wasnt ai supposed to get us post-scarcity?
That worked out, for the founders of frontier labs at least.
The beginning of scarcity in AI
131–140 of 239 posts
Re: The beginning of scarcity in AI
#132Why 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.
The economic hypothesis that has dominated the past hundred years is that economic growth is infinite because resources are infinite and (almost) free. We all know this is unrealistic and disconnected from our human condition.
Regarding "innovation", I agree with your idea. I even think that the major innovation will be to transpose models locally, using reduced infrastructures that will still be sufficient for the majority of use cases.
Re: The beginning of scarcity in AI
#133... 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…
The human brain is incredibly efficient (Approximately 20W of energy consumption¹). These AI systems use many orders of magnitude more energy than human equivalents.
Re: The beginning of scarcity in AI
#134We 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.
This was as clear as the sky when the first llm based businesses popped up. How did you realize this only now?
Re: The beginning of scarcity in AI
#135Neither is this the first time nor are they really confronting it
Re: The beginning of scarcity in AI
#136The models have already plateaued, you don't need latest and greatest.
Re: The beginning of scarcity in AI
#137We 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.
This was as clear as the sky when the first llm based businesses popped up. How did you realize this only now?
Replied here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47804804
And I don't really mean new businesses that are entirely built around LLMs, rather existing ones that pivoted to be LLM-dependent – yet still have non-LLM-dependent competitors.
Re: The beginning of scarcity in AI
#138We 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.
This was as clear as the sky when the first llm based businesses popped up. How did you realize this only now?
same as Uber… in the beginning everyone pretty much new that the cost of rides cannot possibly be that cheap and that it is subsudized. once you corner the market etc people just got used to “real” prices to the poibt that now there are often cheaper alternatives than Uber but people still Uber…
Re: The beginning of scarcity in AI
#139We 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.
> The companies that are entirely AI-dependent may need to raise prices dramatically as AI prices go up. It's not that clear. Sure, hardware prices are going up due to the extremely tight supply, but AI models are also improving quickly to the point where a cheap mid-level model today does what the frontier model did a year ago. For the very largest models, I think the latter effect dominates quite easily.
There's only so far engineers can optimise the underlying transformer technique, which is and always has been doing all the heavy lifting in the recent ai boom. It's going to take another genius to move this forward. We might see improvements here and there but the magnitudes of the data and vram requirements I don't think will change significantly
Re: The beginning of scarcity in AI
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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
I wouldn’t agree. Even at national scale, these projects cost resources. And the resources of all agents (org, countries) are constrained.
While we could reason in "performance / watt" and "performance / people", "performance / whatever other resource involved", and "performance / opportunity cost of allocating these resources to this use case and not another", "performance / whatever unit of stable-ish currency" is a convenient and often "good enough" approximation that somewhat encapsulates them all.
A simplification, like any model, but still useful.