AI's $344B 'language model' bet looks fragile • Hacker News Board

Re: AI's $344B 'language model' bet looks fragile

#51

Post by ElevenLathe » Thu, Sep 11, 2025, 1:16 PM UTC

geon wrote: post #28

wffurr wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> in anonymous forums there's a lot more people pointing out that they think this is hype whereas when we wear our professional hats many of us join in When your boss is hyping it up and demanding all hands on deck full steam ahead on the Good Ship AI, lots of people join in out of fear, particularly in the currently awful job market which is partly being ruined by AI itself. Some of us just stay quiet, keep our hea…

No developer job has yet been lost to AI. We are in a huge recession, and companies like to have an excuse to fire people that can be spun as a positive.

That makes the fear worse, not better. It's clear that fake AI enthusiasm is a litmus test for how much shit you'll eat in order to toe the company line so that you can avoid layoffs in the worst jobs market since the GFC.

Re: AI's $344B 'language model' bet looks fragile

#52

Post by ACCount37 » Thu, Sep 11, 2025, 1:18 PM UTC

Mizza wrote: post #12

What's the path to recouping that money? Even if every major company in the US spends $100,000 a year on subscriptions and every household spends $20/month, it still doesn't seem like enough return on investment when you factor in inference costs and all the other overhead. New medical discoveries, maybe? I saw OpenAI's announcement about gpt-bio and iPSCs which was pretty amazing, but there's a very long gap between…

The "game plan" is, and always was, to target human labor. Some human labor is straight up replaceable by AI already, other jobs get major productivity boosts. The economic value of that is immense.

We're not even at AGI, and AI-driven automation is already rampaging through the pool of "the cheapest and the most replaceable" human labor. Things that were previously outsourced to Indian call centers are now increasingly outsourced to the datacenters instead.

Most major AI companies also believe that they can indeed hit AGI if they sustain the compute and the R&D spending.

Re: AI's $344B 'language model' bet looks fragile

#53

Post by reb » Thu, Sep 11, 2025, 1:19 PM UTC

techpineapple wrote: post #31

brookst wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$100k/year is literally nothing. Think of it as maybe $10k/employee, figuring a conservative 10% boost in productivity against a lowball $100k/year fully burdened salary+benefits. For a company with 10,000 employees that’s $100m/year.

But we won’t get there unless the company integration failure rate falls below 95%

Eh, seems likely to me existing companies are structured for human labor in a way that's hard to really hard to untangle — smart individuals can level up with this stuff, but remaking an entire company demands human-level AI (not there yet) or a mostly AI-fluent team (working with/through AI is a new skill and few workers have developed it).

New co's built by individuals who get AI are best positioned to unlock the dramatic effects of the technology, and it's going to take time for them to eclipse encumbent players and then seed the labor market with AI-fluent talent

Re: AI's $344B 'language model' bet looks fragile

#54

Post by boplicity » Thu, Sep 11, 2025, 1:21 PM UTC

redwood wrote: post #4

This technology demos incredibly well and you can just see how everyone gets giddy with excitement around using it. I watch my colleagues and executives proud to show what they could do or make endless jokes about it. It reminds me of when people first got their phones and couldn't stop showing everyone how cool they were. This leads to an over rotation in the perceived value.. the value is significant just as the mo…

I think it's easy to forget how much low-hanging-fruit there still is, in terms of taking full advantage of this technology.

People are still figuring out very basic integrations, and even now, at this early stage, the things I can do with LLMs are pretty incredible. For example, I was able to set Cursor up on finally dragging an old codebase out of the dark ages. It then built new features that I've long wanted. It took a few hours on my end, but would have been at least a week or two without it.

I'm not exposed to much of the hype, though, so maybe my calibration of what the hype is, is wrong.

Re: AI's $344B 'language model' bet looks fragile

#55

Post by Gigachad » Thu, Sep 11, 2025, 1:22 PM UTC

HWR_14 wrote: post #19

Mizza wrote: post #12

What's the path to recouping that money? Even if every major company in the US spends $100,000 a year on subscriptions and every household spends $20/month, it still doesn't seem like enough return on investment when you factor in inference costs and all the other overhead. New medical discoveries, maybe? I saw OpenAI's announcement about gpt-bio and iPSCs which was pretty amazing, but there's a very long gap between…

If LLMs could double the efficiency of white collar workers, major companies would be asked for far more than $100,000 a year. If could cut their expensive workforce in half and then paid even 25% of their savings it could easily generate enough revenue to make that valuation look cheap.

Ok but then another AI company would just offer the same thing at a lower cost.

Re: AI's $344B 'language model' bet looks fragile

#56

Post by loloquwowndueo » Thu, Sep 11, 2025, 1:23 PM UTC

ElevenLathe wrote: post #51

geon wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No developer job has yet been lost to AI. We are in a huge recession, and companies like to have an excuse to fire people that can be spun as a positive.

That makes the fear worse, not better. It's clear that fake AI enthusiasm is a litmus test for how much shit you'll eat in order to toe the company line so that you can avoid layoffs in the worst jobs market since the GFC.

* toe not tow

Re: AI's $344B 'language model' bet looks fragile

#57

Post by Cthulhu_ » Thu, Sep 11, 2025, 1:23 PM UTC

pixelesque wrote: post #33

geoduck14 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It reminds me of when people first got their phones and couldn't stop showing everyone how cool they were. Your comparison to smart phones is interesting. Smart phones are definitely transformative. There was a lot of hype, but still transformative. Do you believe that LLMs and AI is also going to be transformative?

Likewise with the dot com bubble and the web - it was a bubble and it was overhyped, but it was still transformative if you look back 20 years as to how things are different in terms of media, and commerce.

Both smartphones (and tablets, and smart watches) and the internet went through the hype cycle [0], and the sentiments I've been reading lately indicate AI is in the "trough of disillusionment" right now. That said, I don't believe AI will ever reach the heights (i.e. the measurable ones, how much it penetrates our lives, how much money goes into it) as either smartphones or the internet had. Probably higher than VR / AR, but nowhere near the other ones.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle

Re: AI's $344B 'language model' bet looks fragile

#58

Post by loloquwowndueo » Thu, Sep 11, 2025, 1:23 PM UTC

hobs wrote: post #42

geon wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No developer job has yet been lost to AI. We are in a huge recession, and companies like to have an excuse to fire people that can be spun as a positive.

At my company at least four developer jobs were lost because of AI tooling, but keep spouting off about the entire economy at once.

Four out of how many?

Re: AI's $344B 'language model' bet looks fragile

#59

Post by Gigachad » Thu, Sep 11, 2025, 1:24 PM UTC

gsky wrote: post #48

Most of us believed that crypto currencies were trash. Look how valuable its now . LLMs are a million times better than Crypto currencies.

Crypto never ended up filing those original goals of being an actual currency and smart contracts actually doing things. Blockchains and NFTs were never used to solve any of the problems they claimed to.

It’s just none of that had any baring on the value of the coins.

Re: AI's $344B 'language model' bet looks fragile

#60

Post by impossiblefork » Thu, Sep 11, 2025, 1:25 PM UTC

It's obviously a lot of money, and of course it's too much money, but I think we can still get LLMs much further and I think they're probably the currently most interesting approach.

I don't even care about multimodality etc. I think pure text models are a very appealing idea.