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AI is slowing down

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Re: AI is slowing down

#401

Post by TylerE »

chatmasta wrote: post #389
jimbokun wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very very few consumers will be looking to use an AI to write code for them.

They will, but they won’t realize it’s writing code. It will look like Claude Cowork, which writes code for itself under the hood but is results-oriented for the user.

Co-work is damn near magic. I've been working on a mapping project the past few days, am probably a couple hundred prompts deep in to it (I'm doing some very weird stuff with the data to produce a hybrid map). The processing pipeline is something like 12k lines of python and counting.

Re: AI is slowing down

#402

Post by [deleted] »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #149
toasty228 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> undeniable, massive productivity gains. Take any stock index, remove AI stocks, what do you see? That's right! Nothing... So where is all the productivity going? Where is the value? Where are the massive unemployment stats or the millions of new startups making big $$$?

> Take any stock index, remove AI stocks, what do you see? That's right! Nothing... Where did all the stock gains go before AI? FAANG / MAG-7. Was everything from 2012-2020 fake, too?

[deleted]

Re: AI is slowing down

#403

Post by lunar_mycroft »

simonw wrote: post #144
gdcbe wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe in USA in big tech where companies give absurd wages to engineers anyway in some states, that might be acceptable. But to make their ROI they need that (and more) to be spend world wide... no way that is gonna be a budget that is gonna fly in the long term... Companies love to cut costs, and just like they axe employee numbers at will, they will just as well make that kind of budget quickly dissapear the moment…

The Uber $1,500/engineer/month thing is just the first signal we have had of the price companies may be willing to accept. This price will clearly vary wildly across professions, industries and geographies. I think it's a poor number to build an "AI is slowing down" narrative around.

Uber is not the only company that's putting a per-developer limit on AI spending. I know this because I work for another one (and we have a significantly lower limit). You just heard about Uber first because they're high profile.

Re: AI is slowing down

#405

Post by HerbManic »

squidsoup wrote: post #362
dofm wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He has recently made the very good point that actually, the FAANG companies are struggling to put any ROI numbers on that incredible ground-level utility. Uber, for example, is so unclear there is any ROI, they are cutting their exposure pretty radically. He points out that one single Anthropic customer — a payments provider — accidentally had to pay Anthropic $500M for one month of token spend. That is half what App…

It doesn't matter under Capitalist Realism, the banks were bailed out, the AI companies will be bailed out, and you will pay for it. There is no alternative.

I'm not sure if they would be bailed out. The government tends to help with bank bailouts as they are essentially the hemoglobin of the economy, I see this being more like the dot-com bubble were they will just let it fall and have the bigger more entrenched player pickup the scraps for cents on the dollar.

Re: AI is slowing down

#406

Post by naasking »

> that the infrastructure being built and compute commitments being made are being done so at a level that demands that generative AI and AI compute generate over $2 trillion in annual revenue by 2030

That seems doable. Next generation architectures and the models they produce are accelerating progress. More capable with less data and compute, which ironically will drive more demand, aka Jevon's paradox.

> If you are someone in the executive team of any major tech company, know that your employees are, for the most part, completely and utterly miserable.

I agree this is a problem. Adopting too eagerly and too early, and not listening to feedback from the people who are using these tools is a recipe for disaster.

Re: AI is slowing down

#407

Post by vineyardmike »

avidphantasm wrote: post #396
vineyardmike wrote: post #313

The 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.

[dead]

Re: AI is slowing down

#408

Post by nfw2 »

16bitvoid wrote: post #376
nfw2 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be clear, your position here is that insurmountable barriers to information is the preferable state of the world? One claim of the parent comment was that AI is ineffective. For the purpose of finding answers to questions, it is more resource-efficient than the alternatives, and, to your point, capable of answering questions that were impossible to answer via other means before. In what way is that ineffective?

No, they're saying that 80% of genai queries (aka anything sent to an LLM; I won't speak on the validity of the percentage) are not things someone would search on Google. It's things like trial-and-error vibecoding, openclaw-like agentic loops, talking to chatgpt like it's a person, etc. In other words, most genai queries are not for getting "obscure information" or even getting direct information at all. It's about…

A request that isn't asking for information isn't a query

Re: AI is slowing down

#409

Post by AussieWog93 »

toasty228 wrote: post #118
dkobia wrote: post #9

Zitron is begging for a collapse at this point. Yes, his macro analysis correctly identifies a massive financial risk but his incessant pessimism completely misses the incredible ground-level utility that many of us on HN celebrate every day through undeniable, massive productivity gains. At this point I'm trying to believe there's a middle ground where the level of individual capability this unlocks, leads to major…

> undeniable, massive productivity gains. Take any stock index, remove AI stocks, what do you see? That's right! Nothing... So where is all the productivity going? Where is the value? Where are the massive unemployment stats or the millions of new startups making big $$$?

Literally right here. eComm business turned around from losing money to profitable in less than 12 months after vibecoding a bunch of solutions to variousn problems we were having.

Re: AI is slowing down

#410

Post by lz400 »

Already many comments saying this but Ed Zitron is not a person I trust. He's been so biased and wrong on stuff that I consider very obvious and trivial that his complicated analysis with numbers and trends I can't just take at face value.

As an example of obvious wrong things, I remember a tweet of his where he was mocking people talking about agents and agentic coding. He was kind of saying that he was going crazy as agents weren't a thing really and people talking about them like they were real. Something like "agents?! what agents?! these guys hear themselves?!". The answers were full of hundreds of people patiently explaining how they were actually _using_ agents. This wasn't in 2023, it was a couple of months ago.

He just has an audience and an engagement target. His objective is clicks, not informing.

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