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Spending on AI Is at Epic Levels. Will It Ever Pay Off?

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Re: Spending on AI Is at Epic Levels. Will It Ever Pay Off?

#21

Post by bdangubic »

neuronic wrote: post #8
0000000000100 wrote: post #6

Not egregious API spending, but ChatGPT Pro was been one of the best investments our company has paid for. It is fantastic at reasonable scale ports / refactors, even with complicated subject matter like insurance. We have a project at work where Pro has saved us hours of time just trying to understand the over complicated that is currently in place. For context, it’s a salvage project with a wonderful mix of Razor p…

How are you getting these results? Even with grounding in sources, careful context engineering and whatever technique comes to your mind we are just getting sloppy junk out of all models we have tried. The sketchy part is that LLMs are super good at faking confidence and expertise all while randomly injected subtle but critical hallucinations. This ruins basically all significant output. Double-checking and babysitti…

I genuinely think that biggest issue LLM tools is that most people expect magic because first attempts at some simple things feel magical. however, they take insane amount of time to get expertise in. what is confusing is that I think SWEs spent immense amounts of time in general learning the tools of the trade but this seems to escape a lot of people when it comes to LLMs. on my team, every developer is using LLMs all day, every day. on average based on sprint retros each developer spends no less than an hour each day experimenting/learning/reading… how to make them work. the realization we made early is that when it comes to LLMs there are two large groups:

- group that see them as invaluable tools capable of being an immense productivity multiplier

- group that tried things here and there and gave up

we collectively decided that we want to be in the first group and were willing to put time to be in that group.

Re: Spending on AI Is at Epic Levels. Will It Ever Pay Off?

#23

Post by noosphr »

naveen99 wrote: post #18

It’s not like anyone is going in debt to pay for gpu’s though. So it’s probably ok. Now if banks start selling 30 year mortgages for gpu’s, I might get a little worried.

People act like big tech didn't have a mountain of cash they didn't know what to do with. Each of the big players has around 100 billion that just sitting there doing nothing.

Re: Spending on AI Is at Epic Levels. Will It Ever Pay Off?

#26

Post by kanwisher »

simonw wrote: post #11
profsummergig wrote: post #10

(1999) - "Spending on Amazon warehouses Is at Epic Levels. Will It Ever Pay Off?"

Amazon weren't spending a single digit percentage of GDP on GPUs with a shelf life measured in just a few years though.

but we collectively there was a single digit spend on things like fiber that ended up paying off for the public later

Re: Spending on AI Is at Epic Levels. Will It Ever Pay Off?

#27

Post by g42gregory »

Are we still getting AGI in 2026, per OpenAI?

Based on AGI 2026, they convinced US Government to block high-end GPU sales to China. They said, we only needed 1-2 more years to hold them off. Then AGI and OpenAI/US rules the world. Is this still the plan? /s

If AGI does not materialize in 2026, I think there might be trouble, as China develops alternative GPUs and NVIDIA loses that market.

Re: Spending on AI Is at Epic Levels. Will It Ever Pay Off?

#28

Post by duped »

scuff3d wrote: post #22

While it has its uses I have yet to see a single use case, or combination of use cases, that warrants the insane spending. Not to mention the environmental damage and wide spread theft and copyright infringement required to make it work.

The people funding this seem to believe that firstly text inference and gradient descent can synthesize a program that can operate on information tasks as good or better than humans, secondly that the only way of generating the configuration data for those programs to work is by powering vast farms of processors doing matrix arithmetic but requiring the worlds most complex supply chain tethered to a handful of geopolitically volatile places, thirdly that those farms have power demands comparable to our biggest metropolises, and finally if they succeed, they'll have unlocked economic power amplification that hasn't been seen since James Watt figured out how to move water out of coal mines a bit quicker.

Oh and the really fucky part is half of them just want to get a bit richer, but the other half seem to be in a cult that thinks AI's gross disruption of human economies and our environment is actually the most logically ethical thing to do.

Re: Spending on AI Is at Epic Levels. Will It Ever Pay Off?

#29

Post by lomase »

bdangubic wrote: post #21
neuronic wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you getting these results? Even with grounding in sources, careful context engineering and whatever technique comes to your mind we are just getting sloppy junk out of all models we have tried. The sketchy part is that LLMs are super good at faking confidence and expertise all while randomly injected subtle but critical hallucinations. This ruins basically all significant output. Double-checking and babysitti…

I genuinely think that biggest issue LLM tools is that most people expect magic because first attempts at some simple things feel magical. however, they take insane amount of time to get expertise in. what is confusing is that I think SWEs spent immense amounts of time in general learning the tools of the trade but this seems to escape a lot of people when it comes to LLMs. on my team, every developer is using LLMs a…

I have been in teams that do this and in teams that dont.

I have not see any tangible difference in the output of both.

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