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AI eats the world (Spring 26) [pdf]

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Re: AI eats the world (Spring 26) [pdf]

#171

Post by LtWorf »

pingou wrote: post #154
elvis10ten wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hype is in what AI delivers (at least so far). I would never create a PR without an AI review. I will ask an AI to write code for me from time to time. But it still has huge gaps in quality. And from time to time, it shows me that it doesn’t really understand things. You might point out that how is that any different from your mediocre engineer. But for most people skilled enough, you can easily know the differen…

Ok so the hype would be people saying AI can currently do something well and autonomously when it cannot (or not consistently enough), and it is easy to prove them wrong. But I feel like people are more hyped about what the AI will be able to do soon rather than what it can do now. I think AI does understand things (depending on your definition), how else could we communicate and ask it a question if it didn't? I mea…

> and it is easy to prove them wrong

No, they just say you are using the wrong model or something.

If it's a coworker dumping reviews of crap code on you at work, the incentive is to blanket approve everything because otherwise you're just the grumpy old man who is resisting innovation. No matter that the code makes no sense at all and the tests aren't actually testing what they should test.

Re: AI eats the world (Spring 26) [pdf]

#172

Post by keeda »

StilesCrisis wrote: post #152
keeda wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, I appreciate his historical perspective, but I think one critical mistake his posts make is implying, largely because the parallels to history have been similar so far, that history will repeat. Like, yes, the telecom bubble was a clear case of overbuilding and the AI data center "bubble" looks a lot like that... but this overlooks that the fiber capacity being laid back then far outstripped the demand, where…

> new technology has always created new jobs... but all those new jobs required a higher skill level The industrial revolution didn't seem to require any particular special skill at all. Just anyone who was willing to tend to a machine all day. (Maybe that's a parallel...)

You're right actually, what I really meant to say is a "higher-level skill" rather than a "higher skill-level." Higher-level skills don't necessarily mean a more difficult skill, they're usually just at a higher level of abstraction.

Specifically, the 3 dimensions along with new jobs required new skills were: a) cognitive, b) technical or c) social skills. I guess tending to a machine was a mix of a) and b), because even if the controls were straightforward, it probably required some understanding of the underlying mechanisms.

Re: AI eats the world (Spring 26) [pdf]

#173

Post by littlexsparkee »

benedictevans wrote: post #148
camillomiller wrote: post #125

What in the AI slop is the Yogi Berra “AI predications” duplicate slide?

There are no duplicate slides.

I believe they're referring to the quote showing up on 50 and 51 but that appears to be intentional (transition adds question below)

Re: AI eats the world (Spring 26) [pdf]

#174

Post by seesawtron »

>"We see a future where intelligence is autility like electricity or water and people buy it from us on a meter” Sam Altman

I always considered jokingly that I am "selling" my intelligence when I work for a company. This clarifies that my perception wasn't far off.

Re: AI eats the world (Spring 26) [pdf]

#176

Post by danny_codes »

dist-epoch wrote: post #23
flossly wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that DeepSeek may be important to that. They have a really good model that's open source, raising the bar for all other players: how good your model needs to be so you can make meaningful money on it (better than DeepSeek). Same thing happened on other places the open source offering became popular.

What good is an open-weights DeepSeek model if you have nowhere to run it? OpenAI / Google / Anthropic / XAI also have a ton of compute. That is the real moat.

There are myriad compute providers. I suspect the inference market is hard to monopolize. But given our anti-trust track record the past 40 years I suppose it’s possible.

Re: AI eats the world (Spring 26) [pdf]

#177

Post by danny_codes »

aurareturn wrote: post #109
benedictevans wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've made the semi comparison myself, but the amount of capital required to build a SOTA model today is clearly nowhere near enough to lead to a monopoly. I'm aware that telecoms networks are standardised (I was once a telecoms analyst), but that isn't a precondition for a commodity.

Just like how starting a chip fab was relatively easy back in the 80s and 90s. There were dozens of chip fab companies in the 80s. It turns out that fabs follow Rock's Law which is that the capital cost to build a new fab doubles every 4 years. This means it will quickly get rid of the less competitive players. This is not dissimilar to the LLM scaling laws where you need a magnitude more compute to get unlock a new…

I doubt it. Compute costs tend to crater over time, and LLMs will almost certainly plateau. So the opposite is almost certainly the case: over time, it becomes cheaper to train.

Re: AI eats the world (Spring 26) [pdf]

#178

Post by danny_codes »

dist-epoch wrote: post #14

It will literally eat the world. Just like we crowded out wild animals in a few reserved areas, so will AI data centers crowd us out. To quite Ilya Sutskever: > I think it’s pretty likely the entire surface of the earth will be covered with solar panels and data centers.

I’ll put this in the hilarious category of “man outside his field of expertise”

Re: AI eats the world (Spring 26) [pdf]

#179

Post by camillomiller »

benedictevans wrote: post #148
camillomiller wrote: post #125

What in the AI slop is the Yogi Berra “AI predications” duplicate slide?

There are no duplicate slides.

Ben, I follow you and think you’re brilliant, but boy you can’t take feedback like ever. Duplicate slide is there clearly to add the question, but it has a glaring typo—- “predications” instead of “predictions”. A random internet stranger read to page 51, which is already a rare occurrence, and helped you find a typo that you can now edit. But sure, the answer to that is “your comment is wrong”.
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