s slowing down is because we plebs don’t have access to the top models.

Re: AI is slowing down

#107

Post by spmurrayzzz »

solomatov wrote: post #97
spmurrayzzz wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He has also consistently demonstrated, at least to me, that he doesn't really understand how inference works from a technical perspective, which weakens much of his core thesis for why there should be a collapse. I do value having some naysayers in the mix generally, because we do need balanced critique in what is otherwise a very frothy hype cycle. I just don't think he's making sound arguments, and that's even assu…

> that he doesn't really understand how inference works from a technical perspective Could you share what tells about it? I.e. where he was wrong about it?

There's examples both in his writing and also in his appearances on podcasts, interviews, etc.

I'll cherry pick a couple:

“When these new models ‘reason,’ they break a user’s input and break into component parts, then run inference on each one of those parts.” [1]

This is not at all how test-time compute works. At best, this is a very loose metaphor that he may have used out of convenience. This might sound a bit pedantic to point out, but this is a very basic thing that he's getting wrong (presumably at least, again it could be that he just used a poor metaphor).

A less pedantic example would be his claims related to gpt-5/chatgpt auto-routing. He argued that having a router means OpenAI can no longer cache static prompts, because the user prompt has to come before the hidden instructions [2]. This is just not at all how this works at inference-time. There is no evidence that the standard approach of system>developer>user instruction hierarchy has changed, the public API and caching docs maintain this.

But even more broadly, it suggests he is reasoning about kv/prefix caching at the wrong level of abstraction. It's true that conventional prefix caching does require a stable prefix, so yes, if you literally put variable user content before the static prompt, you would destroy the cacheability of that static prompt.

But that is exactly why inference systems are designed to preserve reusable prefixes where possible (via checkpointing or similar), and why serving systems care so much about prefix caching. This is also a big part of how disaggregated prefill/decode infra works where cache-aware routing is critical. His argument treats a bad prompt layout as if it were a necessary consequence of routing, rather than an avoidable implementation choice.

A router can read the user request, decide which model path to use, and then construct a normal downstream model call with stable static instructions first and user content later. Treating that as impossible implies a fundamental architectural misunderstanding.

[1] https://www.wheresyoured.at/how-to-argue-with-an-ai-booster/

[2] https://www.wheresyoured.at/how-does-gpt-5-work/

Re: AI is slowing down

#108

Post by titzer »

> This is a hysterical era perpetuated by liars, cowards, imbeciles, craven boosters and the easily-fooled. Those excited about generative AI are either the victim or the perpetrator of a con centered around a technology to ingratiate at the highest cost possible.

Who writes like this? When you lead with "everyone who doesn't agree with me is a lying cheat coward imbecile" I think we should just turn the volume down on you to zero.

This is breakdown in dialog. If it leads like this then I I don't care how accurate the critical analysis to follow is. I didn't read the rest of the article and don't think anyone else should either out of sheer disdain for this argumentation style.

Re: AI is slowing down

#109

Post by throw4847285 »

aogaili wrote: post #16

Some people seem to see the world only through bubbles. But if you look at human history, despite the ups and downs, we have a trajectory; generally speaking, human-created systems evolve toward ever-increasing complexity, impact, and efficiency. The current wave of AI unlocked language - the tools are now speaking and understanding. This, on its own, is astonishing progress. Language is the foundation of our culture…

Uhh, citations for all of these claims please.

Re: AI is slowing down

#110

Post by aogaili »

cogman10 wrote: post #103
aogaili wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see your point, but having worked as a consultant for a few years, I think most companies will opt to stay once things are stable. Once these systems are functional, nobody wants to touch them. I remember one government project where we wanted to migrate a system from COBOL to a modern stack. The requirement was for the UI to stay exactly the same as the old green terminal; the evaluation criterion was pixel-perfec…

> the incentive to change them is incredibly low There is no incentive to rewrite working software in COBOL to something else. You don't really change the people cost of maintaining that code all that much and you incur a huge rewrite cost. AI is different, it's an ongoing cost to the company. If that cost raises aggressively, you can bet companies will race to eliminate it, no matter how integrated it is. Companies…

We might need to agree to disagree on this one.

I don't think the transition will be as simple as just flipping a URL. There is an entire legal and technical infrastructure being built around these models and their integration. I think you underestimate an organization's resistance to change once things actually work, as well as the sheer complexity of making that shift.

I also expect pressure will eventually drive the cost of running these models down. Power plants are being built, more capable chips are being produced, and a big chunk of the capital right now is being used to scale the physical infrastructure—the data centers and energy grid. Once that stabilizes, these companies will have positive cash flows. Again, it's highly similar to what we saw with the expansion of social networks, just with more aggressive and widespread adoption.

Ultimately, a handful of companies are going to provide these core capabilities, just like we have a handful of major cloud providers right now. Why do you think this would change? If anything, the trend toward deep vendor lock-in is even stronger now.

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