Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A new AI winter is coming?

taranis.ie

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 301 posts

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#251

Post by mejutoco »

HPsquared wrote: post #47
neom wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Birds and planes operate using somewhat different mechanics, but they do both achieve flight.

Birds and planes are very similar other than the propulsion and landing gear, and construction materials. Maybe bird vs helicopter, or bird vs rocket.

> other than the propulsion and landing gear, and construction materials

"Apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?" Monty Python's Life of Brian.

P.S. It is relative, but quite a lot of differences IMHO.

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#252

Post by aitchnyu »

parineum wrote: post #238
kakapo5672 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and I've had similar results. I'm easily 10x times more productive with AI, and I'm seeing the same in my professional network. The power of AI is so clear and obvious, that I'm astonished so many folks remain in vigorous denial. So when I read articles like this, I too am fascinated by the motivations and psychology of the author. What is going on there? The closest analogue I can think of is Climate Change den…

Half of the value equation is cost which is still coming to you with a VC discount. Would you be 10x productive if you were spending your salary on tokens?

I use OpenRouter and providers are hosting models and competing on price for each request. Will a free market for inference fail without VC money now?

For example: https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-chat-v3.1

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#253

Post by tim333 »

aoeusnth1 wrote: post #108

Token economics are very sound - it's the training which is expensive. Tokens/week have gone up 23x year-over-year according to https://openrouter.ai/rankings . This is probably around $500M-1B in sales per year. The real question is where the trajectory of this rocket ship is going. Will per-token pricing be a race to the bottom against budget chinese model providers? Will we see another 20x year year over the next…

Yeah, that doesn't look at all wintery. More exponential.

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#254

Post by Libidinalecon »

LatencyKills wrote: post #48
gishh wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> something fundamental has changed that enables a computer to pretty effectively understand natural language. You understand how the tech works right? It's statistics and tokens. The computer understands nothing. Creating "understanding" would be a breakthrough. Edit: I wasn't trying to be a jerk. I sincerely wasn't. I don't "understand" how LLMs "understand" anything. I'd be super pumped to learn that bit. I don't…

As someone who was an engineer on the original Copilot team, yes I understand how tech works. You don’t know how your own mind “understands” something. No one on the planet can even describe how human understanding works. Yes, LLMs are vast statistical engines but that doesn’t mean something interesting isn’t going on. At this point I’d argue that humans “hallucinate” and/or provide wrong answers far more often than…

Yes because working on co-pilot makes one well educated in philosophy of mind.

The standard, meaningless, HN appeal to authority. "I worked at Google, therefore I am an expert on both stringing a baroque lute and the finer points of Lao cooking. "

Gemini 3 gives a nice explanation if asked "can you explain how you don't really understand anything"

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#255

Post by skerit »

ZeroConcerns wrote: post #8

Well, the original "AI winter" was caused by defense contracts running out without anything to show for it -- turns out, the generals of the time could only be fooled by Eliza clones for so long... The current AI hype is fueled by public markets, and as they found out during the pandemic, the first one to blink and acknowledge the elephant in the room loses, bigly. So, even in the face of a devastating demonstration…

> despite things being, well, entirely underwhelming

People use LLMs for all kinds of things, but for coding it is absolutely not underwhelming. Can you treat it as a real independent developer, one that doesn't need supervision? No. Can it save you hours and hours of work? Yes.

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#256

Post by baq »

bloppe wrote: post #236
saltcured wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many technologies plateau, but we don't say they all have winters. Terrestrial radio winter? Television winter? Automobile winter? Air travel winter? Nuclear power comes close in terms of its tarnished image and reluctance to reinvest. I personally believe contemporary AI is over-hyped, but I cannot say with confidence that it is going to lead to a similar winter as the last time. It seems like today's products satis…

I think it's easy to talk past one another on this subject. To be sure, I love Claude code. I wish I could pay for several years in advance at today's prices. But the consumer's is not the important perspective for the AI hype cycle. It's the investors' perspective. I'm going to guess that well over a trillion dollars has gone into "AI", including the major labs and all the little "agents for XYZ" startups popping up…

> This will make the very mention of "AI" toxic for most investors sooner than later.

I'm not so sure. I agree about the exceptionally off the charts expectations rivaling only the dotcom bubble, but with the current rate of progress I'd expect AI to be pervasive enough to disappear from investor relationship materials not because it's a buzzword, but because it's assumed to be incorporated just like companies don't mention that they're running Linux servers; companies saying that they're doing stuff without AI will be something to watch for.

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#257

Post by tim333 »

>A new AI winter is coming.

Counterpoint - no it isn't.

The NP arguments are dumb and have nothing to do with thinking. I don't think Einstein was NP complete but could still think.

Winter summer implies sine wave like progress but what we are seeing now is a result of exponential growth in computer hardware such that it is now passing human equivalent levels https://www.bvp.com/assets/uploads/2024/03/price-performance...

LLMs having failings is a blip. Hinton got his nobel prize for work done in the 1980s but we are seeing AI takeoff now 45 years later, almost exactly when predicted by the likes of Moravec/Kurweil because of the hardware progress.

(see the token use graph mentioned by aoeusnth1 - https://openrouter.ai/rankings usage looking exponential too)

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#258

Post by Libidinalecon »

beachtaxidriver wrote: post #93
swalsh wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard disagree, I'm in the process of deploying several AI solutions in Healthcare. We have a process a nurse usually spends about an hour on, and costs $40-$70 depending on if they are offshore and a few other factors. Our AI can match it at a few dollars often less. A nuse still reviews the output, but its way less time. The economics of those tokens is great. We have another solution that just finds money, $10-$30…

It's true, but do you really trust the AI generated + Nurse Review output more than Organic Nurse generated? In my experience, management types use the fact that AI generated + Nurse Review is faster to push a higher quota of forms generated per hour. Eventually, from fatigue or boredom, the human in the loop just ends up being a rubber stamper. Would you trust this with your own or your children's life? The human in…

It works because we are in a health care crisis and the nurse doesn't have anything close to enough time to do a good job.

It is really one of the few great examples that LLMs are good for in an economic sense.

In a different industry, such inefficiency would have been put out of business.

It is a unique economic condition that makes LLMs valuable. It makes complete sense.

To the wider economy though, it is hard to ignore the unreasonable uselessness of LLMs. The unreasonable uselessness points to some kind of fundamental problems with the models that are unlikely to be solved by scaling.

We need HAL to solve our problems but instead we have probabilistic language models that somehow have to grow into HAL.

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#259

Post by kittikitti »

This is a good article and although it does sound like yet another AI doomer piece, it at least tackled it from a unique perspective. AI winter is coming and it's going to be harsh for those who have never heard of an AI winter before the AI summer that started in 2017. This isn't a tulip-mania that's it's so often compared to. People find these concepts distilled down to one neuron and think they know what they're talking about. This AI winter is going to be harsh with economic catastrophes because of climate change and political instability. There might even be another nuclear scare. Will they blame AI for all their problems? Definitely.

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#260

Post by HPsquared »

mejutoco wrote: post #251
HPsquared wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Birds and planes are very similar other than the propulsion and landing gear, and construction materials. Maybe bird vs helicopter, or bird vs rocket.

> other than the propulsion and landing gear, and construction materials "Apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?" Monty Python's Life of Brian. P.S. It is relative, but quite a lot of differences IMHO.

Yes indeed, but they still use wings, fly in the air and so on.

Artificial neural networks have very little in common with real brains and have no structural or functional similarities besides "they process information, and they have things called neurons". They can perform some of the same tasks though, like how a quadcopter can perform some of the duties as a homing pigeon.

Post reply on HN