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How the AI Bubble Bursts

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Re: How the AI Bubble Bursts

#421

Post by h14h »

joshstrange wrote: post #208
h14h wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do wonder how closely prices consumer RAM kits follow the wholesale prices for NAND chips manufacturers see internally. The pcpartpicker graphs you linked show consumer prices have leveled out and may even be starting to fall. Depending on how the economics shake out this could mean we've hit an inflection point. My personal prediction is that once the VC bill comes due and prices for frontier models starts to clim…

Consumer vs NAND is an absolutely fair distinction to make, I'm not sure how to track those prices. My main issue the article saying "RAM prices are crashing" (which I can't find any evidence of) and linking to an article that doesn't even repeat that claim, it instead just speculates that maybe RAM will come down in price due to this new idea. > In any case, I think it's pretty fair to speculate we may be seeing RAM…

> My main issue the article saying "RAM prices are crashing" (which I can't find any evidence of) and linking to an article that doesn't even repeat that claim

That's totally fair. The article is written in a very odd way where it makes a bunch of authoritative, factual-sounding claims and then throws a "this is all very speculative" line right at the end.

It's very interesting speculation, but can't really be considered anything more than that, despite the prose it chose.

Re: How the AI Bubble Bursts

#422

Post by Aperocky »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #239
Aperocky wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Demand of tokens is absolutely skyrocketing. And unlike the traditional "this will replace humans right away", I think what this introduce is a lot of incentive to spread those token in places where there was never any incentive to hire a software engineer for previously. In turn, that will drive a lot of business activity in those area that will potentially fail given the current quality of the output. This feels li…

Maybe we need to focus on a better definition of "bust" but we will surely see something along the lines of the hype-cycle graph in AI; what technology has not fallen into the trough before (best case) reaching a more steady-state of use and growth?

It's also funny because a bust require a 2 quarters time. AI cycle can be faster than that? My workflow is certainly not recognizable compared to past for every 6 months for the past 24 months.

Maybe we are closed to singularity, or maybe we'll just plateau somehow. But either case there are so much work to support the breakneck change that are not done because the change take priority every single time, there should be a lot of things to work on.

Re: How the AI Bubble Bursts

#423

Post by mono442 »

gruez wrote: post #255
schmidtleonard wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Overinflated relative to the wet dreams of the ownership class.

It's not exactly stuff of "wet dreams of the ownership class" to say that of the possible white collar careers, software engineering is pretty hard to beat in terms of salary vs work you need to put in.

Average salaries for software engineering seem higher compared to other professions because the jobs are mostly in the most expensive to live cities. There's no swe jobs in smaller towns but they're jobs for e.g. accountants.

Re: How the AI Bubble Bursts

#424

Post by datsci_est_2015 »

gruez wrote: post #151
hirako2000 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. It's adding tests for me and doing medium complexity refactors that I'd otherwise have to spend hours on

These example put in the category of “best IDE ever created, by a wide margin” - but not “replacement for the programming workforce”.

Re: How the AI Bubble Bursts

#425

Post by somewhatjustin »

hirako2000 wrote: post #117
Aperocky wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Demand of tokens is absolutely skyrocketing. And unlike the traditional "this will replace humans right away", I think what this introduce is a lot of incentive to spread those token in places where there was never any incentive to hire a software engineer for previously. In turn, that will drive a lot of business activity in those area that will potentially fail given the current quality of the output. This feels li…

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.

Coding, writing, summarizing, translating, data analysis, customer support, test generation.

Re: How the AI Bubble Bursts

#426

Post by fsloth »

tartoran wrote: post #392
fsloth wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm paying $20 for Codex and $90 for the Claude Max plan. They are a "pry from my cold dead fingers" product for me. IMO if someone tried this tech last time 6 months ago, or their only exposure is eg. via MS copilot, they do have a rational reason for skepticism. No technology of this complexity has improved this rapidly in my memory (well, ok, we had the CPU speed races from 90's to early 2000's).

Would you still pay if prices were to increase,say $1500-2000 monthly?

Privately no. Professionally yes.

