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

ceodinner.substack.com

141–150 of 218 posts

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

#141
post #17

I don't see how nvidia come out of this stronger their huge customers will be able to produce ASICs hat will be faster and cheaper to operate than their GPUs jensen has to be the luckiest man in the world, first crypto, now "AI"

I think this is what the "circular financing" is all about actually. While you are in the 'picks and shovels' phase you want to use your high margins to buy up the value chain and become more vertically integrated. Effectively investing when the sun shines to diversify the company.

As a possibility for example I can see them transforming from a GPU based corp into a parent company for many full or partially owned "subsidiaries". They still manufacture chips to be "vertically integrated" but that becomes bread and butter as an enablement rather than the main story (e.g. Google TPU's). As their margins go down the value accrues to what they are owning (the business units/product areas).

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

#142
post #98
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

$250k+ a year means ~$12k monthly salary. A semi decent apartment in SV will cost you ~$3k Bills(phone, internet, electricity, etc) another $1k. If you are married, groceries at least $1k. Even if we assume you don’t do anything else in life, and you are in perfect health best case scenario would be $6k savings a month or $72k a year. It would take you 10 years to save $720k plus whatever you make from investments. T…

$2k per month for groceries and utilities for a married couple is insanely high, in any part of the country.

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

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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...

People are already prompting with "yeah, don't do these things": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing

"That's such a great observation that highlights an important social issue — let's delve into it!"

I've been prompting the bot to avoid its tics for as long as I've been using it for anything; 3 years or so, now, I'd guess.

It's just a matter of reading and understanding the output, noticing patterns that are repetitious or annoying, and instructing the bot as such: "No. Fucking stop that."

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

#144
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if the plateau is unanimously declared to have been reached tomorrow OR just one more tiny use case exists tomorrow and all others dwindle away to nothing, than you consider yourself to be correct? What a wild assertion!

If the plateau is reached at some higher level of capability, I will remain correct, yes. If use cases are discovered that do not exist today, I will also be correct. You said it in a silly way but you're directionally correct.

No. You state that this is all that it would take to be considered as tremendous business value. You are moving your goal posts on your point. My point is that you are taking an absolute position that there is tremendous business value in its current form(as a miniscule improvement and one insignificant new use case does does not equate to tremendous business value in itself) and so that remains to be seen.

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

#145
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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.

The trouble is "AI" is waaaaay less of a boost to productivity if you have to actually check the output closely. My wife does a lot with AI-assisted writing and keeps running into companies that think it's going to let them fire a shitload of writers and have the editors do everything... but editing AI slop is way more work than editing the output of a half-decent human writer, let alone a good one.

If you're getting a lot of value out of LLM writing right now, your quality was already garbage and you're just using it to increase volume, or you have let your quality crater.

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

#146
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…

From how stock valuations look like, they had an insane rally from the release of ChatGPT to around mid-2024, from which point it stayed mostly on a consistent trajectory with the rest of the economy.

I think a huge breakthrough for AI was priced in, and we are still waiting to find out if it will come and what it'll be.

Personally, as this article seems investment focused, I see no downside to diversifying away into more varied kind of investments, but then again, I'm not a pro, so take it with a grain of salt..

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

#147

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.

I think there is a high risk that people will begin writing like AI, or they will stop using effective/engaging styles because AI happens to use those. I don't want to deal with people writing in contrived/awkward/imperfect ways just to appear more human. That is a losing game anyway, because AI will learn to copy everyone.

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

#148

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...

Luckily there are plenty of other obvious tells!

Biggest one in this case, in my opinion: it's an extremely long article with awkward section headers every few paragraphs. I find that any use of "The ___ Problem" or "The ___ Lesson" for a section header is especially glaring. Or more generally, many superfluous section headers of the form "The [oddly-constructed noun phrase]". I mean, googling "The Fire-Retardant Giants" literally only returns this specific article.

Or another one here: the historic stock price data is slightly wrong. For whatever reason, LLMs seem to make mistakes with that often, perhaps due to operating on downsampled data. The initial red-flag here is the first table claims Apple's split-adjusted peak close in 2000 was exactly $1.00.

There are plenty of issues with the accuracy of the written content as well, but it's not worth getting into.

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

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rent? Ever heard of equity? If you make 250k you can afford a nice condo. Right away that blows a huge hole in your math. Also $1k month on bills? Groceries too? Judging by your inflated costs for everything, and ann idea that a house (versus more modest accommodations) is what the goal is, you’ve got Lifestyle creep. And, things certainly get a lot easier when your spouse also works.

Bro, not everyone has daddy to give them the down payment to buy anything remotely affordable in SV.

Bro, I can tell you haven’t even tried. Talk to a mortgage advisor.

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

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, interest rates are high right now, but you’d be surprised at how little down payment you need for purchasing a house or a condo. If you’re a tech worker with a stable career making that kind of money, most underwriters will just give you the loan. I think people commonly underestimate how accessible this stuff is It’s easy to make a 40 year forecast spreadsheet for retirement, including housing costs, property,…

So you oblige yourself to an enormous long-term loan at high-interest, burn PMI on it because you have too little equity, secured against an overpriced-for-quality home whose value may already be at peak or plataeu, fixing yourself to one location, while all signs warn that you may be laid off at any time and facing a long period of unemployment. I knew a lot of people who did almost exactly that ~18 years ago. It di…

Well yes, there are tradeoffs. On the other hand, go ahead and burn 3k a month on rent.

There is no one size fits all solution but i’m surprised at how many people here are inadvertently revealing to me that they haven’t even tried evaluating.

For example, you saying there’s nothing “affordable” when the baseline assumption is an income of $250k? Can tell you haven’t looked at what’s in your price range. Alright, good luck I guess!

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