Earlier quoted context omitted.
About which his opinions are continuously being proven wrong.
It seems like economists can do that their entire careers and keep getting paid.
It's all about being economical.
AI is too expensive
141–150 of 165 posts
Re: AI is too expensive
#142I 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…
I don't know what it is but I feel there is some sort of logical fallacy here.
Ed Zitron is an analyst. His viewpoint is that AI is bad for whatever reasons and he does his job by trying to uncover those reasons and does a solid work. He presents a lot of insider knowledge that would otherwise be left unheard.
What are his alternatives? To stop claiming that AI is bad and pivot to "AI is good" writing? To quit writing entirely? To continue writing but in the beginning of each article list the things that he was wrong about in the past? What if it's too early for the things that seem to have been predicted incorrectly by him to materialize and in the end he will appear correct?
I think it's a benefit for society to hear the other side. There are plenty of pro-AI advocates.
Re: AI is too expensive
#143I 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…
I don't know what it is but I feel there is some sort of logical fallacy here. Ed Zitron is an analyst. His viewpoint is that AI is bad for whatever reasons and he does his job by trying to uncover those reasons and does a solid work. He presents a lot of insider knowledge that would otherwise be left unheard. What are his alternatives? To stop claiming that AI is bad and pivot to "AI is good" writing? To quit writin…
He could stop confidently opining about things he clearly doesn't have even a surface-level understanding of. He also employs a tactic beloved of Internet trolls: he writes extremely long posts to stud his bogus claims in; his readers only need the "vibe" of his pieces to get the value they came from, but actually discussing them requires you to get a pickaxe and shovel and start digging. It would be one thing if he'd evinced technical competence over the last year, but he has done the opposite: some of what he's written about software development makes it really clear he's got basically no exposure to it.
It's a bad combination. There are better AI skeptics to follow. Endorsing Zitron, though, has become a "tell".
Re: AI is too expensive
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
What a strange train of thought. Why would you need that amount in this hypothetical? Why would dethroning them alone be worth it? It would literally only be worth it if you could do so profitably. More realistically, it seems like someone calculated that it could still be profitable up to several hundreds of billions of dollars which explains the initial investment. And continued investment can be explained by tryin…
> Why would you need that amount in this hypothetical? They didn't say you need that amount. They say how much you're willing to spend. Need = floor, willing = ceiling. It's a very reasonable argument, except one fact: the chance that you actually dethroning Google is practically zero as Google also has capital, infra and data to train AI. The best plausible outcome is to share the market with Google.
Where are you getting that?
> Catching up quickly means spending >500 billion.
What part of that implies it's about willingness?
Re: AI is too expensive
#145Imagine you were looking at Google, a sustainable and profitable business, and you thought you saw a once in a lifetime opportunity to compete with them and take their position as a leading tech company. How much money would you need to spend to make a credible attempt? Google has had decades to accumulate intellectual and physical capital. Catching up quickly means spending >500 billion. If you can actually dethrone…
Dethroning Google requires having a search engine that returns consistently better results. As they continue to force more and more AI generated results and Ads into their output, this becomes easier and easier.
An open source, networked search engine that doesn't have any ads, and we all collectively host, could do this. Someone is going to pull this off eventually.
You don't have to match the infrastructure of an existing player, you just have to have a profitable path to get there organically.
Oh, and not take the inevitable buyout when it gets offered.
Re: AI is too expensive
#146All of this late stage capitalism has a vulnerability, open source/open weight models. There's nothing stopping China, or even an AI powered researcher, from lowering the compute requirements for a good enough model to the point where it can run on a beefy desktop, or even your phone. At that point, all this investment is about as useful as dark fiber was after the 2000 crash.
Actually, worse... the dark fiber could be utilized with new hardware, and kept supporting more and more bandwidth over time. These data centers are filled with hardware stuck in the present, or past... that won't become more performant over time.
What worries me most is that the entire US economy seems to be held up by this bubble.
Re: AI is too expensive
#147I 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…
I don't know what it is but I feel there is some sort of logical fallacy here. Ed Zitron is an analyst. His viewpoint is that AI is bad for whatever reasons and he does his job by trying to uncover those reasons and does a solid work. He presents a lot of insider knowledge that would otherwise be left unheard. What are his alternatives? To stop claiming that AI is bad and pivot to "AI is good" writing? To quit writin…
An analyst shouldn't have a conclusion carved in stones and work backwards to support said conclusion, for the starter.
Re: AI is too expensive
#148I 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…
> Now almost all providers are hitting limits.
Providers have been hitting limits and growing backlogs -- i.e. real money customers had committed to paying them but could not be realized due to lack of capacity -- to triple-digit billions EACH for multiple quarters now.
People are only just noticing the capacity crunch now because they're being directly impacted by Claude crapping out so much. But a superficial glance at the quarterly earnings of any of the hyperscalers shows that the AI compute crunch and revenues have only been growing pretty much since the AI boom took off. That alone should have raised questions about the bubble narrative.
Yet commentators like Zitron have been crying "bubble" all that time. I guess there's real money... er... engagement to be farmed by playing up the AI backlash. The backlash is real and understandable, but these narratives only serve to muddle useful discourse in exchange for some cheap rage-views.
Re: AI is too expensive
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yes, but those targets are to reach their own timeline for breakeven and if they aren’t able to break even by 2030 I can’t imagine when they will
Re: AI is too expensive
#150I 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…
I'm not really an AI-futurist or anything, I think the truth is between the extremes, but it seems like a lot of people who are ideologically against AI just move the goal posts whenever a new development is made. They also seem to operate under the assumption that whatever the current state of the technology is is as good as it will ever be. "it can't even do x today, so it'll never be good".
You mean just like all AI maximalists that keep pushing the date of AGI to anywhere between "next year" and "10 years from now" ?