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AI is slowing down

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Re: AI is slowing down

#191

Post by aspenmartin »

cm277 wrote: post #105
dkobia wrote: post #9

Zitron is begging for a collapse at this point. Yes, his macro analysis correctly identifies a massive financial risk but his incessant pessimism completely misses the incredible ground-level utility that many of us on HN celebrate every day through undeniable, massive productivity gains. At this point I'm trying to believe there's a middle ground where the level of individual capability this unlocks, leads to major…

Agreed that he has an extreme POV (or more accurately that he trolls for views/subscriptions). But his central argument is valid: if AI underdelivers financially, this bubble will burst and this bubble is magnitudes larger than what we've seen before, so there could be very rough seas ahead. The question is: what does "underdeliver" mean here? the pro-AI arguments I am seeing in this thread are equating mass adoption…

I don’t get this. We already have an insane demand. And yes exactly, this is primarily just with coding agents, but are you aware of what’s coming down the pipeline? It’s not hard to be you just have to find a decent way to keep up with literature.

* robotics (need to close data gap and release first viable product to get a data flywheel)

* conversational ai (no one is ready for this and we’re getting closer and closer to natural speech. The quality still isn’t good enough but it’ll be soon).

* other agentic use cases, openclaw adoption was crazy and that had a ton of barriers to entry

* ai products, like the one OpenAI is working on with Johnny Ive

Anyone thinking it’s unreasonable to hit whatever revenue requirements is just not that aware of what’s happening. Not to mention were capacity constrained already!! This is barely speculation at this point.

Re: AI is slowing down

#192

Post by atleastoptimal »

toasty228 wrote: post #178
atleastoptimal wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what your point is. Stock markets are based on money going into securities based on estimated future value. Even if AI were doubling productivity at a non-AI company, there is more leverage to that money going into an AI company. The question is, is AI leading to massive productivity gains in companies that implement it? AI productivity gains take time to diffuse, but so far companies in the S&P 500 are seei…

> YOY earnings growth rate for the S&P 500 is 21.7% Now remove the companies selling the AI shovels: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HIAjbZxacAARHwD.png > Not sure what your point is. My point is that they're selling us Skynet and the end of employment as we now it, things that we shouldn't even have to measure to perceive the results of, yet no one is able to measure any of it Pointing a finger at nvidia, google, and th…

Is the image you provided depicting revenue, or stock value? My point is about revenue.

Re: AI is slowing down

#193

Post by nfw2 »

moritzwarhier wrote: post #156
nfw2 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The environmental impact of answering a question on an obscure topic with ai model is less than an the impact of answering the question with an hour-long google search hunting for references or a drive to the public library.

That's true, and I am not anti-AI. I was not only thinking about the environmental effects of some single prompt or a certain amount of tokens. Neither did I want to say that a car is always more wasteful than some alternative. But defaulting to the behemoth is inefficient, unless everyone is driven to do it: then it's in some way reasonable. By adding "corrupt" and "dependent", as well as the economic terms, I wante…

I think it's a good analogy in many ways, and personally I think car-centric society has a lot of flaws. I think the ease that AI brings to tasks may erode mental capabilities in the same way cars have eroded our collective physical health.* That said, it doesn't seem to me that we would be better off without cars altogether, despite all the related issues.

I am concerned about the environmental impacts that AI poses, but they don't seem to me to be so catastrophic. Solar and battery tech has made enormous leaps in the past couple decades, and we will need to pivot to clean energy future irrespective of AI.

*This said, I have become gradually more alarmed over the past decade at the lack of epistemological rigor in the general public, as made apparent through the rise of social media. I don't know that AI becoming a truth-seeking crutch for people wouldn't be more good than bad.

Re: AI is slowing down

#194

Post by jsnell »

lompad wrote: post #143
frisbee6152 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most important thing I would point to is Mythos et al and the wave of vulnerabilities that have been discovered in the past couple months. It’s a completely unprecedented event, brought forth almost entirely by improvements in the models themselves. That said. keep in mind, I’m talking about over the past two years. With Claude code and the capabilities gained since December of last year, there have been incredib…

The maintainer of curl - who has access to mythos - disagrees [0]. I think it's dangerous to rely on claims made by people who financially profit from you believing them without checking. [0]: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2026/05/11/mythos-finds-a-curl-v...

That blog post is very clear about the maintainer having no access to Mythos.

