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Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post

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Re: Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post

#241

Post by Ukv »

Denzel wrote: post #237
Ukv wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DeepSeek models are open-source so there are a bunch of third-party providers offering similar prices. Factoring in that DeepSeek have to train the model (whereas third parties can make a small profit over just the inference costs) I'd assume that on net they're spending investor money, but I wouldn't think that's any less true of OpenAI.

Yes, DeepSeek is open-weight, but these third-party providers offering similar prices are subsidized with VC money as well. And you can find a range of prices for deepseek-v4-flash going up to and over $1/Mtok. Even that $1/Mtok provided by Together AI is heavily subsidized by more than $1B in VC money. This makes it unclear how the true cost curve is progressing. It’s not possible to confidently comment one way or a…

> Even that $1/Mtok provided by Together AI is heavily subsidized

Can you link this? I'm unable to find them offering deepseek-v4-flash. I think you could even host the pro model for a bit under $1/Mtok. You can get ~1000TPS out of the box on a B300 that you can rent for ~$3/hr, so around $0.83/Mtok.

Regardless - Alibaba, DeepSeek, NovitaAI, AtlasCloud, Cloudflare, DeepInfra, SiliconFlow, GMICloud, Morph, Baidu, Parasail, DigitalOcean, AkashML, StreamLake and likely others all seem to be offering it under $0.3 per million output tokens[0].

> This makes it unclear how the true cost curve is progressing

For no actual improvement in efficiency to be presented as a 10X yearly improvement since 2018, we'd need to currently be getting 100000000X more intensive models than we should be for what we're paying (a $1/Mtok model actually costs $100000000/Mtok). Presenting, say, a 9X actual yearly improvement as a 10X yearly improvement seems feasible, but for much beyond that I think the exponential just compounds too fast to reasonably fake.

[0]: https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash#pricing

Re: Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post

#242

Post by grebc »

therealdrag0 wrote: post #228
grebc wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think it’s reasonable at all, but live your life as you see fit. It’s easy in retrospect to be say “sure, we were sceptical of crypto”. It certainly was not easy then to voice that, nor is it easy now to be sceptical of AI - without being labelled a Luddite or just negative. Money is a huge factor in all this, people love to discuss the current in thing and what’s more in than some tech that’s IPO’ing? Invest…

Investors made stupid money off speculation with crypto. Investors make money off AI subscriptions for WORK. Thats a huge difference.

Investors are about to make money via an IPO and cashing out equity.

The revenue produced is laughable. If you think it’s the revenue and not the equity that matters, you need to do some serious homework.

Re: Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post

#243

Post by dspillett »

rfgplk wrote: post #168
dspillett wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is no ceiling for complexity. There are perhaps limits to useful complexity. There are certainly limits to complexity people are willing to pay for. So if you are looking to make a living in development the fact that anyone will soon be able to do the basics and customise it for themselves is going to be a problem for you. Not directly, but because you'll be competing for fewer and fewer more interesting jobs…

You're assuming the current ensemble of commonly used software stacks is the most optimal there is. This assumption is simply wrong. Even looking at something simple like the office suite you can probably find countless areas where improvements can be made.

> You're assuming the current ensemble of commonly used software stacks is the most optimal there is.

No, I'm assuming that the level of practical complexity has a much lower bound than people seem to be trying to service, and that while that bound will grow with time it doesn't grow at the rate the available “solutions” do.

Re: Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post

#244

Post by therealdrag0 »

grebc wrote: post #242
therealdrag0 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Investors made stupid money off speculation with crypto. Investors make money off AI subscriptions for WORK. Thats a huge difference.

Investors are about to make money via an IPO and cashing out equity. The revenue produced is laughable. If you think it’s the revenue and not the equity that matters, you need to do some serious homework.

This isn’t about investors, that’s the difference. AI commerce will continue after IPOs or if there was no IPO, I have zero doubt in my mind about that.

Re: Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post

#245

Post by daveshistory »

rfgplk wrote: post #170
daveshistory wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would imagine it is like transcribing, an industry I was in for a little bit when I was younger. I saw the same transition there and imagine it will be elsewhere. First it's a bunch of people saying "AI can't take our jobs, our jobs are thinking jobs." Then it's "Sure, you could use AI, but there's no real advantage to it because it makes so many mistakes." But pretty soon after that it's "Why am I paying a transcr…

Exactly, time amortized LLMs are already unbeatable at this point.

I go back and forth on it a lot myself; and it's not just in the office context.

Grandkid's sports club had an AI-made song about the group at Christmas. It was "good enough" for that. Did they steal the job of a local band? Well, in the sense that the club would have had to commission a song. But in reality, the club wouldn't have paid money for that.

They won't pay money to commission Anthropic (or in that case I assume something like Suno) to make the song in the future either. They just won't pay the money at all. A lot of "valuable" human work will be replaced, but it won't be profitable for the companies. I bet more stuff is being transcribed now than ever before -- but not much money is being made on it.

