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The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy

ceodinner.substack.com

131–140 of 218 posts

Re: The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy

#131
post #73

If energy is indeed the limiting factor here, then maybe the companies building space-based compute (in which energy scales linearly) will remain after the wildfire. The key is for them to build before the money runs out--I'm not sure they will have enough time.

That is a very optimistic scaling assumption - and would almost certainly require substantial in space infrastructure (large scale lunar and asteroid mining and refining, lunar mass drivers, at least solid core nuclear drives) before you can even thin building all the necessary radiators and structural mass.

Mid-Century at least optimistically. All of this will play out before then, but broadly, those who can code the machines will survive and thrive as they always do. Except for the older ones, it will be yet another excuse to jettison all that experience and talent because of the gray hair that makes them creatively dead from the neck up according to youthful disruptive beach loving Vinod Khosla.

Re: The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy

#132
post #47

> AI inference demand is directed at improving actual earnings. Companies are deploying intelligence to reduce customer acquisition costs, lower operational expenses, and increase worker productivity. The return is measurable and often immediate, not hypothetical. Is the return measurable and immediate? Is it really?

Yes. Dentists offices that only need 1 receptionist instead of 2. A dramatic reduction in front line tier 1 customer support reps. Translation teams laid off. Documentation teams dramatically reduced. Data entry teams replaced by vision models.

And yet, whenever I pick up the phone I do so because I need to do something I cannot do on the website.

The chatbot, acting as my agent, whether on the website on on a call doesn't have more permissions than I have.

Re: The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy

#133

I'm excited for the AI wildfire to come and engulf these AI-written thinkpieces. At this point I'd prefer a set of bullet points over having to sift through more "it's not X (emdash) it's Y" pestilence.

It makes me wonder what verbal tics / tells it has in other languages.

Re: The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy

#134

I'm excited for the AI wildfire to come and engulf these AI-written thinkpieces. At this point I'd prefer a set of bullet points over having to sift through more "it's not X (emdash) it's Y" pestilence.

> "it's not X (emdash) it's Y" pestilence. I wonder for how long this will keep working. Can't be too hard to prompt an AI to avoid "tells" like this one...

Anyone lazy enough to not check the output is also going to be lazy enough to be easy to spot.

People who put the effort into checking the output aren't necessarily checking more than style, but some of them will, so it will still help.

Re: The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy

#136
> The first web cycle burned through dot-com exuberance and left behind Google, Amazon, eBay, and PayPal: the hardy survivors of Web 1.0. The next cycle, driven by social and mobile, burned again in 2008–2009, clearing the underbrush for Facebook, Airbnb, Uber, and the offspring of Y Combinator. Both fires followed the same pattern: excessive growth, sudden correction, then renaissance.

I note your AI missed the crypto hypecycle. Maybe because it really was a bubble.

Re: The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy

#137
post #2

> Every promising engineer, designer, or operator is being courted by three, five, ten different AI startups, often chasing the same vertical, whether it’s coding copilots, novel datasets, customer service, legal tech, or marketing automation. This is flat out wrong.

I still don't understand what should this "wildfire" burn. My perspective is very limited, but where are the pets.com of AI today? Where are all the small companies with improbable business cases that are getting absurd valuations/ investments because they're in AI? The space seems mostly dominated by huge players that, while burning tons of cash, are still making real progress on something that will have more econom…

OpenAI and Anthropic.

They have no business case - they are 'burn money and hope AI allows us to build something we can monetise'. That's not a business model.

Re: The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy

#138
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you’re making engineer money, SV & big tech engineer money. Majority of engineering fields do not make that kind of money to retire at 50. Comfortable compared to the rest of the country, sure.

I think maybe that was implied, considering the topic of conversation and website we’re on. That said if you’re making $250k+ a year and not on track to retire by 50, seriously please open a retirement calculator and figure out what you need to do to get there.

Tax rates, cost of living differences, etc depending where you are in the world don't always make this a good salary.

Generally outside SV:

- If you are making $250+ it is at least middle management (not tech work) AND

- Only in zones where cost of living is eating this up (e.g. UK/Europe/Australia/etc can get to this equilvalent salary but costs for example for rent, food, tax, etc are much higher).

In most countries SWE is above average pay, but it isn't life changing and it still unfortunately has the boom/bust cycles.

I've met some very good engineers who have built some great large scale solutions who are on less than this salary often in non tech firms being outside of the SV area due to personal reasons (e.g. can't move due to family, too old to do the interview dance SWE has become these days, etc).

Re: The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy

#139

With little growth and hiring happening outside of firms betting the farm on AI—and getting the funding to stay alive and play the lottery—what is a random tech employee supposed to do here? It seems like right now the most rational move to stay in the industry is to milk the AI wave as much as possible, learn all of the tools, get a big brand name on one's resume, and then land somewhere still-alive once the AI musi…

Do you think this has something to do with the current US policy of antagonizing most of the Western world?

Tech and software's investment balance sheet comes down to a largely fixed cost of development vs. a large customer base where every customer has little to no additional cost.

If you manage to burn the bridges or at least scare hundreds of millions of those people into exploring alternatives, that really eats into your total target market in the long run.

Re: The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy

#140
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just took them a few 26 years to touch their peak dot com bubble stock price again.

And it will be probably the same for nvidia, unless they didn't find another business stream apart from selling "shovels". BTW, stock price is not everything, Cisco survived, grew, and it's the backbone of internet today.

I wonder what’s going to be the “I can cloud-configure all my Cisco routers over the internet” for Nvidia.
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