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AI is slowing down
391–400 of 820 posts
Re: AI is slowing down
#392Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah they seem clickable because anything Anti-AI is a bit soothing right now, but he is constantly wrong and usually is pushing the angle of "these businesses aren't even profitable!" Instantly close the tab as soon as the popup to subscribe to his newsletter pops up.
Why is anti-AI soothing?
Gen AI is strictly bad for society.
Re: AI is slowing down
#393Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you are a consumer and you have a Mac or an iPhone, what do you need from AI that Apple's new offering won't provide? I've been using Kagi Assistant for my AI needs, and have to say, Siri will probably replace it in the fall. The question will be, will I still want to keep Kagi for search, or will this new Siri get me where I need to be on all fronts? I need to start paying more attention to how often I actually…
Very very few consumers will be looking to use an AI to write code for them.
those few are the ones shelling out ridiculous money. mom&pop ChatGPT users aren’t their key demographic/users, it is Uber’s with $1.5k/SWE/month budgets
Re: AI is slowing down
#394Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not related to AI but, I recently rewatched "The Big Short" and your comment reminded me of it. I can't testify the accuracy of the movie, but for over year, Michael Burry was viewed as in the same manner for shorting the market, while the economy was was in a hype cycle.
Burry of course has famously predicted 40 of the last 5 crashes, so maybe not the best example.
And lost his shirt doing it. (Or, well, his investors' money. I'm sure he's fine.) https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/sustainable-finance-r...
Re: AI is slowing down
#395The way I see it, AI is going to change the world radically. It could be for the worse, the better, or a mix of both, but in my mind there's no doubt. We are only five or six years into the leap LLMs represent. For reference, radio waves were discovered in 1886, Marconi used them for communications in 1895, and while telephone and radio coexisted for many decades, it wasn't until the 1995 that mobile phones and wirel…
> LLMs to drive NPC dialog Far more interested in dialog and characters developed by a writer - simulation is boring
>Far more interested in dialog and characters developed by a writer - simulation is boring
It entirely depends on the situation. Background NPCs that just have conversations among themselves would be a great use of LLMs to make the world feel more immersive. Obviously you never want to directly engage the player with LLM generated writing.
Re: AI is slowing down
#396The obvious answer to where the AI Labs get customers is Cloud GPUs. Most users (globally) have cheap phones with poor CPUs and small amounts of RAM. They can't run usable models locally, and it's not clear from the Google-Apple deal if G is selling access to their cloud compute as part of that $1B, or just sharing the weights/IP. Apple themselves have said there is usage limits, with a subscription upgrade for more…
The AI labs are racing to create a moat out of trillion-parameter models and the GPUs that can run them. The problem is this is the wrong architecture for most AI inference use cases. On-device inference is where this is going, clearly Apple believes this too. So Zitron is entirely correct about this AI datacenter build out being a boondoggle with no ROI.
Re: AI is slowing down
#397Today Apple launched its revamped AI offering. Judging by several reports, Apple pays Google a mere billion dollars a year to operate it. Essentially just licensing the IP. Google are (allegedly) happy to turn over the right to operate and distill their models for only a billion a year. Consumer revenue is only a smallish share of the puzzle, but still: If you are a consumer and you have a Mac or an iPhone, what do y…
> 2026 consumer revenue projections from OpenAI are pitched at $14-15 billion, apparently. If they get that, it's the only year they will get that
Would you care to wager on that?
Because I would gladly take the other side at even odds.
> consumer AI is worth, to Anthropic
Anthropic does not really care about consumer AI. I expect consumer is where their least profitably customers are.
My primary expectation is that Apple will mostly increase usage of AI by general consumers. To me, this reads like Instagram adding stories. Did it stop Snapchat's growth? Sure. But I would be cautious about claiming it will take too many users away from OpenAI. I think it will be a fairly different product offering.
If you're paying to use ChatGPT right now, you might be using it for hobby coding, projects, or image generation. If you're paying a lot for ChatGPT, you're almost certainly using it for personal programming projects.
The $100/month (and up) subscribers aren't going to churn because of this, and I would be extremely surprised if the $20/month users do in any meaningful way.
Re: AI is slowing down
#398Today Apple launched its revamped AI offering. Judging by several reports, Apple pays Google a mere billion dollars a year to operate it. Essentially just licensing the IP. Google are (allegedly) happy to turn over the right to operate and distill their models for only a billion a year. Consumer revenue is only a smallish share of the puzzle, but still: If you are a consumer and you have a Mac or an iPhone, what do y…
> 2026 consumer revenue projections from OpenAI are pitched at $14-15 billion, apparently. If they get that, it's the only year they will get that Would you care to wager on that? Because I would gladly take the other side at even odds. > consumer AI is worth, to Anthropic Anthropic does not really care about consumer AI. I expect consumer is where their least profitably customers are. My primary expectation is that…
> Would you care to wager on that?
I don't gamble. Though you might not be alone taking the bet:
https://www.notus.org/technology/trump-blindsided-ai-compani...
"OpenAI CEO Sam Altman pitched the idea of turning over shares in his company to Trump in early 2025 and discussed the matter again with senior officials in recent weeks"
Re: AI is slowing down
#399Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't read Ed Zitron, aside from when he appears here on Hacker News, and I also find his tone to be over-the-top. I think we might agree on that much. These articles are lengthy but, to my understanding, Ed's idea is... * AI companies have committed to purchasing X amount of compute * Data centers are being constructed to meet this demand, they'll need to charge amount Y * AI companies do not have sufficient reven…
> personally the only real use-case for AI that I've seen is code generation or automated sales or scam calls. That seems like a giant paucity of imagination. I can easily name a lot of areas where AI is already having a large impact and it's not hard to imagine the impact growing: 1. Customer service. Yes, we all like to laugh at the silly chatbot mistakes, linked list reversals and Instagram oopsies, but a lot of c…
I would argue that all 4 of these that you have mentioned can be handled with relatively small models very well.
The real question is what situations are the flagship, larger models useful in and will that produce enough demand.
Re: AI is slowing down
#400One of the "smells" that gives away a quacky ranter is they speak in impassioned, "Why doesn't everyone understand this?" tones, but in fact their argument just doesn't flow. If Zitron's argument were as solid as he keeps saying it is, you would read it and understand it and see that it is solid. He would begin somewhere–statistics on AI demand, say–and then walk the calculations carefully over to the next step–maybe…
I like Ed's sense of humor, I also like that he can distill down a lot of messy details into something more cogent, especially with the money side.
But, I also think he has missed the mark on a fair few things in terms of out comes. He may be proven right yet in terms of the general shape of things for some parts of the industry but also will have some big misses.
My general take away usually comes down to, places like OpenAI, Anthropic and Oracle have gone in a little to hard to fast and it may hurt them long term as they struggle to make it work in terms of economics. not that they can't just it will be difficult. But places like Microsoft, Google, Meta, Apple, Amazon; they have a very long runway to endure the growing pains and make it through to a long term business that no longer burns cash.