Re: Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post

#246

Post by ryanackley »

hodgehog11 wrote: post #120
ryanackley wrote: post #28

AI maximalism is making a lot of assumptions that I think are not a given * The curve of AI improvement will continue at the current pace * AI companies will have the capital continue to expand infrastructure * there will be some kind of functioning economy if all knowledge workers are replaced There are strong headwinds to all three of these. Hey it may come to pass but it’s very speculative at this point. I see a l…

Others have commented on the rate of AI improvement. It doesn't need to be current rate for it to be an even more serious problem in the very near future. That's irrespective of prior booms. Regarding AI companies having capital to expand infrastructure; this is largely irrelevant. The cat is out of the bag, and you can already make serious gains by finetuning to local problems on a desktop machine. There is enough h…

You’re just hand waving. No actual facts in your argument.

Sure, if you have a desktop with 175GB of unified memory, you can run deepseek 4 locally. Not completely out of reach but pretty close for almost everyone. There are smaller models but we’re talking about state of the art stuff that can reliably be used to do serious work right?

Also, even in a mad max style dystopian future, the elite need the working class to enjoy their luxuries. There is a long supply chain of experts and workers to build a yacht for example. It’s kind of ridiculous to imagine robots and AI replacing that entire supply chain. It would be extremely fragile. While conceivable, it’s also an unrealistic extrapolation grounded in sci fi instead of reality

Re: Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post

#247

Post by dag100 »

SR2Z wrote: post #221
awesomeMilou wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By completely eliminating the need for a human workforce, therefore rendering a majority of humanity obsolete, therefore lots of social inequality, therefore lots of starvation, poverty and death. When billionaires say "think about the trillions of people that will benefit from AI" and some notion of living in a post scarcity world, they are talking about _their_ descendants, not yours.

If we're all broke/starving/being exterminated, who will the rich sell to? Nobody wants to be king of the ashes. The future is going to be the same as now, just with a little less menial work.

> If we're all broke/starving/being exterminated, who will the rich sell to?

Themselves. The economy is a big cycle where money changes hands to drive production i.e. things getting made. AI will simultaneously greatly increase production (especially once humanoid robots are as dexterous as humans) and make the humans whose jobs it will do economically irrelevant.

So the rich will buy and sell very nice things to each other while the rest of us get left out in the cold because we simply cannot compete with the robots. And because they will capture and control all resources (either by law or by force) we won't be able to create a functioning parallel economy either.

Re: Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post

#248

Post by dag100 »

skybrian wrote: post #213
dag100 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hardly speculative when it is effectively what happened just after the Industrial Revolution, but with more power ceded to capital. In many ways, it's already happening.

No, that was not "effectively what happened" in the Industrial Revolution. That was an enormous change, but it didn't "completely eliminate the need for a human workforce." That's just hype.

Fine, it is not effectively what happened then. It is worse. At least workers are required to run factories (even though working conditions were ridiculously horrible back then). With AI, in maybe 20 years, 95% of all white-collar workers will be economically irrelevant. You won't need accountants, or programmers, or designers. And we can't all become lawyers and surgeons, or tradesmen.

The Industrial Revolution indeed did not completely eliminate the need for a human workforce. The AI Revolution will.

Re: Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post

#249

Post by dag100 »

kristjank wrote: post #82
genezeta wrote: post #3

I've had quite a few conversations and read many thoughts on the subject of job security in the software industry through the years. New technologies, various crisis and crashes, just age , incoming "hordes" of less prepared developers, or whatever. If I had to highlight the one thing all those conversations had in common it would be precisely this: I thought that having this knowledge would set me apart And it never…

Knowledge often does not produce competence, especially in the applicable market. I work on the system administration side of things, and I have encountered many output-competent developers that were immeasurably stupid, but very little incompetent ones with tons of cryptic knowledge and intuitive understanding of the systems they worked on. It seems to me that knowledge doesn't always imply competence, but the lack…

> Knowledge often does not produce competence

From your example, perhaps you mean "competence does not imply knowledge" or more accurately in fact "lack of competence implies lack of knowledge" i.e. !competence -> !knowledge, in that competence && !knowledge is common but !competence && knowledge is rare.

Re: Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post

#250

Post by lofaszvanitt »

lwhi wrote: post #26
genezeta wrote: post #3

I've had quite a few conversations and read many thoughts on the subject of job security in the software industry through the years. New technologies, various crisis and crashes, just age , incoming "hordes" of less prepared developers, or whatever. If I had to highlight the one thing all those conversations had in common it would be precisely this: I thought that having this knowledge would set me apart And it never…

I think in the future, those who succeed will be equivalent to wayfinders. People who _can_ see the wood for the trees, and are able to understand multiple (sometimes conflicting) requirements and work out a way through that solves the problems that arise, for all involved parties. An understanding of domain, the ability to communicate effectively and a mind that can think laterally, will all be vital.

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