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After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

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Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#461

Post by latchup »

Our_Benefactors wrote: post #395
saubeidl wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read your article. My cynical take is that this is the US committing economic suicide, based on a misguided belief in something that'll never happen. The new superpowers will be the EU, which was smart enough not to make the same gamble, and China, which will structurally survive it. I also disagree with your conclusion of a moral imperative to make sure that AI succeeds. I believe it's the opposite. AI failing wou…

> The new superpowers will be the EU Not with how much pulling teeth is required to get them to invest in defense. I don't see how you can unironically make the claim that a written down investment would sink the ship that is the US economy.

I think you missed the point. The EU is "winning by doing nothing" whereas the US is liable for the huge failing investment it made. US economical growth is now entirely reliant on AI, so an AI crash guarantees immediate recession and out-of-control stagflation. The EU with its "less advanced" economy will keep growing just fine with or without AI, surviving the front-line bloodbath by staying behind.

As for defense, they are spending exactly as much as necessary at each point in time: just enough to keep credible US backing until 2025, and as much as they can without destroying their economy since. There is no good argument for an irresponsible spending spree, as the only powers that can realistically challenge the EU without triggering nuclear holocaust are the US and China anyways (Russia don't stand a chance).

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#462

Post by latchup »

Our_Benefactors wrote: post #460
saubeidl wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EU moves slowly, but is unstoppable once in motion. A written down investment thats four times the size of the mortgage crisis.

I assure you, this is not a game where “the only winning move is not to play”, in spite of whatever your domestic politicians are feeding the population.

Are you sure? Based on what? All I see is people desperately throwing money they don't have at AI like a gambling addict who just converted their child's college fund into chips.

Call me a buzzkill here, but my bet is you aren't gonna hit it big. While you can win at the casino, that requires a careful plan with contingency solutions, which AI simply does not have. Realistically speaking, it is indeed best to just not play this game; you are just digging a deeper hole.

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#463

Post by ponector »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #335
taurath wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me this reads like someone's been inside the echo chamber too long. > For you AI skeptics, this is going to be rough to hear, but given the suffering that will occur if AI fails, I believe we have a moral imperative to make sure it succeeds. What if, and hear me out here, the prediction is that it will fail because it can't succeed. It hasn't proven it is capable of producing the results that would justify itself.…

I'm actually from a science, government and defense background, I've never worked in the valley. It might be possible that it can't succeed, but we don't know that and the evidence in terms of what happens if it fails is pretty compelling, so I think morality dictates we have to at least try, at least until we have more information or another path emerges.

AI should succeed.

But LLM is not an AI. Tesla self-driving tech is not an AI.

Even my dishwasher has AI according to the manufacturer!

Can you call it a success if washing machine has AI already?

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#464

Post by pllbnk »

paufernandez wrote: post #103
mikert89 wrote: post #4

I cant believe people still arent grasping the profound implications of computers that can talk and make decisions.

In my case I fully grasp what such a future could be, but I don't think we are on the path to that, I believe people are too optimistic, i.e. they just believe instead of being truly skeptical. From where I look at it, LLMs are flawed in many ways, and people who see progress as inevitable do not have a mental model of the foundation of those systems to be able to extrapolate. Also, people do not know any other forms…

> We are just putting layer upon layer of complexity instead of simplifying.

It really irks me that the direction every player seems to be going to is to layer LLMs on top of each other with the goal of saving money on inference while still making the users believe that they are returning high quality results.

Instead of discovering some radical new ways of improving the algorithms they are only marginally improving existing architectures and even that is debatable.

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#465

Post by bobthepanda »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #269
bobthepanda wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We also have hit ceilings of performance demand. As an example, 8K TVs never really got off the ground because your average consumer could give a hoot. Vision Pro is a flop because AR/VR are super niche. Crypto is more gambling than asset class. Etc. What is interesting is that it seems like the ever larger sums of money sloshing around are resulting in bigger, faster hype cycles. We are already seeing some companies…

Having a local AI might kick start consumer interest in hardware again. I haven't thought about buying a beefy PC in 10 years, but I was wondering how much I would have to spend to run a cutting edge LLM here at home. (It might be too expensive to pay for LLM subscriptions when every device in your house is "thinking" all day long. A 3-5k Computer for a local llm might pay itself off after a year or two. )

I don’t think this is super likely. The crypto boom showed how quickly a GPU, power-intensive computing demand mostly meant putting the chips outside the accessible price range for the consumer, and the market never really quite recovered.

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#466

Post by hiq »

ACCount37 wrote: post #253
hiq wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they aren't even monetizing aggressively That's one of the issues with the current valuation: it's unclear to me how many of the 800M MAU will stick to ChatGPT once it monetizes more aggressively, especially if its competitors don't. How many use ChatGPT instead of Claude because the free version offers more? How many will just switch once it doesn't anymore? OpenAI is already at a 500B valuation; the numbers I cou…

My intuition is that ChatGPT has the mindshare of the "normal user" userbase, which is powerful. Ask Apple. You can still squander a lead like this, but not easily. GPT-5 was in no small part a "cost down update" for OpenAI - they replaced their default 4o with a more optimized, more lightweight option that they can serve at scale without burning a hole in their pockets. At the same time, their "top end" options for…

I don't follow the comparison to Apple. Apple phones are not like Android phones, Apple computers are not like Windows computers. There's a real difference between Apple products and others. There's definitely an appeal for devices that just work and are polished (or so I've heard). I don't think ChatGPT has done that in its space.

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#467

Post by tencentshill »

flyinglizard wrote: post #10

I admit to only being in this industry for three decades now, and only designing and implementing the thermal/power control algo of an AI chip family for three years in that time, but it's the first time I hear of chips "wearing under high intensity use".

People pay less for used crypto-mined GPUs.

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#468

Post by ACCount37 »

hiq wrote: post #466
ACCount37 wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My intuition is that ChatGPT has the mindshare of the "normal user" userbase, which is powerful. Ask Apple. You can still squander a lead like this, but not easily. GPT-5 was in no small part a "cost down update" for OpenAI - they replaced their default 4o with a more optimized, more lightweight option that they can serve at scale without burning a hole in their pockets. At the same time, their "top end" options for…

I don't follow the comparison to Apple. Apple phones are not like Android phones, Apple computers are not like Windows computers. There's a real difference between Apple products and others. There's definitely an appeal for devices that just work and are polished (or so I've heard). I don't think ChatGPT has done that in its space.

If you want a smartphone but know nothing about smartphones? You get an iPhone and don't think about it.

If you want an AI chatbot but know nothing about AI chatbots? ChatGPT is the go-to. Almost synonymous with AI now. Same exact broad appeal.

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#469

Post by esafak »

groundcontrol2 wrote: post #325
CuriouslyC wrote: post #84

This is where we're headed: https://sibylline.dev/articles/2025-10-12-ai-is-too-big-to-f...

Ground control to major Tom ...

Did you know the fictional Major Tom Brough was involved in a ruse to fake the Moon landings? https://www.mirror.co.uk/3am/celebrity-news/indentity-david-...

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#470

Post by taurath »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #413
taurath wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Morality would dictate that we stop spending enough money to end hunger in not just our country but the entire planet on this stupid venture. We are gutting our future entirely on our own and hoping that AI will save us. That’s moral suicide, not an imperative.

I didn't argue against that at any point, but you have to understand the political realities we're operating within.

Hear me out: what if we let China be the biggest, and then tried to make life for our citizens awesome, and competed on our ability to come up with new stuff? What if we solved the problems we had like housing
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