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What if A.I. doesn't get better than this?

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Re: What if A.I. doesn't get better than this?

#41
post #26

What happens is they go out of business: "these firms spent five hundred and sixty billion dollars on A.I.-related capital expenditures in the past eighteen months, while their A.I. revenues were only about thirty-five billion." DeepSeek (and the like) will prevent the kind of price increases necessary for them to pay back hundreds of billions of dollars already spent, much less pay for more. If they don't find a way…

DeepSeek is also undercutting itself. No one is making a profit here, everyone is trying to gobble market share. Even if you have the best model and don't care to make a dime, inference is very expensive.

I'd be surprised if Google weren't closer to profitability than basically anyone else, as they have their own hardware and have been running these kinds of applications for much longer than anyone else.

Re: What if A.I. doesn't get better than this?

#42

OpenAi has 700+ million users. Sam recently said only 7% of Plus users were using thinking (o3)!!! That means 93% of their users were using nothing but 4o! Clearly the OpenAi leadership saw these stats and understood the main initial goal of GPT5 is to introduce this auto-router, and not go all in on intelligence for the 3-7% who care to use it. This is a genius move IMO, and will get tons of users to flood to ChatGP…

> Sam recently said only 7% of Plus users were using thinking (o3) Thinking or just o3, and over what timeframe? There were a lot of days where I would just rely on o4-mini and o4-mini (high) b.c. my queries weren't that complex and I wanted to save my o3 quota and get faster responses. > That means 93% of their users were using nothing but 4o! Also potentially 4.1 and 4.5?

> the percentage of users using reasoning models each day is significantly increasing; for example, for free users we went from https://x.com/sama/status/1954603417252532479

Re: What if A.I. doesn't get better than this?

#43
post #26

What happens is they go out of business: "these firms spent five hundred and sixty billion dollars on A.I.-related capital expenditures in the past eighteen months, while their A.I. revenues were only about thirty-five billion." DeepSeek (and the like) will prevent the kind of price increases necessary for them to pay back hundreds of billions of dollars already spent, much less pay for more. If they don't find a way…

DeepSeek is also undercutting itself. No one is making a profit here, everyone is trying to gobble market share. Even if you have the best model and don't care to make a dime, inference is very expensive.

DeepSeek doesn’t need to make a profit to be successful.

Re: What if A.I. doesn't get better than this?

#45

OpenAi has 700+ million users. Sam recently said only 7% of Plus users were using thinking (o3)!!! That means 93% of their users were using nothing but 4o! Clearly the OpenAi leadership saw these stats and understood the main initial goal of GPT5 is to introduce this auto-router, and not go all in on intelligence for the 3-7% who care to use it. This is a genius move IMO, and will get tons of users to flood to ChatGP…

If they're not paying users then they're just a liability.

How so? You capture the market first, then you turn on paid ads and reap benefits for decades like Google.

Re: What if A.I. doesn't get better than this?

#46

What happens is they go out of business: "these firms spent five hundred and sixty billion dollars on A.I.-related capital expenditures in the past eighteen months, while their A.I. revenues were only about thirty-five billion." DeepSeek (and the like) will prevent the kind of price increases necessary for them to pay back hundreds of billions of dollars already spent, much less pay for more. If they don't find a way…

[deleted]

Re: What if A.I. doesn't get better than this?

#48
post #7

>What If A.I. Doesn't Get Better Than This? What if it does? There's a certain type of fear . . . "It's the fear . . . they're gonna take my job away . . . " It's the fear . . . I'll be working here the rest of my days . . . " -- David Fahl Same fear, different day.

Because every s-curve looks like an exponent for those in the start. I mean look at the first plane, then first air-jets: it’s understandable to assume we would travel the galaxy in something like 2050. Meanwhile planes are basically the same last 60 years. LLMs are great but I firmly believe that in 2100 all is basically the same as in 2020: no free energy (fusion), no AGI.

> Because every s-curve looks like an exponent for those in the start.

No, it looks like an exponential all the way to the top of the curve. And the natural reaction when you consider it an s-curve is to think you're near the top. Unfortunately near the top looks exactly the same as near the bottom, so you might consider that you're nowhere near the top and that there's no reason you should be.

Then you go on to speculate about tech that didn't exist 3 years ago and extrapolate 75 years in the future.

No one has any idea what we'll have in 10 years time never mind 75. Even linearly, it's like someone from 1950 trying to guess about 2025.

Re: What if A.I. doesn't get better than this?

#49

The title is irritating, conflating AI with LLMs. LLMs are a subset of AI. I expect future systems will be mobs of expert AI agents rather than relying on LLMs to do everything. An LLM will likely be in the mix for at least the natural language processing but I wouldn't bet the farm on them alone.

AI is LLMs now. Similar to how machine learning became AI 5-10 years ago.

I'm not endorsing this, just stating an observation.

I do a lot of deep learning for computer vision, which became AI a while ago. Now, when you use the word AI in this context, it will confuse people because it doesn't involve LLMs.

Re: What if A.I. doesn't get better than this?

#50

My current intuition on this topic is that they are right about scaling but they are training on the wrong data. LLMs were not intended to be the core foundation of artificial intelligence but an experiment around deep learning and language. Its success was an almost accidental byproduct of the availability of large amount of structured data to train from and the natural human bias to be tricked by language (Eliza ef…

Not all AI is LLMs. That's just what's most prevalent right now. There's still great work being done by models that don't "speak" but "perform". The issue is they need to be trained to perform like you said. The more tools like Claude Code are used, the more training they receive as well. I do think we'll see a plateau (if we haven't reached it already) of diminishing returns and we'll seek out new algorithms to improve it.

Never underestimate the will of someone determined to gain an extra 10% performance or accuracy. It's the last 1% I worry about. 99.99% uptime is great until it isn't. 99% accuracy is great until it isn't. These things could be mitigated by running inference on different quantinizations of a model tree but ultimately we're going to have to triple check the work somehow.

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