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

I love LLMs, I hate hype

geohot.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 340 posts

Re: I love LLMs, I hate hype

#111

Post by Aurornis »

helloplanets wrote: post #66
Aurornis wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are all still very subsidised. I think the opposite: I think the frontier labs have good margins on their inference unit costs. We can already see what it costs to run near frontier-size models. There are independent business pivoting to serving these models at reasonable prices and they're competing on OpenRouter for costs much lower than frontier labs. > Is there any guarantee that I'll be able to run a Opus…

The subscription based plans are heavily subsidized, but the direct API inference pricing (which larger companies need to pay) is profitable. Using a full Claude Max 20x plan to 100% of weekly usage would easily cost you 2k through the API. While the Claude Max 20x plan is 200 a month.

> Using a full Claude Max 20x plan to 100% of weekly usage

I doubt many of their customers are on the 20X plan. Of those, I doubt many of them are using 100% of their weekly usage regularly.

Comparing the 100% maximum usage scenario of their most discounted plan against the API cost has been a trap in this conversation since it came out. I bet if we saw their financials it would be a tiny sliver in a pie chart somewhere.

Re: I love LLMs, I hate hype

#112

Post by password54321 »

dominotw wrote: post #102
password54321 wrote: post #20

Yeah I don't think any of the labs have some secret sauce for intelligence either. It seems most of the advancements are still coming from hardware, making LLMs more efficient and throwing more compute and data at problems. And even those problems still require a lot of prompt engineering: https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/04d1d1e4-bc75-476a-97cf-49055cd98...

even meta that sucks at doing anything is releasing frontier models. making an top ai is easier than making twitter clone( threads) if you have enough money.

I mean the problem with Threads was lack of user engagement. The same could possibly still be said about their models.

Re: I love LLMs, I hate hype

#113

Post by arjie »

sixtyj wrote: post #86
hamandcheese wrote: post #10

> where’s all this new magical software that the productivity improvements should imply? It's running, privately, in my homelab. I think we are entering what I call the "have it your way" era. If an open source project doesn't do exactly what you want it to do, fork it, or create a new version. It's too easy. This makes me a bit concerned about the future of open source. Upstreaming used to be worth it, since maintai…

Creating a fork of an active project only makes sense if you are its sole user (of the fork) and you really need exactly the modification you've been dreaming of. I have seen so many unnecessary forks of popular projects that I think it's better to stick with the original, even if that means it won't be perfect.

In the old world, this was because keeping in sync with upstream was hard. In the new world, it takes an hour. And because you're the only user, you can test in prod. Makes the whole thing faster. I have lots of forked and family-only software. Some are abandoned upstream etc.

As cost to software goes to zero, these things become easily possible. In the past, I'd only fork top-quality software (things like `xsv` etc. which is easy to edit. These days even complex PHP software I fork with little trouble.

With lots of software, the value is in the data model and algorithm choices. Sometimes I even just point Claude Code / Codex at an open-source thing I want to vendor some functionality into my personal setup with and it gives me what I want. The hard part for me is modeling the data well. That takes experience with encountering things and it's hard to replicate the edges. LLMs often don't get the rough bits right. But someone else's hard work usually has accounted for this.

Re: I love LLMs, I hate hype

#114

Post by bluegatty »

SwellJoe wrote: post #105
bluegatty wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frontier labs will figure out all sorts of ways to wiggle into the value chain beyond being commodities.

When do you reckon they'll start doing that?

They are raking in 10's of billions, growing revenues astronomically as we speak.

That's not sign of commodity actor, just the opposite.

Re: I love LLMs, I hate hype

#115

Post by dominotw »

password54321 wrote: post #112
dominotw wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

even meta that sucks at doing anything is releasing frontier models. making an top ai is easier than making twitter clone( threads) if you have enough money.

I mean the problem with Threads was lack of user engagement. The same could possibly still be said about their models.

yes ofcourse. But engagement needs strategy and execution.

Re: I love LLMs, I hate hype

#116

Post by [deleted] »

hamandcheese wrote: post #10

> where’s all this new magical software that the productivity improvements should imply? It's running, privately, in my homelab. I think we are entering what I call the "have it your way" era. If an open source project doesn't do exactly what you want it to do, fork it, or create a new version. It's too easy. This makes me a bit concerned about the future of open source. Upstreaming used to be worth it, since maintai…

[deleted]

Re: I love LLMs, I hate hype

#117

Post by ChicagoDave »

A lot of people died from Covid and if not for mRNA technology and extraordinary caregivers a lot more deaths would have occurred. That’s hype where it truly belongs. Don’t mix AI hype with Covid conspiracy theories.

Re: I love LLMs, I hate hype

#118

Post by dolebirchwood »

lacedeconstruct wrote: post #110
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #13

At least for me, the jump in productivity has resulted in building stripped down one-off software for my highly specific use-cases. You can use an LLM to create anything but you still need to know what it is that you're building, and you need to think through how everything should work or the LLM will just fill it with sausage. You can tell that the models are still quite jagged and limited by the mixed quality from…

This doesn't make sense, I enjoy making bread at home but it costs 10x and tastes like dog shit I dont want to spend my time perfecting the craft of making bread for my daily needs (maybe once in a while its a soothing activity), I want someone smarter than me to spend his entire life coming up and perfecting a solution and exerting more time and effort than I can afford and I am very happy to support him so I can st…

> This doesn't make sense

Makes perfect sense to anyone good at using these models. What doesn't make sense is that analogy. Typing prompts isn't even close to as difficult to baking bread.

Re: I love LLMs, I hate hype

#119

Post by [deleted] »

emp17344 wrote: post #89
simianthoughts wrote: post #46

This guy is sooooo annoying with his stale takes. This is what he wrote before. > I’m calling it now, the adoption of AI agents into software development will be one of the most costly mistakes in the field’s history. Agents cannot program, and it’s taking longer and longer to realize that they can’t. Now he's writng > I love the progress. I’m so excited for the new LLMs, self driving cars, video generation models, a…

You act as a hype peddler in practically every LLM-adjacent thread. No wonder you’re taking this article so personally. Touch grass.

[deleted]

Re: I love LLMs, I hate hype

#120

Post by esafak »

dude250711 wrote: post #68
Aurornis wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are all still very subsidised. I think the opposite: I think the frontier labs have good margins on their inference unit costs. We can already see what it costs to run near frontier-size models. There are independent business pivoting to serving these models at reasonable prices and they're competing on OpenRouter for costs much lower than frontier labs. > Is there any guarantee that I'll be able to run a Opus…

I thought hardware prices would always just keep going down.

That is a great comparison. The problem is when costs become prohibitive for new entrants.
Post reply on HN