Great insight & nice read! Thanks
I know we're in an AI bubble because nobody wants me
31–40 of 65 posts
Re: I know we're in an AI bubble because nobody wants me
#32It's good that you didn't give up ! So i understand correctly,they spend more even thought They can, optimize and spend less ?
I believe the author is making the point that the companies spending all this money on hardware aren't concerned at all with how the hardware is actually used. Optimization isn't even being considered because its the total cost spent on hardware that is the goal, not output from the hardware.
I slightly have trouble believing that Mr “Stop wasting tokens by saying please to LLMs” Altman is not considering how his models can be optimized. I suppose the real question is how accurate are the utilization numbers in the article.
Re: I know we're in an AI bubble because nobody wants me
#33If they optimize though - and this is coming at some point - local AI becomes possible, and their entire business case as a cloud monopoly evaporates. I think they know they're in a race between centralized control, and widespread use and control, and that is what is really driving this.
Yes, if you see the LLM as a compressed dictionary of all available information. But if they succeed with agentic reasoning models (we are absolutly not there yet) then I think meritocracy will be replaced with assetocracy. The better the model, the more expensive it will be and the better the software will be. I don’t worry about it myself, but I do worry for my kids. Im not even sure what to teach them anymore to h…
Military then a trade then a small business with employees doing the trade then done.
Re: I know we're in an AI bubble because nobody wants me
#34I see a lot of comments here criticizing the author, and I think both teams have a point. There's definitely a bubble, because companies are buying up infrastructure which doesn't need to be used right now. But also, the companies are buying up this infrastructure because whoever controls the infrastructure also controls the industry in around 5 years time.
> There's definitely a bubble, because companies are buying up infrastructure which doesn't need to be used right now. Source? Satya Nadella seems to disagree with your statement (at least as I understand both): https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-ceo-satya-nadell...
Can Satya Nadella be honest regarding this subject?
"Ah yes we invested $13B into OpenAI but it's a bubble"
Re: I know we're in an AI bubble because nobody wants me
#35Author is definitely correct in pointing out the incentives for companies to buy hardware. What the article misses is that there is in fact a reasonable economic incentive to not invest in software even if LLMs were not an economic bubble. It is that every single company is developing the same thing, there are many of those who even develop them as open source, and the ones that are closed as well as any company who would hire this guy, have a bunch of industrial spies inside anyway. Buying hardware may increase your moat, but developing software just rises the sea level.
Re: I know we're in an AI bubble because nobody wants me
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There's definitely a bubble, because companies are buying up infrastructure which doesn't need to be used right now. Source? Satya Nadella seems to disagree with your statement (at least as I understand both): https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-ceo-satya-nadell...
Can Satya Nadella be honest regarding this subject? "Ah yes we invested $13B into OpenAI but it's a bubble"
Being the CEO of a notable publicly traded company (and liable if caught lying about what they do with billions of shareholders dollars) surely a little more than random HN commentator without sources...?
Re: I know we're in an AI bubble because nobody wants me
#37"OpenAI rejected me so the entire industry is going to collapse" is certainly a take. They are still probably one of the less arrogant engineers in silicon valley.
There are people who are experts in a generalist sense. When a new field opens up, they quickly snatch up the opportunity and make immense progress and name for themselves in the evolving field. So in this case the first author is the mouse who ate the cheese and died.
>is the mouse who ate the cheese and died.
I don’t follow what this means
Re: I know we're in an AI bubble because nobody wants me
#38> When I look around, I see hundreds of billions of dollars being spent on hardware – GPUs, data centers, and power stations. What I don’t see are people waving large checks at ML infrastructure engineers like me and my team. That doesn't seem to be the case to me. I guess the author wants to do everything on his own terms and maybe companies aren't interested in that.
There's probably a bit more to it. It really only takes one company to bet on optimizing infrastructure, to the degree that the author suggests to undermine the entire house of cards being built on Nvidia GPUs currently, yet not one AI company is willing to take that bet?
The author could also be correct. Investors tend to be herd animals, and if you're not buying into the same tech as everyone else, your proposal is higher risk. It might very well be easier to say to an investor that you're going to buy a million Nvidia GPUs and stuff them in a datacenter in Texas like everyone else.
I'm interested in the one company that does take the bet on infrastruture optimization. If that works, then a lot of people are going to lose a lot of money really quickly.
Re: I know we're in an AI bubble because nobody wants me
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, if you see the LLM as a compressed dictionary of all available information. But if they succeed with agentic reasoning models (we are absolutly not there yet) then I think meritocracy will be replaced with assetocracy. The better the model, the more expensive it will be and the better the software will be. I don’t worry about it myself, but I do worry for my kids. Im not even sure what to teach them anymore to h…
Military then a trade then a small business with employees doing the trade then done.
Hard disagree. How is putting guns in your children's hands a wise and loving first step?
Re: I know we're in an AI bubble because nobody wants me
#40This is very insightful. I remember the epoch of clueless startups wasting venture capital on Sun servers. I worked at one of those startups. Warden is clearly correct that if you want to train your AI faster then the optimal amount to spend on software optimization is at least a substantial fraction of your hardware budget.
However, clueless people who don't know how to optimize probably don't know where to spend money on optimization, either. So maybe it's just not a great fit for outsourcing, especially in a realm where there's no standard of correctness to measure the results of the supposedly "optimized" training against. And Warden seems to be pitching outsourcing rather than trying to get acquihired.