Re: AI is slowing down

#195

Post by _aavaa_ »

mashlol wrote: post #175
zachthewf wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't read the posted article (I don't read this author anymore because I think it's basically anti-AI ideological propaganda). But from the article I linked back in March 2024: "Generative AI models are expensive and compute-intensive without providing obvious, tangible mass-market use cases. Murati and Altman's futures depend heavily on keeping the world believing that development and improvement of their models…

Has rate of progress increased? How does one measure that? Genuinely curious - would be very interesting to map out the "effectiveness" of each AI model vs how long it took to train/release. From my perspective, the model gains are mostly incremental now and a lot of the gains are just from things like improving the agent harnesses. I could be wrong though.

On the front page right now is the newest announcement from Xiaomi serving large model at over 1,000 tok/s on standard server gpus.

Every facet of the field is being pushed on and advanced at the same time.

Re: AI is slowing down

#196

Post by deaton »

abaymado wrote: post #139
asveikau wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure where I heard this, but I'm reminded of a story about someone predicting the dotcom crash early, circa 1998. For 2 years they were demonstrably crazy, and missed out on massive stock market gains. Then they were right. (And yes, tech slowly bounced back after that.) Predicting the timing of such a thing is notoriously difficult. I don't think being wrong about timing 2 years ago means there won't be a correc…

Not related to AI but, I recently rewatched "The Big Short" and your comment reminded me of it. I can't testify the accuracy of the movie, but for over year, Michael Burry was viewed as in the same manner for shorting the market, while the economy was was in a hype cycle.

Burry of course has famously predicted 40 of the last 5 crashes, so maybe not the best example.

Re: AI is slowing down

#197

Post by argee »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #186
putzdown wrote: post #136

One of the "smells" that gives away a quacky ranter is they speak in impassioned, "Why doesn't everyone understand this?" tones, but in fact their argument just doesn't flow. If Zitron's argument were as solid as he keeps saying it is, you would read it and understand it and see that it is solid. He would begin somewhere–statistics on AI demand, say–and then walk the calculations carefully over to the next step–maybe…

I particularly enjoy reading big banners asking me to pay for a newsletter subscription if I "liked" the content. Not if I found it interesting. Not if it actually provided any value whatsoever to me. No, you just have to "like" it. In other words, it is meant to be written in an engaging way and perhaps reinforce your believes like an echo chamber or even stir up certain strong emotions. Not to convey information. S…

A big chunk of text asked for support on the basis of the article. I hadn’t read the article.

I scrolled down a bit to read. A popup took up my screen, asking me to subscribe, having read essentially nothing at this point.

I just left. Life is too short.

Re: AI is slowing down

#198

Post by chillacy »

dminik wrote: post #134
asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see an argument that the productivity gains are illusory / don’t translate to economic productivity. I’m not denying the possibility. However, most of the engineers I respect have gone from being skeptics a year ago to convinced today. I don’t personally know any true holdouts any more. If there are studies that disprove productivity gains more than six months ago, I’m happy to believe that it was true of the A…

Its funny, I've noticed the same thing, but did not come to the same conclusion. I currently don't have work access to Claude Code, but most of my teammates do. Watching from the outside, the cycle seems to look like this: 1. Experience some success, which hooks you into relying on AI. 2. The AI keeps failing at some task, but you don't want to stop. Keep trying over and over again. 3. Run out of tokens and take a br…

As I work with Claude more and gain a feel for its capabilities, I tend to run into 2 far less often, as I'll decompose my messages more for the current model limitations. The threshold also changes each release.

Re: AI is slowing down

#199

Post by remich »

cogman10 wrote: post #31
gdcbe wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not disagree with what you are saying, but I honestly still believe that most of the utility we experience are honestly gonna become very boring very soon that we can just run local... Even if it's a bit more slow who cares, can just run in background while you work on other stuff yourself, read up on things, review other work... It's not that the utility of it put in question. What is however a giant question m…

Even more dangerous to the big 2 AI companies is the fact that the 20 different Chinese companies are catching up fast and for a lot lower cost. Why should someone pick Opus 4.8 when Qwen3.7 Plus produces similar results for about 1/20th the cost. That sort of pricing disparity is across the board. But further it's becoming more and more apparent that they are doing more with less parameters. That's what's giving the…

Because it doesn't. Not for the tasks where using Opus instead of a lower tier model is appropriate, at any rate. Benchmarks show this, as do revealed preferences of actual users. To believe that Qwen is as capable as Opus at 1/20 the cost you have to believe that every person who does not make the choice to use Qwen over Opus for a given task is some mix of ignorant or delusional. This is certainly an opinion you can hold about other engineers, but it's definitely a questionable one at best.

Re: AI is slowing down

#200

Post by josephlord »

Animats wrote: post #122

* * *

Isn’t the thing that an LLM never knows (at all)? It just guesses words based on the context and previous words and often gets lucky.

It isn’t thinking or knowing and then expressing the resulting understanding but just spitting out contextual words and hoping it reaches a conclusion or ending of some sort.

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