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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?

#331

Post by mmh0000 »

jkestner wrote: post #296
mmh0000 wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did something similar with Whisper a year or so ago. 9 years ago, when my now wife and I were dating, we took a long cross-country road trip, and for a lot of it, we listened to NPR's Ask Me Another (a comedy trivia game). Anyway, on one random episode, there was a joke in the show that just perfectly fit what we were doing at that exact moment. We laughed and laughed and soon forgot about it. Years later, I wanted…

Now, at the price you paid to retrieve that memory, is it a viable business model?

I downloaded 2GiB of data and let a script run for 56 hours. Besides a bit of my time, which I found to be enjoyable, it didn't cost me anything.

Maybe you could argue it cost some electricity, but... In reality, it meant my computer, which runs 24/7 pulling ~185W, was running at ~300W for 56 hours... Thusly.. 300 - 185 = 115W * 56H = 6.44kWh @ $0.13 per kWh = $0.85 + tax.

So... Yes, it was very much worth $0.85 to make my wife happy.

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

#333

Post by [deleted] »

timmytokyo wrote: post #327
WalterSear wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anthropic said their inference is cash positive. I would be very surprised if this isn't the norm.

As if inference exists in a bubble. Driving a car from point A to point B costs $0, as long as you exclude the cost of the car or the fuel you purchased before you were at point A.

[deleted]

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

#335

Post by CuriouslyC »

taurath wrote: post #323
CuriouslyC wrote: post #84

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

To me this reads like someone's been inside the echo chamber too long. > For you AI skeptics, this is going to be rough to hear, but given the suffering that will occur if AI fails, I believe we have a moral imperative to make sure it succeeds. What if, and hear me out here, the prediction is that it will fail because it can't succeed. It hasn't proven it is capable of producing the results that would justify itself.…

I'm actually from a science, government and defense background, I've never worked in the valley.

It might be possible that it can't succeed, but we don't know that and the evidence in terms of what happens if it fails is pretty compelling, so I think morality dictates we have to at least try, at least until we have more information or another path emerges.

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

#337

Post by mock-possum »

dotnet00 wrote: post #105
mikert89 wrote: post #4

I cant believe people still arent grasping the profound implications of computers that can talk and make decisions.

Reminds me of crypto/Web-3.0 hype. Lots of bluster about changing economic systems, offering people freedom and wealth, only to mostly be scams, and coming with too serious inherent drawbacks/costs to solve many of the big problems it promises to solve. In the end leaving the world changed, but not as meaningfully or positively as promised.

Except that nothing of crypto/web3 ever touched my day or day life - ‘blockchain’ is now shorthand for ‘scam’ - whereas LLM-generated content is now an everyday element of both personal and professional projects, and while we maybe already be seeing diminishing returns, even the current state of advancement has already changed how digital content is searched and created forever.

The hype is real, but there’s actual practical affordable understandable day-to-day use for the tech - unlike crypto, unlike blockchain, unlike web3.

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

#338

Post by mock-possum »

throwawa14223 wrote: post #166
mikert89 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the difference is the impact of crypto was always hypothetical, chatgpt can be used, explored, and if you are creative enough, levered in ways as the ultimate tool

ChatGPT is just as useless as a shitcoin and just like a shitcoin the sooner we stop burning electricity on LLMs the better.

I just vibecoded a photo gallery 100% from scratch - Frontend, backend, infrastructure, hosting and domain, from 0 to launch, in a couple of hours the other night.

It would have taken me a whole day, easily, to do on my own.

Useless it is emphatically not

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

#339

Post by bitmasher9 »

bobthepanda wrote: post #110
stanac wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a video on YT (gamers nexus I think) and an excel sheet comparing jumps in performance gains between each new nvidia generation. They are becoming smaller and smaller, probably now driven by AI boom where most of the silicon is used for data centers. Regardless of that, I have a feeling we are approaching the ceiling of chip performance. Just comparing PS3 and PS4 and then PS4 with PS5, performance jump is…

We also have hit ceilings of performance demand. As an example, 8K TVs never really got off the ground because your average consumer could give a hoot. Vision Pro is a flop because AR/VR are super niche. Crypto is more gambling than asset class. Etc. What is interesting is that it seems like the ever larger sums of money sloshing around are resulting in bigger, faster hype cycles. We are already seeing some companies…

It’s funny, but I’m actually very interested in a 8k display with the right parameters. I like to use large displays for monitors, and the pixel density of 4k at a large display is surprisingly low.

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

#340

Post by antonvs »

azeirah wrote: post #80
Juliate wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, running them locally, that's definitely a thing. But then, without this huge financial and tech bubble that's driven by these huge companies: 1/ will those models evolve, or new models appear, for a fraction of the cost of building them today? 2/ will GPU (or their replacement) also cost a fraction of what they cost today, so that they are still integrated in end-user processors, so that those model can run effic…

Given the popularity and activity and pace of innovation seen on /r/LocalLLaMa, I do think models will keep improving. Likely not at the same pace as they are today, but those people love tinkering but it's mostly enthusiasts with a budget for a fancy setup in a garage, independent researchers and smaller businesses doing research there. These people won't sit still and models will keep getting better as well as chea…

No-one on LocalLlama is training their own models. They’re working with foundation models like Llama from Meta and tweaking them in various ways: fine tuning, quantizing, RAG, etc. There’s a limit to how much improvement can be made like that. The basic capabilities of the foundation model still constrain what’s possible.
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