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AI is too expensive

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131–140 of 165 posts

Re: AI is too expensive

#131
post #114

If you're older than 30, you've seen this play out before… This is just how the VC game works. Cross-town Uber rides don't stay $5 forever. The bright side is: this is a golden era of subsidized tokens. It will not always be like this, so now is the time to churn out your passion projects.

> This is just how the VC game works. Cross-town Uber rides don't stay $5 forever. Basically yes but there is a small difference I think. Things like Uber took an existing and proven business model. slapped an App on top and priced the competition out of the market. The winner takes it all. With "AI" it's not yet clear if there will be any winner at all because it's not yet proven if the business model is viable at t…

Also harder to run the competition out of town ie programmers. It will need to always undercut us for the cost and time.

Re: AI is too expensive

#132
post #14

The counter argument (not mine): Software Engineers are willing to spend their own money on AI. The same people that wouldn't pay 10 dollars for code if there was a workaround that took hours.

> Software Engineers are willing to spend their own money on AI.

Unless you’re a freelancer you should never pay for your tools. You’re literally paying your company to do their work. If they want the benefits of an LLM they can pay for it. Otherwise they get what you came with: your hands and skills.

Re: AI is too expensive

#133
post #77
post #36

I really respected Ed Zitron, but I feel like he's very much lost the plot on AI. Scroll back not too far and he was publishing criticisms that no one wants to spend actual money AI. Anthropic has shattered all notions of that since then. Then there was the idea that even if people want it, we have way too much GPU capacity to ever be saturated. Now almost all providers are hitting limits. Now, its the next iteration…

[flagged]

Could you please review and follow the site guidelines when posting here? Your account has unfortunately been breaking quite a few of them.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: Especially please don't cross into personal attack.

Re: AI is too expensive

#134
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did you criticize his past arguments instead of the claims in this article? The one relevant claim you address is basically a shrug on your part. This seems to be purely a character attack of Zitron. I agree that he is very one-sided, but I doubt his hit-rate is much worse than other pundits in the industry.

It's not really a character attack so much as a poor track record attack.

Track record would matter if we would need to trust him. (E.g. he knows some hidden insider data which stays secret, while he shares only a conclusion without must justification)

Track record is not relevant if it is a prediction with all the arguments laid out in the open.

Which is our situation closer to?

Re: AI is too expensive

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Algorithmically and seamlessly weaving undisclosed advertising (or other editorial content) into conversational output is their holy grail. It's the endgame. There's a reason they're pushing so hard.

I'd even walk back on just calling it advertising, because we immediately think of the usual ads we see everywhere. The actual thing here might be much more subtle and worrying, you could call it undisclosed influence.

That's right. Soon we'll need a new term to describe this alongside the growing lexicon of "slop" and "hallucination".

Re: AI is too expensive

#136

If you're older than 30, you've seen this play out before… This is just how the VC game works. Cross-town Uber rides don't stay $5 forever. The bright side is: this is a golden era of subsidized tokens. It will not always be like this, so now is the time to churn out your passion projects.

Seeing as the physics and economics of SaaS LLMs are a lot different from branded taxis, and that LLM token prices are down 100x over the past 4 years, there is good reason to believe that analogy isn't exactly perfect. Price hikes in the near term wouldn't shock me (in fact they've kinda already happened) but in the long term I'm optimistic

Tokens are a commodity, so the price should drop over the long term as more and more efficient compute comes online. However, in the short term, these foundation models are worth paying for. So I think we will continue to see the price creep up as investors push OpenAI and Anthropic to drive revenue growth.

It's hard to imagine a bright future for either company. The more hopeful analog might be Coca Cola & Pepsi. Both have a commodity product, but due to distribution networks and brand, they command a price premium. But it doesn't seem much fun to provide a high-volume low-margin commodity.

Re: AI is too expensive

#137

    Nobody who’s this insistent, aggressive and violative with their language of “it’s here and if you don’t adopt it you’re stupid and dead” has ever been right about anything. Nobody this desperate, insistent and forceful has ever had good intentions, good vibes or brought good omens — they are always bearers of some kind of con. 
Hey, Ed’s almost there! Critics will throw around words like “rage” and “mad” and “crazy”, but unhinged anger is an inevitable and necessary step for every person’s first trip through this process.

I think there’s two productive avenues for reaching the other side here. One is thinking more about the data centers - put aside the “overconfident and unaware of how hard it is to build data centers” hypothesis and instead start by assuming that “announcing and funding a huge data center and never actually building it” is the intended/desired/achieved outcome, and see where that train of thought takes you. (Teaser: interesting how they had the unusually prescient foresight to make SPVs and cardboard cutout companies the bag-holders - specifically in the case of building data centers, but not for any of their other ai-related capex outlay?)

The other avenue would be looking at crypto’s history - it started as a collection of computer science concepts cleverly combined to produce a fiat currency where the issuing government is Mathematics (infinitely more rigidly enforced, but infinitely less concerned with exercising control). Yet now it clearly resembles an unlicensed casino or an unregulated stock market. Imagine this transformation was the intentional result of some plan. What does the entity who came up with and executed this plan look like? What was its goal, why did it want this, and how did it benefit?

Re: AI is too expensive

#138
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry but no. It's a flawed analogy to suggest that an emerging technology like AI follows the same scaling laws as the taxi industry. AI benefits from active R&D, rapidly improving hardware, compounding software efficiencies, and deflationary cost curves that simply have no equivalent in a labor- and vehicle-dependent service...

Yeah. And we were going to use blockchains & ledgers to store & process every single skerrick of data possible… oh wait…

post modern crypto was and never will be useful...

Re: AI is too expensive

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like how he mentions that "AI revenue would need to EXPLODE", seemingly oblivious to the fact that it has been exploding for months

OpenAI is missing their own revenue targets. There are worrying signs that growth is starting to plateau or diversify across players in a way where not everyone will be able to eat.

"Revenue is exploding" and "OpenAI is missing their own revenue targets" are not mutually exclusive.

Re: AI is too expensive

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He seems to primarily discuss the economics of the industry.

About which his opinions are continuously being proven wrong.

It seems like economists can do that their entire careers and keep getting paid.
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