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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?

#251

Post by pooyan2 »

jayd16 wrote: post #221
CuriouslyC wrote: post #84

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

Well we could still vote out the corrupt and actually invest in US infrastructure but I guess that's crazier than hanging all our hopes on AI serfdom.

I live in the U.S. and would like to support our businesses, however the U.S. is neither the leader in semiconductor/electronics manufacturing nor in power production and availability, and without those, they will not end up being the world leader in AI- China will.

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

#252

Post by CuriouslyC »

pizzly wrote: post #233
CuriouslyC wrote: post #84

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

What about the 'openness' of AI development. When I say 'openness' of AI I mean in research papers, spying, former employees, etc. Wouldn't that mean that after a few months to years after AGI is discovered that the other country would also discover AGI due to benefiting from the obtaining the knowledge from the other side? Similar to how the Soviets did their first nuclear test less than 5 years after US did theirs…

This is actually an interesting question! If you look at OpenAI's change in behavior, I think that's going to be the pattern for venture backed AI: piggyback on open science, then burn a bunch of capital on closed tech to gain a temporary advantage, and hope to parlay that into something bigger.

I believe China's open source focus is in part a play for legitimacy, and part a way to devalue our closed AI efforts. They want to be the dominant power not just by force but by mandate. They're also uniquely well positioned to take full advantage of AI proliferation as I mentioned, so in this case a rising tide raises some boats more than others.

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

#253

Post by ACCount37 »

hiq wrote: post #243
ACCount37 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People don't have the grasp of just how insane that "800M MAU and still growing" figure is. CEOs would kill people with their own bare hands to get this kind of userbase. OpenAI has ~4B of revenue already, and they aren't even monetizing aggressively. Facebook has an infinite money glitch, and can afford to put billions in the ground in pursuit of moonshots and Zuck's own vanity projects. Google is Google, and xAI is…

> they aren't even monetizing aggressively That's one of the issues with the current valuation: it's unclear to me how many of the 800M MAU will stick to ChatGPT once it monetizes more aggressively, especially if its competitors don't. How many use ChatGPT instead of Claude because the free version offers more? How many will just switch once it doesn't anymore? OpenAI is already at a 500B valuation; the numbers I cou…

My intuition is that ChatGPT has the mindshare of the "normal user" userbase, which is powerful. Ask Apple. You can still squander a lead like this, but not easily.

GPT-5 was in no small part a "cost down update" for OpenAI - they replaced their default 4o with a more optimized, more lightweight option that they can serve at scale without burning a hole in their pockets. At the same time, their "top end" options for the power users willing to pay for good performance remain competitive.

The entire reason why OpenAI is burning money is "their investments to remain competitive". Inference is profitable - R&D is the money pit. OpenAI is putting money into more infra, more research and more training runs.

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

#254

Post by [deleted] »

dcre wrote: post #240
jayd16 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you do or you're missing current events, right?

Not at all, otherwise models with knowledge cutoffs of six months to a year ago (all current SOTA models) would be useless. Current information is fed into the model as part of the prompt. This is why they use web search. The main reason they train new models is to make them bigger and better using the latest training techniques, not to update them with the latest knowledge.

[deleted]

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

#255

Post by what »

mikert89 wrote: post #111
noir_lord wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has been for a while, the difference isn’t huge but it does seem to be a difference. Slightly different cohorts.

ive been on HN for about 15 years :)

Yet your account is only 3 years old. Do you just constantly have to hide the silly things that you say?

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

#256

Post by tim333 »

maxglute wrote: post #54

AI chips and bespoke data centers are closer to tulips than rail or fiber in terms of deprecated assets. They're not fungible stranded assets with long shelf life or room for improvment. Bubble bursting also points to current model towards AI is inherently not economically viable, i.e. we'll still be inferencing off existing models but won't be pouring 100billions into improving them. TLDR much more all or nothing ga…

The Dutch tulip industry is doing fine.

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

#257

Post by subjectivationx »

quesera wrote: post #48
mikert89 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

anyone mentioning a bubble is underestimating the gravity of whats going on

I'm old enough to have heard this before, once or thrice. It's always different this time. More seriously: there are decent arguments that say that LLMs have an upper bound of usefulness and that we're not necessarily closer to transcending that with a different AI technology than we were 10 or 30 years ago. The LLMs we have, even if they are approaching an upper bound, are a big deal. They're very interesting and ha…

I love chatGPT5 and Claude but they aren't as big of a deal as going from no internet to having the internet.

That I think is the entire mistake of this bubble. We confused what we do have with some kind of science fiction fantasy and then have worked backwards from the science fiction fantasy as if it is inevitable.

If anything, the lack of use cases is what is most interesting with LLMs. Then again, "AI" can do anything. Probabilistic language models? Kind of limited.

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

#258

Post by mmh0000 »

crote wrote: post #225
andy99 wrote: post #147

Cell phones have been through how many generations between the 80s and now? All the past generations are obsolete, but the investment in improving the technology (which is really a continuation of WWII era RF engineering) means we have readily available low cost miniature comms equipment. It doesn’t matter that the capex on individual phones was wasted. Same for GPUs/LLMs? At some point things will mature and we’ll b…

> At some point things will mature and we’ll be left with plentiful, cheap, high end LLM access, on the back of the investment that has been made. Okay, and? What if the demand for LLMs plummets because people get disillusioned due to the failure to solve issues like hallucinations? If nobody is willing to buy, who cares how cheap it gets?

Have you seen the "average" users of LLM? They mostly don't care about hallucinations. It's like that joke[1] "Computer says no", it doesn't matter what is true or real, only that the computer said it, so now that's true in their mind.

Personal anecdote: I work with beginner IT students, and a new, fun (I find it highly doubtful that hallucinations, if unsolved, will have any real negative effect on LLM adaptation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_says_no

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

#259

Post by octoberfranklin »

andy99 wrote: post #147

Cell phones have been through how many generations between the 80s and now? All the past generations are obsolete, but the investment in improving the technology (which is really a continuation of WWII era RF engineering) means we have readily available low cost miniature comms equipment. It doesn’t matter that the capex on individual phones was wasted. Same for GPUs/LLMs? At some point things will mature and we’ll b…

The demand for cellphones never experienced a bubble-pop.

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

#260

Post by tim333 »

alganet wrote: post #93

One key difference in all of this is that people were not predicting the dotcom bubble, so there was a surplus left after it popped. It was a surprise. This AI bubble already has lots of people with their forks and knifes waiting to capitalize on a myriad of possible surpluses after the burst. There's speculation on top of _the next bubble_ and how it will form, even before this one pops. That is absolutely disgustin…

>people were not predicting the dotcom bubble

I don't know if you were there at the time but saying wow what a bubble was much of the conversation back then. I don't know if it was predicting it as saying gosh just look - you can take any company and put ".com" in the name and the stock goes up 5x, it's nuts.

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