411–420 of 557 posts
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> there is a large force on HN that want to deny the value of tokens there is an even larger force on HN that financially _needs_ the value of tokens to be inflated (so much so that bots have overwhelmed the site)
Really? Do you think there are more bots and employees of AI stakeholder companies than there are vanilla engineers on the site?
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Tulips sales also skyrocketed. Seriously, what value are tokens providing other than justifying layoffs. Concretely. Today. Not in the speculating scenario that cardiologist could be replaced with models. We see this new trend of agentic coding, again a promise software will be written that way going forward, despite the number of fiasco already experienced when trusting a model turned bad. The use case may provide v…
> Seriously, what value are tokens providing other than justifying layoffs. Concretely. Today. Claude helped me implement a ridiculous amount of features in my programming language. It's helped me migrate the heap to an easily moveable index-based object space. It's helped me implement generators. It's helped me implement a new memory allocator. It's helped me fix a ridiculous amounts of bugs and make a huge number o…
Just far cheaper (if you are in USA) and probably more useful in terms of job prospects.
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I’m not disagreeing with you, but consumer RAM prices are lagging indicators. If commercial RAM prices are dropping then consumers will see those price drops last, especially given the fact that several consumer manufacturers turned to commercial only.
If they see them. Plenty of businesses are still charging pandemic prices for all kinds of goods and simply pocketing the difference. Cars come to mind instantly. Prices exploded in 2020/1, due to legitimate shortages, most of which have been plus or minus resolved, but the prices for new (and used!) cars never came back down.
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nobody know how to measure software productivity + ai is supposed to mean productivity goes up = more ai means more productivity As best as I can tell, that's the thinking. It's one number, it's very easy to find and manage, and there is a belief that it directly measures productivity. I disagree that it does; seems to me the throughput of useful features is a better measure, but I'm not in the drivers seat on this o…
Incremental revenue and cost-savings, at least for enterprises, is where it would show up. There’s also a present value consideration - if LLM’s make those dollars come into existence closer to the present, they are worth more. The personal use case stuff is messy and subjective.
Cost savings is primarily a function of headcount here. Which is also easy to measure, and so if we take my thesis that easy to measure stuff is prioritized...
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> Seriously, what value are tokens providing other than justifying layoffs. Concretely. Today. Claude helped me implement a ridiculous amount of features in my programming language. It's helped me migrate the heap to an easily moveable index-based object space. It's helped me implement generators. It's helped me implement a new memory allocator. It's helped me fix a ridiculous amounts of bugs and make a huge number o…
Just pay for it, think of it like college tuition. Just far cheaper (if you are in USA) and probably more useful in terms of job prospects.
The thing I am struggling with is where is the impact of LLM tools, especially given the massive increase in token consumption from 2025 to now and the saturated presence of LLMs everywhere. Naively speaking, I have so many expectations for the impact of this tech. I'd expect a noticeable uptick in applications published on Google, Apple and Microsoft app stores. I'd also expect an uptick of games published to Steam.…
I have started making an indie game, as one does, and it’s easily going 2-4x speed, but even still I’d predict a year of free time development with focus to ‘finish’ this thing. But the latest agentic tech is 3 months old.
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LLMs haven't remotely begun to be integrated into the lives of the typical person. Not even close. The typical person is using LLMs not at all as it pertains to their daily life tasks. They're using them almost entirely for limited discussion matters (eg having a discussion with GPT about a medical issue, or a work related matter). This is the first or second inning in the LLM rollout. It'll take 15-20 more years for…
> LLMs haven't remotely begun to be integrated into the lives of the typical person. Not even close. The typical person is using LLMs not at all as it pertains to their daily life tasks. They're using them almost entirely for limited discussion matters This is an argument in favor of demand having leveled off.
This article tries to build upon a lot of half-truths or incorrect facts, like this: > OpenAI is struggling to monetize. They turned to showing ads in ChatGPT, The ads aren’t going into your paid plans (except maybe a highly discounted tier, depending on the market). The ads are a play to offer a free version. Having an ad-supported free tier isn’t new. The discussion about being unprofitable also repeats the reducti…
>The “but they’re losing money” argument never seems to be brought out against competitors that literally give away their models for free and for which we can calculate the cost of serving 400B-1T parameter open weight models. To be fair people aren't exactly bullish on the prospects of deepseek or z.ai either, it's just they're below radar so they don't get mentioned.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z.ai
>> "On 8 January 2026, Z.ai held its initial public offering on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange to become a listed company.[24][25][26] It is considered to be China's first major LLM company that went through an IPO.[26] In February 2026, JPMorgan Chase recommended to investors of purchasing stocks of the company alongside MiniMax.[27]"
https://www.zhipuai.cn/investor_relations/
But I haven't looked into it.
> nobody is sure if even their metered pricing is profitable This is most likely wrong. Lab executives insist that serving tokens is profitable. It's the cost of training next-gen models that requires them to keep raising ever larger rounds. More importantly, many independent providers price tokens of open-weight models at a fraction of Anthropic's prices.
But are they actually profitable, or do they employ creative accounting where only parts of overhead expenses are counted against all of inference revenue, similar to what Uber did? OpenAI's numbers show that they definitely are not profitable on inference, and even worse, revenue growth scaled linearly with inference cost from 2024 to 2025, which means they can't outgrow this problem. See https://www.wheresyoured.at…
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The productivity gains we've seen above the capacity of human productivity would have been impossible without tech. It absolutely was caused by tech. The benefactor of those gains was also entirely decided by those who created the tech. We could have given use of that tech to everyone. In some cases we actually did (e.g. open source), but in most cases we gained (at least partial) ownership of the capital so it was i…
> The productivity gains we've seen above the capacity of human productivity would have been impossible without tech. It absolutely was caused by tech. Would have been impossible without and being caused by are different things. The sense of being “caused by” in a political context are the people who have the power to direct things. Which are not necessarily the people who implement something. > The benefactor of tho…
While you are right to recognize that there was some attempt to inject political context, it was not there originally, and is not the main discussion taking place. The fact that wages and productivity have become decoupled is not inherently political. It is but simple mathematics. Tech is the cause for the decoupling; it is why we have been able to become continually more productive and at an accelerating rate.
> The vast majority of tech work was done in employment
Yes, but generally even where employment is present tech workers also demand a share in ownership (e.g. stock). Tech doesn't invent itself. At least not yet. The workers have held the cards. Even those who haven't won the lottery are still in a pretty good economic position, relatively speaking.