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After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

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Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#181

Post by zerof1l »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #84

This is where we're headed: https://sibylline.dev/articles/2025-10-12-ai-is-too-big-to-f...

Very US-centric article. Written by insecure people who are clinging to power and money desperately.

I don't see how some kind of big breakthrough is going to happen with the current model designs. The superintelligence, if it will ever be created, will require a new breakthrough in model architecture. We've pretty much hit the limit of what is possible with current LLMs. The improvements are marginal at this point.

Secondly, hypothetically, the US achieves superintelligence, what is stopping China from doing the same in a month or two, for example?

Even if China achieves a big breakthrough first, it may benefit the rest of the world.

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#182

Post by pclmulqdq »

trenchpilgrim wrote: post #124
pclmulqdq wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not correct. Solid-state parts wear out like mechanical parts, especially when you run them hot. The mechanism of this wear-out comes from things like electromigration of materials and high-energy electrons literally knocking atoms out of place.

Those parts take decades to wear out, excepting a manufacturing defect.

That is not correct when wires are small and you run things hot. The physics of <10 nm transistor channels is very different than it is for 100 nm+ transistors.

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#183

Post by cactusplant7374 »

bc569a80a344f9c wrote: post #58
cactusplant7374 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author of the article is comparing past and present. It's not irrelevant to the article.

The whole point of the article is that the dotcom era produced long term assets that stayed valuable for decades after the bubble burst, and argues that the AI era is producing short term assets that won’t be of much use if the bubble bursts.

But the chips of the dotcom era were not long-term assets. The author appears to claim that.

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#184

Post by CuriouslyC »

zerof1l wrote: post #181
CuriouslyC wrote: post #84

This is where we're headed: https://sibylline.dev/articles/2025-10-12-ai-is-too-big-to-f...

Very US-centric article. Written by insecure people who are clinging to power and money desperately. I don't see how some kind of big breakthrough is going to happen with the current model designs. The superintelligence, if it will ever be created, will require a new breakthrough in model architecture. We've pretty much hit the limit of what is possible with current LLMs. The improvements are marginal at this point.…

It's a US/China centered article, because that's the game, Europe is not a meaningful player and everyone else is going to get sucked into orbit of one of the superpowers.

If you read the article carefully, I work hard to keep my priors and the priors of the people in question separate, as their actions may be rational under their priors, but irrational under other priors, and I feel it's worth understanding that nuance.

I'm curious where you got the writer "clinging to power and money desperately."

Also, to be fair, I envy Europe right now, but we can't take that path.

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#185

Post by squidbeak »

surgical_fire wrote: post #154
WalterSear wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anthropic said their inference is cash positive. I would be very surprised if this isn't the norm.

I would be surprised if they are being honest.

I'd be more surprised if they didn't know their own business costs.

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#187

Post by pixl97 »

stanac wrote: post #63
cactusplant7374 wrote: post #32

> Most of the money is being spent on incredibly expensive GPUs that have a 1-3 year lifespan due to becoming obsolete quickly and wearing out under constant, high-intensity use. How about chips during the dotcom period? What was their lifespan?

More or less every high-end hardware becomes obsolete, or in other words becomes second class. First difference is that at least networking hardware could be used for years, compute/storage servers became obsolete faster than networking. Second is scale. Google summary says that current investments are 17x greater than dot com investments. It may be wrong about the number but investments are at least on an order of m…

> It may be wrong about the number but investments are at least on an order of magnitude larger.

Which is exactly what we expect if technological efficiency is increasing over time. Saying we've invested 1000x in aluminum plants and research over the first steel plants means we've had massive technological growth since then. It's probably better that it's actually moving around in an economy than just being used to consolidate more industries.

>compute/storage servers became obsolete faster than networking

In the 90s extremely rapidly. In the 00s much less rapidly. And by the 10's servers and storage especially the solid components like boards lasted a decade or more. The reason the servers became obsolete in the 90s is much faster units came out fast and were much faster, not that the hardware died. In the 2010-2020 era I repurposed tons of data center hardware to onsite computers for small businesses. I'm guessing a whole lot less of that hardware 'went away' then you'd expect.

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#188

Post by mrbungie »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #84

This is where we're headed: https://sibylline.dev/articles/2025-10-12-ai-is-too-big-to-f...

> If you think I'm being hyperbolic calling out a future of brutal serfdom. Keep in mind we basically have widespread serfdom now; a big chunk of Americans are in debt and living paycheck to paycheck. The only thing keeping it from being official is the lack of debtor's prison. Think about how much worse things will be with 10% inflation, 25% unemployment and the highest income inequality in history. This is fertile ground for a revolution, and historically the elites would have taken a step back to try and make the game seem less rigged as a self-preservation tactic, but this time is different. As far as I can tell, the tech oligarchs don't care because they're banking on their private island fortresses and an army of terminators to keep the populace in line.

This is suggesting an "end of history" situation. After Fukuyama, we know there is no such thing.

I'm not sure if there is a single strong thesis (as this one tries to be) on how this will end economically and geopolitically. This is hard to predict, much less to bet on.

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#189

Post by dotnet00 »

bluesnowmonkey wrote: post #175
zirror wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you need to verify everything unless it’s self evident. The number of times CoPilot (Sonnett 4) still hallucinates Browser APIs is astonishing. Imaging trying to learn something that can’t be checked easily, like Egyptian archeology or something.

You have to verify everything from human developers too. They hallucinate APIs when they try to write code from memory. So we have: - documentation - design reviews - type systems - code review - unit tests - continuous integration - integration testing - Q&A process - etc. It turns out when include all these processes, teams of error-prone human developers can produce complex working software. Mostly -- sometimes th…

Taking the example of egyptian archeology, if you're reading the work of someone who is well regarded as an expert in the field, you can trust their word a lot more than you can trust the word of an AI, even if the AI is provided the text you're reading.

This is a pretty massive difference between the two, and your narrative is part of why AI is proving to be so harmful for education in general. Delusional dreamers and greedy CEOs talking about AI being able to do "PhD level work" have potentially ruined a significant chunk of the next generation into thinking they are genuinely learning from asking AI "a few questions" and taking the answers at face value instead of struggling through the material to build true understanding.

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#190

Post by CuriouslyC »

mrbungie wrote: post #188
CuriouslyC wrote: post #84

This is where we're headed: https://sibylline.dev/articles/2025-10-12-ai-is-too-big-to-f...

> If you think I'm being hyperbolic calling out a future of brutal serfdom. Keep in mind we basically have widespread serfdom now; a big chunk of Americans are in debt and living paycheck to paycheck. The only thing keeping it from being official is the lack of debtor's prison. Think about how much worse things will be with 10% inflation, 25% unemployment and the highest income inequality in history. This is fertile…

I'm not proposing and end of history, but things can remain in stable equilibrium for longer than you'd expect (just look at sharks!). If we slide into stable dystopia now, my guess is that there will be a black swan at some point that shakes us out of it and continues evolution, but we could still be in for 50 years of suffering.
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