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The beginning of scarcity in AI

tomtunguz.com

121–130 of 239 posts

Re: The beginning of scarcity in AI

#121

one graph, One graph and the author is pinning an entire theory on it? Infra is always limited, even at hyper scalers. This leads to a bunch of tools dfofr caching, profiling and generally getting performance up, not to mention binpacking and all sorts of other "obvious" things.

On X I had seen him mostly posting memes so this post seems par for the course

Re: The beginning of scarcity in AI

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes `foo` is a pointer. `free(NULL)` is harmless in C89 onwards. As I said, programmers freeing NULL caused so many issues they changed the API. It doesn't help that `malloc(0)` returns NULL on some platforms. If you are writing code for an embedded platform with some random C compiler, all bets on what `free(NULL)` does are off. That means a cautious C programmer who doesn't know who will be using their code never a…

So what would be the best practice in a situation like that? I would (naively?) imagine that a null pointer would mostly result from a malloc() or some other parts of the program failing, in which case would you not expect to see errors elsewhere?

> imagine that a null pointer would mostly result from a malloc() or some other parts of the program failing, in which case would you not expect to see errors elsewhere?

Oh yes, you probably will see errors elsewhere. If you are lucky it will happen immediately. But often enough millions of executed instructions later, in some unrelated routine that had its memory smashed. It's not "fun" figuring out what happened. It could be nothing - bit flips are a thing, and once you get the error rate low enough the frequency of bit flips and bugs starts to converge. You could waste days of your time chasing an alpha particle.

I saw the author of curl post some of this code here a while back. I immediately recognised the symptoms. Things like:

    if (NULL == foo) { ... }
Every 2nd line was code like that. If you are wondering, he wrote `(NULL == foo)` in case he dropped an `=`, so it became `(NULL = foo)`. The second version is a syntax error, whereas `(foo = NULL)` is a runtime disaster. Most of it was unjustified, but he could not help himself. After years of dealing with C, he wrote code defensively - even if it wasn't needed. C is so fast and the compilers so good the coding style imposes little overhead.

Rust is popular because it gives you a similar result to C, but you don't need to have been beaten by 10 years of pain in order to produce safe Rust code. Sadly, it has other issues. Despite them, it's still the best C we have right now.

Re: The beginning of scarcity in AI

#123

We just had a realization during a demo call the other day: The companies that are entirely AI-dependent may need to raise prices dramatically as AI prices go up. Not being dependent on LLMs for your fundamental product’s value will be a major advantage, at least in pricing.

in fact I am betting opposite. frontier models are getting not THAT much better anymore at all, for common business needs at least. but the OSS models keep closing the gap. which means if trajectories hold there will be a near future moment probably where the big provider costs suddenly drop shaerply once the first viable local models consistently can take over tasks normally on reasonable hardware. Right now probably frontier providers rush for as much money as they possible can before LLMs become a true commodity for the 80% usecases outside of deep expert areas they will have an edge over as specialist juggernauts (iE a cybersecurity premium model).

So its all a house of cards now, and the moment the bubble bursts is when local open inference has closed the gap. looks like chinese and smaller players already go hard into this direction.

Re: The beginning of scarcity in AI

#124
Why is written with an assumption that we have finite hardware production capacity? Industrial processes can scale up, new factories can come online… it will take a while but the whole point of economics is that supply will scale to meet demand. The shortage is a temporary, point-in-time metric.

And that’s not considering the software innovation that can happen in the meantime.

Re: The beginning of scarcity in AI

#125
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A dollar is an entirely fictional unit and trillions of it can be manufactured at no cost, while watts are constrained by the laws of physics, photons/electrons, supply chain of electricity and all that fun stuff in the real world.

> A dollar is an entirely fictional unit and trillions of it can be manufactured at no cost It’s still a useful proxy for resources allocation and viability.

..unless you're actually reasoning at nation-scale where OP's points apply

Re: The beginning of scarcity in AI

#126

We just had a realization during a demo call the other day: The companies that are entirely AI-dependent may need to raise prices dramatically as AI prices go up. Not being dependent on LLMs for your fundamental product’s value will be a major advantage, at least in pricing.

How is that surprising? We've been taking that into account for any LLM related tooling for over a year now that we either can drop it, or have it designed in a way that we can switch to a selfhosted model when throwing money at hardware would pay for itself quickly. It's just another instance of cloud dependency, and people should've learned something from that over the last two decades.

Not so much that it was surprising, rather that we looked at a competitor’s site and noticed that a) their prices went way up and b) their branding changed to be heavily AI-first.

So we thought, hmm, “wonder if they are increasing prices to deal with AI costs,” and then projected that into a future where costs go up.

We don’t have this dependence ourselves, so this seems to be a competitive advantage for us on pricing.

Re: The beginning of scarcity in AI

#127
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My observation is that the dog sniffs all the tires, picks one tire, lifts one leg and does the deed. I don't know if its a way of marking territory or domination. We need a dogatologist to explain what it means.

That was quite the unexpected anticlimactic ending. I’m sure Terry Pratchett would be proud.

We did it reddit!

Re: The beginning of scarcity in AI

#128

We just had a realization during a demo call the other day: The companies that are entirely AI-dependent may need to raise prices dramatically as AI prices go up. Not being dependent on LLMs for your fundamental product’s value will be a major advantage, at least in pricing.

Yup. Also regardless of price they need to spend more and more as the project collapses under the inevitable incidental complexity of 30k lines of code a day. It's similar to how if you know what you're doing you can manage a simple VPS and scale a lot more cost effectively than something like vercel. In a saturated market margins are everything. You can't necessarily afford to be giving all your margins to anthropic…

I also can’t wait for the time when few know how to code. Just like how many folks don’t know html from css when the homebrew website went away.

Their might always be llms, but the dependence is an interesting topic.

Re: The beginning of scarcity in AI

#129
post #87
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is ASML really the bottleneck? Do you believe anybody but TSMC and few fabs could really use and acquire those machines? I don't know the throughput of a EUV device from ASML but I imagine you need : - clean room, itself needing the infrastructure for it (size, airCo, filtering, electricity) and the staff to run and maintain that basically empty space - wafers to "print" on, so that's a lot of water and logistic to m…

> (so infrastructure for clean water and all chemicals) Fabs are some of the most complex chemical engineering sites (dealing with some of the most dangerous substances) in the world. So don't underestimate the complexity of this part.

Well that was part of my point, not everybody is TSMC. It's not "just" getting an ASML machine and voila, you're good to go.

Re: The beginning of scarcity in AI

#130
... and I have this little idea in the back of my mind: when companies can no longer keep up with demand and people have (albeit more limited and reduced) local capacity, minds will start focusing on techniques (more humble and modest ones) to keep part of the system running locally, without dependency.

I know it may sound ridiculous, but it could actually become a way to break away from the business models that have been developed over the past few decades. Broadly speaking, this even amounts to saying that the biggest victims of AI could be the companies that bet on AI as a service.

Yet I know my vision is way too idealistic but I'm coming to imagine that a human brain, although less efficient in the long run, remains a reliable way to control the resulting costs and could even turn out to be more advantageous and more readily available than its silicon-based counterpart.

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