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

How the AI Bubble Will Pop

derekthompson.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

391–400 of 531 posts

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#391

Post by reaperducer »

emp17344 wrote: post #177
ivape wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More information: Use the LLM more until you are convinced. If you are not convinced, use it more. Use it more in absurd ways until you are convinced. Repeat the above until you are convinced.

You haven’t provided more information, you’ve just restated your original claim. Can you provide a specific example of AI “blowing your mind”?

You haven’t provided more information, you’ve just restated your original claim.

So he's not just an LLM evangelist, he also writes like one.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#392

Post by onraglanroad »

eek2121 wrote: post #175
donatj wrote: post #123

I feel kind of like a Luddite sometimes but I don't understand why EVERYONE is rushing to use AI? I use a couple different agents to help me code, and ChatGPT has largely replaced Google in my everyday use, but I genuinely don't understand the value proposition of every other companies offerings. I really feel like we're in the same "Get it out first, figure out what it is good for later" bubble we had like 7 years a…

In my eyes, it'd be cheaper for a company to simply purchase laptops with decent hardware specs, and run the LLMs locally. I've had decent results from various models I've run via LMStudio, and bonus points: It costs nothing and doesn't even use all that much CPU/GPU power. Just my opinion as a FORMER senior software dev (disabled now).

> Just my opinion as a FORMER senior software dev (disabled now).

I'm not sure what this means. Why would being disabled stop you being a senior software developer? I've known blind people who were great devs so I'm really not sure what disability would stop you working if you wanted to.

Edit: by which I mean, you might have chosen to retire but the way you put it doesn't sound like that.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#393

Post by stnmtn »

Gerardo1 wrote: post #235
squidbeak wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember, investment is for the future. It would seem riskier if progress was flat, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

What makes it seem like progress isn't flat?

Largely speaking across technological trends of the past 200 years, progress is nowhere near flat. 4 generations ago, the idea of talking with a person on the other side of the country was science fiction.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#394

Post by reliabilityguy »

fragmede wrote: post #245
reliabilityguy wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We're realistically ~3 years away from fully autonomous software engineering We had Waymo cars about 18 years ago, and only recently they started to roll out commercially. Just saying.

This isn't a comment on timelines, but a Waymo going wild is going to run over and kill people, so it makes sense to be overly conservative with moving forwards. Meanwhile, if someone hacks into a vibecoded website and deletes everything and steals my user data, no one's getting run over by a car.

Sure. The point I was trying to make is that we can see a technology that is amazing, and seemingly does what we want, and yet has so many edge cases that make it unviable commercially.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#395

Post by lm28469 »

jstummbillig wrote: post #176
lm28469 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All the important people at FAANG, all the people at OpenAI/Anthropic, all the investors. It's like asking big pharma if medicine should be less regulated, "all the experts agree", well yeah, their paycheck depends on it. Same reason no one at meta tells Zuck that his metaverse is dogshit and no one wants it, they still spent billions on it. You can't assume everyone is that dumb, but you certainly can assume that…

Again, this is not an argument. I am asking: Why do we assume that we know better and people with far more knowledge and insight would all be wrong? This is not rhetorical question, I am not looking for a rhetorical answer. What is every important decision maker at all these companies missing? The point is not that they could not all be wrong, they absolutely could. The point is: Make a good argument. Being a general…

You don't have an argument either btw, we're just discussing our points of view.

> Why do we assume that we know better and people with far more knowledge and insight would all be wrong?

Because money and power corrupt the mind, coupled with obvious conflicts of interest. Remember the hype around AR and VR in 2015s ? Nobody gives a shit about it anymore. They wrote articles like "Augmented And Virtual Reality To Hit $150 Billion, Disrupting Mobile By 2020" [0], well, if you look at the numbers today you'll see it's closer to 15b than 150b. Sometimes I feel like I live in a parallel universe... these people have been lying and overpromising things for 10, 15 or 20+ years and people still swallow it because it sounds cool and futuristic.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2015/04/06/augmented-and-virtual-real...

I'm not saying I know better, I'm just saying you won't find a single independent researcher that will tell you there is a path from LLMs to AGI, and certainly not any independent researcher that will tell you the current numbers a) make sense, b) are sustainable

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#396

Post by tromp »

throaway1988 wrote: post #326
Gerardo1 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1 Trillion US dollars? 1 trillion dollars is justified because people use chatGPT instead of google sometimes?

Google search won’t exist in the medium term. Why use a list of static links you have to look through manually if you can just ask AI what the answer is? Ai tools like chatgpt are what Google wanted search to be in the first place.

Because you cannot trust the answers AI gives. It presents hallucinated answers with the same confidence as true answers (e.g. see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45322413 )

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#397

Post by Quarrelsome »

jacknews wrote: post #380
Quarrelsome wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But what if someone reaches autonomous AGI with this push? What if Jesus turns up again? Seems a little optimistic, especially with several leading AI voices suggesting that AGI is at least a lot further away than just parameter expansion.

It seems rather more likely to me, even if it's millennia way, that we get a semblance of an autonomous agentic AI, than what you suggest. It might be impossible, or just need some innovations (eg, transformer), but my point is the investments are non-linear. They are not investing X to get a return of Y. If someone reaches AGI, current business models, ROI etc will be meaningless.

> If someone reaches AGI, current business models, ROI etc will be meaningless.

sure, but its still a moonshot, compared to our current tech. I think such hope leaves us vulnerable to cognitive biases such as sunk cost fallacies. If Jesus comes back that really would change everything, that's the clarion call of many cults that end in tragedy.

I imagine there is fruit that is considerably lower hanging, that has more obvious ROI but is just considerably less sexy than AGI.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#398

Post by throaway1988 »

sejje wrote: post #353
throaway1988 wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

he’s describing conditions that exist for every area in the world that actually experiences winter!

Most places clear the driving surface instead of leaving a foot of snow.

More like the whole world is covered with snow and they clear enough for you to drive on.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#399

Post by throaway1988 »

tromp wrote: post #396
throaway1988 wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google search won’t exist in the medium term. Why use a list of static links you have to look through manually if you can just ask AI what the answer is? Ai tools like chatgpt are what Google wanted search to be in the first place.

Because you cannot trust the answers AI gives. It presents hallucinated answers with the same confidence as true answers (e.g. see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45322413 )

for now

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#400

Post by kingstnap »

dns_snek wrote: post #324
dist-epoch wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fundamentally it will always be cheaper to run LLMs in the cloud, because of batching. Unless somehow magically you'll have the need to run 1000 different prompts at the exact same time to also benefit from it locally. This is even without considering cloud GPUs which are much more efficient than local ones, especially from old hardware.

Yes they'll be cheaper to run, but will they be cheaper buy as a service? Because sooner or later these companies will be expected to produce eye-watering ROI to justify the risk of these moonshot investments and they won't be doing that by selling at cost.

Will they be cheaper to buy? Yes.

You are effectively just buying compute with AI.

From a simple correlational extrapolation compute has only gotten more cheaper over time. Massively so actually.

From a more reasoned causal extrapolation hardware companies historically compete to bring the price of compute down. For AI this is extremely aggressive I might add. HotChips 2024 and 2025 had so much AI coverage. Nvidia is in an arms race with so many companies.

All over the last few years we have literally only ever seen AI get cheaper for the same level or better. No one is releasing worse and more expensive AI right now.

Literally just a few days ago Deepseek halved the price of V3.2.

AI expenses have grown but that's because human's are extremely cognitively greedy. We value our time far more than compute efficiency.

Post reply on HN