Re: How the AI Bubble Bursts

#427

Post by Throaway199999 »

hirako2000 wrote: post #359
Throaway1975123 wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The value is obviously to the people who will use this to replace engineers. I would happily pay $200 a month for this. Luckily I dont need to, it's free. Literally every game and website that I would have had to pay someone else to make I can now make myself. There's no value in that? A year ago the best free LLM couldn't even give me a basic gridmap and collision. Now it can give me a full RCT style prototype & edi…

> luckily I don't have to. It's free. Ponder that for a minute. There are over 2 million games, for Android alone. That you weren't making games before the advent of LLMs makes it cool for you to build, and at no cost. But people have been able to make games without them and already grew the market to saturation. If the outcome of LLMs is that we get more games, it won't imply that people will consume more games. Mos…

There's nothing to "ponder" as you so patronizingly put it, and your stats on gaming are self-evident.

Op never said they're selling games. They said they're making their own games and websites for a fraction of the cost (even $0). That's amazing value. And it's just getting better.

Re: How the AI Bubble Bursts

#428

Post by Throaway199999 »

Aperocky wrote: post #410
hirako2000 wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Demands for tokens exists yes. On one side you have huge demand for the infinitely subsidized tokens so that people can post a "unique" illustration when posting on social media, along with the text itself even. On the other end we have professionals happy to pay a subscription for heavier use, to build something in the hope to sell it. I figured I don't believe in value when my dad explained to me his mate fired his…

> I figured I don't believe in value Maybe you don't, but it's fairly obvious that a lot of things are changing and things are moving. Maybe your dad's mate didn't have to expand on his business, good for him. Other business are expanding because they now can. Will the positive overweigh the negative? Not necessarily, but to go "it's tulip" is the kind of argument so devoid of nuance that we shouldn't be discussing s…

^^^^^

Re: How the AI Bubble Bursts

#429

Post by doom2 »

aurareturn wrote: post #92

This is an awful article. I don't know how it reached #1 on HN. Bottom line is that H100 prices are near 3 year highs, A100s are still profitable to run, B200 prices are increasing, no one has enough compute. Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, AWS, Azure are all compute constrained. Every single one of them said so publicly. Neo clouds are telling customers they're all sold out now and you even have to book compute in…

> Bottom line is that H100 prices are near 3 year highs, A100s are still profitable to run, B200 prices are increasing, no one has enough compute.

Then why aren't the hardware manufacturers of components needed by AI companies making plans yesterday to bring new fabs online to meet demand? That isn't a gotcha question, I genuinely want to know. The money involved isn't that much compared to the money changing hands between Nvidia Microsoft, OpenAI, etc., and it's not like once in-progress data center construction is complete they won't need to buy more RAM and GPUs, especially with any new advances in technology that might happen.

Inevitably someone will reply that hardware manufacturers don't want to be stuck losing money on a facility because the bubble popped and demand disappeared, but if Anthropic and OpenAI are going to "run laps around current big tech", it should be a no-brainer to increase production capacity.

Re: How the AI Bubble Bursts

#430

Post by s1artibartfast »

hbn wrote: post #394
piker wrote: post #31

> They lose a big customer for their cloud services. Even worse considering that now, using the AI they helped fund, everyone can compete with their sub-par products. GitHub is a good candidate for disruption, and that’d be just the start. Look, I'm a Microsoft hater like the rest of us, but calling Microsoft's products sub-par discredits the author a good bit. I invite anyone who thinks this to try and compete with…

If I saw a helicopter crashed into a tree, I don't have to be a helicopter pilot to know it's not an ideal state of a helicopter and something/some people failed. When I'm using MS Word and it takes 20 seconds to cold launch on a machine that's magnitudes faster than any computers 25 years ago where it launched near instantly, I can tell something is going wrong. When all of their software is harassing me to use AI i…

your comment sums up the conflict.

I dont know if you noticed, but there was a shifting of the goal post from "sub-par" to something wrong/sub-optimal.

The best helicopter you can buy may in fact crash into trees sometimes.

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